Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?
MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the worrying trend of strangling free speech"
"My speech at conference was carefully researched, wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence."
"Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill”
"The unambiguous attempt by YouTube to censor my speech is a warning."
"If YouTube is happy to attempt to silence elected Members of Parliament, then they are also happy to censor anyone uploading content to their services."
Yeah it seems likely to me to be an overzealous AI decision, given the background noise of anti-vaccine disinformation on youtube these days I wouldn't be surprised if they've turned up their algorithms at the cost of more false and marginal positives
What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online (adds massive liability for illegal/'harmful' content if it isn't removed quickly so companies will most likely block more content as a result)
Then they simply shouldn't use AI algorithms to censor people.
> What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online
It's not obvious to me that the UK government has any coherent idea of what it is trying to do.
Should we be more forgiving of harm done by faulty algorithms than by negligent human beings? It was the company's choice to save money by automating a process that normally only human beings can do reliably. The consequences to the victim are the same regardless of the instrument used in the commission of the wrongdoing.
Given the quantity of video uploaded to youtube I'm not sure human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore. Humans are definitely better at handling many situations but are also prone to their own biases (e.g. there were facebook moderators a while back who would take down reported content they disagreed with for religious reasons), they are often not given enough time to reasonably review a report, and when exposed to the kind of videos being reported can experience serious mental health problems
Some of these could be dealt with by the companies investing more in moderation (make them employees/better pay/healthcare etc.), but if you want to moderate at the scale of youtube/facebook/etc. then I don't see how you could do it without some automated tools
"human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore."
Then maybe free video hosting is not a viable business, why should youtube destroy all competition and then complain that checking their uploads is not possoble?
Exactly. Perhaps if lots of little video hosting companies existed, this wouldn't be an issue. "Too big to do the right thing" seems like an even worse version of "Too big to fail".
The argument that these companies are too big and that creates bad incentives/lack of incentives to improve is one I'm much more sympathetic to. I'd be in favour of more smaller companies/communities although I don't think this would remove the need for automated tools (e.g. smallish reddit and discord communities often use bots and other tools to automate some moderation). And to make something like this a reality you'd probably need government intervention to overcome the network effect that these bigger platforms have
It would make a lot of sense for the UK government to encourage UK-based PeerTube websites (and other federated social media such as Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc), and to make sure all UK government content is uploaded on such sites.
Then once they have done that, and these sites have lots of users and traction, mandate that Google, Facebook etc also federate using ActivityPub. If they don't, block their sites.
I just asked around (~100 people) and nobody I know has unlimited mobile data here in the UK. As you can get 120gb/month for £20 and unlimited for £40 on a 12 month sim only contract, I think not many people using more than 120GB/month so no good reason to pay double for it.
As anecdata, I cut my package back to 5GB at the start of the first lockdown as my mobil data usage went to nearly 0 since wifi at home and did not run out of data during the last year. I assume anybody who was able to do that done the same.
PeerTube doesn't scale with large number of users, period.
There's currently no way to horizontally scale an instance, so after an instance grows past a certain size it can't transcode uploaded videos fast enough. I love the project but if it can't utilize multiple compute instances to transcode video (or plug into a cloud platforms video transcoding offering), it's never going to grow past this blocker.
I suffered this problem 1 year ago and after raising issue in github I realized peertube wasn't designed from ground to be scaled horizontally. Not only upload video but harddisk is my concern like distributed storage is an after thought.
However I also acknowledge the authors are very open to ideas and they are really awesome. I guess some wizards who knows scaling related things need to be hired and it will costs a lot of money. AFAIK peertube generates money from donation so I don't think we should be harsh on them.
> There's currently no way to horizontally scale an instance, so after an instance grows past a certain size it can't transcode uploaded videos fast enough.
I wasn't aware of that -- fixing it would be a very necessary improvement to the codebase to make the software more useful on big sites.
The youtube alternatives are becoming useful, I can watch most of the content I would otherwise watch on youtube on odysee, it even has a much better UX.
Th UK government is more interested in encouraging "safety tech" including age verification tech. There is no programme, fund, encouragement or anything of support for anyone doing something like a UK-based PeerTube. In their eyes this is not "innovation". I am very happy to stand corrected but speak from 30 years of mixed experiences.
I haven't checked but wasn't the Online safety bill the one which implied all kinds of age verification checks which either weren't feasible or, at a minimum, were a goldmine for identify fraud.
Many people watching this Bill take the view is that it is being used to slip back in age verification, as it attempted to do so, but failed in the Digital Economy Act 2017. In that Act, Part 3 was about a porn sites requiring an age verification proposal; not just declaring you age in some form but linking to some official data from which your age could be verified (like a credit card number). This section got dropped from the Act before it was passed and has led to a course case between the Govt and age verification companies. Now it looks like the Online Safety Bill is being used to repeal the Digital Economy Act 2017 and replace it with this new Act where the age verification requirement is slipped back in.
The Age Verification industry is lobbying hard to see their "investments" pay off this time, after being disappointed in 2017.
>why don't they (govt) open a public video site for anyone to upload to,
If governments tried to create publicly funded video website for anyone to upload to, it still won't accomplish what we'd hope for because governments always exercise their power censor. (See examples of UK BBC censorship.[1])
Look at the cognitive dissonance in the platitude: "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online."
The government-that-censors wants to force private businesses to not-censor?!? Inevitably, the government will force the business to censor something the government doesn't like which creates a contradiction!
[To downvoters: Does a government funded website that has uncensored "free speech" exist now? If not, why would it be realistic that it won't suffer the same pressures to censor that all previous government-controlled communication channels had? Let's not repeat platitudes about "free speech" but really dissect the mechanisms to enable censorship-resistant mass media. The mechanisms of implementation are the more difficult topic!]
EDIT reply to : >"I think op meant, that te government should make video.gov.tld webpage to post government videos there"
But the gp's phrase of "for _anyone_ to upload to" strongly implies user-generated content like Youtube uploaders instead of only the government employees uploading government videos.
This is a good point. They could optimise the site to encourage more uploads instead of engagement. Then the government can mine the data for intelligence.
Turn spying on its citizens and data harvesting of their public info into a useful resource for the benefit of all.
> Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI,
Imo that would be the worst, because a human doing it can be corrected (more training, revised check-lists etc.), but afaik AI moderating in its current form is a black hole and it will remain a black hole for the foreseeable future.
I agree and should have said "should we assume the best of intentions by humans". Delegating decisions on freedom of speech to AI is a flawed and dangerous path.
The idea that a member of parliament should enjoy at least a a much freedom of speech over private media as the broader public actually deserves some challenge.
In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite.
As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox.
It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian.
When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.
It might not be intended to be the rebuttal you are assuming it is. I’m not saying that British law broadly sets a precedent of requiring equal treatment of contrasting political views. It absolutely does not - look at the UK newspaper opinion pages.
