But it is hypocritical to invoke the first amendment as a defense of private censorship when "bad" things are removed, then completely forget that defense when complaining about "good" things being removed.
Well, if the principle is "don't lie", then "expose people who lie" doesn't violate the principle. It remains to be seen, however, whether Google actually has any principles other than making money.
Conspiracy theories are the bane of any society. But, the problem is often one does not know in advance if a conspiracy theory is just a crackpot theory or there is something to it. To wit: SARS-CoV-2 lab origin. mRNA vaccine heart inflammation. Both were denounced as conspiracy theories by the CDC and flagged by YT (and other social media) the CDC has revered on both examples.
I agree with all of that. And there's a big difference between e.g. "dismissing lab leak out of hand is wrong because there's a lot of circumstantial evidence of government suppression and coverup", which many people currently say based on available evidence, and "this is definitely a Chinese bioweapons program" which many people also currently say without any factual evidence whatsoever. I worry a lot about people and organizations who lump them together, but I'm fine with silencing the latter.
The CDC is a political organization controlled by the executive branch that happens to be staffed partly with people who call themselves scientists[0]. The unwavering faith that people put into political organizations is its own tragic issue.
[0] - In the same way that many programmers are terrible at being programmers, many scientists are terrible at being scientists.
The only difference is that you personally believe the evidence to be less strong than others… there’s no fundamental difference, just difference of opinion.
If a socialist candidate is assassinated in South America and someone on YouTube says “this was the American imperialist regimes doing” without evidence, I wouldn’t assume they are right, but I’d see it as an opinion based on historical evidence that I’d hate to see censored.
This applies even if someone claims it was aliens!
> The only difference is that you personally believe the evidence to be less strong than others… there’s no fundamental difference, just difference of opinion.
The differences are in the type of claim being made and in whether the reasons given are real or made up and in whether the reasons actually support the claim and in the systemic harm caused by being wrong. All of those differences matter.
I never made a claim they had more or less evidence, you ignore the South America example entirely which is that it’s ok to have circumspect evidence but extrapolate based on priors.
There’s no place for silencing opinions, and those are opinions that all have different levels of evidence. That you tend to weigh certain evidence differently is your own stance, not objective fact.
To try again, let’s say someone is a “body language expert”. I don’t really believe that to a large degree, but fine. They post a YouTube clip showing the Chinese gov denying the lab leak and say “oh man I can tell based on X, Y, and Z their body language is a total giveaway that this was intentional!”
Again, I don’t believe it. But it doesn’t matter. Whether they think it’s aliens because they saw some cloud trails or tea leaves or whatever, it’s all a matter of degree.
The lab leak was shut down under the same premises. “Our” evidence is strong, and “their” evidence is conspiracy theory. Except it wasn’t. So I don’t trust anyone, you included, to be the decider of valid evidence. I’ll sort through it myself.
> If a socialist candidate is assassinated in South America and someone on YouTube says “this was the American imperialist regimes doing” without evidence, I wouldn’t assume they are right, but I’d see it as an opinion
You are conflating "opinion" with "unsupported statement of fact", "assumption", and "guess". Assumption and conclusion are not synonyms, but your statement here treats them as though they are.
"Murder is wrong" is an opinion, because it's a compressed substitute for an expansive syllogistic trail that starts from some initial premises that are purely personal and subjective about the value and nature of life and being and leads to the conclusion. You reach a moral ruling starting from an instinctive feeling. Expressing that feeling itself is not an opinion, but concluding a moral position from that feeling is. "I like the taste of this cheese" is a factual observation about the self that is not an opinion, because while it observes something personal it itself is not subjectively based on an initial position. You either like the taste of this cheese or you don't. Statements about the cause of things that happen in the world are either true or false, not opinions. There's a reason for the old saw that opinions can't be wrong. Subjectivity is the critical element that makes them opinions in the first place. People tend to lose or forget that distinction or insert subjectivity where none exists, but that's an error which disrupts effective communication and muddies thought.
I never conflated opinion, everything is opinion there are just more or less circumstantial evidences, and it varies widely based on your priors and worldview. I just don’t think YouTube should be silencing them.
If we have to have some private unelected board at YouTube deciding where opinion ends and fact begins, that’s dystopia. People state opinions as facts all the time. “It was the United States gov” is an opinion it’s just a colloquial American thing to say it in that style. Their real belief may be that it’s actually only 90% probable, and their threshold for wording it as certain is lower than yours.
Only a fool listens to a strongly stated opinion, even when it’s worded as though it’s a fact, and isn’t skeptical. If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over. I don’t want that.
I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe, and it seems people who don’t get real worried that their “better” opinions will drown out. I don’t think so. And I’ve seen the people with the right opinions be wrong too often lately to ever trust them.
> Only a fool listens to a strongly stated opinion, even when it’s worded as though it’s a fact, and not be skeptic.
I think I have bad news for you about the world, then.
> If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over.
What is your plan for a society like the one we currently live in that appears to be mostly greatest fools?
> I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe
According to polling, in the US the average joe claims that God directly created humans in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years and that evolution is, to put a common phrase in their mouths, "fake news". https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...
Feel whatever you want about the benefit of religion, that belief is based on something entirely extraneous to evidence.
Exactly. As I had edited in my last comment before I saw your reply, you have a huge lack of faith in the intelligence of others (that, or a big ego).
Believing in religion got humans a lot further due to in-group cooperation. Their exact beliefs may look wrong, but the way it makes them act is more right than atheism or anything else.
In your world talking about any religion would be banned, and what a sad world that’d be.
I’m not fine with silencing either of them, even the people who say it was “definitely” a state bioweapons programme.
However there are a third group that knowingly misrepresent and fabricate evidence to promote conspiracy theories. Screw those guys. They hide under the cover of legitimate opinion, but no platform should be expected to tolerate being used to propagate that sort of crap.
Compounding the problem is that much of the knowledge we hold today was once considered outlandish and false... often with great conviction from those in trusted positions of power. Plate tectonics, doctors being required to wash hands, babies cannot feel pain and don't require anesthesia, and so much more. This doesn't mean all fringe theories are true, of course, but I do caution people in thinking that our current understanding is unequivocally correct just because there is a scientific consensus.
> Conspiracy theories are the bane of any society.
Can you provide some examples of this? I'm having a hard time understanding how or why conspiracy theories are so problematic.
Have they always been problematic? I would love to hear some historical conspiracy theories and their deleterious effects.
Conspiracy theories are a subset of false beliefs. (Well, except where there actually is a real conspiracy.) The target need not have actual power - as long as the belief involves some form of "people are colluding secretly" (aka "conspiring"), it's a conspiracy theory.
Did YT or anyone else ban comments or posts about the lab leak theory or vaccine heart inflammation? Sure people initially dismissed it but the proponents of those theories seem to have not only kept talking but have presented enough credible evidence to change minds about dismissing their theories out of hand. And it seemed to hit a tipping point almost overnight. One day the lab leak was nonsense and the next it was put forth as a possibility worth considering. Isn’t that a sign that things are working?
Don’t get me wrong, it absolutely sucks to feel “silenced” and I’m sure it sucks even more to feel silenced when you are indeed correct or at least aren’t as dead wrong as others claimed. But isn’t the crux of the free speech “marketplace of ideas” that the “good” ideas will find listeners and gain traction anyway? Even when “everyone” initially disagrees or thinks you’re crazy.
Because that’s free speech, too. You have a right to say things even if they sound kind of crazy and I have a right to say “hey, that sounds crazy!”
Also if you scroll down about 40% of the way here: https://m.facebook.com/help/230764881494641/ you will see that claiming that the vaccine has negative effects is still a bannable offense.
How come the folks who keep bringing this up don't also mention that the original "censored" claims were that the virus was both engineered and intentionally leaked?
This is the first major article about covid lab release dating to Jan of 2020. It was also the first article to be censored. Doesn't mention either of those.
> the real reason behind the viral spread is because a weaponized version of the coronavirus was released by Wuhan's Institute of Virology (accidentally or not)
Literally claims it's a manmade weapon released intentionally in the first paragraph.
Edit: it seems pretty obvious that article was banned because it's an unsubstantiated witch-hunt. It even gives the guy's number and urges the reader to harass him. Fwiw "they were just asking questions!" is not a valid argument.
