Under Australian law Google, Facebook etc. are considered publishers and publishers of defamatory content can be sued. This is not new and there are multiple precedences.
I dont know how I feel about this case (seems like Youtube themselves understand they didnt move fast enough) but this idea that sites hosting user content are publishers is some truly evil modern backstabbing of the internet & what made it possible.
It feels fantastic & absurd, a fictitious & inapplicable label or classification.
This is a threat to basic freedom & if it erodes safe harbor protections it will have vast vast & terrifying chilling effects; online sites will have to radically scale back what they can offer the public. It's sad to think any random state can layer in whatever legal nightmare it might cobble together. Humanity shouldnt be so jointly bound to whatever deadweight amy random country cooks up.
On the contrary, every other medium of publishing bears responsibility for its actions. You can sue a newspaper for publishing a defamatory editorial, why shouldn't you be able to sue YouTube for the same? The Internet is not magical or different, nor should it be above the law.
The issue with national boundaries is simple: Companies have to respect the laws where they operate. When they choose to become multinational behemoths, they accept that cost. YouTube is free to not do business in Australia if it doesn't want to follow Australia's laws. But since they make billions of dollars doing business there, they presumably would rather follow the law, and try to pay off politicians to make the law favorable to their business.
The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly. Australia has long had a troubling & distrubing relationship with the press & allowed the wealthy & powerful inordinate legal control over publishing. To apply the same brutal regulation on 98% of human expression & exchange is ignoble. The scope of what you propose to regulate here is so vastly vastly greater.
This application of old, already unreasonable, anti-speech practices to modern telecommunications is derangement.
You notably havent shown any recognition whatsoever of the idea of safe harbor. You've presented only a case for total & complete responsibility, given no outlet or done anything to begin to allow user-content to exist, and are charging these entities with complete responsibility. This is comedically unworkable & a farce, unfit for consideration, in a world when gigabytes cost cents per month & bandwidth is plentiful. These tubes can all just rot & serve only industry & empire if what you propose is allowed.
Only one other country proposes such draconian levels of ultimate responsibity, and that country also funds & pays for hundreds of thousands of censors & moderators operating directly under the state.
The fact that several major governments have come nearly unglued over outright fictions perpetrated across free speech enthusiast platforms suggests unchecked speech isn't an inherent good.
And YouTube doesn't allow free speech. Without regulation, it allows speech as defined as acceptable to YouTube's business. Worse than both regulated speech and free speech is what bad laws like Section 230 ensure: Corporate speech.
This argumemtation is getting darker & weirder quickly. These are publishers... but you dont like that they have rights to not-host content? How is a publisher supposed to do publishing if they also cant tell users they wont host their content? The wbole point of a so called publisher is to exercise their coproate speech rights, which you seem to protest heavily against, & thatcs very confusing to me. That right to pick & discern is the biggest thing 230 does.
As for corproate speech & it's dangers, sites have a right to identity, to shape & grow themselves in ways they think are fit & healthy. That freedom in no way encumbers your right to speech, it doesnt threaten anyone: we all have abundant options for getting our voices out for sharing. We shouldnt all have to listen to whomever wants to yell; free speech doesnt mean every place on the planet must let whomever in to yell as they please. I dont go to a Borders bookstore to get shouted at by religious fringe groups. Bookstores dont have to have copies of books on the shelf, of perhaps these same groups. These defenses are also "corporate speech", the right of Borders Books to maintain their business & shape it. The internet itself rarely cuts anyone off, almost exclusively only under direct legal need, so there's endless options still available; the protest that everywhere, every big site should have to host content seems abominable, uncivil. We have to rely on sites, and a diversity of sites, or perhaps someday more p2p/direct-publish syndication. When a site grow rotten & oppressive, we can & should go vote with our feet, move to other sites.
I agree that unchecked free speech is chaotic & dangerous. Moderation is important, one of the defining characteristics & something we have a lot of diverse different styles & systems for, that we are still learning from. Sites need to be able to host content, without being direct endorsers/directly responsible parties to that content, and they need to be able to say no to content. Without the first, nothing can be shared nor hosted without vast chilling & frighteningly costly & fragile/elaborate safeguards checking each & every word, and eithout the latter all places bece one big room for the very loudest to shout & dominate & control.
It should be possible in any western system of law to defend content containing provably true statements (IANAL!).
>The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly.
