There are two contradictory explanations in the article: that the channel was removed by "faulty automatic moderation" vs. "prompted the company to play a game of both-sidesism" so it was done on purpose.
tl;dr I hate censorship. if its illegal then prosecute them, but this isn't about legality
They have pretty much blocked historical videos containing much about NAZI Germany as well. [1] Going to be real annoying to lose some classic comics which definitely would not pass the hate/sensitivity crowd today.
I understand the concern youtube has but once you go down this path you pretty much are rewriting history. that is what they need to understand, the past is exactly that, a representation of the views and outlooks of the people and places depicted.
If this continues how long before other countries demand to have content their censors deem offensive removed? Why would we be in position to tell them, no we don't find it offensive, when we don't give them the same right in return.
You can be offended all you want but that does not mean you get to prevent others from viewing it.
With regards to new content postings they obviously need a system which first includes trusted accounts, then their algorithm, then an challenge and remediation system that is well documented and enforced.
So .. Forcing other people to pay to host your "not cheap" content is okay?
Maybe I can use my neighbor's power to operate a giant billboard with my personal views? I mean, it's not cheap, but I really think my POV deserves the largest possible platform.
Anything less is effectively my neighbor censoring me.
users provide the content necessary for the platform to exist. Shouldn't we ask them then?
As a user, I am certainly interested in which advertisers are promoting more content controls. That would be quite a service. Nothing is expected to be provided here.
You just don't have the right to tell a private company what content they must allow.
That would be true for some other private company, but I'm not sure this libertarian attitude is applicable to Google/Alphabet - it holds immense power over the 'net nowadays, I bet it can kill any emerging competitor.
Yes, that's sort of true, but imagine that some company openly claims that they are not going to hire women or black people or Muslims. You also shouldn't tell private company who they should hire, yet my guess that if any company started doing this it would stir some controversy and probably wouldn't stay unnoticed.
>You also shouldn't tell private company who they should hire, yet my guess that if any company started doing this it would stir some controversy and probably wouldn't stay unnoticed.
It would be illegal for companies to do this, and governments certainly can tell private companies not to discriminate against certain classes when hiring. Google, meanwhile, is not breaking the law by choosing what content is hosted on their platform and under what circumstances.
You're presenting a false dichotomy here because Google is not a state, it is a private company, and because content creators are not a government whose laws Google must follow, but rather are themselves bound by Google's terms of service, which grant Google absolute, irrevocable and arbitrary power over their accounts, content, visibility and monetization.
If they started banning all Muslims from their platform, would you be okay with it? I guess not, so the power is hardly "absolute, irrevocable, and arbitrary". Which is a ridiculous proposition. We absolutely can legislate about what private corporations can and cannot do.
>If they started banning all Muslims from their platform, would you be okay with it?
No, but again, that would already be illegal, whereas Google demonetizing content due to violence is not.
Moderating or banning content for any reason is not equivalent to discrimination against a protected class, but fair enough - "absolute, irrevocable, and arbitrary" regarding content and accounts, where legal.
My characterization of the rights Google has over user supplied content versus the rights users have over Google is still far more accurate than not.
And you set up a website how, without involving private companies with content rules?
Web hosting comapnies have rules too. Even VPS and public cloud companies have content rules for what you can do with VPS.
So you have to do some kind of server hosting, and make sure your ISP will not take you down for content.
So this turns out to be a bit more involved than "set up your own website".
Also, your statement is not completely true. Phone companies are not allowed to police content of your communications, for example, even if they are private.
It's always the argument of the censors that you can just move to the next layer. Then push for censorship of that as well. `for (;;)`.
And when there's no place to retreat to, because they're literally telling you "no wrongthink allowed on my planet", you won't have any means left to complain.
It has been tried, and it turns out they come after your hosting providers too and get you kicked off that way, they also get you blocked from integrating with any payment platforms (as Patreon competitors have found out). Do you want to use Sendgrid to validate users by email? Twilio to notify people when their subscriptions upload new videos? nope, the thought police are getting you booted off of those too. It's not about making you use another platform, it's about making you shut up completely. If someone actually did everything themselves and made a usable website, I've no doubt they'd be getting ISPs to block it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole thing, but I thought that Google wasn't actually blocking or taking down these videos, only refusing to sell advertising on the video on the behalf of the video's creators.
