YouTube joins Facebook in banning Andrew Tate
bbc.com
bbc.com
For the “if U DoNt LiKe iT JuSt buiLd YoUR oWn YouTuBe” crowd, this will accelerate that outcome.
Eventually they will have deplatformed people with a big enough collective audience that some hole in the wall UGC platform might actually take off.
Of course they do this for more convinceable lying to all their population. Of course any civilized country should block that kind of super-nasty resource, with jailing all their creators if possible.
The comment I was originally replying to was saying they'd pay for a service that had no censorship so ideally such a service would charge so "cheaply" is kind of a requirement in my question as there needs to be a cost.
Of course, taking content down for "copyright infringement" is a form of censorship (one often require by law but censorship nonetheless).
I've never heard of allofmp3.com [1] but it doesn't sound like it was sued out of existence as all of the Russia court cases went in favor of their citizens (what a surprise!). Instead anybody outside of Russia was successfully prosecuted or payment processors "illegally"[2] stopped working with them.
I guess if Russia actually withdrawals from the WTO [3] we might see a return of allofmp3.com then. Although you probably have to buy using some form of cryptocurrency. Probably won't be that hard to convince people to use bitcoin atms to watch the Avengers for 2$.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllOfMP3
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070823070406/http://eng.cnews....
[3]: https://www.iisd.org/articles/news/russia-plans-exit-world-t...
You depend on other companies to exist on the internet and these companies don't have to do business with you. At minimum, you need a domain, you need a place to put your servers, and you need an ISP. For a business to not fail, you also need a way to earn revenue. Each one of these is a pressure point.
If they can do it while being constantly hounded by publishers and DRM enforcers who have unlimited money and drive to strike them down, a random smart group of people can do it too.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/06/133861/cloudflar...
Sure, the likes of Gab, Odysee and BitChute see some traffic, but they will never ever have the same mainstream appeal again that they did before.
As a thought experiment I'd encourage you to think about how causes you agree with might be deplatformed, and which groups would jump at the chance to do so.
Bonus case study: censorship by various middle eastern governments
This isn't a real trade. Platforming bigots won't actually prevent bigots from deplatforming subaltern groups when they have the power to do so.
Well if you had legal protections for speech on online public spaces (twitter, youtube, FB, IG and so on) and a strong court system, that would actually protect subaltern groups from being deplatformed, yes.
It's a lot easier for the "bigots" (though I would have chosen the word zealots myself) to deplatform subaltern groups when that's an accepted method of dealing with dissent, as opposed to being something that's just not done.
The (quite common) view you're espousing of "We should censor and deplatform exactly the set of people *I* find morally abhorrent" stinks of "This is classic "I'm right, so political systems should cater to me."" type thinking.
For what it's worth I think Tate is an absolute piece of shit.
But even if we ignore the point about the middle east and focus entirely on one nation, legal defenses for majority groups have observably failed to protect subaltern groups for the entire history of the country. I do not have confidence that a strong court system protecting white male misogynists will actually consistently protect black gay women, for example. I believe that your statement about the ease of oppression is not actually supported by historical or modern evidence.
Really? You don't think the main reason the US is as desegregated as it is today is because of a strong supreme court that issued rulings such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Allwright , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia , and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boynton_v._Virginia?
Clearly these are all examples of the supreme court failing to protect subaltern groups, which is why all white primaries are still the norm, schools and buses are still segregated, and interracial marriage is still illegal.
Is any court system perfect? Of course not, but the American court system is infinitely better than the court of public opinion when it comes to protecting individual rights for all individuals, regardless of identity.
What planet's history were you even referring to, again?
I'm not even American and I'm still aware of these civil rights victories. But oh no "white (well mixed-race in Tate's case) male misogynists" will also have their speech protected, so I guess these rights have got to go.
Your rights are not predicated on your identity or your beliefs, no matter how abhorrent.
And remember, we aren’t talking about governments taking away Tate’s rights. We are talking about posting on social media.
Virulent bigotry alone is not, and should never be, a crime. You are literally advocating for thoughtcrimes to be punished by the courts.
