If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves.
Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.
YouTube can choose to keep or delete any content on their platform regardless of truth/free speech/or not. It's in the EULA. You want free speech, go outside and yell. No one is stopping anyone from free speech. What Google is doing is cleaning up content on their service according to their EULA. If you disagree with the EULA, you can gladly go use another service.
I will add, targeting a specific genre of videos looks bad, sure. It's only that we are talking about that genre and not all the others of topics YouTube has removed.
If corporations can't discriminate in hiring due to an American principle of anti-racism, then we can also prevent corporations from discriminating in speech on an American principle of free speech.
They have the right to do it, and it will make the world worse off. Taibbi always has had a great guy instinct for normal Americans and how they react to elite condescension, and he's right here.
My idiot brother got twice as radicalized when they kicked Alex Jones's crazy ass off YouTube.
It made people feel better and more morally superior, especially employees. It hurt my brother. Now when he watches that asshole, he's on a website where he is guaranteed to never get the other side.
If you support this, then you don't know anything about how humans react to censorship.
Even before Jones was kicked off, people went to YouTube for insane conspiracy theories and ended up, due to the video recommendation system, still only seeing one side. It really didn't matter whether Jones was on there or his own platform, people watching his videos still only see his (and related) videos.
Consider a utilitarian point of view. This is not about grounding people who already went off the deep end, it's about reducing the number of people who get radicalized. I think from that perspective deplatforming radicals is both ethical and effective.
Obviously I would agree if you're talking about Alex Jones. A thing that worries me is when people are banned or videos are removed when the facts in question are in dispute.
I was a very big proponent of wearing mask in the beginning of the pandemic back when the WHO and Dr Fauci had advised against it not because it was true but to manipulate the public for the purpose of preventing a rush on n95 masks.
If I had stated in a video the truth which was that the public was being manipulated to protect the masks, I would have been contradicting WHO and the video could have been banned. That's a problem.
Sorry about your brother. These platforms are designed for feedback loops. That has nothing to do with free speech or a legal protection to spread libel.
People need to realize that ANY website where a user submits content for is not classified as free speech.
A tweet isn’t free speech.
A post on Reddit isn’t free speech.
These are “articles and or content provided by the public for enhancements to our platform” or whatever EULA legalese they use.
Yeah, like I said, banning a bunch of videos from one genre right now looks bad and people have a right to be upset over it. It’s still YouTube’s legal right to choose which content they want to showcase on their platform.
They hold all the power here. Content creators are at their mercy as far as compensation, views, inclusion in the recommendation engine, etc. then cry foul when the company moves in another direction. Down-leg economics. Specialized businesses based on a supply of value from another business. It’s not a sustainable model for anyone on the 3rd rung.
This is a non sequitur. Free speech is an ideal. We would like google to preserve free speech, even though they are not legally obligated to per the Constitution. If their EULA does not uphold that ideal, then they should change it, not compromise the ideal.
> Free speech is an ideal. We would like google to preserve free speech
Is this self evident? Specifically google, or all and any private platforms? It's not obvious to me that every private entity should hold the ideal of free speech -- particularly a version of free speech that means something different than protection from persecution by the state.
But your desire for Google to host certain kinds of speech against their will doesn't supersede Google's own right to decide otherwise on their own platform.
They have their own free speech rights, as well as free association and the rights of free enterprise.
I generally agree with this but YouTube is a communication channel and has a different set of expectations. Additionally they promoted themselves as an open forum in the beginning.
Ideally, discrimination should not exist in something that is promoted as a public forum.
If YouTube only wanted to serve a certain type of genre or they had the same censorship policies from the beginning then that is one thing. But they promoted themselves as open and free speech and then once they achieved critical mass they changed their mind to push their own agenda.
That is dishonest and an abuse of public trust.
As a contrasting example, censoring porn, while still not free speech, would be fine for YouTube to continue to do since they had this stance from the beginning and people chose to join the platform knowing this.
>Additionally they promoted themselves as an open forum in the beginning.
Was this before or after Google? Because Google's interest in the platform is definitely maximizing revenue and competing with first party streaming services.
> This is a non sequitur. Free speech is an ideal. We would like google to preserve free speech, even though they are not legally obligated to per the Constitution. If their EULA does not uphold that ideal, then they should change it, not compromise the ideal.
I would like to uphold that ideal by putting a political bumper sticker on your car. Can you give me your address so I can send it to you?
If you don't have a car, I can send you a sign to put in your window or a t-shirt with a slogan for you to wear.
I appreciate your cooperation in upholding this important ideal.
I'm going to agree but offer a different focus. The agreement is in that YouTube can do this legally and that is not the problem.
But this is also about the practice of ideals. I watched a Chris Martinson video (PhD neurotoxicology, runs something of a prepping channel on YouTube because he doesn't see how the current US approach will resolve comfortably for people who trust the government) on Vimeo the other day because they'd yanked it from YouTube (it discussed the coronavirus). If it has reached the point where YouTube won't let a medical PhD talk about medical research, what use is this platform to me? Music videos, I suppose.
The reason free speech is ideal happens to be because it is better - YouTube is less fit for purpose as an information distributor, it doesn't represent a full spectrum of opinions. I already know what the official government message is - they have a website. I read it on occasion.
If youtube wants to remove stuff they can, but they should start with removing the values they state on their about page. You can't say you give everyone a voice and then start blanket silencing people.
Yeah, and othre mainstream media organisations - including the freaking New York Times - have successfully campaign dto get many of their remaining advertisers to pull out. To the point where, at least if the people campaigning for this were to be believed, many of the targetted Fox shows couldn't get ads at all.
You seldomly see the ideals of people who believe in freedom of speech but stated so clearly. A world were corporations control all the information people consume but people can "go outside and yell" in frustration. This is the kind of freedom we must bring to Iran.
I don't even know where to start here. Common carrier laws? The post office? Court cases forcing shopping malls and company towns to allow freedom of speech? I guess these are all innovations by the Textualist/Originalists you despise.
I remember that company towns had to allow private speech, but I never heard that shopping malls had to. I always thought that any protest or disruption or unpopular speech in a mall would get you escorted out by security.
Ok what if your telephone or internet company decided the same thing? We will listen in to your private conversations and if you say something we don’t like we will terminate your contract.
Some services are so large and entrenched that they have become natural monopolies that need to be regulated. We place restrictions on what natural monopolies can do because of the effects on society as a whole.
The question that needs to be debated is if YouTube has reached the status of a natural monopoly or not. I think it probably has, but I am open to evidence on the other side.
I’m not seeing a parallel, here. Your example is mixing in a whole bunch of “invasion of privacy” which doesn’t exist in the real situation being discussed, and is going to vastly impact people’s emotional reaction.
Why not use the more natural example? “What if a television network decided the same thing? We will watch your publicly broadcast television show and if you say something we don’t like we will cancel your show.” It’s a lot closer to what’s actually happening in this case, right? And it doesn’t needlessly mix in the hot-button topic of privacy violations.
So what happens when you have a group phone call? Should the telephone company be able to listen in and censor those as it wishes?
The parallel is phone companies in the past did listen in to people’s conversation, but this was recognised as an abuse of a monopoly power. Regulations were introduced to stop this sort of activity.
What we should be discussing is how to regulate natural monopolies like YouTube, not if they should be able to just do whatever they like. Like all regulation there will need to be a balance, but society has a vested interest in ensuring natural monopolies are not abusing their power.
Even if YouTube is not abusing its power, the fact it can is a concern.
> YouTube can choose to keep or delete any content on their platform regardless of truth/free speech/or not. It's in the EULA. You want free speech, go outside and yell. No one is stopping anyone from free speech. What Google is doing is cleaning up content on their service according to their EULA. If you disagree with the EULA, you can gladly go use another service.
Fine, then they are publishers in that case, not a neutral platform. Section 230 should be immediately repealed.
For Example, Holocaust denial is shitty and something that anyone should be allowed to ban just because they don't want to be associated with it. The problem is that you have to draw the line somewhere between "The Jews faked the Holocaust and none of it ever happened" and " The exact number of deaths in the Holocaust will never been known but it was in the millions". The first statement is clearly false, the second statement could be an attempt to downplay the magnitude of the event, but it is hard to say without context and you may never know the intent of the person who said it.
> but it is hard to say without context and you may never know the intent of the person who said it.
So? There is a certain revulsion that a lot of engineers have for situational decision making, but that's how we've been doing the law for centuries. Virtually every line that matters is hard to draw. Yet we don't paralyze ourselves by refusing to act.
We in fact already do that and nobody bats an eye.
People are not intimate with the details of most government bureaucracies, they are not expected to be, and they're no expected to grasp such details in a way that they can make informed decisions.
And frankly that is absolutely correct. We believe in democracy to be the best system despite its flaws, and one of its flaws is that it's evident that most people have no freaking clue about how government works.
If you believe in speech for the purpose of government then you have to reject outright lies design with the intent of deligitimizing democracy.
Authoritarians always justify silencing speech for the greater good. You can reject lies with counters to those lies, or do it your way, and end democracy.
Eloquent, but... YouTube isn't an authoritarian (over anything except their own platform), and their policy, whatever it is, isn't going to "end democracy".
Obviously, YouTube has the right to do whatever they want with their servers. My point wasn't that YouTube's policy was the end of democracy, but that the ethos espoused by the parent commenter, if shared by a majority of the electorate and leaders, results in the end of democracy.
Democracy requires trusting people to not be complete morons. Unfortunately, the polarized nature of political discourse in the US has caused people to think that the 50% of the country that doesn't think like them is too stupid to be trusted with speech and videos.
Despite the fact that my brother has been sucked into the world of Alex Jones, I don't think most Americans are too stupid to resist dumb conspiracy theories. In decades past, this brother was a radical leftist, regularly arrested for trespassing in the late 80's at nuclear power plant protests, and later a radical in Greenpeace in the early 90's. This was long before the internet. He didn't believe the moon landing was real, and always believed in dumb ass conspiracy theories. (He's 11 years older than me, and by the time I was 11, I knew he was a moron.)
My other 4 siblings aren't like him.
His new shift was, honestly, not that weird. He happened to shift to the right, but it's a horseshoe as you know, and crazy is crazy.
There have been, and always will be, highly illogical people looking to indulge their desperate desire to have symmetrical, orderly views of the universe that aren't real. The big, disastrous outcomes must always have been carefully plotted, large, grand plans (like 9/11 being a false flag operation, which my brother also believed then). My brother is one of these people, but most people aren't like that.
This huge drive for censorship didn't occur when a large portion of the American left thought that 9/11 was an inside job, because the normal people on the left knew that it was a large, but still fringe, group within their own sphere. The problem is that the same normal people on the left don't know normal people on the right. Why? Because they don't know ANY people on the right. They are in bubbles now. So they are unable to draw the same conclusion that people like my brother are a fringe on the right. To them, voting for Donald Trump is evidence of a massively delusional person, rather than the grim reality that the vast majority of Trump's voters don't like him, and simply chose a lesser of two evils in their worldview, due to a corrupt, oligarchical class at the top of both major political parties resulting in highly polarized policy positions that force them to do this.
> This huge drive for censorship didn't occur when a large portion of the American left thought that 9/11 was an inside job, because the normal people on the left knew that it was a large, but still fringe, group within their own sphere. The problem is that the same normal people on the left don't know normal people on the right. Why? Because they don't know ANY people on the right.
I think to at least some degree, this is a difference between 2001 and 2020. Normal people on the left knew people on the right, and now they don't.
So when a lawyer or doctor is stripped of their professional license because they become professional bullshit peddlers, does that constitute silencing people or saving lives and the integrity of the justice system?
I don't have time to listen to million bullshit peddlers with an agenda.
Then don't listen to them, the same way the rest do. Doesn't mean you should get to silence them.
A bullshit peddler named Dr. Atkins was the only guy in the 90's saying that eggs were good for you. The rest of the establishment physicians said eggs were bad for you, guacamole was bad for you, all fat was bad, eat more pasta.
They were all wrong, Atkins was right (when it comes to eggs.) But if Youtube had existed, people like you would have said he was dangerous and demanded he be removed. That's the problem:
How do you know the people you think are quacks are actually quacks? What about when the establishment is wrong. The Australian doctor who claimed ulcers were caused by bacteria was silenced, mocked, and ridiculed for decades. He was right, as we know now.
Yann LeCunn was mocked and ridiculed for his neural networks. He was outright rejected from conferences, and papers ignored, despite having groundbreaking results that set new benchmarks, because the established CS folks had decided that neural nets were garbage in the 80's. They were wrong, he was right.
But it's cool, I trust you to make decisions for me on what I can hear.
There is a lot of things we do not know, even on seemingly simple topics such as nutrition.
Just watch the "calorie is a calorie" crowd crashing with "sugar is chronic toxin" crowd. Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola pushes the former view. And in a curated YouTube world, who is going to get removed for spreading misinformation?
Since you've defined free speech as being published by Youtube, a private publisher, I guess you think democracy didn't exist before Youtube and free speech didn't before Youtube?
I thought people were intelligent enough, until we found out that some 75M voted for x. Now x is saying that it's a global conspiracy and bringing 75M believing that lie.
That what I find most amusing about the “everyone should vote”. Then they complain about the stupid people and policies that get voted in.
I might be okay with “every informed person should vote”. But that “informed” part can be heavily politically interpreted.
People have largely missed the fact that politics used to be the domain of informed groups fighting for power blocs. Now it’s been “decentralized” and radicalized on Twitter and Reddit and made into glorified reality Tv entertainment by the mass media (who are clearly serving a market with high demand who treat politics like sports teams).
I’d rather have way less people voting and it go back to being mostly boring educated people topic than it’s below common denominator mess it is today.
But I’m unabashedly elitist and understand that there are plenty of well funded groups who want dumb malleable voters and as many as possible.
>Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.
Yes but the only "free speech" that's realistically able to be implemented is freedom of speech without fear of the government putting you jail for criticizing the government.
The other idealism of free speech implemented by commercial businesses is not possible because we (the collective "we") won't allow it to happen.
There is no broadcasting medium (including websites) in any country that doesn't have interference and pressure to remove/ban content via consumer boycotts, advertiser influence, subscribers, business' self-discretion, or decrees from government officials.
The above list of actors in society is the collective "we" that makes absolute free speech an unattainable goal. There is no business with an infinite bank account that can withstand all outside pressures to censor information. Apple has $200 billion in the bank and yet they bowed to China pressure to remove podcasts that supported Hong Kong.
If a successful/influential giant like Apple can't implement absolute free speech, what's the proposed alternative corporate structure that can do it? Nobody ever lays out a concrete plan that makes free speech possible.
[I don't mind the downvotes but I would really appreciate some replies with constructive comments explaining how commercial businesses can realistically implement free speech.]
People are rational most of the times, and act based on the well of knowledge they have at the time. When you choose to promote certain content because of its high engagement benefits you given its controversial nature, then you are poisoning the well of knowledge for each individual. If you do so in a feedback loop, considering what they were interested in before, you accelerate your earnings as well as the poisoning.
Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.
So democracy and truth are more related to each other than democracy and speech. We tend to think that speech is truth, but it is not, and people over time have voted themselves out into dictatorships over and over.
There has to be a good reason why psychological warfare is used, including by the United States in periods like the Vietnam War. The expectation is that statements written on paper or recited through loudspeakers or similar influence people's thoughts, which influences what actions they will take. Those actions are supposed to be beneficial to the forces scattering them from a helicopter or posting them on walls. They're trying to get you to do something regardless of what your preexisting thoughts are beforehand.
Now tear down the pieces of propaganda and burn them. Is this censorship?
I think human brains are sufficiently able to be hacked by the right information. With certain kinds of information, those people could end up causing material harm to someone who is completely uninvolved. That is the ultimate danger that I believe YouTube and the like are trying to avoid, and if true it would be an admittance of a sort that some kinds of information are dangerous to some kinds of people. The name "psychological warfare" implies that communication can be weaponized, in a sense. Certain people do not change their ways regardless of what you try to tell them.
I think the issue is centered not around people trying to have a reasoned debate, but those who have been lost to debate more or less permanently. Previously, you couldn't scatter this kind of information about on the scale were seeing today, and also recommend similar content using very effective algorithms. The more millions of people the content reaches, the more latent believers it will reach and end up converting, even if the conversion rate is a fraction of a percent. And many of these people are very vocal.
In a sense, the content takedown seems like an attempt to counteract the fact that the algorithms are too effective of a medium for misinformation. I don't think we would have seen this kind of scale with books or flyers.
How effective are they? Just because social media keeps promoting people who promote those ideas doesn't mean they're actually widely and strongly held.
If you really care about misinformation, you'd be more worried about Islam which is explicitly sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-science, and supremacist and those beliefs aren't just written in a book somewhere, they're held by most common Muslims. How are we going to eliminate that with censorship when the censors themselves believe it's a good belief? We need smarter people to have the power of censorship so they can distinguish the truly dangerous beliefs from the transient swings of popular culture.
Hah people correcting racism on a technicality but not at all addressing the bigotry issue is a personal pet peeve of mine. Anti intellectual in my humble opinion
This is mostly true but the three religions you mention aren’t parallel in this respect. Apostasy in Islam is (typically) defined as someone who leaves Islam after being born into a Muslim family or previously accepting Islam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam. So it’s not a race or ethnicity, but in a theological and practical sense people are “born Muslim.” Put differently, separation of ethnic group, language, and religion are less well-defined in many parts of the world than it is among people of European descent.
We've asked you before not to do religious flamewar on HN. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you.
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is exactly what the site is not for, and which destroys what it is for (thoughtful conversation on intellectually curious topics).
> I think the issue is centered not around people trying to have a reasoned debate, but those who have been lost to debate more or less permanently. Previously, you couldn't scatter this kind of information about on the scale were seeing today
you and I couldn't. Oligarchs and their governments could and did. The difference is that now their position is threatened by the democratization of information warfare.
Sometimes I see the argument made that people are hackable by lies, therefore censorship is needed as an antidote. But I don't buy it, because 1) lying is equally available to all, but censorship is available only to the powerful 2) the powerful are as flawed as anyone else, except with power 3) historically the powerful who dabbled in censorship have also lied a lot, and censorship has helped them lie more easily. So the "censorship as antidote to lies" theory is just total bunk from every angle.
Yes, every censor claims to be doing it for the common good. The Catholic Church had its Index of Prohibited Books supposedly to protect innocent souls from heresy, and likewise in various Communist countries past and present the censorship is there supposedly to stop the spread of counterrevolutionary propaganda. The modern Western world, in theory based on Enlightenment ideals, traditionally rejected such arguments, because they believed the answer to bad information was good information. While I am not a fan of "populist" movements that reject evidence, I frankly fear the efforts to suppress them more.
I was just covering one side of the equation. I don't like censorship, and as they say: you should legislate as if your opponent is the one that will apply the law. You can apply censorship to take care of one "good" reason, but eventually censorship will be applied for a "bad" reason.
What I wanted to focus on is that it is not true that free speech is the solution to all democratic problems, it's not an absolute good. We limit speech already, you can't advocate for the killing of other people, races, etc...
Also, about free speech, if you can say what you want but there are very large entities controlling who gets to hear what you say, then in a way censorship might be already happening. In this case non-arousing messages are being suppressed because they don't make money, so we all feel like everybody is either pro-this or against-this, and they're all really mad and or dangerous.
> We limit speech already, you can't advocate for the killing of other people, races, etc...
Actually, not that I support such behavior but (at least in the US) you can generally advocate for it. People usually don't (thankfully) so I don't have any examples immediately to hand, but my understanding is that the legal test is "imminent lawless action". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)
> free speech is the solution to all democratic problems, it's not an absolute good
Rather than an absolute good, I would argue that it ought to be viewed as an absolute right. I would also argue that, whether used for good or ill, free political speech is a functional necessity of any democracy. (Necessary but not sufficient and all that.)
> in a way censorship might be already happening. In this case non-arousing messages are being suppressed
Agreed, but it's a separate issue and I've no idea what anyone is actually supposed to do about it.
> People are rational most of the times, and act based on the well of knowledge they have at the time.
I'm of the opinion that people are not rational most of the time, but operate on habit and reason by use of heuristics. My evidence for this is that rational thought is costly and in psychology they teach this (that people aren't usually rational, merely motivated and economical with their attention).
> Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.
This is a good reason why gatekeeping information is so dangerous.
> So democracy and truth are more related to each other than democracy and speech. We tend to think that speech is truth, but it is not, and people over time have voted themselves out into dictatorships over and over.
Unfortunately there is no test for truth. However if you control people's sources of information you can keep them from figuring out that they have been lied to.
How are we to ensure that the gatekeepers of information are honest and wise?
> If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves.
I mean, the American founders already rejected a lot of ideas about the people governing themselves, because they knew from history that the people often can't check their worst impulses.
> Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.
Yeah, but what kinds of free speech work and what kinds don't? I used to be a free speech fundamentalist, but now I'm getting more skeptical of that position. Sort of like how radical Athenian-style direct democracy doesn't work, maybe radically giving everyone near-unchecked access to nationwide broadcasting doesn't work, either.
Now, I'm not advocating for some kind of universal censorship apparatus, but maybe it's would be best if broadcast speech at least passed through some kind of editor (and I mean editor, making editorial decisions, not a censor) to build more judgement into the system.
As software engineers, we understand the value of code reviews. That kind of thing shouldn't be anathema.
> This is literally the foundation of American govt structure namely the respect for unalienable rights of individuals to express themselves.
> It’s the first line in our enumerated rights.
> This isn’t “oh we should rethink things” this is a matter of natural rights and precedes anything we’ve constructed.
I never said anyone shouldn't have the right to express themselves. Do you think it's in the Constitution that you have the unalienable right post any lie you want to YouTube? I don't remember that being in there.
IMHO, lies are toxic to free speech, and it's in everyone's interest (and moral obligation) to do their best to limit their spread.
IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant.
You don't need to protect speech everyone finds unobjectionable.
