Extremely disappointing. If I can't live-stream a coup attempt, of which I am participating in because I'm convinced there's a pedophile cult controlling my country, why even bother having an Internet?
I bet the credit cards, payment processors, and domain registrars all move against Parler within 365 days of Biden's inauguration.
Unfortunately the conventional financial system and regular internet are under the US Liberal control. Their approved narrative dictates who is allowed to use said infrastructure.
On the one hand I understand why YouTube does it. On the other hand, as a Russian citizen, I shudder to think what will happen if russian government asks YouTube the same thing in regards to our election results. Turns out, instead of playing hide and seek with different parties by blocking unwanted information on the internet, all a government has to do is notify YouTube/Facebook/whatever that the "truth is this and this and would you be so kind as to block any kind of misinformation for us, thank you". The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Nothing is stopping the Russian government from doing that today, so I don't see why it matters.
I could say the same thing about your ask that YouTube allow a free-for-all on their platform but that's only because I'm witnessing the logical conclusion here in the US. We have to do something different or these events will repeat themselves.
I think we've pretty conclusively proven that there's no non-dangerous option available. Maybe this isn't the best answer, but speaking as someone who's very consistently opposed these kinds of content policies in the past, I no longer think it's tenable to take a hard line against information control here.
While I do believe we are at a "benevolent dictator" stage of social media, what happened yesterday should be feared by every democratic nation and regardless of the "side" you are on it should be avoided at most costs.
It's quite literally the seeds to fracturing a society.
This action is YouTube pushing back against government misinformation! Why would you think it's a sign that they're more likely to push government misinformation in the future?
Zoom out. This action is YouTube controlling the dialogue and acting as though they're the Ministry of Truth.
Here's an amazing suggestion for you: if you don't like someone's opinion, don't watch their videos. Amazing. Super easy to do. Just click that little X button at the top right and move on with your life. No draconian censorship, no 1984 bullshit required. Just walk away.
Adults who can handle contrasting opinions should be allowed to see, read, share, and issue them to their hearts' content. Even if you think they're wrong. It's kind of the whole damned point of free speech, which is being pissed away by childish morons who never understood why people fought and died for it to start with.
I agree with you 100%, but the people that push for these kinds of policies are not concerned with what they choose to watch, they want to limit what others watch. Simply being able to not watch a video won't be sufficient for them.
As another commenter mentioned, we are adjusting to a new form of information flow now in the post social media age. What was easily disproven and dismissed 20 years ago, now is amplified by radicals. I don't think banning the speech is the right choice but we need someway to counter misinformation. Its 100x easier to come up with these lies then it is to dispel them. The information war is already heavily on the side of misinformation. Clearly with the rise of Qanan, antifa, and even yesterdays events, our current approach is not work. I am all ears to hear better solutions but trusting people to be able to navigate the sea of misinformation to the island of truth leads to many shipwrecks.
What if I think it doesn't matter at all whether people believe the correct, government-approved, blue-checkmark truth vs. their own interpretation? Since when do we all have to believe the same things for the world to function?
You sound like a high-church advocate getting mad that angry parishioners have started to question the orthodoxy. You should understand that America was founded on that kind of questioning and that kind of rejection of power in favour of open discourse, even by people who are wrong.
> amplified by radicals
Meanwhile the propaganda side is amplified by the people who own the media; ten thousand times louder than any dissident.
I pray this sort of thing just ends up pushing people towards decentralized platforms where they can speak their mind without censors, moderators, and goody-two-shoes apparatchiks complaining about "misinformation". It's so patronizing.
I agree, hopefully they will leave the social media sites into their own decentralized camps. Sounds like a win for all sides. No more megaphone amplifying ideas that don't have the native support to deserve it.
The rest of us will stay secure in our belief that Coronavirus is real, that 5G isn't a government conspiracy, and that Donald Trump lost the election.
Each of those three items have very specific dangerous implications for the people spreading disinfo about them.
Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America. Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?
> the rest of us will stay secure in our belief that Coronavirus is real, that 5G isn't a government conspiracy, and that Donald Trump lost the election.
Saying this demonstrates the false dichotomy. I believe all of those things, too. Guess what: I also believe that flyover Americans deserve a shot at the world their forefathers were working toward. Wedges have been put into place to make it difficult to hold a position like this politically; who represents me?
> Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America.
Which country is that, and why make the assumption that it comes from outside your own borders?
> Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?
Seems like this is a mandate to produce a more secure election. Shouldn't that make both sides happier? Isn't it possible to believe that the election systems are rife with opportunities for fraud and miscounts? Did you live through the 2000 Gore/Bush election? America can do better.
People just stormed the capitol yesterday based on misinformation and propaganda. People avoid masks and vaccines based on propaganda and cause countless deaths.
If I can criticize a tv channel for running dumb shows, then I sure as shit can criticize a website that knowingly chooses to spread lies that predictably get people killed and destabilize democracy.
It’s not about what we like, it’s not about “Adults who can handle contrasting opinions”, it’s about a literal mob of armed people who broke into a government building while it was in the process of certifying the results of an election that the armed mob believed was stolen because of videos they watched and believed.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there is a story behind that analogy — it isn’t bubblebath that hides medieval infants in a washtub’s waste water.
Pretty sure the mob wasn't armed; you can't go around armed in DC. The property damage was minimal, especially compared to the BLM riots of last summer; did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?
"""Five of the arrests were related to guns and two were for illegal possession of other weapons, including metal knuckles and a blackjack-like weapon."""
"""Police Chief Robert J. Contee says two pipe bombs and a cooler with Molotov cocktails were also found near Capitol grounds."""
> did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?
My argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.
As it happens, I believe those riots were triggered by people who believe their lives do not matter to the police on the basis of personal experience. You believe I am wrong about that? Sure, ok, now tell me: why does being wrong about that change my argument that misinformation can cause real harm? You consider the BLM riots to be a bigger event, and that it was based on untruths, so tell me: on what basis does your claim mean that I should stop being concerned about mobs being goaded into action by lies?
You don’t need to convince me I’m wrong about the BLM movement to do that.
Thank you for the information about the armed people. Certainly I don't support anything like that - but then, I'm Canadian, I don't support people being armed in general.
> The same argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.
You make a fair point about the misinformation from a purely argument-logic standpoint (both classes of events being spurred on by some amount of misinformation).
The greater gestalt of my argument is that it's asinine to consider any side of the mainstream media in the USA to somehow not be a biased source of misinformation, malicious and deliberate or otherwise. You can pick your side, Fox or MSNBC or anything else, and get the bias you "prefer", but no matter what you're getting bias, denial of reality when it's inconvenient for the narrative, and propaganda designed to spur you into particular thoughts and actions. If you're going to get mad about it for this event, if you're a principled person, you should have been mad about it for prior events too, even if the results don't run in favour of your own priors.
We can fight about the particulars of the situation, or work together to understand how we're being manipulated into arguing about particulars instead of looking at who's manipulating us, how, why, and in what overall direction.
If Republicans continue to spread dangerous lies and falsehoods, tantamount to falsely claiming a theater is on fire, YouTube should push back. If Republicans post policy proposals or comments on cultural issues, YouTube shouldn’t. Courts in the real world have already addressed this issue, YouTube is catching up to the extant rules of society, not making new ones.
Courts have addressed the issue indeed. The reason youtube is acting independently is because this is way beyond what courts have decided is dangerous speech.