Whoever pays creates is basically the fundamental rule I commit my life to and that I try to see realized for everyone. People think I am an asshole, but I believe I am merely misunderstood.
Yup. It doesn't have to make sense as a policy, y'know; it's all about appearances, public image and not wanting to be associated with "sensitive" stuff of any sort. Documentaries about Nazism, with historical imagery? Exposes of violent extremism? No way, that stuff is way too icky!
It's a fine line between portrayal and promoting, such a fine line that some people might not see where that distinction lies and then mistake one intent for the other. A truly neutral documentary will present the facts and lead you to understand the participants mindset, even if you're not in agreement.
I can't imagine some bot will get this right, but I feel we're morally obligated to retain the material or we'll get even worse at telling the difference.
I think the whole point is that some people don't want you to understand what the others think. In 2019 even empathizing with certain people, or trying to follow the logical steps that lead them to their views is considered a sin by some people.
> In 2019 even empathizing with certain people, or trying to follow the logical steps that lead them to their views is considered a sin by some people.
It's almost like we're sliding back to 1935. There is no shared understanding of the fact that empathizing with people - all people, regardless of their diversity - and trying to understand their views is what leads you to the most correct views over time. It's why the modern West won, and its adversaries lost. I'm starting to think that some people really do hate us for this freedom - they want to be told what to think, and find the very idea of intellectual curiosity or openness to be inherently offensive.
This reminds me of how satire has a short life cycle. For later generations it becomes difficult to see the difference between the parody and thing "being parodied".
So our advertising overlords continue to be the ones that determine what information we're exposed to and what products we're meant to desire.
In honour of our great advertisement-driven society, we shall click that suggested "Up next" video on Youtube, and continue to scroll through that infinite Facebook wall which is so miraculously calculated to maintain our attention.
If I leave it running long enough I always end up with mind-draining pop music. It is a pure nightmare.
But seriously, people promoting rule changes so that advertisers can exclude anything sinful are certainly also against anything that makes Youtube interesting.
>But seriously, people promoting rule changes so that advertisers can exclude anything sinful are certainly also against anything that makes Youtube interesting.
"sin" isn't the only interesting thing about Youtube. I watch plenty of content which is both non-violent and interesting.
I choose that word to highlight similarities to deprecated moral authorities. Not even because of the morals at hand, but because of the insufficiently legitimized authority.
For example for Europe: sex => ok; violence => not ok
compared to the US: sex => not ok; violence => ok
What we will end up with: sex => not ok; violence => not ok
What might be best for educated civil society: sex => ok; violence => ok
Pretty reductionist, but that is where I see Youtube heading towards to.
What I think would help is if we don't use a term like "extremism", which sounds like a term of sketchy censorship justification.
What's "extreme"? Is two men wanting to marry each other extreme? Is advocating for freedom of abortion extreme? Is criticizing the ruling national party extreme? Is saying that climate change is influenced by human actions extreme? Is exposing instances of 'bad apple' abuses of power extreme? There are a lot of people who will answer yes to all of those, in the US alone. ("Of course we believe in freedom of speech, but certainly extremism should be censored!")
I suggest not handing totalitarian censorship tools like the vague "extremism" to politicians and companies.
> What I think would help is if we don't use a term like "extremism", which sounds like a term of sketchy censorship justification.
Well, advocating for genocide on Muslims, spreading deadly propaganda such as antivaxx or "great replacement" or such certainly qualifies as "extremism".
The US already has laws and other mechanisms for handling calls for violence, etc.
For problems of manipulation, I suggest the solution is not a politician or company getting to choose who gets to manipulate, but rather, becoming more resilient against manipulation.
Ok, but your earlier comment was that we shouldn't even use the term "extremism," so what term would you prefer that couldn't be abused in the same way?
But that's what Google is doing. "extremism" is an existing term, and their demonetization and moderation mechanisms exist as well.
If you're suggesting Google should be prevented from moderating content that doesn't meet a strict definition of legal harm... fair enough, but there's nothing stopping laws from being passed which would justify Google's policies.