> And remember, we aren’t talking about governments taking away Tate’s rights. We are talking about posting on social media.
Well I was suggesting that governments regulate the tech monopolies to protect speech on their platforms, given that they are the de facto public square of modern political discourse. I recognize that Tate's freedom of speech was not violated by private platforms censoring him, I'm asserting that those platforms should either be regulated as public squares with the same duty to uphold freedom of (legal) speech, or have their monopolies broken up (i.e. Open APIs and interchange format, with social media monopolies ideally switching to a federated model where nobody has the power to "deplatform" someone else unilaterally).
The state has happily abandoned its own stated principles used to protect white men so that it can crush women, gay people, and racial minorities countless times throughout our history.
Well ...
> Dred Scott v. Sandford,[a] 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that the United States Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for people of African descent, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges that the Constitution confers upon American citizens could not apply to them.[3][4] The Supreme Court's decision has been widely denounced, both for how overtly racist the decision was and for its crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later.[5] Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions". Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".[6] Historian Junius P. Rodriguez said that it is "universally condemned as the U.S. Supreme Court's worst decision."[7] Historian David Thomas Konig said that it was "unquestionably, our court's worst decision ever."[8]
So if you mean, it's desegregated because a really racist Supreme Court decision helped precipitate a civil war that killed a lot of people, because a few rich and powerful people benefitted from enslaving other human beings and refused to give that up, despite it's obvious clash with basic legal principles, then yeah, you might be right.
TikTok and YouTube both have a policy of limiting the spread of anything they can identify as LGBT. If I choose not to censor myself on these platforms my reach will be null. So I'm directly affected.
I just don't think it's somehow impossible to draw a line of acceptable behavior on that platform. A policy of no intervention just leaves you with whatever capitalism feels like that day - and while capitalism really loves to pretend to care about diversity, it really is more of a marketing gag than a anywhere close to a true belief. But Andrew Tate can be the embodiment of toxic masculinity / incel culture / misogyny as long as it pays and nobody complains?
I guess censorship is perfectly fine for most people, and that's the scariest outcome.
"Too bad for them, they should have been thinking like us." No wonder we descent into authoritarianism. Thanks to well meaning crowds of well mannered citizens cheering because the big bad got ousted.
A private company can do whatever they want and ban whoever from their platform.
But can a private company that's used by 99% of the population do the same? I think there's an unexplored grey area there. If HN bans me that's not necessarily censorship, but if Twitter does so, there's an argument it could be. Censorship is not a function of who does it, it's function of scale. The bigger the audience, the more important it is that free speech is upheld.
Our free speech laws have to be updated for the information and Internet era, and the era of mega corporations monopolising a huge chunk of the public space. Of course none of this would happen if open and decentralised standards were used, but that's a discussion for another time.
I can't see any way to justify requiring Facebook et al to host misogynistic content at the barrel of a metaphorical gun.
Yes, because that's how rights work. The rights being debated here are freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, be careful where you draw the line in the sand and decide those rights end, because lines in the sand can be redrawn.
Plus, Twitter isn't used by anywhere near 99% of the population. It isn't, despite what many people say, a primary means of discourse, communication, broadcast media or politics. It's popular but it isn't infrastructure. It isn't the public commons, it isn't a utility. It really isn't worth burning the Constitution over.
If you want the government to take over social media and coerce speech, fine, but accept that that position is explicitly the opposite of what the First Amendment stands for.
Essentially, the first amendment is the floor, not the ceiling. People who want to minimize freedom of speech will point to the first amendment and say that restricting congress from restricting our speech is all we should have.
Big tech companies should be forced to enshrine freedom of speech into their platforms, or face still government sanctions.
The reason the First Amendment denies Congress the right to abridge speech is that freedom of speech implicitly allows freedom from speech, just as the right to assembly implicitly allows the right not to assemble and freedom of religion implies freedom from religion. The First Amendment is written the way it is to protect the right of the people, and of private enterprise, to moderate speech on their property. Their doing so isn't a violation of freedom of speech, it is freedom of speech.
>People who want to minimize freedom of speech will point to the first amendment and say that restricting congress from restricting our speech is all we should have.