Lies as they are online are not absolutes, just look at fact-checking. Tons of things can be misinterpreted (whether intentionally or not) as a lie or truth depending on your leaning even by "authoritative" fact checkers.
Here is a concrete example from NBC[0]: their fact-checkers say Trump's statement about Clinton "acid-washing" her email server was a lie, because her team actually just "used an app called BleachBit".
The funniest of these I saw what a Satire site getting a suspension because their satirical take wasn't literally true. That's one of the main tools of satire.
It's quite common, almost to the point of universality, that employees of a company have motivations that aren't 100% inline with those of the company. Google might care about profit above all else but many of its employees care about using the power of Google to advance their own interests rather than maximizing Google's profits.
Google is also getting rid of all privacy and doing research into robots and AI that will patrol the human race in the near future. They are the backbone for a future where humans are constantly watched.
...what did they even lose by this? What's the point of right wing watch when more or less the entire news culture constantly puts focus on right wing conspiracies to debunk them, to the point of probably giving them more visibility than they rightly should get.
If anything they could probably point out and say "hey, we are balanced!" in the same way reddit could by banning chapotraphouse after thedonald, but people who are on that site still know which way the wind blows.
I hope RWW is able to continue on after this. They do important work.
This exposes what everyone already knows. YouTube (Google... err... Alphabet) doesn't really have a problem with the conspiracy theories and right wing propaganda. They just don't want the drama. Nutjobs watch for hours and apparently click on advertisements.
Those who spread and consume conspiracy theories have one thing in abundance a lot of people don't: time. They can flag whatever they don't like as offensive or as violating DMCA or whatever third thing. Not just once, not just twice, but all day.
And showing a video of someone taking a shit on a sidewalk to show how people are making videos of shitting on the sidewalk is still showing someone taking a shit on the sidewalk. It falls in that realm of "Well, technically, it's against the rules to show people shitting on the sidewalk."
So even if they are showing the content to then explain why that content is wrong or bad, they're still technically showing the content.
I'd wager that Right Wing Watch gets far more flags and reports than the content creators they show so they can debunk them. And if you're only dealing with reports and flags in a "squeaky wheel gets the grease" kind of way, it'll be a long while before you get to the source, because the fanbase of the source will be overwhelming you with reports and flags on channels with critical content showing the offending content as a demonstration of why it is offensive.
HN prevented me from responding because of the downvote brigade.
Anyway the analogy isn't a good match. Shitting on the sidewalk is obscenity, there's no reason to reproduce it without censoring it when discussing it. That's not true of quoting conspiracy theories and propaganda when criticizing it. Context matters greatly.
I was just using it as an easy example of something we should all agree is disagreeable without touching anything even remotely resembling a real issue.
Any site that engages in censorship can never serve as a trusted news source.
The onus is always on the reader to engage in critical thinking. You should be able to read "misinformation" and easily discern it as such. You should also be able to read "information" and easily discern as "misinformation" as well as the ability to read "misinformation" and discern it to be factually consistent and potentially correct.
Do not trust others where your own brain is needed to figure shit out.
I understand your perspective, but your brain is an unreliable editor.
I agree that censorship is bad, and that also we have entered an era where private organizations own platforms where potentially they should not be allowed editorial license because of scale.
This is quite naive. The fact is people have always been vulnerable to misinformation and someone will always exploit that, and that exploitation will hurt people.
Unfortunately what you describe as "easy" isn't for a lot of people. Spend anytime on Facebook and you will see clearly bogus stories racking up likes/comments and driving people nuts. That is the reality of the situation, and you saying what should be doesn't actually help make that reality true.
And to this I will add that neither you, nor I, nor any other intelligent person, is immune to misinformation or disinformation. Knowledge and critical thinking make you more resilient to bullshit, but if you're fed enough of it, it's going to change how your brain is wired.
> You should be able to read "misinformation" and easily discern it as such.
I'm afraid this is equivalent to saying "You should be able to be offered high-sugar food, and avoid it to an appropriate degree." This may be true in the moral sense, but practically speaking most people will fail this test.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting the answer is censorship, but just pointing out that large numbers of people cannot meaningfully deal with misinformation.
I think we have to trust the people to govern themselves in a democracy even if they can’t deal with it properly, and that applies to misinformation. The problem has always been that what one person considers misinformation is just something the other hasn’t learned yet. There is no reason to censor misinformation that is already known to be wrong. Also there is no reason to censor truth. We are left with only censoring gray areas where the populist does not have a clear opinion which you don’t want to censor because it’s not clear if it is misinformation and needs to be discussed. The answer is always don’t censor information. Then beyond misinformation we have lying which you do want to censor. News is considered to be the truth and therefore any news outlet presenting misinformation must be censored or sued. YouTube creators and the internet itself used to be assumed to be filled with bad information. Growing up we couldn’t use an internet source in your paper, especially not Wikipedia which was known to be a bad source. It’s gradually earned respect over time but that respect on Wikipedia really only should apply to undisputed topics. You know that little Twitter message that says “this statement is disputed,” well that should be on every single YouTube video, Wikipedia post and more, UNLESS they specially claim that is true, and that should set them up for lawsuits and more. There is no reason “misinformation” should be censored online.. the public either needs to have education to re-learn that I’m the internet is full of bad information, or every single video and post needs to clearly be marked “we don’t claim accuracy to any facts in this (insert format here)” until people do re-learn this.
I agree, but "critical thinking" itself needs to be monitored or the methods of fact checking and narrative questioning can become weaponized and pervert it into conspiracy. Danah Boyd has some decent talks about this phenomenon. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-03-07-danah-boyd-how-criti...
No, "monitored" critical thinking is not critical thinking by definition. And no, just because something implies nefarious acts by people in power doesn't mean it's wrong. Conspiracies do exist, the government has and can do evil things. See Operation Gladio, Project MKUltra and Operation Northwoods as examples.
YouTube doesn't "report" anything. They host videos that other people create. Nothing there is necessarily "endorsed" by YouTube, and there's not even an implied agreement to only upload newsworthy or even good-faith or non-invented videos to the platform. You should only trust uploads from actual news organizations.
edit: And you should not put blind trust in any "news" organization either. Every observation deserves your full cognition to figure out what is plausible, consistent, implausible, inconsistent, let alone "true" or "false".
YouTube doesn't endorse things that are in violation of their TOS, regardless of someone's ability to evade a censor for whatever reason.
And yeah, sure, everything should be judged on it's merits, however there's simply not enough time in the day to independently verify all facts. It's much easier and generally reliable to start with the mainstream news sources like NPR, who we can generally assume to be trustworthy.
This is a "no true scotsman" fallacy in which one can shift goalposts endlessly with any misinformation with "so and so wasn't really highly educated".
Give me concrete, well-researched, well-evidenced claims about the easy identification of misinformation, because it's so easy.
I do. I will publish them as soon as you publish the studies showing that people can rightly be trusted to limit the information others are allowed to present or consume.
> Mantyla noted, the deletion of the site’s channel erases a deep, years-long archive of video clips—effectively eliminating a resource for understanding and exposing right-wing extremism.
With some warning, I wonder if Aechive Team would have helped back it up to IA
Recently, I've just started relentlessly downloading any YouTube videos that I enjoy. I fear for the future of the platform, and the only way for me to reconcile that fear is to relentlessly archive everything I find interesting.
This is absolutely the correct approach to take. If there is content that you value, you need to personally archive a copy, because it may be gone for hundreds of reasons next time you try to access it.
They do tell you (broadly at a minimum) what the strike was for. RWW claims that two strikes were levied for videos in April, but give no details on what these strikes were for (details that they do know). It would provide more context on whether this is justified.
If RWW is posting content that otherwise would be barred from YouTube (e.g. hate speech, etc) -- effectively rehosting -- it makes sense that it would get strikes. e.g. If you started a "LiveLeak Watch" and reposted gruesome videos under the notion that it's a critique, that would get a ban too.
It's pretty straightforward: conspiracy videos generate a lot of views, which is ultimately profitable for youtube. Videos which point out that the conspiracy videos are garbage have the potential to adversely impact their astronomical view counts and by proxy their profitability. So of course youtube would ban accounts which attempt to undermine their revenue streams.
