I imagine many of these same people championed the rights of private businesses to decide who they did and didn't serve when it came to the infamous cakeshop [1] yet when Youtube or Twitter or Facebook makes exactly the same choice not to be a vehicle for disinformation, those same people lose their minds.
The point here is that the majority of people complaining about this aren't standing up for principle. They just want to get their way.
Live by the sword.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-electi...
> YouTube has taken the position that merely acknowledging an utterance of the false claim is the same thing as making the claim yourself unless you correct and disavow it elsewhere in the video. It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that a false election claim makes an appearance.
Not saying it’s a smart policy, but just to be clear, YouTube does allow you to play a video of Trump saying the election was rigged, provided you warn viewers about it.
Why not just stick it in every video you make regardless of content if the alternative is potentially the loss of your career?
But the capricousness and arrogance with which these platforms treat their users (both content creators and viewers) is not a good long term strategy. I mean, was the Hill supposed to know the content was prohibited? And how are people going to be able to actually access the news of the day? Certainly seems to me like YouTube wants users to go elsewhere.
This authoritarianism is powered by the people, not by direct Government action.
What should you be fighting for? Making these platforms public utilities so using them would confirm protection of the 1st amendment.
I'm a cord-cutter and yes, I use YouTube constantly.
It obviously has a lot more than kitten an puppy videos, it's not that cut and dry.
Less educated people need to learn to trust their instincts, and be skeptical at all times.
Politics is about really simple stuff because you can’t over complicate at such a high level of abstraction.
I think there is no relationship whatsoever between education level and common sense. If anything the correlation is negative. Highly educated people don’t need common sense because they deal with complex things.
> They’ll believe anything the establishment tells them because
> they spend more time in school following directions and going
> “by the book” - they excel at this.
Amazing how many people support tyranny by thinking they are on the side of righteousness.
Everyone has rights, or no one has rights. Remember that
The dominant message they will see is the notion that the election was fully legitimate and had nothing substantial occur that would question its legitimacy. Any compelling or specific counter arguments are simply not visible. So that unengaged person is learning the accepted stance is correct, the unacceptable stance must have a disclaimer because it is so wrong/dangerous, and that if they take that stance they also risk being labeled as crazy or expelled from the platform.
Politics has been rife with BS and lies forever. This isn't a one-off, they've been doing this for years and only in a certain direction. Not un-coincidentally, it's in the opposite direction of their employees' political views which are 95 D for Microsoft to 99% D at Google. (The whole range of big tech companies' political affiliations is within this range, which is actually more partisan than D voters themselves.)
The practical effect of this, and it may be hard to see this coming from an environment where literally 99% of the people who surround you think the same way, is for people to permanently form strong opinions against you. It's already happened in America because of 2020, which is why monopoly break ups are now a highly likely proposition, but coming from a different end of the spectrum.
It has always amazed me the vitriol that tech companies have for people they do not understand or care to.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/questions...
Or you could just present people with the data and let them make up their own minds. We have to stop thinking we're on the 'right' side and it's ok to silence the 'wrong.'
Think about this, if the controls or restrictions you discuss were available to the opposition tomorrow, would you still support them?
It's one thing to have people making false claims, but covering the former president tying of election his claim to the current Ukraine crises should not fall into that category.
When did Youtube become A Russian censor?
Perhaps the right answer is to “divide” it up and set requirements for each category of video, similar to how “YouTube kids” is a thing now. News and podcasts would go under its own section and have some level of sanity checks while home videos can be as random as they want to be.
I think we need to focus on how to make it easier to consume content from multiple platforms together. Small starts are things like web notifications (which are unfortunately abused) so that you can be notified about new videos from an author your just discovered, even if they aren't on your regular platforms. Of course RSS is an awesome version of this but needs some UX built for the average user.
The harder thing is getting curation and recommendation across platforms. But this definitely isn't impossible.
To your point, Youtube has a strong legal incentive to make Youtube Kids succeed, and they failed. I’m not sure we can expect better for other category splits that are no less controversial.
Once you start compromising on principles, the rest is just slippery slope that we are observing.
A decade ago that would be pure heresy on any tech forum. Now it's (currently) the top comment on one of the top stories on HN.
That said, I guarantee that a government-controlled or otherwise heavily regulated platform would have far, far more instances of benign content removed for violating obscure rules. Once the consequences rise to the level of regulatory violations, the companies will pull content without thinking because nobody wants to risk the fines or worse.
These companies are rushing to self-censor their own content as a way to get out ahead of potential future regulation. Politicians and journalists can, and will, seize upon even the slightest missteps or unpopular comment to lambaste tech companies as evil. This move was definitely a mistake, but it's part of a larger movement to aggressively err on the side of safety when it comes to any potentially controversial content.
https://rumble.com/vtyr34-democrats-are-pressuring-companies...
Due to network effects there is no legitimate competition to YouTube, so YouTube needs to be regulated as a monopoly (unless maybe TikTok has started hosting longform videos instead of just people doing stupid dances).
YouTube can play politics if they want. It isn't a good thing, but life has survived CNN and Fox News and it doesn't get worse than that for biased publishing.
I think of YouTube (and many others) as akin to state media anymore.
The WEIRD world is becoming increasingly more authoritarian. I’m already detached from real conflict and scarcity, knowing nothing but peace and prosperity, and the TikTok generation behind me meming about WW3 doesn’t inspire much confidence.
They keep removing videos to keep their advertisers or customers happy. If they are not allowed by the government to delete videos that are not illegal, they can just blame the government.
Of course, they should not be forced to keep every video. It has to be profitable for them.
This would eliminate most the edge cases.
The problem is trusting the algorithm to make decisions and then pretending you aren’t responsible for them.
What you are thinking would apply if they were handling 10s of hours of video everyday from dozens of individuals.
They have about 10 hours of video uploaded every second, throught the day, all week, every month, every year... and their platform has 2 billion users. What you are suggesting would not be possible even if they hired everyone eligible to work in the world.
1. At what point will the information on the internet become so obfuscated that communication and "truth" is difficult to discern from "lies", if not presently today? Consider a person using the internet for the first time in order to find more information on a current event. How many sources (and what qualifies as one) does one have to traverse to weigh what one can consider to be "truthful enough"? Does a person have enough time to sift through all the available sources? To me, this is why media outlets filter their content, in order to protect their version of "truth". News outlets have always been biased, I don't see why YouTube or Twitter or FB cannot do the same thing.
2. Democracy will always be a thin line. There must be a point of "truth" of recording votes that the population is willing to accept. If the majority consistently challenges results or insists that the results are false, then democracy cannot exist, and another form of governmental control, possibly an evolution of authoritarianism or dictatorship, will take its place. Is that more acceptable than less-than-perfect democratic outcomes?
We are living in an era where everyone is on aol. Leaving those comforts will bring a richer experience.
This is a good thing.
Basically every media outlet mentioned here has a long history of publishing really big lies about important stuff they know to be false for monetary gain.
The Hill had to quietly oust one of their own top propagandists recently because of how badly his obvious lies about Ukraine helping to steal the US election from Trump went down with people familiar with objective reality.
Here's their own internal review:
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/483600-the-hills-review-of...
We're seeing on a big scale where this leads right now, and it is no coincidence that all these people seem big fans of Putin and dislike democracy.
And we've got all these people on HN carefully avoiding mentioning that they believe, or worse? support, these lies, and taking the pure and noble stance that we should never censor lies. Which would be a bad stance even if that itself wasn't just another obvious lie for political gain.
Some things are complicated and murky, but there's fairly clear boundaries too sometimes.
When reached for comment, YouTube policy communications
manager Ivy Choi confirmed that the channel had been
suspended for posting content in violation of YouTube’s
policies. “We removed content from and issued a strike
to this channel for violating our election integrity
policy, and as a result, this channel is suspended from
publishing new videos or livestreams for seven days,”
Choi told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We do allow
for content with sufficient educational, documentary,
scientific or artistic context, which the removed content
did not contain.”
If you're Republican, conservative or "libertarian" (riiiight), you need to be quiet and go sit in the corner while the rest of us decide what to do with you.
Removing the dislike count was YouTube's renunciation of democratic ideals.
Now it's a media outlet just like the others.
I think our minds naturally stray to find these patterns to reduce computational load. For example, reading news on reddit and seeing hundreds of comments and very few upvotes puts your mind into "investigation mode" while seeing something average makes you much more trusting of it.
(This feels meta: HN links to a Tampa newspaper, which links to a Twitter thread, which embeds a clip from a video released by The Hill, which contains a clip from Fox News, where one half of the audio comes from a phone line to Donald Trump. Pointers to pointers to pointers. Oh, and now you get me, talking about it.)
The framing is interesting. (I have always found it hard to pin down The Hill.)
First, what Trump said: Mostly, he tried to take credit for cancelling Nord Stream 2. This is a little weird, because it didn't seem especially cancelled. Related to this, he told an unverifiable but plausible anecdote about giving Angela Merkel a white flag, to say that she was "surrendering" to Russia: I say "plausible" because he was pushing Germany (and Europe in general) to increase its defense spending (by threatening not to defend NATO, which you could say emboldened Putin, but you could say that about other things too, like Obama's "red line". "Mistakes were made."). And at the end of the Trump clip, a little unnecessarily, they leave in one sentence from him to the effect that "this would have never happened if I'd been re-elected", which of course he expresses in terms of a supposed "steal".
Could the Hill have cut the clip just before that last sentence? Yes. They would have lost none of their main message. They would have lost something to react parenthetically to, though.
Did they include that one sentence simply because it was adjacent and it gave them some shock value? Or was this their way of smuggling the message to their (not-so-Republican) audience? ("We are ostensibly laughing at Trump, but at least this gets you to listen to him"?) I don't know.
Their reaction is one of implicit mockery. They also imply that Trump typically would also insert some talking point about his supposed healthcare plan (which never happened). Which again they laugh at, because everybody knows there was nothing there.
They also refer to Trump's supposed "defense" of Putin: From context, it sounds like Trump said that Putin's use of the word "peacekeepers" was clever. But there is a weird moment where the host repeats the word "peacekeepers" several times, almost unnecessarily. A paranoiac could say he was trying to reinforce the message.
So what is The Hill's slant? With Rising they lean towards a kind of moderate populism that I have always associated with Russian propaganda. Though that has only ever half- made sense to me: Sure, Russia would want to get support away from the more interventionist centrists ("first choice Trump, second choice Bernie, last choice Hillary"), but you'd think they'd also want to push division, and The Hill's moderate populism is actually not so inflammatory (it does not shove wedges into cracks between identities, like, honestly, CNN/BBC/(CIA?) do. Or did until Biden got them to moderate themselves, a little?)
And The Hill has tended to give time to writers like Matt Taibbi who emphasize that they think "Russiagate" is fake. (Maybe they're right though?)
So then how do we put it all together?