You need to protect speech that is almost universally opposed.
Minorities need protection, majorities don't, and this the basis of the American notion of freedom - insofar as the individual is the smallest minority.
> Do you think it's in the Constitution that you have the unalienable right post any lie you want to YouTube? I don't remember that being in there.
Clearly it isn't and I believe in freedom of association completely too. If a business wants to not serve anyone for any reason, I recognize that - clearly law has developed to qualify this.
This notion of freedom of association has no bearing on my ability to criticize Youtube for doing something I find wrong.
I can simultaneously believe that what Youtube is doing is wrong and they're completely allowed to do it.
You're not really offering any solutions with these platitudes, because if we take your statement to its conclusion, heck it seem we'll just have to live with a third of the population being lulled into supporting potentially violent and seditious people who want to subvert democracy itself. Oh, guess we'll just have to let them or allow the situation to devolve into a civil war.
> You don't need to protect speech everyone finds unobjectionable.
I wasn't talking about objectionable opinions or perspectives. I was talking about lies and falsehoods, which are becoming alarmingly widespread. Even now those things don't full First Amendment protections, which is why there can be laws against fraud and defamation, and the Supreme Court has even said "false statements of fact" do not enjoy protection [1].
You've recited many slogans, but it's important to consider what free speech is supposed to achieve, which, IMHO, is to allow progress towards truth. It's also important to keep other considerations in mind, and balance them. If you but too much focus on too small an area, you can easily find yourself becoming a Paperclip Maximizer.
Do note that US v Alvarez did hold that false statements are not a sufficient basis to restrict speech--there needs to be something else to justify restriction of speech.
Or, a better quote from the syllabus:
> Although the Court has frequently said or implied that false factual statements enjoy little First Amendment protection, see, e.g., Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 340, those statements cannot be read to mean “no protection at all.”
That's true, but we're actually talking about YouTube here, not the government. So if false factual statements enjoy little First Amendment protection, then there's even less grounds to whine about a private party choosing not to disseminate them.
> IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant.
I am extremely confident that I can find examples of speech you wouldn't defend. How do you feel about false advertisement? Sharing of confidential military secrets?
You realize how liable to abuse the idea of “truth” is in a tyrannical regime? Or even just fallible and misguided people?
Like, eugenicists in the 1920s would have a whole host of horrid “truths” they thought were scientifically supported at the time. Imagine the hurdles opposition would have in trying to voice their “factual truth.”
Of course it is abusable. The state has done all sorts of tremendously evil things when wielding its power. "Free speech" has never stopped the crushing of legitimate protest. This is not a surprise to leftist activists, who have been consistently violently attacked by the state for more than a century. I find these arguments so disingenuous when people throw them out while also doing little to nothing to curb existing state abuse. I've never seen right wing "free speech absolutists" at trans-rights protests or fighting against state interference in left-coded academic work.
General restrictions on state power don't work. Capitalism crushes people. When that state power turns on the majority, the majority complains that their voices are silenced and then they go right back to ignoring the continued problems of the minority.
Perhaps the solution is to approach each situation on a case by case process. Protest and agitate when the state harms people and celebrate when the state protects people. Make harm reduction the goal.
In software people often point to how focusing on metrics can make you fail to achieve your true goal. Similarly, we should focus on the thing that free speech is intending to achieve rather than free speech itself.
Freedoms enumerated in the bill of rights were chosen as a reflection of morality. You’re arguing utilitarianism about what’s a moral issue of the inherent right of people to express themselves.
Yet you oppose certain kinds of speech outright by virtue of the fact that the population has decided via democratic legislation that they should be crimes, presumably because of the harm that they cause.
I don't believe that the intention of the framers was that free speech was a good in-and-of itself but that making it difficult (but not impossible) to restrict speech has positive outcomes. At the very least, that is my read of things.
Things aren't made illegal by the universe. Humans decide what the difference is. You simply think that false advertisement is bad but other forms of speech aren't and that is reflected in the law. We chose that some forms of speech aren't protected.
Since you aren't willing to defend that speech and fight to make it legal, are you not interested in free speech?
> IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant.
Defending speech I find repugnant is not the same thing as defending a nonexistent right to post lies on Youtube.
Host the lies on your own website. Create flyers and pass them out. Talk to people in public settings. Write to the newspaper (they might not post your lies, but you're free to try to get them). Hold conferences. Do whatever you want. As long as the lies don't violate a few well-established exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
But the right to have your lies hosted for free (and given a valuable, far-reaching audience) on a private platform, no matter the consequences to others or to the platform itself? It doesn't exist.
The whole point is the sanctimonious, heavy-handed nature of a platform that otherwise likes to act like they're concerned about the public good.
I recognize they have a right to do it, but I have a right to make noise about it and criticize them.
We got so many pop-ups, accounts suspended, etc. around the Hunter Biden stuff, and what do you know - it turns out there was substance to the story.
This never happened around the Russian collusion stuff and I suspect most of the city lib elite that inhabits tech companies wouldn't find that a sanctimonious.
> I recognize they have a right to do it, but I have a right to make noise about it and criticize them.
Nobody suggested otherwise, and your statement that "you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant" is clearly a sidestep. You can support free speech without supporting the nonexistent (and unrelated) right to post lies on Youtube.
Given that the Alien and Sedition Acts took less than 10 years after the passing of the Bill of Rights, and were passed by many of the same people working on the original Constitution, I would dare say that it wasn't all that unanimous.
But, and perhaps more importantly, relatively few people at the time could vote - in 1789 it was about 6% of the population as a whole. On the federal level, there was basically no protection of the right to vote at all - there was that bit about states having to have a "republican form of government", but it wasn't codified, and the broad understanding was that property requirements, poll taxes etc are all compatible with it. So, it was a very different environment overall.
(I'm not disagreeing with your basic premise - I support, it actually. But US is not a good historical model for it. I don't think there's any country that really is, or ever was. Those of us who believe that democracy is dead without radical free speech, have to figure out how to make it all work in a way that is, at least, tolerable to those who disagree with us.)
It's a common way to dismiss Founding stuff, but I'm a fan of the Frederick Douglass view that the Constitution is a "glorious liberty document."
So what if the writers didn't always practice it? If it's been unequally applied - there's no stronger case than to hold people to account with the law of the land.
It's just a made up concept though. It would be physically impossible for YouTube to ban anything if it was a real thing.
That there's a conversation about YouTube censoring people says that it is perfectly possible for free speech to not exist. It's not a physical law of the universe
>Sort of like how radical Athenian-style direct democracy doesn't work, maybe radically giving everyone near-unchecked access to nationwide broadcasting doesn't work, either.
The difference is that direct democracy doesn't scale. Switzerland has a population of 8 million; the US has a population of 330 million. Also, I'm willing to bet that Switzerland is more homogeneous than the US. And size wise, Switzerland is only larger than 9 US states.
What I'm saying is that the US is huge. And diverse. It's a scaling issue.
Calling Switzerland homogeneous because everyone there is white is as racist as saying that China and Japan are the same because they are all yellow.
The US is less diverse than Switzerland and using the current system when it was half the population of Switzerland. The only reason why we do not have direct democracy is because it's a lot harder to rob a country blind when everyone is involved in the decisions.
> The difference is that direct democracy doesn't scale.
I hear that every time Switzerland is mentioned. I've yet to see a strong argument to suggest why it wouldn't scale in this day and age.
What I think doesn't scale is centralized systems like France, where all money flows to Paris and rarely any back. Switzerland on the other hand is extremely federated, to the point each canton, often smaller than average cities, have their own school system. Most tax money stays on the local level and didn't go to Bern. This independence IMHO is the critical factor for scaling that would work for moch larger countries.
As to the homogeneity: US has one language any natively born American speaks. Switzerland has 3, with a considerable political divide between the French and German spanking areas. Finally Switzerland has 20% Foreigners vs 10% in US. So again I would very much challenge you there.
Yeah, the last time the US states had that level of autonomy was 1860 [1]. After 1865, the Federal government consolidated power, and more so after the 1940s [2]. It's just that in the US, most calls for more decentralization (aka "states rights") were considered a "dog whistle" for pro-slavery sentiment (or at the least, pro-racist thoughts). I think it's crazy that the US President has the power that he has (and have felt that way for the past few Presidents) and that Congress have shirked their "checks and balances" [3]---it's just been the most blatant for the last two Presidents.
It's funny you mention the school systems. They aren't centralized in the US. Heck, they aren't even necessarily centralized by the states! In the areas I've attended school, it's been by county. And even the one I graduated high school under was administratively treated as three separate school systems (because even at the county level, it was pretty large). It's one of the few areas left that haven't been completely taken over by the Federal government.
Yes, English is widely spoken in the US, but there are areas where it's a distant second. It may surprise you to learn that the US has no official language. I live in South Florida and it's not rare to encounter areas were on Spanish is spoken. There's an older dialect of German still spoken in parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. And there are areas on the West Coast where Vietnamese, Japanese and Mandarin (I think it's Mandarin is the most widely spoken Chinese language) are spoken.
I am surprised at the 20% (I found figures saying it was as high as %24) in Switzerland, but I would still contend that the US is still diverse. There are cultural differences between New England, the South, Texas, the Midwest, the Southwest and the West Coast that are probably just as deep as the French/German divide in Switzerland.
[1] Just prior the the US Civil war.
[2] Just after the Great Depression and World War II.
[3] And for all my voting life time, Congress has had lower polling numbers than any President, yet we keep electing the same yo-yos to office ("Congresscritter X is an idiot, but X is my idiot!").
It's not a question of whether they are intelligent enough to do so. It is whether or not they can get the information that allows them to do so.
With the vast amount of information on social media, which is where more and more people are getting most of their information nowadays, and the way social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement, and the way human cognitive biases work, the result is you almost never get a balanced view presenting arguments for all sides even if all sides offering information are acting in good faith.
Then add in all those who are not acting in good faith, who have a much easier time generating vast quantities of low quality information than the people arguing in good faith have for generating high quality information, and it is even worse.
There was a recent article in Scientific American that covered research into this. Here was the HN discussion of it [1].
They're not banning all allegations of fraud. They're blocking a specific set of claims that have been shown to be false, for instance that Donald Trump won the 2020 US election.
You need expertise to interpret information and you need the right kind of expertise and even the right combinations of expertise, and even knowing what the right combination of expertise is.
It is a question of intelligence, information, expertise and meta-expertise, all of those things. Privileging any of those components of sense-making is myopia of different sorts depending on what claims people are actually wanting to forward.
For instance if you want to look like a centrist while avoiding calling people dumb you say they're low-information voters, change the news, make them listen to these experts, give person X more control or say, when the news and those experts and that person all have problems of different sorts. Not one-dimensional.
FTFY: If you reject the idea that a majority are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to elect a capable government.
Question: Why is this a threat to democracy, but previous censorship wasn't?
There's always been an expectation of truthfulness in communication: We don't allow people to go around claiming that Pepsi causes AIDS, or cures cancer. You're not allowed to claim you're collecting for a charity, and then keep all the money for yourself. I doubt you'd be terribly okay with me claiming that you're a murderer and asking how much that biases your stance.
(Genuinely trying to understand if there is something that makes this different from any other sort of fraudulent communication - I don't see people defending the other stuff under the guise of "Free Speech", and I'm not clear why this would be different)
If you can prove the lies did damages then you have to pay for the damages. But you still have the right to say it. Having the right to speak doesn't mean there's no consequences to it.
> (Genuinely trying to understand if there is something that makes this different from any other sort of fraudulent communication - I don't see people defending the other stuff under the guise of "Free Speech", and I'm not clear why this would be different)
People are not defending fraudulent communication. They are observing that the same factors that make audiences vulnerable to misinformation affect the censors and the process by which censors determine which information is harmful.
If we had a test for truth or sincerity we could use it to determine which information was false or put forth in bad faith. We don't, so any person who acts as an information gatekeeper could be one of those people who is lying or deceived and they would then be able to corrupt the discourse by censoring the information that exposes their lies or misunderstandings.
Fraud is a very specific (and hard to prove) term of art in US law.
There is no US law that would stop someone from making expressions that are later determined to be fraudulent.
Note, commercial speech (e.g., advertisement) is considered a less protected species of speech and may be subject to prior restraint in limited viewpoint neutral circumstances.
We have a really strong presumption against what's called a prior restraint. It means you generally can't stop someone from publishing something, but you can sue them after.
This does two things. First, it makes it so that if someone feels strongly enough that they're right to be willing to risk the penalty, the public still gets the information. This is important. It's a check on the courts getting it wrong.
And the second is that in order to punish someone for speech, you have to prove it in court in a public adversarial proceeding where the person being punished has an opportunity to defend themselves and the claim is aired as part of the court record in a context where everybody knows that it's in dispute but the media and any interested party still gets to find out what it is.
This is obviously not what happens when you implement a general prohibition against all claims of election fraud with no meaningful opportunity for anyone to view the material being censored or make their case that it shouldn't be prior to its removal.
If you're a doctor and you claim this then those are grounds for having your license stripped and being held criminally liable if people actually take you up for advice.
For one thing, rules for thee and not for me is simply terrible, and the left argued that there was fraud last time.
But more importantly, I don't even think your charity example works. Like you can be charged with fraud if you just put the money into your bank account, but if you collect for a charity and charge a 75% collecting and handling fee? Are you then collecting to a charity?
In this case it is more that somebody claims you are not collecting for the charity, you show the bank statements that conclusively prove (according to yourself) that you were collecting to a charity. Then somebody starts looking into it and claims they have evidence that you play golf with the bank teller. And that their manager is your college buddy.
And now you try to suppress the (alleged) photos.
To be clear, I don't think there was widespread fraud or voter suppression in favor of Biden. But the key difference is that normally there are disinterested parties (in particular courts) that can rule on the evidence, in politics there are by definition no disinterested parties in the US. And because of the superpower status of the US, it is even worse outside it.
Further, even if the citizen ostensibly advocates the wrong belief, or say are persuaded by an adversary, that belief becomes the legitimate value of the population regardless of the reason—-as democracy is purposed to obligate government to pursue the values of its citizens.
I’ve been to a country with a dictatorship with a faux democracy and no free speech. I asked the minister of journalism & communications whether he believes that free speech is possible in a democracy. He unabashedly said no, as there is no guarantee the “consensus” will be “correct”, especially given the influence of its adversaries.
It's not highly restricted. It's a bit more restricted than in the USA and there are plenty of brits that think that's dumb, meaningless and just creates drama whilst simultaneously distracting the police from solving actual crimes.
So you are attempting to make the point that the UK is not an equivalent democracy?
The house of lords can not create bills nor stop them. They can look over the elected parliament's shoulders and whine, that's it. It is a vestigial leaving of the monarchy system that, like the Monarchs themselves, the UK keeps because it's cute.
While in the US, un-elected corporations do very much the same thing, except when they whine, they get their way.
I'm sure it does but in the UK, there is no Citizens United, where the Supreme Corporate Court of America (LLC) decided $$$ = speech, more $$$ = more speech, thus infinite $$$ to political campaigns = ALL GOOD HOMIES (This isn't even satire, this is actually their logic here).
Let's get real, it isn't the fact that corps lobby goverments that is the problem, there problem is when they can give unlimited cash bribes, like that can in the US. But they can not in the UK.
When you really start examining it, the US democrazy(sic) doesn't seem all that exceptional.
"Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked."
Yes, really, because an important part of the democratic process is that the opposition can express their ideas, criticism and disagreement without fearing fines or prison.
Yes, in the UK, this verbal playing field is narrower than in the US, but still fairly wide. Corbynistas could advocate for nationalization and open borders without being jumped on by uniformed thugs.
Look to places like Russia and Turkey to see a severely constricted field, with the opposition risking their freedom by doubting the Dear Leader.
This kind of dogmatic statement is good for soliciting a response, but I think it's intellectual degradation.
There are infinitely many interpretations of "democracy" and "free speech" and it's hardly a simple yes/no question. We should be free/democratic society as much as possible, and it's an ongoing (while not always successful) effort. We should discuss concrete steps.
On the contrary, I think this goes to the root of the matter. Can you trust people or not? That's a fundamental question that decides whether you can have real democracy, or only a sham. Because any kind of democracy where people are only allowed to make "safe" choices, decided on by someone else (e.g. the censors), is a sham. And that's true even if the censors themselves are directly or indirectly democratically appointed. Iran is a good example of such system taken to its logical conclusion.
I'm sorry but trust isn't a binary value. I trust people in my life to be reliable and trustworthy to a certain extent and in certain areas. I don't trust my party-animal buddies to be on time for breakfast a 8 AM, and I don't trust my stressed out workaholic friend to just chill on a Friday afternoon.
You cannot simplify trust to a single variable; you have to go case by case. And trust in the masses is partial; finding where it is and where it is not is critical.
How would you manifest that partial trust when it comes to political power, though? The problem with that power is that splitting it up is a zero-sum game - you can give less to "the masses", but then somebody else is getting more. Who would that be, and why would you trust them?
But at the end of the day either you give everyone a vote or you don't.
A system where the most trusted people had 10 votes and least trusted people had 0.1 vote might make sense in a society of nerds voting on a software project, but not in general political application.
After all even “democracy” is nuanced here in the states. Obvious examples from our past include the wholesale disenfranchisement of women until 100 years ago, Jim Crow era laws, poll taxes, and more. Did we have democracy then? Do we have democracy now?
Did we have free speech when broadcasters in the USA had to abide by the Fairness Doctrine? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Our system has it’s faults. But one can’t say that we ever had unfettered democracy or free speech, ever.
At what point is speech considered abuse? If you make the analogy between speech and network traffic, we intentionally censor “abusive” traffic to save our networks from collapse. Could one make the argument that entities with an interest in destabilizing our democracy should not be able to inject propaganda into our discourse because “free speech”? I think it’s a valid argument to have and a nuance that we have to contend with.
There are no absolutes. Trivializing this with a snappy trope of “democracy can’t survive without free speech” is disingenuous IMO.
What a stupid argument. "Child pornography and obscenity are banned, therefore democracy does not rely on free speech, therefore we don't need free speech at all." Obviously "free speech" comes with the colloquially-understood fact that it doesn't include child pornography.
You're new so you might wonder why you're downvoted. Hackernews has some guidelines, and while they're far from being perfect they do help to maintain above average online conversation. Please have a read (it's pretty short!): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Key point related to your comment:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Firstly, the op like myself would have been against all those disasters of democracy as well.
Secondly, you're using things we deemed reprehensible enough to stop doing, outlaw, or repeal as an excuse to now do something in kind.
Op seems to have learned from those mistakes, why are you trying to use them to justify making new ones?
> Why is it that we have to ignore nuances in these arguments?
I very much agree. Why can't you understand that just because we've never had perfectly free speech, that maybe it's still worth fighting for most of the time. And that a few counter examples do not therefore equate to free speech being something unworthy of protecting.
> Could one make the argument that entities with an interest in destabilizing our democracy should not be able to inject propaganda into our discourse because “free speech”?
One could also argue that censoring one side of politics deepens divisions and drives people to polical extremes. I would rephrase "democracy can’t survive without free speech" as "democracy can’t survive without free political speech"
I wouldn't call Singapore a democracy. It's an authoritarian one-party state that happens to hold elections. These elections are always won by the same party.
The democracy index rates Singapore at 6.02/10. About 0.03 away from being a "hybrid regime" and currently rated a "flawed democracy." It's ranked as worse than places such as Ukraine (currently in a civil war), Thailand (run by a military dictatorship), etc.
Having been stuck in the lockdown they imposed earlier this year, which was widely unpopular with the city's residents and which lead to the biggest support for the opposition in the country's history, I would not at all call Singapore a democracy.
Interesting that Singapore also is the 4th least corrupt country per the Corruption Perceptions Index - one of the biggest discrepancies with the Democracy Index.
Making analogies requires that the two ideas come from the same class of ideas. In what way is traffic and speech in the same class?
The reason this becomes an absolute is, unlike with traffic, the decision about which speech is abusive is objective and itself easy to abuse. When there's no way to talk about the abuse (a situation the abuser would create) then it will continue until the abuser's ability to censor speech is removed. In the real world this ability is often removed as the result of some serious violence and so most people don't like to create conditions that could lead to such a situation.
People sometimes say that speech in a democracy is a nicer alternative to violence.
An individual's understanding of the world is shaped exclusively by the signals produced by their 5 senses. Intelligence governs an individual's ability to interpret those signals and draw further conclusions from those interpreted signals, but if that individual is fed a constant stream of bad yet internally-consistent data, correct application of logic and reason will lead that individual to objectively incorrect conclusions. Further, human beings aren't perfectly rational machines capable of processing the utterly overwhelming amount of signals we are exposed to at any given instant, rather we develop blinders to focus in on specific signals and we develop heuristics to reach decisions without processing all possible signals. I haven't read every whitepaper put out by every politician I've ever supported, nor has 99.9999+% of others, but we still support politicians because of our heuristics and blinders. I prefer forming my opinions from whitepapers, source documents, and a rigorous analysis of a candidate's behavior, but ultimately a heuristic I rely on is the opinion of other people or institutions that I trust, like the New York Times, the Economist, Ezra Klien, Matt Yglesias, Raj Chetty, etc.
I've decided that I don't like believing incorrect things, so I've thought a lot about epistemology and embraced a mixture of pragmatism and empiricism (where possible). I try to independently verify suspicious claims, but it took me a long time to become a competent data scientist, I'm willing to spend far more time searching for good data/signals and analyzing them than most other people, and I still can't be informed on everything which necessitates reliance on sub-optimal heuristics. Most people don't even attempt the rigor I aspire to, preferring a tribal epistemology, where they outsource opinion-forming to the thought-leaders of their tribe. If those tribal thought-leaders are telling people things like
* "Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring out of the basement of this pizza restaurant" or
* "COVID-19 is a librul hoax so don't wear a mask or embrace any hard-won public health advice" or
* "Joe Biden's landslide victory isn't real, and even though we can't prove it, despite the fact that electoral systems are designed so that malfeasance would be easily detectable, you should ignore reject the result of a DEMOCRATIC ELECTION, EVEN IN STATES WHERE THE OUTCOME WAS CONFIRMED BY A HAND RECOUNT"
you'll see behavior from individuals in that tribe that's consistent with the signals those individuals perceive, but the behavior won't produce the expected outcome, because the signals don't reflect reality. Instead, it will produce mayhem, death, destruction, pain, and loss. This is empirically undeniable.
