This sounds a lot like you don't use YouTube at all, as I've not seen auto-generated kids videos or content farm trash in a long time, and YouTube is my primary entertainment/educational video source.
But putting that aside from a person using YT often from incognito mode and similar:
- there is a overlap between "content farm trash" and "entertainment visdeos" what you might seem as "content trash" other might see as "short simple entertainment".
- there is a lot of educational content on YT, sadly it is often not featured that much on a "incognito" front page
- there is a lot of entertainment content with a bit of educational content on it.
- there is even more purely entertainment content on it
- there is questionable kids content on it (but YT explicitly split out YT Kids because it (at least officially) doesn't want kids on the normal YT (kids != teens/young adults)
- there is questionable "content farm trash" it also tries most to "play to algorithm" so it might seem that there is a lot of it when you visit YT in incognito mode/without personalized YT preferences. But it's not what keeps the platform alive.
- there is a lot of TV content on it (at least in some countries) (e.g. a recordings of TV news programs uploaded by the TV channels which produced it).
- there is quite a bit of serious content, discussions, etc. on it sadly mostly demonetized.
- there is a bit of more then just a bit of very very wrong and misleading content on it.
Or in other words YT is a platform for all content, from extremely serious discussions over good entertainment, grate educational material to pointless 5 minute craft videos and ending with conspiracy theories.
While I agree yt has lots of flaws, you need to curate your feed a bit. 95% of my feed is engineering, dev, history and super niche music. "Dont Recommend Channel" was literally the greatest feature they ever created.
>Literally any other site where one can upload videos would be better.
You can make that case, but it's hard to beat youtube. It's not just a matter of the amount of content, but also support on settop boxes/devices, quality of playback,etc.
Having said that, I'm starting to go to the effort of building an offline library. To me, the youtube death of a thousand cuts is happening because of their increasingly heinous ads (like google search) and strengthening copyright enforcement (since their position is now in place).
> Where, exactly, is "the place" for "serious content" like this?
In a place the creator is in full control and isn't funded by advertisers which will pull their funding for anything they dislike.
That's pretty much the nature of publishing content - if you're not independent there's always the tension of your funding source dictating the content.
YouTube is the most accessible place for content like this. They may be running the site into the ground lately but the initial implementation of a site that allows easy uploading, sharing and discovery of video content still has a lot of merit and is miles beyond anything else if only for the fact that it has the largest market share.
The only alternative would be some kind of distributed torrent index. But would need to work in a browser to be accessible to people. So, unless browsers add first class support for this, this means a web site with ads, probably and then you have the same problems again.
I doubt this. People are willing to reupload videos that they like, so why wouldn't they seed? for example this video has been reuploaded quite a few times because people like it so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu-EA1ruNk
The whole point of a video hosting service is to act as an easy directory for finding videos you like. The fact that the same service happens to host the videos in this case is inconsequential.
Like, say, the railroads or the phone network, a mass-membership video platform is something which has too many "res publica" aspects to just let it be the property of / in control of a private corporation; but which developed within, or was developed by, one or more such private corporations.
The solution seems to be one of:
1. Let said corporations exert such control over public life.
2. Have nation-states nationalize it.
3. Have the UN internationalize it.
4. Have nation-states, perhaps in collaboration, strongly regulate it.
5. Force it (e.g. via regulation) to become distributed, so that no single entity can exert significant control.
Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.
Eventually people will get fed up with youtube. Peertube is already beginning to become popular and many youtubers are posting there and odesy. Google has become like most large American companies with a self destructive management layer, eventually that will eat Youtube as well. I'd certainly prefer we get a free/distributed alternative to nationalizing and cementing a terrible monopoly.
Even worse for Google, when people get banned off YouTube, they get banned across all of Google's services.
Every time you upload what is arbitrarily controversial, that outcome has to be weighed, and if PeerTube provides a viable alternative, why not use it?
I tend to agree with your conclusion, but not necessarily with your argument. That is, yes, people might be "fed up with YouTube", but the point is that at any one time there can only be one video platform which hosts most videos... it doesn't really matter whether it's YouTube or NotYouTube by some other corporation; and the amount of material on YouTube is so staggering that I doubt we would see a distributed version of it being comparable any time soon. We don't even have a good distributed search engine (that I know of).
I didn't downvote your comment but having governments own the media would increase censorship instead of decrease it. We're not just talking about China CCP censorship but also democratic nations such as UK. See examples of BBC censorship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
>3. Have the UN internationalize it.
This idea is underspecified because it does not explain implementation of how the video website is funded. This is key because censorship happens by proxy via money. If the implementation is to get governments to collectively chip in to fund a global video website, you will get more censorship -- not less. Politicians like to exercise government's power to censor.
That's not a big list, more people are censored on youtube daily than BBC did in it's lifetime. This does not support your point.
"Politicians like to exercise government's power to censor."
And CEO's don't? Abusing political office for sensorship is a crime, abusing CEO position is ordinary business. Who is going to hold them accountable ?
Are you free to show the world your company's dirty business? In contrast, I can submit a freedom of information request and get access to lots of information from mutiple government departments.
What instance can you think of where governments have been held accountable for their censorship? There aren't a lot of high profile cases there.
> Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.
Based on what evidence? Where have alternatives been tried? Why aren't those alternatives in general use if they are so good? Is this a comparison of messy reality with unattainable theory?
Trading a thing we can choose not to use for a thing must use and that is integrated with military force. is always a bad trade. However bad Google is, government control of the media is worse.
The only exception I make to that rule is foreign ownership of media, which is probably worse than government control. But both are pretty bad.
>" Where have alternatives been tried? Why aren't those alternatives in general use if they are so good?"
Did you live under a rock for the past hundred years? We have actual regulation of newspapers, radio and television. They dont need to be owned by the government, but we have media regulators thay set standards, and where you can complain
I suppose my response to that is you're waving your hand and saying "there is hundreds of years of evidence" without actually pointing to any.
Social media is still a far better platform for getting out an unpopular message than newspapers, radio and television. The past hundred years of those media have been marked by minority groups (political, but also in the common sense of the word) really struggling to get a voice.
jasode: I didn't say I support option 2, I just laid out the options; and I did say there are pros and cons. I actually agree with you.
Pro option 2: There will be an official mechanism for people to influence how such a platform is managed.
Con for option 2: Governments are typically not very answerable to people, and definitely exploit the possibility of manipulating mass media or media platforms. Also, they have a natural symbiosis with large business interests, so it's possible they'll just be ok with the way things stand.
As for option 3 - it's true that this is underspecified, and I'm not even sure there's a relevant precedent for anything like that. I mean, even something like ISO is independent of the UN. Although that suggests the possibility of a group of nation-states setting something like that up voluntarily, not necessarily going through the UN. Also, you'd need nation-states to want this bad enough, and I'm not at all sure enough of them do.
I think it's absurd that we're talking about nationalizing entertainment websites like YouTube while the topic of nationalizing big pharma or big real-estate or big agriculture is never discussed.
I'm stunned. YouTube removed testimonial accounts of families of people currently in Xinjiang concentration camps -- because the speakers showed ID cards of their family member, violating YouTube's harassment policies on personally-identifiable information. That's not speculative inference -- the YT representative flat out *tells* the author:
>"We welcome responsible [sic] efforts to document important human rights cases around the world. We also have policies that do not allow channels to publish Personally Identifiable Information in order to prevent harassment."
This doesn’t sound bad or wrong at all. Can someone help me understand the outrage? We all know China likes to disappear people and YouTube would be complicit in that if they allowed these people showing their ids to stay up. Sounds like a common sense security step designed to at worst protect YouTube from the liability of being complicit in those people’s deaths and at best an attempt to help them.
> In what way does that help prevent China from disappearing these people?
Because the disappearance would be more visible to foreigners, and therefore more embarrassing to China. It's bad PR.
IIRC, some Soviet dissidents were merely harassed for an extended period time and/or offered the option of exile, because they were so well known in the West.