I do not sympathize with Google, but Boingboing looks ridiculous here. Its contributors have been advocating for modern pro-censorship movement, which pushes for filtering of content because of a ever growing list of allegedly offensive things, and signs. But wait a minute, they aren't happy with the results. What could go wrong. Now, as AI doesn't seem to cope with their demands, what will they want as a solution? Politically correct humans reviewing every video?
The same thing we use when enforcing the rules of any infrastructure: publicly accountable and transparent due process. These problems will continue until big tech implements a proper rule of law[1]. They will continue[2] to be responsible for these difficult decisions as long as their platforms idea of justice is the rule of man[2].
Not sure I clearly see your position. If platforms should abstain from censorship unless proper legal process forces them to do so is what you mean - I would not argue. But it's not the point of my comment. Pro-cesorship movement never advocated for proper due process, they want quick, peferably automatical "deplatforming".
That's not what I'm talking about. The platforms need to create a new form of "legal process" where these issues are defined and adjudicated in an open process. Google et al are de facto a new layer of government, and they need to act like it. Currently, they are trying to act like a "(mostly) benevolent dictatorship" and finding out that the hard way that you can't actually please everyone. The proper way to handle calls for censorship/banning/etc is to tell them to take their grievances to the formalized judicial process and/or argue for changing that process in the formalized, open "legislature".
For a much better explanation, I highly recommend watching Raph Koster's talk (my previous [2]). Even though it was at GDC and initially talks about VR and MMOs, the talk is not actually about games; it's about the ethical and social responsibilities of creating social spaces, and the may ways we've tried to solve their problems in the past.
It seems like the defenders of censorship always imagine the censors will block only the things they don't like, but it rarely works out that way. Anyone who advocates censorship needs to realize that some things they don't want censored will be, through imperfection, abuse of power, or simple difference of opinion.
Not for the things described in the article, no. If you really just want to document things, you can host videos by yourself and just offer them for download.
What makes youtube important isn't that they host your videos, but that they get people to watch them.
It was in another article, which is directly linked in this one.
> But, regardless, it seems quite apt in this context
No it's not. He's just being a conservative asshole.
> Use of a single, seemingly accurate, phrase seems like an odd reason to distrust a source
It's not just the single phrase, but what you can extrapolate from it. Calling someone a hate channel is a pretty serious deal these days, and just throwing such an accusation around like that shows that at the very least whoever wrote that article doesn't in the slightest bit intend to show the complete picture. And no, I won't trust a source that I caught once telling only half the story on things where I wouldn't even know.
Why does anyone think this needs to be an all or nothing approach?
First step: remove the literal nazis. Nazis are bad and anyone who says otherwise is bad. Anyone who screams, “censorship!” About removing nazis is defending nazis.
Second step: Evaluate what worked and what didn’t work about removing nazis. Correct mistakes.
Third step: Pick the next most evil topic after nazis and repeat.
If you had your own website where choices of this kind need to be made.. sure, you can go ahead and make determinations based on principle. Your own definitions and evaluations of Nazism, evil, eviler and such will shine through, especially the priority list. Your own values will shine through the "what worked?" Step. Overall though, it would be totally fine. You are a person (presumably a decent one) and your principled choices are a great way to govern your website.
YouTube is a major part of global media, a major subsidiary of Google/alphabet and a major channel through which democratic politics, speech and social life is conducted around the world. YouTube makes more mayors, parliamentarians an public intellectuals than they likely even bother to know about.
It's an institution, in every sense. Ways of doing things that are perfectly workable for a person do not translate to institutional scale.
There is no objective definition of good. To someone you're a good person. To someone else you're as bad as a nazi. That's the real slippery slope: from benevolent censor to malevolent.
I don't murder people, so...no. That is incorrect.
Someone can say I'm as bad as a nazi, but they would be incorrect, so their opinion would not matter.
censorship doesn't work and will never work. if you cut someone's tongue you only prove you're afraid of what he has to say.
the best solution is to fight them back by showing them the opposite ideas. don't censor Nazis, put as advertisements and suggestions to positive content highlighting why they are wrong.
The allegedly worst site of actual national socialists had some badly drawn anime comics with very questionable messages and a minuscule user base. They were at the lowest bottom of the barrel for years. Then censorship ambitions flared up and look where we are now...
Not that rational arguments seem to work in this discussion...
