What's with the reservation?
Feel that wind in your hair? We are currently flying down the slope, cheered on by the pantheon of gleeful authoritarians each with their cute idea of how individuals are best controlled.
The only question is whether we'll have a chance to stop after the centralized surveillance industry has been fully coopted for their goals, or whether the momentum will carry us all the way to oppressing the refuge of Free p2p communications.
Is this actually the case? Removing firearms videos from YouTube seems perfectly reasonable to me. The internet is big; I'm sure you can find elsewhere to host your videos. Is a company taking steps to distance themselves from such a contentious issue equal to "flying down the slippery slope of authoritarianism"? As always when I hear these panicked comments, I fail to see how this is true.
It's not that they're being threatened, it's that they're actively being taken away. Society may react to this loss of liberty by restoring it through alternate approaches. Or, it may not.
> Removing firearms videos from YouTube seems perfectly reasonable to me
I mean yes, obviously there are plenty of people who want censorship for one reason or another, otherwise it wouldn't be happening. So one's own comfort with censorship is not evidence that censorship is not happening.
> Is a company taking steps to distance themselves ...
It's what they're doing, not why. Despite the trope, evil never shows up twirling a mustache.
YouTube is effectively a monopoly. You can upload your video elsewhere, but next to nobody will see it. That gives YouTube equal censorship power as a government censor. We should be equally appalled by it.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
First they came for the firearms, and I did not speak out—
Because I did not like firearms
Then they came for the sex workers and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a sex worker (or used them)
Then they came for something I cared about and there was no one left to speak for me.
This isn't government oppression, there will be alternates to the services offered.
For a start, have you talked to people outside of your bubble? Do you know what "web browser" means to most people out there? It means Google. Honestly, go out and ask people.
The Internet is not such a big place any more. It is very centralised. You might think that if the worst happens you can just host videos yourself but I think you would be mistaken. To do that you need to use one of a small handful of CDNs. Good luck trying to host your own server now.
It's been the case for a while that most people have had asymmetric lines, ie. a poor upload speed, so we ended up going the centralisation route.
Add to that the loss of net neutrality and the prevalence of "devices" as opposed to general purpose computers and I would ask you: do you still fail to see how the slope is true?
We do. We exist in objective reality. The reality is you're engaging in a narrative that has direct, practical negations in the real world. In front of your face. They've existed for decades. Half the people who claim to be "hackers" on here couldn't exploit a wet paper bag. They're just american centrists, full of "acksually"-ism's who happen to write code. I mean the fact that PG's writing is considered interesting or note-worthy should be your first sign that this community isn't terribly academic in any field, really.
>do you still fail to see how the slope is true?
Yeah. I guess I missed the part where you kind of just lightly touched on different characteristics of the current technological landscape and then just jumped right back into your conclusion.
As powerful as the four-horsemen might now have become, they'll surely become past-their-prime IBMs or Microsofts in subsequent generations.
In this context, a responsibility of technologists is to provide another round of disruption - sooner than the last - in order to prevent incumbents from getting too entrenched.
>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
Promote it yourself.
Also, it is worth noting that these actions are a result of a law enacted by the government, so even if the government isn't expressly curbing anyone's speech, it is having the chilling effect that opponents of sesta/fosta said it would.
They've both always had the equivalent of the security guard in the golf cart, who kicks people out for violating the mall's rules, and is often wrong.
(Oh, and there aren’t public roads, either. There’s just one big private road network, which finances itself by placing billboards on the roads. For the most part, they’ll build out roads to any location, big or small, without worrying about what kind of activity goes on in those locations. But only for the most part…)
Luckily, most people never need to deal with these difficulties! There‘s one big shopping mall chain that dominates the whole country - most of the world, even. (It’s owned by the same company as the road network.) And it has a really nice offer for everyone: you can have all the space you want to engage in everything from idle chitchat to grave political lectures, from science demos to showing off your video game skills - all for free. Plus, the mall staff takes care of efficiently guiding people around to speakers that might interest them, so it’s really easy to spend hours bouncing from one interesting session to the next, with all your needs taken care of. Altogether, a highly engaging, communal, even productive environment. Much nicer than going to someone’s house. The only catch is that the staff will never recommend anything outside the mall, no matter how relevant. Oh, and... there is that mall cop. He mostly stays out of sight, though. There are only a few things that bother him, so just make sure to steer clear of those and he’ll leave you alone. Although, he does sometimes change the rules at a whim… and if he does kick you out, there’s almost nowhere else to go…
People should be cautious about flouting the "they're private businesses and can do what they want" argument. It actually makes a compelling case for nationalizing these services and treating them as public utilities, a line of thinking that is rapidly picking up steam in various political groups.