If this was driven by courts, they would have an order to show it.
The big foundational lie is that there are no biological differences. This is demonstrably false, but you will not see it, or any of it's many corollaries censored.
> The big foundational lie is that there are no biological differences. This is demonstrably false, but you will not see it, or any of it's many corollaries censored.
People right of center tend to overestimate how much biological differences matter (versus societal forces), people on the left tend to underestimate it. That's been true for a long time. I don't think either point of view is particularly censored though.
We're talking about censoring outright lies (the kind that the Putin government puts out, say)
And what exactly are you talking about? The women can't do math as well as men? Please do share.
Were you referring to gender or race? Because racism (and ideas of racial supremacy) is not not rooted in science. That would be another right wing conspiracy theory.
It's really hard to have a discussion when the examples you use are so vague.
Did you even read the tweet? It's not youtube pushing back against government misinformation. It's about youtube punishing their users who express "misinformation" or wrongthink. Youtube is doing the opposite of what you are claiming. They are making the government/establishment ( "and given that the election results have now been certified " ) narrative the default narrative that you cannot stray from on youtube.
I swear, the amount of people here blatantly and blindly support everything tech media does is rather interesting. I'd almost say there is a concerted effort here to push a pro-censorship and pro-tech narrative here backed by a political faction.
Oddly enough, you can still say Trump stole 2016 on youtube.
Everyone is an arbiter of their own platform. They do it when they take down spam on their platform, and they do it when they take down harassment on their platform. And now they do it when they take down calls to violence on their platform. I'd rather they do that than be a place where all of that festers.
This is way too strong of a conclusion to draw. They don't arbitrate all truth on their platform, they arbitrate it when not doing so could have dangerous consequences for a large number of people. There's a big difference between that and what you're talking about.
> They have become the arbiters of truth on their platform.
That's the way it always has been everywhere. If you believe otherwise then you're being naive.
There's always a line and it's moved by the platform owner at their will when it suits them. These platforms are a big like cities with eminent domain, most people are aware of it but don't care until the city is taking away their property.
There is a distinction between the government and the people who are elected and work in the government.
The position of the government is that Trump lost the election.
The position of the sitting president is that he won.
If Trump signed an executive order saying “Actually I won” that would then be him acting as the government, but I suspect that such an order wouldn’t actually succeed and so the position of the government would still, at the end of the day, be Trump losing.
Indeed, I don't know what the right answer is here. As a civilization, we're struggling to adapt to the sudden fundamental shift in how information flows. I see these things as experiments in ways to mitigate the negative externalities caused by the changes, which to me is a good thing. We should be trying stuff out to see what works. I just fear that we won't be able to understand the blast radius of these experiments and may end up causing something dreadful to happen.
I'm going to be honest I wonder if the censorship and content policing isn't having a worse effect than allowing the content in the first place. Tech companies have demonstrated a very clear liberal bias (which in itself isn't a bad thing necessarily). However by removing/censoring content they are actually legitimizing it because people don't see these companies as a neutral third party but rather a biased dictator of information.
I have distant family that has bought into the conspiracy theories. But now that Youtube has started directing traffic away from their channels and putting up these warnings they feel under attack and have only doubled down on their beliefs. It makes it a lot harder to work with them/discuss these issues.
When 49% of the country voted for a man who is currently the sitting president by law, and you can't even retweet his tweets it's pretty upsetting to them. They feel like they are under attack by the Big Tech companies. I know why Twitter did this. But it's only creating far more polarization between the rich people in power (aka Big Tech) and these people.
> Tech companies have demonstrated a very clear liberal bias (which in itself isn't a bad thing necessarily).
The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.
Given how difficult it is to build trust in democracy and how easy it is to collapse it, I think that these companies would be irresponsible to continue providing a megaphone for these claims.
Alternative sites dedicated to the people who feel like they are "under attack" fail to launch because it turns out that catering to these people leads to nothing but misinformation, racism, and content that is either borderline or outright child pornography.
My 2c on this issue is that we will not resolve this situation by accommodating conspiracy theories and racism. Instead, the only way that we can reconcile these two groups of people is by ensuring that everyone sees the same news - recommenders that have partitioned the world in half need to be done away with, even if it reduces user engagement.
> The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.
Yes, and because of the partisanship it’s mainly liberals that don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.
When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.
> don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.
There has been no evidence to support any of the claims being made about systemic election fraud.
Zero. What is there to take seriously?
> When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.
I don't think those ideas were mainstream at all on the left, and even if they were, they weren't being made by people in positions of power. There's a difference between someone anon on the internet claiming fraud (because that's meaningless) vs the sitting president doing so.
I don't call Barack Obama spending the time between Nov and Jan drumming up support for an insurrection against the government. Can you show me where that happened?
I don't recall Hillary Clinton ever making the claim of election fraud, or any elected official saying those things.
Right now you have the majority of Republicans in the House making those kind of claims, in addition to the President and several Senators. The fact you would equate the two shows you are too deeply biased to talk neutrally on this subject.
To coin a popular phrase, "reality has a liberal bias."
When one side of the partisan divide has willfully abandoned all pretense at adherence to facts, to protest that people call them out for this, while not calling the other side out for something they're not doing in any meaningful sense is...well, it's frankly absurd, and smacks of the same kind of party-over-reality logic that the aforementioned side is operating on.
It doesn't matter if 9%, 49%, or 99% of the people choose to follow someone who spits on facts when they don't get him everything he wants: the people asserting that reality is still reality are just as much in the right, no matter who or how many dislike it.
Slippery slope works in both directions. If the president is spreading misinformation on an election he just lost, and if everybody's OK with that, what happens when a more capable wannabe dictator comes next and spreads misinformation? We just let them seize the power?
this is a very insightful comment, i'm going to bookmark your post and set a calendar event one year from now to come back a re-read it. I think you're exactly right.
it's kind of heartbreaking how fractured everything is becoming. even outside of politics it feels like the places i found community are gone or dying, being replaced by walled gardens and personality fiefdoms. it never used to feel so lonely.
It used to get me down but now I see it as living through history. Our ancestors lived through worse. We’re witnessing the continued evolution of human civilization.
This is the logical consequence of doing something because you can, while not asking yourself "should you."
We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it's high time (in the US and likely EU) we take a long look at Social Media practices and regulate them.
I understand, truly, the value of free speech. And I understand that censorship is an incredibly dangerous road.
But yesterday, a mob breached the Capitol attempting to stop the peaceful transition of power. In no small part because of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
The people running these companies, I believe, have a moral responsibility to act.
I think we have to bite that bullet. I wouldn't quite characterize it as "China is right" - there's no plausible claim that social stability will be threatened by Winnie the Pooh, he's banned just because Xi Jinping doesn't want to be made fun of. But the vision of a future where anyone can say anything to an arbitrarily large audience is, I think, going to have to be buried.
They believe disrespect for their leader is bad for social stability. Even if it weren't perceived that way, and it was understood as the petty reaction that it is, it's still just an abuse of an existing censorship system. And most items that are censored are seen as important to national stability.
Just like how NSA spying was justified for national security purposes, you see people abusing the system and spying on ex lovers.
Yes absolutely we should let the powerful people set limits to how much we're allowed to express our thoughts and to whom.