Not to sound too stark, but... have the CCP not made it abundantly clear that they don't give a fuck about "embarrassment" and "visibility to foreigners" in the last several years? They will do what they want to whomever they want if there's a serious enough need to do it in their eyes. Uygur, Hongkonger, foreigner, doesn't matter. The current party leadership are way beyond the point where visibility/embarrassment in Western press means anything.
The CCP isn't a big monolith. It's thousands of people with different levels of callousness. Even if some people are willing to damn the torpedoes and flat out execute potential political rivals, there are still people who care about appearances.
> Not to sound too stark, but... have the CCP not made it abundantly clear that they don't give a fuck about "embarrassment" and "visibility to foreigners" in the last several years?
At least with Xinjiang, they deny all the negative stories and have invested quite a bit of effort to push unbelievable "positive" propaganda about it. Disappearing someone who's known outside of China undermines that propaganda effort. That doesn't mean they won't do it, but clearly identifying yourself like these people did makes such actions more costly, which can tip the scales (e.g. it might save you from a bullet and land you in prison instead).
If you stay anonymous, no one may know unless the pile of bodies gets too big to deny.
> Atajurt has collected thousands of video testimonies from family members of Turkic Muslims who have disappeared in Xinjiang. Witnesses show their identification to prove they are real people.
Given that these people are giving their testimony to Atajurt (and not the Chinese government), these are people trying to share their story so the rest of the world knows how bad things are. As the article says, this knowledge is either shared directly (the videos themselves are shared), or indirectly ("the information in the videos is then used by other organizations..., which documents [sic] where detentions are occurring, which communities are most affected, and who has disappeared."). YouTube is therefore preventing one of the most oppressed groups in the world from explaining how they are oppressed.
If the victims can't document their own identities (and their still-victimized family members), it's harder to apply real political pressure to the CCP about the camps. They can keep claiming theyre not really camps, the escaped victims are paid actors, not real people, etc. This isn't doxxing - these are victims voluntarily documenting their experiences.
The Google policy on PII linked from YouTube's response quoted in the article is intentionally a bit broad and vague and considers "full name" PII, but lots of people say their full name on YouTube videos. Showing ID cards isn't mentioned in the policy - those could violate the rules about addresses, but the ID documentation being shown certainly isn't accurate anymore: the people in the videos escaped the camps and I presume aren't in China anymore.
Maybe it's the documenting of the relatives still in the camps YouTube objects to. If this is a violation, would a news clip about a missing child that includes the child's name and photo also be a violation? Seems like it should be. If YouTube takes that down, are they trying to help the missing child?
>Maybe it's the documenting of the relatives still in the camps YouTube objects to. If this is a violation, would a news clip about a missing child that includes the child's name and photo also be a violation?
The difference is that a missing child is unlikely to be punished for appearing on YouTube. The same can't be said for a detained political prisoner.
If they're in the camps, they are already being punished and abused. Might there be some retaliation? Yes, that's possible. But never calling out abusive behavior because then the abuser might escalate their abuse is a great way to encourage abusers.
They're free post whatever content they want on their own servers. YouTube doesn't want to be blamed for any retaliation that occurs. It's disingenuous to suggest that they're intentionally silencing human rights just as it would be disingenuous to blame YouTube for any retaliation if they had left the videos up. It's called having a different value system. People these days are seem to react with any sort of action that they disagree with the worst possible interpretation possible.
I dunno, this seems to be pretty consistent with YouTube's other policies. They aren't crossing any new boundaries here. Note:
1) YouTube isn't doing anything wrong. They obviously support in principle the rights of humans.
2) They are consistently applying their policies. This could reasonably be used to dox people (eg, holding up ID of your enemies so maybe they get rounded up eventually).
3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules, so there isn't much they can practically do.
You might (quite reasonably!) want YouTube to be active in promoting some combination of human rights and/or free speech. But YouTube has made their in-practice policy quite clear. They are also going to defer to what the local authorities believe is acceptable.
> 3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules, so there isn't much they can practically do.
Isn't YouTube banned in China? What "local government rules" are you thinking of, specifically?
I was thinking Chinese ones. Didn't realise YouTube was banned. But nevertheless, as a principle, they have made it clear that they don't want misinformation on their platform and the local government will be pretty clear that this is misinformation.
That wouldn't be a radical departure from policy for YouTube. This is well trod ground.
> ...they have made it clear that they don't want misinformation on their platform and the local government will be pretty clear that this is misinformation.
Come on. "not wanting misinformation on their platform" != kowtowing to authoritarian regimes outside of their jurisdiction.
How, as a matter of policy, do you expect them to make that distinction?
The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.
> How, as a matter of policy, do you expect them to make that distinction?
They make their own call on what misinformation is (or who to trust to identify it), which is how they actually do it.
> The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.
That's not the obvious way, that's a stupid way for reasons that should be obvious for anyone with any knowledge of history or current events. Keep in mind this is political information, not technical information.
>1) YouTube isn't doing anything wrong. They obviously support in principle the rights of humans.
YouTube is a company. The default for a company is indifference to every topic. And that's fine. YouTube doesn't "obviously support in principle" anything.
The people there will support things, but companies are not just the mathematical average of the people there. It's specifically about how those people choose to act when they're acting in the name of the company. Nothing about YouTube makes me think it's interested in using the platform supporting the rights of humans.
If there was some clickable and advertiser friendly content produced by people promoting human rights, I'm sure YouTube would be happy to host that. But they're happy to host almost all flavors of advertiser friendly content. I'm sure they would take credit for hosting that video as if YouTube itself was doing something that moved the needle on human rights. When all they're really doing is not prohibiting the content on their default-allow platform.
It's been known for years that YouTube removes evidence of warcrimes because those videos are too graphic.
>2) They are consistently applying their policies.
When videos about a topic they "obviously support in principle" runs up against the general purpose policies, what would "support" look like other than creating a special case in their policies?
>3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules
What government is telling YouTube to make videos about human rights abuses unavailable worldwide? And why would a company that "obviously support in principle the rights of humans" choose to do business within that government's jurisdiction?
yeah, I get that I'm being really critical and holding youtube to a high standard. But it's also totally fine if YouTube chooses not to meet that standard. Most companies barley have the manpower and expertise to execute on a signal focus. YouTube doesn't have to try to move the needle on human rights issues. All I really mean is that we shouldn't default to giving them even a single ounce of unearned goodwill on their human rights record.
Not sure if they are still doing it. But for a fairly long time YouTube censor the word CCP and some other negative words related to CCP.
Not surpassing consider some of those moderators are pro CCP.
Peter Thiel talked about this in happening in Facebook moderation. But I gather most on HN somehow loathe him so it might not matter much what he has to say.
People spend half the time complaining YT etc are censoring content, and then the other half complaining they don't censor content (conspiracy theories, fake news, isis.
I'm honestly not sure what anyone expects here. It's like they just want to be outraged and big tech is a convenient target
Youtube make pennies per video, if you can provide "discernment" at that price, I'm sure they'll take you call. Until then, it's hammers missing nails and smashing walnuts.
And that's without worrying that your definition might not match anyone else's...
It's really not their problem though, is it. Because there are 2 fixes:
* do nothing and have fake news etc everywhere.
* make it much much harder for users to submit material
Both of those have serious impacts on us. So it's our problem really isn't it?
Before you reply, ask yourself: would I pay a dollar to reply? If the answer is no, you can't really expect YC to spend money on "discernment" for every thread/article/text post can you?
Yep, and I’m sure dang has silenced some people talking about [what they perceived as] human right abuses because that poster was [in dang’s subjective judgement] talking in a way that harmed the health of the community.
I stick around this forum because I trust dang’s subjective judgement to be broadly wise. Partly because this is because the one time they chastised me I re-read my comment, gave it a second thought, and concluded “yep, thats easily-misinterpreted enough that someone with broader context on the overall health of this forum should remove it.”
Me too. I find it weird that companies don't just come out and say that. The assumption seems to be that most people can't understand that. I am starting to suspect they're right though, given the number of people even on HN who seem to think "something must be done" and "think of the children!".
"Peace and Order in China", and sensationalized coverage of violence against Asians in the US.