There are no street corners on the internet. And there never will be.
That's your street corner.
Pre-internet you couldn't walk into a TV centre and demand to be broadcast to everyone on Channel 73 and now similarly you can't expect to force YouTube to stream content it doesn't like.
Just because a huge proportion of the internet has joined the YouTube club, doesn't magically make it a commons. Theyre the ones paying for hosting, staff, etc, not the state.
TV never was how people talk to each other. Internet - and particularly the monopoly platforms like FB or YT - are the modern day street.
If you want to go and shout in Times Square in NY or Trafalgar Square in London, you'd have to physically go there, make an effort.
What you want is much worse though, you want a way to contact millions or billions of people for free. It is precisely like my TV analogy, because you want the sort of reach only newspapers or TVs previously had, which you had to pay for. What you want is to be lazy and have a company promote you to their audience without limit, while dismissing the reality that there are no limits to how to promote yourself online, outside the company gardens. You could text all your friends your website address and ask them to text it to all their friends. Or email them. Or flyer your website address to all your neighbours.
You've still got your street corner.
This raises an interesting question: who built that audience? YouTube or its users?
At what point does a business/service used by the public actually need to serve the public? If Google has a virtual monopoly on a service, why should they not be regulated as such?
I think the right to utility services usually comes from contractual agreements between companies and the localities they serve in exchange for those companies usually exclusive roles in servicing those areas and they usually agree to being heavily regulated.
If we’re going to be a country which is heavily invested in private property rights, the companies will _almost_ always have a choice in what products they decide to distribute and which products they choose to not distribute.
I find it strange to imply google has a monopoly on serving videos, they may have a large and readily available audience, but they’ve spent a rather large amount of time and energy building this audience and the infrastructure needed to accommodate.
It’s not like it’s difficult to go set up a website and serve videos, it’s trivial in labor and trivial in cost.
People seem to be implying they feel like they’re entitled to an audience that someone else built and I think that’s a strange thing to believe.
Again, let’s make other video services more popular rather than pretend YouTube is somehow the only way on the entire internet to serve videos.
That ship has already sailed I'm afraid. Nearly every common internet service now has a single provider that dwarfs the few competitors it has, both in actual usage and mindshare.
Oftentimes that mind-boggling success was fueled by easy treatment from regulators/the government as well as fate and circumstance, not from any groundbreaking ingenuity from the company that made it.
It may sound strange today to think of social media, internet search, etc as a public utility, but within a decade or two it will seem like common sense. Google, Facebook, YouTube and others are censoring their way towards nationalization.
What makes you think having content standards has anything to do with whether or not a content company would be nationalized?
Wouldn’t the first thing to happen under a heavy regulation be something close to television licensing? They have far far stricter standards of what can be shared than any relevant social media platform.
The vast majority of the youtube videos I see, I do not see on youtube, but as embedded content.
>>Removing firearms videos from YouTube seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I am sure Gun Rights are also no a pressing issue for you, or you may even be Anti-Gun Ownership by private citizens...
Let me ask you then, would you feel the same if this was an Issue you cared Deeply about. Pick a Social topic the you care about, then image if You Tube censored that topic from their platform.. What is your reaction.
//Edit to add, before you Paint me as some conservative, I am Libertarian. In the words of Austin Peterson: “I want gay couples to be able to protect their marijuana fields with fully automatic rifles"
https://air.mozilla.org/privacy-lab-orchid/
It's one of my favorite talks, and I love the format: each slide is a news article.