I'm sure there will be no violence since nobody will fight to their death fighting against that, after all it's never happened before let alone for smaller restrictions on people's freedom. Wow, the past, what a good thing it was without the Internet acting as a megaphone, certainly no revolutions nor wars for independence.
The world is analog, not digital, although many on HN forget this probably due to working with computers so much.
There are an infinite number of positions between China-style full control of speech and, say Parler or Voat style "anything goes including things such as calling for killing all the n__g__s and k_k_s and f_g___s".
Most systems that attempt to do useful work require some kind of friction or impedance or damping. I've seen nothing that suggests that information systems are any different.
You are making the same fallacy you are putting forward - assuming that the system is mechanical and just needs tuning with "impedance or damping". This fails to take into account the fact that the people in positions to make decisions on control of speech have vested interests and are even often extremely wealthy sociopaths.
When people who get censored on all media platforms, ridiculed, ignored, and aren't allowed a day in court to even present their evidence. They're going to feel like the game is rigged.
I don't think it was a good idea to go inside the capital and it will cause very negative and counterproductive blowback.
Media coverage of this will be biased, compare it to the "mostly peaceful" protests happening all summer. It will be used as an excuse to further censorship and sideline sympathizers. The reaction will increase polarization and decrease our ability to communicate.
I'm not saying election fraud happened but I completely understand their frustration.
> ridiculed, ignored, and aren't allowed a day in court to even present their evidence.
..other than the nearly 60 court cases? [1] or the dozens of news outlets that have attempted and failed to find actual evidence? [2] Saying they're not allowed to present their evidence is patently false.
It's not like this is the first time the exact same people made the same claims with no evidence [3].
I looked through some of what's here. I don't really have the vocabulary to understand if these items are significant or not. Some of them seem like they might be, some of them seem like they're probably not significant, and some seem to point to evidence that claims of fraud are in actuality a farce.
I do have some trust in our institutions and our court system, though. The fact that there has been bi-partisan dismissal across the board of claims of election fraud - even from judges and officials who are on-the-record Trump supporters - leads me to believe that there is little here of substance. Why would Republican Trump supporters who are proud (perhaps to a fault) of defying the mainstream media suddenly fall in line? They didn't fall in line with the other 'fake news' events throughput the presidency, why this one? Imagine the credibility they'd gain if there was actually enough fraud to change the election, and they found it!
I've seen people point to the fact that many of the cases were dismissed by judges without actually hearing the evidence, due to clerical or timing problems. I am incredulous. In order to accept that, I have to believe that a Republican judge who supports Donald Trump and presumably wanted to see him back in the presidency looked at the lawsuit, understood the situation and it's urgency, and shrugged his (or her) shoulders and said 'sorry, you might be right, but I'm not gonna look at it.' I don't buy it.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm not trying to argue a side here beyond describing things from the perspective of the disaffected, and then what the likely outcome will be.
These people are already suspicious of the legitimacy of the election, denying them the transparency of discovery and a public trial erodes that faith further. Gore got a trial in 2000 with a challenge to the electoral college. The mass of mail in ballots this year represents a dramatic change from the norm and I understand why people want more scrutiny. But really, if half the country doesn't trust the integrity of our election system do we even have a democracy anymore?
It's not that the media should have given credence to the election fraud allegations - they are obviously bullshit. It's that they should have also been just as skeptical and censorious of other allegations without any evidence, such as Russiagate. Dozens of people were accused of colluding with a foreign power, which is crazy, and not just Republicans - Bernie Sanders was accused as well. And the impeachment report by Mueller did not reveal a single piece of direct evidence of any collusion. Even the people convicted during the trial were not convicted of collusion but of other crimes. The problem is that you can't pick and choose what you will censor or control based on political preference. The crazy right wing extremists might be ignorant and on the wrong path but they sense unfairness just like anyone else.
To take that position in good faith you’d have to support the censorship of political movements every time a government building was breached and/or vandalized by their protestors.
I’d put more of the blame on mainstream media which was basically gaslighting anybody who wanted to rest assured that the election results are accurate.
Calls were made too early too many times over the course of the last couple of months, eroding the trust of the 99% of the completely normal Trump supporters out there.
Even if the Democrats are 100% sure the election is totally squeaky clean there should be no problem to go over it with a fine tooth comb so that everyone can be certain. Instead any attempt at transparency was ridiculed from the beginning with lots of goal post moving to follow about just how much discrepancies there actually were.
Some law changes right before the election also don’t really make sense (like waiving the need to verify signatures and in fact making it impossible to do after the fact by destroying envelopes) and instead if bringing clarity to the situation, mainstream media ridiculed anyone who had doubts about this as being crazy.
The elections were certified. Not just by the media, also by the courts. Many of them, including the supreme court, have heavy republican representation. If there was any credible reason to doubt the results these Republican officials - many of them outspoken Trump supporters - would have considered it. This isn't about wanting people to feel secure about the election, it's about yelling and screaming until they get the results they want.
Yea I know how it played out. I think you may be projecting the viewpoints of crazy trump supporters onto me.
My problem is before it was certified, the media “called” it and ridiculed anyone who doubted them.
It’s totally reasonable for people to want to know why is it that dead people voted, (and more importantly, how many), why strange laws were passed right before the election that made signatures un-important, or why observers were being given a hard time during counting. Instead of being treated as reasonable people, we are lumped in with the crazies who shout that all of this is fraud before there is evidence of it. However, it is equally crazy to shout that “there is no fraud!” before all of this is actually ironed out, and that is where mainstream media failed and destroys any existing trust I had.
I have never watched Fox News. I’ve laughed at stupid NY Post stories my whole life with my likeminded liberal friends. But I am not so blind with rage towards Trump that I can’t see when the media will do anything within their (soft) power to make sure he doesn’t win, even at the cost of their journalistic integrity.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't come to the same conclusion. I don't think that there is any amount of certification or 'fair treatment' that could have come from the press that would have made Trump stand down. Every inch of leniency trump and his most ardent supporters get they take a mile. As long as he's up yelling on his soapbox his people are going to try to find reasons to believe him.
Yes, sometimes dead people 'vote', but that happens in all elections and more importantly happens in both parties, but not enough to swing elections.
I have a pet theory (maybe a conspiracy theory, idk) that the reason the Republican officials have been so quick to shut down fraud claims is because any investigations will find just as much or more fraud on their side.
Presidents have been literally assassinated long before the Internet. The county when to civil war without electricity. Yellow journalism was the original “fake news” and there was no utopia when everyone “agreed on the facts”.
Let’s not pretend the Internet has enabled something particularly nefarious here.
By pressing these companies to be the arbiters of free speech, you’re exacerbating the problem. These thoughts and people don’t go away, they just move to other platforms.
I'm actually somewhat surprised at HN's response. I've seen so many outcrys because platforms like YouTube are causing the collapse of civilization because they're allowing misinformation to spread so freely.
> I'm actually somewhat surprised at HN's response
Me too. And that goes for the whole thing. The comments are filled with people peddling conspiracy theories, and saying we still don't quite know if there was significant fraud in the election. We're getting to a point where truth doesn't exist.
So how is free and fair debate supposed to work? We may not want the government to decide who to silence, somewhere in the debate people have to say "I think what you just said is abhorrent and I'd rather you didn't say it in my café".
Problem is, there are only a handful of cafés in the world that everyone frequents and so there's an onus on the people who run them to make a lot of decisions about who gets to say what. Add to that the cafés don't live off selling coffee or having debates, they sell adverts for other things, which complicates their incentives.