TL,DR:
Democracy depends on the votes of people. People form opinions only from the information that passes through their senses and into their mind. Garbage in, garbage out. It's possible to solve problems through rational analysis of sufficiently accurate models of reality, but models that don't reflect reality can be extremely, devastatingly destructive. If the signal "Donald Trump actually won the election and it is being stolen from him" was an accurate description of reality, it would rational to use violence to repel the usurpers trying to steal your country. But that signal is false, and spreading that signal both is eroding belief in democracy among the communities where enough members embrace that false signal, and it will in lead to unjustified murders.
What exactly does a hand recount confirm? What is the point, when the accusation had nothing to do with counting? The accusation is that fraudulent ballots were mixed in with the legitimate ones. Recounting the contaminated pile tells us exactly what?
Each state has its own laws regarding elections and recounts, but in all the states I've looked at, voters have to sign either a document at their precinct if they're voting in person, or on an envelope for their ballot if they're voting by mail. If there are more votes in a precinct than there are in that precinct's voter registration database, or if they have a mismatch of signed envelopes or sheets and ballots, or the hash on the envelope doesn't correspond to the ballot, or votes from people not registered to that precinct, or multiple signed sheets/envelopes for a single registered voter, all of this makes the "they just dumped in more ballots in" theory more unbelievable, as the amount of coordination and access needed to successfully execute that theoretical tampering without leaving plenty of evidence becomes realistically impossible.
It's fine to investigate a hypothesis if you're willing to accept the hypothesis is false. But if you continue asserting your hypothesis is true after many competent investigators, including investigators ideologically aligned with yourself and your desired outcome, investigate the system and find no evidence to support said hypothesis, instead finding evidence that repudiates your hypothesis, well, it's bad for democracy to continue pushing that hypothesis.
Witness affidavits suggest some counties in some states did not follow their own laws.
Now, unfortunately, there is no legal remedy because in most cases the irregular ballots cannot be separate from the regular ballots once they are pooled together.
A lot of election laws define the rules, but few define the remedy if they are broken.
There have been a lot of signed witness affidavits, but nearly all of them have been thrown out in court as not credible, and 0 of them have lead to victories in court.
What does "Govern themselves" practically mean in this context?
Lets say that I'm an intelligent person that firmly believes in "rugged individualism" to the point where I'm an anarcho-georgist [1] and do not recognize the state as an authority for real property allocation based on a well reasoned moral philosophy.
Given the fact that there is no unclaimed territory for which I could live without falling under the purview of a state's thumb, and hence would not be allowed to "govern myself", how would I then govern myself consistent with my political philosophy?
This is obviously a hyperbolic example, but it's IMO an important exercise to explicate how a large group of people with heterogeneous values, is supposed to act/behave when a prime mover state system is (in effect) demanding no values be higher than it.
Well, we do reject this idea. That's why we have a republic rather than a direct democracy.
The same allegory of the cave justifications for why the average individual is too stupid to rule and shouldn't be allowed to are made today. Oh, you aren't well enough educated or experienced enough? You should not govern, and move aside for those who are educated or experienced...
We have a republic, because that's how it was organized more than two centuries ago, and changing it from within the system is extremely difficult. But many states have elements of direct democracy in form of public initiatives, and they generally tend to be the states that were settled and organized later (e.g. West Coast), and did so with benefit of hindsight, after seeing many decades of how the original system works.
So I'm not sure if it's even meaningful to say that we do reject the idea. The original designers did (mostly; they weren't a hivemind, either), but we aren't them; and they weren't really representative of their entire society, either.
If you think people are so smart, why should you care if people get banned from Youtube?
Clearly smart people will discover smart videos on any web site they are located on, and there's no reason for anyone to need Youtube to find an audience.
How would one determine whether information is false or not? It's easier to publish disinformation than it is to disprove it, and while some people are clearly better at sifting truth from fiction than others, I suspect everyone has beliefs that are based upon false information.
Moreover, this isn't censorship by the government, but by Google. Why should a private company be made to disseminate disinformation when it doesn't want to? A key part of freedom of speech is the freedom not to speak, and mandating that a company publish information it doesn't want to is surely just as bad as forcing it to censor information it does want to publish.
The possibilities of targeting messaging via fb, youtube, twitter ad budgets go far beyond the freedom of speech the authors of the constitution had in mind, no?
The ability to address a snug fit tailored messaging to specific audiences is a completely new level of "talking". It subverts the traditional democratic communication, where all participants realistically had a comparable and diverse data/information set. In contrast, given sufficient targeting advertisement budget, you can very deliberately dissimimate messages which shift the electorates decisions just enough that you get the political climate and outcome you want.
That's no longer the free speech of the constitution. That's mass manipulation. Brain hacking it was called elsewhere in the discussion.
What can yt, twitter, fb do?
Banning certain content feels bad, but how can they nudge us with the tweets, videos and posts that challenge us a little, like the old news stand always carried the paper we normally wouldn't read. Until we did, once in a while. And of course the paper was not 95% letters to the editor, unredacted.
How can the fb, google ai help us to structure the flood of information in a more nuanced way? Instead of a plump ban?
This country's government is based on the idea that people aren't intelligent (or interested) enough to think about politics for themselves. That's what a representative democracy is.
That's not why it's a representative democracy. The reason is that direct democracy was not logistically possible at the time, and also for support if states' rights.
By that logic its not contradictory to be intolerant of people intolerant of intolerance. Or is it only valid logic with an even number of intolerances?
This logic doesn't work in the abstract, you got to apply it to a concrete situation. Each situation is different, they are not all the same to be judged in one swoop.
Each situation is morally relative and ineffective at resolving conflict, instead only deepening the divide. You cannot fight hate with hate and achieve love. We all must be more tolerant of people and their fallibility in order to reach common ground and discover that we are all much more alike than we are different. Don't love the sinner, hate the sin. MLK nailed it when he said that the means are the seeds from which the ends grow. You cannot hope to bear fruit when starting from a rotten seed. It's so easy to retaliate but true power is the confidence to de-escalate.
Each situation is morally relative and animosity is ineffective at resolving conflict, instead only deepening the divide. You cannot fight hate with hate and achieve love. We all must be more tolerant of people and their fallibility in order to reach common ground and discover that we are all much more alike than we are different. Love the sinner, hate the sin, but teach and forgive. MLK nailed it when he said that the means are the seeds from which the ends grow. You cannot hope to bear fruit when starting from a rotten seed. It's so easy to retaliate but true power is the confidence to de-escalate.
Democracy is also intrinsically linked to freedom of association.
YouTube has chosen to deny associating itself with certain views, as is their right. It is no different than how Fox, CNN and others may choose what to broadcast.
Don't like that? Use BitChute or PeerTube or similar.
> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
-- Erich Fromm
He said that 1958, in an interview with Mike Wallace. Since then the gap between rich and poor (and between rich and mega-rich) kept exploding, media have been consolidated further, people have been uprooted even more, have been shit on and lied to even more, and have even less stakes in the outcome. Just doing more of the same will never lead to different results, yet by now many use current the state of things to argue for exactly that.
There's no such thing as free speech. Speech is bought through marketing. The wealthier and more get more of it. This is inherently undemocratic, as constituents don't have equal political influence.
Dogmatic arguments suck. Is Android/Apple better?
We don't live in a democratic utopia. Instead, belief in democracy and associated values has provided maximal value creation and competitiveness generated by knowledge economies when compared to other current operating models.
That half the country is willing to dismantle what's responsible for their quality of life would be funny, if it wasn't the joy of dictators everywhere. They can point to the absurdity of mob rule as half of us bite the hand that feeds. Clearly, something is already broken.
>If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves.
Elegantly put. It seems you've triggered an avalanche of replies looking to stick asterisks or [#] footnotes and caveats to this statement to suit their biases of the day.
Bang some caveats in there and you put universal suffrage as a concept in question.
If you believe in science, then you believe that experts and authorities can be wrong, and likely are wrong about some things. You believe that it is important to question those beliefs. What youtube is doing is against science.
If you believe in liberty, then you know that more than one thing can be right at the same time. That there is more than one way to do things. What youtube is doing is against liberty.
Sometimes I wonder if flat earthers are fake news themselves.
You can stand on the shore of a body of water larger than 3 miles and watch boats sail over the horizon. No need for tools, geometry, or privilege, you can stand there and see it.
And even if they are real, their numbers are small even with the amount of propaganda they create.
If you believe in science, you also believe that things can be proven wrong, and that repeating wrong things can influence people especially if you have the power to amplify your voice with money.
If you believe in liberty, you believe in the liberty of a set of an individuals (a company) to do what they damn well please with their platform.
But how can one know what is wrong and right without examining all information first? Liars and True Believers will get you every time, unless you are provided the opportunity to discover truth for yourself.
YouTube is now determining what content should be present on their platform using editorial criteria, which makes them a de facto publisher.
>If you believe in liberty, you believe in the liberty of a set of an individuals (a company) to do what they damn well please with their platform.
Not absolutely. Murder is technically an expression of liberty, but to kill is to remove the person's faculties to express liberty and therefore a wrong usage.
Science does not talk about right or wrong. It talks about things that are falsifiable.
If there is an idea that so far has not been falsified, it becomes the established scientific fact.
However, someone else may come up with a better idea. Do we prevent them from talking about it or collaborating with people? It may take some time and lots of communication and collaboration to get to the bottom of it. Years or even decades. Do we ban them from youtube in the interrim?
Youtube can do what they please, but what they are doing is against liberty, against science, and it is un-american.
The parent post took some linguistic shortcuts, but I'll mention for completeness (and in case you're genuinely confused) that "the existence of God" is not a concept the scientific method can or should be applied to, because it is not possible to falsify that claim. A better phrasing of the sentence would be "If there is a falsifiable idea that so far has not been falsified, it may be considered established scientific fact." Scientific progress occurs not just by discovering new tenets, but by disproving incorrect ones, and nobody's come up with an objective test for the presence or absence of the Divine.
Emotions flare because faith is a deeply personal issue, but from a lab protocol standpoint it's not a testable hypothesis, and thus not really worth arguing about.
Are the things people uploading false?
Then what's the problem.
Are these people trying to collaborate to solve the problem or are you using people who might be doing that as cover for a giant set of disinformation campaigns that are actively killing people right now?
If Youtube wants it to be "their platform" and not part of the public commons, then they need to remove everything that isn't a YouTube Original. No UGC.
If you believe in science you are likely a neo-religious fundamentalist. Science doesn't need to be believed. The process puts forward propositions. You either think the scientific method has purpose and helps us understand our reality or not.
Then what? Allowing false information to fester is wrong, censorship is wrong. The way forward is to ban recommendation algorithms and go back to personal (as in, from other humans you know) recommendation systems.
I'm inclined to agree, but that is not the direction things seem to be headed. Dorsey called for increasingly personalized algorithms before congress a few weeks ago, while Zuckerberg basically implied FB would continue to acquiesce to congressional requests for censorship.
The algorithm here really is the perpetrator. The insane things I've had recommended to me by Youtube after watching rather boring philosophy videos or a bit of history is amazing. One of their recommendations was literally full on nutter ranting at a camera - and it came up on a video of a guy who builds and tests medieval longbows!
Sort of a paradox personally. I think the algorithm has gotten better, not perfect, about recommending me less batshit insane videos. And I appreciate it.
But things like the Hunter censorship absolutely cross a line and are enraging. Banning (even loosely defined) hate speech is not the same thing as being the arbiter of truth.
> Allowing false information to fester is wrong...
That sounds good, but it is not true. If the CEO of YouTube was a committed Hindi the public would demand that he overlook Buddhist/Muslim/Christian/Atheist content on his platform. Tolerance of people we truly believe to be wrong is a key value that needs to be preserved.
The sort of people who talk about "false information" in their policies tend to be running more authoritarian style countries - they don't actually know what is true and false, but they do know what they want to hear to promote stasis in leadership.
What about people who earnestly believe that genocide is justifiable? What should YouTube do with that content? Or people advocating Euthanasia of mentally handicapped individual? I'm not saying I know a good line, but there clearly is one.
People want Youtube to be free and open...and remove things that aren't true.
They want Facebook to open its social graph so other social networks can compete...and take privacy seriously so there isn't another Cambridge Analytica.
I definitely see how YT content policy is a fraught subject but it's unbelievably naïve to say it's risking the radicalization of a group of people giving life to a 17-state effort to nullify the popular vote in the artificially packed Supreme Court. I'm willing to err on the side of not placating a faction of society that are already sold on fascism as our best path forward.
So what happens when "false" information "conspiracy theories" turn out to be true? How should it be handled when people in the position to censor information choose to do so in bad faith? (e.g. they lied about it being fake, or they weren't sure it was fake but they chose to censor bc it aligned with their political beliefs) And what if the censorship impacts were time sensitive? (e.g. they negligently censored sensitive election-related information immediately before an election, and then decided to report it as legitimate news shortly after the election - after the censorship goal was accomplished)
"Oops we made a mistake" is not even close to an acceptable response. I say we treat free speech more like civil rights, harsh penalties and all.
From the article: Hunter Biden was announcing that his “tax affairs” were under investigation....That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually everyone in “reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an aristocratic snort....That tale was not Russian disinformation, however, and Biden’s announcement this week strongly suggests Twitter and Facebook suppressed a real story of legitimate public interest just before a presidential election.
“Cutting down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie." Perfect summary of the article.
It seems that there's a strong component to this argument that such moves inflame Trump supporters. The problem with this is that it has been established that a substantial part of Trump supporters will be inflamed no matter whether the subject at hand corresponds to a real issue, or a completely fabricated one.
Thus the people who should be concerned here are the ones who try to take reality into consideration when judging news, in which case the issue here is really no worse than the coverage and editorial lines that most need media currently hold. Looking from that perspective, YouTube's policy allows by far the broadest expression of opinions in an online property without having to go with less mainstream forums.
For Taibbis argument to be taken seriously, he should address the problems that stem from a section of society to be completely dissociated from reality.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -Isaac Asimov
or more to the point
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Colbert
You're not entitled to be heard. That isn't a tenement of Democracy or Liberty. You're entitled to be able to speak (as long as you don't hurt others rights).
So what is un-american thinking that Youtube needs to allow conspiracies and crazy un-proven, and way out there content.
Thank you for making my point. Not sure why I'm replying, as its wholely offtopic
- Nuclear, i think you should read up why people are against it. ( spoiler, it isn't the science... but maybe you should think about who can do it effectively vs the potential risks of doing it wrong... or you know, the imbalance of global power when only a few countries could generate.. well, power )
- GMO, again, same point above. "Sure you can have this great crop, no seeds". Again, GMO per say isn't bad, its the implementation that's bad.
- Gender science. Stop worrying about what other people do with their life, worry about your life my fellow human.
- Nature vs nurture. Sure, an argument that goes back B.C., and now you think this is a conservative vs liberal? Wait, is this Paleo conservatism? lol
Again, not even relating to the argument at hand. There's no "true" side in any of these, as two of them are well, not science. And the other two, will continue to evolve with science. But nice try :)
Oh... and thank you for taking the quote of a comedian ( and my quip, so seriously). Any arguments about the first one?
My point was that liberals have their own biases and can be ignorant. For example, in the nurture vs nature debate, the blank slate has been disproven for years. Everything is heritable, yet the left clings to the idea of all disparities being caused by culture because it fits their ideology. -> You can't fix nature with policy but you can if it's nurture.
Because it increases the amount of pesticides used (or incorporates them directly into the plant where they can't be rinsed off) and pollutes the natural gene pool with artificial genes. The increased amounts of pesticide run off the field and mess up the rest of the ecosystem. Now you're seeing herbicide-resistant weeds come up in these fields.
>and pollutes the natural gene pool with artificial genes
As opposed to the natural gene pool being constantly polluted by spontaneous mutations? Or is that fine because of the naturalistic fallacy?
>The increased amounts of pesticide run off the field and mess up the rest of the ecosystem. Now you're seeing herbicide-resistant weeds come up in these fields.
AFAIK this is a non-issue except to the farmers. Resistance to whatever usually comes at a cost, so in the wild the superweeds will get out-competed by their non-resistant counterparts.
> Does this argument work without the "all pesticides are bad" assumption? I searched up bt gene's use in pesticides[1] and it looks pretty safe.
Its referring to herbicide-resistant GMO crops where the pesticides are Roundup or Liberty. With regard to Bt, there's a big difference between topical application of Bt and GMO Bt corn (where the Bt is produced inside the plant so bugs are poisoned by the plant).
> "all pesticides are bad" assumption
Its more of a heuristic where we assume that things that are bad for biological organisms are bad for biological organisms because molecules don't make decisions about what to react with, they react with anything that forms the right molecular bonds. Since the biosphere has a lot of bimolecular pathways its not possible to categorically test everything and catalog all the possible reactions, we just know we can limit the amount of unwanted reactions by using the minimum amount of pesticide.
> As opposed to the natural gene pool being constantly polluted by spontaneous mutations?
They aren't in opposition because mutations don't stop when you start polluting the gene pool with GMO products.
> Or is that fine because of the naturalistic fallacy?
Its an application of the precautionary principle where we act in such a manner to create the least possibility of harm because the scope and extent of the effects are not known.
> AFAIK this is a non-issue except to the farmers.
Yes its a problem for the farmers because they can no longer rely on the herbicide to control those competitor organisms, which was the entire point of using a selective herbicide / GMO crop system.
With regard to the ecosystem disruption due to pesticide runoff, its an issue for anyone who is dependent on the biosphere because of the harmful effects on biodiversity.
>With regard to Bt, there's a big difference between topical application of Bt and GMO Bt corn (where the Bt is produced inside the plant so bugs are poisoned by the plant).
Why would there be? The wikipedia article I linked mentioned ingestion testing. It's not like they tested bt as a regular spray on pesticide, found it was safe, then approved bt gmo corn without further testing.
>Since the biosphere has a lot of bimolecular pathways its not possible to categorically test everything and catalog all the possible reactions, we just know we can limit the amount of unwanted reactions by using the minimum amount of pesticide. [...] Its an application of the precautionary principle where we act in such a manner to create the least possibility of harm because the scope and extent of the effects are not known.
But the scope and extent of the effects are not known. Glyphosate and bt have both been thoroughly studied. With your "precautionary principle" we'd all be not eating chocolate right now if it was first used as a pesticide (chocolate kills dogs, so if dogs were somehow a pest, it can be used as a pesticide against them).
>They aren't in opposition because mutations don't stop when you start polluting the gene pool with GMO products.
So mutations are intrinsically bad? In other words, if there were some way to stop naturally occurring mutations globally, you'd support it?
>Yes its a problem for the farmers because they can no longer rely on the herbicide to control those competitor organisms, which was the entire point of using a selective herbicide / GMO crop system.
It's a problem, but the alternative (not using any GMO/herbicide) is worst, since the weeds will still be growing out of control. At least if you used GMO/herbicide you have a few decades of weed-free growth.
>With regard to the ecosystem disruption due to pesticide runoff, its an issue for anyone who is dependent on the biosphere because of the harmful effects on biodiversity.
This is totally orthogonal to the discussion of GMOs. If you're worried about pesticide/herbicide run-off from farms, then you'd want to regulate it directly, rather than trying to regulate it by proxy by limiting access to technology that allows for greater pesticide/herbicide use. It's not like the threshold where herbicide levels tolerated by non-gmo crops is the same threshold that ecosystem damage occurs. Not to mention, non-gmo crops can still have their herbicide resistance raised by selective breeding.
If you're concerned about the safety of glyphosate formulations you may be interested to learn that the testing and regulatory process appears to have been captured. [0] [1]
> Why would there be?
Are you asking why there would be a difference between a topical application that could be rinsed off and a substance that is produced by the plant and is inside the plant material itself?
> But the scope and extent of the effects are not known.
Indeed, this is why the precautionary principle is at play here.
> Glyphosate and bt have both been thoroughly studied.
They've been studied enough to suggest that they are potentially hazardous depending on the dose and context.
> With your "precautionary principle" we'd all be not eating chocolate right now if it was first used as a pesticide (chocolate kills dogs, so if dogs were somehow a pest, it can be used as a pesticide against them).
That's not a valid interpretation of the precautionary principle.
> So mutations are intrinsically bad? In other words, if there were some way to stop naturally occurring mutations globally, you'd support it?
I haven't suggested that, of course mutations are not "bad", they just are. I was responding to your placement of GE products in opposition to mutations. No, I wouldn't stop evolution if I could, but that's interesting and I wonder if a population with no mutations would have significantly lower cancer rates. Its an interesting thought experiment.
> It's a problem, but the alternative (not using any GMO/herbicide) is worst, since the weeds will still be growing out of control. At least if you used GMO/herbicide you have a few decades of weed-free growth.
There are other ways to control competitor organisms besides herbicide and there are people who use conventional herbicide that don't use GMOs (and so they don't use as much herbicide). Just so you know, most farmers are not letting weeds grow out of control on their fields :)
> This is totally orthogonal to the discussion of GMOs. If you're worried about pesticide/herbicide run-off from farms, then you'd want to regulate it directly, rather than trying to regulate it by proxy by limiting access to technology that allows for greater pesticide/herbicide use.