> Videos which point out that the conspiracy videos are garbage have the potential to adversely impact their astronomical view counts and by proxy their profitability.
Do they really though? Is there evidence that there are *any* effective strategies for reducing viewership of mind-rotting extremist content at scale?
I would actually disagree. Unless a video has gone specifically out of its way to say so, very often a big debunking video will cause a bump in the original video's views, which is sort of a win win for YT
Well, I've seen statistics (I don't remember where, sorry), suggesting that deplatforming Daesh worked pretty well.
It is my understanding that what the right wing is going through in 2021 is kinda what Muslims have gone through in 2016, with lots of outrage because some visible targets have been taken down, the malicious actors attempting to fan the outrage and get the entire community to protect the actual evil content, the feeling of being singled out for termination, etc.
Has anyone else noticed that most complaints like this about Youtube's moderation fail Hanlon's razor? I'm just not sure I believe these type of conspiracies that attribute specific and nefarious reasons for these moderation decisions.
It is natural to try to see patterns in the moderation, but I think the largest pattern is that there is little pattern. They instead have an job that is impossible to do at the scale they do it at the budget they do it at. They therefore make a lot of mistakes. They hate to admit these mistakes so they are constantly trying to defend the indefensible rather than admit that there is no way to have a uniform moderation policy that works on the hundreds of hours of video that are uploaded every minute.
> Has anyone else noticed that most complaints like this about Youtube's moderation fail Hanlon's razor?
Yes, and it drives me bonkers because everyone who makes these kinds of complains tend to like the narrative that YouTube is 100% hellbend on just being bad because Google Is Bad (tm)
Agreed. If this was a right-wing account taken down it'd feed into their liberal-run social media conspiracy, and there'd be an article about it on Fox New instead of the daily beast.
I'd be curious to know what the strikes were for, since they never discuss them. But non-political channels get burned by unfair strikes all the time, including on very old videos.
Another possibility is the use of targeted reporting by fans of those featured in videos.
“trying to defend the indefensible rather than admit that there is no way to have a uniform moderation policy”
This is the money shot right here. They can’t admit the impossibility because if they did they further open the door to the private platform versus town square debate (which doesn’t seem to have certain consequences either way… yet)
> Has anyone else noticed that most complaints like this about Youtube's moderation fail Hanlon's razor
In this case, they're putting profit over ethics leading to negative effects, so this one doesn't. Furthermore, Hanlon's razor is a false dichotomy: In this case the result is unethical yet neither malicious nor stupid.
I think you're misreading this. The real issue here is that Youtube does in fact have policies and algorithms in place to censor right-wing and "conspiracy" content, but it seems that now some left-wing orgs are upset to find that these same rules also apply to them. Dozens of popular conservative channels have been permanently banned over the last few years, including Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneaux, Nick Fuentes, as well as many others, but I'm guessing The Daily Beast or Right Wing Watch weren't complaining when that happened.
> Videos which point out that the conspiracy videos are garbage have the potential to adversely impact their astronomical view counts and by proxy their profitability.
How much overlap do you think there is between those who watch conspiracy videos and those who watch the videos that debunk them? I'd guess it's really small, probably <5% and possibly <1%—depending on how much Youtube's algorithm recommends the latter to the former. Actually, if they wanted to maximize view counts, they could tweak the algorithm and keep both videos, thus both keeping the gullible audience and driving outrage views from the skeptical audience.
Critical thinking is the best strategy.
Censorship is paternalistic, imperfect, often nefarious and in many subtle ways far worse than having an unreliable brain.
It is a nice sounding claim and I hope you're right. I consider myself a critical thinker, but I'm not sure it's leading to my being more correct or better informed about things.
It seems that the deluge of content available today guarantees that whatever view you're even mildly sympathetic toward will get reinforced, and then you are immediately placed on a slope toward the extremes (in terms of other recommended content).
One of the few antidotes I've seen to this has been the emergence of long-form podcasting where conversations are still allowed to meander, dwell on minor points, or become boring. It seems harder for people to shill for multiple uninterrupted hours at a time.
And yet if you rely on this as a source of information you can't pick very many topics to be informed about given the constraint of time.
As nice as that sounds, critical thinking is not an emergent property of networks of people. Information pollution is, and we need to start thinking about it in the same way we think about other kinds of pollution.
A little bit of garbage here and there is easy to deal with, and that's what critical thinking is for. But given enough garbage, your normal functions (and that of the network you're a part of) will be impaired.
You are what you eat, and your brain is what it reads. Feed it enough garbage, and no amount of critical thinking will save you.
If your goal is to have a "stable" system that converges towards truth, stability, consensus, and generally progresses over time, you need to have some sort of mechanism to regulate garbage.
When people suggest "critical thinking" as a solution to high-volume and high-visibility disinformation, my guess is they think the problem I'm trying to solve is: "There's so much disinformation, and I just don't know what to think!" when actually the problem is "There's so much disinformation, and my fellow countrymen are acting on it in ways that cause measurable harm to me and to society at large."
It's a complex topic. I'm not suggesting that there's an easy answer and I'm not here to sing the praises of censorship, but I find it frustrating to see "think critically" proposed as if it's the simple, obvious solution over and over again.
I think at least on some level, you might be right that there's a misunderstanding between the individual-level problem description and the system-level problem description.
Great point! Just one quick question: how do you decide what is “garbage”?
Would it be heliocentric models of the solar system? What about hand washing as a way to prevent disease? Perhaps a bit more recently the sars-cov-2 lab leak theory?
Not everything is black and white. Some things are, and that is what I'm talking about.
It's not for me to decide which politician has the best or most honest character (though I'll give you my opinion if asked). But if you do a math exam wrong, you're going to score garbage grades. There are some things in life which for all practical purposes are clear cut.
I'll take your examples.
1. Heliocentric model: Garbage.
2. Hand washing: Not garbage.
3. SARS-CoV-2 lab leak theory: Not garbage.
Obviously the distinction between garbage and not-garbage is not just about the topic, it's about the actual information. For example, it's important to talk about the heliocentric model because it gives us perspective on the current state of human knowledge and it humbles us in the face of uncertainty é what we don't (yet) know. There's great pedagogical or even archival value in this. We could write a book about this, but I hope one example makes the point.
If you ask me, and I'm a biochemist, about the third, I will say that I believe it to be less likely than natural occurrence, and I'd worry about how productive the question was. But it doesn't mean it's pollution. I can have an opinion about something, even a strong one, and still defend your right to express contrary or different ideas. I know this skill seems to be in short supply these years, but it's not that difficult really.
Because the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the Sun is not in the "centre" (whatever that means) of the universe. That idea, as originally conceived, is just incorrect.
As you get older, your ability to think critically declines. If it was ever present. Even someone very sharp can be tricked. You’re talking about a principle, not the reality of our society.
If I remember right it was an explanation for why so many elderly folks fall for scams. Their ability to parse grifters declines, literally a part of the brain related to trust declines as we get much older. Here is some discussion in Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-older-adults-...
Every problem has a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong.
Humans are prone to fall for self-reinforcing belief loops like conspiracy theories. They subvert the mechanism of critical thinking a bit like a prion will misfold proteins and cause all sort of issues.
Excuse me if I doubt they were purely honest good actors themselves. The article and name of the “watchdog” have so much partisan vitriol baked in it’s impossible for me to assume they were much better than their targets.
I have to admit I laughed… I read your message then went go to check the name. “Right Wing Watch”. If anything your message contains more vitriol than their name does, are you sure you’re not projecting?
FTA: “And then they found some video from eight years ago, that they flagged, took that down, and that was our third strike,” he explained. “And they took down our entire account.”
That is not like the take down algorithm is being triggered by something you just posted, that sounds just like someone deciding to look in your garbage bins to find anything to be used against you. It stinks a lot, and I don't mean the garbage.
" ... the deletion of the site’s channel erases a deep, years-long archive of video clips—effectively eliminating a resource for understanding and exposing right-wing extremism."
Well, that one is 100% their fault. Never, ever, ever, rely on any other service for keeping data other than your own backups. Especially when the party involved in keeping your data is also the same one who can wipe it from existence if anyone with deep enough pockets or connections says so.