I think it's awful how all the social media firms have waited until now to grow a spine, but I'm not sure what the best course would have been.
Liberal ideals of open debate are not very popular among the educated and powerful in the US anymore.
I'm sort of ambivalent on them myself, but I do think it's worth pointing out that events have arguably destabilized in tandem with the increasing use of censorship by the social media firms. Open debate is, per liberal theory, supposed to reduce political acrimony and to serve as a 'relief valve' for public discontent that would otherwise be vented in violence and disorder. As censorship increases, you should expect more disorder and more political violence rather than less if free speech theory is correct. If free speech theory is wrong, then censorship should cool political passions and enable the state to recoup legitimacy.
Reality is more complex than that, but we should at least acknowledge that our constitutional system of government assumes that free and open debate will help to maintain a peaceful and orderly republic.
These don't feel like cafés, and I think that hits the issue. They seem to be more billboards on the side of a highway. They encourage engagement but not community. I have personally found it rewarding to step off Twitter/Facebook, and into a discord/slack with some friends, keep up regular periodic video calls, and engage in moderated communities like HN.
These "cafes" are small/tiny and have a stronger social construct. We know each other and are held accountable to each other. Not just pissing on the commons.
Why bother with these policies? They are not enforced in any type of uniformity. Rather, they should just say we take down anything we want. At least then, they wouldn't be seen as the hypocrites they are.
This is a pretty vague announcement. What counts as "misinformation" or a "false claim" and who makes that decision? Will YouTube be contacting primary sources to verify all claims made in videos? Will they be relying on some designated "fact checkers"? Or maybe they're trying to tell us that ALL claims of voter fraud will automatically be deemed false without any form of review (this was the approach Twitter took with their labeling)?
What people are missing with all of this is that censorship is a bandaid but doesn't address the root cause. The duopoly of parties that have captured the US political system are corporate servants that have allowed the public to descend into worse and worse conditions since the 70s. The reason Trump was successful was because he (falsely) claimed he would address this grift and corruption. Instead of addressing it, the establishment has tried to tamp down any dissent and promote censorship. Without relief and a release valve, the pressure in tank will certainly will get even higher and eventually explode, with a more competent and scary Trump 2.0 when the democratic establishment fails to deliver even through they now control everything.
> We believe people should be able to speak freely, share opinions, foster open dialogue, and that creative freedom leads to new voices, formats and possibilities.
> We believe everyone should have easy, open access to information and that video is a powerful force for education, building understanding, and documenting world events, big and small.
> We believe everyone should have a chance to be discovered, build a business and succeed on their own terms, and that people—not gatekeepers—decide what’s popular.
With the events that occurred in the past year, these statements are completely false.
People once had the right to kick people out of their private business because they didn’t like how someone looked.
Your right to kick me out of your private business because you don’t like my opinions will be looked at the same way. Fundamentally illiberal.
I have a human right to hold and express any political opinion I want. Eventually we’ll have to campaign to make free speech a civil right and a protected class, just like they did in the 60s for race, and later for sexual orientation. We iterate our laws as we acquire new knowledge through moral science.
you are not wrong, but this philosophy becomes deeply flawed once it starts being applied by chokepoint monopolies who control the flow of all potential avenues for speech and commerce online. when twitter plays favorites it is inconvenient, when mastercard & cloudflare do it is fundamentally destabilizing.
This is absolutely correct, and it would benefit society immensely if #2 is solved quickly. A free marketplace of ideas, no matter how blasphemous, must always exist. President Obama said it best at his speech to the UN when he discussed the infamous YouTube video released prior to Benghazi. The answer is always more speech.
I consider this an unfortunate decision. Actively censoring "misinformation" regarding election irregularities will achieve the exact opposite of what (I hope) is intended here: to prevent harm.
Trump has already been successful in creating the image of a rigged election in the minds of his supporters. He has been working on this for at least a year. This already happened. It can't be undone by censorship.
The only thing that censorship will achieve is to further the "us versus them" mentality. Instead of visiting YouTube, where maybe 0.1% of the content is right-wing conspiracy talk, they will retreat to some "free speech" media site where every other channel is crackpot hour.
Thus driving that content to other sites where no differing opinions will be found to moderate the extreme positions on either side, thus assuring further polarization. The posturing and virtue signaling is idiotic.
I hope in addition to the antitrust lawsuits, congress and governments around the world look into collusion behavior between the big tech companies. It almost seems like they are part of a cartel acting together.
The book "Fahrenheit 451" just called, it wants its dictatorial world back from the current society...
Why most people don't realize that censorship leads us to a very very dark futur?
In my opinion, everything would be so much better if we could educate kids and adult on "critical thinking" and "intelligence", instead of censoring everything that could be "fake" (for real or not) based on decision of the ruling cast of a country.
Maybe it is because we are literally fucking watching mass misinformation and delusion spread by nefarious actors lead to mobs trying to prevent the legitimate and peaceful transfer of power in a nation armed with nuclear weapons. The nostalgic claims that good information will chase out bad and that sunlight is the best disinfectant to treat misinformation have been shown to be complete bullshit. The free speech maximalists were wrong and we have demonstrable proof that continuing to listen to them will lead to the downfall of civilization.
At this point we know with absolute certainty that a lack of censorship (either direct or self-censorship due to societal costs) leads to a very, very dark place. Time to start exploring other options.
I'm sorry but your statements are completely ridiculous and based on nothing.
The problem your are seeing in the us is not really due to misinformation being available, but to the country on its way to Idiocracy.
The issue is the real lack of intelligence. A long tradition of corrupt leaders have pushed for the suppression of critical thinking in the population as it is way more convenient to control the population.
Trump leds to having people acting like that because everything now is about reacting and not thinking anymore.
Imagine one second that Google leaders were friends with Trump that would protect their interest.
Which truth would be enforcing?
Look at the situation in China?
Look at Russia that poison its opponents but decide that the state truth is that it is a 'fake news'.
Read farhenheit 451 and 1984 and you will understand!
Censorship is not the solution, totalitarian Governments come from censorship. They are never good.
With free speech, it should come responsibility. You should be responsible for your speech, if it is false, and pay for it in a Court, but you should not be censored.
The problem is that the same people that accuse Trump of spreading misinformation with no proofs are the same that cheered on the New York Times and WP accusing Trump of being a Putin puppet with no profs whatsoever over years because they wanted to prevent the "legitimate transfer of power" as you say.
If what you say is false, you should pay for it, including Trump, but you should have the right to say it.
Ad hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacies are rather pathetic. Try providing proof that expanded free speech is what led to this drop in war and conflict. I could just as easily claim that the growth of international franchised food and beverage chains is what has led to the overall drop in nation-state conflict.
Why is it that free speech absolutists like you can’t see that the unfettered ability to spread mass disinformation has unambiguously led to a dark, dark present?
Meanwhile, you’re enjoying the benefits of commenting on a moderated forum where @dang has arbitrary power to delete posts and ban accounts. And it’s precisely because of his moderation on this privately-run publicly-available platform that we continue to enjoy relatively troll-free, level-headed adult discussions about difficult topics.
It is scary how wrong you are.
I think that you are speaking of facebook, not hn.
The huge value of HN is especially that it supports critical thinking.