Are you suggesting that it would be better to place limits on how much / how often herbicide could be applied to a field? Perhaps so but I'm not convinced that the laws in this case could be finely tuned enough to achieve the effect without creating a rule that was either too strict or too lenient (or perhaps both at once) for a large percentage of farmers. Without a selective herbicide/crop system, farmers have to be careful about when and how much herbicide they apply, lest they kill their own crops. With a selective herbicide/crop system, they can just cover the field in herbicide, resulting in substantially greater application amounts. Your argument that application amounts could be specified by law leaves me unconvinced that the concern with the selective systems is misplaced.
> It's not like the threshold where herbicide levels tolerated by non-gmo crops is the same threshold that ecosystem damage occurs.
Its likely that ecosystem damage is unavoidable with agriculture and so we prefer a minimalist approach, rather than meeting some arbitrary threshold value (which could only be estimated on the basis of imperfect knowledge anyway).
> Not to mention, non-gmo crops can still have their herbicide resistance raised by selective breeding.
I know some farmers who would be very happy if the same level of herbicide resistance exhibited by GMO crops was available in a non-GMO product. I'm sure its possible, pe...
These topics, to be charitable, are heavily debated in biology and sociology, at least to some degree - look up "nature nurture" on Google Scholar and you'll find as much scientific debate, and recently attempts to transcend the debate, as you could read in two lifetimes. I don't think most "liberals" are even opposed to nuclear and GMO.
These types of articles are always insane to me. YouTube is a private company. They're pretty much allowed to moderate the content on their platform in an arbitrary way. I would argue that this is a good thing.
We can't have it both ways, but we want it both ways. We want a non-government controlled way to communicate, but we want to mandate that they're liable to uphold the same First Amendment protections that the government has to provide. That's insane, that's not a good standard to pursue, and we should rather focus on the cost-benefit and pros and cons of either reinstating the Fairness Doctrine or creating a government-run social media website where information can be freely shared and subjected uniformly to First Amendment protections.
Isn't that part of what's critical to have a free market? Sure, there are market inefficiencies when you get to the level that trusts and monopolies exist, don't get me wrong.
Rather than patch the symptoms of the problem, attack the root cause: If companies are acting anticompetitively, stimulate competition in the marketplace. If companies are allowed to make arbitrary decisions (which they should in a free-enough market), seek alternatives, such as government enterprises.
If folks don't like payment processors denying payment or ISPs denying service, seek forming a government enterprise that _can't_ deny service to any citizen.
In a theoretical world, sure. In reality it is government actors that are twisting the arms' of tech companies to remove unapproved speech. So I'm not so sure a government controlled ISP/payment processor/video platform (something like China?) would really fix the situation.
As long as it isn't due to a protected class reason, I don't immediately see the problem. If you break your ISPs TOS, or you commit fraud, it makes sense that those private companies would not want you as a customer.
If this is your argument then you should be against laws that prevent discrimination against a protected class. If the markets are efficient enough to account for free speech issues, i.e. someone can just start another facebook/youtube, the markets should be efficient enough to correct themselves for companies that decide to discriminate against protected classes, i.e. someone can just start another facebook/youtube.
That's not a reasonable analogy. a) Youtube's decision (wise or not) is not arbitrary. b) Neither video creators nor viewers are "customers" of Youtube.
right, in principle there is nothing wrong (imo, at least) with a private company deciding what can/cannot be said on its online properties. we might, as individuals, pressure a company to change it's moderation policy, but we should not seek to outlaw moderation.
of course, this doesn't work so well in practice when all the viable platforms are controlled by a few huge companies that are more or less ideologically aligned. in my view, this is more of an antitrust issue than a freedom of speech issue. moderation on social media would be a non-issue if there were a reasonable range of platforms to choose from. hateful and/or misleading content would also be far less impactful if uploading a single video to the youtube didn't have the potential of reaching an enormous audience.
I don't disagree with this. It is a monopoly problem. However, what this article suggests and a lot of other solutions suggest is patching the symptom and not getting to the root of the problem. We've lost our stomach for stimulating competitive marketplaces and forgotten that a sufficiently competitive market will settle on an optimal outcome. That does mean regulation is required and it does mean that breakups are required. That's treating the root cause and not just the symptom.
So solutions should be focused on lowering the power of Youtube by making it easy to have competition to it but instead it seems to me the opposite is being proposed: with every new regulation that companies like Youtube have to follow, the harder the regulation is to enforce the harder it is for competitors to get into the market (so essentially these regulations are building a moat around YouTube). That doesn't seem to me like the right goal here.
I think there needs to be updated thought leadership on what qualifies as "common carrier" and what doesn't.
Whether gov't or private, if a platform is primarily promoted as an open communication channel then I think that some, if not all, aspects of "common carrier" laws should apply.
Social media platforms would not have the trust and would not have been adopted as quickly if they started off censoring as much as they do now. In that regard, they presented themselves as open and impartial, then shifted once they achieved sufficient critical mass.
YouTube censors content all the time. Pornography and pirated content, being just the most obvious examples. Others that want censored content have only to look to other sites to find that content.
In my opinion, YouTube should (and does) have content standards, and be extremely free in how they determine them. People certainly have a right to publish and consume conspiracy theories, but I don't understand why YouTube has anything close to an obligation to host or promote them.
The only time Taibbi brought up government intervention in the article was to oppose it. Specifically he criticized a new bill that would "require that political ads or content produced by foreign governments be marked by disclaimers, and that companies should remove any such content appearing without disclaimers. It would also expand language in the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requiring that any content intended to influence U.S. citizens politically be reported to the Department of Justice."
Saying something is bad is not the same thing as saying something should be illegal.
Why can't the phone company listen to private conversations? What does being paid have to do with their enforcement of their own property rights? Couldn't they just say in the EULA "we will listen to your calls and disconnect you if you say something we don't like"?
There are laws against eavesdropping on private electronic communications.
> What does being paid have to do with their enforcement of their own property rights?
Because paying for a service establishes certain rights and expectations that patronizing a free/ad-supported website does not. In other words, payment creates a contract.
> Couldn't they just say in the EULA "we will listen to your calls and disconnect you if you say something we don't like"?
I suppose in theory, though it would be difficult to show that all parties to the call agreed to such a EULA.
> There are laws against eavesdropping on private electronic communications.
Likewise, people are discussing reform of the laws that govern the behavior of giant media properties. Surely you agree those laws (against eavesdropping) were passed for a reason and are not arbitrary?
> Because paying for a service establishes certain rights and expectations that patronizing a free/ad-supported website does not. In other words, payment creates a contract.
People are not basing their criticisms on the violation of a contract but on the public good of the free exchange of information.
> I suppose in theory, though it would be difficult to show that all parties to the call agreed to such a EULA.
"By continuing to stay on the line, you agree to the end user license agreement available in full online or by mail upon request."
> Surely you agree those laws (against eavesdropping) were passed for a reason and are not arbitrary?
I'm puzzled by the question. My position on wiretapping laws is beside the point.
> People are not basing their criticisms on the violation of a contract but on the public good of the free exchange of information.
Again, this is puzzling because it doesn't seem related to the topic at hand. You asked a direct question (why is paying different?) and I gave a direct answer (because contracts).
> "By continuing to stay on the line, you agree to the end user license agreement available in full online or by mail upon request."
Doesn't cover minors, who can't consent to binding contracts, and I doubt it would be popular with customers anyway. Can you imagine having that play every time you make or receive a phone call?
> I'm puzzled by the question. My position on wiretapping laws is beside the point.
No, it isn't. Spartan-S63 seem to be advocating [0] YouTube can moderate their platform however they like. souprock suggests [1] that same logic allows the phone company to disconnect anyone who criticizes the phone company. You say [2] that doesn't apply because that would require breaking the law. I'm observing that the law you refer to places limits on the phone company, which is what people are suggesting with respect to YouTube. Section 230 reforms might limit the ability of YouTube to do what they want with their platform, just like the laws governing telecom utilities were written in order to balance the interests of the public and the consumer against the interest of the telecom company to do what they want with their property.
> Again, this is puzzling because it doesn't seem related to the topic at hand. You asked a direct question (why is paying different?) and I gave a direct answer (because contracts).
I'm asking why you think paying or not is relevant to the issue of section 230 reform. People aren't advocating for the reform of section 230 because their contracts were violated. They're advocating for the reform of section 230 because they believe its harmful for companies like YouTube and Facebook to exert this much influence over the discourse without any liability. Payment or lack of a contract is immaterial.
> Doesn't cover minors, who can't consent to binding contracts, and I doubt it would be popular with customers anyway. Can you imagine having that play every time you make or receive a phone call?
Yet GDPR exists and there are popup windows on many webpages because of the legality of the tracking measures employed by advertising companies.
Can you call something a private company when they are the defacto monopolistic standard? What other video social media sites are there that eve remotely come close to competing?
When that happens, you're either basically a utility for the public, or a monopoly and need to be broken up. This whole concept that these "first amendment protects companies even though they control the market" reasonings are just absurd. It's exactly like defending the railroads for not wanting to ship black people because they don't have rails for "colored folk" and since they're a "private company" they can do what they want.
Why is it insane to criticize the decisions of a corporation? Activists of all stripes regularly criticize corporate behavior that is completely legal and within their rights as a private company. Is there some substantial difference between arguing a corporation should go out of its way to accommodate the spirit of environmental conservation, and going out of its way to accommodate the spirit of open discussion? You shouldn't presume such criticism is lobbying for a change to the law (the original article does not).
This reflexive “YouTube can ban whatever they want” is just a way for people to stop thinking about the issue to avoid cognitive dissonance. Aside from a few hard-headed libertarians, no one who says that believes it in any other context aside from censoring conservatives.
> These types of articles are always insane to me. YouTube is a private company. They're pretty much allowed to moderate the content on their platform in an arbitrary way.
Now post “YouTube is a private company and I support their right to ban BLM”
Even more insane is the idea that YouTube are "blocking content" and therefore treading on people's "freedom" to publish whatever they want.
Until platforms like YouTube even existed the only way to get anything seen or heard by people was to go through a big TV or radio network, who of course filtered what they would or would not air. Just because you filmed a video about a crackpot theory DOES NOT give you the right to air it to millions, and never in our history has a person been able to do so.
If you want to stand in Times Square holding a sign about your theory, you're free to do so. If you want to buy your own TV channel and air it, you're free to do so. If you DEMAND some TV network run it, you're gunna have a bad time.
>These types of articles are always insane to me. YouTube is a private company. They're pretty much allowed to moderate the content on their platform in an arbitrary way. I would argue that this is a good thing.
They are allowed to, but they should be criticized for being hostile to the concept of free speech. Especially since nobody believes YouTube endorses what is posted on Youtube videos.
Separately, their monopoly should be broken up. We can't let a company dictate all political discourse in the country.
There is a difference between "allowed to" and "ought to". It's a question of ethics, not law.
In my opinion it feels immoral for someone who has this much control over human interaction to act in a way that undermines free discourse so blatantly. To see an American company ignore the value of free speech is disheartening to me. YouTube is so popular and I wish they took a different stance on these issues.
Sounds like something a censorship advocate would say (or someone who dislikes the actual things being censored as of the current climate). Will you still believe the same way when the pendulum swings and it's the left that is being censored?
So far it has not. The courts have shot down the the lawsuits on procedural grounds without looking at the evidence. Several states have held hearings were a lot of these allegations are discussed in detail. The hour long hearings are on youtube.
Generally speaking the affidavits that have been presented to the judges have been casually dismissed as wild conspiracy theories and never really been taken seriously. Vast majority of affidavits are not addressed at all in their findings.
E.g. the PA lawsuits, I wouldn't really classify it as dismissing it on procedural grounds.
It was moreso that the case was dismissed on overwhelmingly partisan bias grounds.
I am happy to reference posts where I go into greater detail on the facts of these judgements on which my opinion is based, if anyone is legitimately interested.
Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines?
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"?
>Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits
>The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results.
>The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome.
>The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots.
>Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud.
>Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
>In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
>The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures cer...
I did see it but it was also flagged so I couldn't reply.
The thing about those affidavits, multiple people said the same thing about different polling places which makes it more believable in my eyes than if it was just one person for each allegation.
I do think there was fraud, I'm sure there is even some amount of fraud every election. The real question should be, was the fraud widespread and did it make a difference? I don't know but the fact that people can't even debate this is concerning to me.
Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines?
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"?
>Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits
>The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results.
>The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome.
>The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots.
>Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud.
>Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
>In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
>The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures cer...
Here's one example. It clearly wasn't decided on procedural grounds.
==========
Judge Matthew W. Brann dismissed the case with prejudice on November 21, citing "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations," noting that "[i]n the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state ... [o]ur people, laws and institutions demand more". He likened the Trump team argument to "Frankenstein's Monster", and characterized the requested remedy to disqualify nearly seven million votes as "unhinged from the underlying right being asserted."
Maybe procedural grounds was the wrong word but this is a good example of what I meant.
"I don't want to see the evidence that may disqualify votes because it will disqualify other votes." is basically the logic. It seems weird to me but I'm not a lawyer so I could be wrong and this is perfectly normal ruling from a judge.
Meh, I'm not impressed. Of the dozen or so sources I looked at, half them are links to articles on right-leaning news sites or tweets parroting speech from Trump lawyers, with no links to primary documents. This isn't evidence.
One source was a video of election workers moving boxes around, with a conspiratorial narrative overlaid. This isn't evidence.
Several tweets showing "voting spikes" in favor of Biden as a result of regular counting operations. Nothing wrong here.
The remaining sources discuss "irregularities of expectation", yet none provide any plausible narrative of wrongdoing. The most plausible explanation is that it Democrat-favored voting methods were more streamlined, reliable, and less contested this year compared to years previous. Obviously this nets more votes for Democrats, but nothing practical is stopping a Republican from voting by mail, either. Also, I wouldn't be shocked if the 2020 election was actually more fair than in previous years, due to a large decrease in wrongfully-rejected ballots. I wouldn't be surprised if more Democratic votes were thrown away wrongfully in 2016 than fraudulent Democratic votes were accepted in 2020. If you're concerned about the legitimacy and fairness of U.S. elections, you can't talk about voter fraud while ignoring historical voter disenfranchisement. If someone thinks that mail-in voting was too easy this year, then their gripe is with the judicial systems that permitted this year's election rules.
Conclusion: The linked website doesn't seem to have very high standards of verification, as most items are obviously flimsy or easily debunkable.
Youtube is a private company and can therefore do what it wants with its property - the Youtube platform.
However, it may be a bad decision to act as a Ministry of Truth while a number of court cases are still ongoing.
Especially since the evidence presented in court proves electoral fraud - even if it is not entirely clear whether it is relevant enough to impact the outcome of the election.
Did you read the article? There is nothing in the article in support of government oversight of private companies. Rather, the article argues that private companies should choose to do the right thing, and that consumers should take their business to companies who choose to do the right thing.
It is wrong. It IS un-american. And no, it will not "radicalize" us. Radicalize? To what? Being free speech? Being pro-debate? Allowing discussion so people are free to choose for themselves? And youtube is not just allowing for content. They aren't a "content allowing" platform. They are creating it, curating it, producing it, etc...
No, the ftc needs to regulate them (and all social media, frankly) as a public utility, and then GUARANTEE constitutional rights.
The only way to combat "bad" speech is with MORE speech.
You don't "win the argument" by censoring it. If you're censoring content, you're a freaking bolshevik, and have no place in a democratic-based constitutional republic. Pure and simple.
I really don't agree that this is "the latest salvo in the fight against 'domestic anti-democracy information'". Youtube's generally had a very permissive stance on information they don't think is accurate; they're taking this one, targeted action against a uniquely dangerous threat.
When did hackers go from celebrating the freedom of information on the internet to acting as apologists for authoritarian censorship by near-monopolistic corporations? When they all started working for them?
You have a right to say whatever you want to whomever you want without fear of government retaliation, as long as it isn't "hate speech" in a fairly narrow legal sense. This is what "having free speech in society" has always meant.
The government will also punish people who commit crimes against you merely because they dislike your words, which frees you to say things you might otherwise keep to yourself.
What you don't have a right to do is amplify your message using the massively powerful social-media megaphones which are created and owned by tech companies. If you want to amplify a message that these companies find strongly objectionable, you'll have to build your own megaphone, or find one owned by someone with different views from Google/Facebook/Twitter.
That said, I wonder if it's sufficient to reduce the amount of amplification rather than outright censoring things the company disagrees with. For example, YouTube could let conspiracy videos be hosted but leave it up to viewers to discover them rather than recommending them in search or "related videos". It seems likely that censoring will have unintended consequences.
It used to be that the tech companies where champions of free speech, the ideal. It changed when generation woke entered their workforce. There has been a generational change brought on by changed values in American universities. That's what really is happening.
> We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK.
Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.
Thats an interesting definition of capitalism that excludes the part where the capital was accumulated. Probably that's why the libertarians say "free market capitalism" in order to exclude the mixed market and autocratic versions.
What a retconning farce this is. 40 years ago you could not publicly endorse recreational drug use, atheism, or interracial marriages without a substancial block of society chastating you as an incorrectable heathen.
Values change, what people find acceptable and what they do not find acceptable changes.
I'm not 100% sure either. I think maybe GP is suggesting that rather than being stalwart champions of free speech as you implied, boomers are just more racist and want to be free to say racist things.
Fortunately for all of us, it's not the general population of millenials or boomers who decide what speech the government gets to prevent; it's experienced justices, who tend to take the constitution much more seriously than the average person.
The statistic that 40% of millenials want laws preventing statements offensive to minorities is kind of baffling to me. Do you think they just don't understand the constitution, or do they want it rewritten to allow this kind of law?
>What a retconning farce this is. 40 years ago you could not publicly endorse recreational drug use, atheism, or interracial marriages without a substancial block of society chastating you as an incorrectable heathen.
Imagine if the value that changed was that we treated people with different opinions with respect instead of changing the opinions that get you run out on a rail.
> "What you don't have a right to do is amplify your message using the massively powerful social-media megaphones which are created and owned by tech companies."
What makes anyone think that other groups won't be able to create their own social-media megaphones? The tech is well understood already and they're highly motivated and well funded. It's been tried a couple of times already and eventually they're going to succeed. And if the last two US presidential election results are any indication, they might grow as big (or bigger!) as any of the other social-media giants. What will we do then?
> You have a right to say whatever you want to whomever you want without fear of government retaliation, as long as it isn't "hate speech" in a fairly narrow legal sense. This is what "having free speech in society" has always meant
Wrong twice.
First of all, the United States doesn't have laws against hate speech. The US Supreme Court has said hate speech is protected by the first amendment. So, you're protected from government retaliation, even if it's hate speech.
Second of all, that's NOT what "having free speech in society" means. It's what the first amendment means. In American culture, writing op eds to a privately owned newspaper is a classic example of free speech, going all the way to revolutionary times (and actually predating the constitution). In the past (before the internet), prominent newspapers would brag that they would publish editorials from any significant public figure, even if they detested that public figure, because free speech was a good thing. That's why the NYTimes has published so many editorials from dictators.
The article you are commenting on did not propose any new laws, nor did I in my comment. Did you mean to reply to somebody else or to comment on another article?
I don't think the government should require tech companies like Google to support free speech. I think Google should support free speech because it's the right thing to do. I believe the author of this article feels similarly, just as the editors of major American newspapers did from about 1600 to 2005.
> the United States doesn't have laws against hate speech
Interesting, thanks for enlightening me! Canada does have laws against hate speech and I'd mistakenly thought the US did as well. In any case, speech intended to incite lawbreaking, whether a hate crime or otherwise, is not protected under the first amendment. If you tell your Twitter followers to go burn down all the Jewish-owned business or whatever, and they do, your speech is illegal. So there are at least some limits.
And I agree that freedom of speech goes beyond the first amendment. But the "significant public figure" of that is important: not anyone could get published in the New York Times, you already had to have reach and notoriety. They wouldn't have published articles by some random basement crackpot moon conspiracist, because that person wouldn't have a chance to get famous in the first place. They probably also don't publish opinion pieces with easily-disproven counterfactual statements. YouTube's algorithm, by default, makes no distinction: any idiot can go viral and get tons of reach on a video loaded with outright lies. YouTube has provided a platform that makes the spread of misinformation much easier and in my opinion it's their responsibility to take action to correct that.
> In any case, speech intended to incite lawbreaking,
The standard is "imminent lawless action." You can in fact advocate lawbreaking, including violent lawbreaking (e.g. people advocating punching all Nazis are protected).
Only if they did so or were likely to do so right away.
I think the standard could change, considering that when that standard was set, such advocacy couldn't be effectively spread without a trail of publishers and broadcasters that would be vulnerable to direct retaliatory violence.
What happens when all megaphones are either government- or large-corporation-owned, and whenever you try to speak on your own, the nearest megaphone just yells over whatever you have to say?
It's a very good argument to support 1950's style anti-monopoly legislation, and as someone who defends platforms' rights to have some degree of moderation it follows that we should have as many platforms as needed to satisfy demand.
Absolutely. I don't think that private censorship per se is problematic - the problem, rather, is that it amounts to monopoly abuse in the present configuration of the market.
(Although I'd prefer an economic system that makes monopolies fundamentally impossible or very unlikely - i.e. one that constrains the ability to concentrate capital.)
Was that ever not the case? Was there a time when any person with any message could reach the whole country with their message?
The scarce resource here isn't freedom of speech, it's people's attention. As always, you can say whatever you want, and as always, it's hard to get people to listen to you. Before the internet, you basically needed an already-famous person to take an interest in you in order to get noticed. Now a message can go viral organically, without needing to involve any journalists or talk-show hosts, but the platforms are free to stop something from going viral if they don't like it. Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away.
But to answer your question, I think breaking up the platforms would be a better solution than treating them as de-facto public services and trying to regulate them as such. Or appropriate them and make them into actual public services :)
It's a matter of relative power to spread the message, not absolute. So it's not a question of whether any single random person could reach the whole country, but rather how many people can that single random person reach, and how much can those who control the means of mass distribution of information can use that to reduce the reach of a single person.
