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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

If it's nonsense, then why censor it?

If it's not nonsense, then why censor it?

If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it?

The discussion has to be one of nuance, but i think back to the days of TVs (lol). TV and radio had (to my understanding) laws about what you can say on air, different than what you would encounter on the sidewalk. It seems to make sense. After all, piping instructions on drinking bleach into everyones home seems bad. Inciting riots in mass seems bad. I don't know, but it seems logical to me.

The internet is obviously different.. but not different in every way, in my view. It seems like we need to be honest with ourselves. The internet is different than just yelling things on street corners. What should be allowed? I don't know. But i don't think it has the same freedoms as yelling on the sidewalk.

> If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it?

Not comparable.

> > If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it?

>Not comparable.

Nor did it ever actually happen.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/fact-check-no-trump-did-not-t...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/11/joe-biden/...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/live-blog/202...

Not anywhere will you find Trump saying to “inject bleach”. That was the media narrative, completely their words.

> And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?

Seems to me like he is very clearly talking about the viability of injecting disinfectant.

The Politifact article even clarifies that Joe Biden's error was saying Trump advised "drinking bleach", as opposed to "express interest in exploring whether disinfectants could be applied to the site of a coronavirus infection".

You admit his is talking clearly then? Many people seem to chose when to give him that consideration.

You have to forgive his genius occasionally overwhelming the average human’s ability to comprehend speech.

> “Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”

His cognitive ability was off the charts - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uvwbd75ujU

> Many people seem to chose when to give him that consideration.

You mean everyone, from either tribe, when it suits them?

Personally I always try to figure out what a politician is intending to say, even if they are only semi-coherent in conveying it. This is the leader of the free world, after all, with his finger on the button...

He was talking about the viability of injecting UV disinfectant, not bleach.

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/cedars-sinai-statement...

This was released 3 days prior to his statement: https://irdirect.net/prviewer/release/id/4294930

> Our team has shown that administering a specific spectrum of UV-A light can eradicate viruses in infected human cells (including coronavirus) and bacteria in the area while preserving healthy cells

UV light was mentioned prior in the presser. Trump wasn't specific, but you can't say he said inject bleach, read the transcript for yourself:

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronaviru...

It's disingenuous to say he was suggesting for people to inject bleach or disinfectant.

Even if he didn't clarify what disinfectant, he sure as hell didn't tell people to do anything, he was talking about research.

I don't really want to defend Trump, who is proudly stupid and mean spirited. But at bottom, it was a question about whether it was feasible, not a suggestion.

And "something like that" in his statement is not necessarily just filler. Read charitably, he could be asking if a similar effect can be achieved with something else. We use some types of disinfectants for broadly similar effects--like mouth wash. In the past, we've used iodine to disinfect water for drinking, which was ingested.

I'm not saying its a plausible strategy, but its not pants on fire stupid to wonder out-loud if you can get something like a disinfectant inside. I'd imagine you can't, but I can't articulate why you can't beyond the likelihood the required concentrations would destroy your bodies' cells too.

I watched that press conference on tv when it aired. It wasn't even the top 20 dumbest things he said in that conference.

This is the good faith interpretation.

The more people learn to do this, the further we'll get in our discourse.

I'd love to watch a breakdown of current news stories done with charitable interpretations only. Does anyone know of a news source that doesn't drop down into mischaracterizations of every opposing viewpoint?

That's fair. Instructions on drinking bleach might cause others to be harmed. This is different because nobody has ever come to harm because of this. I'd imagine if people believed this, there would have been some kind of violence on say, January 6th the day of the insurrection-- sorry, inauguration.

Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.

>” Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.”

You can click the edit button. But you’re probably trying to make a snarky point.

If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things. Here’s a scenario:

Claiming that people are being systematically discriminated against could lead to violence and death. Saying that police officers kill minorities could lead to another CHAZ/CHOP, which was also an insurrection where people died. As a result, we need to silence ACAB and anyone who delegitimizes our police.

We don't do prior restraint on speech in the U.S. Only if there's an imminent threat of violence (and that imminence is not interpreted liberally) do we allow the government to stop a speaker. If speech eventually leads to violence, we expect law enforcement to deal with it, and there can be consequences after the fact, but not before.

> You can click the edit button.

Don't think so.

> If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence

Nope. Just agreeing with my parent comment that there is a significant difference between harm-causing misinformation and this very good election business.