As far as I know and saw, @dang and co try to be involved the minimum with the platform and in a few years I never saw content that was censored by the moderator. At worst it was debunked by the community.
Now, at the opposite, in my opinion, every article and opinion can be posted on HN. And the real value here are the comments and discussion around these links so that there can be a collective critical thinking réflexion about them.
Whoever can post anything, and sometimes I'm wondering if the article is true, if there are hidden fact or something that was deformed. And then, the comments let people all give their own opinion and often share interesting relating links and information.
From all of that, it give you a better base to have plentyfull of elements to make your own opinion on a topic!
> The huge value of HN is especially that it supports critical thinking.
By what mechanism? It's a basic reddit-style forum that allows comments and up- and down-voting. What's the secret sauce that causes Hacker News to "support critical thinking"?
The answer isn't secret, and it's pretty simple: there are commenting guidelines[1]. If you don't follow the guidelines, your posts are killed. If you repeatedly don't follow the guidelines, your account is restricted.
This is the same exact mechanism that distinguishes subreddits with high-quality comment sections (/r/science, /r/askhistorians) from the rest. And it's worth noting that even the rest have some forms of moderation. You'll be hard-pressed to find anywhere on the Internet with no moderation that hasn't become an absolute cesspool dominated by the worst possible actors.
> As far as I know and saw, @dang and co try to be involved the minimum with the platform
If I'm reading this right, you acknowledge that @dang and co have the power to moderate Hacker News essentially however they see fit, and yet you simultaneously recognize that they're capable of exercising these powers judiciously and only when needed.
Maybe sit back and reflect on that for a minute.
> ...in a few years I never saw content that was censored by the moderator.
You can literally see a graveyard of three dead comments on this very thread, that are invisible to anyone who doesn't have `showdead` flag turned on. It's not remotely difficult to find accounts whose posts are hidden by default from the community as a whole, to the point where some people make a point of notifying individuals who've been commenting for years without realizing that nobody can see their posts.
The fact that you don't personally see moderation is not evidence that there's no moderation.
Amongst numerous others that have nothing to do with personal attacks, one of the guidelines is:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Baseless, unsubstantiated, and repeated complaints about election fraud could easily be argued to fall afoul of this guideline and I would not be personally surprised to find [dead] comments here along such lines.
In 1954 a Puerto Rican group fired shots into Congress - there was no social media back then. Jimmy Carter pardoned them.
The suggestion now is that social media is ok to use as a tool to organize the kind of looting and arson that results in the killing of people like David Dorn, but not organize a protest that results in vandalism of the hallowed halls of insider trading.
A few years ago, Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional baseball game. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook did not see themselves as responsible for the online hate that led to it. Was it MSNBC that radicalized the shooter then? Where was he getting his information from?
The fact of the matter is that violent language against specific political figures is acceptable, and violence from others is not acceptable. This is further proved in specific cases like the Kathy Griffin decapitation video, the drawing of Trump's head being cut off (Facebook sent a specific memo to Cognizant that this was a valid exception).
This is being done because the vast majority of people working at these companies see fit to lecture the world on topics like unconscious bias, and then selectively apply their policies when it aligns with their personal politics - completely oblivious to the other cases where enforcement should be equal.
This will be seen as an escalation and further undermine the credibility of these companies in the eyes of millions. If at all they stay it will be because of prevailing trends and network effects only.
I guarantee you that at this very second you could search twitter and find folks freely expressing their admiration for Rand Paul's neighbour, who attacked him so violently that he was critically hospitalized. There is a sickness in political discourse that is being selectively attended to by people suffering from the very same sickness.
In order to be a free country there must be freedom, even if you don't like what other people say. This is a dangerous precedent.
We are rapidly getting to the point where elections are not based on merit of candidates but by what the media says and allows to be said.
Having a free press and allowing citizens to be heard becomes crucial to a functioning democracy.
That being said, I'm also in favor of letting companies have freedom to run their companies as they see fit as long as it is legal and moral. But this decision by YouTube saddens me.
If the media didn't keep censoring and banning people I doubt the Capitol would have been stormed. When you take away people's ability to be heard, debate, and participate in democracy, people feel they have nothing to lose. Recent events are the consequence.
Either there are consequences for your lies and misinformation or truth is doomed and freedom will follow soon after.
> If the media didn't keep censoring and banning people I doubt the Capitol would have been stormed. When you take away people's ability to be heard, debate, and participate in democracy, people feel they have nothing to lose. Recent events are the consequence.
This is absolute bullshit and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it. This event was not a response to censorship, it was a response to an subset of the population being fed a steady diet of outrage and misinformation and then putting on your surprised pikachu face when they get upset that their candidate lost an election. These people had the ability to be heard and debate and participate, they just are not willing to accept the consequences of that participation or to acknowledge that their candidate lost.
Sure it wasn't the sole cause but it was definitely a strong contributing factor. Listen to the interviews of the people that were there.
It's human behavior when people don't feel like they are being heard and understood they raise their voice, become less agreeable, and when something is important enough to them and there is no peaceful way to resolve things they become violent.
Acknowledging what someone else says and repeating back to them what they are saying works amazingly well for disarming conflict.
When dialog ceases to be the means by which people can peacefully resolve their differences then violence is inevitable.
Censoring and banning people further escalates conflict because it takes away people's ability to feel like they are being heard and understood.
If instead the dialog going something like "well why do you believe that, what evidence do you have to support that claim, did you consider X, here's why I disagree with you, etc" then maybe people would have changed their minds.
Instead, by and large, the approach taken by the media and tech companies was "you guys are wrong, you're an idiot, and we are going to silence you". I don't think that helps and only further escalates things.
Along your point though, should there then be censorship of the ideas that led people to the BLM riots? I don't think censorship is the answer there either.
Who gets to decide what is true and how does that not lead to dangerous concentrations of power?
The amount of virtue signaling and back peddaling by facebook, youtube, and twitter now that the results are certified is disgusting.
They profited for years off of this bile and misinformation and now that the tide is starting to turn they want to pretend like they weren't a huge part of the problem.
135 comments
[ 72.9 ms ] story [ 410 ms ] threadIt leaves a vacuum though, i bet parler's revenue doubles in 60 days.
Unfortunately the conventional financial system and regular internet are under the US Liberal control. Their approved narrative dictates who is allowed to use said infrastructure.
I could say the same thing about your ask that YouTube allow a free-for-all on their platform but that's only because I'm witnessing the logical conclusion here in the US. We have to do something different or these events will repeat themselves.
It's quite literally the seeds to fracturing a society.
Here's an amazing suggestion for you: if you don't like someone's opinion, don't watch their videos. Amazing. Super easy to do. Just click that little X button at the top right and move on with your life. No draconian censorship, no 1984 bullshit required. Just walk away.
Adults who can handle contrasting opinions should be allowed to see, read, share, and issue them to their hearts' content. Even if you think they're wrong. It's kind of the whole damned point of free speech, which is being pissed away by childish morons who never understood why people fought and died for it to start with.
I've offered an idea for an experiment that could plausibly lead to a (partial) solution here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662949
You sound like a high-church advocate getting mad that angry parishioners have started to question the orthodoxy. You should understand that America was founded on that kind of questioning and that kind of rejection of power in favour of open discourse, even by people who are wrong.
> amplified by radicals
Meanwhile the propaganda side is amplified by the people who own the media; ten thousand times louder than any dissident.