Clearly propaganda. For all of the demonitization and sometimes outright removal of anti-CCP content, YouTube seems perfectly content to promote CCP propaganda.
Twitter is similar. Under suggested accounts to follow, there are promoted accounts presenting China as an utopian dream.
Say what you will about Big Tech censoring conservatives, or even CCP human rights abuses. Various rationales exist, and we can disagree on those premises. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, these same companies are willing to take advertising dollars to promote CCP propaganda.
Without attributing motive there is an obvious, glaring inconsistency here. If you had to attribute motive, how would you characterize it?
The irony in your comment is you seem to only be able to recognize a problem when it impacts people you deem to be victims and.or agree with politically, but when it impacts people you disagree with it is "we can disagree on those premises"
Censorship by these platforms is real, ever present and has been highlighted for many years by many groups only to be meet with "mah private platform".
People like me has been warning that censorship is never the solution, but as usual as long as the people being censored where deemed "wrong thinkers" it is perfectly fine
I wonder how proponents of this argument would feel if another industry was squarely in the hands of the right, like education. Let's say all the best educations were in private colleges and they didn't tolerate much in the way of left wing speech.
Everyone knows that 3 SV companies have a politically charged uber-monopoly that they are exploiting to silence the political enemies of the DNC and increasingly enemies of the CCP. Everyone.
No it isn't. We've had years of progressives screaming that private companies aren't allowed to just do as they please simply because they are private. You aren't permitted to suddenly become an ardent liberty advocate simply because it suits you when you've been demanding regulation and authoritarianism previously.
>when it impacts people you disagree with it is "we can disagree on those premises"
I'm not sure what gave you that impression. For clarity's sake I'm opposed to censorship across the board. If information is incorrect or misleading, it should be exposed in the clear light of day.
I was trying to avoid opening up a partisan quagmire.
A thought experiment. What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship?
I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere.
With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure.
Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No?
It just seems very strange, the situation that platforms that have become truly global can silence people without any enforceable appeal system, using a weird mix of western moral and eastern business incentives in deciding to do so.
The trouble is, we already know more or less what would happen:
They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech.
We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.
There is an idea in human culture that we make decisions by looking at the evidence and then changing our minds to coincide with the truth. In this world unlimited Free Speech makes sense.
But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now.
Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
The key thing here to recognize is that this unlimited free speech on platforms ended the day Trump was elected. It's presented as about hate speech or preventing misinformation but it's really about class and culture. The top 20% or so of the population, those that are employed by and control all the American mega corporations comprise the professional managerial class. There is nothing they despise more than the cultural values of the Walmart-shopping working class. When those people elected that insane clown as president is the day the professional managerial class decided they need to play a more active role in projecting their moral and cultural values onto everyone else.
Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.
Facebook never allowed porn or even artistic nudes. YouTube only sometimes allows nudity/sex. Twitter and YouTube started scrubbing media drops from ISIS and other violent Islamist groups before Trump even had the nomination. They did so after bipartisan calls for social media to deplatform terrorist propaganda.
Reddit also cracked down on Syrian civil war media around this time. The videos were often gruesome propaganda and evidence of war crimes at the same time.
The reason people called on social media to remove this material instead of making it a job for law enforcement is that First Amendment protections are very broad. Praising ISIS or sharing "inspirational" videos of them killing government soldiers is not a crime if it doesn't also call for imminent lawless action. But few Americans of any political affiliation want such material to spread freely online, so it has been suppressed by other means on major platforms.
I'm not endorsing or condemning how these platforms behave. I'm just pointing out that they have long suppressed material that the First Amendment protects. The timeline of moderation well predates the Trump presidency.
It is also trivially the case that "due process is good, but not the highest good". Or, to take a less charged example, freedom of contracts
I don't mean to be snarky, but to try to draw a line. There are goods and rights that are intrinsically important (say food, water, social life, freedom from crime) and some that are important for the maintaining of a society (contracts are a good example here).
One of these "to maintain a society" freedoms is due process. Another, free speech. Both are important for their own sake, but also to check and control power.
You can say, and it is reasonable to say, that not suffering the ill effects of crime is more important than having good due process. But, given that due process is an important check on those in power, whenever they say "we need to reduce due process to get better law enforcement", you should be wary.
To sum up: some seemingly rational trades between values are dangerous, especially since they reduce our ability to influence society/to undo those trades.
"Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. "
Sunlight is ALWAYS the best disinfectant. Free speech is the first amendment in the US Constitution because those that wrote it had first hand experience what life is like without it.
That's an argument for transparency, not for unlimited free speech. It is, in fact, somewhat the opposite of what's been pushed for recently, with people like Zuckerberg wanting "privacy for me, but not for thee".
Transparency allows us to see what's going on inside companies, and make sure that they're not making decisions that are to the detriment of our society as a whole.
Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born.
>Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born.
In my opinion, the best way to give credence to these kinds of beliefs is to drive them underground. Now you have people whispering from the bushes about the topic to people they think might be swayed to join them and no one is around to counter what they are saying. The best way to keep people from believing these kinds of things is to let their proponents speak, and then call them on it. Joe Gullible will at least be able to see both sides.
Similarly, the best way to unlearn bigotry is to converse with people you are bigoted towards about a range of topics. Eventually you learn that they are just people, like everyone else. The same thing could happen with politics if we stopped being shoved into bubbles (or willingly building them up).
Unfortunately, advertisers don't want to place ads where contentious discussions occur and big companies don't want to lose advertising revenue, so here we are.
You’re making the appeal again that people actually respond to new information and change their opinions based on evidence. This isn’t true so the argument that driving something underground is bad because there’s no one to argue against it is a moot argument- people wouldn’t respond to rational evidence-based reasoning anyways.
Why do you say that people don't change their opinions based on evidence? I've seen it happen. Hell, I've done it myself. Even the people posting in favor of these sorts of topics cite "evidence", for different values of the word "evidence". White supremacists talk about "color" on "color" crime stats, flat earthers mention the horizon not appearing curved (had to look one up), climate "deniers" point to sunspot cycles, anti-vaxxers reference that one autism study, etc, etc. Obviously people do change their opinions based on evidence. They just don't necessarily look for evidence against the topic, mainly, or don't question the evidence provided. These are things they might be exposed to if the conversations weren't banned or relegated to "bubbles".
There is also the potential problem of censoring people who actually do hold a valid evidence-based opinion on a topic, it's just not one that's politically en vogue currently. Not to mention all the topics where it isn't clear what the truth is, despite a plethora of evidence for and against, and the person in charge holds a strong opinion on it.
What I'm saying, I guess, is "citation needed". Show me your evidence that people don't change their opinions based on evidence and maybe I'll change my opinion on this topic :)
It’s just happenstance that the “altright” is what has been taking advantage of places with light moderation. In the future, it just as easily could be another extremist group - maybe communists? Or fundamentalist Muslims?
Of course, those currently a part of the Christian, American far right would be pleading for more regulation on free speech.
once you scale up past a certain size, some kind of open democratic/lawful process seems the only fair way to do these things... though that goes against the recent trend of privitization/marketization of everything...
I haven't used Facebook in 10 years but my friends have shown me it. What's there to distribute? The chat functionality? The main feed is just a heavily curated stream of garbage that's vaguely influenced by your friend's list. It looks like there's nothing there other than this bizarre social pathology that's been continuously optimized and iterated to be as addictive as possible.
For chat you have XMPP, for feeds you have RSS and webpub (mastodon.) There's ical for sharing events of course.
It seems to me that a distributed (and more secure) version needs to have something in it that would cause a network effect. The idea of Facebook seems sound, it's just hard to get everyone to agree on one and when they do it's hard to break them free.
Exactly. Unless it’s run by a state actor it has to be commercialized (or subsidized which means money has to get in anyway) but by being run by a state actor is it evidently politicized.
Sure - we had it pre-internet with BBS's. There was even a standard for sharing message forums across them - FidoNET.
It may look crude from todays perspective, but there is zero reason the same concepts couldn't take root today. The big problem is friction. Just logging into to some "free" service that someone else runs for you is all most people want to think about.