Maybe I should just take The Hill at face value: They're trying to do an "inside baseball" thing, and this really is the compromise political position they've decided they believe in (presumably because it looks like a way forward that seems "good" to them while also protecting their interests).
Anyway, I guess the lesson for The Hill is that, if you're using sarcasm to deal with Trump's claims, you're being too subtle. And if I can write a post this long wondering what their angle is, then they're being too subtle.
Which might be necessary and true, but would still be a little sad: "We can't have interesting things because the other people are too stupid."
[0]: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/13/breitbart...
We've only had nuclear weapons for 70 years. We used them to blow each other up on day 1. The odds are not in our favor that nuclear warfare will be contained.
People have found a vulnerability and learned how to hack it.
Though individuals have been changing their values as well. On the left and the right, and the center as well, there is more support for authoritarian. Part of that is due to COVID, so maybe it will fade. Hopefully it will, but we'll see I guess.
On the other hand, the world is probably the most united it's been in a while because of Russia so there's that.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-...
That is an interesting take on it. It may not be wrong, but I hadn't heard that before.
But now you hear about it. The world you planned for was always an illusion. It never existed outside a narrow slice of time in post-WW2 peace and prosperity, and only for the thin slice of humanity that got to enjoy it. Now the hard part is: what do you do about it now that you know you were fed pleasing lies?
The world is certainly dark but I find comfort in knowing that the majority of us simply want to live peaceful lives, and watch our families prosper.
If course mistakes happen when you stop blindly accepting everything S valuation.
But other changes are for the better. And you don't need war to make these changes. If you make them before hard times come, you'll be better prepared for them: becoming more stoic (less emotional, less offended at everything), becoming more serious, more resourceful, more self-reliant, lowering your expectations, being more humble, being more careful with your words and who you speak openly with, knowing your place instead of speaking for the whole of humanity, being better able to negotiate, being better able to compromise, being more tolerant of other opinions, appreciating the wisdom of our ancestors more, and focusing more on what really matters.
To connect the two, you'd have to complete the scurrilous reference made that we are currently in a time of "weak men". You may or may not be aware that the "Hard times..." meme is widely used among not just stoics, but also fascist groups to suggest that the current generation is soft and weak, and that only by adversity can men become strong again.
One can do almost everything good you listed, and indeed aspire to it, without becoming stoic and emotionless. To have feelings isn't weak.
I think we need catastrophe and suffering to bring out the best in ourselves, because without them society writ large trends inexorably in a direction that nobody would argue represents the best of our species.
Perhaps people want a more authoritarian world (without realizing it). The ratio of static to noise has been increasing year by year. People don't want to take (nor have) the time to balance alternate view points and spend the time to independently determine fact from opinion. I think the current lack of direction creates turmoil--there are too many options, too many sources of information, and the quality of all of them have gone down while they compete to pull at our amygdalas for seconds of our time. Maybe there is a higher percentage of people who just want answers from someone they trust so they can get on with their lives.
I think I've been on HN long enough to know that (re)implementing limitations on the control of information would make most of you scream. But maybe its for the best. It's already been proven many times over that people aren't going to research facts themselves. So having fewer organizations spoon feed choice bits of information can't be worse. Note that I am not suggesting to deliberately block information, but rather have organizations that are more selective (i.e. exactly like it was during the newspaper era).
I think it's incredibly unlikely for the USA to become a dictatorship. We have too many checks and balances, and the decision making is cordoned off into many compartments, and the country is split 50/50 on who they vote for. An authoritarian-bent president would have to fight three branches of government, 50 governors (all of whom have their own state-level army, by the way), 100 senators, hundreds of congressmen, thousands of judges and lawyers, 150 million citizens, and so on and so forth. And on top of that, manage the country on a national and international level. I just dont see it happening. Trump did not bring us any where closer to that reality by the way (name one legislative/judicial change that moved the needle closer in that direction).
All this to say, there's nothing to be scared about. The internet has been a fun experiment but it's given a microphone to too many people, and has crumpled the gatekeepers who had the job of filtering out the diamonds from the mud (and did that job extraordinarily well, by the way, because they had to, or die). It feels like our culture has been dying. The influence artists had up until the 90s was comparatively huge. If resources were pooled to support the most talented (be it artists, journalists, architects, musicians, corporate / government leaders, etc), I think we would experience another golden era of culture.
1. Authoritarianism is not a good thing, hard stop.
2. The US is not a long way away from authoritarianism. It's one strongman with actual brains away from it.
Making consessions like you suggest is precisely how we slip into authoritarianism.
Yes but only until a violent event that strikes fear in the minds of the people. Then the government may convince people to give up their freedoms in the name of security.
I think the question is how dedicated are we to our values, not in good times, but in uncertain times.
Youtube literally operates walk-in 'creator spaces' where creators with popular channels can go to make use of editing equipment and resources. They can staff a media liaison office. They can staff a media liaison office in every major city of every first world country. They have those offices already existing to sell adverts, after all.
It would be trivial for them to operate those media liaison offices and ensure that things like this don't happen. They choose to hide behind the 'oops, the algorithm did it, nothing we could have done' excuse.
I'm convinced that deepfakes will be as easily generated as a Snapchat filter within a few years, substantially less time than society will require to adjust to this reality.
Filming a deepfake with a DV cam pointed at your screen is very convincing. Sadly.
World War 1 was very much avoidable. Time and time again World War 1 has been called unnecessary because the original dispute that triggered the conflict was limited.
The problem was that there were not enough who were afraid, and that goes for WWII too.
There is also the view, which I think has considerable merit, which regards WWII in Europe as a continuation of WWI, and the Pacific war as a largely separate, though concurrent, event.
(If any one is interested in the book I will hunt it down as I don’t remember the name).
Another anecdote that speaks to the sentiment of the beginning of the war is Britain’s initial deployment of troops. The troops were literally marching towards Germany with music and percussionists that was supposed to motivate the troops and strike fear into the enemy. I imagine an army like you would see in Game of thrones (walking from point A to point B and making camp in between). Germany used their planes and promptly dispatched the British troops which suffered devastating losses. After this event Britain changed their tactics and took the war seriously.
(This event may have been WW2 which would make the story even more ridiculous).
On a spectrum, where e.g. anarchy is on the other end, it is a good thing. Where to place the pin however is a challenge. Binary decisions such as that ("this thing can only be good or bad") is an extremely restricted way at seeing the world.
>The US is not a long way away from authoritarianism. It's one strongman with actual brains away from it.
I'd love to here why you think that.
Regarding the US falling to authoritarianism, there are at least two factors: 1. Most people are in a state of conditioned helplessness where they don't feel there is anything they can do to affect change. 2. Most people don't have minds of their own but just parrot what they hear in the media that aligns with their party. These two in conjunction leave an opening for someone to execute a soft coup. In fact a draft Trump executive order to discard the election results was released recently. He had convinced his base that the election was fraudulent. Seeing how far Trump got at eroding democracy, imagine someone like Trump but competent in the same situation. Every democracy that has gone authoritarian had plenty of branches and politicians and checks and balances in place.
Poverty and disease, for one.
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Said differently, the belief in non-violence can be stated as "I believe in pursuing non-violent means in absolutely every situation except for those in which another actor acts violently toward me"
The official start of WWI was a month after Franz Ferdinand's assassination, even though it's so heavily identified nowadays as "the start of the war". It's entirely possible that in the future, the instigating event will be identified as something that already happened and it's just taking a while for the shooting to start as alliances solidify, and that people who think we're already in WWIII have the same "the instigating event is the start of the war" association.
Russia's incursion into Ukraine near the end of February could, for example, end up being it.
The Syrian civil war was over 15 countries and factions. War in Afghanistan over 5 countries, technically much more.
None of these wars were consider WW3, and just because the war between Ukraine and Russia is in Europe doesn’t make it any different.
> There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.
And Hill responds “we’re already in it”
Maybe you disagree, but I was surprised by that response and found it very thought provoking
After 9/11 we had the GWoT mainly in the Middle East after the NYC attack. Global War on Terror, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syrian, Yemen and Africa.
The Eastern European conflicts 2008 Georgia, and the Ukrainian conflict since 2014.
Source?
Nearly 9% of US presidents have been assassinated. Over a much much smaller timeframe. I would bet you would be less likely to have been assassinated as a Tsar than as a President.
That seems substantial, at least compared to Presidents, especially considering the threat of assassination was a serious consideration given all the political intrigue. Whereas AFAIU U.S. Presidents didn't take the threat of assassination seriously until the 20th century, exposing themselves to the public in ways that would be unthinkable to Tsars; or monarchs and, later, autocrats generally for that matter.
On the other hand, likelihood of death per year looks more comparable. For Tsars I get 2.1% (5 / (1917 - 1682)). For Presidents I get 2.3% (3 / (1917 - 1789)) or 1.7% (4 / (2022 - 1789)), depending on the range.
These days autocrats don't invest themselves much in establishing national political legitimacy or institutional legitimacy, focusing almost exclusively on building and grooming a power base where everyone in power has a vested interest in keeping the leader alive. So Putin probably doesn't have much to worry about, excepting perhaps some patriot military General.
EDIT: It's 27% of Tsars and 1.6% likelihood of death per year if starting from 1613, the start of the Romanov Dynasty. (Refreshing my Russian history as I go.) Numbers don't really change if we go back to 1547, Ivan the Terrible and first self-styled Tsar of Russia, as we add another intervening murder. And that's being charitable on the first metric given rapid succession and overlap during the Time of Troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_monarchs
My guess is both attempts and successes are fewer over time and will approach 0 until some structural change shocks increasingly complacent protections.
I think this word should be banned from such comparisons. Equal outcome can equal opportunity and different takes on what matters. Right-wing libertarianism tends to be the most "pure technical freedom" for the individual but tends to lead to little practical freedom for those without significant capital.
You could rightfully argue that the far end of either in its pure form is the meaningful flavor of "freedom".
Authoritarianism is orthogonal to that, in either case.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Political_Compass_stand...
I guess the Liberal Party in Australia has some similarities to the Conservative Party in the UK.
"We all" find our opinions are unwelcome on the internet when we say things like that.
What do you mean by this?
I don't know if the person I replied to knows that - I think there are a lot of people who don't. It's worth pointing out though there's a disconnect from the first sentence to the second. Why is it that we have to have hard times for us to be better? Well, the argument from the meme - which many people take seriously even if you or I don't - is that recent times have been easy and this has created weak (and other pejoratively described) men.
I compare it to kids having allergic reactions. If you grow up in a sterile environment your immune system reacts to minor environmental irritants. And that is maladaptive.
My parents were in their 20s during the Bangladesh independence war, when Pakistan engaged in genocide of Bangladeshis: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/genocide-us-cant-reme.... Even leaving aside the violence—when they were growing up, 1 out of 4 kids didn’t make it to age 5. They can talk about the war in, if not neutral, objective and unemotional terms. They would never suggest they’ve encountered any adversity in their life. But certainly nothing that happens in America gets them all that worked up.