>>If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things<<

If it were just as bad as "The censors want to prevent the bad things", I think I might feel that it would be justifiable. This type of thinking also robs the broader public of its agency to reason. The broader public is not comprised of petulant children, regardless of what the media outlets would tell you and what the behavior of Twitter might show (very few of those people display that sort of behavior in actual life, where consequences happen).

This "moral highgrounding", to protect us from the corruption of verbiage that may occur on one platform or another is a ridiculous idea to think that functional adults might need. We are not so weak as to be protected from ideas that "must not be named". Words are not magic, and people cannot be enchanted by their mere utterances. They can be enticed by them being outlawed and the verboten mystique that makes the forbidden seem so savory.

People may be uneducated, but it is impossible to educate them through silence and the silencing of ideas. These verboten ideas will get spread around, major platform or no. They'll spread without any kind of resistance or discussion and no disinfectant light of truth by debate will be shone on them because they will be pushed down to the nooks and crannies, off of the popular platforms where the light of day can show them to be the BS that they are. They'll find their place in small groups and factions, I felt and grow and split people apart. They'll make people not talk to each other and they'll make us a weaker country and a less educated one. A country that tries to run away from hard questions and conversations because it's easier to tell someone or some group to shut up and don't talk about that, rather than address a topic with an open and honest conversation with facts and dialogue.

You realize this is YouTube's position right? They're fine with the exact clip The Hill used if it's to criticize those ideas. To oppose YouTube's stance is to argue we shouldn't pair false claims with the evidence that refutes it.

I'm not sure I represented myself well at all. I'm not for censorship or any form of "Ministry of Truth". Those ideas will be paired with videos naturally by people who would choose to refute the ideas put forth. And I think fair use should cover rebuttal videos (though I'm unsure how copyright works in that way). I don't think anyone needs to be banned for showing a video discussing any topic... it's legal, and a private platform. They have the right, but it seems a bit tacky. I don't see how I could have been misconstrued as for not rebutting poor arguments or false information with facts, good arguments and critical thinking skills. I apologize if I did - I got a little long winded and should have kept it shorter and to the point.

> I don't see how I could have been misconstrued as for not rebutting poor arguments or false information with facts, good arguments and critical thinking skills.

Again, you're agreeing with YouTube on that point. The Hill's ban was because they didn't contextualize the false information they shared.

Here's Kim Iverson breaking down the criteria for Political Disinformation and what they might have done to break said policy:

https://youtu.be/t-oEaACklrc

EDIT: and I think I see where we're breaking down in our communications. We are basically agreeing (I think). I don't think YouTube's need for an immediate tag or rebuttal around "misinformation" leads to further discourse. I think rebuttal videos which would be linked, by way of the shared interest algorithm, would further discourse. Instead of scrounging for ad revenue and pushing people down into their own little bubble, YouTube has an obligation to offer up rebuttal videos, videos which offer an alternative to supposed misinformation, not to outright ban something like raw footage of political figures putting their foots in their mouths.

A similar claim of "clear and present danger" was used in 1919 to prosecute anti-war protestors for handing out pamphlets which advocated draft resistance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

While there is certainly a case for criminalizing direct prompts to imminent violence, attaching consequentialism to ideas is a very slippery slope, given enough creative hermeneutics by whoever currently wields state power. (I recall no shortage of conservatives circa 2004 who genuinely believed Michael Moore was guilty of treason.)

You tell me: is this comedy sketch satire, or an explicit call to violence? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhWCk2f2alI

See, THIS is incomparable because anti-war pamphlets are ideas being banned. This policy from YouTube is not doing that. It's saying that ideas based on misinformation must be paired with the evidence to contextualize it.

Obviously the context is different (particularly in the difference between a state and a private corporation, quasi-monopolistic or not).

The key comparison is this: who decides what is misinformation? who decides what information/disinformation is "dangerous"? The right consequentialist narrative can frame any idea as dangerous.

Obviously it's dangerous to advise people to drink bleach. But you can find millions who'd make the same claim of vaccines (both "the jab", or pre-COVID childhood vaccinations); or, of ivermectin (while claims of its COVID efficacy are dubious, neither is it categorically unsafe for humans).

I'm not going to lose much sleep over YouTube attaching "The more you know..." links on controversial subjects, paternalism and "the backfire effect" notwithstanding. The concern is algorithmically putting their thumbs on the scale of discourse (and with second-order self-censorship effects). Even if/when they're mostly right (COVID vaccines work; global warming is anthropogenic), that is a disturbing level of unaccountable power.