I think there is a huge opportunity for a modern revival of concepts like BBS's and FidoNET, but with a modern spin on UI and communications. instead of the master nodelist like FidoNET had use a distributed directory along the lines of DNS. Heck why invent a new protocol - just adopt DNS with a few tweaks.
It did not stop the live stream but after they took it down, it could not spread further. If we remove censorship such tragic events will spread easily.
I’m not sure how you can compare trying to bring awareness to the world of people suffering, vs someone carrying out criminal activity via live stream.
Yes. I, as a student of violence, gained incredibly useful information from analysis of that video.
The ways in which people, moved, hid, fled, Red Sweater Guy's failed counter-attack. Those were all incredibly valuable things to watch. Being involved in security planning, IT and otherwise, I have to bring the best possible information from the real-world to help mitigate and plan.
I think for a while BitChute [1] was like what you describe. There are probably other platforms created in response to censorship and I suspect they stay mostly uncensored until they get popular and/or try to monetize videos. Eventually they get enough pressure from their local governments, investors, financial institutions and will take the same path as YT or get taken down. To add to your thought experiment, maybe the platform would remain less censored for some time if it were started by an incredibly wealthy philanthropist and had no desire to make money from it. The ties to financial institutions make it hard to be a neutral platform as they will have their own policies for what content investors and advertisers find acceptable. The financial institutions are heavily inter-connected internationally. So maybe the answer is to keep the monetized content on YT and just accept that their content is heavily regulated. Then create a similar platform that is not tied to any financial institutions at all. Incorporate the company and put their headquarters and servers in a country that has minimal content regulations. The remaining challenges will be finding CDN's, DNS providers and ISP's that can also remain neutral.
So how do you architect a system that doesn't have a single point of failure on all axis, storage/delivery/financial?
It's funny how the early web thinking encompassed nuclear war but not the presence of authoritarian government in the East and a zealotic secular religion in the West.
That is a great question and I think some site creators have shared your thoughts on this. I don't believe there is a single simple answer. The internet is not as distributed as some think it is. IP allocation is still controlled by a small number of governments ARIN, APNIC, RIPE NCC, AFRINIC. ISP's, DNS providers, CDN's are subject to their governments regulations and political influence. Every proposed solution I have seen ends up down some rabbit holes and obscure technologies that are generally too hard for the masses to adopt.
> Every proposed solution I have seen ends up down some rabbit holes and obscure technologies that are generally too hard for the masses to adopt.
There's an implicit circle in this logic. Manually crafting IP packets is unwieldy to the masses, too, but some kind souls came along and made web browsers to make the crafting of IP packets for the purpose of browsing the web easy.
The only thing stopping us from doing the same for better "obscure technologies" is willpower.
I believe the network effects are stronger than the free speech incentive for most people, after all, that is what current leading platforms bet on when deciding about censorship.
This can be in theory only resolved by the state. Advertisers will adjust, marketing is the most adjustable business there is.
It's a big point of dispute if a state should be able to censor someone, of course, but IMO state should not allow censorship within a global privately owned platform.
The state is one piece of the puzzle for sure. I have a theory that if a very wealthy philanthropist not entrepreneur were to create a new platform, we may find that it remains far less censored even if/when it gets popular. Money talks too much sometimes and if the only regulations on a platform were state/federal laws then I suspect there would be far less censorship. This may be especially true if run in a country that tries to remain politically neutral. There would still be pressure to remove content that embarrasses politicians. Short of content that explicitly breaks laws, there would be no financial incentive to remove content. Oppressive countries would still block the site, but people are adaptive and will find a way to get the news out to the world.
>I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure.
It's an interesting thought. I rather like the idea as the different political kinks of the big companies are rather obvious. You'd still have the problem of moderation in terms of various types of pornography (country specific), automated cruft/spam and the edge conditions of various degrees of violence in videos. Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine.
Maybe the problem is that a system like youtube or Facebook is monolithic. Placing responsibility in one groups' lap can't be a healthy thing in the long run. That, and people shouldn't get so triggered by what they see on a little screen.
The amount of Usenet servers allowing binary-containing posts is next to zero because of piracy and child porn issues, and the text-only stuff never became mass-market enough to show up on the attention radar of media and wide society.
The problem, I think - and this is pure supposition on my part - is that the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" (i.e. emotional reaction) also kinda accidentally optimises for the shady shit.
You could always find shady shit on Usenet if you wanted it. But you have to go looking for it. Because there wasn't an algorithm feeding you whatever it thought would keep you interested, it wasn't front and centre.
As you say, it never became mass-market enough. Because most people aren't really into the shady shit. Everyone might google for 2 girls 1 receptacle once for kicks, but it's not what most people want to see all day. Without the algorithm, it dies in user sub and most people don't even see it.
Usenet collapsed under the weight of spam and trolls. People tried to keep it going with some bolted on moderation tools but they never worked very well and eventually people moved on to more moderated platforms.
Even if you remove alt.binaries the rest of the Usenet had a massive spam problem that was never fully solved. Once a community grows large enough you can't get around the need for moderation, it takes far too few bad faith actors to increase the noise level beyond the point that the average person can tolerate. It doesn't take long for the quality people to leave in search of a less noisy venue.
It's more interesting because the two have areas where they're clearly opposed.
Then you watch them twist themselves into pretzels with things like Blizzard's Blitzchung fiasco. Or the NBA's position on political issues around China.
> What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship?
Just the same what happened to 4chan and its more shady copycats: it's going to be immediately overrun by far-right extremism, misogyny, gore, violence and a lot of pedophiles.
> More honest and real world feel?
When I go onto the city plaza and shout a Hitler salute or that women belong in the kitchen, I'm going to be beat up or arrested. On a "censorship" or rather moderation-free platform, there are no mechanisms to enforce social norms and laws.
If people can't be trusted to consume information without censorship, is that a problem with the platform or the consumer?
If we accept the premise that individuals cannot be trusted with information, where does that lead us?
There will always be problems in society. Taking a narrow view of exceptional circumstances, characterizing it as dangerous or "an emergency" ignores the larger picture. Given a chance for rational, open dialog, people equipped to do so can come to conclusions based upon reason. It is the natural course of the dissemination of information.
I remember when the rallying cry of the hacker movement was: "Information wants to be free"
Somewhere along the line we've supplanted that with gatekeeping and walled gardens. Cynics will observe that there is no gatekeeping without walled gardens. Therefore, if there was a motive for censorship and gatekeeping, walled gardens satiated the need.
Can we say that there was not a pre-existing structure for censorship?
The Internet may have temporarily disrupted censorship for some, but it has been a case of solve et coagula. Dissolve and reform. Where before there was a limited conduit of information via mainstream presses and televised talking heads, there is now a curated garden of content. Simulated peer groups share their views. Those that step outside of the prescribed narrative can be removed. Thus the individual need not solely trust their taking head, they can look to their peers and fulfill their desire to conform to social norms.
You ask "What if it [insert-platform] wasn't censored?". As a cynic I must conclude that there would be no point to these platforms without censorship. They either wouldn't be created, or an overriding need to censor them would naturally arise. Censorship is the feature.
Firstly, that's a false dichotomy, secondly, sensorship and moderation are distinct terms; removing pornography is not censorship.
Thirdly, media firms are conducting sensorship under false pretences. So there are at least 3 degrees of separation between "you cant arbitrarily sensor invonvenient speech" and "everything turns into 4chan/b"
Honestly, I don't know the distinction, please explain how you see it.
In both censorship and moderation, there is an authority within some platform with some autonomy (like a country or a social network or house owners meeting etc) which decides which information is acceptable and which is not.
About degrees of separation: I agree, I just did a bit overdramatic illustration of outcomes.
> Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No?
Nope, it'd be a shithole of the worst of the internet; advertisers would stay well away, ISPs would ban it, and it would quickly go away.
Nobody wants "true" freedom. I mean Reddit tried to be a bastion of free speech and had to rein it wayyy back in, first with hate subreddits, then more recently delisting NSFW subreddits, making them much harder to discover - instead of creating filters or adding additional ways to specify why something is not safe for work.
