“Innocent until proven guilty” is a philosophical concept that many legal systems subscribe to in the context of criminal law.
> Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking action
Indeed, it’s very similar in the sense that the concept of the freedom of speech goes way beyond the 1st amendment. It existed before it. And it is the first amendment that exists because of the freedom of speech, not the other way round.
> A private company can do what it wants within the bounds of the law.
Yeah, including immoral actions that others may disagree with.
The morality in this instance does not follow this principle. If people find these allegations credible—and most should—the morally correct action is to deplatform him and delete his content.
Why should most people find these allegations credible? I do not believe there is a police report, arrest, and let alone a trial. These are currently just allegations, their credibility has not been adjudicated.
A person may know how slow and different a legal decision is compared to what may be obvious and a reflection of reality, and therefore might arrive at a conclusion well before a system designed to be conclusive would.
The law is more about what can be proven than it is about what is true, and for people who know that, legal judgement stands separately from moral evaluation.
You have one party making an allegation claiming they have documents to back it up and the other party denying innocence with claims of their own exculpatory evidence. Nothing has been shared to the public by either party for me evaluate who has the preponderance of evidence.
I do believe YouTube (or any other private platform) can and should be able to set it's own rules for participation so I see no issue with what they did here. If it's a right for someone to be on that platform then we should not be relying on a private party to guarantee that and make the necessary legislative changes.
I would just love to understand why I should be outraged at this individual before anything has been presented before me so that I can evaluate for myself.
And how exactly is it obvious that the guy is guilty? Just because he makes click-baity divisive videos, might allegedly have been a playboy in the past, and you don't like him, doesn't equate to "obviously he must have done it".
Why?
Once you venture into private parties evaluating other private parties, you encounter a collision of rights. It's still freedom of speech and association to not want to do business with certain people, and as long as those certain people aren't of a protected class, this falls well within the moral concepts of both free speech and presumption of innocence.
Neither do corporations. This is easy to demonstrate. Imagine you refuse to talk to Trump supporters - most people would say that's your right.
> It's still freedom of speech and association to not want to do business with certain people
imagine the outrage if Tomorrow YouTube deletes accounts for anyone that supported Trump
No, it doesn't "only" apply in a court of law. I choose to apply it in my own psyche (which breaks the "only"), and I choose to do so because I understand the reasons why a court of law applies the principle.
Just because the whole village is wielding pitchforks doesn't mean it's rational for you to also do the same.
That meaning being “the concept of innocent until proven guilty is only universally applicable in a court of law”.
So unless your psyche has any force beyond itself or it happens to be a court of law, your gotcha lacks any meaningful effect.
Beyond you grandstanding that is.
- It’s not about enforcing anything on anyone, I think you’re missing the point
- Thank you for your contribution
This was what early internet was like: Usenet, IRC, etc.
Immediately following crises everyone talks about making the network more resilient and so on, but it never fully recovers because everyone intuitively knows that establishing consus is slow and bumpy, and that major restructuring/retooling efforts are way easier to accomplish unilaterally. So people start drifting away because unless there's a quick technical fix that can be deployed within a month or two, It's Over. Distributed systems always lose against coherent attackers with more than a threshold level of resources because the latter has a much tighter OODA loop.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
I'm building a p2p social network and struggling hard with how to balance company needs, community needs, and individual freedom. A free-for-all leads to a tyranny of structurelessness in which the loudest and pushiest form a defacto leadership that doesn't represent the will of the majority. On the flip side, overly restrictive rules stifle expression and cause resentment. These are hard questions and there is no one answer, except that unmoderated networks always suck eventually, so the question is one of line drawing and compromise.
I'm fine with YouTube not wanting to provide a platform for people who they feel are harmful, but they need to define that in an explicit way so that these decisions are not made arbitrarily.
I believe primary Brand's job for the last few years has been as a content creator. Given this I think it's reasonable to expect he should have some legal rights. Personally I don't see a huge amount of difference between an Uber gig worker and a YouTube content creator. Both should have some basic rights regardless of whether they're technically classed as "employees".
They call it the Creator Responsibility Policy.
My use of the word "explicit" here was intentional. As it stands the "rules" may as well just read "if we don't like what you're doing on or off our platform we reserve the right fire you as a content creator". And again I'll note, if you're fired as a content creator for some arbitrary reason you have no way to challenge the decision.
I don't think this is acceptable. I think Google should ultimately be able to run their platform however they like, but they have a responsibility to make those rules clear when people are dependant on them for their income.
If an online platform creates an unclear or vague rule and use that rule to remove a user, then that user could pursue legal actions. If a court agrees that the rule (or rules) used to remove the user from the platform is unclear or too vague from the perspective of a reasonable person then the platform would need to pay out for their mistake.
Therefore it would be in their interest to ensure they have clear and explicit rules.
I don't think this is hard and we shouldn't pretend it is. It's just regulators in the West rather force Apple adopt USB-C and destroy E2E than than protect us from arbitrary corporate censorship.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if the judicial branch was in charge of arbitration.