I pray this sort of thing just ends up pushing people towards decentralized platforms where they can speak their mind without censors, moderators, and goody-two-shoes apparatchiks complaining about "misinformation". It's so patronizing.
The rest of us will stay secure in our belief that Coronavirus is real, that 5G isn't a government conspiracy, and that Donald Trump lost the election.
Each of those three items have very specific dangerous implications for the people spreading disinfo about them.
Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America. Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?
Saying this demonstrates the false dichotomy. I believe all of those things, too. Guess what: I also believe that flyover Americans deserve a shot at the world their forefathers were working toward. Wedges have been put into place to make it difficult to hold a position like this politically; who represents me?
> Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America.
Which country is that, and why make the assumption that it comes from outside your own borders?
> Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?
Seems like this is a mandate to produce a more secure election. Shouldn't that make both sides happier? Isn't it possible to believe that the election systems are rife with opportunities for fraud and miscounts? Did you live through the 2000 Gore/Bush election? America can do better.
If I can criticize a tv channel for running dumb shows, then I sure as shit can criticize a website that knowingly chooses to spread lies that predictably get people killed and destabilize democracy.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there is a story behind that analogy — it isn’t bubblebath that hides medieval infants in a washtub’s waste water.
"""Police Chief Robert J. Contee says two pipe bombs and a cooler with Molotov cocktails were also found near Capitol grounds."""
- https://www.fox5dc.com/news/over-50-people-arrested-14-offic...
Normally I consider Fox to be right-wing.
> did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?
My argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.
As it happens, I believe those riots were triggered by people who believe their lives do not matter to the police on the basis of personal experience. You believe I am wrong about that? Sure, ok, now tell me: why does being wrong about that change my argument that misinformation can cause real harm? You consider the BLM riots to be a bigger event, and that it was based on untruths, so tell me: on what basis does your claim mean that I should stop being concerned about mobs being goaded into action by lies?
You don’t need to convince me I’m wrong about the BLM movement to do that.
> The same argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.
You make a fair point about the misinformation from a purely argument-logic standpoint (both classes of events being spurred on by some amount of misinformation).
The greater gestalt of my argument is that it's asinine to consider any side of the mainstream media in the USA to somehow not be a biased source of misinformation, malicious and deliberate or otherwise. You can pick your side, Fox or MSNBC or anything else, and get the bias you "prefer", but no matter what you're getting bias, denial of reality when it's inconvenient for the narrative, and propaganda designed to spur you into particular thoughts and actions. If you're going to get mad about it for this event, if you're a principled person, you should have been mad about it for prior events too, even if the results don't run in favour of your own priors.
We can fight about the particulars of the situation, or work together to understand how we're being manipulated into arguing about particulars instead of looking at who's manipulating us, how, why, and in what overall direction.
If this was driven by courts, they would have an order to show it.
One side is detached from reality and they happen to have the same political allegiance. Doesn't give any more merit to their claims.
And the thing is, the reality of the situation is so apparent that I don't even have to specify which side I am talking about!
People right of center tend to overestimate how much biological differences matter (versus societal forces), people on the left tend to underestimate it. That's been true for a long time. I don't think either point of view is particularly censored though.
We're talking about censoring outright lies (the kind that the Putin government puts out, say)
And what exactly are you talking about? The women can't do math as well as men? Please do share.
Were you referring to gender or race? Because racism (and ideas of racial supremacy) is not not rooted in science. That would be another right wing conspiracy theory.
It's really hard to have a discussion when the examples you use are so vague.
I swear, the amount of people here blatantly and blindly support everything tech media does is rather interesting. I'd almost say there is a concerted effort here to push a pro-censorship and pro-tech narrative here backed by a political faction.
Oddly enough, you can still say Trump stole 2016 on youtube.
That's the way it always has been everywhere. If you believe otherwise then you're being naive.
There's always a line and it's moved by the platform owner at their will when it suits them. These platforms are a big like cities with eminent domain, most people are aware of it but don't care until the city is taking away their property.
The position of the government is that Trump lost the election.
The position of the sitting president is that he won.
If Trump signed an executive order saying “Actually I won” that would then be him acting as the government, but I suspect that such an order wouldn’t actually succeed and so the position of the government would still, at the end of the day, be Trump losing.
The way to make the population aware is not through videos that people "MUST SEE!!11". Or typical manipulative ways of steering the masses.
Of course the winners write history, if they were correct or not is in the end "less important" in some ways and more important in others
I have distant family that has bought into the conspiracy theories. But now that Youtube has started directing traffic away from their channels and putting up these warnings they feel under attack and have only doubled down on their beliefs. It makes it a lot harder to work with them/discuss these issues.
When 49% of the country voted for a man who is currently the sitting president by law, and you can't even retweet his tweets it's pretty upsetting to them. They feel like they are under attack by the Big Tech companies. I know why Twitter did this. But it's only creating far more polarization between the rich people in power (aka Big Tech) and these people.
The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.
Given how difficult it is to build trust in democracy and how easy it is to collapse it, I think that these companies would be irresponsible to continue providing a megaphone for these claims.
Alternative sites dedicated to the people who feel like they are "under attack" fail to launch because it turns out that catering to these people leads to nothing but misinformation, racism, and content that is either borderline or outright child pornography.
My 2c on this issue is that we will not resolve this situation by accommodating conspiracy theories and racism. Instead, the only way that we can reconcile these two groups of people is by ensuring that everyone sees the same news - recommenders that have partitioned the world in half need to be done away with, even if it reduces user engagement.
Yes, and because of the partisanship it’s mainly liberals that don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.
When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.
There has been no evidence to support any of the claims being made about systemic election fraud.
Zero. What is there to take seriously?
> When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.
I don't think those ideas were mainstream at all on the left, and even if they were, they weren't being made by people in positions of power. There's a difference between someone anon on the internet claiming fraud (because that's meaningless) vs the sitting president doing so.
I don't call Barack Obama spending the time between Nov and Jan drumming up support for an insurrection against the government. Can you show me where that happened?
I don't recall Hillary Clinton ever making the claim of election fraud, or any elected official saying those things.
Right now you have the majority of Republicans in the House making those kind of claims, in addition to the President and several Senators. The fact you would equate the two shows you are too deeply biased to talk neutrally on this subject.
When one side of the partisan divide has willfully abandoned all pretense at adherence to facts, to protest that people call them out for this, while not calling the other side out for something they're not doing in any meaningful sense is...well, it's frankly absurd, and smacks of the same kind of party-over-reality logic that the aforementioned side is operating on.
It doesn't matter if 9%, 49%, or 99% of the people choose to follow someone who spits on facts when they don't get him everything he wants: the people asserting that reality is still reality are just as much in the right, no matter who or how many dislike it.
As for the rest, I would think that channeling more people into conspiracy theories (which was the previous status quo) is more harmful.
A woman died yesterday for QAnon.
We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it's high time (in the US and likely EU) we take a long look at Social Media practices and regulate them.
But yesterday, a mob breached the Capitol attempting to stop the peaceful transition of power. In no small part because of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
The people running these companies, I believe, have a moral responsibility to act.
Just like how NSA spying was justified for national security purposes, you see people abusing the system and spying on ex lovers.
The slippery slope argument is not a fallacy.
https://www.taobao.com/list/product/%E7%BB%B4%E5%B0%BC%E7%86...