Parler likes to pretend it's a bastion of free speech, but it actively bans any LGBTQ+ content and had to start moderating or be deplatformed by the likes of Apple, Google, and their hosting party.
Reddit also grew to be one of the biggest sites on the internet with their low censorship policy before they started the crackdown. It’s not evidence crackdowns are necessary because they got successful first.
Censorship is the quintessential differentiating factor of reddit's success, they simply offloaded the censoring to the users. Later on they added some global site guidelines, but reddit has always been about censorship.
Early Reddit had a large number of communities with their own rules. Before that you had message boards that had mostly homogeneous moderation. The moderation for /r/askhistorians was different from /r/humor and that was a key part of the design.
Without this I doubt Reddit would have progressed much from its early programmer audience. It’s not accidental they took a light touch and let communities self moderate in the beginning.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind some form of content moderation. But I'd prefer some honesty and objectivity in the enforcement.
I've had a couple of accounts banned from social media (one on Twitter, one on YouTube). In both cases, I had no idea what policy I had supposedly violated until after I appealed, which is less transparent than a Soviet show trial. In the case of YouTube, the appeal itself got stuck in limbo, and someone at Google briefly locked my main account (rather than the "brand account" sub-account associated with the channel). The thought of having all email since 2004, my family's TV service and my domain names all ripped away from me for arbitrary, capricious and clumsy enforcement of vague policies was like an ice bath.
I've migrated most of my stuff away from Google now, or at least have accounts I don't care about losing.
Exactly , there is nothing wrong with Moderation. The problem comes there’s inconsistent enforcement and the inability to appeal and reform moderation rules in light of mistakes. Transparent moderation is probably the best.
None of those things are equivalent to each other. In particular, the difference between complete free speech and a lassez-faire economy or anarchism is so massive as to not be comparable.
Editorial control over their own website is a first amendment protected right. Such a law denying them the right to determine what is on their own webpage would be unconstitutional.
Your assertion is correct. They have editorial control over their website as a matter of free-speech. However, when the YouTube sponsored "Freedom Forum" gives the YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcikci a "free expression award" for censoring content, that's hypocritical.
>@YouTube CEO @SusanWojcicki has been at the forefront of fighting hate speech and misinformation online. She’ll be honored at this year’s Free Expression Awards.
It is possible to agree with the right of a private company to control their own platform how they see fit, while disagreeing with the choices they make.
That said, there are cases where platforms have censored content at the behest of government officials. In these cases it is alleged that 1st amendment rights are violated and platforms are acting as agents of the government.
>These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies.
>The document shows that California state officials contacted YouTube directly to remove the video on September 24, 2020, and that YouTube seemed to respond by deleting the video on September 27, 2020
User-level subscribable mute and block lists. The platforms could even offer their own mute and block lists for those who wish to have the same experience as now (which would have the advantage of being completely auditable).
This allows each user to tailor their experience as they feel comfortable. Outraged communities can have their moderated bubbles. Those open to alternative viewpoints are free to peruse an unmoderated stream.
LBRY is barely decentralized. AFAICT, you can't go and upload videos without either going through verification (and many regions are not allowed) or buying LBRY which are listed only on a few exchanges.
I doubt they would take down pictures of the Jan rioters just because PII.
If that’s not the case, I will admit they are being pedantically consistent but socially irresponsible for erasing evidence of systemic and illegal harassment and imprisonment of their own people.
YouTube is obviously carrying water for the CCP. Now think about all those videos they said were election or pandemic related propaganda, like the videos about ivermectin from Bret Weinstein, and ask yourself what makes those situations different?
Kharagpur IIT was the most Maoist/extreme left of all IITs. Even Jyoti Basu wanted to shut it down. I read once somewhere that back in seventies, they had Mao, Zhou, and Enver Hoja portraits hanging in their halls.
The whole Kharagpur area was a Maoist hotbed, and I believe still is to lesser extend to this day.
Sundar is worth $600b, did an MBA at Wharton, and is CEO of a trillion dollar multinational. It's pretty funny to me that people would be implying he's Maoist.
Fear of government-enforced market shut-out vs fear of civil liability for facilitating medical fraud. The fundamentals of Google's decisionmaking are the same, but the legal, societal, and ethical contexts in which it occurs can lead reasonable people to widely different value judgements of the outcome.
Stop relying on corporate ad delivery networks to host your videos for free. YouTube, like all big businesses, cares only about money, they would slap ads onto everything on the website if advertisers would permit it. When advertisers pay for your hosting they are the ones that determine whether or not it stays online.
Keep in mind as you comment here, on this anonymous forum, that China has a well-documented policy of paying people (wu mao) to post positive comments about the Chinese Communist Party and derail any criticism of it:
It doesn't seem to be well-documented. Examining the links, there's talk about such practices, rumors, a scientific paper about trying to identify "wu mao" posts (which concludes it's difficult to identify them for certain) etc. It is perhaps more accurate to say there is some evidence to indicate this may be happening.
Google wants in the china market bad, and have changed their "do no evil" policy to reflect that. To be in the Chinese market requires compliance with the CCP.
You are asking a free site to comply with rules in each country and not piss off all members of said countries. The outrage should be directed at your governments who have done nothing substantial regarding the China situation or any other humar rights situation around the world. It is not the duty of a private company to be at the forefront of foreign policy.
This comment isn't remotely related to the article. Nobody is asking YouTube to comply with any rules - instead, this is YouTube using a contorted reading of their own rules (which they inconsistently apply) to do something that people generally agree is bad.
"Atajurt has collected thousands of video testimonies from family members of Turkic Muslims who have disappeared in Xinjiang. Witnesses show their identification to prove they are real people."
If you believe that YouTube is simply an open and neutral “village square” for information and ideas then I have a bridge to sell you. Same goes for all the large platforms.
Censorship is censorship is censorship, no matter how hard you try to explain, justify or deny it, regardless if it's about prisoners, Covid, fake news or whatever someone somewhere decided it should not be accessible by a wide auditorium.
But it's not only Google at fault here, it's the voter that allowed government to push such censorship laws upon Google.
It would be great to hear some inside baseball from some peers working on Youtube content moderation. Not just tech and policy, but whether there is any internal dissent about policy and who decides. Surely there are some on HN?
There was a rumor that YT, FB, and Twitter have a deal with the Gov't regulators to leave them unregulated if they give a back channel of control to state censors. There were some leaked documents about internal government "partner" programs. Did anything come of that? It read to me like they were outsourcing some of their censorship to state agents, or perhaps they were setting up rapid response customer service teams to implement state censorship policies (e.g., question the election, vaccine safety, pandemic origins, etc...)
I had thought they "just knew" what content to prohibit based on where the political winds were blowing, but maybe it was more coordinated.
Question is - what is the fuss about? Everyone and their dog knows that Communism is a torturous system that can't exist without killing lots of people. I was born in the Soviet Union and i know it and everyone out of the couple billion people who lived in the Soviet bloc knows, there is no need to prove it time and again.
What is the value of these videos since we can't do anything with China anyway?
I personally don't know what to do about it. But it seems like it's worth establishing what at least the truth is before we do something (either by deciding to, or by deciding not to do anything).
I wish it were so that everyone knew that "Communism is a tortuous system," but it unfortunately does not seem to be the case anymore. People who were born and never lived in a world with the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall are now voting age, and they don't have an aversion to communism. Even before the Soviet Union fell, a lot of people in the west were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Fortunately we had people like Solzhenitsyn who documented how bad it was. Atajurt and the Uigher witnesses are giving us what may become our generation's equivalent of "In the First Circle."
Is it that difficult for Youtube to differentiate between someone doxing someone vs someone volunteering identifying information about themselves or their family members with absolutely no malice?
Surely for a company which prides itself in having AI which can determine emotions, do natural language analysis etc, this is pathetic.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadLiterally any other site where one can upload videos would be better.
But putting that aside from a person using YT often from incognito mode and similar:
- there is a overlap between "content farm trash" and "entertainment visdeos" what you might seem as "content trash" other might see as "short simple entertainment".
- there is a lot of educational content on YT, sadly it is often not featured that much on a "incognito" front page
- there is a lot of entertainment content with a bit of educational content on it.