And I can’t help but feel that this really does make them better, more capable, and more effective people. They’re able to grapple with reality in all its messiness in a detached unemotional way.
The legislation is based on the principle that everyone has the right to say what they want to say, but they have no right to be heard by others. This phraseology was used by several during the recent committee hearings, including by Facebook employees for example. So it will effectively enshrine in law: shadow banning, delisting from Google search etc.
Also enshrined in the legislation is the principle of banning content which is 'legal but harmful to adults'. 'Harmful', amongst many other terms, is not defined.
Also enshrined in law will be the principle that certain types of 'journalistic' content will be protected from this censorship if it meets criteria to be decided upon by the new regulator, Ofcom.
This will be an enabling act. It is full, from front to back, of opportunity for scope creep through secondary legislation.
As I said, the UK is leading the charge with this, but the EU has been keeping pace [1]. I haven't seen similar in the US as of yet.
[0] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... [1] - https://ec.europa.eu/info/digital-services-act-ensuring-safe...
The root cause of this is that our society has forgotten how to argue for free speech as a moral case. We've taken it for granted for so long, we can't remember why it's good. Meanwhile the enemies of it have spent years steadily attacking it, often with lies (e.g. the numerous fake claims of Twitter bots controlling elections).
I try to listen to podcasts, occasionally, that are contrary to my own beliefs, not because of free speech but rather to make sure that I don’t end up in a “bubble.”
Coincidentally, I listed to something by The Hill on YouTube last week and it was reasonably good because they had three people speculating on the future economy with slightly different points of view. Not great stuff but worth having on while I was cooking dinner. Also, as a liberal, there is a conservative think tank at Stanford University that I occasionally listen to, not always comfortable for me, but worth a little time every month.
Free speech, in supporting views different from own own, is so very important.
Actions like this have turned this into political red meat for some. These companies really need to learn how to read the room. Ratcheting downward the ability of people to freely use these platforms just feeds into whatever persecution complex they have, and justifies it. You don't get rid of bad ideas by allowing them not be spoken no matter how well meaning you are.
You can’t force people or businesses to listen to you or broadcast your speech. That’s American liberty. That’s freedom.
You can’t claim that a business is “the public square” and then force them.
If you do want a digital public square look for something run by the government with a mandate to publish everything.
I’m pretty sure people wouldn’t be too happy with that either… too many libtards, too many nazis, too many racists, too many whatevers…
Why not? We place some pretty serious obligations on a few industries - one example is electricity providers of last resort.
Electricity is deemed a common utility and a regulated, granted natural monopoly - one considered a necessary requirement for all citizens and organizations.
Video streaming is not a monopoly, and no number of bad faith arguments about popularity or awareness in consumer headspace change the fact that there are a number easily accessible competitors.
Or you could call your congress people and ask them to increase funding for PBS or NPR or whatever. Or start a tax funded service.
Or start your own service. I’m sure you’ll welcome everyone’s suggestions on how to run it.
Or is it that you want someone else to run it, you don’t want to pay anything for it, don’t want to pay taxes for it, but you do want a say in how it’s run?
(Not you personally but y’all)
Its amazing watching progressives grovel at the feet of corporations bc you agree with their censorship, and for free market conservatives to turn on them bc the corporations they rallied their whole lives turned on them.
I want Twitter and YouTube treated like my ISP, or my electric company.
You can't take away the public square and then demand people only air grievances in the public square.
The line between corporations and government is so blurred online that we must blur the lines between public and private spaces online.
I was basically addicted to YouTube a few years back, first thing every day was go there, I could stop going to it many times a day, even when I felt it was too much. Now, I maybe actively go to YouTube 2-3 times a week, otherwise I just watch embedded videos on websites or Twitter.
I’m not surprised tiktok has taken over.
I think YouTube have basically neutered themselves over trying to “do the right thing” politically
You could automate moderation with ML, automatic recognition, user-flagging but the sheer number of false positives, and alleged false positives, means you basically need to have a full human moderation team to have real accuracy.
You could just use human moderators, but then you have to pay for them all. Ads based websites can't afford that.
You could charge users money and not be purely ads-based, but then you won't be a top web destination because people aren't willing to pay for the internet with money.
So the only remaining option is to automate, ignore the false positive problem entirely and rake in money while abusing your content creators and users. This is 'The Google Strategy'.
If these idiots were taking just themselves off the cliff, then sure. But they are taking villagers who cant tell the difference between legit or not off the cliff too.
Even worse, those idiots are turning these misguided villagers onto the rest who know better to not listen to these idiots.
This is a failing of the education system here. But no one is talking about how to really distinguish propaganda from real. Sure they misguided people have freedom of speech, but they are growing like a virus and a virus needs to contained. Social literally has the term "viral" for crying out loud.
The other more important thing to contain would be the medium on which this infection is spreading. Which mean reducing the impact of the feed algorithm. Access to the feed should be limited. Also, facebook and youtube dont want to give up the feed. That is what keeps the humans hooked.
If one part of the body is cancerous, you cut it off. You dont stand around arguing if that part of the body has right to free speech.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/595709-white-hou...
[1] https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1499545712668905473
[2] I'm speaking of course of LumenDatabase, which used to be called "chillingeffects.org" back when Google was ostensibly in accord with its philosophy.
In my opinion all elections are rigged, why on earth would you risk losing power to the whim of the 'unwashed'.
Both parties are two sides of the same coin and go back and forth to give everyone the illusion of choice. But when people mass together and demand social change, BLM ect its allowed to happened only until it starts working, then the authorities crack down with a iron fist.
Its well documented that the USA rigs elections in other countries. So if the technology exists and the appetite exists, what's stopping them? Laws? Morals?
Do we really think that the intelligence community is going to let a random popular citizen have command of the biggest military in the world and a finger on the nuclear button, just because a couple of extra people put their name on a piece of paper?
I think that is absurd, all elections are rigged and to suggest otherwise is naive, holding on to a romantic notion that we choose our leaders.
Then you could respond with how things are effectively systemically rigged through gerrymandering/news media/misinformation/propaganda/mind control/harassment/selective enforcement but that’s something else.
Iceland maybe, but that would be the exception to the rule.
Much better alternatives exist. Support decentralized internet ideas, save the internet for future generations.
particularly appropriate quote:
> What casual observers might not understand, however, is just how far the policy goes. Not only does YouTube punish channels that spread misinformation, but in many cases, it also punishes channels that report on the spread of misinformation. The platform makes no distinction between the speaker and the content creator. If a channel produces a straight-news video that merely shows Trump making an unfounded election-related claim—perhaps during a speech, in an interview, or at a rally—YouTube would punish the channel as if the channel had made the claim, even if no one affiliated with the channel endorsed Trump's lies.
[1]: https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-electi...
The state of our world is comically broken, and it’s getting worse by the year. I cannot fathom any viable solution to turning things around. Roger Waters album “Amused to Death” was astonishingly prescient.
If it's not nonsense, then why censor it?
Thus they censor because they cannot claim to be impartial anymore.
But there used to be platforms on the internet.
But they got threatened by the left and the right for different reasons. Censor or be broken up.
We will see more ex-platforms this year but for different reasons.
Imagine in a totalitarian regime, you would like to inform people on system critical thoughts others have been executed for, so people can avoid them.
The problem of newspeak is that most of us don't see it, until it's too late. When we feed the machine with our fears, it will cut us off.
Most of us still like each other.
There's a always enough people who would enjoy the killing, if only someone would employ them to do it. And most people would probably deal with it as long as they aren't the victims. It's really sad. Our societies are very vulnerable to falling into such messes.
By the way, not that I would support this at all (since I believe in free speech), but any idea if any speeches from Putin or Xi, or official government accounts from either country have been banned from Twitter or YouTube et. al. like our own US President's social media accounts were? I'm guessing not likely, given that they've really done nothing about ISIS accounts in the past, or posts from those on the "left" side of the culture wars calling for and supporting outright violence in US cities or against individuals.
This is inaccurate. The precedent for removing extremist content was set in the late 2000s when Facebook, Google, and Twitter started massive campaigns to investigate, report and remove Islamic extremist content on their platforms. A lot of legitimate non-extremist Islamic content and users got caught up in the censorship. I didn't hear anything about it from free speech absolutists, though.
https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1495146891646013443
This is a path where all this censorship will lead to if they don't stop it. It will be as bad for the modern day Oligarchs as it was for the French nobility during the revolution, if they can't control it. But the problem is during the last year only more and more trust has been eroded. All week on twitter Pfizer, and vaccine side effects has been trending. Today on twitter it's "They lied" is trending. You can see how alarming this is to some at the top.
Hypernormalization
Looked it up and found a Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
And the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw
They've already gone far enough for the market to start to solve this. Rumble and Gettr and whatever else are gaining users. But it's producing an ideological split which is pretty dangerous. The other platforms don't set out to attract only the right, but when the censorship by the incumbents is one-sided, it's them who want to leave for somewhere else. Which only makes the incumbents lean more to the left.
What we need is some way to get left-leaning people to move to platforms without excessive censorship, which would both keep the balance and deter the incumbents from continuing to be heavy handed.
A lot of this is cultural. The thing where people cheer because their ideological opponent got silenced is cancer and needs to go away. Everyone of all stripes should quit platforms that do this, and then they wouldn't.
This is kind of like the thing where violence is impermissible except in self-defense. We need to cancel anyone who tries to cancel anyone.
There's no shortage of people trying to make these platforms but the problem is free-speech oriented sites get deplatformed. "Build your own hosting company!", "Build your own mobile operating system!", "Build your own payment processor!", etc, etc. A small handful of tech and payment companies can veto any website or app.
It's like the old days of broadcast television where if your show was too controversial for ABC, CBS, or NBC it didn't get on TV, period.
I agree, but Section 230 also contributes to this. It eliminates the legal consequences for that hamfisted behavior and enables these sites to grow far beyond their ability to properly manage the site.
It's often been said that clumsy AI moderation is necessary because there's no other way to moderate sites with so many users. If true, I see that as an argument against enabling sites to grow "too big to moderate" rather than an argument for excusing hamfisted behavior.
The far right despises technology companies, and there will be a huge push by their members to bring them all to heel.
That risk is likely one reason why Biden's state of the union speech echoed Trump policies: strengthening the border, moving jobs (like chip manufacture) to America, improving police funding, etc.
YouTube isn't a news network. It's a video platform catering to a global audience, many of whom are really really bad critical thinking. Same with Facebook. We all know what happens when content isn't curated, and it's really, really bad.
I'm glad that you're an adult and can make your own grown up decisions, and actually get news from a wide range of sources, and curate it yourself. I obviously wish everyone had that skill, but they don't, and it's actually really really dangerous to take that privilege you've earned for granted.