That goes against today's mainstream ideal of de-platforming people who say provably false (allegedly) things against minorities, women, LGBTQ communities, etc. The logic there is Platform X is a private business and they can kick out anyone they want.
>> The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly.
> That goes against today's mainstream ideal of de-platforming people who say provably false
Two things, first, there's a difference between (almost) no one being able to speak online & most everyone except those who social pressures have massively turned against. Even if we did fully kick people off the internet, the scale seems to be less than 1-in-a-million problematic segments of humanity to people who do more or less fine. The main discussion to me isnt the unpallatable ones- it's the 99.999999% case, it's what's generally available before you fuck up & piss society off, brcome too hot to handle. Tbis horseshit about anyone having to host content having to be a publisher is an actual mortal threat to whether humanity (generally) is allowed a voice & to share & express themselves. The minor exceptional case you discuss wouldnt be a case at all without there being an ability to speak, which Australia g the "publishers" brigade of shouters threatens.
Second, I continue to argue even the deplatformed have enormous & vast powers to present themselves online. Their personage may not be welcome on various vast platforms- but if they set up a website, a weblog, or whatnot, usually that content can be shared. Even that is more than these people necessarily ought receieve, is businesses performing services for them for free. Even if the platform blocks your site entirely, you still have a site. People can freely of their own will type in your domain name & go there. They can use other sites to link to you. Communications capabilities are fantastically cheap, just epically low cost, from hardware (purchased or rented) to software (free in many cases). The deplatformed have tried to band together & erect their own platforms time and time again, and no one stops them, no one prevents that. They fail all on their own, have yet to arise to become places of vitality & noteability.
A newspaper is a carefully crafted collection of articles by the editors. 720,000 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day. Equating the two is simply not reasonable. YouTube is more like a library or archive, where users themselves decide what to consume.
I would very very definitely separate them from publishers.
Trying to put them back in the publisher camp because there need to be ways for users to find & get content, and hopefully good content, relevant to what they're looking for, in no way changes this
So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard.
That is absolutely not reasonable: If YouTube cannot curate 720,000 hours of video a day, perhaps it shouldn't be accepting 720,000 hours of video a day. And perhaps, if it hired the staff to appropriately do so, it wouldn't be (part of) one of the most profitable companies on the planet.
Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior. In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem that is apparently getting drastically worse every single day.
And as a former library employee, I can absolutely tell you that libraries pay attention to each and every book that goes into their collections. And while libraries value speech of varying viewpoints, and often celebrates things like "banned books", they are also very rare to give home to outright defamation.
This seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy, given how very cheap & affordable digitalized expression is. Radically raising the barrier to entry to express yourself- turning back the clock to the 1970's level communication systems, or going Full Chinese Authoritarian moderation- does not seem worthy the rather abstract benefit of better regulation.
Bits are cheap. Being so very very afraid of them isnt going to progress us through these times. Clutching for such absolute assurity is blanketly infeasible & cavalierly retrogressive.
I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion. Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous.
The cost of bits has nothing to do with it. It's about ensuring companies are not causing mass global harm through their actions. Right now, Section 230-powered social media companies have been responsible for genocides, and you suggest that holding them to any sort of accountability would be "hideous and cruel". I think "dude can't spout off whatever defamation he wants unchecked on YouTube, but less people are slaughtered" is a fairly good tradeoff.
> * I would recommend tuning your language down from suggesting "holding companies accountable for ensuring their products follow the law" is "hideous and cruel". That seems really detached from the discussion.
You've fictitiously made up the link between the first part & the second. I was replying to your absolutely shocking (to me) proposal that we shut down youtube until human moderators can review all incoming content, currently around 720,000 hours/day, and calling the stream of content an "absolutely unhinged problem" (your emphasis). My words might better be expanded into:
> [Your demand to human moderate all content/be afraid of/revile against content/sharing] seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy,
Again I feel "misconstrue" is a generous definition of your other fork here:
> Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous.
Once again, I was discussing your proposal, not the law. Perhaps if we do take Australia seriously (hard to do at present), & regard them a publisher, sites hosting user-content have a higher bar to moderation than what they're doing.
Perhaps just ongoing legal court cases are the check & balance they need & the system is working; they will refine their tools for filtering content to get better, fulfillent to the law perhaps without ever becoming anything humanity would ever have recognized in any way as a publisher before. Personally, I think that would reflect very poorly on the law, would define government as ignorant stupid & incapable of it's base sovereign duty, be unable to make even a simple grasp of reality, but perhaps modern expression can adapt & survive under such merciless ignorant stupidity anyhow. Alas, most likely, it will only be the very very large, existing companies that can navigate & adapt, wade through this legal hell, develop the complex & careful processes & systems to still accept user-content.