Google/Facebook/Twitter have become monopolistic de-facto utilities. The you'll have to build your own megaphone argument is no longer valid. Especially when they're attempting to impact election results while cashing in on governmental protections that minimize their risk.
Freedom of speech in the broadest sense (as in "the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction.") isn't binary, and cannot be absolute. There are some forms of expression that we almost universally agree shouldn't be allowed. Incitement to violence, "shouting fire in a crowded theater", depictions of sex with minors, etc are all unprotected from restriction.
In that sense it's like the concept of freedom in general. It's slippery, difficult to define, and has fuzzy boundaries. We're not always going to agree on the extent of each freedom. Where does your freedom end and mine begin?
In this particular case, how big does a company need to be before we start forcing it to host content that it doesn't want to host? When is it ok to force someone to provide a universal platform... to tie their hands so they can't moderate as they see fit?
Do I have a right to stand on your stage and shout whatever I want at your audience?
> It is amazing to me that there are so many people, smart people even, that are adamant that we shouldn't have free speech in society.
This can be attributed to nothing more than personal political bias. There is no way these people would be arguing for censorship if the censorship favored the other side.
It also makes me want to move. There is no advantage to being an American without the freedom of speech and press.
No where on earth. If freedom of speech and press are over here, and it certainly looks like it is over here. Then why not move to China or Singapore? You could have the same level of censorship, but a more effective political system and more opportunity to grow wealth.
I have encountered few people who have said “we shouldn’t have free speech in society”. Perhaps your argument needs more nuance to reflect the complexity of this issue.
I have seen fifteen or so such top- or second-level comments on this and the previous thread. It was about one apologist to every two critics there, and one to four here. It is by no means a rare perception here.
yeah but i wonder... the main argument here is that youtube is private and it can do whatever it wants.
but if it's true for youtube, why it cannot be true for an hosting company or a service provider? can't they just shut down my server or my ip? they are private after all...
is there a legally safe to speak freely on the internet? or our freedom of speech is limited only to photocopies?
>One of the most critical to-do items for the American democracy movement over the next four years will be to more effectively counter domestic anti-democracy disinformation. If possible, it should be done on both the supply and demand sides. We can't ignore this issue any longer.
Hmmm...
I can think of some historical examples where governments used rhetoric oddly reminiscent of that rhetoric spoken by the ex-cia officer that tried to run for president the quote's taken from.
Germany during the 1930's
The Soviet Union during the 1920's...well...most of time existing I guess
“In sum, the majority of Americans are generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the manner required”.
“To the degree to which they are required to do so, they will interpret what is demanded of them in distorting and inadequate ways. As a result they will interact and communicate in ways that undermine the functioning of democratic institutions and the meaning of democratic practices and values.”
Amusingly, the author is clearly one of those who are "generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the manner required". The one-sided blame makes it clear that he can't graciously accept defeat.
You make that sound like a bad thing? There are some that believe (as I do) that democracy will leads to oligarchy. But then again I've been reading a lot of Rothbard recently.
As for populism in a democratic system is a symptom of politicians/political parties not being seen by their citizens to be taking actions in regards to thorny subjects such as immigration, globalisation and law enforcement.
Rothbard ended up as extreme paleocon, and his adherents such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe developed his line of thinking to its logical conclusion:
"In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order."
(Then neo-reactionaries took it from there, ditching all the excuses to present this state of affairs as "libertarian", and correctly calling it the new feudalism.)
These conversations always go like this. It becomes tedious.
1) I don't care what Rothbard became in the end. It is completely irrelevant. Rothbard's critique of the state is an interesting perspective and some of them seem particularly apt when the leviathan of government is eroding people's rights because of COVID.
2) As for the Hoppe quote. The "neo-reactionary" you mention can be counted on one hand. The activist left (which is why that quote is on wikipedia in the first place) will take quotes and call someone alt-right based on one spicy paragraph in a book (which is exactly the trick you've tried here and I am not that naive to fall for it).
I haven't read "Democracy the God that failed" (yet) and I will decide for myself once I've read the book. I very much doubt it is a new feudalism and I very much doubt you've read the book either.
From watching him speaking. Hoppe's construction seems to be that given the choice between King and a Politician, a King would be better. His rationale for this is sound IMO. The most important part of it (for me) is a King will care about his legacy and a politician typically won't.
My own feelings is that I've never thought that democracy is effective or desirable. I've found the act of voting to be completely pointless due to the fact I have nobody to vote for in the UK that represents my interests of decreasing the state.
The only time when voting is effectives is during referendums when it is a single issue. Even then it isn't effective The UK's politicians and press did everything they could to deny the referedum result (and are still doing so btw).
I have heard arguments that the whole idea of democracy itself has been perverted during the enlightenment of those putting a Christian/Individualist perspective on Athenian ideas. But I won't pretend to know the argument well enough to have any opinion either way on it.
I think that life would be better if employers honoured their wage obligations instead of drawing up elaborate networks of hidden fees and transfers which put employees' hard earned wages back into the employer's pocket. Nobody really owns anything, they have everything they think they earned on layaway.
Well, the problem is that there are all these intertwined concepts so that for the most part we have:¹
* We want individuals to be able to express themselves so long as they are not explicitly deceiving people or hurting them
* We believe groups of individuals should have the freedoms individuals do
* We believe that individuals whose sole purpose is to act to provide a service to individuals expressing shouldn't be liable for the expression under some conditions. e.g. if I let you rent my sound equipment, I shouldn't be liable because you use it to call for violence against some dude and likewise for online platforms provided they take some reasonable measures
* We believe that picking and choosing what people can use your platform to express is expression in itself, but sometimes you are obligated to suppress some expression
So YouTube is one of these platforms. They should be allowed to pick and choose what people can use them to express because that's a freedom one person has, and therefore that they have as a group of people who individually have it. So the defence rests on it being expression.
However, the defence for them not being liable for expression on their platform is that they're "just the platform". By choosing not to enforce on other things and choosing to enforce on these things they're not "just the platform" - the expression they permit is their expression.
It's a bit hazy, but it feels to me like you forfeit some of your "just a platform" defence when you exercise your "it's my right to expression" defence. Morally, of course, not legally. IANAL and this isn't a court so who gives a damn about the law on its own.
¹ If you don't hold these beliefs, then you're not in the audience for the comment. Skip safely.
This might seem extreme, but I think we should allow people to make up their own minds about what is truth and what is not. They are very clear cases for censorship (direct threats of violence for example) but Questioning the outcome of an election should not be one of them. Somehow we’ve allowed corporations to be the arbiters of truth in this nation, enter control the reins of communication.
Questioning the outcome of an election is universally agreed to be perfectly acceptable. This is why we have a wide variety of opportunities for public participation and observation.
Filing dozens outlandish lawsuits is certainly a way to demonstrate fealty to the administration, but as we're seeing, it's not particularly productive.
Funding propaganda efforts to exploit people's ignorance in pursuit of undermining public confidence in the electoral process is shitty behavior at best and sedition at worst.
Conflating all of these and describing them all as 'questioning the outcome' is unlikely to change anyone's mind about any of it, but it does serve to highlight a profound lack of understanding about how elections work.
In my youth we had the FCC fairness doctrine to prevent corporate media from descending into polemics, but that rule was removed in the 80's, and then the FCC abdicated oversight of internet content in general, so I'm not sure how any of this is supposed to be fixed at this point.
How would you suggest a company like YT can "allow people to make up their own minds" about an issue if they do not "provide a platform for views" of that issue that they "don't share"?
Unless you are just making the point that YT censorship is more acceptable than government censorship (which I think everyone agrees with), then I'm not sure how you can have your cake and eat it to here.
Right. The actor matters a huge amount. We all agree on that.
But if you run a forum and say you will not allow any view to be expressed therein that you don't agree with, you aren't in fact "allowing people to make up their own minds"---unless by "allowing people" you just mean not actively harming them for expressing views in other places, or something equally wild.
Another way of saying it is that no one would say you are "tolerant" if you only "tolerate" behavior you agree with.
> But if you run a forum and say you will not allow any view to be expressed therein that you don't agree with, you aren't in fact "allowing people to make up their own minds"
I think you're missing their argument. YouTube censoring doesn't prevent information from being published elsewhere.
Yeah, I've definitely grasped their argument, which became clear once they clarified that "allowing people to make up their minds" doesn't mean "allowing content the owners disagree with" but rather "we won't try to criminalize this speech on other platforms." After all, if I were a publisher who refused to publish books with a certain viewpoint, in what other way could I say I (as opposed to the government, say, or the publishing industry as a whole) am "allowing people to make up their minds"?
(Sidenote: I do think YouTube and other corporate-run forums like that would welcome some regulation in the area, for two reasons: (1) they'd no longer be blamed for how they decide difficult content questions, and (2) it might make it more difficult for small startups to disrupt this space by increasing the legal barriers to entry.)
for folks with a strong opinion on this, how do you square your opinion on youtube censorship with your opinion on net neutrality? youtube censorship is okay but isp censorship is bad? i have multiple isps available to me without any change to the quality of my life, but no comparable alternative to youtube.
What does it mean to be a “comparable” alternative to YouTube?
There are dozens of online video platforms[0], plus other places like Patreon and OnlyFans, and decentralised systems like PeerTube. If none of them work for you, you can get a VPS and start hosting videos on your own web site.
The difference between YouTube censorship and ISP censorship is the amount of capital you need to circumvent it. If ISPs start filtering traffic, you need tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars to build hardware infrastructure to run a competing ISP. If YouTube starts filtering videos, you need $5 to rent a server to host those videos instead.
Boy, technologists. We used to see a gap in the market and fill it with superior products. Now we see a gap in the market and complain that the market leader isn’t owning that space any more.
First off, I don't think I will ever be convinced by someone calling something "un-American" or "American." That is almost always lazy thinking that tries to wrap up an emotional sentiment into some kind of conclusion. America and what it is to be American has changed and it will continue to change. We'd better hope that change is guided by reasoning about what is good or bad for this country instead of appeals to what is "American" or not.
Second, I'm rather disappointed by the defenses of free speech we see these days. They are flimsy, lack substance, and at times seem unwilling to actually argue for free speech. Is free speech actually good for anything? Is the only reason we attack attempts by people to encroach on it because it is "American"? I, for one, would like an argument for its value.
This piece is flimsy. The discussion is about youtube getting removing election misinformation. Ok, controversial. I get it.
It brings up Hunter Biden's laptop as a case where
> That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually everyone in “reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an aristocratic snort, a la Christiane Amanpour
with those lovely scare quotes around "reputable". I'm not sure what to say here. Is it better for the media to run around screaming after every single lead? Even the ones that look flimsy to them? Is it better for the US media to be so willing to report and investigate on anything and everything these days when the media making a hubub about anything is enough to have an effect?
Taibbi proceeds to ask us to indulge in a hypothetical, one where
> what would have happened if Facebook and Google had banned 9/11 Truth on the advice of intelligence officials in the Bush years
and the natural result of this is that
> it will start to make sense that Trump voters in Guy Fawkes masks are now roaming the continent like buffalo.
I'm sorry but this is incredibly lazy thinking. I'm going to stop quoting the piece because I'm tired and I have things to say. Things have changed. We've had Trump in office and he was most assuredly different than other presidents -- in good ways and bad. We've had the rise of the internet, of smartphones, of digital technology, and social media. Information flows freely. Nowadays we don't risk not having access to information, we risk being drowned in it. The "echos" in our echo chambers aren't some soft faint whispers we can't see beyond, they are roaring deluges that drown out everything else.
I'm sorry for the longer post, but the truth is that I hate these kinds of articles. They seem to just gawk at the problems we face today and do little to inform or provide perspective or argue. Taibbi in this case seems to think it's enough to post a tweet or some headlines; the reader will draw the right conclusions for themselves. It's obvious after all. Isn't it? But then that's exactly the problem we face, where everything is obvious but somehow the other guy's come to a different conclusion and but it's all wrong!
Offer some damn arguments. Try to convince people. If free speech is worth fighting for it isn't because it's some kind of "American" ideal, it's because its a good thing, a worthwhile ideal to practice, a civic habit that improves our democracy and secures it for the future. People deal with information differently these days; that landscape has most assuredly changed. Is it any surprise that free speech will need to fought for again?
This is a solved problem : don't BAN, but FLAG conspiracy theories and dangerous memes with a notice citing links to facts.
I've enjoyed the somewhat balanced weekly covid discussions of youtuber Dr Chris Martenson / PeakProsperity. He generally backs up his opinions with links to science studies and data, but has been censored by youtube for mentioning controversially that "HCQ has some efficacy as a prophylactic before exposure to Covid". ( He has also covered topics such as less severe Covid outcome for those taking Vitamin-D, for which there now seems to be a lot of evidence... yet why are we not seeing governments recommend and supply it more widely ? )
Are we still able to rationally discuss on youtube topics such as : Did SARS-CoV2/Covid originate elsewhere than at the seafood market in Wuhan [ there are a handful of data with earlier cases in distant locales ] ?
Are we allowed to make videos discussing the cause of collapse of WTC building 7 on 911 ? Engineering Professor Leroy Hulseys structural study at Fairbanks University argues that the canonical explanation of fire damage leading to failure of a weak point followed by cascading collapse is 'unlikely'.
Will we be able to share videos that say fracking for oil produces so much extra methane as to render the proponents criminally liable for the acceleration of global warming ?
Will we be able to discuss on youtube.com whether google.com should pay more tax than they currently do ? What body decides this ?
The very same people complaining about this also complained when platforms did exactly what you suggested. Even attempting to "fact check" is considered censorship.
This is very, very, very far from a solved problem. It is not at all clear that flagging posts does anything to limit the spread of false information. Even when we know that the information we are reading is false, we can still end up believing it, especially if we are distracted or under time pressure [1]. Yesterday, the Lawfare podcast did an interview with a researcher studying misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information which I suggest people check out if they want to learn more about the issue [2].
> "Even when we know that the information we are reading is false, we can still end up believing it"
I'm not saying human perception is the 'solved problem' - if I know something is false, then can I also believe it ? I actually think the human mind is capable of believing both proposition "X is true" and its logical negation "X is not true". eg "birds are dinosaurs" is both true and not true, inmnsho.
I want people to believe things that are true, but this would require much wider access to higher quality science education, as well as access to good information, protected freedom of speech ...
My feeling is the Twitter model - where outrageous untruths are tagged with a notice - is a good start, and much better than the path of outright censorship that youtube seems to be choosing. I'd like to see a kind of wikipedia crowd-sourced model to fact-check social media - flag a post/comment with "controversial" / "established dogma" / "noncontroversial" / "conspiracy theory" : ] - similar to how we have pseudo-public reviews of books on Amazon and goodreads. Perhaps this can be gamed, but we still have wikipedia and much of it _is_ accurate, so there is hope.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 383 ms ] threadDemocracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.
I will add, targeting a specific genre of videos looks bad, sure. It's only that we are talking about that genre and not all the others of topics YouTube has removed.
My idiot brother got twice as radicalized when they kicked Alex Jones's crazy ass off YouTube.
It made people feel better and more morally superior, especially employees. It hurt my brother. Now when he watches that asshole, he's on a website where he is guaranteed to never get the other side.
If you support this, then you don't know anything about how humans react to censorship.
I was a very big proponent of wearing mask in the beginning of the pandemic back when the WHO and Dr Fauci had advised against it not because it was true but to manipulate the public for the purpose of preventing a rush on n95 masks.
If I had stated in a video the truth which was that the public was being manipulated to protect the masks, I would have been contradicting WHO and the video could have been banned. That's a problem.
People need to realize that ANY website where a user submits content for is not classified as free speech. A tweet isn’t free speech. A post on Reddit isn’t free speech. These are “articles and or content provided by the public for enhancements to our platform” or whatever EULA legalese they use.
Yeah, like I said, banning a bunch of videos from one genre right now looks bad and people have a right to be upset over it. It’s still YouTube’s legal right to choose which content they want to showcase on their platform.
They hold all the power here. Content creators are at their mercy as far as compensation, views, inclusion in the recommendation engine, etc. then cry foul when the company moves in another direction. Down-leg economics. Specialized businesses based on a supply of value from another business. It’s not a sustainable model for anyone on the 3rd rung.
Is this self evident? Specifically google, or all and any private platforms? It's not obvious to me that every private entity should hold the ideal of free speech -- particularly a version of free speech that means something different than protection from persecution by the state.
They have their own free speech rights, as well as free association and the rights of free enterprise.
Ideally, discrimination should not exist in something that is promoted as a public forum.
If YouTube only wanted to serve a certain type of genre or they had the same censorship policies from the beginning then that is one thing. But they promoted themselves as open and free speech and then once they achieved critical mass they changed their mind to push their own agenda.
That is dishonest and an abuse of public trust.
As a contrasting example, censoring porn, while still not free speech, would be fine for YouTube to continue to do since they had this stance from the beginning and people chose to join the platform knowing this.
Was this before or after Google? Because Google's interest in the platform is definitely maximizing revenue and competing with first party streaming services.
I would like to uphold that ideal by putting a political bumper sticker on your car. Can you give me your address so I can send it to you?
If you don't have a car, I can send you a sign to put in your window or a t-shirt with a slogan for you to wear.
I appreciate your cooperation in upholding this important ideal.
Alternatively this could be your next great side hustle: live ad and t-shirt marketing in the gig economy.
But this is also about the practice of ideals. I watched a Chris Martinson video (PhD neurotoxicology, runs something of a prepping channel on YouTube because he doesn't see how the current US approach will resolve comfortably for people who trust the government) on Vimeo the other day because they'd yanked it from YouTube (it discussed the coronavirus). If it has reached the point where YouTube won't let a medical PhD talk about medical research, what use is this platform to me? Music videos, I suppose.
The reason free speech is ideal happens to be because it is better - YouTube is less fit for purpose as an information distributor, it doesn't represent a full spectrum of opinions. I already know what the official government message is - they have a website. I read it on occasion.
https://www.amazon.com/Durvet-Ivermectin-Paste-Equine-Deworm...
There is no evidence that dweezeban2 works against COVID. Just like there is no evidence of election fraud. Protests are mostly peaceful.
I have so had it with media and big tech.
Advertisers are attacked relentlessly if they advertise on non-liberal media. Been at ad-tech companies and seen this happen in person.
Even 20 years ago this was common pattern for talk radio.
They're certainly possible for alternatives to, say, reddit. These sites already exist. Are you referring to the high costs of serving video?
Forums are one thing.
Hosting huge amounts of videos, adding in all the security to keep DOS from taking out the system is a lot of money.
Oh and since most sites do this all for free, you can’t really change anything either.
Rush used to talk all the time about the nasty calls his clients got.
It was routine for them to get flooded with hate calls.
While I’m sure Textualist/Originalists on the court will find innovations to legislate FB “yelling freedom” rights it has not been a historical norm.
Some services are so large and entrenched that they have become natural monopolies that need to be regulated. We place restrictions on what natural monopolies can do because of the effects on society as a whole.
The question that needs to be debated is if YouTube has reached the status of a natural monopoly or not. I think it probably has, but I am open to evidence on the other side.
Why not use the more natural example? “What if a television network decided the same thing? We will watch your publicly broadcast television show and if you say something we don’t like we will cancel your show.” It’s a lot closer to what’s actually happening in this case, right? And it doesn’t needlessly mix in the hot-button topic of privacy violations.
The parallel is phone companies in the past did listen in to people’s conversation, but this was recognised as an abuse of a monopoly power. Regulations were introduced to stop this sort of activity.
What we should be discussing is how to regulate natural monopolies like YouTube, not if they should be able to just do whatever they like. Like all regulation there will need to be a balance, but society has a vested interest in ensuring natural monopolies are not abusing their power.
Even if YouTube is not abusing its power, the fact it can is a concern.
Fine, then they are publishers in that case, not a neutral platform. Section 230 should be immediately repealed.
For Example, Holocaust denial is shitty and something that anyone should be allowed to ban just because they don't want to be associated with it. The problem is that you have to draw the line somewhere between "The Jews faked the Holocaust and none of it ever happened" and " The exact number of deaths in the Holocaust will never been known but it was in the millions". The first statement is clearly false, the second statement could be an attempt to downplay the magnitude of the event, but it is hard to say without context and you may never know the intent of the person who said it.
So? There is a certain revulsion that a lot of engineers have for situational decision making, but that's how we've been doing the law for centuries. Virtually every line that matters is hard to draw. Yet we don't paralyze ourselves by refusing to act.
People are not intimate with the details of most government bureaucracies, they are not expected to be, and they're no expected to grasp such details in a way that they can make informed decisions.
And frankly that is absolutely correct. We believe in democracy to be the best system despite its flaws, and one of its flaws is that it's evident that most people have no freaking clue about how government works.
If you believe in speech for the purpose of government then you have to reject outright lies design with the intent of deligitimizing democracy.
Democracy requires trusting people to not be complete morons. Unfortunately, the polarized nature of political discourse in the US has caused people to think that the 50% of the country that doesn't think like them is too stupid to be trusted with speech and videos.
Despite the fact that my brother has been sucked into the world of Alex Jones, I don't think most Americans are too stupid to resist dumb conspiracy theories. In decades past, this brother was a radical leftist, regularly arrested for trespassing in the late 80's at nuclear power plant protests, and later a radical in Greenpeace in the early 90's. This was long before the internet. He didn't believe the moon landing was real, and always believed in dumb ass conspiracy theories. (He's 11 years older than me, and by the time I was 11, I knew he was a moron.) My other 4 siblings aren't like him.
His new shift was, honestly, not that weird. He happened to shift to the right, but it's a horseshoe as you know, and crazy is crazy.
There have been, and always will be, highly illogical people looking to indulge their desperate desire to have symmetrical, orderly views of the universe that aren't real. The big, disastrous outcomes must always have been carefully plotted, large, grand plans (like 9/11 being a false flag operation, which my brother also believed then). My brother is one of these people, but most people aren't like that.