> While Right Wing Watch had essentially moved away from regularly posting its videos to YouTube over the past year, as Mantyla noted, the deletion of the site’s channel erases a deep, years-long archive of video clips—effectively eliminating a resource for understanding and exposing right-wing extremism.
Nothing in here says "we lost our only copies of the videos", just that the resource is now gone from the Internet, and that users currently can't get at it.
What prevents them from uploading the videos to a different service like Vimeo, Odysee, Archive.org etc. then?
They could create a new YT account with the sole purpose of sending people to a video hosted elsewhere. A bit cumbersome, but better than nothing, and would force YT to prohibit links in YT descriptions, which would be anti-competitive.
For those that haven't seen a RWW video, they don't add commentary to their video content, they simply memorialize extremist right wing messages from politicians and talking heads.
That's the point being made here: they are being banned not for copyright reasons (e.g. their act of re-uploading clips) but for the content in those clips. That is, YouTube is banning them for posting (exclusively right wing) extremist content, which they are posting specifically to expose. People who don't watch the handful of national right wing news outlets or the hundreds of local stations likely won't otherwise know what half of the country is being fed daily.
Why would it be a double standard for "right wing watch" to not repost left wing content?
(EDIT: For the record I am all for a "left wing watch" that only reposts influencial left-wing's voices that the posters believes violates terms of service on the website they post on. I just don't understand why "right wing watch" should be expected to do so, or why it's a double standard if they don't.)
I mean no, you're not going to get banned for posting support for universal healthcare, ending the drug war, ending for-profit prisons, etc even though these are extreme left positions in current US politics.
If you post misinformation telling people that it's illegal to charge for healthcare and that you can just throw out any medical bills you receive without recourse, or that drug laws are unconstitutional so you can't actually go to jail for them, or that private prisons don't count so you are allowed to break out of them, well yeah you might get banned!
The one extreme position, among others, is that you are unrestrained by laws. Liberals, Marxists, fascists, jihadis, the drug cartel, and criminals, all have that in common. Win, do nothing but print money to line your own pockets. Loose, double the murder rate, burn cities, work with your Marxist friends to unleash a bioweapon on the world that kills millions, one of the worse mass murders in history.
I'm banning you because I don't like you. Go away. If I liked you, you could do or say whatever you want. Anything. But I don't like you so you're banned. That's the honest reason. They don't say it because bailout time is coming up again and they don't want the Clara Petacci treatment.
>you're not going to get banned for posting support for universal healthcare, ending the drug war, ending for-profit prisons, etc even though these are extreme left positions in current US politics
Close to 2/3rds of the American public supports universal healthcare and ending the drug war. Therefore they can't by definition be extreme left positions.
"63% of U.S. adults say the government has the responsibility to provide health care coverage for all"
It's not that they are extreme left positions, it's that that other 35% thinks that universal healthcare, or abortion, or whatever === Stalinism and will paint moderate views as if they are extremism when disingenuously asking "why isn't the extreme left content taken down".
This is an incredibly dishonest reply. No one thinks those are extreme anymore. Most of those made it to the mainstream democratic platform in the last primaries.
If you can't figure out where the leftist extremism is, you aren't looking hard enough, or you are being willfully ignorant.
The point is that the right likes to paint those positions as dangerous extreme left ideas, and a lot of the time when someone says "but what about the extreme left" they are talking about those, and trying to make the argument that they're not being taken down - so obviously white supremacists and covid conspiracy theorists deserve to be on youtube too.
Those are pretty moderate left positions. If you want extreme left, you need to go out into the wilderness where people want to outright abolish money and overthrow capitalism.
Maybe libertarians like the idea, I don't know, but it's one of the core properties of idealized communism. From Wikipedia (emph added):
> Communism ... is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is ... a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of ... money.
If they don't add commentary, then it's literally just a compilation of videos that they think YouTube should cancel, so it's no surprise that YouTube would cancel them.
Hughes v. Benjamin determined that Benjamin's (Sargon of Akkad, anti-feminist youtuber) reposting of this type was fair use, in fact he was even awarded fees. This a U.S. district court decision wrt federal law so YMMV.
Except YouTube (temporarily) banned them for community guidelines violations, not copyright violations. So the Hughes v. Benjamin decisions isn't relevant.
You are absolutely correct, his video did not have any added audio commentary or basically anything and he won his case, his video was just sections copied directly from the source creating a compilation of the original video.
In this case as I understand it, the content being uploaded is extremist content (in their eyes) explicitly being uploaded to highlight its extremism (in their eyes), the difference between the two situations being that Sargon’s video didn’t contain extremist content that YouTube wouldn’t want on their platform.
RWW is posting content they essentially want to be removed. They got what they wanted, the content was removed. In a sense they succeeded in what they set out to do.
I wish their channel be reinstated, but this situation looks to be slightly different from Benjamin’s unless more details come out.
It seems like YouTube messed up and is treating them harshly, but for all we know this type of content is now no longer allowed on the platform due to policy change.
Ah, thanks for the context - when I saw the headline, I thought that cancel culture had finally caught up to left-leaning sources, but apparently it's just a left-leaning source accidentally getting caught up in the right-wing cancellation net.
I literally cannot think of any more correct political mission for our media to pursue than holding politicians accountable using their own words. It's not "cancelation" when people hear something a politician said and vote them out of office, we just call it voting.
I never understood the idea of "right-wing conspiracies". Those conspiracies used to be "left-wing" less than a decade ago. Big pharma, Iraq WMDs, the Bilderberg, big banks, 9/11, etc.
The only thing they have in common is that they are all anti-establishment at core. It seems to me that the Left, who used to be anti-establishment, has now become what it once fought.
Nope we are still here. Look at the anti-war movement. Full of left wing veterans like myself who are anti-establishment. Its just the democrats who changed. The people who actually were left, didnt. Of course America doesn't have a good basis of what left wing is.
Good on you for sticking to your principles. In my opinion the left and and the right doesn't mean much outside of French politics over the 18th and 19th century. A lot of what was considered left wing is now right wing and vice versa. Now it's more about tribes than principles.
Biden is marching us to war with Iran, the very thing people were terrified Trump would do just months ago, and people are cheering him on now. The flip in news reporting and how top Democrats react to what is nearly the same actions is insane.
I think left leaning people see like 90% of elected Democrats, CNN watchers, & people calling themselves "liberal" as the left-most edge of the right wing. "Left leaning" TV networks & Democrat leadership seem to try very hard to never even entertain leftist ideas like universal healthcare, right to housing, etc. They aren't okay with Biden because he's on the left, they're okay with him because he's close enough to center-right IMO.
Too bad you can't just pull a Matrix and upload all those lessons on a quick floppy disk as opposed to 18 years of school (that might be diluted content through political powers).
I know nothing about bitchute, but I am skeptical of the Wikipedia article you cite.
This Wikipedia article excerpt seems like editorial, not information. It might be 100% accurate but the spin is so blatant that I don’t trust Wikipedia on this.
Similarly, I wouldn’t trust a Wikipedia article about Adolf Hitler if it began “Hitler was one of the most evil men of the 20th century”. Although I believe that statement to be true, there’s too much editorial bias.
I want an encyclopedia to tell me unbiased facts and let ME make the moral conclusions.
“Conspiracy theories” and “right wing” are labels of opinion, not fact, these days. They don’t inform, they label.
The claims you mention are backed by eight (8) sources.
Additionally, there has been extended discussion on the Wikipedia talk page for this article about this exact "neutrality" issue. You should have a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BitChute
So what though? There is no shortage on the internet of left wing outlets that consider any non-hard-left opinion to be "conspiracy theories" and "far right hate", and any website that doesn't censor conservatives to be guilty by association. They could find 20 or 30 such sources, but that is meaningless and tells us nothing. Especially in the modern era where the term "conspiracy theory" has become a largely meaningless insult, due to the prevalence of actual conspiracies.
I took a look just now to see what you mean. Not surprisingly, a lot of the videos are the sort of things YouTube would ban, but that doesn't automatically mean they are wrong, bad or "FUD", which is again a kind of meaningless insult given that a lot of what official sources claim about COVID is specifically designed to create fear, by their own admission! See e.g. the the SAGE SPI-B subcommittee and their reports.