I still don't see what you are trying to protect against or how. I don't see great evils about. I don't see these platforms as bad. It's a hard job trying to insure moderation standards are met worldwide. I don't see systematic bad behavior you write about, I see company's trying to do a pretty good job, trying to navigate hard social issues of the say safely (something you propose blowing up by eliminating Section 230 & it's ability to let these company's pick what content to host):
> Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior
This crystalizes what I find so terrifying. I've already said I disagree, don't find much of a compelling case for bad behavior. Whether or not scale is an excuse, it misses the obvious truth: the internet has vastly vastly empowered & enabled expression, in ways radically unlike what came before. This planet is vastly more capable. Scale isn't an excuse: it's a fact. One you propose unwinding & turning off. For unspecified spectres of evil & harm, that I think are mostly imagined.
I don't see any recognition of the impossibility of the task you demand companys take, when you describe "accountability." Let's take on of the few truly agreeable awful large scale (more than a couple person sized) incidents, Myanmar (largely lain at Facebook (not Youtubes) feet). First up, yes, Facebook should have done more. They did not deplatform enough people fast enough or aggressively enough. But I have sympathys in abundance, rather than merely axes to grind here. The world is extremely difficult to grasp & understand, the case of what's happening on the ground somewhere is complex & actively developing, & there's so much regional contexts that are hard to ac...
Okay, like, are tech companies paying you by the word for this?
The fact that you just "have sympathies" about a giant evil ad company enabling genocide because it would be so deeply troubling if companies were to be held accountable for their actions really sums up... everything here. I have no further notes, I think we've covered it here. Your comment here was so very "the NRA's thoughts and prayers are with the families of the kids gunned down" that there's really nowhere else to go.
You'd rather genocide than Google and Facebook be less profitable. Full stop. Because that's the true result of what I'm talking about: These companies aren't going to disappear because they're regulated and have to be accountable, as much as their shills will claim is plausible. The information age isn't going away. But when tech companies bear responsibility for their decisions, they probably won't make up half of the Fortune 10. They're abnormally profitable because they're also abnormally unregulated.
> You'd rather genocide than Google and Facebook be less profitable. Full stop
Again this abuse of Fear & emotions to deny engaging in actual discussion. I keep feeling like you have nothing but condemnation & scorn to offer, endless protest but no willingness to acknowledge, and that your words lack reason & justification & instead are loaded with emotion & zealous conviction.
> a giant evil ad company enabling genocide
Legally mandated genocidal information. The government & military itself were spreading the genocidal messages. I don't agree with this, everyone agrees the reaction could have been faster. But I also understand & appreciate that it wasn't always clear what was happening, that trying to respond to a government going bad, quietly, & pushing dark propoganda is not easy. You keep trying to make it look simple, to emphasize only how any disagreement, how any search of moderation is unreasonable: the word genocide sends chills down our spines, is starkly reprehensible. But the practical challenge here is still valid; identifying what's happening, figuring out how to deploy sufficient intelligence to resist governmental & civilian information war, fighting each battle, each piece of content, as it streams in from across the globe: the challenge is significant, is a war effort fought on behalf of a people, a hard war effort. Acknowledge that. Don't escape to reductionism.
I think it's crass & foolish to regard companys with such grim-dark-shaded glasses. These companies are a mix of many things. Yes, they have ads (like all companies they seek to make money). Yes many are quite big/giants. But they also have some noble & good purposes (helping us find information, watch cool videos, share with our friends & family, host our content, provide online hangout places), and generally, I think they execute fairly well, that the tradeoffs are reasonable & all in all not badly slanted against users in the vast majority of circumstances. Ultimately they sell ads by competing to be better places than the other online places; that diversity & competition is something I cherish & which I believe in, keeps us pointed forward.
You dismiss me out of hand, in my view because I have asked us to see & acknowledge shades of gray & difficulties & think these are hard problems. Again you violate site guidelines here, and reduce a long case to simplistic out of hand dismissal:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
Your replies keep circling back to the simple, again in violation of guidelines:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
And you have only belittled and insulted me, rather than taken my arguments as serious. Violation of this guideline:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Let me restate my case, yet again, because I agree it might not be clear where I'm coming from, why I would mount these defenses.