I am mainly responding to the ‘if they’ll do this to an MP they will do it to you’ syllogism, which seems to rest on the underlying assumption that an MP has at least the same speech rights (on a private website) as a member of the public - when in fact the ability of an MP to oblige a private company to carry their speech is expressly limited.
I am arguing that the fact he is an MP does not entitle him to special treatment and indeed historically brings his speech rights under greater scrutiny.
My point is mostly that MPs are not broadly entitled to use private platforms to speak unopposed, and in fact are more restricted by current law in that respect than people who are not MPs or parliamentary candidates.
>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?
How is that 'the best'. Only Silicon Valley thinks that is a valid legal excuse for anything. If you can't operate within the law you can't operate.
The US better start regulating their companies or you end up with a trade war due to the whole world including Europe just kicking these vendors out of the market entirely and permanently
>If you can't operate within the law you can't operate
That's demonstrably untrue. Look at the rise of Uber. If I started running an unlicensed taxi, they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly, but Uber had the resources to tie up enforcement until public opinion about their VC-subsidized "taxis" prevented any action.
>they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands, it wouldn't have been the state that would come down 'hard'. (its the other cab drivers, physically assaulting you)
As a response to this kind of energy, we actually ended up liberizing our cab market a lot more before Uber came. And when Uber came here there was no good will for the existing established cab companies, because people considered them borderline mobsters.
Okay. So it wasn’t a mistake. Google like any other media company decided to exercise editorial control and let part A speak while muzzling party B.
Now what?
There is no consensus of what to do with political speech and media.
In some counties only the ruling government gets access. In some counties, only the leading parties have access and all must share time equally. In others, you only get the access that you can buy. In still others, no one gets access except under regulated conditions like a debate.
If Google takes a step back from the label of Big Tech and admits that YouTube is just another multinational media company… then what do they lose?
>There is no consensus of what to do with political speech and media.
There is though. The general consensus of free societies is that the democratically elected government regulates speech and not the market.
The problem is youtube/facbeook/instagram/linked-in perform functions that one would normally classify as 'public space'. Obviously that might need some level of policing, because some speech is criminal (like a threat of violence made to another person). But private companies shouldn't be forced to police.
I blame the lack of regulations much more than the for profit companies trying to make a profit (they are legally bound to pursuit profit by their stock holders).
The trouble is the US is allergic to do such a thing, and when another country starts regulation the companies of one of their biggest trade ally's...
So, please, uncle Sam. Can you please make sure the ToS of facebook and the like, is written by your congress. So that there is direct democratic influence on it? Even Facebook will like a lot better that way, because it actually allows them to stop pretending to be 'the facebook state' and can just go back to 'facebook, the for profit company'.
> wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence.
Much of the problem comes down to the fact that the "science" changes quite frequently. When new evidence appears, which updates our Bayesian Priors ( airborne vs aerosol/fomites, vaccine type effectiveness, delta variant transmittivity, ventilator usefulness, lab leak hypothesis, comorbidity statistics, etc ) the Powers That Be rely on the pre-update "science" to determine if censorship is warranted.
One can argue if censorship of "disinformation" is a societal good, and I won't litigate that general matter here, but it becomes a particular point of contention if what is classified as disinformation changes with every Lancet publication.
And just to try and be helpful for the direction of the debate...
The issue isn't that YouTube can do this. They can, that is cool. Free world. The issue that is if they are going to do this everyone should respond. Nobody ever vetted YouTube as the arbiter of truth. They are not qualified for this, and they are going to screw up really badly.
If they're going to set themselves up for failure, we all have to make sure we're standing outside the blast zone when they screw up really badly.
Sadly, YouTube is among Google best products. Myself do lots of cognitive load to avoid google services when possible, but yt has not rival amount quality of content and application. Im even paying for premium now. I'm paying with my dollars because there is no alternative except maybe the internet library..
> Nobody ever vetted YouTube as the arbiter of truth.
The institutions we set up to arbitrate truth - the courts - are already swamped beyond belief in many countries.
The problem is that our societal systems of governance have been designed hundreds of years past, when life was focused on a couple dozen kilometers around where one lived. Nowadays, with global instant communication and knowledge available to almost everyone, conflicts and disagreements achieve far, far more reach and impact - and our societal foundations have never been updated to reflect the new reality and its demands.
The US still votes on Tuesdays because of farmers commitments to church and market days in the 19th century (https://www.history.com/news/why-is-election-day-a-tuesday-i...), copyright as a concept dates back to the 1700s, and legal language is so full of Latin and other outdated language it is impossible to understand for normal citizens.
We are witnessing a break-up of society, especially between the old/Boomer generation and the young "digital natives". For us young people, we see the possibilities and dangers of technology - and we see that our societal infrastructure is horribly outdated and the old generation which is in power dragging their feet and doing everything they can to prevent progress.
> The issue that is if they are going to do this everyone should respond
"Everyone should" just doesn't work. It doesn't happen. The vast majority of people don't care, and the few who care are not going to change their habits and jump to a niche platform that maybe solves their problem. Network effects and the comfort of familiarity too big to ignore.
This is a government which is in the process of criminalising protest under a deliberately vague 'public nuisance' clause. They only want freedom of expression for their views and not for those that oppose them.
Can someone explain to me how this makes sense when they are letting insulate britain block motorways? Like which protests are they trying to stop?
I assume blocking motorways is illegal already, yet the police are doing nothing, which is leading dangerously to vigilante justice as per some videos, which is only a question of time before it turns really violent.
Wtf is the UK government doing? Why do they need more powers when they don't use the current ones? Or is it for "other" types of protests? Shutting down motorways is fine.
Blocking motorways is probably illegal - the trouble is, the police arrest people and then they just go ahead and do it again. (Also, I think the Supreme Court decided that the law on blocking highways didn't apply to people doing it in the name of protest so it's far from clear that those people could be convicted - the court has shown activist tendencies in general, something that some pundits predicted would happen as soon as the UK created one.) One of the things the final law is expected to include is more provisions allowing the police to take action to stop people form doing this.
I mean, it's almost identical to the old Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, but with different hats. They've always done a fair amount of development of the common law. The court under Baroness Hale was maybe a little more vigorous at that than usual, the current regime maybe a little less than usual. I don't see any of it as outside the usual bounds of British jurisprudence.
The SC didn't rule that the obstruction of the highway offence didn't apply in cases of protest. The question is whether the exception in the Act applies:
“if a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence” (Highways Act, 1980, s.137).
They ruled that, under some circumstances, 'proportionately' exercising the right to protest could qualify as a lawful excuse. In the case in point, the protesters had blocked one of multiple entrances to an arms fair, in circumstances when only arms fair traffic was likely to even notice the protest (it was an entryway to the Excel centre). Also, the protest was of short duration.
The consequence of the decision is that the question of lawfulness is now case-by-case, as it is with other highway obstructions. There is essentially no chance that protesters blocking motorways are going to escape a conviction on the basis of this decision. They're also likely to be given post-conviction orders making repetition imprisonable.