I phrased it this way to avoid outcry from people who disagree that we’re on the slope — but who cannot disagree that we must at least be near the slope.
We have lost footing on this slope.
Just washing our hands of these items, writing them down as the cost of freedom, is not going to cut it.
Because the way I see it, as long as there exist pedophiles who aren't lucky enough to work at the government agencies charged with cataloging child porn, there will be a desire to trade in it. And reducing its availability drives up the price, and thus increases the demand to make more.
My personal solution is to just not look at it, but I understand this may be hard for some in the same way that it's hard for congresscritters to keep to themselves in public bathrooms.
I don't know. I'm just saying that free-for-all is never going to be acceptable to the overwhelming majority of any population, when it comes to certain topics. If the anonymous p2p networks cannot find a solution (any solution) that can keep this stuff somewhat at bay, they will be ostracized.
Ideally, I should be able to run a decentralized facebook-like pod (or any other IM/social/sharing system) with a good degree of certainty that unsavoury material of this or that type will not end up on my pod. The Powers That Be should be able to somehow trust that this is indeed the case without being able to read all content.
If we had a system like that, we could clearly decouple the discussion on what is or is not "unacceptable material" from the discussion on whether a given communication protocol is bad in itself. At the moment, authorities can just say that p2p networks are full of bad stuff so they are bad and should be banned. You cannot fight that charge without showing some effort trying to get rid of bad stuff. Once you have something like that, even very rough and automated, it becomes easier to say "no, I won't ban X from my network because I am certain that X is legal[1]" or "no, you cannot ban me for Y because I'm sure Y is not on my network".
[1] or should be legal, which is basically equivalent for civil disobedience. If you are planning armed resistance, nothing will ever satisfy a censor, and you have very different requirements from regular people.
This might provide employment for the many people, often referenced by users on this site, who may be losing work in the near future due to technology's advances.
The moderators would be like quasi-lawyers: able to interpret content and assess the legality in a tentative way... to be further decided through some other formal review process. Of course, anyone could submit content for review, as well.
I could imagine whole industries being built around this task, especially if it's so important to everyone. Just because it's a lot of work, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
it's just a trade-off. do you value freedom or security?
a side-effect of security is you're also creating the conditions for tyranny. choose wisely!
Specifically, it's not a meaningful argument because it's far too broad, and applies to more or less anything.
Example: "Now they're just banning asbestos and lead. But next year it'll be wood and orange juice!"
Is that true? I always assumed the fallacy was named for the already existing expression.
Funny! I'd never thought of that. For those curious, Wiktionary says that it's actually from the Latin, "fallere", to deceive [1].
I know a lot of people who I would consider gun enthusiasts that wouldn't hurt anyone unless they weren't given a choice.
Hopefully this wave of censorship will lead to better privacy-respecting tools.
Netscape -> IE monopoly -> explosion of choices
Email provided by your employer or ISP -> explosion of choices
IBM & Apple computers -> explosion of choices
Intel processor monopoly -> ARM computing explosion of choices
Kodak, majority of the film market -> explosion of camera choices
Tight music label monopolies + radio & store distribution -> explosion of cheap consumer choices for streaming vast amounts of music. No longer do you have to spend $20-$25 in adjusted 2018 dollars to buy an album with two songs you want to hear.
ABC, NBC, CBS, limited tightly controlled broadcast platforms with very regulated content -> endless array of media start-ups online, streaming choices, news sources
Playboy & similar, nearly your sole porn option for decades, highly restricted distribution -> seemingly infinite porn online from thousands of large sites
Information broadly, from limited, tightly controlled research options, difficult to access (if you can at all depending on your location) -> explosion of research options online, at a click, practically at zero cost
Limited publishing options, from almost nothing for the common person -> dozens of easy, inexpensive ways to publish text/audio/video and reach an audience. For $5 per month I can easily serve up video on my own site, host my own blog, post my own music, whatever.
The centralization and monolithic architecture is the source of insecurity - an thus its creator of its own downfall and demise.
The Centralization is the root-cause of the rampant security issues in recent years.