First, no one here is actually making that argument.
Second, it baffles me how you can type that and not realize that allowing congress to restrict our speech more than they're allowed to makes our speech less free.
And third, I have to echo the sentiment of sascha_sl's comment here. It's telling that this outrage only ever comes out on behalf of people with a specific political bent. None of Hacker News' free speech advocates ever go to bat for LGBT or black or leftist content that gets unfairly demonetized or banned, which despite the narrative happens all the time. Only ever for the right-wingers, racists and assholes, and only after Trump's white supremacist fringe base started getting banned en masse.
This isn't about freedom of speech, and never has been. It's about one political ideology wanting the government to coerce private platforms into publishing their propaganda against their will.
1st Amendment: Congress SHALL MAKE NO LAW [...]
Curious, isn't it?
I'm not sure why you think that Congress, which is likely near the MOST PARTISAN it's ever been, will responsibly and reasonably use this "force" to ensure viewpoint neutrality, instead of say, amplifying the voices that support their position.
Also, part of the 1st Amendment is allowing people to associate (or not) with each other. As long as you aren't discriminating for an illegal purpose, you can make whatever rules you want. If you don't like the "big tech" rules, don't participate. But if you break their rules, they can kick you out.
The first amendment means that the GOVERNMENT can't silence jerks, but is ALSO means that people who don't want to hear jerks don't have to listen.
These companies were regulated because of market dominance. It isn't efficient to have 2 electric or 2 telegraph or 2 phone companies when they were established -- so government set a reasonable profit margin and then drew up rules by which the companies had to abide to stay in their position. (I'm guessing bus/plane was more about not crowding others out, as they don't have the sunk costs or moat that the other companies acquire by their nature.)
In my opinion its far more damaging to allow sites like youtube to become so influencial in public life yet wield the power to censor anyone they don't like.
I believe that social media should be tightly bound by the constitution so that they may not overstep the rights of the people.
They shouldn't be allowed to ban viewpoints they don't like.
They shouldn't be allowed to unreasonably collect and use data, nor come up with agreements that allow the use of important data.
Quite simply I would rather trust a government that at occasionally follows the rules than near despot oligarchs who never do.
"Hey, we kept that bigot you like so much on YouTube" won't convince a fascist who has a gun pointed at me not to shoot.
Fascists don't need any "martyr", even leaving aside the fact that nothing being done to Andrew Tate here is worthy of that label, because fascists are perfectly capable of fabricating a strong sense of victimhood in their own heads. The antidote to fascism is overwhelming opposition, not appeasement.
They don't respond to truth, civility, or compromise - though they may on occasion weaponize such ideas when it serves their own ends - because they don't believe in either of those things. This is just liberal brainrot. It didn't work in the Weimar republic and it certainly isn't working in the USA.
In truth, not banning people like this from society just teaches others that their sick ideas must have some sort of validity to them. Otherwise, why would it be on display?
The resentment builds up over time, the bans add fuel to the fire, and the “ bad speech” only comes back later in greater numbers and even worse forms.
What’s worse is the “bad speech” goes underground and begins communicating in less obvious ways.
You’re looking at this through a 10 year lens thinking “we vanquished Alex Jones, and we will defeat the next one.”
Look at it through a 100 year lens and you might see a different picture.
As for the 100 year view, you don't have to do anything for bigots to "build up resentment" and last time it reached boiling point, we had a civil war where we kicked their ass. The biggest reason why racism prevailed so strongly in the South (and to a lesser extent, the North) had nothing to do with resentments. It was because Lincoln deciding to play the appeasment game and picking a Confederate ex-slave owner as VP who promptly halted and reversed Reconstruction post Lincoln's assassination.
No matter what time scale you view things, reality contradicts your view.
Which manuscripts? Claims of "reading history" are often false. The same people who support Tate also tend to hate academic historians, for example.
Where do we draw the line? Using institutions to carry out the project of silencing unwelcome ideas... is to my taste unpalatable.
A free society isn't something that can magically sustain itself without active effort and intolerance should not be tolerated. Sure, you can paint this as a "paradox" but aside from fascists cry bullying about being oppressed (while actively salivating about acquiring the ability to oppress everyone) and naïve liberals who can't remotely imagine the idea of bad faith actors in politics, I don't think anybody is getting oppressed here.
