Hacker News Reader

Comment by evo_9 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> God forbid the man is allowed to speak directly to the American people instead of the media's portrayal of him, which is highly inaccurate.

He is allowed to do so.

He is not allowed to violate YouTube’s platform policies while using their platform. He can, of course, host his videos on his own infrastructure (or those interviewing him can host them on theirs.)

> He can, of course, host his videos on his own infrastructure (or those interviewing him can host them on theirs.)

Imagine your phone carrier starts listening in on your phone calls, and they decide certain ideas are not allowed so they block you from using your phone. Is the response "well you can build your own phone service and talk with people there".

Yes, they're a private company, but large social media companies are large because the public is on them... and they are leveraging this power to censor and shape public opinion. It's arguably a huge amount of power that should be regulated to protect the public from corporate abuse.

> Imagine your phone carrier starts listening in on your phone calls,

There should definitely be a law against that.

> and they decide certain ideas are not allowed so they block you from using your phone. Is the response "well you can build your own phone service and talk with people there".

Well, yeah, phone service depends on universal end-to-end service; and is regulated accordingly. The internet equivalent isn’t hosting, its ISPs, and the equivalent regulation is net neutrality regulation, which, yeah, we should have federally. If either RFK’s ISP was prohibiting him from hosting videos, or potential viewers ISP’s were stopping them from viewing them, we’d have an access issue analogous to your hypothetical, and I would say it points to the need for net neutrality.

There's a pretty clear dividing line that says neutrality of communication does not extend beyond physical infrastructure. He cannot be denied access to phone lines or internet fiber, but any service running on them is free to set their own TOS and enforce them. In fact, internet really isn't free at all since Trump rolled back net neutrality. No more than he's allowed to walk onto the set of a news broadcast and interrupt the anchors.

> Is the response "well you can build your own phone service and talk with people there".

Are you claiming hosting video on the internet is comparable to creating a telephone network?

All RFK Jr has to do is pay a host for some bandwidth and his video is available to all on his website.

It's not just hosting a video though, it's going to multiple stream channels hosted by other people and having millions of people watch on-demand. YouTube is insanely huge, and there is no comparison. If all social media bans RFK, he might as well retire.

We could give YouTube the same rights that we give other common carriers, but I suspect the antitrust exemptions may make people unhappy. We would gain the ability to force them to be non-discriminatory, though.

I have to admit that the irony of posting that sort of thing on a communications medium where all posts are monitored and some are blocked is always amusing to me.

Why do you think a phone call (with implied privacy and the legal framework to back it up) is the same as a company providing you public presence under their brand name, and advertising revenue?

Because it's all information and mass communication technologies.

That may be the case, but we don't have to like it.

He may or may not be correct with his assertions - but it doesn't matter. There's no safe world where mega-corps get to be the arbiter of "truth".

Allowing his content to be accessible to everyone, debated, and perhaps even ridiculed is how we expose truths and fallacies. Hiding them away or suppressing them doesn't somehow make things disappear.

How many things were suppressed regarding the COVID-19 origin story; labeled as false and then turned out to be true? How many things regarding the ongoing Hunter Biden story were suppressed, and then turned out to be true?

I'm not passing judgement on RFK Jr's statements or their truthiness - I am passing judgement on mega-corps getting to decide what the "truth" is.

This modern era we live in, where we don't want to hear or see anything we disagree with, is very dangerous.

For the first time in human history people get to choose their own religion. The modern era only looks bad if you ignore the past.

Sometimes freedom of speech and the democratic process has to be prioritized over private platform policies. There are large nations where all large mass media networks are forced to allow every candidate and party a certain amount of election propaganda on their airwaves, maybe that's an idea to stop this abuse by YouTube and other networks?

>Sometimes freedom of speech and the democratic process has to be prioritized over private platform policies.

Freedom of speech is exactly what allows Youtube to decide what speech to allow and what speech to prevent, and under what terms. Forcing a private company to publish speech against its will is the exact opposite of freedom.

>There are large nations where all large mass media networks are forced to allow every candidate and party a certain amount of election propaganda on their airwaves, maybe that's an idea to stop this abuse by YouTube and other networks?

It isn't abuse. Youtube removed the material because it violated their policies.