Who cares later if the "misinformation" later is found to be true ? The most important thing is to obey and follow the will of the collective - set by the whatever the media overlords and political masters judge as "correct thinking". Any attempt to deviate from the same is "radicalization" and must be suppressed by any and all means.
Who are you or YouTube to make this judgement?
More often than not, the "I'm smarter than the average person" types are the ones making the worst decisions.
Taking away their ability to hear different viewpoints especially those they believe to be true just drives these people to radicalize even further. I’m not even touching the matter of dismissing almost half of a country. Very shortsighted perspective.
Not true because law enforcement is still in place to take care of crime. Some amount of crime and confusion are also the price you pay to get the benefits of freedom.
Curation is about selection, not exclusion. As in selecting art for an exhibition on the basis of its value or quality. Curating is not about excluding or banning content via clumsy and vague censorship.
> "and it's really, really bad."
When trigger-happy censorship is the norm, really really really really bad things can happen.
> "become radicalized and violent when stupid bullshit like this starts gaining traction".
Bullshit like what? They (The Hill) were discussing and analyzing news, not propagandizing vulnerable youtube viewers.
It's disappointing you imply we need mandatory shielding from information, including analysis of news and events, with penalties for those not falling in line. Putin would agree with you. He threatens and shuts down media outlets for mentioning the word "war".
Mindless youtube viewers are not the tipping point to society meltdown.
I've watched a few 'The Hill' clips on youtube before, and I noticed they disagree with each other and provide alternate views. It's not a propaganda machine, so shouldn't be treated like one.
You may want your news and analysis to be grounded in loyalty to a monolith narrative and distributed via sanctioned memes. Others want more than that, such as counter-points, alternate views, robust debate, transparency and discussion. We learn more that way.
In my country Australia, we have a national "Q&A" TV panel show on the public broadcaster, covering news and politics. The idea is discussion, yet on the recent episode a young Russian Australian man was booted out of the studio audience because he mentioned he supported Putin's action in Ukraine. Instead of challenging the man's views, he was booted out live on air.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqPIxtJd2uU&t=304s
This isn't how civil discourse should operate.
All that being said: i think that censorship does way more harm than whatever nonsense these channels put out.
Network news runs on the same model.
Sometimes the filler (news or other content) is good but not always.
How do you solve that? Education? Too late - they’re adults.
I also encourage them to form their own opinions.
If you form your own opinions through a mediator, you will be deceived. If you form it via direct connection, you will be overwhelmed. Nothing is new or old, here. It is just difficult to have good opinions while also not letting your platform be abused.
Yeah just go build your own platform they will say as if it had not been attempted numerous times only to be censored off every hosting/ payment/ app platforms they could use or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions." Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable.
Was this really something that stopped any of the services?
>or hacked to have all the personal information of their users doxxed because they had "bad opinions."
Come on this is not fair. This was caused by these services choosing to hire low skilled developers. The guy building Parler didn't even understand the proper way to set up his authentication strategy nor did he really understand his database and its advantages/limitations. If anything, this should teach the other side to respect the effort that goes into developing these platforms(this disrespect for the skillset is something I see A LOT among the right wing youtubers I follow). They are so freaking proud to be not one of the "elites" by eschewing the desire for knowledge and a love of learning so much so that it bites them in the ass when they are booted off an existing platform and then realize this tech stuff is so hard.
>Even the ones that actually exist just become hiveminds of their own because they become populated by people who have been censored everywhere else, as if having every community devolve into hive minded safe spaces is actually desirable.
These platforms need to welcome the other side then, the ones doing the censoring.
If I go to a restaurant and eat some food and complain that food tasted awful, I am not saying that the restaurant should be forced by the government to make good food nor am I saying that everyone is forced to eat at that restaurant. I'm simply saying that the product served to me was not good.
Similarly when someone complains about Youtube engaging in censorship, you should not interpret that to mean that Youtube is infringing on first amendment rights, or that everyone is forced to use Youtube... rather it's an argument that the product Youtube provides is not as good as it could otherwise be. People are welcome to have an opinion and discuss whether Youtube's policies improve its service or are detrimental to its service without it devolving into a discussion about legal rights and government enforcement.
You can disagree with a position about censorship and make good arguments that Youtube censoring certain content or being the arbiter of truth makes for a better product, just as you can disagree with someone about whether a restaurant serves good food... but don't change someone's argument about the quality of a product into an argument about someone being forced into something or having their rights violated since no one ever made any such claim.
But, the issue that people are starting to react to is - are some platforms a natural monopoly?
Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
That a political question.
And see, there's always a fine balance between private property rights and other rights. For example: you can't prevent people from a given ethnicity from shopping in your store, even though it is a private property and in many cases you can refuse service to a particular customer - just not for this reason. And this is perfectly okay, because private property rights aren't absolute.
I must have missed the covenant to not enforce their patents that youtube extends to parties they've deplatformed and the indemnity they offer against the enforcement third party patent rights that they've obtained through cross licensing.
This isn't even a call to violence or targeted harassment. It's the opinion of a man about election results.
Nothing to do with youtube’s first amendment right, only Section 230 privileges
Lets strip them down to shreds in the public square for not censoring fast enough! Woohoo
If you disagree with certain ideas, you have to fight it in the open. That's how we get a big tent with general consensus across key issues, and avoid parallel universes of polar opposite information. The end result of all this is just going to be a truly Balkanised / multipolar world, but instead of geographical boundaries, it's all going to be in the mind. Your neighbour and you could have totally different ideas about certain issues - because you are consuming and contributing to totally different sets of information. And that will lead to immense physical conflict in the future.
Very worrying times right now.
What if the dangerous outcome is what's happening right here in this thread, and the thousands of others like it here on HN and elsewhere? Right in front of our eyes every day but we cannot see it, because it is normal.
[1] https://twitter.com/medvedevrussiae/status/14986197503347507...
The social media platforms can't prevent if Russia goes to war with NATO. Censoring the russian official won't do anything.
First off, it obviously needs to be relative reputation, and not centralizedI think some sort of cross platform web of trust, where you publicly endorse some friends, some content creators, and some investigative journalists, etc. You also publicly repudiate sources of information that you don't find credible. This means that if anyone goes off the rails there's a visible trail of distrust, and that information is de-prioritized in your network.
This also has a bit of sybil resistance built in, because upvotes or downvotes of thousands of bots isn't relevant at all to your trust graph unless friend of friends actually endorse some of these bots or something. Still though, it would probably also be good to have some burnable staking mechanic. Everyone needs to put in a dollar, or 10 dollars, or something to participate (which could be removed at any time), and people who clearly violate terms of use would have their stake burned, and all of their endorsements or repudiations would be invalidated.
I feel like eventually someone is going to have to build something like this. Incentives are hard to get right, but if by some miracle it works, and the trust graph takes off, then lots of these problems just go away. Imagine something like DNS that you could just query to see how much you should trust some chunk of information. It would be a game changer.
I'm being quite reductive, but at the same time your points could be interpreted to resemble the concept. Fruit for thought
Actually, I see this as both not the only remaining option and also as not an option.
If you can't moderate, then you're being irresponsible on your platform. Reduce the load (disable comments, limit uploads, etc), hire, or shut down.
"We're too big to moderate" is an absurd and irresponsible statement by some of the biggest companies in the world.
"Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
I’m not arguing either way. I lean more toward keeping information uncensored, but let’s recognize that the ready ingestion of poison isn’t in the majority’s interest. And society always is willing to say “we’ll censor our taboos”, we didn’t really mean uncensored anyway.
Most of this stuff is really just memes being shared around. And memes, as much as they sometimes look like utterly uneducated trash (complete with errors of spelling / grammar / logic) are usually created by one person then shared by many. I suspect that one person is something of a mastermind; the many, of course, may be morons.
The discussion always seems to go toward censoring the many. I don't support that, even if I vehemently disagree with them. If my aunt, who I don't want to call a moron but does share some utterly insane memes, continues posting things, that's fine. I vehemently disagree with her and hate her viewpoint. She should get to share it anyway.
But I feel like social networks could do a lot more in locating and halting the mastermind that's 50 shares back in the chain, whispering in in their ears. It's like the story from a couple weeks back about a 3-person media shop being responsible for a huge amount of misinformation on Facebook. That was exposed by journalists. Facebook, I feel, would let them go on forever and invests basically nothing in finding out where some of the more virulent content comes from.
The Uber strategy, services with no possible path to profitability being propped up indefinitely by billionaires that refuse to stop believing the dream of infinite growth, is incredibly damaging to any ecosystem it infests. Youtube only exists because Google wants data. Video hosting is just too expensive for any realistic business model to support storing and distributing every vacation video ever made, for free, forever. This cradle-to-grave life support preempts all competition and creates monopolies so large they begin to creak and splinter under their own weight.
The strategy for Youtube moderation is maximum efficiency per dollar: deal with as much muck as possible with the smallest budget possible, and just let the errors happen because it's too expensive to prevent them (but if the public outcry is big enough, they can reverse the decision.) They can't make things better. There's just no money for it, because Youtube is just too big and it doesn't, cannot, and will never make any money.
I was in a chat with someone who worked with Google once and they said, paraphrased, "Our company suggested we could have a team for providing support for non-Partner users, and Google flat-out said 'It doesn't matter how cheap you go, it cannot be done.'"
I'm really glad Patreon exists. I think the only solution to all of this is to break the notion that web hosting (and, on another topic, creative work) is free, or that it can be supported by ads. Things cost money. People should be expected to contribute to support services they use.
(And of course, that brings up the issue of those who don't have money being excluded. There is no societal problem more than six steps away from poverty/income inequality. Probably no more than four steps, even.)
EDIT: all these talking points are the same ones I remember the alt-right getting in a tizzy about when Google started adding information about the Holocaust under holocaust-denial sewage.
I think we need a better word than censorship.
More like inept penny pinchers.
With this shift in society, it makes sense for our AI banning tools to also conflate use/mention.
It is less a programmatic problem and more a real problem. Since even if you don’t use but mention you are considered to have signal-amplified and therefore used. That is, mentioning is now using.
A disclaimer is a way to demonstrate transparently that a reasonable consideration was made before magnifying false claims.
There may be better ways, but it at least accounts for the cost of signal amplification in some way.
Welcome to our new algorithmic future, brought to us by VCs and software engineering.
Suppression of misinformation is an important function if you want a marketplace of ideas to actually work. However building massively scaled platforms for information dissemination ensures that it will be done by robots with no judgement (either the machine kind, or poorly paid people following a script).
The article makes it seem as if a human made the decision, not an algorithm. At the very least, humans came up with the policy and wrote the algorithms, and could override them if they wanted to.
This isn't a sophomoric forum like reddit. This is meant to be a place where adults discuss. Adults can see that there are democratic implications of the scenario you're describing worthy of discussion. 'Another platform' may take years to develop, and nothing stops Youtube or another hostile player from simply buying it out and kneecapping it, and how many elections are influenced while that takes place?