"Nazis" in these sorts of discussions is broadly meant to include 'actual national socialists', neo-nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists, and their sympathizers, stooges, and fellow travelers. This makes it a form of metonymy.
Since the broader term includes more materials than "badly drawn anime comics", it appears you do not understand what most people usually mean by "Nazis". (To confirm my suspicion, I see at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729764 that you used the phrase "national socialists knew very well", suggesting that you consider it as a term for people in the past, and not those in the present. How then did any of them have web sites, and were interested in anime?)
By the way, many people who, seemingly hyper-pedantically narrow the use of "Nazi" for "actual national socialists" or (seen elsewhere) "members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party" are often deliberately derailing the topic. My advice is to not follow practices which might mistakenly get you labeled as a Nazi sympathizer.
In any case, the HN guideline is to assume the "strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize". "Actual national socialists" is a much weaker and not really justifiable interpretation.
Well, if we're going to do that, I think this extended "Nazi" label should also include militant Islamic anti-Semitism, as from ISIL, Hezballah, Hamas and the like. Since there is a fairly clear line of descent from the early-20th-c. anti-Semitism that Hitler drew onto, to present-day Islamic fundamentalism and extremism.
Well, the godfather of the PLO, Amin al-Huesseini, hobnobbed with Hitler and Himmler, and tried to raise an Arab legion for the SS, before returning to fan the flames against a peaceful partition in 1947, so the link isn't all that hard to trace.
The main thread I pointed to was one of white nationalism and related areas of white supremacy and white separatism.
While that certainly includes antisemitism, most of the people in the organizations you describe do not consider themselves white, nor, I suspect, are they doing so because of a believe in some variant of Aryan racial superiority.
That makes them "not Nazis".
Similarly, those killed in the Holocaust included Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma, and homosexuals. Though these were considered racially inferior, deviant, or enemy nationals, while the Jews were falsely maligned as a 'counter-race', deserving of far worse treatment.
That does not make all anti-LGBT people Nazis by extension.
Just like it does not make all anti-Semites Nazis.
I think it wasn't made clear that I was referring to the daily stormer in the example I have given, I was reluctant to give out a name. It is very true that there are at least some differences between "classical" national socialists and neo-nazis.
I just wanted to point out that I actually visited the site once and it was ridiculous from top to bottom without any significant amount of users (per page rank). They were spectacularly banned which just seems to be like upgrading the position of North Korea. Something you might want to avoid. I believe it is worth thinking about it.
> My advice is to not follow practices which might mistakenly get you labeled as a Nazi sympathizer.
Me being a bit non-conformist from time to time is actually pretty useful against ideologies like nazism. Guilt by association is a different story however. But you are correct, let us be more self critical about that.
As I understand it - which isn't saying much - 4chan's /pol/ is a more frequented link for the ilk we refer to, and with much better design skills than what you described.
I'm all in for demonetising them, just don't remove them. you're losing the opportunity to change someone's mind when you shut their mouth. instead of removing them, the platforms need to provide with ways to counter them. I'm taking about putting 'advertisements' against their ideas in their videos, in the automatic suggestions, everywhere.
you need to understand that the people who are convinced of these ideas are easily manipulated emotionally. All you really need to do is offer them a meaning and a feeling of belonging to a group. they don't care about facts, you need to emphasize about the group's betrayal to them.
A textbook publisher is not obligated to publish every textbook where there is the slightest demand for it.
A newspaper is not obligated to publish every letter-to-the-editor which comes its way.
A scientific journal is not obligated to publish every article submitted. Articles are even retracted.
Their failure to publish is neither "cutting someone's tongue" nor "censorship". Or, if it is censorship, it's been around since forever, making the term meaningless.
Why should Google have an obligation to publish that no other media company has?
(I also agree with DanBC that what you wrote is not true. Among other things, why are there so many anti-vaxxers when the anti-anti-vaxxers have used the techniques you mentioned, and more, and when there is no credible doubt about the lack of connection between vaccinations and autism?)
When running ads, Youtube allows you to target certain audiences. Perhaps they should just allow people to target (or block) certain content creators in a similar manner.
Choose target video controversial threshold: 0 =O===== 100
I suppose you could look at the number of views / comments / likes / dislikes ratios to determine a level of controversy. Youtube viewers are already grouped into various audiences. So their behavior towards certain video's tells something about the video.