- there is even more purely entertainment content on it
- there is questionable kids content on it (but YT explicitly split out YT Kids because it (at least officially) doesn't want kids on the normal YT (kids != teens/young adults)
- there is questionable "content farm trash" it also tries most to "play to algorithm" so it might seem that there is a lot of it when you visit YT in incognito mode/without personalized YT preferences. But it's not what keeps the platform alive.
- there is a lot of TV content on it (at least in some countries) (e.g. a recordings of TV news programs uploaded by the TV channels which produced it).
- there is quite a bit of serious content, discussions, etc. on it sadly mostly demonetized.
- there is a bit of more then just a bit of very very wrong and misleading content on it.
Or in other words YT is a platform for all content, from extremely serious discussions over good entertainment, grate educational material to pointless 5 minute craft videos and ending with conspiracy theories.
You can make that case, but it's hard to beat youtube. It's not just a matter of the amount of content, but also support on settop boxes/devices, quality of playback,etc.
Having said that, I'm starting to go to the effort of building an offline library. To me, the youtube death of a thousand cuts is happening because of their increasingly heinous ads (like google search) and strengthening copyright enforcement (since their position is now in place).
In a place the creator is in full control and isn't funded by advertisers which will pull their funding for anything they dislike.
That's pretty much the nature of publishing content - if you're not independent there's always the tension of your funding source dictating the content.
The whole point of a video hosting service is to act as an easy directory for finding videos you like. The fact that the same service happens to host the videos in this case is inconsequential.
Continual seeding to millions of peers is not.
The solution seems to be one of:
1. Let said corporations exert such control over public life.
2. Have nation-states nationalize it.
3. Have the UN internationalize it.
4. Have nation-states, perhaps in collaboration, strongly regulate it.
5. Force it (e.g. via regulation) to become distributed, so that no single entity can exert significant control.
Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.
Every time you upload what is arbitrarily controversial, that outcome has to be weighed, and if PeerTube provides a viable alternative, why not use it?
I didn't downvote your comment but having governments own the media would increase censorship instead of decrease it. We're not just talking about China CCP censorship but also democratic nations such as UK. See examples of BBC censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
>3. Have the UN internationalize it.
This idea is underspecified because it does not explain implementation of how the video website is funded. This is key because censorship happens by proxy via money. If the implementation is to get governments to collectively chip in to fund a global video website, you will get more censorship -- not less. Politicians like to exercise government's power to censor.
That's not a big list, more people are censored on youtube daily than BBC did in it's lifetime. This does not support your point.
"Politicians like to exercise government's power to censor."
And CEO's don't? Abusing political office for sensorship is a crime, abusing CEO position is ordinary business. Who is going to hold them accountable ?
Are you free to show the world your company's dirty business? In contrast, I can submit a freedom of information request and get access to lots of information from mutiple government departments.
What instance can you think of where governments have been held accountable for their censorship? There aren't a lot of high profile cases there.
> Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.
Based on what evidence? Where have alternatives been tried? Why aren't those alternatives in general use if they are so good? Is this a comparison of messy reality with unattainable theory?
Trading a thing we can choose not to use for a thing must use and that is integrated with military force. is always a bad trade. However bad Google is, government control of the media is worse.
The only exception I make to that rule is foreign ownership of media, which is probably worse than government control. But both are pretty bad.
Did you live under a rock for the past hundred years? We have actual regulation of newspapers, radio and television. They dont need to be owned by the government, but we have media regulators thay set standards, and where you can complain
Social media is still a far better platform for getting out an unpopular message than newspapers, radio and television. The past hundred years of those media have been marked by minority groups (political, but also in the common sense of the word) really struggling to get a voice.
Pro option 2: There will be an official mechanism for people to influence how such a platform is managed.
Con for option 2: Governments are typically not very answerable to people, and definitely exploit the possibility of manipulating mass media or media platforms. Also, they have a natural symbiosis with large business interests, so it's possible they'll just be ok with the way things stand.
As for option 3 - it's true that this is underspecified, and I'm not even sure there's a relevant precedent for anything like that. I mean, even something like ISO is independent of the UN. Although that suggests the possibility of a group of nation-states setting something like that up voluntarily, not necessarily going through the UN. Also, you'd need nation-states to want this bad enough, and I'm not at all sure enough of them do.
>"We welcome responsible [sic] efforts to document important human rights cases around the world. We also have policies that do not allow channels to publish Personally Identifiable Information in order to prevent harassment."
Because the disappearance would be more visible to foreigners, and therefore more embarrassing to China. It's bad PR.
IIRC, some Soviet dissidents were merely harassed for an extended period time and/or offered the option of exile, because they were so well known in the West.
At least with Xinjiang, they deny all the negative stories and have invested quite a bit of effort to push unbelievable "positive" propaganda about it. Disappearing someone who's known outside of China undermines that propaganda effort. That doesn't mean they won't do it, but clearly identifying yourself like these people did makes such actions more costly, which can tip the scales (e.g. it might save you from a bullet and land you in prison instead).
If you stay anonymous, no one may know unless the pile of bodies gets too big to deny.
Given that these people are giving their testimony to Atajurt (and not the Chinese government), these are people trying to share their story so the rest of the world knows how bad things are. As the article says, this knowledge is either shared directly (the videos themselves are shared), or indirectly ("the information in the videos is then used by other organizations..., which documents [sic] where detentions are occurring, which communities are most affected, and who has disappeared."). YouTube is therefore preventing one of the most oppressed groups in the world from explaining how they are oppressed.
That sounds pretty bad to me.
The Google policy on PII linked from YouTube's response quoted in the article is intentionally a bit broad and vague and considers "full name" PII, but lots of people say their full name on YouTube videos. Showing ID cards isn't mentioned in the policy - those could violate the rules about addresses, but the ID documentation being shown certainly isn't accurate anymore: the people in the videos escaped the camps and I presume aren't in China anymore.
Maybe it's the documenting of the relatives still in the camps YouTube objects to. If this is a violation, would a news clip about a missing child that includes the child's name and photo also be a violation? Seems like it should be. If YouTube takes that down, are they trying to help the missing child?
The difference is that a missing child is unlikely to be punished for appearing on YouTube. The same can't be said for a detained political prisoner.
1) YouTube isn't doing anything wrong. They obviously support in principle the rights of humans.
2) They are consistently applying their policies. This could reasonably be used to dox people (eg, holding up ID of your enemies so maybe they get rounded up eventually).
3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules, so there isn't much they can practically do.
You might (quite reasonably!) want YouTube to be active in promoting some combination of human rights and/or free speech. But YouTube has made their in-practice policy quite clear. They are also going to defer to what the local authorities believe is acceptable.
Isn't YouTube banned in China? What "local government rules" are you thinking of, specifically?
That wouldn't be a radical departure from policy for YouTube. This is well trod ground.
Come on. "not wanting misinformation on their platform" != kowtowing to authoritarian regimes outside of their jurisdiction.
The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.
They make their own call on what misinformation is (or who to trust to identify it), which is how they actually do it.
> The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.
That's not the obvious way, that's a stupid way for reasons that should be obvious for anyone with any knowledge of history or current events. Keep in mind this is political information, not technical information.
Google has tons of offices in China, and RnD sweatshops
YouTube is a company. The default for a company is indifference to every topic. And that's fine. YouTube doesn't "obviously support in principle" anything.
The people there will support things, but companies are not just the mathematical average of the people there. It's specifically about how those people choose to act when they're acting in the name of the company. Nothing about YouTube makes me think it's interested in using the platform supporting the rights of humans.
If there was some clickable and advertiser friendly content produced by people promoting human rights, I'm sure YouTube would be happy to host that. But they're happy to host almost all flavors of advertiser friendly content. I'm sure they would take credit for hosting that video as if YouTube itself was doing something that moved the needle on human rights. When all they're really doing is not prohibiting the content on their default-allow platform.
It's been known for years that YouTube removes evidence of warcrimes because those videos are too graphic.
>2) They are consistently applying their policies.