I think different sites have a right to govern themselves. Taking that away takes away diversity. That's of tantamount importance to me. I believe some sites we have today will wreck & ruin themselves all on their own good time. But if we try to regulate & restrict, I believe we'll create legal quagmires that newer smaller would-be upstarts will be unable to ever face: we should not be creating vast new barriers. Legal permissiveness, with some acceptance of mistakes, is required. We cannot expect techno-mystical solutionism, nor have utopian expectations of perfect regulation.
As for genocide, the fact that the state & military of Myanmar itself were disseminating much of the information is one basic neutron-moderator I'd try to carefully insert into your nuclear-blow-up reaction of accusations against me. Trying to understand, no, ...
>> A newspaper is a carefully crafted collection of articles by the editors. 720,000 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day. Equating the two is simply not reasonable. YouTube is more like a library or archive, where users themselves decide what to consume.
You:
> So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard.
You're trying to win this one- in part- by covertly asserting your definition of Youtube being a curator. Which directly charges over & ignores exactly what the parent said.
Curators operate by tastes. Not by moderation guidelines. If youtube took 1/2 the 720,000 hours of day of video & said, nah, we don't want the rest, you might maybe have a leg to stand on. It's a silly pretense, calling them a "curator," or a "publisher," or whatever other pre-contemporary shoebox of an idea you strive to fit them into. There's simply no parallel. We never could amass information like this before; it physically was not possible. We never could allow so many visitors to an archive of humanity before; it physically was not possible. What's happening now does not mirror the past, it is something new, and doesn't fit the compact tight little vintage models you try shoving it into.
You were a librarian, so you might enjoy a reading suggestion on an idea to pool human knowledge & expand it's access. John G Kemeny, Chairman of Math & Astronomy at Dartmouth, wrote "A Library for 2000 A.D." (and 2100 AD), written ~1962, imagining a vast globe-spanning system of teleconnected/replicating microfiche to capture human knowledge & development. It was an epic & expansive proposal, expecting 10,000,000 items (mostly articles, papers, some books) per year added (and increasing in velocity). He writes of high-science-fiction of the day, but today it feels so unbeleivably antiquated, prehistoric. We are unimaginably more empowered, more capable than he could have imagined.
Things have changed vastly in 10~20 the past years (20TB hard drives for $450!), and trying to impose old framings to view & understand & govern what we expect or how we regulate is a huge hazard. I think it's imperative that we recognize that there are things without precedent, and be willing to adapt & accept that there are new things. Sites that accept user-content are, to me, a phenomenon begat by possibility. Stores & businesses did not have place for words, short of a bulletin board, before; it wasn't practical & it wouldn't go far. Now that expression has such new potential, we must be willing to face & accept that preliminary fact, rather than regress to using only old patterns to make our decisions.
Exactly. This is clearly a content host, a site, eith userhgenerated content. Pretending that it's otherwise is a vast existential risk which would greatly greatly greatly limit human expression & creativity.
21 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 56.8 ms ] threadIt feels fantastic & absurd, a fictitious & inapplicable label or classification.
This is a threat to basic freedom & if it erodes safe harbor protections it will have vast vast & terrifying chilling effects; online sites will have to radically scale back what they can offer the public. It's sad to think any random state can layer in whatever legal nightmare it might cobble together. Humanity shouldnt be so jointly bound to whatever deadweight amy random country cooks up.
The issue with national boundaries is simple: Companies have to respect the laws where they operate. When they choose to become multinational behemoths, they accept that cost. YouTube is free to not do business in Australia if it doesn't want to follow Australia's laws. But since they make billions of dollars doing business there, they presumably would rather follow the law, and try to pay off politicians to make the law favorable to their business.
This application of old, already unreasonable, anti-speech practices to modern telecommunications is derangement.
You notably havent shown any recognition whatsoever of the idea of safe harbor. You've presented only a case for total & complete responsibility, given no outlet or done anything to begin to allow user-content to exist, and are charging these entities with complete responsibility. This is comedically unworkable & a farce, unfit for consideration, in a world when gigabytes cost cents per month & bandwidth is plentiful. These tubes can all just rot & serve only industry & empire if what you propose is allowed.
Only one other country proposes such draconian levels of ultimate responsibity, and that country also funds & pays for hundreds of thousands of censors & moderators operating directly under the state.