Regardless of platform and motivation, there is a more general issue.
There is no fine well defined line between public documentation and promotion. Raising awarness is a form of promotion. Even if material is ultimately objective. There is no going around it, so it's always going to be subjective and leave someone unhappy, either for material being present or not present.
When we had nation states, we had free speech. Now we have companies and surveillance capitalism and we're back in the dark ages. Centuries of civic progress, payed for with blood, sold for the consumption of crappy content and evaporated in just two decades. Looks like Enlightenment has failed after all.
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[ 14.9 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadThey have pretty much blocked historical videos containing much about NAZI Germany as well. [1] Going to be real annoying to lose some classic comics which definitely would not pass the hate/sensitivity crowd today.
I understand the concern youtube has but once you go down this path you pretty much are rewriting history. that is what they need to understand, the past is exactly that, a representation of the views and outlooks of the people and places depicted.
If this continues how long before other countries demand to have content their censors deem offensive removed? Why would we be in position to tell them, no we don't find it offensive, when we don't give them the same right in return.
You can be offended all you want but that does not mean you get to prevent others from viewing it.
With regards to new content postings they obviously need a system which first includes trusted accounts, then their algorithm, then an challenge and remediation system that is well documented and enforced.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/06/youtube-b...
You just don't have the right to tell a private company what content they must allow.
While in theory you aren't losing that ability, in practice most people can't afford to.
Maybe I can use my neighbor's power to operate a giant billboard with my personal views? I mean, it's not cheap, but I really think my POV deserves the largest possible platform.
Anything less is effectively my neighbor censoring me.
> Set up your own website and host the content. Nobody is removing that ability.
In practice, things might not be that simple.
And this is a strawman anyway, there are plenty of sites that let you post video content without these same sorts of policies.
And if they don't have the network effects of YouTube, boo hoo.
You can ask users to pay for it just like Netflix, New York Times etc do. Or have advertising.
But of course just like YouTube you then need to factor in their needs.
As a user, I am certainly interested in which advertisers are promoting more content controls. That would be quite a service. Nothing is expected to be provided here.
That would be true for some other private company, but I'm not sure this libertarian attitude is applicable to Google/Alphabet - it holds immense power over the 'net nowadays, I bet it can kill any emerging competitor.
It would be illegal for companies to do this, and governments certainly can tell private companies not to discriminate against certain classes when hiring. Google, meanwhile, is not breaking the law by choosing what content is hosted on their platform and under what circumstances.
You're presenting a false dichotomy here because Google is not a state, it is a private company, and because content creators are not a government whose laws Google must follow, but rather are themselves bound by Google's terms of service, which grant Google absolute, irrevocable and arbitrary power over their accounts, content, visibility and monetization.
No, but again, that would already be illegal, whereas Google demonetizing content due to violence is not.
Moderating or banning content for any reason is not equivalent to discrimination against a protected class, but fair enough - "absolute, irrevocable, and arbitrary" regarding content and accounts, where legal.
My characterization of the rights Google has over user supplied content versus the rights users have over Google is still far more accurate than not.
Web hosting comapnies have rules too. Even VPS and public cloud companies have content rules for what you can do with VPS.
So you have to do some kind of server hosting, and make sure your ISP will not take you down for content.
So this turns out to be a bit more involved than "set up your own website".
Also, your statement is not completely true. Phone companies are not allowed to police content of your communications, for example, even if they are private.
Cast your own copper.
Make your own country.
It's always the argument of the censors that you can just move to the next layer. Then push for censorship of that as well. `for (;;)`.
And when there's no place to retreat to, because they're literally telling you "no wrongthink allowed on my planet", you won't have any means left to complain.
Advertisers do not want to be associated with violent content. Regardless of whether the content is serving some greater cause or not.
You, sir, are a man of culture
Which is why there is no money in Boxing, UFC, action movies and so on. It's got nothing to do with violence.
True. They do not want that.
> And for good reason.
I disagree. That's not a good enough reason to censor such information from the public.
I can't imagine some bot will get this right, but I feel we're morally obligated to retain the material or we'll get even worse at telling the difference.