This huge drive for censorship didn't occur when a large portion of the American left thought that 9/11 was an inside job, because the normal people on the left knew that it was a large, but still fringe, group within their own sphere. The problem is that the same normal people on the left don't know normal people on the right. Why? Because they don't know ANY people on the right. They are in bubbles now. So they are unable to draw the same conclusion that people like my brother are a fringe on the right. To them, voting for Donald Trump is evidence of a massively delusional person, rather than the grim reality that the vast majority of Trump's voters don't like him, and simply chose a lesser of two evils in their worldview, due to a corrupt, oligarchical class at the top of both major political parties resulting in highly polarized policy positions that force them to do this.
> This huge drive for censorship didn't occur when a large portion of the American left thought that 9/11 was an inside job, because the normal people on the left knew that it was a large, but still fringe, group within their own sphere. The problem is that the same normal people on the left don't know normal people on the right. Why? Because they don't know ANY people on the right.
I think to at least some degree, this is a difference between 2001 and 2020. Normal people on the left knew people on the right, and now they don't.
I don't have time to listen to million bullshit peddlers with an agenda.
A bullshit peddler named Dr. Atkins was the only guy in the 90's saying that eggs were good for you. The rest of the establishment physicians said eggs were bad for you, guacamole was bad for you, all fat was bad, eat more pasta.
They were all wrong, Atkins was right (when it comes to eggs.) But if Youtube had existed, people like you would have said he was dangerous and demanded he be removed. That's the problem: How do you know the people you think are quacks are actually quacks? What about when the establishment is wrong. The Australian doctor who claimed ulcers were caused by bacteria was silenced, mocked, and ridiculed for decades. He was right, as we know now.
Yann LeCunn was mocked and ridiculed for his neural networks. He was outright rejected from conferences, and papers ignored, despite having groundbreaking results that set new benchmarks, because the established CS folks had decided that neural nets were garbage in the 80's. They were wrong, he was right.
But it's cool, I trust you to make decisions for me on what I can hear.
There is a lot of things we do not know, even on seemingly simple topics such as nutrition.
Just watch the "calorie is a calorie" crowd crashing with "sugar is chronic toxin" crowd. Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola pushes the former view. And in a curated YouTube world, who is going to get removed for spreading misinformation?
Not Coca-Cola, they are too rich for that.
I might be okay with “every informed person should vote”. But that “informed” part can be heavily politically interpreted.
People have largely missed the fact that politics used to be the domain of informed groups fighting for power blocs. Now it’s been “decentralized” and radicalized on Twitter and Reddit and made into glorified reality Tv entertainment by the mass media (who are clearly serving a market with high demand who treat politics like sports teams).
I’d rather have way less people voting and it go back to being mostly boring educated people topic than it’s below common denominator mess it is today.
But I’m unabashedly elitist and understand that there are plenty of well funded groups who want dumb malleable voters and as many as possible.
Yes but the only "free speech" that's realistically able to be implemented is freedom of speech without fear of the government putting you jail for criticizing the government.
The other idealism of free speech implemented by commercial businesses is not possible because we (the collective "we") won't allow it to happen.
There is no broadcasting medium (including websites) in any country that doesn't have interference and pressure to remove/ban content via consumer boycotts, advertiser influence, subscribers, business' self-discretion, or decrees from government officials.
The above list of actors in society is the collective "we" that makes absolute free speech an unattainable goal. There is no business with an infinite bank account that can withstand all outside pressures to censor information. Apple has $200 billion in the bank and yet they bowed to China pressure to remove podcasts that supported Hong Kong.
If a successful/influential giant like Apple can't implement absolute free speech, what's the proposed alternative corporate structure that can do it? Nobody ever lays out a concrete plan that makes free speech possible.
[I don't mind the downvotes but I would really appreciate some replies with constructive comments explaining how commercial businesses can realistically implement free speech.]
Which business with UGC is censorship proof?
Isn't that the issue? Nobody has come up with a way to accomplish that. Does anyone have any constructive ideas on this?
Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.
So democracy and truth are more related to each other than democracy and speech. We tend to think that speech is truth, but it is not, and people over time have voted themselves out into dictatorships over and over.
(edit: typos, many)
Now tear down the pieces of propaganda and burn them. Is this censorship?
I think human brains are sufficiently able to be hacked by the right information. With certain kinds of information, those people could end up causing material harm to someone who is completely uninvolved. That is the ultimate danger that I believe YouTube and the like are trying to avoid, and if true it would be an admittance of a sort that some kinds of information are dangerous to some kinds of people. The name "psychological warfare" implies that communication can be weaponized, in a sense. Certain people do not change their ways regardless of what you try to tell them.
I think the issue is centered not around people trying to have a reasoned debate, but those who have been lost to debate more or less permanently. Previously, you couldn't scatter this kind of information about on the scale were seeing today, and also recommend similar content using very effective algorithms. The more millions of people the content reaches, the more latent believers it will reach and end up converting, even if the conversion rate is a fraction of a percent. And many of these people are very vocal.
In a sense, the content takedown seems like an attempt to counteract the fact that the algorithms are too effective of a medium for misinformation. I don't think we would have seen this kind of scale with books or flyers.
How effective are they? Just because social media keeps promoting people who promote those ideas doesn't mean they're actually widely and strongly held.
If you really care about misinformation, you'd be more worried about Islam which is explicitly sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-science, and supremacist and those beliefs aren't just written in a book somewhere, they're held by most common Muslims. How are we going to eliminate that with censorship when the censors themselves believe it's a good belief? We need smarter people to have the power of censorship so they can distinguish the truly dangerous beliefs from the transient swings of popular culture.
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is exactly what the site is not for, and which destroys what it is for (thoughtful conversation on intellectually curious topics).
We've warned you many times about this in the past. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this going forward, we'd appreciate it.
you and I couldn't. Oligarchs and their governments could and did. The difference is that now their position is threatened by the democratization of information warfare.
What I wanted to focus on is that it is not true that free speech is the solution to all democratic problems, it's not an absolute good. We limit speech already, you can't advocate for the killing of other people, races, etc...
Also, about free speech, if you can say what you want but there are very large entities controlling who gets to hear what you say, then in a way censorship might be already happening. In this case non-arousing messages are being suppressed because they don't make money, so we all feel like everybody is either pro-this or against-this, and they're all really mad and or dangerous.
This is not an easy problem to solve.
Actually, not that I support such behavior but (at least in the US) you can generally advocate for it. People usually don't (thankfully) so I don't have any examples immediately to hand, but my understanding is that the legal test is "imminent lawless action". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)
> free speech is the solution to all democratic problems, it's not an absolute good
Rather than an absolute good, I would argue that it ought to be viewed as an absolute right. I would also argue that, whether used for good or ill, free political speech is a functional necessity of any democracy. (Necessary but not sufficient and all that.)
> in a way censorship might be already happening. In this case non-arousing messages are being suppressed
Agreed, but it's a separate issue and I've no idea what anyone is actually supposed to do about it.
I'm of the opinion that people are not rational most of the time, but operate on habit and reason by use of heuristics. My evidence for this is that rational thought is costly and in psychology they teach this (that people aren't usually rational, merely motivated and economical with their attention).
> Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.
This is a good reason why gatekeeping information is so dangerous.
> So democracy and truth are more related to each other than democracy and speech. We tend to think that speech is truth, but it is not, and people over time have voted themselves out into dictatorships over and over.
Unfortunately there is no test for truth. However if you control people's sources of information you can keep them from figuring out that they have been lied to.
How are we to ensure that the gatekeepers of information are honest and wise?
(I hate this but...)
...and Hitler before them.
I mean, the American founders already rejected a lot of ideas about the people governing themselves, because they knew from history that the people often can't check their worst impulses.
> Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.
Yeah, but what kinds of free speech work and what kinds don't? I used to be a free speech fundamentalist, but now I'm getting more skeptical of that position. Sort of like how radical Athenian-style direct democracy doesn't work, maybe radically giving everyone near-unchecked access to nationwide broadcasting doesn't work, either.
Now, I'm not advocating for some kind of universal censorship apparatus, but maybe it's would be best if broadcast speech at least passed through some kind of editor (and I mean editor, making editorial decisions, not a censor) to build more judgement into the system.
As software engineers, we understand the value of code reviews. That kind of thing shouldn't be anathema.
It’s the first line in our enumerated rights.
This isn’t “oh we should rethink things” this is a matter of natural rights and precedes anything we’ve constructed.
> It’s the first line in our enumerated rights.
> This isn’t “oh we should rethink things” this is a matter of natural rights and precedes anything we’ve constructed.
I never said anyone shouldn't have the right to express themselves. Do you think it's in the Constitution that you have the unalienable right post any lie you want to YouTube? I don't remember that being in there.
IMHO, lies are toxic to free speech, and it's in everyone's interest (and moral obligation) to do their best to limit their spread.
IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant.
You don't need to protect speech everyone finds unobjectionable.
You need to protect speech that is almost universally opposed.
Minorities need protection, majorities don't, and this the basis of the American notion of freedom - insofar as the individual is the smallest minority.
> Do you think it's in the Constitution that you have the unalienable right post any lie you want to YouTube? I don't remember that being in there.
Clearly it isn't and I believe in freedom of association completely too. If a business wants to not serve anyone for any reason, I recognize that - clearly law has developed to qualify this.
This notion of freedom of association has no bearing on my ability to criticize Youtube for doing something I find wrong.
I can simultaneously believe that what Youtube is doing is wrong and they're completely allowed to do it.
I wasn't talking about objectionable opinions or perspectives. I was talking about lies and falsehoods, which are becoming alarmingly widespread. Even now those things don't full First Amendment protections, which is why there can be laws against fraud and defamation, and the Supreme Court has even said "false statements of fact" do not enjoy protection [1].
You've recited many slogans, but it's important to consider what free speech is supposed to achieve, which, IMHO, is to allow progress towards truth. It's also important to keep other considerations in mind, and balance them. If you but too much focus on too small an area, you can easily find yourself becoming a Paperclip Maximizer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Or, a better quote from the syllabus:
> Although the Court has frequently said or implied that false factual statements enjoy little First Amendment protection, see, e.g., Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 340, those statements cannot be read to mean “no protection at all.”
I am extremely confident that I can find examples of speech you wouldn't defend. How do you feel about false advertisement? Sharing of confidential military secrets?
Like, eugenicists in the 1920s would have a whole host of horrid “truths” they thought were scientifically supported at the time. Imagine the hurdles opposition would have in trying to voice their “factual truth.”
General restrictions on state power don't work. Capitalism crushes people. When that state power turns on the majority, the majority complains that their voices are silenced and then they go right back to ignoring the continued problems of the minority.
Perhaps the solution is to approach each situation on a case by case process. Protest and agitate when the state harms people and celebrate when the state protects people. Make harm reduction the goal.
In software people often point to how focusing on metrics can make you fail to achieve your true goal. Similarly, we should focus on the thing that free speech is intending to achieve rather than free speech itself.
I don't believe that the intention of the framers was that free speech was a good in-and-of itself but that making it difficult (but not impossible) to restrict speech has positive outcomes. At the very least, that is my read of things.
Since you aren't willing to defend that speech and fight to make it legal, are you not interested in free speech?
Defending speech I find repugnant is not the same thing as defending a nonexistent right to post lies on Youtube.
Host the lies on your own website. Create flyers and pass them out. Talk to people in public settings. Write to the newspaper (they might not post your lies, but you're free to try to get them). Hold conferences. Do whatever you want. As long as the lies don't violate a few well-established exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
But the right to have your lies hosted for free (and given a valuable, far-reaching audience) on a private platform, no matter the consequences to others or to the platform itself? It doesn't exist.
I recognize they have a right to do it, but I have a right to make noise about it and criticize them.
We got so many pop-ups, accounts suspended, etc. around the Hunter Biden stuff, and what do you know - it turns out there was substance to the story.
This never happened around the Russian collusion stuff and I suspect most of the city lib elite that inhabits tech companies wouldn't find that a sanctimonious.
Nobody suggested otherwise, and your statement that "you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant" is clearly a sidestep. You can support free speech without supporting the nonexistent (and unrelated) right to post lies on Youtube.
But, and perhaps more importantly, relatively few people at the time could vote - in 1789 it was about 6% of the population as a whole. On the federal level, there was basically no protection of the right to vote at all - there was that bit about states having to have a "republican form of government", but it wasn't codified, and the broad understanding was that property requirements, poll taxes etc are all compatible with it. So, it was a very different environment overall.
(I'm not disagreeing with your basic premise - I support, it actually. But US is not a good historical model for it. I don't think there's any country that really is, or ever was. Those of us who believe that democracy is dead without radical free speech, have to figure out how to make it all work in a way that is, at least, tolerable to those who disagree with us.)
So what if the writers didn't always practice it? If it's been unequally applied - there's no stronger case than to hold people to account with the law of the land.
Go is arguing that free speech is required for democracy, and that democracy is why we want free speech.
The founders didn't like democracy all that much though
We don't "want free speech," it exists and a government that represents free people will recognize that.
The founders arrived at a consensus with representative democracy. They realized the dangers of democracy.
That there's a conversation about YouTube censoring people says that it is perfectly possible for free speech to not exist. It's not a physical law of the universe
Yet you can still release bad code. Code review is people looking at your idea/code and judging for themselves. Giving feedback.
Here we're trying to prevent that code from even being seen by others.
Ah yes, because Switzerland is such a hell hole.
What I'm saying is that the US is huge. And diverse. It's a scaling issue.
Calling Switzerland homogeneous because everyone there is white is as racist as saying that China and Japan are the same because they are all yellow.
The US is less diverse than Switzerland and using the current system when it was half the population of Switzerland. The only reason why we do not have direct democracy is because it's a lot harder to rob a country blind when everyone is involved in the decisions.
I hear that every time Switzerland is mentioned. I've yet to see a strong argument to suggest why it wouldn't scale in this day and age.
What I think doesn't scale is centralized systems like France, where all money flows to Paris and rarely any back. Switzerland on the other hand is extremely federated, to the point each canton, often smaller than average cities, have their own school system. Most tax money stays on the local level and didn't go to Bern. This independence IMHO is the critical factor for scaling that would work for moch larger countries.
As to the homogeneity: US has one language any natively born American speaks. Switzerland has 3, with a considerable political divide between the French and German spanking areas. Finally Switzerland has 20% Foreigners vs 10% in US. So again I would very much challenge you there.
It's funny you mention the school systems. They aren't centralized in the US. Heck, they aren't even necessarily centralized by the states! In the areas I've attended school, it's been by county. And even the one I graduated high school under was administratively treated as three separate school systems (because even at the county level, it was pretty large). It's one of the few areas left that haven't been completely taken over by the Federal government.
Yes, English is widely spoken in the US, but there are areas where it's a distant second. It may surprise you to learn that the US has no official language. I live in South Florida and it's not rare to encounter areas were on Spanish is spoken. There's an older dialect of German still spoken in parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. And there are areas on the West Coast where Vietnamese, Japanese and Mandarin (I think it's Mandarin is the most widely spoken Chinese language) are spoken.
I am surprised at the 20% (I found figures saying it was as high as %24) in Switzerland, but I would still contend that the US is still diverse. There are cultural differences between New England, the South, Texas, the Midwest, the Southwest and the West Coast that are probably just as deep as the French/German divide in Switzerland.
[1] Just prior the the US Civil war.
[2] Just after the Great Depression and World War II.
[3] And for all my voting life time, Congress has had lower polling numbers than any President, yet we keep electing the same yo-yos to office ("Congresscritter X is an idiot, but X is my idiot!").
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
With the vast amount of information on social media, which is where more and more people are getting most of their information nowadays, and the way social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement, and the way human cognitive biases work, the result is you almost never get a balanced view presenting arguments for all sides even if all sides offering information are acting in good faith.
Then add in all those who are not acting in good faith, who have a much easier time generating vast quantities of low quality information than the people arguing in good faith have for generating high quality information, and it is even worse.
There was a recent article in Scientific American that covered research into this. Here was the HN discussion of it [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716
By banning allegations of election fraud you could change "almost never" to "never".
It is a question of intelligence, information, expertise and meta-expertise, all of those things. Privileging any of those components of sense-making is myopia of different sorts depending on what claims people are actually wanting to forward.
For instance if you want to look like a centrist while avoiding calling people dumb you say they're low-information voters, change the news, make them listen to these experts, give person X more control or say, when the news and those experts and that person all have problems of different sorts. Not one-dimensional.
[2] https://primer.ai/
There's always been an expectation of truthfulness in communication: We don't allow people to go around claiming that Pepsi causes AIDS, or cures cancer. You're not allowed to claim you're collecting for a charity, and then keep all the money for yourself. I doubt you'd be terribly okay with me claiming that you're a murderer and asking how much that biases your stance.
(Genuinely trying to understand if there is something that makes this different from any other sort of fraudulent communication - I don't see people defending the other stuff under the guise of "Free Speech", and I'm not clear why this would be different)
People are not defending fraudulent communication. They are observing that the same factors that make audiences vulnerable to misinformation affect the censors and the process by which censors determine which information is harmful.
If we had a test for truth or sincerity we could use it to determine which information was false or put forth in bad faith. We don't, so any person who acts as an information gatekeeper could be one of those people who is lying or deceived and they would then be able to corrupt the discourse by censoring the information that exposes their lies or misunderstandings.
There is no US law that would stop someone from making expressions that are later determined to be fraudulent.
Note, commercial speech (e.g., advertisement) is considered a less protected species of speech and may be subject to prior restraint in limited viewpoint neutral circumstances.
This does two things. First, it makes it so that if someone feels strongly enough that they're right to be willing to risk the penalty, the public still gets the information. This is important. It's a check on the courts getting it wrong.
And the second is that in order to punish someone for speech, you have to prove it in court in a public adversarial proceeding where the person being punished has an opportunity to defend themselves and the claim is aired as part of the court record in a context where everybody knows that it's in dispute but the media and any interested party still gets to find out what it is.
This is obviously not what happens when you implement a general prohibition against all claims of election fraud with no meaningful opportunity for anyone to view the material being censored or make their case that it shouldn't be prior to its removal.
I'm pretty certain you're 100% allowed to do this, though Pepsi inc may sue for damages.
But no US law can prevent you from saying it in the first place.
neither does youtube removing videos.
But more importantly, I don't even think your charity example works. Like you can be charged with fraud if you just put the money into your bank account, but if you collect for a charity and charge a 75% collecting and handling fee? Are you then collecting to a charity?
In this case it is more that somebody claims you are not collecting for the charity, you show the bank statements that conclusively prove (according to yourself) that you were collecting to a charity. Then somebody starts looking into it and claims they have evidence that you play golf with the bank teller. And that their manager is your college buddy.
And now you try to suppress the (alleged) photos.
To be clear, I don't think there was widespread fraud or voter suppression in favor of Biden. But the key difference is that normally there are disinterested parties (in particular courts) that can rule on the evidence, in politics there are by definition no disinterested parties in the US. And because of the superpower status of the US, it is even worse outside it.
I’ve been to a country with a dictatorship with a faux democracy and no free speech. I asked the minister of journalism & communications whether he believes that free speech is possible in a democracy. He unabashedly said no, as there is no guarantee the “consensus” will be “correct”, especially given the influence of its adversaries.
Not really. UK has far more limits on speech than the US but is just as much of a Democracy as the US.
"Free" speech has be weaponized in the internet age. It is a cancer that is actively destroying democracy.
Otherwise, you run out of words to describe most other countries.
They have a literal "House of Lords" which is "... by appointment or by heredity or official function."[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords
The house of lords can not create bills nor stop them. They can look over the elected parliament's shoulders and whine, that's it. It is a vestigial leaving of the monarchy system that, like the Monarchs themselves, the UK keeps because it's cute.
While in the US, un-elected corporations do very much the same thing, except when they whine, they get their way.
Thanks god that never happens in Britain.
Let's get real, it isn't the fact that corps lobby goverments that is the problem, there problem is when they can give unlimited cash bribes, like that can in the US. But they can not in the UK.
When you really start examining it, the US democrazy(sic) doesn't seem all that exceptional.
And, frankly, stuff like ASBO makes it hard to take UK as a good example of a free society.
More information with less analysis of it will make less meaningful votes
There was lots of information about Brexit for example but a good portion of it was made up
Yes, really, because an important part of the democratic process is that the opposition can express their ideas, criticism and disagreement without fearing fines or prison.
Yes, in the UK, this verbal playing field is narrower than in the US, but still fairly wide. Corbynistas could advocate for nationalization and open borders without being jumped on by uniformed thugs.
Look to places like Russia and Turkey to see a severely constricted field, with the opposition risking their freedom by doubting the Dear Leader.
I cannot help but wonder if anyone has considered Taibbi is just Trump; cashing in on rage he induces.
No way to comment unless you pay.
Hrmmm
There are infinitely many interpretations of "democracy" and "free speech" and it's hardly a simple yes/no question. We should be free/democratic society as much as possible, and it's an ongoing (while not always successful) effort. We should discuss concrete steps.
You cannot simplify trust to a single variable; you have to go case by case. And trust in the masses is partial; finding where it is and where it is not is critical.
A system where the most trusted people had 10 votes and least trusted people had 0.1 vote might make sense in a society of nerds voting on a software project, but not in general political application.
In addition other democratic states have strict limits on free speech such as Singapore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_14_of_the_Constituti...
After all even “democracy” is nuanced here in the states. Obvious examples from our past include the wholesale disenfranchisement of women until 100 years ago, Jim Crow era laws, poll taxes, and more. Did we have democracy then? Do we have democracy now?
Did we have free speech when broadcasters in the USA had to abide by the Fairness Doctrine? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Our system has it’s faults. But one can’t say that we ever had unfettered democracy or free speech, ever.
At what point is speech considered abuse? If you make the analogy between speech and network traffic, we intentionally censor “abusive” traffic to save our networks from collapse. Could one make the argument that entities with an interest in destabilizing our democracy should not be able to inject propaganda into our discourse because “free speech”? I think it’s a valid argument to have and a nuance that we have to contend with.