As far as I know, there is no violation of the First amendment here so even if you think hate speech should be protected free speech (which I don't agree with), nobody's freedoms have been breached here.
Nobody I'm confident in trusting, for sure.
Interpretation by who? The things I’ve seen labeled as fascist and racist in recent years have led me to believe this is not true. But then again many of the people doing the labeling not only are quick on the trigger to make accusations of fascism and racism, but also seem to see the world in very black and white terms and seem to have little interest in things like nuance or context. I suppose all ideas become easy to parse with no ambiguity in interpretation when you have zero interest in introspection or countenancing views that differ from your own.
Also, I'd love to see examples of the things you're talking about that are simultaneously filled with nuance and context, but also elicited an internet death penalty.
There is no defense, absolutely none, for allowing companies to just deplatform viewpoints they don't like in a coordinated fashion.
This wasn't a conspiracy theorist or dangerous person like alex jones, this guy was just a jerk with a knack for being rude.
We made a massive jump from banning those dangerous to banning what is unpalatable for most.
Its quite clear that soon we will see more of this and the "correct" opinion will be all thats left.
Authoritarianism often comes slow.
You might also have forgotten about the inconvenient fact that Tate is facing credible accusations of human trafficking which he has so far narrowly avoided facing due to being based in Romania.
That can't possibly be right, or the Democrats wouldn't be so focused on "reaching across the isle" /s
This will make the problem worse.
This will not fix the problem.
This will hurt something unrelated.
Basically the same as FUD deployed by incumbent tech giants. You don't need to even try to claim your product is better. People are familiar with your product and know that it's crap. You just have to introduce enough uncertainty into the conversation to slow progress towards other solutions.
The “banning works” takes such a narrow view of time it’s remarkable. There was a world before YouTube, before internet, and before television.
Horrible ideas spread when they are unchallenged, not when they are driven underground.
When an idea is transparently horrible, it's proponents are not interested in discussion except as a means to propogate their message to others. In a reasoned debate, fascists always have to work the least because it always takes more mental effort to debunk a terrible idea than stating said idea.
Meanwhile, adhering to the rules of respectability means the fascist gets to expose far more people to their message in a format where they get to express their message without interruption.
The only reason why you should ever talk to a fascist is to ridicule them. Jean Paul-Satre put it best when talking about anti-Semites (though it really applies to all strains of fascism):
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Also, nobody is being silenced here either because there is no obligation built into the first amendment or even the very concept of Free speech to provide a platform for anybody.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_effect_(psychology)
this became clear as the right became more and more extreme as people had their views censored.
this stupidity only mixes the normals with the crazies forcibly.
people who like tate could soon end up moving to the same kinds of alternative sites that crazies jones now reside on.
this is a dangerous road that ends with the people who feel beaten down eventually popularizing crazy ideas.
its the irony of censorship that too much of it typically causes many of the problems it wanted to avoid.
I don't want to see the outcome of the many impressionable teens who followed tate get exposed to harmful radical ideologies because they followed him to a less savory and crazier site!
Its extremely dangerous to let these companies become the modern public square because deplatforming people on places like youtube and social media basically ends up censoring them.
They essentially have the first amendment stripped because we put it in the hands of private companies.
I think social medias should be forced to conform to certain rules such as not banning viewpoints they don't like UNLESS they are dangerous (terrorism, extremism, etc.)
I hate seeing this kind of thing happen and I don't even like tate.
But it doesn't matter, it is part of the dystopian big tech ideal that if the social media mob want you banned on one platform due to a ToS violation, then you will be banned everywhere else and there is no redemption as they find more 'villains' of the week to get clicks, outrage and as many eyeballs as possible.
So you will have no say and you will be still happy. [0]
[0] https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/wefs-global-...
I don't understand your argument at all.
Perhaps lets go far to de-platform them of their bank accounts, credit cards, etc since they are too private companies? Can we also contact their phone / energy provider(s) to shut off their electricity as well so they cannot access the internet?