Absolutely ridiculous, opinions like these make me cringe, is it that to hard to understand what you consider "hate speech" is other persons opinion?, you don't have to agree him, but others might. Youtube or any platform's user response will judge that content.
It should never be government or few people in power to decide what is acceptable.
I am so glad that I left the left few years back, they completely lost their marbles.
Most ideologies have, shall we say, "bad parts". And they may have a history that is somewhere between sordid and outright evil.
And of course "crack down on hate speech" is these days most often levied against criticism of islam. We have yet to see even basic discussion on things like the role of islam in slavery, historically and contemporary. Additionally the blatantly racist laws of Saudi Arabia that are defended as just islam's laws, racist where it pertains to faith, sex, and the blatant exploitation/slavery imposed on Asians there, all justified through islam. But of course censorship doesn't just stop there. It is now defending things like Erdogan's support of islamic state (including the massacres), and of course the Chinese state's many sordid actions in Nepal, Xinjang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and even just generally within China. The massive corruption.
And then of course there is the many ways in which sex, corruption, labor exploitation, criticism of power figures like Xinnie the Pooh and so on is getting censored.
We should just not do this. We should not let the idea that people might get the wrong idea, or personally care hinder criticism of ideologies, including of course in areas where there may be minorities criticized and especially not in cases where the majority or an oppressive government is getting criticized.
We should be allowed to openly discuss things like China's destruction of Nepal. We should be able to ask a muslim why they follow a prophet that, according to muslim tradition, killed over 10000 people, including having women and children massacred. We should be bringing up Erdogan's dealings every chance we get. And so on and so forth. We should be able to bring up San Francisco's treatment of the people getting forced out of that area.
> China's destruction of Nepal
Do you mean Tibet?
And anyway, who said there are a few people insisting that racial arguments are hate speech?
If anybody feels insulted by speech, they need to grow up, grow a thicker skin. Don't go running to governments or corporations to create laws to defend their feelings. You sneaked in "threaten" to broaden your scope for your speech argument, physical attacks are already illegal.
"because it is physically possible to hold some opinion it must be as correct as any other opinion"
Again, regarding what is "correct", just for demonstration, I might agree or not agree or don't give a flying fuck and not be interested in your discussion at all. That does not and should not take your or my right away of saying it. If your opinion stands the test of time, then evolution will eventually show you are correct, and same applies to anybody else.
"Few people in power", I was speaking relatively, compared to population of a country.
Regarding "racial arguments", you used "argument" not physical attack, in which case you don't have any right to stop them in delivering such argument.
I am so glad that I migrated to this country where freedom of speech is still defended vehemently.
Your stated position is a logical contradiction: good job.
If phrased this way, do you still disagree?
In other words, it might sound like a good idea, but there's absolutely no way to prevent a legal standard that does not stem from actual or credible harm from being abused by the powerful to suppress the powerless.
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encycloped...
a "True Threat" is a threat of ACTION not a speech.
I.e. if a person is in their garage, they have bomb making materials all around them, and make a threat to bomb a location at a specific time, date, they have now made a threat of ACTION thus it becomes an ACTIONABLE item for law enforcement
This is often used by people that advocate for censorship as a "limit on free speech" but it is not, it is a limit on actions, we have always had limits on actions
If you act reasonably around others who are willing to be unreasonable, you lose.
While people will say "We'd get a safer society as a result" - that's not addressing the problem, which is: what did they trade or give up in order to reach that compromise with the gun owners? There has to be something for it to be fair to everyone.
I am fully aware that not all gun owners in America espouse positions as extreme as, "There should be no waiting periods, no background checks, and no restrictions based on mental health for buying any weapons up to and including truly military-grade hardware," but so far as I can tell, that is the position the NRA has taken in this. Going from there to anything that I would see as a "reasonable compromise" would definitely require the other side to give up quite a lot.
Personally, I own no guns, and am uninterested in them, so a 2nd amendment repeal, full ban, and confiscation would not have any direct negative effects on me (and I would not object to it). However, I would be perfectly comfortable with gun control that was far short of that.