Please don't just repeat talking points, it adds nothing to the conversation.
If anyone wants to give a reason why these arguments are always about freedom of speech VS censorship, instead of being about private property + free markets, please I'm open to this.
But this actually is a potentially thinly veiled way to spread disinformation, right? If you wanted to push a dishonest narrative, all you'd need do is show clips of someone else speaking the words and call it "reporting".
And this is all within the context of a massive surge in d/misinfo across these platforms. They're already having trouble keeping up. I think that context is important, because it warrants a different level of "aggression" in policing. If someone is spouting lies is it reasonable to, say, block the original producer of those lies, but let thousands of other accounts repeat them and generate millions of impressions for the lies?
Because, the lies would still be getting out there, and these platforms are trying to combat being the conduit for them no matter where it comes from. Seems reasonable.
This happens all over the place; policies around abuse end up getting applied to people that report that they are being abused, policies around misinformation get applied to people who report that misinformation is happening. It's kind of big news that Trump is still pushing this narrative in 2022. It actually is entirely legitimate to report that he's still saying this, he's likely to be the Republican candidate in 2024, people should know that he hasn't stopped making this claim.
There's a debate about disinformation censorship that's all about whether or not censorship is the right way to stop people from telling these lies, but even before we get to that debate, regardless of whether or not someone believes that censorship actually helps prevent the spread of misinformation -- the reality is that platforms like Youtube/Twitter are too big to effectively apply many of these rules, and often they end up affecting the opposite of their intended targets.
We have these high-level conversations about whether or not censorship on broad platforms that are nevertheless private is appropriate, and there's some value in having those conversations. But how often do we step back and ask, "are the platforms even capable of pulling off the censorship that they claim in the first place? Is Youtube even capable of censoring election misinformation without also censoring a bunch of other stuff that they didn't intend to?"
A conversation about censorship on tech platforms that doesn't take into account how clumsy these filters are in practice isn't really an accurate reflection of the reality. We have debates about whether or not private censorship on a broad scale is a good idea, but it's not even clear that any of these tech platforms are capable of doing censorship in a targeted way for any context-dependent topic.
It reminds me of how we used to have a bunch of conversations about the morality of self-driving cars making moral choices during accidents, but you zoom out and realize that even those debates are just incredibly optimistic, and in reality the cars just crash into guardrails because their sensors aren't good enough. We should not go into these conversations assuming that accurately targeted censorship of the kind that Youtube proposes even is possible at the global scale Youtube wants to operate on, we have a lot of data showing that large platforms aren't really capable of moderating with the same degree of precision as smaller platforms.
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.
Not comparable.
How to drink bleach: Unscrew cap from bottle. Pour bleach down your throat.
Was that so bad?
“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
An argument doesn't have to make logical sense for it to convince millions of people. Especially not if they like the conclusion.
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.
In this specific debate, if "misinformation" is forbidden, whoever gets to decide what is classified as "misinformation", will control society.
We have the internet, where you can rent or run your own server and storage and post your conspiracy theory videos.
I don't believe any entity should ever have the power to frame what is and is not acceptable to believe to such a large amount of the world, be it Google, Facebook or a government.
It doesn't matter whether they are shaping it politically or profitably or via AI for clicks. It isn't neutral and drowns out or outright eliminates competing views.
Broadcasters are forced to do all kinds of stuff. In Canada they have to carry a certain percentage of Canadian content.
(I don’t necessarily think it’d be the best idea for the most part though.)
Between the trio of media, tech, and government there's enormous control over what we hear and learn about. The filters they apply are powerful, yet inconsistent, and often populist, political, or irrational.
These 3 groups have this control, yet are incapable of using it to optimise for citizenry well-being.
For the same reasons that AT&T can't terminate your phone service if they hear you talking about something that's opposed to the political preferences of AT&T or its leadership. These companies have become the public square and the law needs to be updated to reflect that. If they have to become public utilities fine.
There's a big difference between a small company being coerced by the government into some action, versus the same action on a very small handful of multi-billion dollar companies that have a collective monopoly on our entire public and political discourse.
What's really bizarre is how the left is supposed to be opposed to, e.g. Citizens United, and the establishment neoliberal take is ultra-pro corporate rights and autonomy and 0 government intervention. IMHO thinking a few companies should be free to make a cooperative agreement and shut whoever they want out of communicating on these popular platforms is a radical right-wing position.
If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income.
A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
If people banned from that is "censorship", then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago.
It's difficult when the backbone of the internet isn't available to you. For instance, AWS can be denied cutting off vital internet infrastructure we take for granted. Further payment processors like Visa can cut off access. Even banks could cut you off and even seize your funds if they got the directive.
You can spin your own service is a nice fiction we tell ourselves but with financing getting cut off it becomes impossible to build a service that reaches a lot of people without a lot of money and a disregard for profit.
In China maybe someone would come knocking on the door to take you away to jail. But in the US, we don't need to go that far. All it would take is the press secretary telling big tech they need to help fight "misinformation" and pointing them in the right direction.
Yeah, right up until we don't. Wishful thinking doesn't scale.
Note all the attempts in the article to paint them as "armed" and "extremists". There was no violence, no destruction of property. It was a legal demonstration until it was made illegal by invoking the Emergencies act. And this use of the law in my opinion was an abuse as it clearly is for terrorist threats. Not Canadian working class people peacefully demonstrating.
EDIT>> My mistake, censorship falls clearly under Orwell
Search for the HN submissions reporting on G Suite for even more ideas.
This is fundamentally a business decision driven by advertising: they don't want ads for dish washing detergent pixels away from someone Chomsky posting or Brandon posting. They want a stream of inane pablum for the Skinner box.
That said, I hate to see conservative or any other opinions censored, and this is what YouTube is doing, because if we give up on true free speech then I think that bodes ill for our society long term.
The machine thrives on fear. Twitter is a rage machine... its function is to generate tribal anger and mass hysteria, and its mechanism and chief innovation for doing so is shortening the language. When everything is a soundbite, nothing real can be expressed, only affiliation with one group or another. Any thought that tries to explore both sides of a conversation and weigh their relative merits requires more characters than Twitter allows, and that's by design. We sleepwalked into this.
/Rant. About your point about enjoying killing and carnage, it was also something Hannah Arendt talked about extensively, and we can see it on both sides of the political spectrum in America now, both "mobs" of totalitarian/authoritarians. It's the end equilibrium of the totalitarian state to have generations of killers weaned on brutality who enjoy it for its own sake, and in theory the normalization or stabilization of a state which breeds those minds is the most frightening thing for the future of humanity. Nazi Germany was almost there.
I'm still trying to formulate this. But I've begun to come to the conclusion that the only important thing is to stop thinking in terms of who's right or wrong. The only way for civilization forward is to re-introduce the civic principle, to enforce the rules of debate; to ingrain the reflexive ability to absorb the other person's point of view and see them as a human like yourself; even if you believe they are wrong. The ability to put their wrongness into context so you can accept it and treat them as an equal before you go about dismantling their arguments. Without that, we're just bloodthirsty savages. And that, sadly, seems like the way it's going.
A lot of people should be outright admitting democracy only "works" when their side wins.
Yeah, but to do that you need a humans with judgement and time to think, and that's expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if Youtube's human moderators are paid on production, and quite separate from whoever's writing the policies they execute.
In the model I proposed, your "score" of anyone else would only be affected by people who you've selected to "score" others. This is exactly how people build trust mentally today, but assisted by a graph that lets you expand your trust network beyond Dunbar's number, which is required for filtering modern media.
The Dystopian centralized credit score seen in the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" is what will happen if we fail to build something capable of calculating relative trust relationships.
You haven't defined what "compete with it" actually means here.
> Google also controls the largest search platform
If it was only a search platform, this would hardly matter, because search engines are not hard to replace. But Google search is merely the entry point to a much larger system (notably, a vast online ad platform and data collection system), and that's a problem.
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.
And the COVID situation showed how bad it was. I can't imagine why someone would think it works "well enough"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_European_Constitution_re...
There’s a difference between letting people think and say what they want, vs letting them use you as a megaphone.
Is Pro-suicide or self-harm content right-wing? Because it's not allowed on YouTube.
If the problem is that people don't know how to talk to each other anymore, and that isn't solved by creating more insular communities.
There's a very obvious solution to this, and it involves government regulation.
Their network had nothing to pull people into. Parler didn't have that problem, in fact, I hear it was doing relatively well until they collapsed due to their own technical incompetence.
>Then in the case of censorship, you have to deal with being a persona non grata that socially conscious people and institutions won't touch, and that you need to build it in like a month before any political momentum gained dissipates and people move on.
Again it seems like we had evidence of a platform that managed to overcome this. Maybe I could have my memory wrong but Parler started off small, got promoted quietly by right wing people but was somewhat ready to organically grow as discontent grew among right wing people on existing platforms. Maybe it was just a honeypot all along (as some say) but it feels like they could have been an example that disproves your theory. The pieces were definitely there.
>Even if you manage to succeed after all that, and get adoption, all you have done is manage to create the same type of platform that censored you in the first place, with the only difference being that it is your hivemind of your own beliefs.
I wonder if liberal people went on Parler and confronted right wingers. I know they gladly ban people for doing the same on /r/Conservative but Parler being a "free speech" platform I wonder if they just let people be as they are.
Everyone is welcome, the ones doing the censoring just don't want to go there because they're happy in their cesspool.
All that you can hope is that the person reading it is open to information and changing their mind. If they are not then there is nothing that can be done anyway.
I have been drawn into trying to evaluate this claim that the Czech Republic / Czechia has had a statement issued by its "Supreme Prosecutor" that anyone supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine will face criminal penalties. I would love to be able to go to a reputable media source to evaluate it. It is inordinately difficult to judge. I would prefer that the BBC/CNN/LA Times spent time debunking this sort of thing or confirming it. As it is I am on my own with nothing but a wall of flag-waving and emotional condemnation instead of investigative journalism -- that's what I want from the media -- not opinion pieces: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30560672
In looking at that story it was fascinating to see the struggle within the Czech Republic with various sides accused of being Russian mouthpieces and the establishment of state censorship apparatuses well in advance of this phase of the conflict with Russia.
Also, I don't see how systematically scrubbing video recordings of a man who loves to say "I never said that" about things he has said on camera is a net gain to truth-telling.
It's literally their written policy and has been enforced multiple times. App store and GPlay apps have to adhere to Apple/Google set content standards. You can't host 'free speech' apps there because trolls instantaneously fill the 'free speech' apps up with visibly anti-semitic content then report it to google and down it goes.
Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
At the same time, don't expect everyone to provide access to their platform regardless of what someone does.
YouTube suspending accounts is the old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
There is nothing stopping Fox News/NewsMax/OAN from creating their own video hosting platform.