FWIW I pretty strongly support the campaign's expressed aims, but reckon that this is some of the shittest praxis I've seen from protest group. Like the previous stunt by a bunch of XR-aligned people of gluing themselves to public transport, it's got a tenuous link with the aim pursued and is going to cost their cause vastly more public support than it can hope to gain.
There was a BLM protest that pulled down a statue of a slave trader in Bristol. Honestly, pretty much every elected politician would have been OK with that. But then there was another protest in London where some critical graffiti was sprayed on a statue of Winston Churchill. Despite his faults, Churchill is an extremely popular figure; no elected politician would support statues of him being damaged or removed.
So a bill to stop protests damaging statues seemed like a good idea to them.
From the perspective of civil servants and the police, if you offer them more power of course they'll say yes. Who wouldn't want more power, after all?
But getting the bill through the bureaucracy took time, and by the time it was ready the most recent protest-policing news was a police crack-down on a candle-lit vigil for a woman who'd been raped and murdered just days before... by a policeman.
> Why do they need more powers when they don't use the current ones?
Is this a serious question? To make their job easier, always. It's a lot easier to do what you want when you don't have little things like the law or people's rights standing in the way.
> Can someone explain to me how this makes sense when they are letting insulate britain block motorways? Like which protests are they trying to stop?
They are letting them? I'm pretty sure they get arrested every single time. Or are you wanting a instant jail sentence for being suspect of making people late?
the police and courts have the ability to impose bans on individuals returning to protests and re-offending. They could quite easily say "if you participate in another protest where a road is blocked in the next 12 months, we'll hand you a 1 month jail sentence".
For some reason this isn't being used, and they just let people go again and again, and they always return a few days later. Well, actually, they DO issue these restrictions, but don't follow up with actual punishment. Boggles the brain. You take a handful of grandmas and stick them in actual, factual jail for a month, see how many people return to protest next time.
The bans have been imposed. They've literally got multiple injuctions againist them.
> You take a handful of grandmas and stick them in actual, factual jail for a month, see how many people return to protest next time.
What you think they would be victimised? Mate they won't be touched and all the cons will love them. Bashing old people gets you put into protection in the jails.
David Davis is a backbench MP, he isn't a Government minister. I would sooner eat my own eyeballs than vote Conservative, no matter who the candidate, but Davis does have a principled track-record in voting for civil liberties.
As an EEA citizen living in the UK (now a citizen, but was here pre-brexit under EU freedoms) I see absolutely nothing wrong with the host state requiring me to carry an ID card. In fact, many countries require this for their own citizens, see Germany.
As an EEA citizen living in the UK, let me tell you that you’re missing the plot.
Whether you agree or not with the requirement of ID cards for EU nationals in the UK, doesn’t change the fact that David Davis repeatedly voted against extending one’s civil liberties, based on their nationality.
This is what the previous commenter noted, and is factually correct!
David Davis is a joke and his word is not worth more than his EU trade deal that never happened.
Are there any five eyed nations where I can get a group of my friends together then block a major arterial road to protest some issue without expecting to be arrested?
Arguing that labour camps, apartheid, the raping both literal and figurative as well as outright genocide that occurred were justified because people today are "freer" (IYO) is a stretch.
I don't know man, but arguing for a process that discriminated against people on the basis of their color is something that I thought was a thing of the past. I guess I was wrong.
It's impossible to know. You would need to be able to predict how that country would have evolved over the last number of years without British involvement. Comparing it now to how it was when it was colonised by the British is pointless.
is this a new revisionist rhetoric being pushed all of a sudden? I keep hearing the same arguments in Spain about how they brought freedom to the Americas
I understand being unconformable with one's country's past, but the mental hoops to try to get some justification to colonization is so strange.
Even if (and that's a BIG if) those societies ended up "freer" let's not fool ourselves, not a single country went to colonise another for hundreds of years to make it freer, they went there to exploit it. If 500 years later that country is in a better shape now (again a BIG if), that's an unintended side effect.
> not a single country went to colonise another for hundreds of years to make it freer, they went there to exploit it.
Generally speaking the colonisers established their colonies to access natural resources, being new agricultural techniques to undeveloped lands, and engage in trade. The culture of the coloniser naturally came along with them.
Even if there were no specific goal of bringing freedom that may still have been a side effect.
yeah, but that's what I mean, if it's just a side effect then how is it relevant to the whole "illustrious history" of the UK comment which was defended by saying that the colonies are now "freer".
How is that an argument? If I enslave a group of people, force on them my language so they can follow orders and 500 years later that language opens doors for them, how am I "illustrious"? it's a side effect of an inhumane act.
Trying to twist this so my history doesn't make me uncomfortable is historical immaturity.
The only places I can think of that Britain currently "hangs on to" against the will of the inhabitants are arguably Scotland and Northern Ireland, but in both those places about half the population want to continue to belong to the UK.
So it's not obvious to me who you're referring to here.
Badly phrased. I meant inhabitants of all current and ex-colonies. Not just the remaining ones.
Although, the talk of blocking another Scottish independence referendum could certainly be used as evidence of holding on to a country against the inhabitants will. You can't know their will if you prevent them from expressing it. Yes, they expressed it 7 years ago but a lot has changed since then, most notably leaving the EU.
Regarding ex-colonies:
Don't we have to eventually "let bygones be bygones"?
Otherwise, where do we draw the line? How far do we go back? Those original human perpetrators are long dead.
"Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin."
I'm not arguing that, it's a bigger debate. But claiming that the UK exists as it does because of a long commitment to freedom (when the colonies are a big example of the antithesis of freedom) is dishonest.
"The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation."
What do you mean? The MP was talking about past achievements, saying that the history of the UK was enlightened by freedom. There is not even an argument about what you're talking about, because they actually are referring to historic achievements.
It's not as interesting to talk about present achievements because the UK is clearly in decline. That's why this politician was identifying their ideology with the glorious past and romanticizing it.
I'm sure there are positives, but the UK's history is clearly not about freedom. The UK's history is subjugating a massive amount of people. So claiming that the UK has its historic achievements because of freedom is just blatant revisionism. You could definitely find some good things though.
All of these things only applied to (part of) the population in Britain. Colonial subjects of the UK had none of these rights in practice, except for settlers.
The Chagos Islands would meet that definition if there were any residents left; they were all forcibly removed, but campaign to return.
Ostensibly they are forbidden from returning because the islands are a nature reserve, but it came out in leaked cables the nature reserve's raison d'etre is keeping out the Chagos Islanders. Conservation is only a side-effect.
Each time the debate about free speech on social media comes up, people say: "well private platforms, they can censor whatever they want, they are not the government". Of course it only applies to the speech the former do not like: expediency.
Here is a thing: social media grew that big because governments created a legal environment in which social media could grow that big. DMCA, safe harbor, the fact that social media are not liable for the content their users post...
