Hacker News Reader

Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Steelman argument is it's better to know what liars, bigots, and other naughty people are up to than push them entirely underground. And someday future moderators may think you're naughty/lying/a quack/etc.

IMO we should not let private platforms become near monopolies, and certainly not without regulation, since they become a defacto public square. But if we're going to let them eat the world, then hopefully they'll at least use good judgment and measures like de-ranking or even banning folks who encourage others to do harm. Making bans temporary is a safety valve in case of bad moderation.

That steelman is still a pretty bad argument, though. I don't see why giving liars, bigots and other naughty people a megaphone is required in order to know what they're saying.

I suppose the argument there is that it's not necessarily a megaphone for the fella with 24 followers. The concern comes from when someone amasses a following through "acceptable" means and then pivots. Not sure how to balance that.

new algos will gladly give people with 24 followers millions of views if the content pushes the right metrics

Yeah, I personally still see a place for permanent bans. But I can see the other side.

Who gets to decide who’s naughty? One day it’s the Biden admin, and the next it’s the Trump admin. That’s the tough part about censorship.

You can leave it up to companies, but what happens when Trump allies like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison buy up major platforms like Twitter and TikTok?

Do we really trust those guys with that much power?

We can use objective metrics to tell if someone is a liar, a bigot, and a paid disinformant working for a foreign state.

... or we could have, 5-10 years ago. No matter what we call one of these people, no matter how true our findings are, if you accuse a bad person of a bad thing these days, they'll just accuse you of the same bad thing (no matter how little sense it makes) and they have so many stupid followers who will believe it, that being correct is no longer a winning strategy.

That’s just the thing. Your definition of an “objective metric” can be totally different than somebody else’s.

Biden’s definition of the objective truth is very different than Trump’s. It doesn’t matter what the actual truth is. Whoever’s in charge gets to decide what gets censored.

What is Youtube a 'near monopoly' in? Online video.....? Do you have any idea how much video there is online that's not on Youtube? They don't meet the legal definition of a monopoly

People change/make mistakes. Permanent bans are rarely a good idea.

Earlier in 2025, the video game Fortnite announced[1] that they were giving cheaters with lifetime bans a "second chance" and let them return to the game. Lo and behold, cheating in the game spiked up this year and has returned as a huge ongoing problem. Turns out, the vast majority of the bans were probably correct, and when you let people back into something who were banned for doing X, they're going to immediately start doing X again once they're back in.

1: https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-anti-cheat-update-feb...

Both these things can be true.

People deserve second chances every now and then. Many people squander their second chances. Some people don't.

Admittedly, Google was very heavy handed with Covid censorship. Sure, there was a lot of genuine misinformation that maybe deserved it, but they also tended to catch a lot of actual qualified scientists engaging in scientific debate (say, arguing in favor of masks and the transmission through air theory in the early days) or even some discussion that wasn't opposing the official stances.

Somewhat related, it's pretty insane how even to this day YouTubers have to avoid referring to by name a global multi-year situation that everyone who existed at the time went through. It's due to advertisers rather than government pressure, but still, insane.

Yeah at the time I get the impression they were banning dissent, not just egregious or dangerous content (whatever that even means). I though most places came to their senses a long time ago and walked back that heavy handedness, I'm surprised this just happened.

Your point reminded me that around the time when the pandemic first started, I saw a YouTube video on physics titled something like "Corona and Arc Discharge" and it had the contextual note that is sometimes added to videos. I think the official name YouTube gives it is: "topical context in information panel". I thought it was a funny case where the automated system thought this physics video had something to do with COVID.

Merriam Webster defines con man as "a person who tricks other people in order to get their money : con artist"

Even if people were straight up wrong about their COVID-19 theories, I don't think many of the banned people were trying to get viewers to send them money.

> trying to get viewers to send them money.

They were trying to get viewers to get money. It's an important distinction.

We both know that ads and sponsorships are a significant way influencers monetize their viewers.

All they have to do is lie to attract eyeballs and they make money. E-begging isn't necessary, the platforms allow you to extract value from viewers at an incredible scale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com