To answer your question, though, in the end, what non-gun-owners "give up" in any compromise with gun owners is some safety. It's certainly an intangible, and there's no way to measure how much is being given up at any given time—it's possible, depending on the particular restrictions that are and aren't enacted, that they give up almost none...or a great deal. This is an inherent problem when the compromise in question is about restrictions on possession or use of a thing: people who do not need or want it, but see a reason that it should be restricted, are never going to have to give up something as easily quantifiable as those who do want it, no matter how objectively good the restrictions they want are.
But the pro-gun lobby in the US are bringing all of this on themselves. The level of gun violence in the US is appalling, and is clearly becomming unacceptable to many and possibly a majority of Americans. Every attempt to mitigate it is actively opposed by the gun lobby, often with patently ridiculous measures designed to be ineffective. So I have no sympathy for the gun lobby. If they want to own guns and preserve an armed culture I think its entirely reasonable for the rest of America to expect them to do so safely. If they can’t come up with an effective regulatory system they can live with and which protects the public from gun violence, then I think they won’t have a moral leg to stand on when the rest of the country takes their toys away from them. Guns with effective and safe regulation, or no guns at all and the responsibility for coming up with what that safe and effective regulation is sholod fall on gun owners. Here in the UK we went with pretty much no guns at all. I hope America keeps its traditions and culture, but not at any price when that price is paid in blood.
Regarding main story, I used to work in broadcasting and it was clear from the oscilloscopes when some porn was on air or on a tape. This was not an exact science, but experienced engineers knew what the 'scope was telling them. This was a long time ago and I am sure Google would have machine learned porn a long time ago. No evidence for that but I doubt it is a recent innovation.
Therefore this enabling of the feature that enforces the Terms of Service is probably due to changes up ahead in the legal landscape and not because Google suddenly decided they wanted clean servers.
I wrote a much longer reply but decided that arguing this topic here is probably not appropriate. Suffice it to say that the notion that the "pro-gun lobby" is in any way opposed to safe ownership of guns or supports mass shootings or other criminal gun violence is absurd.
Because every "compromise" gets turned into something else to be attacked. That "Gun show loophole" was an explicit concession, that is something offered in compromise, is now being turned into something to be attacked and revoked.
There is no "compromise" - the goal is ban and confiscation. We've seen it time and time again. How many times must one put their hand on the iron before they realize it burns?
Personally, I do not agree with "ban and confiscation". At most, I think that items designed to circumvent existing law (eg bump stocks, which essentially exist to in effect circumvent fully automatic gun regulations) should be illegal. I'd also like to see the case for and against a few other things (eg large magazine clips) but overall AR-15s and other boogeymen are fine to me. Elsewise, my belief is that most of the focus should be on limited tightening access (gun violence restraining orders for instance), much of it within our existing system, and not much more. Basically, I think that the mass shooting phenomenon people are reacting to could be quite tempered with slight tweaks, not wholesale confiscation.
But: I am culturally more on the moderate left side. The NRA's rhetoric these days, and even more so of too many of its supporters, is full of often conspiracy tinged liberal caricature and conspiracy. I honestly don't feel like defending the NRA position these days, because not only is it too rigid, it is identity oriented. And on identity, many of them by default, in their posts, already think I'm a piece of shit who wants to take their guns anyways. Why bother speaking up against the lefties that actually do want to confiscate?
Guns have essentially become a part of right-wing identity politics. A position that might be fatal for their full cause. (Though judging from current youthful view (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/12/are-mille...) more in terms of restrictions on access instead of restrictions on equipment.).
What makes you say this? Even in heavy gun control countries, some forms of shooting (e.g. pest control, hunting, target) and gun ownership are still generally legal.
Exactly what gets made legal and illegal is precisely what is being debated, but I'd be incredibly surprised if you ended up with total ban and confiscation. I think a compromise is exactly what everyone wants.
Haven't some heavy gun control regimes in the US ended up as de-facto total bans? IIRC, one city "allowed" legal gun ownership (or maybe just legal handgun ownership), but it required police approval, which was almost never granted.