Are these social media entitled to all these favorable laws? My point is, it goes both ways. Yes social media as private companies can censor whatever legal content they want, No the government doesn't have to let them off the hook and doesn't have to keep a favorable legal or fiscal framework for these particular platforms to growth exponentially either...
I'm not saying governments should crack down on these platforms, I'm just saying that ultimately, the legislator makes the laws...
The platforms make money at scale, well how about they become liable "at scale" if the content is public?
Concerns about liability is why platforms like Youtube are blocking stuff, they're trying to self-police before the government hits them with a big liability hammer.
So I'm not sure really what you're trying to say. You seem to be against safe harbour and laws that make them not liable. You argue that they should 'become liable at scale'. However you seem to be against their attempts to block content such regulations are likely to make them liable for.
Yes of course, I know perfectly well this is an inappropriate example. None of us want it to have been blocked. Probably nobody at Youtube actually wants to block it either, they're just applying their rules inappropriately. In fact it looks like it's already unblocked. But who gets to write the rules and objectively define what is or isn't appropriate?
If you want regulation and liability, edge cases like this are absolutely going to happen and we're going to have to find ways to manage that.
I'm interpreting the comment above as advocating for the pre-Section 230 world, where as long as you didn't moderate at all, you were shielded from liability.
I'm not sure that's good for the world per se (there's also no obligation for YouTube to collect contact info, so either you've effectively legalized defamation/libel because there's no way to hold anyone legally accountable for it in order to remove it, or you're replacing it with a DMCA-like system where mere accusations of defamation are enough to remove a video, thereby increasing censorship). But it is true that it's specific policy choice by lawmakers and we could choose differently.
> I'm just saying that ultimately, the legislator makes the laws...
Almost always when this debate is had, it's in the context of the US, where the First Amendment is a _hard_ stop against this sort of thing, but otherwise suggesting that the government have the final say over whatever you are allowed to say isn't historically a very popular suggestion.
Of course, in other jurisdictions, they can pass whatever laws they want, and platforms can choose to comply, comply only locally, withdraw, or pay whatever fines to keep going as they are.
Do you think that the government should force HN to host child pornography and not remove it if someone uploads it? Or is that not how it works at all?
Of course not, the government is free to pass whatever laws regulating whatever kind of content is allowed, as they should and have been doing. What is your point again?
It should be easy to work out the point, if you weren't being completely disingenuous.
The topic of forcing platforms to remove illegal content is completely, utterly different to the topic of forcing them to host content, whether illegal or otherwise.
And in the US, the government is _not_ free to pass laws forcing platforms to host, or remove, non-illegal content, without explicitly coming into conflict with the first amendment.
Problem here is that the legislators have skipped making laws on this area because of expedience, politicians have hotlines to the big tech where they can call in ask for content to be removed without any transparency or records whatsoever. And not only that big tech are in many cases subsidized by governments, decided by the same politicians that make the calls. We are talking about massive corruption on the highest level.
This new way of governance is not confined to social media but it also been used excessively during the Covid pandemic, instead of doing the hard work of passing legislation in a legislative body, governments are using back channels to pressure companies, NGOs, cities, etc to do their bidding, without any transparency or records.
It is obviously anti-democratic to its core.
Free speech is not absolute, government has the right to censor, however is has to do it properly by passing legislation, using courts and other transparent institutions.
I'm not surprised. Google cancelled a Ukrainian engineer who had objections to the CRT "fact" that all white people enjoy privilege. Remember that Ukrainians had to suffer Hitler, the Great Famine, Stalin and the Soviet Union.
The insidious mind games that the Google nomenklatura plays are described here, by an honest and harmless person. Highly recommended, also the comment section under the video:
> the CRT "fact" that all white people enjoy privilege
Do you have a source for this? I am very far from knowledgeable about CRT but AFAIK what you've said there is just an incorrect right-wing talking point in the current anti-CRT fervour.
I mean, looking at the content, that's a heavily conservative, definitely alt-right, if not outright right-wing, channel.
And the segment immediately prior to him proclaiming the white privilege is "a garbage concept" is him proudly relating the story about how he triggered and trolled people by "identifying as a female powerlifter" and all the alt-right people who covered it...
So I've watched pretty much of all Triggernometry output, the 2 presenters have interesting backgrounds. Konstantin grew up in Soviet Russia and has been pretty left-wing his whole life (now identifies more centre-left), and Francis is a former teacher who spent time in Venezuela (I think his mother is from there?). As you can assume, they are pretty critical of communism.
However it's interesting you've described the content as right-wing, as it's far from that. They are very pro-freespeech, and have interviewed some pretty old-school left-wing people such as George Galloway.
Of course people just see that they interviewed people like Nigel Farage and assume they are right-wing (just because you interview a right/left winger doesn't make you that thing).
> (just because you interview a right/left winger doesn't make you that thing)
Indeed not but your reaction to what they're saying does - if you sit there and don't push back against X-wing views, that does tend to paint you as X-wing-leaning yourself (regardless of where you were born and where you claim to be politically.)
In the linked video from above, for example, there's no pushback to Zuby's strongly conservative views about trans people, wokeness, abortion, etc.
I think their style is just to ask questions and get the guest to open up about whatever topic they're discussing, and they do push back if the guest says something outlandish. They usually just want the discussion "out there" for other's to make their own minds up.
> strongly conservative views about trans people, wokeness, abortion, etc.
Don't forget that outside of Twitter, Academia and Silicon Valley (i.e. most of the world), these are not "conservative" views but pretty mainstream.
(I'll caveat that with abortion that one is probably too big a topic to discuss here.)
CRT is just the common sense of realising that government treated certain perceived races differently and the rest is mostly just normal history.
That being said, Ukrainian opression in the USSR is not something you can only approach with common sense. You need a rigorous approach to it and even then you can land on quite different conclusions.
When I started seeing the right-wing freakout over CRT I went and read some stuff on it.
Let me put it this way. Yes, there are things I disagree with in the CRT package, but there was nothing in there that justifies the amount of attention it's getting.
Some parts were quite reasonable. The idea that it's not just the letter of the law that matters but how the law is applied by the actual people applying it is common sense. The idea that a bureaucracy or social system can have biases built into it that none of the participants are fully aware of (systemic racism) is also obvious to anyone who has ever dealt with bureaucracies. This latter point is the base from which the straw man “all whites are racist” is extracted. That’s not what they are really saying. They are pointing out that one can participate in a system that has built in biases without consciously holding those biases.
Like most political freak outs (including some on the left) it's overblown bullshit to rally up the base. Remember that modern US elections tend to be won on which side has larger turnout, and getting the base riled up with anger is the way you maximize turnout.
The usual tactic is to cherry pick the craziest possible quotes or craziest people from the other side and portray them as representative of the entire movement. Sure you can find people in the CRT community saying stupid crazy things, but that is true for any group of people if you search hard enough.