There are no absolutes. Trivializing this with a snappy trope of “democracy can’t survive without free speech” is disingenuous IMO.
Key point related to your comment:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
By mentioning child porn, he/she shows that there is actually a line and now we can discuss where it should lie.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Firstly, the op like myself would have been against all those disasters of democracy as well.
Secondly, you're using things we deemed reprehensible enough to stop doing, outlaw, or repeal as an excuse to now do something in kind.
Op seems to have learned from those mistakes, why are you trying to use them to justify making new ones?
> Why is it that we have to ignore nuances in these arguments?
I very much agree. Why can't you understand that just because we've never had perfectly free speech, that maybe it's still worth fighting for most of the time. And that a few counter examples do not therefore equate to free speech being something unworthy of protecting.
One could also argue that censoring one side of politics deepens divisions and drives people to polical extremes. I would rephrase "democracy can’t survive without free speech" as "democracy can’t survive without free political speech"
The democracy index rates Singapore at 6.02/10. About 0.03 away from being a "hybrid regime" and currently rated a "flawed democracy." It's ranked as worse than places such as Ukraine (currently in a civil war), Thailand (run by a military dictatorship), etc.
Having been stuck in the lockdown they imposed earlier this year, which was widely unpopular with the city's residents and which lead to the biggest support for the opposition in the country's history, I would not at all call Singapore a democracy.
Lovely place, but I definitely wouldn't want to live there.
The reason this becomes an absolute is, unlike with traffic, the decision about which speech is abusive is objective and itself easy to abuse. When there's no way to talk about the abuse (a situation the abuser would create) then it will continue until the abuser's ability to censor speech is removed. In the real world this ability is often removed as the result of some serious violence and so most people don't like to create conditions that could lead to such a situation.
People sometimes say that speech in a democracy is a nicer alternative to violence.
I've decided that I don't like believing incorrect things, so I've thought a lot about epistemology and embraced a mixture of pragmatism and empiricism (where possible). I try to independently verify suspicious claims, but it took me a long time to become a competent data scientist, I'm willing to spend far more time searching for good data/signals and analyzing them than most other people, and I still can't be informed on everything which necessitates reliance on sub-optimal heuristics. Most people don't even attempt the rigor I aspire to, preferring a tribal epistemology, where they outsource opinion-forming to the thought-leaders of their tribe. If those tribal thought-leaders are telling people things like
* "Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring out of the basement of this pizza restaurant" or * "COVID-19 is a librul hoax so don't wear a mask or embrace any hard-won public health advice" or * "Joe Biden's landslide victory isn't real, and even though we can't prove it, despite the fact that electoral systems are designed so that malfeasance would be easily detectable, you should ignore reject the result of a DEMOCRATIC ELECTION, EVEN IN STATES WHERE THE OUTCOME WAS CONFIRMED BY A HAND RECOUNT"
you'll see behavior from individuals in that tribe that's consistent with the signals those individuals perceive, but the behavior won't produce the expected outcome, because the signals don't reflect reality. Instead, it will produce mayhem, death, destruction, pain, and loss. This is empirically undeniable.
TL,DR: Democracy depends on the votes of people. People form opinions only from the information that passes through their senses and into their mind. Garbage in, garbage out. It's possible to solve problems through rational analysis of sufficiently accurate models of reality, but models that don't reflect reality can be extremely, devastatingly destructive. If the signal "Donald Trump actually won the election and it is being stolen from him" was an accurate description of reality, it would rational to use violence to repel the usurpers trying to steal your country. But that signal is false, and spreading that signal both is eroding belief in democracy among the communities where enough members embrace that false signal, and it will in lead to unjustified murders.
It's fine to investigate a hypothesis if you're willing to accept the hypothesis is false. But if you continue asserting your hypothesis is true after many competent investigators, including investigators ideologically aligned with yourself and your desired outcome, investigate the system and find no evidence to support said hypothesis, instead finding evidence that repudiates your hypothesis, well, it's bad for democracy to continue pushing that hypothesis.
Witness affidavits suggest some counties in some states did not follow their own laws.
Now, unfortunately, there is no legal remedy because in most cases the irregular ballots cannot be separate from the regular ballots once they are pooled together.
A lot of election laws define the rules, but few define the remedy if they are broken.
What irregular ballots are you talking about?
https://www.democracydocket.com/
Lets say that I'm an intelligent person that firmly believes in "rugged individualism" to the point where I'm an anarcho-georgist [1] and do not recognize the state as an authority for real property allocation based on a well reasoned moral philosophy.
Given the fact that there is no unclaimed territory for which I could live without falling under the purview of a state's thumb, and hence would not be allowed to "govern myself", how would I then govern myself consistent with my political philosophy?
This is obviously a hyperbolic example, but it's IMO an important exercise to explicate how a large group of people with heterogeneous values, is supposed to act/behave when a prime mover state system is (in effect) demanding no values be higher than it.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
The same allegory of the cave justifications for why the average individual is too stupid to rule and shouldn't be allowed to are made today. Oh, you aren't well enough educated or experienced enough? You should not govern, and move aside for those who are educated or experienced...
So I'm not sure if it's even meaningful to say that we do reject the idea. The original designers did (mostly; they weren't a hivemind, either), but we aren't them; and they weren't really representative of their entire society, either.
Any argument advocating censorship is ultimately arguing for dictatorship.
Clearly smart people will discover smart videos on any web site they are located on, and there's no reason for anyone to need Youtube to find an audience.
Moreover, this isn't censorship by the government, but by Google. Why should a private company be made to disseminate disinformation when it doesn't want to? A key part of freedom of speech is the freedom not to speak, and mandating that a company publish information it doesn't want to is surely just as bad as forcing it to censor information it does want to publish.
The ability to address a snug fit tailored messaging to specific audiences is a completely new level of "talking". It subverts the traditional democratic communication, where all participants realistically had a comparable and diverse data/information set. In contrast, given sufficient targeting advertisement budget, you can very deliberately dissimimate messages which shift the electorates decisions just enough that you get the political climate and outcome you want.
That's no longer the free speech of the constitution. That's mass manipulation. Brain hacking it was called elsewhere in the discussion.
What can yt, twitter, fb do?
Banning certain content feels bad, but how can they nudge us with the tweets, videos and posts that challenge us a little, like the old news stand always carried the paper we normally wouldn't read. Until we did, once in a while. And of course the paper was not 95% letters to the editor, unredacted.
How can the fb, google ai help us to structure the flood of information in a more nuanced way? Instead of a plump ban?
Until then, I reluctantly take the ban.
Likewise, no government should allow for parties that would destroy itself - yet here America is, falling apart.
YouTube has chosen to deny associating itself with certain views, as is their right. It is no different than how Fox, CNN and others may choose what to broadcast.
Don't like that? Use BitChute or PeerTube or similar.
Don't confuse them.
-- Erich Fromm
He said that 1958, in an interview with Mike Wallace. Since then the gap between rich and poor (and between rich and mega-rich) kept exploding, media have been consolidated further, people have been uprooted even more, have been shit on and lied to even more, and have even less stakes in the outcome. Just doing more of the same will never lead to different results, yet by now many use current the state of things to argue for exactly that.
Dogmatic arguments suck. Is Android/Apple better?
We don't live in a democratic utopia. Instead, belief in democracy and associated values has provided maximal value creation and competitiveness generated by knowledge economies when compared to other current operating models.
That half the country is willing to dismantle what's responsible for their quality of life would be funny, if it wasn't the joy of dictators everywhere. They can point to the absurdity of mob rule as half of us bite the hand that feeds. Clearly, something is already broken.
Elegantly put. It seems you've triggered an avalanche of replies looking to stick asterisks or [#] footnotes and caveats to this statement to suit their biases of the day.
Bang some caveats in there and you put universal suffrage as a concept in question.
If you believe in science, then you believe that experts and authorities can be wrong, and likely are wrong about some things. You believe that it is important to question those beliefs. What youtube is doing is against science.
If you believe in liberty, then you know that more than one thing can be right at the same time. That there is more than one way to do things. What youtube is doing is against liberty.
There's healthy questioning and there's people with the intellectual honesty of a used car salesman
You can stand on the shore of a body of water larger than 3 miles and watch boats sail over the horizon. No need for tools, geometry, or privilege, you can stand there and see it.
And even if they are real, their numbers are small even with the amount of propaganda they create.
If you believe in liberty, you believe in the liberty of a set of an individuals (a company) to do what they damn well please with their platform.
But how can one know what is wrong and right without examining all information first? Liars and True Believers will get you every time, unless you are provided the opportunity to discover truth for yourself.
YouTube is now determining what content should be present on their platform using editorial criteria, which makes them a de facto publisher.
>If you believe in liberty, you believe in the liberty of a set of an individuals (a company) to do what they damn well please with their platform.
Not absolutely. Murder is technically an expression of liberty, but to kill is to remove the person's faculties to express liberty and therefore a wrong usage.
If there is an idea that so far has not been falsified, it becomes the established scientific fact.
However, someone else may come up with a better idea. Do we prevent them from talking about it or collaborating with people? It may take some time and lots of communication and collaboration to get to the bottom of it. Years or even decades. Do we ban them from youtube in the interrim?
Youtube can do what they please, but what they are doing is against liberty, against science, and it is un-american.
Because it hasn't exactly been falsified as far as I know.
Emotions flare because faith is a deeply personal issue, but from a lab protocol standpoint it's not a testable hypothesis, and thus not really worth arguing about.
Are these people trying to collaborate to solve the problem or are you using people who might be doing that as cover for a giant set of disinformation campaigns that are actively killing people right now?
If Youtube wants it to be "their platform" and not part of the public commons, then they need to remove everything that isn't a YouTube Original. No UGC.
Oh now they are getting confirmed.
I much prefer recommendations from people.
But things like the Hunter censorship absolutely cross a line and are enraging. Banning (even loosely defined) hate speech is not the same thing as being the arbiter of truth.
That sounds good, but it is not true. If the CEO of YouTube was a committed Hindi the public would demand that he overlook Buddhist/Muslim/Christian/Atheist content on his platform. Tolerance of people we truly believe to be wrong is a key value that needs to be preserved.
The sort of people who talk about "false information" in their policies tend to be running more authoritarian style countries - they don't actually know what is true and false, but they do know what they want to hear to promote stasis in leadership.
I mean they have the right to take it down, but if I were running YouTube I wouldn't.
They want Facebook to open its social graph so other social networks can compete...and take privacy seriously so there isn't another Cambridge Analytica.
So what happens when "false" information "conspiracy theories" turn out to be true? How should it be handled when people in the position to censor information choose to do so in bad faith? (e.g. they lied about it being fake, or they weren't sure it was fake but they chose to censor bc it aligned with their political beliefs) And what if the censorship impacts were time sensitive? (e.g. they negligently censored sensitive election-related information immediately before an election, and then decided to report it as legitimate news shortly after the election - after the censorship goal was accomplished)
"Oops we made a mistake" is not even close to an acceptable response. I say we treat free speech more like civil rights, harsh penalties and all.
From the article: Hunter Biden was announcing that his “tax affairs” were under investigation....That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually everyone in “reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an aristocratic snort....That tale was not Russian disinformation, however, and Biden’s announcement this week strongly suggests Twitter and Facebook suppressed a real story of legitimate public interest just before a presidential election.
Thus the people who should be concerned here are the ones who try to take reality into consideration when judging news, in which case the issue here is really no worse than the coverage and editorial lines that most need media currently hold. Looking from that perspective, YouTube's policy allows by far the broadest expression of opinions in an online property without having to go with less mainstream forums.
For Taibbis argument to be taken seriously, he should address the problems that stem from a section of society to be completely dissociated from reality.
or more to the point
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Colbert
You're not entitled to be heard. That isn't a tenement of Democracy or Liberty. You're entitled to be able to speak (as long as you don't hurt others rights).
So what is un-american thinking that Youtube needs to allow conspiracies and crazy un-proven, and way out there content.
Except when it comes to nuclear, GMO, gender science, nature vs nurture, I'm sure there are other things I'm not remembering right now.
- Nuclear, i think you should read up why people are against it. ( spoiler, it isn't the science... but maybe you should think about who can do it effectively vs the potential risks of doing it wrong... or you know, the imbalance of global power when only a few countries could generate.. well, power )
- GMO, again, same point above. "Sure you can have this great crop, no seeds". Again, GMO per say isn't bad, its the implementation that's bad.
- Gender science. Stop worrying about what other people do with their life, worry about your life my fellow human.
- Nature vs nurture. Sure, an argument that goes back B.C., and now you think this is a conservative vs liberal? Wait, is this Paleo conservatism? lol
Again, not even relating to the argument at hand. There's no "true" side in any of these, as two of them are well, not science. And the other two, will continue to evolve with science. But nice try :)
Oh... and thank you for taking the quote of a comedian ( and my quip, so seriously). Any arguments about the first one?
Why specifically is it bad? If you want non-GMO food you can just grow your own.
Does this argument work without the "all pesticides are bad" assumption? I searched up bt gene's use in pesticides[1] and it looks pretty safe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis#Toxicol...
>and pollutes the natural gene pool with artificial genes
As opposed to the natural gene pool being constantly polluted by spontaneous mutations? Or is that fine because of the naturalistic fallacy?
>The increased amounts of pesticide run off the field and mess up the rest of the ecosystem. Now you're seeing herbicide-resistant weeds come up in these fields.
AFAIK this is a non-issue except to the farmers. Resistance to whatever usually comes at a cost, so in the wild the superweeds will get out-competed by their non-resistant counterparts.
Its referring to herbicide-resistant GMO crops where the pesticides are Roundup or Liberty. With regard to Bt, there's a big difference between topical application of Bt and GMO Bt corn (where the Bt is produced inside the plant so bugs are poisoned by the plant).
> "all pesticides are bad" assumption
Its more of a heuristic where we assume that things that are bad for biological organisms are bad for biological organisms because molecules don't make decisions about what to react with, they react with anything that forms the right molecular bonds. Since the biosphere has a lot of bimolecular pathways its not possible to categorically test everything and catalog all the possible reactions, we just know we can limit the amount of unwanted reactions by using the minimum amount of pesticide.
> As opposed to the natural gene pool being constantly polluted by spontaneous mutations?
They aren't in opposition because mutations don't stop when you start polluting the gene pool with GMO products.
> Or is that fine because of the naturalistic fallacy?
Its an application of the precautionary principle where we act in such a manner to create the least possibility of harm because the scope and extent of the effects are not known.
> AFAIK this is a non-issue except to the farmers.
Yes its a problem for the farmers because they can no longer rely on the herbicide to control those competitor organisms, which was the entire point of using a selective herbicide / GMO crop system.
With regard to the ecosystem disruption due to pesticide runoff, its an issue for anyone who is dependent on the biosphere because of the harmful effects on biodiversity.
Roundup (aka glyphosate) seems to be pretty safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Glyphosate_alone
>With regard to Bt, there's a big difference between topical application of Bt and GMO Bt corn (where the Bt is produced inside the plant so bugs are poisoned by the plant).
Why would there be? The wikipedia article I linked mentioned ingestion testing. It's not like they tested bt as a regular spray on pesticide, found it was safe, then approved bt gmo corn without further testing.
>Since the biosphere has a lot of bimolecular pathways its not possible to categorically test everything and catalog all the possible reactions, we just know we can limit the amount of unwanted reactions by using the minimum amount of pesticide. [...] Its an application of the precautionary principle where we act in such a manner to create the least possibility of harm because the scope and extent of the effects are not known.
But the scope and extent of the effects are not known. Glyphosate and bt have both been thoroughly studied. With your "precautionary principle" we'd all be not eating chocolate right now if it was first used as a pesticide (chocolate kills dogs, so if dogs were somehow a pest, it can be used as a pesticide against them).
>They aren't in opposition because mutations don't stop when you start polluting the gene pool with GMO products.
So mutations are intrinsically bad? In other words, if there were some way to stop naturally occurring mutations globally, you'd support it?
>Yes its a problem for the farmers because they can no longer rely on the herbicide to control those competitor organisms, which was the entire point of using a selective herbicide / GMO crop system.
It's a problem, but the alternative (not using any GMO/herbicide) is worst, since the weeds will still be growing out of control. At least if you used GMO/herbicide you have a few decades of weed-free growth.
>With regard to the ecosystem disruption due to pesticide runoff, its an issue for anyone who is dependent on the biosphere because of the harmful effects on biodiversity.
This is totally orthogonal to the discussion of GMOs. If you're worried about pesticide/herbicide run-off from farms, then you'd want to regulate it directly, rather than trying to regulate it by proxy by limiting access to technology that allows for greater pesticide/herbicide use. It's not like the threshold where herbicide levels tolerated by non-gmo crops is the same threshold that ecosystem damage occurs. Not to mention, non-gmo crops can still have their herbicide resistance raised by selective breeding.
If you're concerned about the safety of glyphosate formulations you may be interested to learn that the testing and regulatory process appears to have been captured. [0] [1]
> Why would there be?
Are you asking why there would be a difference between a topical application that could be rinsed off and a substance that is produced by the plant and is inside the plant material itself?
> But the scope and extent of the effects are not known.
Indeed, this is why the precautionary principle is at play here.
> Glyphosate and bt have both been thoroughly studied.
They've been studied enough to suggest that they are potentially hazardous depending on the dose and context.
> With your "precautionary principle" we'd all be not eating chocolate right now if it was first used as a pesticide (chocolate kills dogs, so if dogs were somehow a pest, it can be used as a pesticide against them).
That's not a valid interpretation of the precautionary principle.
> So mutations are intrinsically bad? In other words, if there were some way to stop naturally occurring mutations globally, you'd support it?
I haven't suggested that, of course mutations are not "bad", they just are. I was responding to your placement of GE products in opposition to mutations. No, I wouldn't stop evolution if I could, but that's interesting and I wonder if a population with no mutations would have significantly lower cancer rates. Its an interesting thought experiment.
> It's a problem, but the alternative (not using any GMO/herbicide) is worst, since the weeds will still be growing out of control. At least if you used GMO/herbicide you have a few decades of weed-free growth.
There are other ways to control competitor organisms besides herbicide and there are people who use conventional herbicide that don't use GMOs (and so they don't use as much herbicide). Just so you know, most farmers are not letting weeds grow out of control on their fields :)
> This is totally orthogonal to the discussion of GMOs. If you're worried about pesticide/herbicide run-off from farms, then you'd want to regulate it directly, rather than trying to regulate it by proxy by limiting access to technology that allows for greater pesticide/herbicide use.
Are you suggesting that it would be better to place limits on how much / how often herbicide could be applied to a field? Perhaps so but I'm not convinced that the laws in this case could be finely tuned enough to achieve the effect without creating a rule that was either too strict or too lenient (or perhaps both at once) for a large percentage of farmers. Without a selective herbicide/crop system, farmers have to be careful about when and how much herbicide they apply, lest they kill their own crops. With a selective herbicide/crop system, they can just cover the field in herbicide, resulting in substantially greater application amounts. Your argument that application amounts could be specified by law leaves me unconvinced that the concern with the selective systems is misplaced.
> It's not like the threshold where herbicide levels tolerated by non-gmo crops is the same threshold that ecosystem damage occurs.
Its likely that ecosystem damage is unavoidable with agriculture and so we prefer a minimalist approach, rather than meeting some arbitrary threshold value (which could only be estimated on the basis of imperfect knowledge anyway).
> Not to mention, non-gmo crops can still have their herbicide resistance raised by selective breeding.
I know some farmers who would be very happy if the same level of herbicide resistance exhibited by GMO crops was available in a non-GMO product. I'm sure its possible, pe...
These topics, to be charitable, are heavily debated in biology and sociology, at least to some degree - look up "nature nurture" on Google Scholar and you'll find as much scientific debate, and recently attempts to transcend the debate, as you could read in two lifetimes. I don't think most "liberals" are even opposed to nuclear and GMO.
We can't have it both ways, but we want it both ways. We want a non-government controlled way to communicate, but we want to mandate that they're liable to uphold the same First Amendment protections that the government has to provide. That's insane, that's not a good standard to pursue, and we should rather focus on the cost-benefit and pros and cons of either reinstating the Fairness Doctrine or creating a government-run social media website where information can be freely shared and subjected uniformly to First Amendment protections.
Rather than patch the symptoms of the problem, attack the root cause: If companies are acting anticompetitively, stimulate competition in the marketplace. If companies are allowed to make arbitrary decisions (which they should in a free-enough market), seek alternatives, such as government enterprises.
If folks don't like payment processors denying payment or ISPs denying service, seek forming a government enterprise that _can't_ deny service to any citizen.
Uhh... what? Trump and the Republicans are twisting the arms of tech companies to remove speech favoring... themselves?
of course, this doesn't work so well in practice when all the viable platforms are controlled by a few huge companies that are more or less ideologically aligned. in my view, this is more of an antitrust issue than a freedom of speech issue. moderation on social media would be a non-issue if there were a reasonable range of platforms to choose from. hateful and/or misleading content would also be far less impactful if uploading a single video to the youtube didn't have the potential of reaching an enormous audience.
Whether gov't or private, if a platform is primarily promoted as an open communication channel then I think that some, if not all, aspects of "common carrier" laws should apply.
Social media platforms would not have the trust and would not have been adopted as quickly if they started off censoring as much as they do now. In that regard, they presented themselves as open and impartial, then shifted once they achieved sufficient critical mass.
In my opinion, YouTube should (and does) have content standards, and be extremely free in how they determine them. People certainly have a right to publish and consume conspiracy theories, but I don't understand why YouTube has anything close to an obligation to host or promote them.
Saying something is bad is not the same thing as saying something should be illegal.
> What does being paid have to do with their enforcement of their own property rights?
Because paying for a service establishes certain rights and expectations that patronizing a free/ad-supported website does not. In other words, payment creates a contract.
> Couldn't they just say in the EULA "we will listen to your calls and disconnect you if you say something we don't like"?