The goal is effective gun safety laws. If you had those, nobody would be talking about bans or confiscations and this issue would simply not exist. If the only two choices the American public faces is hundreds of dead children per year or blanket bans. Who can blame them for choosing the latter? So come on gun lobby. Provide an alternative. This is your problem to fix.
In the case of the Parkland shooter that sparked this latest round of protest, the murderer had something like 30+ police visits in a year including one in which he attempted to drink gasoline to commit suicide[0]. My ex-girlfriend, after attempting suicide with a kitchen knife, was committed for evaluation and subsequently barred from owning any firearms after a single incident.
Florida, and the United States as a whole already have laws on the books for this exact type of situation but the LEOs failed to act, and as a result 17 teenagers needlessly lost their lives. How about, before attempting to ban something, we enforce the good laws we have on the books? Banning the AR-15 would not have prevented this shooting. Enforcing our existing laws would have.
[0] - https://qz.com/1214418/the-fbi-broward-county-sheriffs-offic...
My understanding is that they don't think the sensible restrictions will stay sensible, but rather they'll be stepping stones to heavy restrictions or outright bans. That's not an unreasonable attitude given that ultimate goal of gun control advocates tend towards the latter.
Unrestricted access to purchase battlefield weapons like the AR-15, lack of centralized records of gun owner permits, prohibitions on digitizing gun ownership records for criminal investigations, and disallowing research into understanding outbreaks in gun violence are all morally indefensible policies. I don't trust an organization who conflates defense of those policies with fighting mass gun confiscation.
The AR-15 is only popular among enthusiasts because it is basically a Lego set of the firearm world. Historically every style of weapon that gun owners have has been used extensively on the battlefield. If the AR-15 is banned then another rifle/pistol building platform will be popularized and replace it. Attempting to ban a weapon on certain visual features or other features that do not affect its firing operation are meaningless.
I'm not so sure, since it really depends on how you define success. I'd wager strict gun control advocates would define it as something fairly extreme, like "an end to gun violence," which could only be achieved by extreme, not "sensible," restrictions.
> Wanting to solve the massive gun violence problem in America is not unreasonable.
True, but unfortunately we're also suffering from an extreme lack of trust. You're not going to see compromises unless that trust is rebuilt from both sides. Until then, the best you're going to get is opportunistic exploitation of temporary situational strength.
5 years to halve gun deaths in America, or all automatic and semi automatic weapons get banned. You can set whatever laws you like, it’s your problem, you fix it. If you think it’s a mental health issue, fine, you get whatever funding you need to address it.
That would still be 50% more gun deaths per capita than the European countries with the loosest gun controls and highest levels of gun ownership. It’s 2.5x Israel and is higher than Nicaragua.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604135
> And let's be clear, in this putative Civil War 2.0, we're threatening to kill gun-grabbers wholesale and retail, with guns being one of the least effective means when compared to tactics like killing Blue cities. People kill other people, guns are inanimate objects.
There are like 15 posts very similar to this, although some are flagged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
He offered elsewhere a clearly reasonable return to the "pre-1965 demographics of the US." And so very positively spoke of "moving past the concept of equality before the law."
And he isn't alone.
There are some real scary correlations between the gun-fetishists--and I say that having grown up around firearms; I am not scared of them any more than I am scared of any other recklessly used tool with a toxic culture surrounding them--and generally toxic and antisocial worldviews. But the causation is not the guns, to be clear; the machismo-driven culture that leads to the guns is the cause.
If the gun lobby comes up with effective regulations that preserve their interests and that also work, this problem wouldn't exist. This is their problem to fix.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Gu...
The sad thing is that it will stop other, new creators from being discovered.
Maybe one day the big corps will realize they can't cave to every single blip on the political radar and try to please everyone at once, especially when to this day they ignore calls to remove actual violent and disturbing content, some of which is blatant recruitment material for extremist groups.
You might not care about these things, but censorship will eventually hit something you do care about. The impulse to improve society by controlling people's thoughts is never satisfied.
Can you now see why some of us have been consistently opposed to censorship generally, even when people were talking only about censoring the most disreputable people? We need to commit to equal treatment of all legal speech. The only alternative is suffocation.