But regarding your question, I actually think that there's a serious dysfunction here in the way Fox News can legally spread lies that are very damaging to society with little to no legal consequence. They even alleged in a slander case that the Tucker Carlson show is actually just entertainment, and reasonable people can't expect it to be truthful - even though millions of people get their news primarily from Fox News, including Carlson talk shows, fully believing they are telling the truth.
And I see that YouTube is cracking down on a lot of the same misinformation that Fox News propagates (and sometimes, worse stuff), but my point is that this shouldn't be up to Google to decide what political talking points are or aren't allowed. YouTube functions as a public space in our daily lives, we express ourselves there, I don't think it's good for society for a single company decide this policy unilaterally.
On the other hand, it's good that platforms offer some kind of curation and differentiate themselves based on that. There are YouTube alternatives like Lbry in which practically everything is allowed, and I think both models are necessary.
I did my darnedest when writing that post, and I don't really think your meta-commentary is adding to the discussion.
If you don’t understand how this kind of thinking is bad for the people and good for those in power I suggest you go and do some reading.
And YouTube gets no love because they also removed the dislike button (which is a much more robust way of moderation) because they didn't like the outcome
How can it not be condescending to say "30% to 40% of people don't have enough intelligence to filter propaganda". Whether that's true or not is debatable but there's no phrasing it better.
You and YouTube seem to share the same sentiment that you somehow are smarter in every way than the said 30-40% of the population.
But I don’t see how that’s related to the discussion about YouTube suspending a channel.
Blocking a nation's highways and borders for weeks is not legal.
People screamed blue-bloody-murder when BLM and Occupy protesters chained themselves to barrels across interstates, disrupting traffic for an hour or two...but the Canadian government tolerates a complete shutdown of a border, along with near continuous public disturbance for weeks - before finally clearing the protesters, and that's somehow an example of oppression?
The Canadian truckers picked up the trash. I never saw a cleaner protest.
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.
So you agree YouTube is perfectly ok to remove content because it mentions 'the opinion of a man about election results.'?
And if Trump was to hypothetically win in 2024, would it be perfectly fine for YouTube to remove any content which is dissenting of Trump? I'm sure a dislike or negative comment would stop that...
There is nothing stopping Trump from creating his own video platform. He is supposedly a billionaire isn’t he?
It's true the large social platforms are privately owned and so they can censor to their hearts content, but given the obliquity and integration these largest platforms have in the social fabric, is that reasonable?
Should they at least have clear moderation policies? It's an issue that needs some hefty discussion and evaluation especially, as we're seeing in this thread, the outsized influence on and control of public discourse they have.
This is absolutely misinformation that did lead to radicalization.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-labels-trump-illegiti...
https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10835034?hl=en#zip...
“Election integrity: Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of select past national elections, after final election results are officially certified. This currently applies to: Any past U.S. Presidential election The 2021 German federal election”
When Putin started his invasion, Trump praised him for being smart, then praised him again, suggesting he'd captured a whole country for a small cost in sanctions.
What do you think you're expressing when you say that Trump isn't a Putin puppet? That he's not made of wood?
What they do have is a brand and a social network that surfaces, promotes, and moderates video content to drive engagement and ad views.
They’ve grown large by moderating and curating content but now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content? Makes no sense whatsoever.
You’re pronouncing youtube a “public square”, which should therefore be seized by the government… But what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet.
Of course they do. There are channels that can be removed that would instantly lose access to millions of monthly viewers that can't practically be replaced anywhere. They have a monopoly on that type of reach (the most important type), and especially when these platforms decide to blacklist in concert.
> now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content
Yes, because once your business decisions have the power to decide who gets elected President, for example, it's in a different class and has to be regulated differently than a corner flower shop. There are many examples of laws and regulations that apply to business based on size.
> what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet
Again, it's not one of endless, it is entirely unique -- for many channels, their reach on YouTube is not replaceable anywhere. That's like saying, AT&T can shut off your phone service for your political opinions because you can always go meet someone in person to talk. That's simply not how we've historically agreed to interpret the obligations of massive communications platforms, and there's a very good reason for that.
I don't want who gets to speak to the public decided by some faceless, unelected tech oligarchs. That's a dystopia. "They only get to decide if you easily get access to an audience of millions, you can always get an audience of 5" is a deeply flawed argument.
If I set up Paul's Video Hosting Service next week, and someone wants to post videos of kittens being tortured, I'm not hosting their videos. I'm not even hosting videos of a presidential candidate making certain pronouncements. No US court would agree that I should be forced to do so.
To whatever extent it is reasonable for YT to be forced to host any legal content, where's the boundary between the putative pvhs.com and youtube.com?
Utilities haven't been "seized" by the government because there are regulations on them. Telecoms haven't been seized by the government.
YouTube has monopoly level dominance in terms of engagement. Competitors can't gain market share because YouTube is already prevalent, and video is a "solved" problem. Consumer gets no benefit by using a different platform, and there is essentially no product feature that could be invented to make an alternative platform compelling enough to use over YouTube.
Instead of regulating YouTube, we could define an open database/protocol of video content and allow anybody to build a UI around the same set of content. In that way, there is no network effect gating people into a single platform. This is where things will likely trend in the longer run with social etc. And I would bet the free market will get to it eventually.
Then YouTube is just a web UI. And I guarantee you in this world there would be many other widely used sites, as there's no content/network effect lock.
Monopolies appear on the basis where it is effectively unreasonable to expect a competitor to form. E.g. railroads. Anybody can build their own railroad. Is it going to happen in practice? No, because cost to do so is prohibitively high.
A quick search[0] shows that YouTube dominates ~76% of the market. Do you really believe your own statement?
[0] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu...
You can't anonymously access information as almost everything is tied to you ID number. You can't buy things, chat, watch TV (smart tvs), or do most anything with any sense of privacy.
Living in China as a Chinese means living with a drastically different mindset when it comes to these sorts of things. It's hard to understand how it changes you unless you've lived there.
I’m not saying I’d live in China, but I feel we’re putting too much credit in our own system. Even comparing ourselves to China doesn’t feel productive, we all have our local issues and should probably focus on solving them.
Sacrifice another ~350k Americans and countless others around the globe from our refusal to stop misinformation, I sleep. Save some gamers' mock wounded pride; real stuff.
Never saw much misinformation on Twitch to be honest, but they are taking a more active role as of a few days ago: https://safety.twitch.tv/s/safety-news/detail?language=en_US...
But to actually answer your comment:
1. A company removing proven disinformation is quite far from what censorship is. Also not really something that would be considered dystopian.
2. I would disagree that Orwell work is about “censorship is bad”. His work is IMHO more about exploring risks caused by attempt to do population surveillance and control. Spreading lies and falsehood consistently to destroy any understanding of an actual situation, the way Trump does by lying about election fraud, is way closer to the Orwellian nightmare than YouTube removing that content.
From the article: > The Hill’s channel is unable to upload new videos for seven days, although its older videos can still be accessed.
No.
> Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
The answer is no.
Vimeo exists. Facebook and Twitter both feature user-generated video content. I hear TikTok is a thing. In addition to these platforms basically anyone can self-host in 2022. Plenty of news outlets self-host.
> If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
You have not made the case that there should be only one platform so the second part of your statement is irrelevant.
> That a political question.
Only for people who want to say things without suffering the consequences.
Given the state of cloud computing in 2022, there has never been a time that it has been easier to host your own video streaming, so it's not a natural monopoly either.
I’m not making a case for anything - I’m explaining the narrative behind a growing POV.
But I will say that YouTube is different than Facebook videos or TikTok. YouTube is meant to be a searchable video index across topics and time. It’s a video search engine and hosting service in one.
All this hub about right to publish is a non sequitur.
Corporations have locally-defined privileges and exist by, and at, the will of the people where they reside. Governments can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all.
If we don't like what Google is doing, we can simply write laws regulating it differently.
-----
In reply:
> "In a U.S. historical context, the phrase "corporate personhood" refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
Hint: ongoing legal debate, i.e. it's up to government to decide what "corporate personhood" means—exactly what I am saying. It's up to government, not "inalienable" or "natural" or whatever.
It's a purely legal question whether trillion dollar corporate mega-platforms with billions of users have the same regulations and responsibilities as widows and orphans. We don't have to let the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons and YouTubes of the world trample on basic human rights "because ackshually, corporations are people too." Certainly nothing about the 14th Amendment requires it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
>Government can change what those privileges are at any moment, for any reason—or no reason at all.
No, this isn't the way government works anywhere outside of a dictatorship.
> No, this isn't the way government works anywhere outside of a dictatorship.
It really is. The executive branch is the most constrained in practice, but the legislative branch is relatively free to do whatever they want (spend money, create or abolish departments, set the rules, change the rules, allocate money to enforce the rules, etc. Even revise their own deliberative procedures), and the judiciary is even less constrained except that it is the other two branches that control who gets appointed as judges.
There are checks and balances, but those are pretty much always another part of government, so ultimately, anything the three branches agree on gets done. Anything.
There might be consequences including failing to get reelected for the executive and legislature, but that doesn't necessarily undo what's already been done.
[1] https://www.history.com/news/14th-amendment-corporate-person...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...
It's about having equal reach for different political opinions. If you completely remove one voice without any legal mandate to do so, you are just the same as a political tool.
There are far more than a dozen websites out there.
Last mile delivery by telephone and cable companies have government right of way monopolies.
YouTube can’t be watched without government grants.
And the Canadian (and other country) content laws apply to non-spectrum using channels.
But all this is silly. The phone company can’t decide to cancel my phone call because of what I’m saying. A law can stop YouTube.
A train line that is the sole means of commerce in and out of a town is a common carrier. There's no competitors really possible to enter into that market. For that train line to decide to not run certain cargo outside of safety concerns is to then control all the commerce with no reasonable competitor.
Literally right now I'm watching streaming video content hosted from some service other than YouTube. I probably spend less than an hour a week watching YouTube content. It's hardly the only rail line in town, nor is it the only way I can view video content. Now if the only viable ISP said "you can't connect to YouTube, if you don't like it sell your house and move to the next town over" then yeah that's a common carrier and shouldn't be allowed to do that.
DNS names aren't limited by the US government. There are lots of TLDs which are controlled by other governments. And largely they're pretty much managed by lots of different corporations. Either way, the government directly getting involved in taking over your domain name without any due process just to silence your speech probably does become a first amendment issue at least for US nationals. Either way, they're massively less limited than how many effective TV freqiencies or phone providers are in a given metro area.
Free speech limits power and increases competition, which is the most effective way to decrease rent seekers.
I've heard this argument in my country already from certain circles
The people who are very sure that they're way smarter than the average are often not very smart.
If that is too difficult, perhaps consider the challenge the news org faces.
Everyone makes bad decisions. While you are angry at YT for what they have removed, are you also praising them for each thing they did not action? If not, you are getting upset about a very small percentage. That may be valid for your own issues, but it does not make it representative
If you ever wonder why other humans don’t support your issue, and your issue is not representative, perhaps that is your answer to make more sense of things.