I don't see all the same videos you do, but here are some titles that should cause us to think twice before writing off this site as "far right":
1. "Pfizer whistleblower exposes the corrupt and unethical company for what they really are" - although BitChute seems mostly to be conservative videos, this one could easily be a headline found in the Guardian.
2. "NSA whistleblower demonstrates Biden administration spying on political opponent's communications" - haven't watched it so have no idea if it's true, but this is pretty much the core theme of the Snowden revelations which, again, was spearheaded by the Guardian just a decade ago. This is hardly "far right" or "hate".
3. "Fine print in Biden's tax proposal will have middle class Americans fuming". This sounds like a bog standard centre-right reaction to tax changes. Very much not far right or hate.
4. "Remembering dogs in warfare on memorial day", sounds quite nice actually.
5. "Journalism jobs disappeared faster than coal miners, according to Dpt of Labor" - sounds again like something the left would care about.
I took a look at the "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD" video to see what it was about. It turns out to be some guy getting agitated because (so he says) he shared a video of a doctor on Facebook who treated people with COVID talking about ways the doctor (claims he) helped save them, and was banned from Facebook as a result. From this event the speaker takes a large leap and infers that because discussion of saving people with COVID is banned, "they want to kill you". You can argue that this is a ridiculous inference, but frankly it's inevitable people will look for explanations of otherwise apparently inexplicable events, like people being banned for hosting doctors talking about doctor-ing, and some of those explanations will be extreme.
Is this so different to YouTube? I just did a quick search and found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLpW76qpHUU titled "WHY I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS", which consists of some dude exhorting violence against them. The YT front page doesn't show these sorts of videos because it's normally filled with pop content or very personalized stuff. BitChute has way less content and is a refuge for people who get banned from other platforms, so, no surprise that stuff is more visible.
Finally, BitChute is currently advertising at the top of their site a new content policy:
Their previous policy on prohibited hate speech said: "There should be a reasonable probability that the content would succeed in inciting actual action against the target, recognizing that such causation should be rather direct." This is a reasonable policy! But the UK government forced them to remove this requirement because a reasonable probability that something will happen is, apparently, not a requirement to be hate speech in the UK. Same for "inciting violence". So they've now updated their policies to not even require direct incitement. Ironically the YouTube "I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS" video would be banned under both BitChute's new and old policy because it directly incites people to violence. This is not the document of some far right extr...
I've attempted this several times when I noticed blatant NPOV violations or political propaganda in articles on the most diverse subjects. The result tends to be swift, the edits are reverted without any clear explanation. When I make edits I tend to add a section to the "Talk" page inviting other editors to discuss the proposed change and - after making the edit - add a note to the change calling for a discussion instead of a reversion. The discussion tends to be limited to "this is not a NPOV violation" or "there are sources" where the former is clearly untrue and the latter tend to be circular references to articles in activist publications. As it stands Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything which involves politics - which is getting close to being just about everything now that even mathematics is getting challenged by critical theorists. This is a classical example of the tragedy of the commons with political activists abusing the platform for their own purposes without taking into account whether this abuse weakens the platform - which it clearly does.
> Earlier Monday, Right Wing Watch said it had received a notice of a permanent ban related to rules violations in the video clips that it posts, which often show examples of alleged hate speech, conspiracy theories and other prohibited content.
So it sounds like that's the type of hosting provider they might want.
some of these censor heavily too and their audience is tiny compared to you tube. Also, not as good usability or streaming. YouTube is unmatched in terms of audience and user interface. It's like competitors cannot even come close in terms of making something that works as well as YouTube. Look at Microsoft and Bing...15 years later despite billions in R&D it still sucks. DuckDuckGo offers privacy but the results are still worse than Google. It's just so hard to overcome this.
It's very probable that no one does. YouTube is under no obligation (at least from a legal or even policy perspective) to disclose it, and it's possible that it was just marked as "bad" and taken down.
Presumably the violations are in the original videos that RWW posts. It's not enough for Youtube's current processes to post them under a different context that (hopefully) makes it clear that they're false; presumably Youtube's concern is that they're indistinguishable from the originals.
corporations which rely on advertising for revenue are (beyond a certain size) incompatible custodians of platforms that offer reasonable freedom of expression unless bound to do so by law.
– debate!
(edit: That's a a pretty clumsy and cumbersome sentence but I've gotten my point across I hope.)
As an extremist on many axis, I object to the use of extremist as a pejorative. I support people and ideas that while extreme, seem right to me. Or even extremely right. I don't support favoring moderate ideas that are right but less right than more extreme versions. If someone isn't extreme about anything, I suspect that they don't think for themselves. To me, not-at-all-an-extremist is mild pejorative.
If you don't like it because the politics are wrong, fine, explain that. If you don't like it because the politics are extreme, you haven't yet described why I shouldn't like it.
Extremism is used as pejorative because part of its definition is not wanting to take part in any kind of meritocratic discussion and accepting your being outnumbered gives you right to use extreme measures to be heard and/or prove your point.
Extremist movements tend to be composed from people that do not listen, do not want to understand the other side and are interested only in furthering their own views. Further, frequently more moderate people (as in being more open to discussion or not accepting extreme measures being used) are being ejected from extremist movements to preserve their extremist nature. This process of polarization is a contest on who can be even more extreme and makes further resolution of the difference in views even more difficult.
I object to the idea of extremism.
Resolution of any problem requires that people cooperate and extremism thrives on prolonging the problem rather than seeking resolution.
(edit: hint, maybe you meant to use word "radical" rather than "extremist". Radical is an extremist sans extreme methods)
> After being accused of extremism, Martin Luther King Jr. criticized the mainstream usage of the term in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love…Was not Amos an extremist for justice…Was not Martin Luther an extremist…So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?"
I think you can see how 'extremism' has been used as pejorative in order to dismiss radicalism.
As the Wikipedia entry points out: "When in conflict, the activities of members of low power groups tend to be viewed as more extreme than similar activities committed by members of groups advocating the status quo."
Viewed through that lens, if the status quo isn't meritocratic, then doesn't your definition imply extremists actually do have "the right to use extreme measures to be heard and/or prove [their] point"?
Quoting Letter From A Birmingham Jail:
"If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action."
I'm not sure of the etymology here, but "extremist" could also denote someone who uses extreme measures to achieve their goals. By this definition, someone who wants complete redistribution of wealth, but aims to achieve that by voting for like-minded people would be less of an extremist than someone who wants basic workers' rights, but will murder employers.
I feel that this definition is closer to how "extremist" is reasonably used, it's probably pointless to argue, since most people seem to use the word as just another generic pejorative. Oh well.
Extremist means more than simply holding an unpopular and unusual viewpoint, but rather that extreme measures should be used. Believing say abortion is murder isn’t extremist, believing people should therefore kill abortion doctors is.
YouTube both bans the "watchdog" and the "right-wing conspiracies" equally now, it seems. Unless they start allowing everyone to use the platform (following the laws of their country, of course) I don't really care that they are now censoring an organization designed to censor other people.
>In fact, Right Wing Watch’s exposure of Jones’ false and conspiratorial rhetoric was key to YouTube and other social-media platforms eventually removing his channel InfoWars from their sites.
This is a classic example of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They wanted YouTube to cancel these people, so logically, YouTube has to cancel compilations of these people. It doesn't matter that RWW is criticizing them. Otherwise, people can just post the videos while pretending to criticize them.
>Notably, many of the right-wing outlets and personalities that Right Wing Watch chronicles are not currently suspended or banned from posting content to YouTube
The article frames this as a contradiction when there isn't one. RWW didn't get cancelled for chronicling commentators who didn't get cancelled. They were cancelled for chronicling the cancel-worthy content.
YouTube seems perfectly fine with allowing crypto scams to run for hours on end, generating huge profits for scammers.
We need an alternative that can generate even 1/4 the audience of YouTube. There are many cloud providers, many car brands, many food stores, many email providers, but just one YouTube.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadYou need to have principles on your side and back those principles even when "bad" people enjoy those principles.
You will not go far if instead of principles you back people because they agree with you on a particular topic.