And YouTube doesn't allow free speech. Without regulation, it allows speech as defined as acceptable to YouTube's business. Worse than both regulated speech and free speech is what bad laws like Section 230 ensure: Corporate speech.
As for corproate speech & it's dangers, sites have a right to identity, to shape & grow themselves in ways they think are fit & healthy. That freedom in no way encumbers your right to speech, it doesnt threaten anyone: we all have abundant options for getting our voices out for sharing. We shouldnt all have to listen to whomever wants to yell; free speech doesnt mean every place on the planet must let whomever in to yell as they please. I dont go to a Borders bookstore to get shouted at by religious fringe groups. Bookstores dont have to have copies of books on the shelf, of perhaps these same groups. These defenses are also "corporate speech", the right of Borders Books to maintain their business & shape it. The internet itself rarely cuts anyone off, almost exclusively only under direct legal need, so there's endless options still available; the protest that everywhere, every big site should have to host content seems abominable, uncivil. We have to rely on sites, and a diversity of sites, or perhaps someday more p2p/direct-publish syndication. When a site grow rotten & oppressive, we can & should go vote with our feet, move to other sites.
I agree that unchecked free speech is chaotic & dangerous. Moderation is important, one of the defining characteristics & something we have a lot of diverse different styles & systems for, that we are still learning from. Sites need to be able to host content, without being direct endorsers/directly responsible parties to that content, and they need to be able to say no to content. Without the first, nothing can be shared nor hosted without vast chilling & frighteningly costly & fragile/elaborate safeguards checking each & every word, and eithout the latter all places bece one big room for the very loudest to shout & dominate & control.
>The thesis that it's ok that we simply not give humanity places to speak & share is ghastly.
That goes against today's mainstream ideal of de-platforming people who say provably false (allegedly) things against minorities, women, LGBTQ communities, etc. The logic there is Platform X is a private business and they can kick out anyone they want.
> That goes against today's mainstream ideal of de-platforming people who say provably false
Two things, first, there's a difference between (almost) no one being able to speak online & most everyone except those who social pressures have massively turned against. Even if we did fully kick people off the internet, the scale seems to be less than 1-in-a-million problematic segments of humanity to people who do more or less fine. The main discussion to me isnt the unpallatable ones- it's the 99.999999% case, it's what's generally available before you fuck up & piss society off, brcome too hot to handle. Tbis horseshit about anyone having to host content having to be a publisher is an actual mortal threat to whether humanity (generally) is allowed a voice & to share & express themselves. The minor exceptional case you discuss wouldnt be a case at all without there being an ability to speak, which Australia g the "publishers" brigade of shouters threatens.
Second, I continue to argue even the deplatformed have enormous & vast powers to present themselves online. Their personage may not be welcome on various vast platforms- but if they set up a website, a weblog, or whatnot, usually that content can be shared. Even that is more than these people necessarily ought receieve, is businesses performing services for them for free. Even if the platform blocks your site entirely, you still have a site. People can freely of their own will type in your domain name & go there. They can use other sites to link to you. Communications capabilities are fantastically cheap, just epically low cost, from hardware (purchased or rented) to software (free in many cases). The deplatformed have tried to band together & erect their own platforms time and time again, and no one stops them, no one prevents that. They fail all on their own, have yet to arise to become places of vitality & noteability.
Now if they just handled DMCAs and court-orders I might accept some level of protections for them.
Trying to put them back in the publisher camp because there need to be ways for users to find & get content, and hopefully good content, relevant to what they're looking for, in no way changes this
They do accept plenty of dmca & court orders.
That is absolutely not reasonable: If YouTube cannot curate 720,000 hours of video a day, perhaps it shouldn't be accepting 720,000 hours of video a day. And perhaps, if it hired the staff to appropriately do so, it wouldn't be (part of) one of the most profitable companies on the planet.
Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior. In fact, the only thing 720,000 hours of video a day speaks to is an absolutely unhinged problem that is apparently getting drastically worse every single day.
And as a former library employee, I can absolutely tell you that libraries pay attention to each and every book that goes into their collections. And while libraries value speech of varying viewpoints, and often celebrates things like "banned books", they are also very rare to give home to outright defamation.
Bits are cheap. Being so very very afraid of them isnt going to progress us through these times. Clutching for such absolute assurity is blanketly infeasible & cavalierly retrogressive.