Also, Youtube isn't a mass media broadcaster. The premise for regulation of broadcast over the electromagnetic spectrum is that useful bandwidth represents a limited resource. The internet isn't a limited resource, there isn't a finite amount of "internet" to be used that Youtube is taking up, so the argument for regulating Youtube as if it were a broadcaster makes no sense.

If you can't admit that YouTube is a mass media broadcaster, then I feel it's not really an honest discussion. Of course they are, they're huge enough now, they're replacing TV. It doesn't matter that they're a private company.

The question of free speech can't be reduced to technicalities. We're all people and we're all smarter than that.

First it's YouTube and Facebook censoring, next it's your ISP, next it's your chat apps. And even if you're 100% aligned with their decisions on what should be censored, one day you won't. And then you have no way to be heard.

> If you can't admit that YouTube is a mass media broadcaster

Mass media broadcasters also set content policies, and usually are much narrower than YouTube in what they will carry (both as to actual content and provenance.)

So, sure what you're point is there, is it now that YT is excessively tolerant rather than too restrictive?

That is why some democracies force broadcasters to allow all political candidates in an election to get their message through.

So the minimum would be to not permit YouTube deleting election propaganda.

> Sometimes freedom of speech and the democratic process has to be prioritized over private platform policies.

Freedom of speech IS EXACTLY the right of private platforms to set content policies.

Whether or not big tech censorship is currently legal, I think a more interesting question is should it be?

Should this small handful of unelected people be able to wield so much power over the country? If one of them (or even worse, a few of them in collusion) decided that they wanted a particular outcome in an election, it seems like they'd be pretty well situated to make it happen.

This power used to rest with the legacy media companies, but now it's shifting. What's the right thing to allow here (if you pretend for a second that it's up to us)?

Big Tech is doing far more to affect our elections than anything a foreign state like Russia could do

>> I was under the impression he was a nut thx to the headlines that pepper the American media landscape until I watched most of his Town Hall the other night.

He thinks HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

> In his book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy says he takes "no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS"," [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.

Sorry it seems like you miscopied the quote and left off this clause starting with "but":

> , but he spends over a hundred pages quoting HIV denialists such as Peter Duesberg who question the isolation of HIV and the etiology of AIDS.[269] Kennedy himself refers to the "orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS",[252]: 348 and the "theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS",[252]: 351 as well as repeating the HIV/AIDS denialist false claim that no one has isolated the HIV particle and "No one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs".

That HIV causes AIDS is almost certainly true came from overwhelming evidence from multiple angles, not from some sort of "scientific proof". Realistically there is no such thing as scientific proof- just "enough evidence that making the alternative case requires extraordinary evidence and predictive ability".

What I don't like is that Kennedy is trying to place a pseudoscientific veneer over a conspiracy theory idea, sort of "oh hey it looks like the science is still up in the air". If somebody were to convincingly demonstrate that HIV didn't cause AIDS, it would rewrite large sections of many textbooks.

I was responding to your claim that "he thinks", not the claim that all these other scientists that he covers in a book think.

Anthony Fauci used to spread misinformation about AIDS, too. [0]

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/video/video-resurfaces-fauci-warning-h...

the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS were around 1981, he said that in 1983, and at the time, we actually didn't know very much about transmission. 1983 was the year that HIV was determined to be the cause of AIDS. That's not spreading misinformation because nobody at the time really knew any better for sure, and the precautionary principle applies in this case. Further, he went on to be one of the "heroes" of HIV/AIDS.

I was so terrified of HIV/AIDS at that time that I went into drug discovery research and later worked with people who helped develop anti-HIV drugs (protease and transcriptase inhibitors). To hear people today try to discredit Fauci for doing his job is just painful to watch. It took decades of hard research before we really understood the nature of transmission. I believe the current understanding is mucous membranes between two people touching has a measurable but very small rate (.01% of exposures lead to infection).

Why do you think that would make him less of a good choice than the other main presidential candidates?

A person not understanding the limits of their intellect and not deferring to subject matter experts makes for a bad leader.

Thabo Mbeki had the same view and that didn't exactly work out great for South Africa.

I want my leaders to live in reality.

Sure, but again I said compared to the other main candidates. Biden is obviously not there mentally and Trump is living in his own ego.

Yikes.

He is very much a nut. Much like Ron Paul he applies a broad brush to everything to make it sound like he's got some good intentions (which he actually might) but his specific ideas and proposed policies are bona fide nonsense that could results in tens of millions of excess deaths.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com