The CDC is a political organization controlled by the executive branch that happens to be staffed partly with people who call themselves scientists[0]. The unwavering faith that people put into political organizations is its own tragic issue.
[0] - In the same way that many programmers are terrible at being programmers, many scientists are terrible at being scientists.
If a socialist candidate is assassinated in South America and someone on YouTube says “this was the American imperialist regimes doing” without evidence, I wouldn’t assume they are right, but I’d see it as an opinion based on historical evidence that I’d hate to see censored.
This applies even if someone claims it was aliens!
The differences are in the type of claim being made and in whether the reasons given are real or made up and in whether the reasons actually support the claim and in the systemic harm caused by being wrong. All of those differences matter.
There’s no place for silencing opinions, and those are opinions that all have different levels of evidence. That you tend to weigh certain evidence differently is your own stance, not objective fact.
To try again, let’s say someone is a “body language expert”. I don’t really believe that to a large degree, but fine. They post a YouTube clip showing the Chinese gov denying the lab leak and say “oh man I can tell based on X, Y, and Z their body language is a total giveaway that this was intentional!”
Again, I don’t believe it. But it doesn’t matter. Whether they think it’s aliens because they saw some cloud trails or tea leaves or whatever, it’s all a matter of degree.
The lab leak was shut down under the same premises. “Our” evidence is strong, and “their” evidence is conspiracy theory. Except it wasn’t. So I don’t trust anyone, you included, to be the decider of valid evidence. I’ll sort through it myself.
You are conflating "opinion" with "unsupported statement of fact", "assumption", and "guess". Assumption and conclusion are not synonyms, but your statement here treats them as though they are.
"Murder is wrong" is an opinion, because it's a compressed substitute for an expansive syllogistic trail that starts from some initial premises that are purely personal and subjective about the value and nature of life and being and leads to the conclusion. You reach a moral ruling starting from an instinctive feeling. Expressing that feeling itself is not an opinion, but concluding a moral position from that feeling is. "I like the taste of this cheese" is a factual observation about the self that is not an opinion, because while it observes something personal it itself is not subjectively based on an initial position. You either like the taste of this cheese or you don't. Statements about the cause of things that happen in the world are either true or false, not opinions. There's a reason for the old saw that opinions can't be wrong. Subjectivity is the critical element that makes them opinions in the first place. People tend to lose or forget that distinction or insert subjectivity where none exists, but that's an error which disrupts effective communication and muddies thought.
If we have to have some private unelected board at YouTube deciding where opinion ends and fact begins, that’s dystopia. People state opinions as facts all the time. “It was the United States gov” is an opinion it’s just a colloquial American thing to say it in that style. Their real belief may be that it’s actually only 90% probable, and their threshold for wording it as certain is lower than yours.
Only a fool listens to a strongly stated opinion, even when it’s worded as though it’s a fact, and isn’t skeptical. If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over. I don’t want that.
I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe, and it seems people who don’t get real worried that their “better” opinions will drown out. I don’t think so. And I’ve seen the people with the right opinions be wrong too often lately to ever trust them.
I think I have bad news for you about the world, then.
> If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over.
What is your plan for a society like the one we currently live in that appears to be mostly greatest fools?
> I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe
According to polling, in the US the average joe claims that God directly created humans in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years and that evolution is, to put a common phrase in their mouths, "fake news". https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...
Feel whatever you want about the benefit of religion, that belief is based on something entirely extraneous to evidence.
Exactly. As I had edited in my last comment before I saw your reply, you have a huge lack of faith in the intelligence of others (that, or a big ego).
Believing in religion got humans a lot further due to in-group cooperation. Their exact beliefs may look wrong, but the way it makes them act is more right than atheism or anything else.
In your world talking about any religion would be banned, and what a sad world that’d be.
Column A, Column B.
> In your world talking about any religion would be banned, and what a sad world that’d be.
I promise I wouldn't ban talking about religion.
> Their exact beliefs may look wrong, but the way it makes them act is more right than atheism or anything else.
Secular humanists would strongly disagree.
However there are a third group that knowingly misrepresent and fabricate evidence to promote conspiracy theories. Screw those guys. They hide under the cover of legitimate opinion, but no platform should be expected to tolerate being used to propagate that sort of crap.
Have they always been problematic? I would love to hear some historical conspiracy theories and their deleterious effects.
Also Ancient Rome and demonizing political opponents (some the depravity ascribed to some of the emperors were exaggerations).
Don’t get me wrong, it absolutely sucks to feel “silenced” and I’m sure it sucks even more to feel silenced when you are indeed correct or at least aren’t as dead wrong as others claimed. But isn’t the crux of the free speech “marketplace of ideas” that the “good” ideas will find listeners and gain traction anyway? Even when “everyone” initially disagrees or thinks you’re crazy.
Because that’s free speech, too. You have a right to say things even if they sound kind of crazy and I have a right to say “hey, that sounds crazy!”
Also if you scroll down about 40% of the way here: https://m.facebook.com/help/230764881494641/ you will see that claiming that the vaccine has negative effects is still a bannable offense.
How come the folks who keep bringing this up don't also mention that the original "censored" claims were that the virus was both engineered and intentionally leaked?
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir...
Literally claims it's a manmade weapon released intentionally in the first paragraph.
Edit: it seems pretty obvious that article was banned because it's an unsubstantiated witch-hunt. It even gives the guy's number and urges the reader to harass him. Fwiw "they were just asking questions!" is not a valid argument.
Do you know what the word "accidentally" means?
Edit: ah you're the troll I unfortunately encountered yesterday. Won't be engaging further, have a good evening!
Yes. Do you know what a disjunction is?
Here is a concrete example from NBC[0]: their fact-checkers say Trump's statement about Clinton "acid-washing" her email server was a lie, because her team actually just "used an app called BleachBit".
Do you see the point I am making?
0. https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465
If anything they could probably point out and say "hey, we are balanced!" in the same way reddit could by banning chapotraphouse after thedonald, but people who are on that site still know which way the wind blows.
This exposes what everyone already knows. YouTube (Google... err... Alphabet) doesn't really have a problem with the conspiracy theories and right wing propaganda. They just don't want the drama. Nutjobs watch for hours and apparently click on advertisements.
Those who spread and consume conspiracy theories have one thing in abundance a lot of people don't: time. They can flag whatever they don't like as offensive or as violating DMCA or whatever third thing. Not just once, not just twice, but all day.
And showing a video of someone taking a shit on a sidewalk to show how people are making videos of shitting on the sidewalk is still showing someone taking a shit on the sidewalk. It falls in that realm of "Well, technically, it's against the rules to show people shitting on the sidewalk."
So even if they are showing the content to then explain why that content is wrong or bad, they're still technically showing the content.
I'd wager that Right Wing Watch gets far more flags and reports than the content creators they show so they can debunk them. And if you're only dealing with reports and flags in a "squeaky wheel gets the grease" kind of way, it'll be a long while before you get to the source, because the fanbase of the source will be overwhelming you with reports and flags on channels with critical content showing the offending content as a demonstration of why it is offensive.
Anyway the analogy isn't a good match. Shitting on the sidewalk is obscenity, there's no reason to reproduce it without censoring it when discussing it. That's not true of quoting conspiracy theories and propaganda when criticizing it. Context matters greatly.
The onus is always on the reader to engage in critical thinking. You should be able to read "misinformation" and easily discern it as such. You should also be able to read "information" and easily discern as "misinformation" as well as the ability to read "misinformation" and discern it to be factually consistent and potentially correct.
Do not trust others where your own brain is needed to figure shit out.
I agree that censorship is bad, and that also we have entered an era where private organizations own platforms where potentially they should not be allowed editorial license because of scale.
I'm afraid this is equivalent to saying "You should be able to be offered high-sugar food, and avoid it to an appropriate degree." This may be true in the moral sense, but practically speaking most people will fail this test.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting the answer is censorship, but just pointing out that large numbers of people cannot meaningfully deal with misinformation.
I would expect YouTube only to report honestly (as a news source) for things align with it's commonly held beliefs.
YouTube endorses everything it does not censor.
edit: And you should not put blind trust in any "news" organization either. Every observation deserves your full cognition to figure out what is plausible, consistent, implausible, inconsistent, let alone "true" or "false".