It's almost like we're sliding back to 1935. There is no shared understanding of the fact that empathizing with people - all people, regardless of their diversity - and trying to understand their views is what leads you to the most correct views over time. It's why the modern West won, and its adversaries lost. I'm starting to think that some people really do hate us for this freedom - they want to be told what to think, and find the very idea of intellectual curiosity or openness to be inherently offensive.
In honour of our great advertisement-driven society, we shall click that suggested "Up next" video on Youtube, and continue to scroll through that infinite Facebook wall which is so miraculously calculated to maintain our attention.
There's nothing wrong with this, right?
But seriously, people promoting rule changes so that advertisers can exclude anything sinful are certainly also against anything that makes Youtube interesting.
"sin" isn't the only interesting thing about Youtube. I watch plenty of content which is both non-violent and interesting.
For example for Europe: sex => ok; violence => not ok
compared to the US: sex => not ok; violence => ok
What we will end up with: sex => not ok; violence => not ok
What might be best for educated civil society: sex => ok; violence => ok
Pretty reductionist, but that is where I see Youtube heading towards to.
[1] https://www.bitchute.com/
What's "extreme"? Is two men wanting to marry each other extreme? Is advocating for freedom of abortion extreme? Is criticizing the ruling national party extreme? Is saying that climate change is influenced by human actions extreme? Is exposing instances of 'bad apple' abuses of power extreme? There are a lot of people who will answer yes to all of those, in the US alone. ("Of course we believe in freedom of speech, but certainly extremism should be censored!")
I suggest not handing totalitarian censorship tools like the vague "extremism" to politicians and companies.
Well, advocating for genocide on Muslims, spreading deadly propaganda such as antivaxx or "great replacement" or such certainly qualifies as "extremism".
For problems of manipulation, I suggest the solution is not a politician or company getting to choose who gets to manipulate, but rather, becoming more resilient against manipulation.
If you're suggesting Google should be prevented from moderating content that doesn't meet a strict definition of legal harm... fair enough, but there's nothing stopping laws from being passed which would justify Google's policies.
Would it be okay to substitute "Five 9s of uptime" in an SLA with "solid uptime" and call it good?
5 months ago Alex Jones was extreme. In this last round, Eli the computer guy was considered too extreme.
The same thing we use when enforcing the rules of any infrastructure: publicly accountable and transparent due process. These problems will continue until big tech implements a proper rule of law[1]. They will continue[2] to be responsible for these difficult decisions as long as their platforms idea of justice is the rule of man[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law
[2] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-A...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_man
That's not what I'm talking about. The platforms need to create a new form of "legal process" where these issues are defined and adjudicated in an open process. Google et al are de facto a new layer of government, and they need to act like it. Currently, they are trying to act like a "(mostly) benevolent dictatorship" and finding out that the hard way that you can't actually please everyone. The proper way to handle calls for censorship/banning/etc is to tell them to take their grievances to the formalized judicial process and/or argue for changing that process in the formalized, open "legislature".
For a much better explanation, I highly recommend watching Raph Koster's talk (my previous [2]). Even though it was at GDC and initially talks about VR and MMOs, the talk is not actually about games; it's about the ethical and social responsibilities of creating social spaces, and the may ways we've tried to solve their problems in the past.
What makes youtube important isn't that they host your videos, but that they get people to watch them.
When the masses rely on one person, then that one person changes his mind, you get what you get.
YouTube, really, is just someone else’s computer. He doesn’t like how it’s being used, he fixes that.
I’m not surprised here.
There has to be a shift to self-reliance with this sort of thing.
> Steven Crowder's hate channel
I don't think it's a very trustworthy source of information.
That's a genuine surprise! You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing
> > Steven Crowder's hate channel
I don't see this phrase in the article, perhaps it was removed. But, regardless, it seems quite apt in this context: https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1134264395717103617
> I don't think it's a very trustworthy source of information
Use of a single, seemingly accurate, phrase seems like an odd reason to distrust a source
It was in another article, which is directly linked in this one.
> But, regardless, it seems quite apt in this context
No it's not. He's just being a conservative asshole.
> Use of a single, seemingly accurate, phrase seems like an odd reason to distrust a source
It's not just the single phrase, but what you can extrapolate from it. Calling someone a hate channel is a pretty serious deal these days, and just throwing such an accusation around like that shows that at the very least whoever wrote that article doesn't in the slightest bit intend to show the complete picture. And no, I won't trust a source that I caught once telling only half the story on things where I wouldn't even know.