Harm isn't this subjective, there are objective criteria for classifying harm. Hate speech has no upside and causes much harm. That's not true of the others in your list.
You're begging the question here, assuming that what is called hate speech is necessarily harmful. I am quite certain that in the US political climate much of Palestinian political speech would easily be considered anti-semitic hate speech. Whether you consider this speech the valid outcry of the oppressed, or hateful bigotry of terrorist sympathizers, depends on your political perspective.
There is no definition of hate speech that is simultaneously objective and useful. If you can use it against your enemies today it can be used against you tomorrow.
Dan does a great job of moderation here, and if you break the rules repeatedly, you'll get kicked out. I guess that's "censorship" if you squint, but it's also YC protecting their private property and their rights to control who does what here. I don't see how that's a problem?
If that forum is censored with too broad a stroke, that actually harms society. I think everyone can agree that too broad censorship is bad, and if it hits large swathes of society, is really bad.
The difference between youtube and hacker-news is scale and near-monopoly. There is also an important difference of human and machine censorship. Not a difference of appeal, but a difference of unintended consequences. A human censor will notice when certain rules have unintended and too broad of an effect. There is a baseline of human oversight built in because there is a human somewhere. Automated systems do not have this property, if they have rules that seemed reasonable but aren't in practice, or aren't anymore, the system won't notice.
Like the other responder said. Youtube isn't just "someone's site". It is a full half of the bloody internet. The other half being split between Google and FB. I exaggerate for dramatic effect of course. But, most of the video content consumed online is currently on Youtube. And most of the internet is solely accessible through Google. Not to mention that a full 1/8th or 1/10th of the World has Facebook accounts. Funnily, I just Googled it, and according to the first hit Facebook has 2.2 Billion accounts.
At some point we have to admit/define/state that these entities and the products/platforms they provide are utilities for lack of a better word. Once they get to that point, they should rightly lose all ability to take sides. They must be hit with a giant stick if they so much as think of using their platforms to do anything other than make a profit. Imagine if telephone companies started dropping calls or disconnecting users that were saying "naughty" things.
No matter what someone is saying, banning them is a form of social signalling. It says, "we disagree with what these people are saying". There are many many things that the majority doesn't like the minority saying, and the world will be worse off if they manage to ban it all.
If I were gay, I would care less if people judged me based on their religion. I would care if a bunch of yokels started targeting me with violence.
But then, most hateful speech could predict a later killing. Someone who thinks gays should go to hell might decide to help them along, as it were. The difference between the two things you have quoted, then, is one of degree: saying the second demonstrates more hate than the first, but it is the same brand of hate.
But isn't the issue here precisely to ban illegal activities (sex trafficking adverts, hate speech)?
The same free speech rules that apply to you also apply to google.
Google obtained this position by being trusted to not engage in censorship. So while yes, they can change their stance (burning off goodwill until they become irrelevant), it's a facile analysis.
Toxic is a matter of opinion. Pointing out the hypocrisy is relevant, insofar as it's relevant in every other forum between one actor accusing another of being a bad actor. How you take something to be derailing, when it's relevant, is beyond me.
A facile analysis, most definitely.
I'd often make a similar point to argue against this centralized communication technology being adopted in the first place. But now that it has become society's main form of communication, pushing this point on its own does little but condone censorship.
Sure both businesses and consumers have the right to make their own choices. My issue with the current state of affairs is the blatant push by certain industries, particularly the media, to push one side of an agenda. They glamorize businesses that kowtow to a minority of loud voices as if it's the only acceptable course of action. That may seem like an accomplishment but it could very well be flipped around when the loudest opinion is against you on an issue.
> To be clear, I’m not saying we’ve slid down the slope at this point, just that we appear to be perched on/near it.
I like to think of it as more of a roller coaster. Some times we're sliding down, some times the momentum carries us back up, and some times we level off for a bit. I just hope that there's enough momentum on the preservation of our rights to carry us through the current wave of hysteria.