When videos about a topic they "obviously support in principle" runs up against the general purpose policies, what would "support" look like other than creating a special case in their policies?
>3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules
What government is telling YouTube to make videos about human rights abuses unavailable worldwide? And why would a company that "obviously support in principle the rights of humans" choose to do business within that government's jurisdiction?
yeah, I get that I'm being really critical and holding youtube to a high standard. But it's also totally fine if YouTube chooses not to meet that standard. Most companies barley have the manpower and expertise to execute on a signal focus. YouTube doesn't have to try to move the needle on human rights issues. All I really mean is that we shouldn't default to giving them even a single ounce of unearned goodwill on their human rights record.
Not sure if they are still doing it. But for a fairly long time YouTube censor the word CCP and some other negative words related to CCP.
Not surpassing consider some of those moderators are pro CCP.
Peter Thiel talked about this in happening in Facebook moderation. But I gather most on HN somehow loathe him so it might not matter much what he has to say.
I'm honestly not sure what anyone expects here. It's like they just want to be outraged and big tech is a convenient target
Discernment.
Google promised to not be “evil”, which is only as reliable a promise to the degree that “evil” is well-defined.
And that's without worrying that your definition might not match anyone else's...
Thats their problem. Alternatively,maybe they don't give a fuck because they have a monopoly and they have nonreason to spend more money
* do nothing and have fake news etc everywhere.
* make it much much harder for users to submit material
Both of those have serious impacts on us. So it's our problem really isn't it?
Before you reply, ask yourself: would I pay a dollar to reply? If the answer is no, you can't really expect YC to spend money on "discernment" for every thread/article/text post can you?
I stick around this forum because I trust dang’s subjective judgement to be broadly wise. Partly because this is because the one time they chastised me I re-read my comment, gave it a second thought, and concluded “yep, thats easily-misinterpreted enough that someone with broader context on the overall health of this forum should remove it.”
That party is not gonna continue for long, we clearly have laws coming down the pipe
This issue has no practical solution.
Right now we can't discern gossip, propaganda, whistleblowing, journalism, etc. Because we can't discern authenticity.
Say whatever you want. Sign your name if you want.
Those choices are important signals for viewers evaluating new information.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpmYGObyCW3xgkpY2cFlacQ
"Peace and Order in China", and sensationalized coverage of violence against Asians in the US.
Clearly propaganda. For all of the demonitization and sometimes outright removal of anti-CCP content, YouTube seems perfectly content to promote CCP propaganda.
Twitter is similar. Under suggested accounts to follow, there are promoted accounts presenting China as an utopian dream.
Say what you will about Big Tech censoring conservatives, or even CCP human rights abuses. Various rationales exist, and we can disagree on those premises. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, these same companies are willing to take advertising dollars to promote CCP propaganda.
Without attributing motive there is an obvious, glaring inconsistency here. If you had to attribute motive, how would you characterize it?
Censorship by these platforms is real, ever present and has been highlighted for many years by many groups only to be meet with "mah private platform".
People like me has been warning that censorship is never the solution, but as usual as long as the people being censored where deemed "wrong thinkers" it is perfectly fine
Everyone knows that 3 SV companies have a politically charged uber-monopoly that they are exploiting to silence the political enemies of the DNC and increasingly enemies of the CCP. Everyone.
I'm not sure what gave you that impression. For clarity's sake I'm opposed to censorship across the board. If information is incorrect or misleading, it should be exposed in the clear light of day.
I was trying to avoid opening up a partisan quagmire.
> private company something something
> society, ethical standards something something
> whose standards
summary every single thread on topics like this
I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure.
Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No?
It just seems very strange, the situation that platforms that have become truly global can silence people without any enforceable appeal system, using a weird mix of western moral and eastern business incentives in deciding to do so.
They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech.
We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.
But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now.
Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.
Dont the top 2% that actually own these corporation control them?
Reddit also cracked down on Syrian civil war media around this time. The videos were often gruesome propaganda and evidence of war crimes at the same time.
The reason people called on social media to remove this material instead of making it a job for law enforcement is that First Amendment protections are very broad. Praising ISIS or sharing "inspirational" videos of them killing government soldiers is not a crime if it doesn't also call for imminent lawless action. But few Americans of any political affiliation want such material to spread freely online, so it has been suppressed by other means on major platforms.
I'm not endorsing or condemning how these platforms behave. I'm just pointing out that they have long suppressed material that the First Amendment protects. The timeline of moderation well predates the Trump presidency.
I don't mean to be snarky, but to try to draw a line. There are goods and rights that are intrinsically important (say food, water, social life, freedom from crime) and some that are important for the maintaining of a society (contracts are a good example here).
One of these "to maintain a society" freedoms is due process. Another, free speech. Both are important for their own sake, but also to check and control power.
You can say, and it is reasonable to say, that not suffering the ill effects of crime is more important than having good due process. But, given that due process is an important check on those in power, whenever they say "we need to reduce due process to get better law enforcement", you should be wary.
To sum up: some seemingly rational trades between values are dangerous, especially since they reduce our ability to influence society/to undo those trades.
Sunlight is ALWAYS the best disinfectant. Free speech is the first amendment in the US Constitution because those that wrote it had first hand experience what life is like without it.
Transparency allows us to see what's going on inside companies, and make sure that they're not making decisions that are to the detriment of our society as a whole.
Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born.
In my opinion, the best way to give credence to these kinds of beliefs is to drive them underground. Now you have people whispering from the bushes about the topic to people they think might be swayed to join them and no one is around to counter what they are saying. The best way to keep people from believing these kinds of things is to let their proponents speak, and then call them on it. Joe Gullible will at least be able to see both sides.
Similarly, the best way to unlearn bigotry is to converse with people you are bigoted towards about a range of topics. Eventually you learn that they are just people, like everyone else. The same thing could happen with politics if we stopped being shoved into bubbles (or willingly building them up).
Unfortunately, advertisers don't want to place ads where contentious discussions occur and big companies don't want to lose advertising revenue, so here we are.
There is also the potential problem of censoring people who actually do hold a valid evidence-based opinion on a topic, it's just not one that's politically en vogue currently. Not to mention all the topics where it isn't clear what the truth is, despite a plethora of evidence for and against, and the person in charge holds a strong opinion on it.
What I'm saying, I guess, is "citation needed". Show me your evidence that people don't change their opinions based on evidence and maybe I'll change my opinion on this topic :)
Of course, those currently a part of the Christian, American far right would be pleading for more regulation on free speech.
For chat you have XMPP, for feeds you have RSS and webpub (mastodon.) There's ical for sharing events of course.
It seems to me that a distributed (and more secure) version needs to have something in it that would cause a network effect. The idea of Facebook seems sound, it's just hard to get everyone to agree on one and when they do it's hard to break them free.
My firm belief is that that is impossible.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/home
It may look crude from todays perspective, but there is zero reason the same concepts couldn't take root today. The big problem is friction. Just logging into to some "free" service that someone else runs for you is all most people want to think about.
I think there is a huge opportunity for a modern revival of concepts like BBS's and FidoNET, but with a modern spin on UI and communications. instead of the master nodelist like FidoNET had use a distributed directory along the lines of DNS. Heck why invent a new protocol - just adopt DNS with a few tweaks.
If somebody else wants to spend their money to host such things, they're free to do it.
Bad stuff happens. Thinking you can filter it out is a fools errand.
In that case someone should build an streaming platform where there is no censorship, let the market decide.
The ways in which people, moved, hid, fled, Red Sweater Guy's failed counter-attack. Those were all incredibly valuable things to watch. Being involved in security planning, IT and otherwise, I have to bring the best possible information from the real-world to help mitigate and plan.
[1] - https://www.bitchute.com/
It's funny how the early web thinking encompassed nuclear war but not the presence of authoritarian government in the East and a zealotic secular religion in the West.
There's an implicit circle in this logic. Manually crafting IP packets is unwieldy to the masses, too, but some kind souls came along and made web browsers to make the crafting of IP packets for the purpose of browsing the web easy.
The only thing stopping us from doing the same for better "obscure technologies" is willpower.