First step: remove the literal nazis. Nazis are bad and anyone who says otherwise is bad. Anyone who screams, “censorship!” About removing nazis is defending nazis.
Second step: Evaluate what worked and what didn’t work about removing nazis. Correct mistakes.
Third step: Pick the next most evil topic after nazis and repeat.
Third step: Broaden the definition of nazi and repeat.
If you had your own website where choices of this kind need to be made.. sure, you can go ahead and make determinations based on principle. Your own definitions and evaluations of Nazism, evil, eviler and such will shine through, especially the priority list. Your own values will shine through the "what worked?" Step. Overall though, it would be totally fine. You are a person (presumably a decent one) and your principled choices are a great way to govern your website.
YouTube is a major part of global media, a major subsidiary of Google/alphabet and a major channel through which democratic politics, speech and social life is conducted around the world. YouTube makes more mayors, parliamentarians an public intellectuals than they likely even bother to know about.
It's an institution, in every sense. Ways of doing things that are perfectly workable for a person do not translate to institutional scale.
the best solution is to fight them back by showing them the opposite ideas. don't censor Nazis, put as advertisements and suggestions to positive content highlighting why they are wrong.
Not that rational arguments seem to work in this discussion...
Since the broader term includes more materials than "badly drawn anime comics", it appears you do not understand what most people usually mean by "Nazis". (To confirm my suspicion, I see at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729764 that you used the phrase "national socialists knew very well", suggesting that you consider it as a term for people in the past, and not those in the present. How then did any of them have web sites, and were interested in anime?)
By the way, many people who, seemingly hyper-pedantically narrow the use of "Nazi" for "actual national socialists" or (seen elsewhere) "members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party" are often deliberately derailing the topic. My advice is to not follow practices which might mistakenly get you labeled as a Nazi sympathizer.
In any case, the HN guideline is to assume the "strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize". "Actual national socialists" is a much weaker and not really justifiable interpretation.
While that certainly includes antisemitism, most of the people in the organizations you describe do not consider themselves white, nor, I suspect, are they doing so because of a believe in some variant of Aryan racial superiority.
That makes them "not Nazis".
Similarly, those killed in the Holocaust included Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma, and homosexuals. Though these were considered racially inferior, deviant, or enemy nationals, while the Jews were falsely maligned as a 'counter-race', deserving of far worse treatment.
That does not make all anti-LGBT people Nazis by extension.
Just like it does not make all anti-Semites Nazis.
I just wanted to point out that I actually visited the site once and it was ridiculous from top to bottom without any significant amount of users (per page rank). They were spectacularly banned which just seems to be like upgrading the position of North Korea. Something you might want to avoid. I believe it is worth thinking about it.
> My advice is to not follow practices which might mistakenly get you labeled as a Nazi sympathizer.
Me being a bit non-conformist from time to time is actually pretty useful against ideologies like nazism. Guilt by association is a different story however. But you are correct, let us be more self critical about that.
When you remove their funding - by demonetizing them - their spread slows.
you need to understand that the people who are convinced of these ideas are easily manipulated emotionally. All you really need to do is offer them a meaning and a feeling of belonging to a group. they don't care about facts, you need to emphasize about the group's betrayal to them.
A newspaper is not obligated to publish every letter-to-the-editor which comes its way.
A scientific journal is not obligated to publish every article submitted. Articles are even retracted.
Their failure to publish is neither "cutting someone's tongue" nor "censorship". Or, if it is censorship, it's been around since forever, making the term meaningless.
Why should Google have an obligation to publish that no other media company has?
(I also agree with DanBC that what you wrote is not true. Among other things, why are there so many anti-vaxxers when the anti-anti-vaxxers have used the techniques you mentioned, and more, and when there is no credible doubt about the lack of connection between vaccinations and autism?)
Choose target video controversial threshold: 0 =O===== 100
There is no fine well defined line between public documentation and promotion. Raising awarness is a form of promotion. Even if material is ultimately objective. There is no going around it, so it's always going to be subjective and leave someone unhappy, either for material being present or not present.
1. https://www.infowars.com/watch-live-democrats-activate-milit...