The left does this too by e.g. painting all Christian conservatives as Dominionists when the latter is an extreme fringe position rejected by most.
This is the danger of these discussions. Yes, perhaps Ukrainians have been structurally oppressed, but that is irrelevant to the point here. The same would have happened to a white engineer from Moscow whose great grand parents had been killed by Stalin.
Those who brought out Champagne when Trump was censored... watch out... sooner or later, you'll be the one censored, and no one will be there to help you.
Jews (plenty of examples including the Holocaust). LGBT+ (unless you think that what happened to Alan Turing wasn't persecution). Muslims (by Christians and others). Christians (by Romans throwing them to the lions and others).
If there is a group, chances are it's been censored and persecuted.
I know that I'm supposed to assume the best, but with you it's pretty hard because history is so full of examples that it seems your question is not in good faith.
I also wasn't talking about one specific group. I was talking about what history shows about what happens to a group after it is censored. That is why I said "a group" instead of "this group" or "that group".
Smash the tech giants into many little pieces and their market power is reduced to the point that it really is private businesses and none of this matters. youtube_v1 blocks your video, touyube_v2 or v3 or whatever will have it because they are separate and not a cartel as that would be illegal.
The problem is facbook, google, apple, microsoft, etc etc are all vastly too big. If they need to be monolithic (they don't, but let's entertain the argument ) then treat them as a utility the same way we treat natural monopolies of drinking water distribution. Nationalisation is one way. Regulated return and heavily regulated business practise is another. Generally hacking it up into pieces and letting the pieces remain private is preferred when that can be done effectively.
Nobody cares that NBC didn't cover this speech. It's not interesting as a censorship question even if the omission is following the explicit political dictates of their owners (or staff). That's a better place to be all around.
> . youtube_v1 blocks your video, touyube_v2 or v3 or whatever will have it because they are separate and not a cartel as that would be illegal.
You're supposing that youtube_v1, youtube_v2, and youtube_v3 wouldn't all block you. They would, because all three companies would include a cohort of the same activist employees with the same censorious ideology all pushing to cancel the same people at the same time.
And why wouldn't we? That's the situation we have today. People banned from one major social media platform get banned from all major social media platforms pretty quickly. The state even encourages it.
Splitting tech companies won't do any good for censorship resistance on its own. We need common carrier requirements, not more heads on the censorship hydra.
> They would, because all three companies would include a cohort of the same activist employees with the same censorious ideology all pushing to cancel the same people at the same time.
Which is collusion and we have remedies for it. It's just a better place to be all around.
>Splitting tech companies won't do any good for censorship resistance on its own
It really will. The power imbalance is redressed so a multitude of normal policy options become available that aren't against a monolithic standard oil.
But sure, please do focus on the many other benefits of smashing _all_ entities with outsized market power into many pieces wherever such outsized market power arises.
edit:
3 is because I was establishing the point and didn't want to list out 50, which is closer to the right number of competing similar sized entities we'd want. If not a thousand.
It is worth noting, for those outside of the UK that David Davis has an absolutely brilliant track record of saying absolutely asinine nonsense. There's just no substance to what he says. No, I'm not talking about this video (although I have watched it and it's absolutely par for the course). He never talks with substance on any issue, and his main claim to fame was violating a binding vote of the house of commons to provide accurate sector by sector guidance to the house on the impact of Brexit. He was famously quoted as saying "There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside" and equally famous for... editting the reports to remove any references to the downsides of brexit. Needless to say he went on to resign in protest at the deal he himself had negotiated. He's just a hilariously inadequate man.
Having said all this, it sounds like the video was taken down by an over-aggressive automated system rather than some grand conspiracy to censor this incredibly inconsequential (and ahistorical) speech and it was back up within 6 hours.
"In PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980), the Supreme Court ruled that California could interpret its state constitution to protect political protesters from being evicted from private property, held open to the public, without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment. In this case, the California court went beyond the federal rule and held that, under the California constitution, a shopping mall owner could not exclude a group of high school students who were engaged in political advocacy. The state court decision has been adopted in one form or another by a substantial minority of states."
157 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadWorth a watch.
Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?
MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the worrying trend of strangling free speech"
"My speech at conference was carefully researched, wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence."
"Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill”
"The unambiguous attempt by YouTube to censor my speech is a warning."
"If YouTube is happy to attempt to silence elected Members of Parliament, then they are also happy to censor anyone uploading content to their services."
What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online (adds massive liability for illegal/'harmful' content if it isn't removed quickly so companies will most likely block more content as a result)
Then they simply shouldn't use AI algorithms to censor people.
> What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online
It's not obvious to me that the UK government has any coherent idea of what it is trying to do.
Some of these could be dealt with by the companies investing more in moderation (make them employees/better pay/healthcare etc.), but if you want to moderate at the scale of youtube/facebook/etc. then I don't see how you could do it without some automated tools
Then maybe free video hosting is not a viable business, why should youtube destroy all competition and then complain that checking their uploads is not possoble?
"I just closed my eyes, swung my fist repeatedly, and started walking! How should I have known you'd be standing there?"
forcing private entities to host things they dont want to sounds like a huge can of worms
Then once they have done that, and these sites have lots of users and traction, mandate that Google, Facebook etc also federate using ActivityPub. If they don't, block their sites.
(which happens to be the real world)
I very much doubt this is the case given the number of tariffs with data caps
As anecdata, I cut my package back to 5GB at the start of the first lockdown as my mobil data usage went to nearly 0 since wifi at home and did not run out of data during the last year. I assume anybody who was able to do that done the same.
If "for most is unlimited" you mean "most don't use up all their data", then yes. If you mean "most have unlimited data plans", then see links above.
EDIT: apologies for the statista link, it wasn't paywalling me when I first looked: it shows about 12% have unlimited data.
There's currently no way to horizontally scale an instance, so after an instance grows past a certain size it can't transcode uploaded videos fast enough. I love the project but if it can't utilize multiple compute instances to transcode video (or plug into a cloud platforms video transcoding offering), it's never going to grow past this blocker.
However I also acknowledge the authors are very open to ideas and they are really awesome. I guess some wizards who knows scaling related things need to be hired and it will costs a lot of money. AFAIK peertube generates money from donation so I don't think we should be harsh on them.
I wasn't aware of that -- fixing it would be a very necessary improvement to the codebase to make the software more useful on big sites.
I've never actually watched a video on a mobile device (I tried once and didn't have enough bandwidth).
If I'm at home or office, I have a desktop PC, and if I'm out and about I have better things to be doing with my time.
The Age Verification industry is lobbying hard to see their "investments" pay off this time, after being disappointed in 2017.
If governments tried to create publicly funded video website for anyone to upload to, it still won't accomplish what we'd hope for because governments always exercise their power censor. (See examples of UK BBC censorship.[1])
Look at the cognitive dissonance in the platitude: "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online."
The government-that-censors wants to force private businesses to not-censor?!? Inevitably, the government will force the business to censor something the government doesn't like which creates a contradiction!