I believe the network effects are stronger than the free speech incentive for most people, after all, that is what current leading platforms bet on when deciding about censorship.
This can be in theory only resolved by the state. Advertisers will adjust, marketing is the most adjustable business there is.
It's a big point of dispute if a state should be able to censor someone, of course, but IMO state should not allow censorship within a global privately owned platform.
It's an interesting thought. I rather like the idea as the different political kinks of the big companies are rather obvious. You'd still have the problem of moderation in terms of various types of pornography (country specific), automated cruft/spam and the edge conditions of various degrees of violence in videos. Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine.
Maybe the problem is that a system like youtube or Facebook is monolithic. Placing responsibility in one groups' lap can't be a healthy thing in the long run. That, and people shouldn't get so triggered by what they see on a little screen.
The amount of Usenet servers allowing binary-containing posts is next to zero because of piracy and child porn issues, and the text-only stuff never became mass-market enough to show up on the attention radar of media and wide society.
The problem, I think - and this is pure supposition on my part - is that the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" (i.e. emotional reaction) also kinda accidentally optimises for the shady shit.
You could always find shady shit on Usenet if you wanted it. But you have to go looking for it. Because there wasn't an algorithm feeding you whatever it thought would keep you interested, it wasn't front and centre.
As you say, it never became mass-market enough. Because most people aren't really into the shady shit. Everyone might google for 2 girls 1 receptacle once for kicks, but it's not what most people want to see all day. Without the algorithm, it dies in user sub and most people don't even see it.
Usenet collapsed under the weight of spam and trolls. People tried to keep it going with some bolted on moderation tools but they never worked very well and eventually people moved on to more moderated platforms.
Even if you remove alt.binaries the rest of the Usenet had a massive spam problem that was never fully solved. Once a community grows large enough you can't get around the need for moderation, it takes far too few bad faith actors to increase the noise level beyond the point that the average person can tolerate. It doesn't take long for the quality people to leave in search of a less noisy venue.
Then you watch them twist themselves into pretzels with things like Blizzard's Blitzchung fiasco. Or the NBA's position on political issues around China.
Just the same what happened to 4chan and its more shady copycats: it's going to be immediately overrun by far-right extremism, misogyny, gore, violence and a lot of pedophiles.
> More honest and real world feel?
When I go onto the city plaza and shout a Hitler salute or that women belong in the kitchen, I'm going to be beat up or arrested. On a "censorship" or rather moderation-free platform, there are no mechanisms to enforce social norms and laws.
If we accept the premise that individuals cannot be trusted with information, where does that lead us?
There will always be problems in society. Taking a narrow view of exceptional circumstances, characterizing it as dangerous or "an emergency" ignores the larger picture. Given a chance for rational, open dialog, people equipped to do so can come to conclusions based upon reason. It is the natural course of the dissemination of information.
I remember when the rallying cry of the hacker movement was: "Information wants to be free"
Somewhere along the line we've supplanted that with gatekeeping and walled gardens. Cynics will observe that there is no gatekeeping without walled gardens. Therefore, if there was a motive for censorship and gatekeeping, walled gardens satiated the need.
Can we say that there was not a pre-existing structure for censorship?
The Internet may have temporarily disrupted censorship for some, but it has been a case of solve et coagula. Dissolve and reform. Where before there was a limited conduit of information via mainstream presses and televised talking heads, there is now a curated garden of content. Simulated peer groups share their views. Those that step outside of the prescribed narrative can be removed. Thus the individual need not solely trust their taking head, they can look to their peers and fulfill their desire to conform to social norms.
You ask "What if it [insert-platform] wasn't censored?". As a cynic I must conclude that there would be no point to these platforms without censorship. They either wouldn't be created, or an overriding need to censor them would naturally arise. Censorship is the feature.
Thirdly, media firms are conducting sensorship under false pretences. So there are at least 3 degrees of separation between "you cant arbitrarily sensor invonvenient speech" and "everything turns into 4chan/b"
In both censorship and moderation, there is an authority within some platform with some autonomy (like a country or a social network or house owners meeting etc) which decides which information is acceptable and which is not.
About degrees of separation: I agree, I just did a bit overdramatic illustration of outcomes.
Nope, it'd be a shithole of the worst of the internet; advertisers would stay well away, ISPs would ban it, and it would quickly go away.
Nobody wants "true" freedom. I mean Reddit tried to be a bastion of free speech and had to rein it wayyy back in, first with hate subreddits, then more recently delisting NSFW subreddits, making them much harder to discover - instead of creating filters or adding additional ways to specify why something is not safe for work.
Parler likes to pretend it's a bastion of free speech, but it actively bans any LGBTQ+ content and had to start moderating or be deplatformed by the likes of Apple, Google, and their hosting party.
Reddit was much better in the past.
But you do still need to solve the monetization issue as the site scales. Paying for accounts/to get rid of ads like old SA?
Distributed technologies are the solution to this.
Without this I doubt Reddit would have progressed much from its early programmer audience. It’s not accidental they took a light touch and let communities self moderate in the beginning.
I've had a couple of accounts banned from social media (one on Twitter, one on YouTube). In both cases, I had no idea what policy I had supposedly violated until after I appealed, which is less transparent than a Soviet show trial. In the case of YouTube, the appeal itself got stuck in limbo, and someone at Google briefly locked my main account (rather than the "brand account" sub-account associated with the channel). The thought of having all email since 2004, my family's TV service and my domain names all ripped away from me for arbitrary, capricious and clumsy enforcement of vague policies was like an ice bath.
I've migrated most of my stuff away from Google now, or at least have accounts I don't care about losing.
https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/u-s-senator-alex-padill...
How about a completely law-free society?
Tell me, in what other system of human interaction is a total lack of rules and regulations ever the optimal?
What would be more real about it?
>@YouTube CEO @SusanWojcicki has been at the forefront of fighting hate speech and misinformation online. She’ll be honored at this year’s Free Expression Awards.
https://twitter.com/1stforall/status/1378505352715571206?lan...
It is possible to agree with the right of a private company to control their own platform how they see fit, while disagreeing with the choices they make.
That said, there are cases where platforms have censored content at the behest of government officials. In these cases it is alleged that 1st amendment rights are violated and platforms are acting as agents of the government.
>These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies.
>The document shows that California state officials contacted YouTube directly to remove the video on September 24, 2020, and that YouTube seemed to respond by deleting the video on September 27, 2020
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ca-big-tech-biden-cen...
These instances were uncovered by FOIA requests to the US government. Unfortunately, the CCP does not honor such requests.
Information wants to be free. Privacy is equally important.
This allows each user to tailor their experience as they feel comfortable. Outraged communities can have their moderated bubbles. Those open to alternative viewpoints are free to peruse an unmoderated stream.
Centralized : Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
People who have disappeared can't exactly be harassed as a result of a YouTube video...
I doubt they would take down pictures of the Jan rioters just because PII.
If that’s not the case, I will admit they are being pedantically consistent but socially irresponsible for erasing evidence of systemic and illegal harassment and imprisonment of their own people.
The whole Kharagpur area was a Maoist hotbed, and I believe still is to lesser extend to this day.
A lot of German Marxists were rich idle intellectuals, as were original Russian commies, the kids of spoiled Russian boheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want explanation as to why, there's many years worth at these links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
We are truly living in the future
But it's not only Google at fault here, it's the voter that allowed government to push such censorship laws upon Google.
I had thought they "just knew" what content to prohibit based on where the political winds were blowing, but maybe it was more coordinated.
Centralized censorship platforms are an existential threat to a free society, an accident waiting to happen.
What is the value of these videos since we can't do anything with China anyway?
I wish it were so that everyone knew that "Communism is a tortuous system," but it unfortunately does not seem to be the case anymore. People who were born and never lived in a world with the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall are now voting age, and they don't have an aversion to communism. Even before the Soviet Union fell, a lot of people in the west were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Fortunately we had people like Solzhenitsyn who documented how bad it was. Atajurt and the Uigher witnesses are giving us what may become our generation's equivalent of "In the First Circle."
Surely for a company which prides itself in having AI which can determine emotions, do natural language analysis etc, this is pathetic.