The cost of bits has nothing to do with it. It's about ensuring companies are not causing mass global harm through their actions. Right now, Section 230-powered social media companies have been responsible for genocides, and you suggest that holding them to any sort of accountability would be "hideous and cruel". I think "dude can't spout off whatever defamation he wants unchecked on YouTube, but less people are slaughtered" is a fairly good tradeoff.
You've fictitiously made up the link between the first part & the second. I was replying to your absolutely shocking (to me) proposal that we shut down youtube until human moderators can review all incoming content, currently around 720,000 hours/day, and calling the stream of content an "absolutely unhinged problem" (your emphasis). My words might better be expanded into:
> [Your demand to human moderate all content/be afraid of/revile against content/sharing] seems like a hideous & cruel way to take away a basic right to expression that humanity ought enjoy,
Again I feel "misconstrue" is a generous definition of your other fork here:
> Similarly, insinuating that YouTube having to follow US or Australian law about published content is "Full Chinese Authoritarian" moderation is also unnecessarily ridiculous.
Once again, I was discussing your proposal, not the law. Perhaps if we do take Australia seriously (hard to do at present), & regard them a publisher, sites hosting user-content have a higher bar to moderation than what they're doing.
Perhaps just ongoing legal court cases are the check & balance they need & the system is working; they will refine their tools for filtering content to get better, fulfillent to the law perhaps without ever becoming anything humanity would ever have recognized in any way as a publisher before. Personally, I think that would reflect very poorly on the law, would define government as ignorant stupid & incapable of it's base sovereign duty, be unable to make even a simple grasp of reality, but perhaps modern expression can adapt & survive under such merciless ignorant stupidity anyhow. Alas, most likely, it will only be the very very large, existing companies that can navigate & adapt, wade through this legal hell, develop the complex & careful processes & systems to still accept user-content.
I still don't see what you are trying to protect against or how. I don't see great evils about. I don't see these platforms as bad. It's a hard job trying to insure moderation standards are met worldwide. I don't see systematic bad behavior you write about, I see company's trying to do a pretty good job, trying to navigate hard social issues of the say safely (something you propose blowing up by eliminating Section 230 & it's ability to let these company's pick what content to host):
> Scale is not an excuse. It isn't a defense for bad behavior
This crystalizes what I find so terrifying. I've already said I disagree, don't find much of a compelling case for bad behavior. Whether or not scale is an excuse, it misses the obvious truth: the internet has vastly vastly empowered & enabled expression, in ways radically unlike what came before. This planet is vastly more capable. Scale isn't an excuse: it's a fact. One you propose unwinding & turning off. For unspecified spectres of evil & harm, that I think are mostly imagined.
I don't see any recognition of the impossibility of the task you demand companys take, when you describe "accountability." Let's take on of the few truly agreeable awful large scale (more than a couple person sized) incidents, Myanmar (largely lain at Facebook (not Youtubes) feet). First up, yes, Facebook should have done more. They did not deplatform enough people fast enough or aggressively enough. But I have sympathys in abundance, rather than merely axes to grind here. The world is extremely difficult to grasp & understand, the case of what's happening on the ground somewhere is complex & actively developing, & there's so much regional contexts that are hard to ac...
The fact that you just "have sympathies" about a giant evil ad company enabling genocide because it would be so deeply troubling if companies were to be held accountable for their actions really sums up... everything here. I have no further notes, I think we've covered it here. Your comment here was so very "the NRA's thoughts and prayers are with the families of the kids gunned down" that there's really nowhere else to go.
You'd rather genocide than Google and Facebook be less profitable. Full stop. Because that's the true result of what I'm talking about: These companies aren't going to disappear because they're regulated and have to be accountable, as much as their shills will claim is plausible. The information age isn't going away. But when tech companies bear responsibility for their decisions, they probably won't make up half of the Fortune 10. They're abnormally profitable because they're also abnormally unregulated.
And you'd rather genocide than fix it.
Again this abuse of Fear & emotions to deny engaging in actual discussion. I keep feeling like you have nothing but condemnation & scorn to offer, endless protest but no willingness to acknowledge, and that your words lack reason & justification & instead are loaded with emotion & zealous conviction.