I do have a problem with the gun stuff. Even "how to" videos that result in somehting that's currently illegal. Information should not be banned, and it's a futile effort to try to do that. The internet is too big.
Any high school chemistry student learns enough to build a bomb. Should we ban chemistry videos? Ban learning about chemical oxidation?
But bottom line, it's Google's service and I guess they can do what they want with it.
I think it's weird that Youtube would take that channel down because most people aren't going to have the patience to watch it, and they're not going to copy it.
Compare that to this fucking idiot, who has a huge and young audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeNgIWj8ZM0
By the same token, everyone else can also do whatever they want. Including publicly criticizing Google for removing lawful information, advocating that everyone stop using their services until they change their policy, then using, promoting or creating competing services that don't censor, etc.
except that due to youtube and google's near monopoly on consumers, none of this is going to happen. This is why google can choose to censor (or in fact, do whatever the fuck they want), because they know their customers (i mean products) don't have anywhere else to go to.
The idea that they have a monopoly in email or video hosting is ridiculous. They have a thousand competitors and it's easy for customers to switch.
They still have a huge slice of those markets for the same reason Microsoft used to have a huge slice of the browser market -- they're the default on the most popular OS (once Windows, now Android). But Mozilla et al took a huge chunk out of Microsoft's browser share after customers got sick of all of Microsoft's anti-user behavior.
Because people will stay with the defaults unless they have a reason to switch. But if you do give them a reason, like banning legitimate content they want to view and create, that's another story.
And the more people switch, the better the alternatives get and the easier it is for more people to join them.
If "information should not be banned" and it doesn't work anyway, why are you OK with banning illegal stuff?
Also, to point out the obvious, it's OK to not want something on your site.
This is where you are wrong. It is either all or it is not. You can't draw the line. Either information can free flow through your router or it can't.
I can't really see it another way.
And a company can absolutely do that, but paying that much attention to the content of the media changes their responsibilities under the DMCA and Section 230 of the CDA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
It made Reddit mostly unusable (beyond it's usual uselessness, mind you) for about a week, and most sub moderators were either unwilling to moderate the net neutrality spam, or quite often, the ones posting it.
But where it really started to grind my gears was when the Reddit admins posted an announcement proud of it, like it was some sort of accomplishment that the entire site had been replaced by spam of a single post, because, of course, it's a political view they're lobbying for.
I have gained a lot of appreciation for HN's ability to allow reasonable debate of all views, and really to keep the site's content enjoyable, interesting, and varied. I can't say remotely the same for where Reddit is right now. If you don't agree with Reddit's political views, you should most likely be looking for alternative websites.
No. The dystopian fetish ever present in popular culture has done more harm than any poorly crafted piece of legislation has ever done in the U.S.
And lastly, I read the book for the second time just last week. Most memeified and over-interpreted book in existence. Interestingly there's this reocurring event of two-minutes hate, as well as war fervor against whoever the government has deigned the enemy. This enemy is never the same entity, but during the war fervor, everyone pretends they're the worst when they were just allies a week ago. Seems awfully familiar. I also see some nice examples of doublethink in these types of threads where HNers usually drool over capitalism and the rights of private organizations; and they also pride themselves on being so logical (2 + 2 = 5); yet they can't seem to understand that free speech only applies to the government. Soooooooo Orwellian, oh em gee. It's so cringey hearing people use 1984 as a stand-in for anything and everything when they've barely read the book, or from a high school understanding of it.
Basically, we should make sure not to be a frog that gets boiled (to throw in another metaphor).
But I think it’s also false in many of the contexts where it’s applied. People do notice change, even if it happens slowly. They’re just not always able to do anything about it.
I can certainly see limiting videos that are illegal (child porn) or that describe things that are illegal throughout the US (converting semiautomatic weapons into automatic).
But banning videos of adult pornography and showing legal firearm-related content is a different beast. A private company surely has the right to decide not to host such content, but consumers can likewise consider whether they want to do business with (including giving unfettered access to email and search queries) a company that proceeds down this slippery slope.
To be clear, I’m not saying we’ve slid down the slope at this point, just that we appear to be perched on/near it.