These companies are not obligated to pay creators. They pay them because it's profitable, and the moment money exchanges hand and someone livehood depends on them, the relationship changes.
At that point, if you leave creators without recourse, you only changed labels and left workers without hundreds of years worth of labor rights thrown down the toilet.
Makes me think whether receiving regular earnings from any online service should legally redefine the relationship between the user and the service to something closer resembling an employment contract.
You say this as a person with no fear of getting unpersoned when the wind changes, or a cosmic ray flips a bit. It never happened to you and you don't have empathy for the wide range of people it happens to (some of them as innocent as snow), so you don't quite have the fear of it in your bones. Until you're the one to get unpersoned, and then it's too late.
It would’ve been better for it to be called “not-guilty until proven guilty” since criminal courts aren’t in the business of establishing innocence nor do they have the power to declare someone innocent.
But I guess that doesn’t roll as nicely off the tongue.
If you are incorporated (and therefore benefit from government-provided protection from liability and lower tax rates) then you no longer get to choose your customers; you’re a common carrier and must provide the same service to all customers. You can only terminate a customer for non-payment (if you’re a paid service) or if the customer takes actions that directly threaten your business (eg attempts to hack your service).
Social media companies may no longer promote or suppress content; they can only provide tools to let users do so themselves (eg filter/block/subscribe/tag). Advertisers can use similar filters for ad placement.
They choose platforms with moderation (aka censorship) and stay away from those that don't.
Advertisers are what demand moderation not users so as to protect their bottom line. It’s disingenuous to say otherwise and ignores a multitude of services that became and still are incredible popular with little moderation.
Please provide examples.
So we can compare them to the likes of Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Reddit etc.
Emphasis on the AND. There is some correlation between Youtube's popularity and the lack of moderation but that isn't what made them popular.
I do agree on the advertiser's demanding moderation and I honestly don't blame them. If I made a product and I'm paying good money for advertising. I wouldn't want my products to be even remotely associated with anything that might promote controversy AND lower sales. Emphasis on the AND. The companies job is to make money and if that means embracing censorship or decrying it then they'll do it. Hell, they'll even do both at the same time. Advertisers are a leech on society and I hate that I'm defending them. But they pay the bills so....
That doesn't mean that vast majority of users don't want moderation. Every "free-speech" alternative to an already existing platform that I've visited has been complete shit. Filled with nutjobs that couldn't play nice with the normal folk.
I also think Threads is perhaps a reasonable challenge to the idea that society wants moderation. Unlike the anti-Musk Twitter alternatives it started with a massive and mixed userbase and was a completely viable alternative, yet it almost immediately collapsed. It's really hard to see why without looking to the fact that were also featuring the sort of "moderation" that historically only comes as a bait-and-switch after a platform is extremely well established.
The reason people stopped using it was because after the initial install they realised it was missing basic features like a web app, search, chronological feed etc.
Those have now been added and reports from popular users is that engagement across the board is increasing again. Far from collapsing and well on its way to being a true Twitter alternative.
[1] - https://gizmodo.com/threads-has-lost-more-than-80-of-daily-a...
If I see a billboard on a bus station, what is the advertiser endorsing here?
What about a magazine ad? Reasonable people assume the advertiser supports every view expressed therein?
If I happened to see an ad on a website with user generated content, would I really think the advertiser endorsed each post?
Sorry, this argument is fallacious. Reasonable people do not make these conclusions.
It's not an endorsement. People make associations all the time consciously or not. There are obviously positive and negative associations. And if it's within your power to reduce the negative associations which might impact the perception of your product then why won't you do it? Advertising is primarily an appeal towards emotion not logic. It's manipulative by nature.
I don't know what I'm saying that's so unreasonable.
Also, I can't control whether some homeless person pees next to my billboard, but if my competitors also have billboards in the area then I may still come out on top. But if I can move my weight to move those homeless people elsewhere, preferably to my competitors billboards then I'll do it. This isn't a moral argument.
Nobody associates Coke with the reek of bum piss because they encountered a messy billboard. This is simply an unreal line of argument.
It certainly would be interesting if we lived in a world where advertisers refused to run ads in stadiums of losing teams, ran their ads only on sunny days, and only on positive, uplifting tv episodes while entirely avoiding shows about serial killers. We can fantasize, but the actual world has never worked this way.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
They remove child pornography. They comply with DMCA. They ban entire countries.
You want to show your content on the internet? Start your own hosting service or find one that will allow your content. Nobody owes you anything.
Users don’t want the responsibility of filtering out CP, gore, sexual violence, etc. I would bet the average user actively wants that content suppressed. Just look at any of the cases of social media moderators developing PTSD from their work.
The position that only the government is bound by "freedom of speech" is, at the very least, weird in an international context where things that are not the US government are expected to respect people's freedoms.
It is also perfectly legal to do a lot bad things like e.g. buying the product of slave labor in other countries or blood diamonds or buying stocks of companies known to pollute with wild disregard.
Also in the US:
> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law.
is misleading, the more precise version is that "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in criminal courts.