[To downvoters: Does a government funded website that has uncensored "free speech" exist now? If not, why would it be realistic that it won't suffer the same pressures to censor that all previous government-controlled communication channels had? Let's not repeat platitudes about "free speech" but really dissect the mechanisms to enable censorship-resistant mass media. The mechanisms of implementation are the more difficult topic!]
EDIT reply to : >"I think op meant, that te government should make video.gov.tld webpage to post government videos there"
But the gp's phrase of "for _anyone_ to upload to" strongly implies user-generated content like Youtube uploaders instead of only the government employees uploading government videos.
Does the UK's BBC count as a government-sponsored website? They already have examples of hosting videos of parliament speeches. E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-58259509
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
Turn spying on its citizens and data harvesting of their public info into a useful resource for the benefit of all.
Isn't that exactly the problem?
Social media platforms' business models depend on not being able to moderate all content. Examples like this are an inevitability of the concept.
Imo that would be the worst, because a human doing it can be corrected (more training, revised check-lists etc.), but afaik AI moderating in its current form is a black hole and it will remain a black hole for the foreseeable future.
In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite.
As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox.
It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian.
When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.
Um. This is not the rebuttal to the MP's position that you think it is.
I am mainly responding to the ‘if they’ll do this to an MP they will do it to you’ syllogism, which seems to rest on the underlying assumption that an MP has at least the same speech rights (on a private website) as a member of the public - when in fact the ability of an MP to oblige a private company to carry their speech is expressly limited.
I am arguing that the fact he is an MP does not entitle him to special treatment and indeed historically brings his speech rights under greater scrutiny.
My point is mostly that MPs are not broadly entitled to use private platforms to speak unopposed, and in fact are more restricted by current law in that respect than people who are not MPs or parliamentary candidates.
I don't read the MP's objection to YouTube as expressing the position that he has the right to speak unopposed.
I read the MP's position as objecting to the idea that his opponents have the right to speak unopposed.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
How is that 'the best'. Only Silicon Valley thinks that is a valid legal excuse for anything. If you can't operate within the law you can't operate.
The US better start regulating their companies or you end up with a trade war due to the whole world including Europe just kicking these vendors out of the market entirely and permanently
Hence the quotes wrapping sentence.
That's demonstrably untrue. Look at the rise of Uber. If I started running an unlicensed taxi, they'd come down on me very hard and very quickly, but Uber had the resources to tie up enforcement until public opinion about their VC-subsidized "taxis" prevented any action.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands, it wouldn't have been the state that would come down 'hard'. (its the other cab drivers, physically assaulting you)
As a response to this kind of energy, we actually ended up liberizing our cab market a lot more before Uber came. And when Uber came here there was no good will for the existing established cab companies, because people considered them borderline mobsters.
Now what?
There is no consensus of what to do with political speech and media.
In some counties only the ruling government gets access. In some counties, only the leading parties have access and all must share time equally. In others, you only get the access that you can buy. In still others, no one gets access except under regulated conditions like a debate.
If Google takes a step back from the label of Big Tech and admits that YouTube is just another multinational media company… then what do they lose?
There is though. The general consensus of free societies is that the democratically elected government regulates speech and not the market.
The problem is youtube/facbeook/instagram/linked-in perform functions that one would normally classify as 'public space'. Obviously that might need some level of policing, because some speech is criminal (like a threat of violence made to another person). But private companies shouldn't be forced to police.
I blame the lack of regulations much more than the for profit companies trying to make a profit (they are legally bound to pursuit profit by their stock holders).
The trouble is the US is allergic to do such a thing, and when another country starts regulation the companies of one of their biggest trade ally's...
So, please, uncle Sam. Can you please make sure the ToS of facebook and the like, is written by your congress. So that there is direct democratic influence on it? Even Facebook will like a lot better that way, because it actually allows them to stop pretending to be 'the facebook state' and can just go back to 'facebook, the for profit company'.
Much of the problem comes down to the fact that the "science" changes quite frequently. When new evidence appears, which updates our Bayesian Priors ( airborne vs aerosol/fomites, vaccine type effectiveness, delta variant transmittivity, ventilator usefulness, lab leak hypothesis, comorbidity statistics, etc ) the Powers That Be rely on the pre-update "science" to determine if censorship is warranted.
One can argue if censorship of "disinformation" is a societal good, and I won't litigate that general matter here, but it becomes a particular point of contention if what is classified as disinformation changes with every Lancet publication.
The issue isn't that YouTube can do this. They can, that is cool. Free world. The issue that is if they are going to do this everyone should respond. Nobody ever vetted YouTube as the arbiter of truth. They are not qualified for this, and they are going to screw up really badly.
If they're going to set themselves up for failure, we all have to make sure we're standing outside the blast zone when they screw up really badly.
The institutions we set up to arbitrate truth - the courts - are already swamped beyond belief in many countries.
The problem is that our societal systems of governance have been designed hundreds of years past, when life was focused on a couple dozen kilometers around where one lived. Nowadays, with global instant communication and knowledge available to almost everyone, conflicts and disagreements achieve far, far more reach and impact - and our societal foundations have never been updated to reflect the new reality and its demands.
The US still votes on Tuesdays because of farmers commitments to church and market days in the 19th century (https://www.history.com/news/why-is-election-day-a-tuesday-i...), copyright as a concept dates back to the 1700s, and legal language is so full of Latin and other outdated language it is impossible to understand for normal citizens.
We are witnessing a break-up of society, especially between the old/Boomer generation and the young "digital natives". For us young people, we see the possibilities and dangers of technology - and we see that our societal infrastructure is horribly outdated and the old generation which is in power dragging their feet and doing everything they can to prevent progress.
"Everyone should" just doesn't work. It doesn't happen. The vast majority of people don't care, and the few who care are not going to change their habits and jump to a niche platform that maybe solves their problem. Network effects and the comfort of familiarity too big to ignore.
Is it just because they really want to, compared to people with a more "live and let live" attitude?
I assume blocking motorways is illegal already, yet the police are doing nothing, which is leading dangerously to vigilante justice as per some videos, which is only a question of time before it turns really violent.
Wtf is the UK government doing? Why do they need more powers when they don't use the current ones? Or is it for "other" types of protests? Shutting down motorways is fine.
“if a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence” (Highways Act, 1980, s.137).
They ruled that, under some circumstances, 'proportionately' exercising the right to protest could qualify as a lawful excuse. In the case in point, the protesters had blocked one of multiple entrances to an arms fair, in circumstances when only arms fair traffic was likely to even notice the protest (it was an entryway to the Excel centre). Also, the protest was of short duration.
The consequence of the decision is that the question of lawfulness is now case-by-case, as it is with other highway obstructions. There is essentially no chance that protesters blocking motorways are going to escape a conviction on the basis of this decision. They're also likely to be given post-conviction orders making repetition imprisonable.