> a giant evil ad company enabling genocide
Legally mandated genocidal information. The government & military itself were spreading the genocidal messages. I don't agree with this, everyone agrees the reaction could have been faster. But I also understand & appreciate that it wasn't always clear what was happening, that trying to respond to a government going bad, quietly, & pushing dark propoganda is not easy. You keep trying to make it look simple, to emphasize only how any disagreement, how any search of moderation is unreasonable: the word genocide sends chills down our spines, is starkly reprehensible. But the practical challenge here is still valid; identifying what's happening, figuring out how to deploy sufficient intelligence to resist governmental & civilian information war, fighting each battle, each piece of content, as it streams in from across the globe: the challenge is significant, is a war effort fought on behalf of a people, a hard war effort. Acknowledge that. Don't escape to reductionism.
I think it's crass & foolish to regard companys with such grim-dark-shaded glasses. These companies are a mix of many things. Yes, they have ads (like all companies they seek to make money). Yes many are quite big/giants. But they also have some noble & good purposes (helping us find information, watch cool videos, share with our friends & family, host our content, provide online hangout places), and generally, I think they execute fairly well, that the tradeoffs are reasonable & all in all not badly slanted against users in the vast majority of circumstances. Ultimately they sell ads by competing to be better places than the other online places; that diversity & competition is something I cherish & which I believe in, keeps us pointed forward.
You dismiss me out of hand, in my view because I have asked us to see & acknowledge shades of gray & difficulties & think these are hard problems. Again you violate site guidelines here, and reduce a long case to simplistic out of hand dismissal:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
Your replies keep circling back to the simple, again in violation of guidelines:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
And you have only belittled and insulted me, rather than taken my arguments as serious. Violation of this guideline:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Let me restate my case, yet again, because I agree it might not be clear where I'm coming from, why I would mount these defenses.
I think different sites have a right to govern themselves. Taking that away takes away diversity. That's of tantamount importance to me. I believe some sites we have today will wreck & ruin themselves all on their own good time. But if we try to regulate & restrict, I believe we'll create legal quagmires that newer smaller would-be upstarts will be unable to ever face: we should not be creating vast new barriers. Legal permissiveness, with some acceptance of mistakes, is required. We cannot expect techno-mystical solutionism, nor have utopian expectations of perfect regulation.
As for genocide, the fact that the state & military of Myanmar itself were disseminating much of the information is one basic neutron-moderator I'd try to carefully insert into your nuclear-blow-up reaction of accusations against me. Trying to understand, no, ...
>> A newspaper is a carefully crafted collection of articles by the editors. 720,000 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day. Equating the two is simply not reasonable. YouTube is more like a library or archive, where users themselves decide what to consume.
You:
> So this comment hinges on a particularly egregious bit of logic: The idea that the fact that 720,000 hours of video get uploaded to it justifies poor curation, because being responsible for it is hard.
You're trying to win this one- in part- by covertly asserting your definition of Youtube being a curator. Which directly charges over & ignores exactly what the parent said.
Curators operate by tastes. Not by moderation guidelines. If youtube took 1/2 the 720,000 hours of day of video & said, nah, we don't want the rest, you might maybe have a leg to stand on. It's a silly pretense, calling them a "curator," or a "publisher," or whatever other pre-contemporary shoebox of an idea you strive to fit them into. There's simply no parallel. We never could amass information like this before; it physically was not possible. We never could allow so many visitors to an archive of humanity before; it physically was not possible. What's happening now does not mirror the past, it is something new, and doesn't fit the compact tight little vintage models you try shoving it into.
You were a librarian, so you might enjoy a reading suggestion on an idea to pool human knowledge & expand it's access. John G Kemeny, Chairman of Math & Astronomy at Dartmouth, wrote "A Library for 2000 A.D." (and 2100 AD), written ~1962, imagining a vast globe-spanning system of teleconnected/replicating microfiche to capture human knowledge & development. It was an epic & expansive proposal, expecting 10,000,000 items (mostly articles, papers, some books) per year added (and increasing in velocity). He writes of high-science-fiction of the day, but today it feels so unbeleivably antiquated, prehistoric. We are unimaginably more empowered, more capable than he could have imagined.
Things have changed vastly in 10~20 the past years (20TB hard drives for $450!), and trying to impose old framings to view & understand & govern what we expect or how we regulate is a huge hazard. I think it's imperative that we recognize that there are things without precedent, and be willing to adapt & accept that there are new things. Sites that accept user-content are, to me, a phenomenon begat by possibility. Stores & businesses did not have place for words, short of a bulletin board, before; it wasn't practical & it wouldn't go far. Now that expression has such new potential, we must be willing to face & accept that preliminary fact, rather than regress to using only old patterns to make our decisions.
investigated by the "vulgar" comedian in question.