I was referring to GP's overt arrogance in justifying YouTube's intervention here.
People can generally duduce for themselves what the truth is.
News orgs are rushing to print the story and (at most) only include small tidbits of reactionary analysis. It isn’t the fault of the individual as much as it is the medium. The medium inherently lacks depth.
Two places to start: Daryl Cooper, Michael Tracy.
Faith affiliated:
thetablet.org Deseret.com tabletmag.com
And this site appears to exist to aggregate quality news from every angle:
Pretty extreme view sending in the national guard, right? Except according to a poll around that time, 52% of Americans answered yes to "Do you approve or disapprove of sending in the U.S. military where there are violent protests?" So obviously that op-ed wasn't a fringe belief, but it was enough to end the career of the person responsible to bring it to print, in addition to apologies and a commitment to never do anything like that again.
Being critical of sometimes violent disruptive protests is a view that has been highly suppressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/52-americans-support-deployi...
Her career is alive and well.
2. There was a supreme court decision that a platform (in that case a large mall) that makes itself a de-facto public square has to act like one, accruing responsibility to protect speech. I believe this is the right link: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-s...
2. Regarding the shopping mall they found the CA state constitution not the US constitution protected their right to promote nazi literature at the mall. It is also completely bonkers nonsense and invention. It is in fact the exact sort of judicial invention our current majority claims to be against it says.
> Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.
It nowhere says that the mall ought to provide a venue. Notably it says you may publish not someone else must publish for you with their ink and paper.
This is just CA making up law from whole cloth to suit their disposition.
Where is YouTube headquartered?
The same people who regulate, pass laws, and appoint prosecutors who oversee litigation against big tech, also hold hearings and blame social media for fake news and extremism. There have been explicit calls to clean up their content or face regulation. That starts to implicate government censorship.
Google doesn't give a fuck about election integrity. They do business all around the world in places without elections. They use slave labor. But they are afraid US politicians might do a privacy crack down.
> slave labor
Can you be more specific?
Googling "Google slave labor" reveals a lawsuit from 2019 or so from folks whose children were injured & died in cobalt mines that big tech ultimately received refined cobalt from.
The case was thrown out[] because the companies were found to have just purchased refined cobalt down the supply chain, and the labor did not fall under the definition of human trafficking.
[] https://www.jurist.org/news/2021/11/federal-court-dismisses-...
If the insurrection had been successful the best case scenario would be economic collapse and possibly civil war in the country where these platforms are based out of. It is likely that many states would reject the sovereignty of the federal government if it didn't honor the outcome of the election, and from there things would quickly spiral out of control.
The potential outcome from the end of democracy in the us would entail catastrophic risk for the companies based here.
It’s outrageously hypocritical that the Russian official’s account is alive today. They didn’t even slap a warning label on his tweet.
It’s sad that not everyone agrees with all the choices they make?
Doesn’t seem sad to me.
The alternative, where youtube cannot choose what content to host, seems sad to me.
You want to argue he did something illegal, should be in prison, should not be allowed to run? Fine, that's what the court system and respective political parties are for. But please don't tell me it's completely cool that tech CEOs get to decide who can and can't run. You may like the side they fall on this time, but how confident are you that you'll agree in the future? What if leadership changes? What do you think would happen when a politician has a credible shot of winning on a promise to break them up?
None of what you've described would prevent him from running. And in fact, thanks to Streisand Effect, much of it centers him in the public eye.
You can't buy that kind of publicity.
That's probably the moment they could face regulation. Individually, it's their platform to choose what they want to host or not.
As I suspect you know, his point was that it’s sad that YouTube is making politically motivated censorship decisions, just like China would. While we all know that Silicon Valley leans left, I think that those of us who want good things for the world would like to believe that these companies can check their politics at the door when it comes to running platforms that serve people across the political spectrum. Sadly, that’s not the case.
If YouTube identified itself as a partisan platform where speech that is not left leaning is in danger of being curtailed (which is what it is), I wouldn’t have a problem with these actions. But it masquerades as a neutral platform that is open to all, in the same way that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox masquerade as news outlets. That is a threat to democracy, because it creates the impression that only content which aligns with the platform owner’s political ideology is newsworthy or acceptable for viewing, and anything else is fringe.
My desire to give companies rights diminishes with scale.
There is virtually no competition to youtube in the video streaming space (in terms of sheer reach and volume), so choices that youtube make have clear political implications on what voices get heard.
Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, Netflix, etc. + VC money, all have the money and means to compete directly with YouTube if they choose.
The market for “I want to watch Trump claim he stole the election without a disclaimer in the description” might not be that huge. As others have pointed out, creating news about election misinformation is still no problem on YT provided it’s explained as misinformation and not just provided without context.
Also, these content providers can self-host their video content and promote their content as they see fit.
You have to decide if bookmarking the sites of your favorite content providers is a better option than accepting YT’s content guidelines.
But you don’t get to demand that YT host whatever content suits your views. They can curate their platform as they see fit and you can consume it or not as you see fit.
It is more of a monopoly than Standard Oil was in terms of market share. There were plenty of competitors back then, just as now, and yet the Sherman Antitrust Act happened.
The network power of these organizations makes them monopolies even aside from market share. In Sherman era anti-trust, "Build your own rail network" would not have flown as an argument, because it was clear that coercive actions to force people into a different network were problematic.
The government can regulate monopolies for any reason. You can read the Sherman Act, court opinions during that time, and the argument of it removing centralization of power. The "predatory pricing" argument is a recent invention, ironically created with right-wing judicial activism, and neither historical or textual in nature.
Again, no number of bad faith arguments about popularity make it a monopoly. Standard oil was the only accessible supplier in the market in many places. The video streaming and hosting market has many easily accessible suppliers wherever there is internet access.
>The government can regulate monopolies for any reason.
Whether or not the government can regulate a monopoly is not being debated here. Nobody is talking about that straw man.
This isn't a problem if there are dozens of video hosting services or search engines that all have equal market share, but there aren't.
TikTok is still a competitor. Facebook, Vimeo, Reddit, Twitch, etc. all popular, easily accessible competitors as well.
Good luck convincing a judge that YouTube can't ban people.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
Seems to me like he is very clearly talking about the viability of injecting disinfectant.
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.
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.
Private companies are free to curate their content as they see fit and you can choose to consume it or not.
These independent content creators and journalists can all self host.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that every view gets maximum amplification on private networks. It means that the government won’t take steps to repress the speech, which they aren’t.
Again, no number of bad faith arguments about popularity or awareness in consumer headspace make it a monopoly. You are not entitled to being discovered in competitive markets, and forcing suppliers to host your content is anti-competitive.
By all means argue that they made her feel that it was not possible or sensible to try to do the job she wanted to do. But she resigned, and that's not the same thing.
Getting to zero after boosting doesn’t seem like censorship.
Not too many years ago no one had the ability to call anyone with a telephone. That service is provided by private companies in many countries. Is denying someone the ability to call their associates censorship?
Times change.
That becomes more problematic and debatable once infrastructure companies such as a DNS provider or a hosting company refuses to deal with some content given that you remove the ability to create your own soapbox.
Nope, you are misunderstanding something here. Removing what was considered "given" is what becomes perceived as censorship.
So we don't have to use the word censorship but there is a lot of voting with feet going on that suggests some sort of speech suppression. The persistent banning of private opinions by American big tech is probably the major cause of that.
I think Youtube would be a better product and better serve their viewers and content creators if they didn't suspend The Hill for playing a clip of Donald Trump. My belief in this does not imply any use of force whatsoever.
You're not addressing why YouTube is blocking it or the state of it's own rights as a private platform, just making blanket moral statements about opinion.
It is much more like 14th Amendment rights and the 1964 CRA enhancement of that. There are prohibitions on private organizations denying equal service based upon certain characteristics.
As Twitter, Youtube, Facebook are not actually broadcasters in any sense (what are they broadcasting?), their refusal to conduct business with others can't be cloaked in 1st amendment grounds. No one is forcing anyone to watch anything on any of these platforms.
The crux of this issue is political affiliation is not a protected class, and therefore it can be discriminated against. (And we do have non-immutable, changeable characteristics as protected classes.)
Any of 1) section 230 clarifications or changes, 2) expansions of protected classes under the 14th, or 3) monopoly regulatory power will make these prohibitions invalid.
There is a certain U.S. political party who has a persecution fetish that makes bad faith statements about their opinions needing to be protected, but I'll let you figure out which one it is.
Everyone already knows this... so instead of constantly bringing it up to make ourselves sound smart, let's instead actually discuss something more meaningful, such as whether the food served by the restaurant really is shitty? What reasons might a restaurant have for serving shitty food, do they perhaps gain financially from it? Would it be more effective to work with the restaurant to get them to stop serving shitty food, or would it be more effective to open up a restaurant next door that doesn't serve shitty food? What are the trade-offs?
Those are more interesting topics rather than pointing out the fact that a restaurant has the right to serve shitty food and you can't force them not to.
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 you think it is a right that people should have, talk to your representative and get the government to create GovTube where anyone can post any type of conspiracy crap they desire.
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?
You have no shield against private oligopolies.
There needs to be an actual free market where people have a realistic set of alternatives.
Pointing out public versus private is IMO misidentifying the problem.
For starters, Google doesn't get to raise a private army or arrest The Hill for misuse of their services.
Twitter can't prevent this from happening by censoring a russian official.
It's easy after the fact to lay blame, but interfering in discussion, even heated and wild, is an easy slope into censorship and tyranny.
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...
> “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.”
With enough size and political influence they could do it, it just hasn't been in fashion.
The former guy got banned on all the services all at once. Even tiktok which he was not on. Hell, even grindr banned him.
There may not be direct coordination (maybe there is), but there's a signal and no one likes to make waves
They all took a different direction about the "pee tape":
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/opinion/comey-book-steele...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/magazine/nothing-proves-y...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
For more: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+trump+pee...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
The complaint seems to be that the corruption he was probably involved in is slightly different than the corruption Trump was talking about. Which again, standard political fare but the crackdown on the story seems suspicious. If it had been Trump there is no way such a story would have been quietened down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden#Investor_and_lobb...
The product is better if I am in control. YouTube ought to stay out of it. It does not know my intent. If it guesses wrong it should be criticized, just like a restaurant guessing at my food preferences and allergies.
This is a different argument.
You already have the agency of being in control, you can pick any platform to watch from. Youtube is exercising it's own right to censor, similar to how you want to censor for your kid, based on what you think is harmful.
Again, you're agreeing with YouTube on that point. The Hill's ban was because they didn't contextualize the false information they shared.
There's no evidence supporting price controls to be an effective way to fight inflation, as was shown to produce awful results in the 70s among many other eras, yet we have politicians pushing for that.
There's no evidence to support that nominal wages rising, but at a rate lower than inflation leads to people being better off, yet we have politicians pushing this.