And yeah, sure, everything should be judged on it's merits, however there's simply not enough time in the day to independently verify all facts. It's much easier and generally reliable to start with the mainstream news sources like NPR, who we can generally assume to be trustworthy.
I couldn't argue that someone is educated (regardless of degree) or wise without a practiced mind geared toward (critical) thinking.
Give me concrete, well-researched, well-evidenced claims about the easy identification of misinformation, because it's so easy.
The process of understanding is a continuum that we strive towards.
There is an entire replication crisis in scientific literature debunking "well-researched, well-evidenced claims".
The only way out is to think.
With some warning, I wonder if Aechive Team would have helped back it up to IA
This is absolutely the correct approach to take. If there is content that you value, you need to personally archive a copy, because it may be gone for hundreds of reasons next time you try to access it.
And you won't even know which video is gone unless you've taken a copy of your playlist (my favourites playlist is about 25% holes after 10 years.)
If RWW is posting content that otherwise would be barred from YouTube (e.g. hate speech, etc) -- effectively rehosting -- it makes sense that it would get strikes. e.g. If you started a "LiveLeak Watch" and reposted gruesome videos under the notion that it's a critique, that would get a ban too.
It's despicable, sure, but not at all surprising.
Do they really though? Is there evidence that there are *any* effective strategies for reducing viewership of mind-rotting extremist content at scale?
It is my understanding that what the right wing is going through in 2021 is kinda what Muslims have gone through in 2016, with lots of outrage because some visible targets have been taken down, the malicious actors attempting to fan the outrage and get the entire community to protect the actual evil content, the feeling of being singled out for termination, etc.
It is natural to try to see patterns in the moderation, but I think the largest pattern is that there is little pattern. They instead have an job that is impossible to do at the scale they do it at the budget they do it at. They therefore make a lot of mistakes. They hate to admit these mistakes so they are constantly trying to defend the indefensible rather than admit that there is no way to have a uniform moderation policy that works on the hundreds of hours of video that are uploaded every minute.
Yes, and it drives me bonkers because everyone who makes these kinds of complains tend to like the narrative that YouTube is 100% hellbend on just being bad because Google Is Bad (tm)
I'd be curious to know what the strikes were for, since they never discuss them. But non-political channels get burned by unfair strikes all the time, including on very old videos.
Another possibility is the use of targeted reporting by fans of those featured in videos.
This is the money shot right here. They can’t admit the impossibility because if they did they further open the door to the private platform versus town square debate (which doesn’t seem to have certain consequences either way… yet)
In this case, they're putting profit over ethics leading to negative effects, so this one doesn't. Furthermore, Hanlon's razor is a false dichotomy: In this case the result is unethical yet neither malicious nor stupid.
How much overlap do you think there is between those who watch conspiracy videos and those who watch the videos that debunk them? I'd guess it's really small, probably <5% and possibly <1%—depending on how much Youtube's algorithm recommends the latter to the former. Actually, if they wanted to maximize view counts, they could tweak the algorithm and keep both videos, thus both keeping the gullible audience and driving outrage views from the skeptical audience.
It seems that the deluge of content available today guarantees that whatever view you're even mildly sympathetic toward will get reinforced, and then you are immediately placed on a slope toward the extremes (in terms of other recommended content).
One of the few antidotes I've seen to this has been the emergence of long-form podcasting where conversations are still allowed to meander, dwell on minor points, or become boring. It seems harder for people to shill for multiple uninterrupted hours at a time.
And yet if you rely on this as a source of information you can't pick very many topics to be informed about given the constraint of time.
A little bit of garbage here and there is easy to deal with, and that's what critical thinking is for. But given enough garbage, your normal functions (and that of the network you're a part of) will be impaired.
You are what you eat, and your brain is what it reads. Feed it enough garbage, and no amount of critical thinking will save you.
If your goal is to have a "stable" system that converges towards truth, stability, consensus, and generally progresses over time, you need to have some sort of mechanism to regulate garbage.
When people suggest "critical thinking" as a solution to high-volume and high-visibility disinformation, my guess is they think the problem I'm trying to solve is: "There's so much disinformation, and I just don't know what to think!" when actually the problem is "There's so much disinformation, and my fellow countrymen are acting on it in ways that cause measurable harm to me and to society at large."
It's a complex topic. I'm not suggesting that there's an easy answer and I'm not here to sing the praises of censorship, but I find it frustrating to see "think critically" proposed as if it's the simple, obvious solution over and over again.
I think that's quite insightful.
Would it be heliocentric models of the solar system? What about hand washing as a way to prevent disease? Perhaps a bit more recently the sars-cov-2 lab leak theory?
It's not for me to decide which politician has the best or most honest character (though I'll give you my opinion if asked). But if you do a math exam wrong, you're going to score garbage grades. There are some things in life which for all practical purposes are clear cut.
I'll take your examples.
1. Heliocentric model: Garbage.
2. Hand washing: Not garbage.
3. SARS-CoV-2 lab leak theory: Not garbage.
Obviously the distinction between garbage and not-garbage is not just about the topic, it's about the actual information. For example, it's important to talk about the heliocentric model because it gives us perspective on the current state of human knowledge and it humbles us in the face of uncertainty é what we don't (yet) know. There's great pedagogical or even archival value in this. We could write a book about this, but I hope one example makes the point.
If you ask me, and I'm a biochemist, about the third, I will say that I believe it to be less likely than natural occurrence, and I'd worry about how productive the question was. But it doesn't mean it's pollution. I can have an opinion about something, even a strong one, and still defend your right to express contrary or different ideas. I know this skill seems to be in short supply these years, but it's not that difficult really.
Once bitten, twice shy
Fool me once, shame on you ...
Why wouldn't the accumulation of experiences logically lead to people being savvier about claims over time?
Every problem has a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong.
Humans are prone to fall for self-reinforcing belief loops like conspiracy theories. They subvert the mechanism of critical thinking a bit like a prion will misfold proteins and cause all sort of issues.
That is not like the take down algorithm is being triggered by something you just posted, that sounds just like someone deciding to look in your garbage bins to find anything to be used against you. It stinks a lot, and I don't mean the garbage.
" ... the deletion of the site’s channel erases a deep, years-long archive of video clips—effectively eliminating a resource for understanding and exposing right-wing extremism."
Well, that one is 100% their fault. Never, ever, ever, rely on any other service for keeping data other than your own backups. Especially when the party involved in keeping your data is also the same one who can wipe it from existence if anyone with deep enough pockets or connections says so.
> While Right Wing Watch had essentially moved away from regularly posting its videos to YouTube over the past year, as Mantyla noted, the deletion of the site’s channel erases a deep, years-long archive of video clips—effectively eliminating a resource for understanding and exposing right-wing extremism.
Nothing in here says "we lost our only copies of the videos", just that the resource is now gone from the Internet, and that users currently can't get at it.
This is a trick I’ve seen right wingers employing over and over.
Edit: burn, karma, burn!
That's the point being made here: they are being banned not for copyright reasons (e.g. their act of re-uploading clips) but for the content in those clips. That is, YouTube is banning them for posting (exclusively right wing) extremist content, which they are posting specifically to expose. People who don't watch the handful of national right wing news outlets or the hundreds of local stations likely won't otherwise know what half of the country is being fed daily.
(EDIT: For the record I am all for a "left wing watch" that only reposts influencial left-wing's voices that the posters believes violates terms of service on the website they post on. I just don't understand why "right wing watch" should be expected to do so, or why it's a double standard if they don't.)
This is clearly whataboutism though.
If you post misinformation telling people that it's illegal to charge for healthcare and that you can just throw out any medical bills you receive without recourse, or that drug laws are unconstitutional so you can't actually go to jail for them, or that private prisons don't count so you are allowed to break out of them, well yeah you might get banned!
I'm banning you because I don't like you. Go away. If I liked you, you could do or say whatever you want. Anything. But I don't like you so you're banned. That's the honest reason. They don't say it because bailout time is coming up again and they don't want the Clara Petacci treatment.
Close to 2/3rds of the American public supports universal healthcare and ending the drug war. Therefore they can't by definition be extreme left positions.