I'm sure there will be no violence since nobody will fight to their death fighting against that, after all it's never happened before let alone for smaller restrictions on people's freedom. Wow, the past, what a good thing it was without the Internet acting as a megaphone, certainly no revolutions nor wars for independence.
There are an infinite number of positions between China-style full control of speech and, say Parler or Voat style "anything goes including things such as calling for killing all the n__g__s and k_k_s and f_g___s".
Most systems that attempt to do useful work require some kind of friction or impedance or damping. I've seen nothing that suggests that information systems are any different.
I don't think it was a good idea to go inside the capital and it will cause very negative and counterproductive blowback.
Media coverage of this will be biased, compare it to the "mostly peaceful" protests happening all summer. It will be used as an excuse to further censorship and sideline sympathizers. The reaction will increase polarization and decrease our ability to communicate.
I'm not saying election fraud happened but I completely understand their frustration.
..other than the nearly 60 court cases? [1] or the dozens of news outlets that have attempted and failed to find actual evidence? [2] Saying they're not allowed to present their evidence is patently false.
It's not like this is the first time the exact same people made the same claims with no evidence [3].
How long should they be taken seriously for?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=evidence+of+2020+election+fr...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d
I do have some trust in our institutions and our court system, though. The fact that there has been bi-partisan dismissal across the board of claims of election fraud - even from judges and officials who are on-the-record Trump supporters - leads me to believe that there is little here of substance. Why would Republican Trump supporters who are proud (perhaps to a fault) of defying the mainstream media suddenly fall in line? They didn't fall in line with the other 'fake news' events throughput the presidency, why this one? Imagine the credibility they'd gain if there was actually enough fraud to change the election, and they found it!
I've seen people point to the fact that many of the cases were dismissed by judges without actually hearing the evidence, due to clerical or timing problems. I am incredulous. In order to accept that, I have to believe that a Republican judge who supports Donald Trump and presumably wanted to see him back in the presidency looked at the lawsuit, understood the situation and it's urgency, and shrugged his (or her) shoulders and said 'sorry, you might be right, but I'm not gonna look at it.' I don't buy it.
These people are already suspicious of the legitimacy of the election, denying them the transparency of discovery and a public trial erodes that faith further. Gore got a trial in 2000 with a challenge to the electoral college. The mass of mail in ballots this year represents a dramatic change from the norm and I understand why people want more scrutiny. But really, if half the country doesn't trust the integrity of our election system do we even have a democracy anymore?
https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/05/state-officials-asses...
Calls were made too early too many times over the course of the last couple of months, eroding the trust of the 99% of the completely normal Trump supporters out there.
Even if the Democrats are 100% sure the election is totally squeaky clean there should be no problem to go over it with a fine tooth comb so that everyone can be certain. Instead any attempt at transparency was ridiculed from the beginning with lots of goal post moving to follow about just how much discrepancies there actually were.
Some law changes right before the election also don’t really make sense (like waiving the need to verify signatures and in fact making it impossible to do after the fact by destroying envelopes) and instead if bringing clarity to the situation, mainstream media ridiculed anyone who had doubts about this as being crazy.
My problem is before it was certified, the media “called” it and ridiculed anyone who doubted them.
It’s totally reasonable for people to want to know why is it that dead people voted, (and more importantly, how many), why strange laws were passed right before the election that made signatures un-important, or why observers were being given a hard time during counting. Instead of being treated as reasonable people, we are lumped in with the crazies who shout that all of this is fraud before there is evidence of it. However, it is equally crazy to shout that “there is no fraud!” before all of this is actually ironed out, and that is where mainstream media failed and destroys any existing trust I had.
I have never watched Fox News. I’ve laughed at stupid NY Post stories my whole life with my likeminded liberal friends. But I am not so blind with rage towards Trump that I can’t see when the media will do anything within their (soft) power to make sure he doesn’t win, even at the cost of their journalistic integrity.
Yes, sometimes dead people 'vote', but that happens in all elections and more importantly happens in both parties, but not enough to swing elections.
I have a pet theory (maybe a conspiracy theory, idk) that the reason the Republican officials have been so quick to shut down fraud claims is because any investigations will find just as much or more fraud on their side.
Let’s not pretend the Internet has enabled something particularly nefarious here.
By pressing these companies to be the arbiters of free speech, you’re exacerbating the problem. These thoughts and people don’t go away, they just move to other platforms.
top comment on HN is how this could be dangerous road to go down on.
top replies on twitter are how this doesn't go far enough.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Me too. And that goes for the whole thing. The comments are filled with people peddling conspiracy theories, and saying we still don't quite know if there was significant fraud in the election. We're getting to a point where truth doesn't exist.
Problem is, there are only a handful of cafés in the world that everyone frequents and so there's an onus on the people who run them to make a lot of decisions about who gets to say what. Add to that the cafés don't live off selling coffee or having debates, they sell adverts for other things, which complicates their incentives.
I think it's awful how all the social media firms have waited until now to grow a spine, but I'm not sure what the best course would have been.
I'm sort of ambivalent on them myself, but I do think it's worth pointing out that events have arguably destabilized in tandem with the increasing use of censorship by the social media firms. Open debate is, per liberal theory, supposed to reduce political acrimony and to serve as a 'relief valve' for public discontent that would otherwise be vented in violence and disorder. As censorship increases, you should expect more disorder and more political violence rather than less if free speech theory is correct. If free speech theory is wrong, then censorship should cool political passions and enable the state to recoup legitimacy.
Reality is more complex than that, but we should at least acknowledge that our constitutional system of government assumes that free and open debate will help to maintain a peaceful and orderly republic.
These "cafes" are small/tiny and have a stronger social construct. We know each other and are held accountable to each other. Not just pissing on the commons.
IMHO, storming White House already crosses the line for a free and fair debate. And so do baseless calls to do that.
yesterday was a gift to social media monopolies.
Censorship is not necessary in a fair society.
> We believe people should be able to speak freely, share opinions, foster open dialogue, and that creative freedom leads to new voices, formats and possibilities.
> We believe everyone should have easy, open access to information and that video is a powerful force for education, building understanding, and documenting world events, big and small.
> We believe everyone should have a chance to be discovered, build a business and succeed on their own terms, and that people—not gatekeepers—decide what’s popular.
With the events that occurred in the past year, these statements are completely false.
1) Any private company (or person) has the right to determine what speech they tolerate, amplify or disseminate
2) No company should be so big that their assertion of that right dramatically changes the national conversation
And political affiliation is not a protected class under the Civil Rights Act.
If you go on a political tirade, I have every right to kick you out of my home. Or office. Or restaurant. Or app.
Your right to kick me out of your private business because you don’t like my opinions will be looked at the same way. Fundamentally illiberal.
I have a human right to hold and express any political opinion I want. Eventually we’ll have to campaign to make free speech a civil right and a protected class, just like they did in the 60s for race, and later for sexual orientation. We iterate our laws as we acquire new knowledge through moral science.
Trump has already been successful in creating the image of a rigged election in the minds of his supporters. He has been working on this for at least a year. This already happened. It can't be undone by censorship.
The only thing that censorship will achieve is to further the "us versus them" mentality. Instead of visiting YouTube, where maybe 0.1% of the content is right-wing conspiracy talk, they will retreat to some "free speech" media site where every other channel is crackpot hour.
Why most people don't realize that censorship leads us to a very very dark futur?