> If it's instructions on drinking bleach, why censor it?

How to drink bleach: Unscrew cap from bottle. Pour bleach down your throat.

Was that so bad?

Fair, what i meant should probably have been worded: "Recommendations on drinking bleach to cure Covid" or etc.

YouTube is just a wolf in sheep's clothing; another media outlet disguised as a sharing platform.

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ― Malcom X

It's a media outlet for those that treat it as such. If I come there for news, it's from channels I know and trust. Other than that, it's mostly for non-political entertainment.

This argument would work equally well to support spreading neo-nazi propaganda material. Trite catchphrases are nothing to base a belief system around.

An argument doesn't have to make logical sense for it to convince millions of people. Especially not if they like the conclusion.

That's Godwin's law territory. I remember being taught in the very liberal NY schools I went to that the ACLU defending the free speech rights of Nazis in Illinois was part of the deal in a free society, and in this case we're not even talking about Nazis. But I'll defend to the death your right to say ridiculous nonsense.

Well, on one hand, there's a group's right to say what they like, and on the other, there's the discussion of what a corporate platform should host for free, what they can remove, what they ought to remove, what they're required by law to remove, and whether/how monopoly status changes any of that. Those are thorny and nuanced questions that catchphrases are no use in solving.

Also, we were already off topic when you mentioned censorship, so Nazis aren't that much further a digression. I think the real topic here is that Youtube can never possibly support a moderation team proportionate to its size while still offering free uploads, so it's limping along with garbage moderation that often has disastrous effects.

Youtube isn't saying that no one has the right to say ridiculous nonsense, they are saying that they can't use their platform and infrastructure to do so.

Who gets to decide what other people are allowed to believe, and on what basis?

You don't think people could believe non-sense?

I do. I know lots of people who believe things I believe are nonsense. You won't see me going around saying they should be censored.

Yeah but are you going to print out all their insane bs in gigantic lettering and put it on signs on your lawn and the exterior walls of your house? You going to print it on tshirts and wear them to work or out in public?

There’s a difference between letting people think and say what they want, vs letting them use you as a megaphone.

> If it's nonsense, then why censor it?

Because people believe the nonsense and then storm the capital, and/or support overturning democratic elections in order to allow would-be dictators to seize power.

Misinformation can have a serious and deeply negative impact on the world, and the general public is clearly not immune to it.

Specious argument. First of all, the democrats did a lot of calling of elections into question, and so have republicans, and so what? Second, there has been an enormous amount of violence in the U.S. in the past several years, and the vast majority of that did not happen on 2021-01-06. Third, "storming" of capitols is a thing that has happened plenty in the U.S., and fairly recently too, once in the past year alone in Georgia, and in Wisconsin in 2010, and so on.

Your argument seems to boil down to: “bad things have happened before, so bad things aren’t bad”.

1. In a close election, contesting it or demanding a recount is fine and sane. Step aside once the results of that process are in. Trying to discredit the entire system with a mountain of bullshit and overthrow an election when it is overwhelmingly clear that it did not go in your favor is an incredibly dangerous road for us to go down. The two practices are incomparable.

2. I can’t understand this argument. Are you saying that 1.6.21 must compose a minimum of 51% of all violence in the US over the past several years before it qualifies as an issue?

3. Presidents inciting their supporters to violently overthrow elections that did not go in their favor is not a thing that has happened plenty recently nor should it ever.

I'm saying we don't do prior restraints on speech in the U.S. Law enforcement can take care of the rest.

And YouTube is saying that it is not obligated to carry content that convinces stupid people to do dangerous things. Doing so causes chaos, which ultimately reduces advertising spend and hurts profits.

So storming the US Capitol is okay, and to be expected in the future? What will you say when Democrats do it? Will it be insurrection in that case? I mean, explicitly stating the purpose is to overturn the election. When does it become insurrection, exactly? Does it not count when 'patriots' are doing it to 'save the country'?

We have hundreds of years of debate and experience with freedom of speech, and I think the conclusions are clear.

In this specific debate, if "misinformation" is forbidden, whoever gets to decide what is classified as "misinformation", will control society.

Some would claim religion is misinformation and causes a lot of problems… they’d say the only thing going for it is that a lot of people believe it.

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