I suppose in theory, though it would be difficult to show that all parties to the call agreed to such a EULA.
Likewise, people are discussing reform of the laws that govern the behavior of giant media properties. Surely you agree those laws (against eavesdropping) were passed for a reason and are not arbitrary?
> Because paying for a service establishes certain rights and expectations that patronizing a free/ad-supported website does not. In other words, payment creates a contract.
People are not basing their criticisms on the violation of a contract but on the public good of the free exchange of information.
> I suppose in theory, though it would be difficult to show that all parties to the call agreed to such a EULA.
"By continuing to stay on the line, you agree to the end user license agreement available in full online or by mail upon request."
I'm puzzled by the question. My position on wiretapping laws is beside the point.
> People are not basing their criticisms on the violation of a contract but on the public good of the free exchange of information.
Again, this is puzzling because it doesn't seem related to the topic at hand. You asked a direct question (why is paying different?) and I gave a direct answer (because contracts).
> "By continuing to stay on the line, you agree to the end user license agreement available in full online or by mail upon request."
Doesn't cover minors, who can't consent to binding contracts, and I doubt it would be popular with customers anyway. Can you imagine having that play every time you make or receive a phone call?
No, it isn't. Spartan-S63 seem to be advocating [0] YouTube can moderate their platform however they like. souprock suggests [1] that same logic allows the phone company to disconnect anyone who criticizes the phone company. You say [2] that doesn't apply because that would require breaking the law. I'm observing that the law you refer to places limits on the phone company, which is what people are suggesting with respect to YouTube. Section 230 reforms might limit the ability of YouTube to do what they want with their platform, just like the laws governing telecom utilities were written in order to balance the interests of the public and the consumer against the interest of the telecom company to do what they want with their property.
> Again, this is puzzling because it doesn't seem related to the topic at hand. You asked a direct question (why is paying different?) and I gave a direct answer (because contracts).
I'm asking why you think paying or not is relevant to the issue of section 230 reform. People aren't advocating for the reform of section 230 because their contracts were violated. They're advocating for the reform of section 230 because they believe its harmful for companies like YouTube and Facebook to exert this much influence over the discourse without any liability. Payment or lack of a contract is immaterial.
> Doesn't cover minors, who can't consent to binding contracts, and I doubt it would be popular with customers anyway. Can you imagine having that play every time you make or receive a phone call?
Yet GDPR exists and there are popup windows on many webpages because of the legality of the tracking measures employed by advertising companies.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25391771
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25393539
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25393738
I've only commented on the phone company analogy.
Google, et al, need to be roped into similar laws. They are providing a defacto public square that deserves more regulation -- one way or the other.
When that happens, you're either basically a utility for the public, or a monopoly and need to be broken up. This whole concept that these "first amendment protects companies even though they control the market" reasonings are just absurd. It's exactly like defending the railroads for not wanting to ship black people because they don't have rails for "colored folk" and since they're a "private company" they can do what they want.
Now post “YouTube is a private company and I support their right to ban BLM”
For the record.
Until platforms like YouTube even existed the only way to get anything seen or heard by people was to go through a big TV or radio network, who of course filtered what they would or would not air. Just because you filmed a video about a crackpot theory DOES NOT give you the right to air it to millions, and never in our history has a person been able to do so.
If you want to stand in Times Square holding a sign about your theory, you're free to do so. If you want to buy your own TV channel and air it, you're free to do so. If you DEMAND some TV network run it, you're gunna have a bad time.
They are allowed to, but they should be criticized for being hostile to the concept of free speech. Especially since nobody believes YouTube endorses what is posted on Youtube videos.
Separately, their monopoly should be broken up. We can't let a company dictate all political discourse in the country.
In my opinion it feels immoral for someone who has this much control over human interaction to act in a way that undermines free discourse so blatantly. To see an American company ignore the value of free speech is disheartening to me. YouTube is so popular and I wish they took a different stance on these issues.
YouTube has every right, and a deep responsibility to cut this kind of bullshit off at every turn.
Did you read the terms of posting here?
what were the courts' findings?
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkqFTUEvMoU Wisconsin State Legislature Election Hearing is still live streaming when I post this.
Second edit: Why is my first comment flagged?
E.g. the PA lawsuits, I wouldn't really classify it as dismissing it on procedural grounds.
It was moreso that the case was dismissed on overwhelmingly partisan bias grounds.
I am happy to reference posts where I go into greater detail on the facts of these judgements on which my opinion is based, if anyone is legitimately interested.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu2
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu3
Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/12/08/trump-a...
>Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits
>The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results.
>The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome.
>The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots.
>Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud.
>Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
>In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
>The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures cer...
I also doubt most people on HN have the patience to wait for that site to load. It took like a minute.
And of course it's pro-Trump, but I'm sure that's only a small reason why it was flagged.
(Odd thing, I posted a comment to you earlier and it's not visible except when I am logged in. Hopefully at least you saw it.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu2
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prucomaclu3
Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/12/08/trump-a...
>Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits
>The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results.
>The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome.
>The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots.
>Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud.
>Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
>In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
>The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures cer...
This is basically not a true statement. You can see for yourself here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...
Here's one example. It clearly wasn't decided on procedural grounds.
==========
Judge Matthew W. Brann dismissed the case with prejudice on November 21, citing "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations," noting that "[i]n the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state ... [o]ur people, laws and institutions demand more". He likened the Trump team argument to "Frankenstein's Monster", and characterized the requested remedy to disqualify nearly seven million votes as "unhinged from the underlying right being asserted."
Regardless of the validity* of many of the claims it is certainly relevant to the topic.
* And there are few debunked ones.
One source was a video of election workers moving boxes around, with a conspiratorial narrative overlaid. This isn't evidence.
Several tweets showing "voting spikes" in favor of Biden as a result of regular counting operations. Nothing wrong here.
The remaining sources discuss "irregularities of expectation", yet none provide any plausible narrative of wrongdoing. The most plausible explanation is that it Democrat-favored voting methods were more streamlined, reliable, and less contested this year compared to years previous. Obviously this nets more votes for Democrats, but nothing practical is stopping a Republican from voting by mail, either. Also, I wouldn't be shocked if the 2020 election was actually more fair than in previous years, due to a large decrease in wrongfully-rejected ballots. I wouldn't be surprised if more Democratic votes were thrown away wrongfully in 2016 than fraudulent Democratic votes were accepted in 2020. If you're concerned about the legitimacy and fairness of U.S. elections, you can't talk about voter fraud while ignoring historical voter disenfranchisement. If someone thinks that mail-in voting was too easy this year, then their gripe is with the judicial systems that permitted this year's election rules.
Conclusion: The linked website doesn't seem to have very high standards of verification, as most items are obviously flimsy or easily debunkable.
The only way to combat "bad" speech is with MORE speech.
You don't "win the argument" by censoring it. If you're censoring content, you're a freaking bolshevik, and have no place in a democratic-based constitutional republic. Pure and simple.
The government will also punish people who commit crimes against you merely because they dislike your words, which frees you to say things you might otherwise keep to yourself.
What you don't have a right to do is amplify your message using the massively powerful social-media megaphones which are created and owned by tech companies. If you want to amplify a message that these companies find strongly objectionable, you'll have to build your own megaphone, or find one owned by someone with different views from Google/Facebook/Twitter.
That said, I wonder if it's sufficient to reduce the amount of amplification rather than outright censoring things the company disagrees with. For example, YouTube could let conspiracy videos be hosted but leave it up to viewers to discover them rather than recommending them in search or "related videos". It seems likely that censoring will have unintended consequences.
> We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK. Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
Values change, what people find acceptable and what they do not find acceptable changes.
Fortunately for all of us, it's not the general population of millenials or boomers who decide what speech the government gets to prevent; it's experienced justices, who tend to take the constitution much more seriously than the average person.
The statistic that 40% of millenials want laws preventing statements offensive to minorities is kind of baffling to me. Do you think they just don't understand the constitution, or do they want it rewritten to allow this kind of law?
There is some talk about changing or repealing the first amendement. A good article about how this shift in values happened: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
Imagine if the value that changed was that we treated people with different opinions with respect instead of changing the opinions that get you run out on a rail.
What makes anyone think that other groups won't be able to create their own social-media megaphones? The tech is well understood already and they're highly motivated and well funded. It's been tried a couple of times already and eventually they're going to succeed. And if the last two US presidential election results are any indication, they might grow as big (or bigger!) as any of the other social-media giants. What will we do then?
Wrong twice.
First of all, the United States doesn't have laws against hate speech. The US Supreme Court has said hate speech is protected by the first amendment. So, you're protected from government retaliation, even if it's hate speech.
Second of all, that's NOT what "having free speech in society" means. It's what the first amendment means. In American culture, writing op eds to a privately owned newspaper is a classic example of free speech, going all the way to revolutionary times (and actually predating the constitution). In the past (before the internet), prominent newspapers would brag that they would publish editorials from any significant public figure, even if they detested that public figure, because free speech was a good thing. That's why the NYTimes has published so many editorials from dictators.
I don't think the government should require tech companies like Google to support free speech. I think Google should support free speech because it's the right thing to do. I believe the author of this article feels similarly, just as the editors of major American newspapers did from about 1600 to 2005.
Interesting, thanks for enlightening me! Canada does have laws against hate speech and I'd mistakenly thought the US did as well. In any case, speech intended to incite lawbreaking, whether a hate crime or otherwise, is not protected under the first amendment. If you tell your Twitter followers to go burn down all the Jewish-owned business or whatever, and they do, your speech is illegal. So there are at least some limits.
And I agree that freedom of speech goes beyond the first amendment. But the "significant public figure" of that is important: not anyone could get published in the New York Times, you already had to have reach and notoriety. They wouldn't have published articles by some random basement crackpot moon conspiracist, because that person wouldn't have a chance to get famous in the first place. They probably also don't publish opinion pieces with easily-disproven counterfactual statements. YouTube's algorithm, by default, makes no distinction: any idiot can go viral and get tons of reach on a video loaded with outright lies. YouTube has provided a platform that makes the spread of misinformation much easier and in my opinion it's their responsibility to take action to correct that.
The standard is "imminent lawless action." You can in fact advocate lawbreaking, including violent lawbreaking (e.g. people advocating punching all Nazis are protected).
I think the standard could change, considering that when that standard was set, such advocacy couldn't be effectively spread without a trail of publishers and broadcasters that would be vulnerable to direct retaliatory violence.
(Although I'd prefer an economic system that makes monopolies fundamentally impossible or very unlikely - i.e. one that constrains the ability to concentrate capital.)
The scarce resource here isn't freedom of speech, it's people's attention. As always, you can say whatever you want, and as always, it's hard to get people to listen to you. Before the internet, you basically needed an already-famous person to take an interest in you in order to get noticed. Now a message can go viral organically, without needing to involve any journalists or talk-show hosts, but the platforms are free to stop something from going viral if they don't like it. Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away.
But to answer your question, I think breaking up the platforms would be a better solution than treating them as de-facto public services and trying to regulate them as such. Or appropriate them and make them into actual public services :)
In that sense it's like the concept of freedom in general. It's slippery, difficult to define, and has fuzzy boundaries. We're not always going to agree on the extent of each freedom. Where does your freedom end and mine begin?
In this particular case, how big does a company need to be before we start forcing it to host content that it doesn't want to host? When is it ok to force someone to provide a universal platform... to tie their hands so they can't moderate as they see fit?
Do I have a right to stand on your stage and shout whatever I want at your audience?
This can be attributed to nothing more than personal political bias. There is no way these people would be arguing for censorship if the censorship favored the other side.
It also makes me want to move. There is no advantage to being an American without the freedom of speech and press.
You have a right to free speech until it infringes on someone else.
The real problem is that people falsely think YouTube is the only way to publish a video on the Internet...
but if it's true for youtube, why it cannot be true for an hosting company or a service provider? can't they just shut down my server or my ip? they are private after all...
is there a legally safe to speak freely on the internet? or our freedom of speech is limited only to photocopies?
Hmmm...
I can think of some historical examples where governments used rhetoric oddly reminiscent of that rhetoric spoken by the ex-cia officer that tried to run for president the quote's taken from.
Germany during the 1930's
The Soviet Union during the 1920's...well...most of time existing I guess
Cambodia in the 1970's
China....currently
“In sum, the majority of Americans are generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the manner required”.
“To the degree to which they are required to do so, they will interpret what is demanded of them in distorting and inadequate ways. As a result they will interact and communicate in ways that undermine the functioning of democratic institutions and the meaning of democratic practices and values.”
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8806z01m/qt8806z01m_noSpl...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/iron-law-of-oligarchy
As for populism in a democratic system is a symptom of politicians/political parties not being seen by their citizens to be taking actions in regards to thorny subjects such as immigration, globalisation and law enforcement.
"In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order."
(Then neo-reactionaries took it from there, ditching all the excuses to present this state of affairs as "libertarian", and correctly calling it the new feudalism.)
1) I don't care what Rothbard became in the end. It is completely irrelevant. Rothbard's critique of the state is an interesting perspective and some of them seem particularly apt when the leviathan of government is eroding people's rights because of COVID.
2) As for the Hoppe quote. The "neo-reactionary" you mention can be counted on one hand. The activist left (which is why that quote is on wikipedia in the first place) will take quotes and call someone alt-right based on one spicy paragraph in a book (which is exactly the trick you've tried here and I am not that naive to fall for it).
I haven't read "Democracy the God that failed" (yet) and I will decide for myself once I've read the book. I very much doubt it is a new feudalism and I very much doubt you've read the book either.
From watching him speaking. Hoppe's construction seems to be that given the choice between King and a Politician, a King would be better. His rationale for this is sound IMO. The most important part of it (for me) is a King will care about his legacy and a politician typically won't.
My own feelings is that I've never thought that democracy is effective or desirable. I've found the act of voting to be completely pointless due to the fact I have nobody to vote for in the UK that represents my interests of decreasing the state.
The only time when voting is effectives is during referendums when it is a single issue. Even then it isn't effective The UK's politicians and press did everything they could to deny the referedum result (and are still doing so btw).
I have heard arguments that the whole idea of democracy itself has been perverted during the enlightenment of those putting a Christian/Individualist perspective on Athenian ideas. But I won't pretend to know the argument well enough to have any opinion either way on it.
* We want individuals to be able to express themselves so long as they are not explicitly deceiving people or hurting them
* We believe groups of individuals should have the freedoms individuals do
* We believe that individuals whose sole purpose is to act to provide a service to individuals expressing shouldn't be liable for the expression under some conditions. e.g. if I let you rent my sound equipment, I shouldn't be liable because you use it to call for violence against some dude and likewise for online platforms provided they take some reasonable measures
* We believe that picking and choosing what people can use your platform to express is expression in itself, but sometimes you are obligated to suppress some expression
So YouTube is one of these platforms. They should be allowed to pick and choose what people can use them to express because that's a freedom one person has, and therefore that they have as a group of people who individually have it. So the defence rests on it being expression.
However, the defence for them not being liable for expression on their platform is that they're "just the platform". By choosing not to enforce on other things and choosing to enforce on these things they're not "just the platform" - the expression they permit is their expression.
It's a bit hazy, but it feels to me like you forfeit some of your "just a platform" defence when you exercise your "it's my right to expression" defence. Morally, of course, not legally. IANAL and this isn't a court so who gives a damn about the law on its own.
¹ If you don't hold these beliefs, then you're not in the audience for the comment. Skip safely.
Filing dozens outlandish lawsuits is certainly a way to demonstrate fealty to the administration, but as we're seeing, it's not particularly productive.
Funding propaganda efforts to exploit people's ignorance in pursuit of undermining public confidence in the electoral process is shitty behavior at best and sedition at worst.
Conflating all of these and describing them all as 'questioning the outcome' is unlikely to change anyone's mind about any of it, but it does serve to highlight a profound lack of understanding about how elections work.
In my youth we had the FCC fairness doctrine to prevent corporate media from descending into polemics, but that rule was removed in the 80's, and then the FCC abdicated oversight of internet content in general, so I'm not sure how any of this is supposed to be fixed at this point.
Unless you are just making the point that YT censorship is more acceptable than government censorship (which I think everyone agrees with), then I'm not sure how you can have your cake and eat it to here.
But if you run a forum and say you will not allow any view to be expressed therein that you don't agree with, you aren't in fact "allowing people to make up their own minds"---unless by "allowing people" you just mean not actively harming them for expressing views in other places, or something equally wild.
Another way of saying it is that no one would say you are "tolerant" if you only "tolerate" behavior you agree with.
I think you're missing their argument. YouTube censoring doesn't prevent information from being published elsewhere.
(Sidenote: I do think YouTube and other corporate-run forums like that would welcome some regulation in the area, for two reasons: (1) they'd no longer be blamed for how they decide difficult content questions, and (2) it might make it more difficult for small startups to disrupt this space by increasing the legal barriers to entry.)
There are dozens of online video platforms[0], plus other places like Patreon and OnlyFans, and decentralised systems like PeerTube. If none of them work for you, you can get a VPS and start hosting videos on your own web site.
The difference between YouTube censorship and ISP censorship is the amount of capital you need to circumvent it. If ISPs start filtering traffic, you need tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars to build hardware infrastructure to run a competing ISP. If YouTube starts filtering videos, you need $5 to rent a server to host those videos instead.
Boy, technologists. We used to see a gap in the market and fill it with superior products. Now we see a gap in the market and complain that the market leader isn’t owning that space any more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms
Second, I'm rather disappointed by the defenses of free speech we see these days. They are flimsy, lack substance, and at times seem unwilling to actually argue for free speech. Is free speech actually good for anything? Is the only reason we attack attempts by people to encroach on it because it is "American"? I, for one, would like an argument for its value.
This piece is flimsy. The discussion is about youtube getting removing election misinformation. Ok, controversial. I get it.
It brings up Hunter Biden's laptop as a case where
> That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually everyone in “reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an aristocratic snort, a la Christiane Amanpour
with those lovely scare quotes around "reputable". I'm not sure what to say here. Is it better for the media to run around screaming after every single lead? Even the ones that look flimsy to them? Is it better for the US media to be so willing to report and investigate on anything and everything these days when the media making a hubub about anything is enough to have an effect?
Taibbi proceeds to ask us to indulge in a hypothetical, one where
> what would have happened if Facebook and Google had banned 9/11 Truth on the advice of intelligence officials in the Bush years
and the natural result of this is that
> it will start to make sense that Trump voters in Guy Fawkes masks are now roaming the continent like buffalo.
I'm sorry but this is incredibly lazy thinking. I'm going to stop quoting the piece because I'm tired and I have things to say. Things have changed. We've had Trump in office and he was most assuredly different than other presidents -- in good ways and bad. We've had the rise of the internet, of smartphones, of digital technology, and social media. Information flows freely. Nowadays we don't risk not having access to information, we risk being drowned in it. The "echos" in our echo chambers aren't some soft faint whispers we can't see beyond, they are roaring deluges that drown out everything else.
I'm sorry for the longer post, but the truth is that I hate these kinds of articles. They seem to just gawk at the problems we face today and do little to inform or provide perspective or argue. Taibbi in this case seems to think it's enough to post a tweet or some headlines; the reader will draw the right conclusions for themselves. It's obvious after all. Isn't it? But then that's exactly the problem we face, where everything is obvious but somehow the other guy's come to a different conclusion and but it's all wrong!
Offer some damn arguments. Try to convince people. If free speech is worth fighting for it isn't because it's some kind of "American" ideal, it's because its a good thing, a worthwhile ideal to practice, a civic habit that improves our democracy and secures it for the future. People deal with information differently these days; that landscape has most assuredly changed. Is it any surprise that free speech will need to fought for again?
I've enjoyed the somewhat balanced weekly covid discussions of youtuber Dr Chris Martenson / PeakProsperity. He generally backs up his opinions with links to science studies and data, but has been censored by youtube for mentioning controversially that "HCQ has some efficacy as a prophylactic before exposure to Covid". ( He has also covered topics such as less severe Covid outcome for those taking Vitamin-D, for which there now seems to be a lot of evidence... yet why are we not seeing governments recommend and supply it more widely ? )
Are we still able to rationally discuss on youtube topics such as : Did SARS-CoV2/Covid originate elsewhere than at the seafood market in Wuhan [ there are a handful of data with earlier cases in distant locales ] ?
Are we allowed to make videos discussing the cause of collapse of WTC building 7 on 911 ? Engineering Professor Leroy Hulseys structural study at Fairbanks University argues that the canonical explanation of fire damage leading to failure of a weak point followed by cascading collapse is 'unlikely'.
Will we be able to share videos that say fracking for oil produces so much extra methane as to render the proponents criminally liable for the acceleration of global warming ?
Will we be able to discuss on youtube.com whether google.com should pay more tax than they currently do ? What body decides this ?
The very same people complaining about this also complained when platforms did exactly what you suggested. Even attempting to "fact check" is considered censorship.
[1] "You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read" : https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/Gilbert%20et%20al%20%28EVER...
[2] "The Lawfare Podcast: The Vaccine Misinformation Cometh" : https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-vaccine-misinfor...
I'm not saying human perception is the 'solved problem' - if I know something is false, then can I also believe it ? I actually think the human mind is capable of believing both proposition "X is true" and its logical negation "X is not true". eg "birds are dinosaurs" is both true and not true, inmnsho.
I want people to believe things that are true, but this would require much wider access to higher quality science education, as well as access to good information, protected freedom of speech ...
My feeling is the Twitter model - where outrageous untruths are tagged with a notice - is a good start, and much better than the path of outright censorship that youtube seems to be choosing. I'd like to see a kind of wikipedia crowd-sourced model to fact-check social media - flag a post/comment with "controversial" / "established dogma" / "noncontroversial" / "conspiracy theory" : ] - similar to how we have pseudo-public reviews of books on Amazon and goodreads. Perhaps this can be gamed, but we still have wikipedia and much of it _is_ accurate, so there is hope.