So what is their response? Don't like it? "BuILd yOur Own VISa / mASteRcArD paymeNtS pLATFORM", "buIlD yOUr oWN IsP", "BuiLD YOUr oWN doMain PRoviDER", etc, etc.
As I said, creating a big tech dystopia on trying to get those you don't like to be de-platformed off of the internet which the point is anyone can get this same treatment. Not just this single user.
Like I said, this is creating a big tech dystopia on trying to get those you don't like to be de-platformed off of the internet via a mob, which the point is anyone can get this same treatment. Not just this single user and perhaps you think it's OK for the banks, payment platforms, etc to do the same?
So the next time someone you like gets the same co-ordinated mass ban; let's tell them to 'Be nice' to the big tech companies. So on to the next 'villain' of the week.
But the difference is that YouTube, FB etc. present themselves as platforms, avoiding the liability of being seen as a publisher.
If they start making value judgements on certain content, then they can't claim they act as a neutral platform, and as such should be held liable for other content.
Then and only then will they actually have a private platform where they can ban anyone for any reason. Until then, they are imposing on the public, and the public has every right to require them to respect our most foundational values of freedom of speech.
I am also confused about why do you refer to people like Tate as ‘villains’ in quotes. The dude is a star of incels and like-minded women-haters. The world is better off without his content.
EDIT: it seems that people have been making Tate clips and uploading them to TikTok and those are also the ones that got banned.
>TikTok has also banned an account belonging to Mr Tate as part of an ongoing investigation to remove content that violates its policies.
>A TikTok spokesperson told the BBC: "Misogyny is a hateful ideology that is not tolerated on TikTok.
>"We've been removing violative videos and accounts for weeks, and we welcome the news that other platforms are also taking action against this individual."
The only reason he is famous, is that "Hustlers University" instructs you to spam clips of his to social media together with affiliate links to his scheme. Compound that with his Alex Jones-like talent to generate the most divisive, ridiculous, humorous and infuriating soundbites and you have a TikTok smash hit. But just like Alex, once he glows out, his shady dealings and ridiculous statements will relegate him to a subject of mockery and an argument to dismiss his ideas for the opposing side.
Instead of asking why someone was "immediately guilty as charged", one should maybe ask why it takes a coordinated effort to get social media giants to act on toxic people that are very clearly violating their terms of service. All while YouTube keeps banning LGBTQ creators from recommendations (not even just demonetization) for using words like "lesbian" in video titles. Why does HN rarely get upset about those cases?
Like I also said, Neither YouTube or HN cares and expecting YouTube to change is futile and it will happen to anyone. That is the point.
But then again, some believe it is not enough to de-platform or do a mass ban of these LGBTQ creators off of the internet. Why not get the payment companies and the banks to freeze their funds as well, or why not contact their energy and phone provider so that they can't access the internet or have electricity as well?
I await a giant outcry when this happens to another person and the whole of HN starts crying about the big tech surveillance dystopia they helped to create.
Downvote if you find my comments to lack substance
Other readers found it particularly insightful, it is all that matter
Sometimes you don't need to understand, that's just the way it is, otherwise my input wouldn't be needed if everyone knew
This is the real reason this stuff is banned. Don't let them convince you it's for any sort of noble reason.
I don't think they care - nor should they, really - about silencing this a-hole or another one for good. They just care about PR and business so they boot users who threaten that.
CEOs also, like all humans, don't want angry hoards of very online people (blue checkmarks) screaming at them, and have shown time and time again they are willing to bend to the mob to make the screaming stop.
They're making a financial judgment call. Hostile people scare "normal people" off the platform. Somebody decides whether they'll make more money by scaring off fans of the hostile posters, and how much of that hostility the "normal people" will take before they decide the site causes more aggravation than pleasure.
Captialism famously doesn't depend on generosity, but on self-interest. They can generally be trusted to make decisions based on it. I don't know whether they're right in this instance or not, but the decision makes sense viewed in that light. The whole point of capitalism is that it doesn't need to be noble to nudge people in directions that have wide benefits.
That is not useful as a base for debate. You're just spilling all your negative feelings in this post...