FWIW I pretty strongly support the campaign's expressed aims, but reckon that this is some of the shittest praxis I've seen from protest group. Like the previous stunt by a bunch of XR-aligned people of gluing themselves to public transport, it's got a tenuous link with the aim pursued and is going to cost their cause vastly more public support than it can hope to gain.
[see https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/offences-during-protes...]
There was a BLM protest that pulled down a statue of a slave trader in Bristol. Honestly, pretty much every elected politician would have been OK with that. But then there was another protest in London where some critical graffiti was sprayed on a statue of Winston Churchill. Despite his faults, Churchill is an extremely popular figure; no elected politician would support statues of him being damaged or removed.
So a bill to stop protests damaging statues seemed like a good idea to them.
From the perspective of civil servants and the police, if you offer them more power of course they'll say yes. Who wouldn't want more power, after all?
But getting the bill through the bureaucracy took time, and by the time it was ready the most recent protest-policing news was a police crack-down on a candle-lit vigil for a woman who'd been raped and murdered just days before... by a policeman.
Is this a serious question? To make their job easier, always. It's a lot easier to do what you want when you don't have little things like the law or people's rights standing in the way.
They are letting them? I'm pretty sure they get arrested every single time. Or are you wanting a instant jail sentence for being suspect of making people late?
For some reason this isn't being used, and they just let people go again and again, and they always return a few days later. Well, actually, they DO issue these restrictions, but don't follow up with actual punishment. Boggles the brain. You take a handful of grandmas and stick them in actual, factual jail for a month, see how many people return to protest next time.
> You take a handful of grandmas and stick them in actual, factual jail for a month, see how many people return to protest next time.
What you think they would be victimised? Mate they won't be touched and all the cons will love them. Bashing old people gets you put into protection in the jails.
Well, if you're British, sure? If you're an EU Citizen wanting to live or work in the UK, he was very much "they should have ID cards" in 2017.
Whether you agree or not with the requirement of ID cards for EU nationals in the UK, doesn’t change the fact that David Davis repeatedly voted against extending one’s civil liberties, based on their nationality.
This is what the previous commenter noted, and is factually correct!
David Davis is a joke and his word is not worth more than his EU trade deal that never happened.
I'm sure the inhabitants of the many countries the British invaded and continue to hang on to would disagree.
The Online Safety Bill he mentions in his outrage at YouTube taking down his speech is itself an attack on freedoms.
He's also part of a political party working to criminalise protests they disagree with.
The political systems of every one of those countries are freer today than they were before the British “visited”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Norman_Engl...
I'm also not sure if being a white coal miner in 1870 in Britain would have been much better than the jobs in the colonies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold,_Flintshire#The_Mold_Riot
Propose one colony where the indigenous society was freer
So the assertion is that being colonised increased their freedom?
I don't know man, but arguing for a process that discriminated against people on the basis of their color is something that I thought was a thing of the past. I guess I was wrong.
And countries don't evolve in a vacuum. Many countries would have adopted British ideas of freedom just through observation.
I understand being unconformable with one's country's past, but the mental hoops to try to get some justification to colonization is so strange.
Even if (and that's a BIG if) those societies ended up "freer" let's not fool ourselves, not a single country went to colonise another for hundreds of years to make it freer, they went there to exploit it. If 500 years later that country is in a better shape now (again a BIG if), that's an unintended side effect.
Generally speaking the colonisers established their colonies to access natural resources, being new agricultural techniques to undeveloped lands, and engage in trade. The culture of the coloniser naturally came along with them.
Even if there were no specific goal of bringing freedom that may still have been a side effect.
How is that an argument? If I enslave a group of people, force on them my language so they can follow orders and 500 years later that language opens doors for them, how am I "illustrious"? it's a side effect of an inhumane act.
Trying to twist this so my history doesn't make me uncomfortable is historical immaturity.
The only places I can think of that Britain currently "hangs on to" against the will of the inhabitants are arguably Scotland and Northern Ireland, but in both those places about half the population want to continue to belong to the UK.
So it's not obvious to me who you're referring to here.
Although, the talk of blocking another Scottish independence referendum could certainly be used as evidence of holding on to a country against the inhabitants will. You can't know their will if you prevent them from expressing it. Yes, they expressed it 7 years ago but a lot has changed since then, most notably leaving the EU.
Otherwise, where do we draw the line? How far do we go back? Those original human perpetrators are long dead.
"Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin."
~ Deuteronomy 24:16
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866094
~ Numbers 14:18
;)
A phrase for ever situation. So versatile.
It is either:
A. Never
B. Sometime
If you feel it's A then there's nothing to debate.
If you feel it's B then let's haggle over the definition of sometime?
It appears my definition is that that "sometime" is now.
Your definition is sometime in the future.
It's not as interesting to talk about present achievements because the UK is clearly in decline. That's why this politician was identifying their ideology with the glorious past and romanticizing it.
Any positives are negated by past malevolent actions?
Thanks for your comments!
--
EDIT: Upon some cursory research I still am not sure I can agree with your assessment.
--
[1] Bill of Rights : 1689
[2] United Kingdom : 1707
[3] Civil Liberties in UK : (various dates)
[4] Magna Carta : 1215
[5] Parliamentary Privilege
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom#Kingdom_of_Grea...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_liberties_in_the_United_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_privilege
There is no history of the UK being enlightened by freedom.
;)
Ostensibly they are forbidden from returning because the islands are a nature reserve, but it came out in leaked cables the nature reserve's raison d'etre is keeping out the Chagos Islanders. Conservation is only a side-effect.
Here is a thing: social media grew that big because governments created a legal environment in which social media could grow that big. DMCA, safe harbor, the fact that social media are not liable for the content their users post...
Are these social media entitled to all these favorable laws? My point is, it goes both ways. Yes social media as private companies can censor whatever legal content they want, No the government doesn't have to let them off the hook and doesn't have to keep a favorable legal or fiscal framework for these particular platforms to growth exponentially either...
I'm not saying governments should crack down on these platforms, I'm just saying that ultimately, the legislator makes the laws...
The platforms make money at scale, well how about they become liable "at scale" if the content is public?
So I'm not sure really what you're trying to say. You seem to be against safe harbour and laws that make them not liable. You argue that they should 'become liable at scale'. However you seem to be against their attempts to block content such regulations are likely to make them liable for.
Yes of course, I know perfectly well this is an inappropriate example. None of us want it to have been blocked. Probably nobody at Youtube actually wants to block it either, they're just applying their rules inappropriately. In fact it looks like it's already unblocked. But who gets to write the rules and objectively define what is or isn't appropriate?
If you want regulation and liability, edge cases like this are absolutely going to happen and we're going to have to find ways to manage that.
I'm not sure that's good for the world per se (there's also no obligation for YouTube to collect contact info, so either you've effectively legalized defamation/libel because there's no way to hold anyone legally accountable for it in order to remove it, or you're replacing it with a DMCA-like system where mere accusations of defamation are enough to remove a video, thereby increasing censorship). But it is true that it's specific policy choice by lawmakers and we could choose differently.