In my opinion, everything would be so much better if we could educate kids and adult on "critical thinking" and "intelligence", instead of censoring everything that could be "fake" (for real or not) based on decision of the ruling cast of a country.
At this point we know with absolute certainty that a lack of censorship (either direct or self-censorship due to societal costs) leads to a very, very dark place. Time to start exploring other options.
The problem your are seeing in the us is not really due to misinformation being available, but to the country on its way to Idiocracy.
The issue is the real lack of intelligence. A long tradition of corrupt leaders have pushed for the suppression of critical thinking in the population as it is way more convenient to control the population.
Trump leds to having people acting like that because everything now is about reacting and not thinking anymore.
Imagine one second that Google leaders were friends with Trump that would protect their interest. Which truth would be enforcing?
Look at the situation in China?
Look at Russia that poison its opponents but decide that the state truth is that it is a 'fake news'.
Read farhenheit 451 and 1984 and you will understand!
With free speech, it should come responsibility. You should be responsible for your speech, if it is false, and pay for it in a Court, but you should not be censored.
The problem is that the same people that accuse Trump of spreading misinformation with no proofs are the same that cheered on the New York Times and WP accusing Trump of being a Putin puppet with no profs whatsoever over years because they wanted to prevent the "legitimate transfer of power" as you say.
If what you say is false, you should pay for it, including Trump, but you should have the right to say it.
What proof? There is still less war and conflict today than the last couple of centuries.
Meanwhile, you’re enjoying the benefits of commenting on a moderated forum where @dang has arbitrary power to delete posts and ban accounts. And it’s precisely because of his moderation on this privately-run publicly-available platform that we continue to enjoy relatively troll-free, level-headed adult discussions about difficult topics.
The huge value of HN is especially that it supports critical thinking.
As far as I know and saw, @dang and co try to be involved the minimum with the platform and in a few years I never saw content that was censored by the moderator. At worst it was debunked by the community.
Now, at the opposite, in my opinion, every article and opinion can be posted on HN. And the real value here are the comments and discussion around these links so that there can be a collective critical thinking réflexion about them.
Whoever can post anything, and sometimes I'm wondering if the article is true, if there are hidden fact or something that was deformed. And then, the comments let people all give their own opinion and often share interesting relating links and information.
From all of that, it give you a better base to have plentyfull of elements to make your own opinion on a topic!
By what mechanism? It's a basic reddit-style forum that allows comments and up- and down-voting. What's the secret sauce that causes Hacker News to "support critical thinking"?
The answer isn't secret, and it's pretty simple: there are commenting guidelines[1]. If you don't follow the guidelines, your posts are killed. If you repeatedly don't follow the guidelines, your account is restricted.
This is the same exact mechanism that distinguishes subreddits with high-quality comment sections (/r/science, /r/askhistorians) from the rest. And it's worth noting that even the rest have some forms of moderation. You'll be hard-pressed to find anywhere on the Internet with no moderation that hasn't become an absolute cesspool dominated by the worst possible actors.
> As far as I know and saw, @dang and co try to be involved the minimum with the platform
If I'm reading this right, you acknowledge that @dang and co have the power to moderate Hacker News essentially however they see fit, and yet you simultaneously recognize that they're capable of exercising these powers judiciously and only when needed.
Maybe sit back and reflect on that for a minute.
> ...in a few years I never saw content that was censored by the moderator.
You can literally see a graveyard of three dead comments on this very thread, that are invisible to anyone who doesn't have `showdead` flag turned on. It's not remotely difficult to find accounts whose posts are hidden by default from the community as a whole, to the point where some people make a point of notifying individuals who've been commenting for years without realizing that nobody can see their posts.
The fact that you don't personally see moderation is not evidence that there's no moderation.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Baseless, unsubstantiated, and repeated complaints about election fraud could easily be argued to fall afoul of this guideline and I would not be personally surprised to find [dead] comments here along such lines.
The suggestion now is that social media is ok to use as a tool to organize the kind of looting and arson that results in the killing of people like David Dorn, but not organize a protest that results in vandalism of the hallowed halls of insider trading.
A few years ago, Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional baseball game. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook did not see themselves as responsible for the online hate that led to it. Was it MSNBC that radicalized the shooter then? Where was he getting his information from?
The fact of the matter is that violent language against specific political figures is acceptable, and violence from others is not acceptable. This is further proved in specific cases like the Kathy Griffin decapitation video, the drawing of Trump's head being cut off (Facebook sent a specific memo to Cognizant that this was a valid exception).
This is being done because the vast majority of people working at these companies see fit to lecture the world on topics like unconscious bias, and then selectively apply their policies when it aligns with their personal politics - completely oblivious to the other cases where enforcement should be equal.
This will be seen as an escalation and further undermine the credibility of these companies in the eyes of millions. If at all they stay it will be because of prevailing trends and network effects only.
I guarantee you that at this very second you could search twitter and find folks freely expressing their admiration for Rand Paul's neighbour, who attacked him so violently that he was critically hospitalized. There is a sickness in political discourse that is being selectively attended to by people suffering from the very same sickness.
We are rapidly getting to the point where elections are not based on merit of candidates but by what the media says and allows to be said.
Having a free press and allowing citizens to be heard becomes crucial to a functioning democracy.
That being said, I'm also in favor of letting companies have freedom to run their companies as they see fit as long as it is legal and moral. But this decision by YouTube saddens me.
If the media didn't keep censoring and banning people I doubt the Capitol would have been stormed. When you take away people's ability to be heard, debate, and participate in democracy, people feel they have nothing to lose. Recent events are the consequence.
> If the media didn't keep censoring and banning people I doubt the Capitol would have been stormed. When you take away people's ability to be heard, debate, and participate in democracy, people feel they have nothing to lose. Recent events are the consequence.
This is absolute bullshit and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it. This event was not a response to censorship, it was a response to an subset of the population being fed a steady diet of outrage and misinformation and then putting on your surprised pikachu face when they get upset that their candidate lost an election. These people had the ability to be heard and debate and participate, they just are not willing to accept the consequences of that participation or to acknowledge that their candidate lost.
It's human behavior when people don't feel like they are being heard and understood they raise their voice, become less agreeable, and when something is important enough to them and there is no peaceful way to resolve things they become violent.
Acknowledging what someone else says and repeating back to them what they are saying works amazingly well for disarming conflict.
When dialog ceases to be the means by which people can peacefully resolve their differences then violence is inevitable.
Censoring and banning people further escalates conflict because it takes away people's ability to feel like they are being heard and understood.
If instead the dialog going something like "well why do you believe that, what evidence do you have to support that claim, did you consider X, here's why I disagree with you, etc" then maybe people would have changed their minds.
Instead, by and large, the approach taken by the media and tech companies was "you guys are wrong, you're an idiot, and we are going to silence you". I don't think that helps and only further escalates things.
Along your point though, should there then be censorship of the ideas that led people to the BLM riots? I don't think censorship is the answer there either.
Who gets to decide what is true and how does that not lead to dangerous concentrations of power?
I mean the US is already there.
I recall many years ago having to actively search for the positions and speeches from Ron Paul because he was barely given air time in debates.
Same goes for Andrew Yang where I only got to know him through alternative media sources (podcasts) instead of major news channels.
They profited for years off of this bile and misinformation and now that the tide is starting to turn they want to pretend like they weren't a huge part of the problem.