"63% of U.S. adults say the government has the responsibility to provide health care coverage for all"
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
'65% of voters support ending the “War on Drugs.”'
https://drugpolicy.org/press-release/2021/06/50th-anniversar...
"That's a dishonest framing, given you're neglecting this murderous position, that race essentialism position, and--"
"Sunshine. And. Rainbows. :)"
If you can't figure out where the leftist extremism is, you aren't looking hard enough, or you are being willfully ignorant.
That seems more like a libertarian position to me.
> Communism ... is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is ... a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of ... money.
You are absolutely correct, his video did not have any added audio commentary or basically anything and he won his case, his video was just sections copied directly from the source creating a compilation of the original video.
In this case as I understand it, the content being uploaded is extremist content (in their eyes) explicitly being uploaded to highlight its extremism (in their eyes), the difference between the two situations being that Sargon’s video didn’t contain extremist content that YouTube wouldn’t want on their platform.
RWW is posting content they essentially want to be removed. They got what they wanted, the content was removed. In a sense they succeeded in what they set out to do.
I wish their channel be reinstated, but this situation looks to be slightly different from Benjamin’s unless more details come out.
It seems like YouTube messed up and is treating them harshly, but for all we know this type of content is now no longer allowed on the platform due to policy change.
No it's not? Where'd you get that intention from? It's literally to catalogue and store the content
The only thing they have in common is that they are all anti-establishment at core. It seems to me that the Left, who used to be anti-establishment, has now become what it once fought.
Centralized : Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
> BitChute is a video hosting service known for accommodating far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists, and for hosting hate speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute
This Wikipedia article excerpt seems like editorial, not information. It might be 100% accurate but the spin is so blatant that I don’t trust Wikipedia on this.
Similarly, I wouldn’t trust a Wikipedia article about Adolf Hitler if it began “Hitler was one of the most evil men of the 20th century”. Although I believe that statement to be true, there’s too much editorial bias.
I want an encyclopedia to tell me unbiased facts and let ME make the moral conclusions.
“Conspiracy theories” and “right wing” are labels of opinion, not fact, these days. They don’t inform, they label.
1. "Why the COVID Delta variant is a scam"
2. "THEY'RE IN CONTROL OF EVERYTHING ON EARTH"
3. "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD!!!"
4. "I'm Asking You Who Took the Shot / Horror Movie Countries"
It's just an endless stream of conspiracy and FUD.
I don't see all the same videos you do, but here are some titles that should cause us to think twice before writing off this site as "far right":
1. "Pfizer whistleblower exposes the corrupt and unethical company for what they really are" - although BitChute seems mostly to be conservative videos, this one could easily be a headline found in the Guardian.
2. "NSA whistleblower demonstrates Biden administration spying on political opponent's communications" - haven't watched it so have no idea if it's true, but this is pretty much the core theme of the Snowden revelations which, again, was spearheaded by the Guardian just a decade ago. This is hardly "far right" or "hate".
3. "Fine print in Biden's tax proposal will have middle class Americans fuming". This sounds like a bog standard centre-right reaction to tax changes. Very much not far right or hate.
4. "Remembering dogs in warfare on memorial day", sounds quite nice actually.
5. "Journalism jobs disappeared faster than coal miners, according to Dpt of Labor" - sounds again like something the left would care about.
I took a look at the "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD" video to see what it was about. It turns out to be some guy getting agitated because (so he says) he shared a video of a doctor on Facebook who treated people with COVID talking about ways the doctor (claims he) helped save them, and was banned from Facebook as a result. From this event the speaker takes a large leap and infers that because discussion of saving people with COVID is banned, "they want to kill you". You can argue that this is a ridiculous inference, but frankly it's inevitable people will look for explanations of otherwise apparently inexplicable events, like people being banned for hosting doctors talking about doctor-ing, and some of those explanations will be extreme.
Is this so different to YouTube? I just did a quick search and found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLpW76qpHUU titled "WHY I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS", which consists of some dude exhorting violence against them. The YT front page doesn't show these sorts of videos because it's normally filled with pop content or very personalized stuff. BitChute has way less content and is a refuge for people who get banned from other platforms, so, no surprise that stuff is more visible.
Finally, BitChute is currently advertising at the top of their site a new content policy:
https://support.bitchute.com/policy-changes/2021-06-01/
Their previous policy on prohibited hate speech said: "There should be a reasonable probability that the content would succeed in inciting actual action against the target, recognizing that such causation should be rather direct." This is a reasonable policy! But the UK government forced them to remove this requirement because a reasonable probability that something will happen is, apparently, not a requirement to be hate speech in the UK. Same for "inciting violence". So they've now updated their policies to not even require direct incitement. Ironically the YouTube "I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS" video would be banned under both BitChute's new and old policy because it directly incites people to violence. This is not the document of some far right extr...
So it sounds like that's the type of hosting provider they might want.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-reinstates-ch...
Parler, for example, had a bit of a hair-trigger on left-wing accounts trolling on the site, as well as being stricter than Twitter itself on porn/swearing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-... https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/pa...
Pick one. There is a very strong correlation on every somewhat-popular forum and platform on the net.
My guess is that since RWW has a pretty active doxxing operation running outside of YouTube, they've decided to take action on that basis.
Only a guess, though.
Publicly traded corporations are incompatible custodians of platforms that offer reasonable freedom of expression unless bound to do so by law.
– debate!
(edit: That's a a pretty clumsy and cumbersome sentence but I've gotten my point across I hope.)
corporations which rely on advertising for revenue are (beyond a certain size) incompatible custodians of platforms that offer reasonable freedom of expression unless bound to do so by law.
– debate!
(edit: That's a a pretty clumsy and cumbersome sentence but I've gotten my point across I hope.)
And why do you call them custodians? If I own a theater, I get to decide what plays and concerts are presented. Am I a custodian as well?
If you don't like it because the politics are wrong, fine, explain that. If you don't like it because the politics are extreme, you haven't yet described why I shouldn't like it.
Extremist movements tend to be composed from people that do not listen, do not want to understand the other side and are interested only in furthering their own views. Further, frequently more moderate people (as in being more open to discussion or not accepting extreme measures being used) are being ejected from extremist movements to preserve their extremist nature. This process of polarization is a contest on who can be even more extreme and makes further resolution of the difference in views even more difficult.
I object to the idea of extremism.
Resolution of any problem requires that people cooperate and extremism thrives on prolonging the problem rather than seeking resolution.
(edit: hint, maybe you meant to use word "radical" rather than "extremist". Radical is an extremist sans extreme methods)
> After being accused of extremism, Martin Luther King Jr. criticized the mainstream usage of the term in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love…Was not Amos an extremist for justice…Was not Martin Luther an extremist…So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?"
I think you can see how 'extremism' has been used as pejorative in order to dismiss radicalism.
As the Wikipedia entry points out: "When in conflict, the activities of members of low power groups tend to be viewed as more extreme than similar activities committed by members of groups advocating the status quo."
Viewed through that lens, if the status quo isn't meritocratic, then doesn't your definition imply extremists actually do have "the right to use extreme measures to be heard and/or prove [their] point"?
Quoting Letter From A Birmingham Jail:
"If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action."
I feel that this definition is closer to how "extremist" is reasonably used, it's probably pointless to argue, since most people seem to use the word as just another generic pejorative. Oh well.
Out of curiosity, which ideas are you enthusiastic about killing for?
What kind of question is that? If you actually think it over there are a fuck ton of ideas you'd be willing to kill over.
Besides, the US is known for having a very small Overton Window compared to the rest of developed countries.
This is a classic example of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They wanted YouTube to cancel these people, so logically, YouTube has to cancel compilations of these people. It doesn't matter that RWW is criticizing them. Otherwise, people can just post the videos while pretending to criticize them.
>Notably, many of the right-wing outlets and personalities that Right Wing Watch chronicles are not currently suspended or banned from posting content to YouTube
The article frames this as a contradiction when there isn't one. RWW didn't get cancelled for chronicling commentators who didn't get cancelled. They were cancelled for chronicling the cancel-worthy content.
We need an alternative that can generate even 1/4 the audience of YouTube. There are many cloud providers, many car brands, many food stores, many email providers, but just one YouTube.