Almost always when this debate is had, it's in the context of the US, where the First Amendment is a _hard_ stop against this sort of thing, but otherwise suggesting that the government have the final say over whatever you are allowed to say isn't historically a very popular suggestion.
Of course, in other jurisdictions, they can pass whatever laws they want, and platforms can choose to comply, comply only locally, withdraw, or pay whatever fines to keep going as they are.
The topic of forcing platforms to remove illegal content is completely, utterly different to the topic of forcing them to host content, whether illegal or otherwise.
And in the US, the government is _not_ free to pass laws forcing platforms to host, or remove, non-illegal content, without explicitly coming into conflict with the first amendment.
This new way of governance is not confined to social media but it also been used excessively during the Covid pandemic, instead of doing the hard work of passing legislation in a legislative body, governments are using back channels to pressure companies, NGOs, cities, etc to do their bidding, without any transparency or records.
It is obviously anti-democratic to its core.
Free speech is not absolute, government has the right to censor, however is has to do it properly by passing legislation, using courts and other transparent institutions.
The insidious mind games that the Google nomenklatura plays are described here, by an honest and harmless person. Highly recommended, also the comment section under the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs27FtYKEos
Do you have a source for this? I am very far from knowledgeable about CRT but AFAIK what you've said there is just an incorrect right-wing talking point in the current anti-CRT fervour.
Di Angelo, whose views are being taught at Google, seems to believe that white privilege and white unconscious racism are prevalent.
I'm not sure that this is a "right wing" talking point. Here is a Black man, who studied CS at Oxford, talking about white privilege:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAo3t_KWHhI
I mean, looking at the content, that's a heavily conservative, definitely alt-right, if not outright right-wing, channel.
And the segment immediately prior to him proclaiming the white privilege is "a garbage concept" is him proudly relating the story about how he triggered and trolled people by "identifying as a female powerlifter" and all the alt-right people who covered it...
However it's interesting you've described the content as right-wing, as it's far from that. They are very pro-freespeech, and have interviewed some pretty old-school left-wing people such as George Galloway.
Of course people just see that they interviewed people like Nigel Farage and assume they are right-wing (just because you interview a right/left winger doesn't make you that thing).
Indeed not but your reaction to what they're saying does - if you sit there and don't push back against X-wing views, that does tend to paint you as X-wing-leaning yourself (regardless of where you were born and where you claim to be politically.)
In the linked video from above, for example, there's no pushback to Zuby's strongly conservative views about trans people, wokeness, abortion, etc.
> strongly conservative views about trans people, wokeness, abortion, etc.
Don't forget that outside of Twitter, Academia and Silicon Valley (i.e. most of the world), these are not "conservative" views but pretty mainstream.
(I'll caveat that with abortion that one is probably too big a topic to discuss here.)
"bad", not as much, until those opinions start to impact (mostly vulnerable) people negatively.
That being said, Ukrainian opression in the USSR is not something you can only approach with common sense. You need a rigorous approach to it and even then you can land on quite different conclusions.
Let me put it this way. Yes, there are things I disagree with in the CRT package, but there was nothing in there that justifies the amount of attention it's getting.
Some parts were quite reasonable. The idea that it's not just the letter of the law that matters but how the law is applied by the actual people applying it is common sense. The idea that a bureaucracy or social system can have biases built into it that none of the participants are fully aware of (systemic racism) is also obvious to anyone who has ever dealt with bureaucracies. This latter point is the base from which the straw man “all whites are racist” is extracted. That’s not what they are really saying. They are pointing out that one can participate in a system that has built in biases without consciously holding those biases.
Like most political freak outs (including some on the left) it's overblown bullshit to rally up the base. Remember that modern US elections tend to be won on which side has larger turnout, and getting the base riled up with anger is the way you maximize turnout.
The usual tactic is to cherry pick the craziest possible quotes or craziest people from the other side and portray them as representative of the entire movement. Sure you can find people in the CRT community saying stupid crazy things, but that is true for any group of people if you search hard enough.
The left does this too by e.g. painting all Christian conservatives as Dominionists when the latter is an extreme fringe position rejected by most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
The evidence does not need to be from now.
If there is a group, chances are it's been censored and persecuted.
I know that I'm supposed to assume the best, but with you it's pretty hard because history is so full of examples that it seems your question is not in good faith.
I also wasn't talking about one specific group. I was talking about what history shows about what happens to a group after it is censored. That is why I said "a group" instead of "this group" or "that group".
The problem is facbook, google, apple, microsoft, etc etc are all vastly too big. If they need to be monolithic (they don't, but let's entertain the argument ) then treat them as a utility the same way we treat natural monopolies of drinking water distribution. Nationalisation is one way. Regulated return and heavily regulated business practise is another. Generally hacking it up into pieces and letting the pieces remain private is preferred when that can be done effectively.
Nobody cares that NBC didn't cover this speech. It's not interesting as a censorship question even if the omission is following the explicit political dictates of their owners (or staff). That's a better place to be all around.
You're supposing that youtube_v1, youtube_v2, and youtube_v3 wouldn't all block you. They would, because all three companies would include a cohort of the same activist employees with the same censorious ideology all pushing to cancel the same people at the same time.
And why wouldn't we? That's the situation we have today. People banned from one major social media platform get banned from all major social media platforms pretty quickly. The state even encourages it.
Splitting tech companies won't do any good for censorship resistance on its own. We need common carrier requirements, not more heads on the censorship hydra.
Which is collusion and we have remedies for it. It's just a better place to be all around.
>Splitting tech companies won't do any good for censorship resistance on its own
It really will. The power imbalance is redressed so a multitude of normal policy options become available that aren't against a monolithic standard oil.
But sure, please do focus on the many other benefits of smashing _all_ entities with outsized market power into many pieces wherever such outsized market power arises.
edit: 3 is because I was establishing the point and didn't want to list out 50, which is closer to the right number of competing similar sized entities we'd want. If not a thousand.
Have you been living in a cave? What would you call today's cross-company bans except collusion?
Prosecuting a facebook sized company for doning something flagrantly illegal is a lot harder than one or more of a great many smaller sized companies.
Having said all this, it sounds like the video was taken down by an over-aggressive automated system rather than some grand conspiracy to censor this incredibly inconsequential (and ahistorical) speech and it was back up within 6 hours.
From https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-s...
"In PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980), the Supreme Court ruled that California could interpret its state constitution to protect political protesters from being evicted from private property, held open to the public, without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment. In this case, the California court went beyond the federal rule and held that, under the California constitution, a shopping mall owner could not exclude a group of high school students who were engaged in political advocacy. The state court decision has been adopted in one form or another by a substantial minority of states."
Same with this guy. Another lies-spewing Tory was autodetected as talking nonsense. Colour me surprised.