I think Google should ban any videos promoting these effectively disproven and dangerous economic ideas.
Economic opinions are generally not that clear cut, requiring an awful lot of theoretical harness and qualifications to explain. Evidence is similar, you can quibble about a lot of things in economics.
Whether the election was stolen, well, where is a shred of evidence? It's not hard to define what we mean by stolen.
If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said"
There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.
I believe we should mass purge all these videos proposing that the ex president colluded with Russians. We don't want the public to be misinformed.
Consider which regimes throughout history have used silencing political opposition the most, and whether you want to be aligned with them.
I certainly don't.
"Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division."
So I listed some very dangerous economic views that have been proven to fail throughout history, and are widely agreed upon by economists.
So we should silence anybody promoting these views, following your logic. It's for the good of society
We should ban all videos proposing the ex president colluded with Russia too, as it was always a conspiracy theory with no evidence. No matter how much people wanted it to be true. Undermining the legitimacy of a validly elected president should be a silence-able offense. All the better if the party in power or their affiliates are the ones to do the silencing.
Maybe take into consideration which regimes throughout history have used silencing speech the most and whether you want to align with them.
But generally I don't expect holders of these views to acknowledge the hypocrisy of them, or how closely they align to the tactics of authoritarian regimes throughout history.
The situation says more about the deep division and anxiety within society that made it possible than social media being a cause.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-s...
And what about Joe Biden's proud public boast that he threatened to withhold aid if a Ukrainian prosecutor wasn't fired ? (who was investigating Burisma - the company whose board Hunter biden was on.)
https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-joe-biden-forced-ukraine-t...
Anyways, it's pretty clear that there are different standards for different people for news that gets published/censored/suppressed and most importantly amplified.
As Elon Musk said just today: "All news sources are partially propaganda, some more than others" - when he was told by governments (not Ukraine) that Starlink should block Russian news.
"“I don’t want to interfere in U.S. elections,”"
I don't find that decisive on the facts given everything else.
Stormy Daniels denied sleeping with Trump, because someone threatened the life of her child. It was and is still a true thing that happened.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/09/25/trum...
You can prove anyone “wrong” by playing with definitions or getting super technical about things.
https://news.yahoo.com/john-bolton-putin-waiting-possible-13...
Taken from someone else:
Trump had the US military abandon their bases in Syria and Russia promptly captured them.
Russia was caught paying bounties in Afghanistan for killing American soldiers. Trump did nothing.
After Putin seized Crimea, Obama put sanctions on Russia. Trump promptly got rid of those sanctions for his buddy, then declared that Crimea belonged to Russia, recognizing the legitimacy of their invasion.
Russia keeps creeping advancing the border with Georgia. They just literally move fences and markers at night and take land a few hundred meters at a time.
This happened during Trump's administration. Trump did nothing.
Belarus, which is a puppet for Putin, as he wants Ukraine to be, is run by his puppet dictator Lukashenko. Lukashenko won a clearly rigged election in 2020, leading to mass protests. A similar situation happened in Ukraine during Obama's administration, and we backed the protests and they ousted Yanukovych, and Ukraine was able to elect a free government that wasn't Putin's puppet. So when a similar situation arises while Trump was President, guess what he did?
The Trump Administration has gone AWOL on Belarus.
Guess who ran Putin's puppet, Yanukovych's campaign in Ukraine? Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Then they became Trump's campaign manager and deputy campaign manager.
Putin invades Ukraine, Trump calls him a genius.
He's a Putin puppet. Putin had a puppet President of the US. It's fucking insane that this happened. But it did. Wake the fuck up.
"We don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." -Eric Trump, 2014
I repeat: I think Ukraine, and the world, could do well with some mean tweets and mean phone calls in place of what we have now!
The obvious gulf between how Trump was useful to Putin and how his actual puppets are useful to Putin is all people not disposed to agree with you can see. It doesn't matter that your tangible points are correct if people immediately discard it over your emotional appeal.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bolton-putin-waiting-for-tru...
My view is that it is functionally a public square, regardless of who owns it. Compare a protest on the side of a road in a company town.
A right to access to an audience, not a right to an audience.
The owner of an auditorium or hall is allowed to not give platform to anyone. They get to decide who gets heard.
You need to be able to cite a source, ideally a case or specific law, on such a claim because no one else I know holds to that definition. A link to a Wikipedia article about a different concept does not satisfy, because it does not cite a legal definition of free speech by US courts.
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.
No it won't, not in meaningful numbers. Most people don't want that kind of garbage in their feeds. If they did 4chan would be more popular than Twitter.
Most people don't want to have disgusting, antidemocratic viewpoints forced on them by social media. They want to not see that stuff.
If a platform is too large to be moderated effectively, there needs to be a discussion about what happens next, which indeed is either free-for-all, clear moderation policy or opaque random and easily biased decisions.
1) Youtube hosts everything that's legal, no filters at all
2) Youtube decides what it does and doesn't host
3) Somethings are ok (e.g. news / fake news), others are not (porn). Who decides what's ok and not ok if it's not the legal system or youtube itself?
Or, maybe, prior administrations are at least partly to blame? And maybe you didn't even bother to read the list I gave you, of things Trump allowed Putin to do?
Cheers.
> In the grand scheme of things is looks like a pretty routine case of potential corruption, but that being associated with the president's son like a big deal
If you're making the claim that simply being on a board of directors or part of a venture firm because of who you know or are related to is ipso facto corruption, unfortunately we're unlikely to ever rid ourselves of that short of random work assignments in some kind of scifi YA novel.
And, frankly, the reason these left-leaning outlets were suppressing the story was because to a lot of people the situation does meet the standard of ipso facto corruption. It seems clear that the people who were interacting with Hunter thought they were buying influence in the US political apparatus, probably the executive given his father's position; otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense. To a lot of people that basically is corruption. Although I doubt it is unusual in the US Congress if we poked around a little.
EDIT, was Russia-US war. My bad.
It came out in December that his taxes were being investigated and it was widely reported. Easy to see from the wikipedia article where there are multiple citations from major news outlets.
> It is materially interesting what business connections the US president has with (famous for being corrupt I might add) Ukraine.
What is interesting? You're playing connect the dots and taking possible tax issues from business in China and connecting it to made up stories about Burisma and saying "now prove me wrong". Again, the impetus is on the person making the argument to make an actual concrete claim. The Senate republicans already have you covered on the Ukraine part, of course (nothing).
> otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense
Henry Kissinger got a bunch of people to heavily invest in Theranos. You're going to need more substance than "why do rich white people keep failing upwards?" for a story here.
You've got the vice-president on tape repeating the official government line in public? And you want this to be front page news? Why?
And why did Trump disagree with all those people, in the blackmail transcript you posted he seems a real fan of this person who is linked to Oligarchs and corruption. What's that all about?
Biden's own words below:
In December 2015 -- he told Ukrainian officials: "We're leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money."
"Well, son of a bitch," Biden continued. "He got fired."
A classified US State Department email from 2016 shows a leading diplomat warning that Hunter Biden’s lucrative job with a Ukrainian energy company “undercut” American efforts to fight corruption in the Eastern European country.
https://nypost.com/2022/02/02/us-diplomat-warned-about-hunte...
I don't care what Trump agrees/disagrees with or who he is a fan of. Irrelevant to this discussion which started with a verifiably false accusation. The media has noticeably different amplification standards depending on who they do or do not favour.
Do you legitimately not understand that it was the perceived motivation and not the action that people dislike? No one cares about the Biden scenario because it takes five minutes of Googling to find out that the whole thing was over the British being mad the prosecutor didn't turn over documents potentially indemnifying Burisma to UK authorities when requested. Why would Biden be personally mad at a prosecutor for NOT indemnifying his son's employer?
>A classified US State Department email from 2016 shows a leading diplomat warning that Hunter Biden’s lucrative job with a Ukrainian energy company “undercut” American efforts to fight corruption in the Eastern European country.
I mean, yeah, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that Hunter Biden is someone who only makes smart choices that help advance his father's aims. Unless you're aiming to criticize Joe Biden as a parent instead of as a political figure, that's not relevant by itself.
You've levied a pretty heavy claim with nothing but your word as evidence for it.
I remember thinking "oh yeah, that makes sense, they wouldn't view free speech in isolation but as a tool of the democratic process."
My preference is to leave all content up, but perhaps provide filters to users so they can choose to look at a bubble if they like. Or have an open standard for video data, on which anybody could build a UI layer.
Just saying, there's a clear double standard here. Saying the election was stolen due to collusion with Russians seems to be along awfully similar lines.
I'm happy to allow companies to do whatever they like, but the data needs to be decoupled from the UI then. Otherwise it's a natural monopoly.
I think history will see it that way, though it may take another decade or two.
This is simply untrue: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/senate-intell...
Even a Republican-backed investigation found many links between Trump campaign advisors and Kremlin officials.
Just because Trump says he was "totally exonerated" for the soundbite doesn't mean anything.
Also, you can tie most government officials to Russia in some capacity. Everybody in politics is well connected.
It was a widely spread conspiracy theory with 0 evidence given a veil of credibility because many talking heads brought it up as if there were something tangible backing it.
Just because many people talked about and bought into it doesn't invalidate that it was a conspiracy theory
Nobody is claiming Trump is a genius. The Russian ties are all out there in the open. The only open question was whether they rise to a criminal level. Trump apparently thought they did when he panicked and fired James Comey to halt an investigation. I don’t think the connections were necessarily criminal, just un-American (that of cozying up to corrupt dictators while denigrating allies).
No. That's never been the case. Your room is open to all and people who want to listen aren't prevented from going into it.
However, I'm also not obligated to host you in a room I own. The government guarantees my freedom of association as well. You want to opine, do it in your own room, or do it in places owned by the public at large.
Your recollection of what you were supposedly thinking doesn't mean you didn't misread what was written either. If you want me to even consider your claim, you are going to need a source on it. Because, like I said, it's a heavy one.
Which lends some rather solid credence to all the people back around the election who were saying this looks like fairly obvious corruption. I mean, the facts haven't really changed much, the only change is that the political establishment is OK with it being reported on in December. Anyone reading the initial story could have told you there was going to be an investigation.
Whether they'll find anything is an open question since the person who controls the executive is currently president - but it looks as shady as anything in US politics. There is little question that the big tech giants were making a political move when they took the story down on its first arrival, it would have swung votes and they didn't want that.
Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
> Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
Not finding evidence can't be the story because the original story (which is what had no evidence), er, was a story? Again, an accusation can't pull itself up by its bootstraps. There has to be a there, there.
Now you may not care. I certainly don't think it is the biggest issue, this sort of corruption is pretty small biscuits compared to the damage that US politicians of Biden's tenure typically manage to do. However, the fact that there was a vigorous campaign of censorship leading up to the election is extremely weird. Which is the polite phrase for "this was a partisan lie by omission because big tech is showing their cards and those cards are Democrat".
