No, they didn't. The problem that Youtube is dealing with is advertisers leaving, not the actual comments. Dealing with the problem of advertisers leaving is different from dealing with those comments. It's unclear whether dealing with those comments is even desirable, because Youtube would, in essence, become the censor of what is and is not okay to post in the comments sections, even if they don't break any codifiable rules or laws. Would you find it acceptable that what your freedom of expression is filtered by rules as unclear as that?
Laowhy86 got his comments disabled because his daughter appeared in some of his videos. If this standard were to be pushed across the board then it would effectively ban comments on any videos that have underage people appear in them. Is this desirable for our society?
>Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in.
But this is not true.
Firstly, kids on YouTube were NOT impacted by this. When a creep watches a video of a person then that person is not negatively impacted by it.
Secondly, all you've done is hide the problem. The videos of the kids still exist, the time stamps can still be created. All the creeps need to do is share that information somewhere else. That's it. And the only way to fight this one is to simply bar kids from appearing in any media content. Good luck posting a video of you walking around town or of an event where somebody underage might be.
This is similar to the discussion about whether you are allowed to let your 9 year old go outside unsupervised. It's a question of how much freedom do we allow people and kids in our society. It seems to be that public opinion is on the side of less freedom and more protection.
Unfortunately this is inaccurate. There are billions of daily adolescent YouTube users, some of whom entering puberty that were exposed and continue to be exposed to the recommendation algorithm that created this mess in the first place, and for periods running into hours every evening.
At such an early stage in development, it is absolutely the company's duty of care to ensure that a 5 year old is not being sent up a gradient of a recommendation system that is encouraging them (with the help of the comments just removed) to view people of their own age in a sexual manner. Not only were children impacted by this, but the mechanism that enables it remains active to this day.
I agree with the idea of allowing children outside, but as per my reply to your previous comment, not if that means spending all day in the back yard of the village creepy old man. Balance is required in every situation, and denial of the kind your comment is riddled with accomplishes nothing.
You are talking about a different issue.
>At such an early stage in development, it is absolutely the company's duty of care to ensure that a 5 year old is not being sent up a gradient of a recommendation system that is encouraging them (with the help of the comments just removed) to view people of their own age in a sexual manner.
Why would it be the company's duty of care and not the parent's? The parent should be the one that controls what the child consumes, not some nameless company or the government.
>I agree with the idea of allowing children outside, but as per my reply to your previous comment, not if that means spending all day in the back yard of the village creepy old man.
Again, this should be done by the parent, not by a faceless corporation or the government. It is the parent's job to deal with this.
It is the company's duty of care for the same reason that
- it is the city's duty of care if the child goes outside and falls down an unmaintained manhole
- it is the school's duty of care if a fire extinguisher malfunctions and kills the child
- it is the driver's duty of care if the child crosses the road and gets struck on a green crossing
In all these cases, the entities assume a certain privilege to operate due to the trust placed in them that enables the freedom for the child to go outside whatsoever. If that duty does not exist, then there is no trust the child can safely leave home unattended. In effect what you're arguing for is total control from the parent -- a much worse outcome for a child than self-moderation on behalf of the trusted entities they would otherwise have had the freedom to interact with.
It is the company's duty of care for the same reason that
- it is the city's duty of care if the child goes outside and falls down an unmaintained manhole
- it is the school's duty of care if a fire extinguisher malfunctions and kills the child
- it is the driver's duty of care if the child crosses the road and gets struck on a green crossing
In all these cases, the entities assume a certain privilege to operate due to the trust placed in them that enables the freedom for the child to go outside whatsoever. If that duty does not exist, then there is no trust the child can safely leave home unattended. In effect what you're arguing for is total control from the parent -- a much worse outcome for a child than self-moderation on behalf of the trusted entities they would otherwise have had the freedom to interact with.
But this is not comparable to "going outside" at all. This is "seeking out and going onto private property and seeing stuff you shouldn't". The logic that a company is comparable to public spaces doesn't hold water. YouTube is not a public space any more than Pornhub or 4chan is. If 4chan wanted to cater to 10 year olds (yes yes I know) then the way to do so would clearly not be to remove content not suitable to kids but to create a separate place for those kids.
The ways in which people access community-created content (or commentary) have changed substantially enough that I don't believe this is true any longer. Content providers now bear a portion of this responsibility in addition to child-rearers. That is ethically much more sticky, I'll admit, but I also think that moral imperative does not automatically follow the path of greatest simplicity.
They can, that's enough reason. It's their lawn, they can do whatever they want. If you invite me into your house and I start yelling like crazy (because I have the right to), if you don't like it you would suggest me to get out (gently or not). You will be right. Who am I to complain about what I can or cannot do in your house?
> freedom of expression
Why people always misinterpret what freedom of expression is? It does not apply to the comments section of Youtube. People are not entitled to be heard or to express whatever they want in Youtube comments.
It's not Youtube's responsibility to protect anything, they just need to keep things barely legal. They are doing this because of the dollars and public image. Youtube owes us nothing, let alone guaranteeing our freedom of expression or protecting classes. If they say so, it's just PR.
I don't believe so. We don't let parents send their children down into coal mines, and neither should we allow parents to make their children famous on youtube. Parental rights are secondary to the rights of the child.
Do I want edgelords and abusers all over my screen? Also no.
At this stage I'll take any attempt to do something, even if it is deeply corporate. At least Nestle you can argue with without getting death threats.
(Not always true of e.g. Shell...)
Google already does this, I don't see the issue with it hypothetically happening on YouTube. If you search for a well-known person, place or thing, you'll be presented with information aggregated from trustworthy sources. Can they be wrong? Sure, and it happens. It's not sinister.
It sounds like you're envisioning someone manually tagging things. That would be odd and suboptimal. Instead, just tag helpful Wikipedia pages about the broad scientific consensus of things on relevant videos.
Putting a link under the videos isn’t likely to achieve that, but that’s a separate issue.
The only problem I have with Google doing this, is that I trust corporations and government about the same — i.e. that both will lie and dissemble as much as they are allowed to get away with for their own or their leader’s benefit, without regard for my interests.
Sounds great, I'm all for it.
Sure the truth can be complicated, but I fail to see how implementing software that auto-links to a relevant article on Wikipedia causes Google to be the arbiter of truth.
Even if Google thinks climate change isn't man-made and links to sources backing that up?
There aren't sources backing up that climate change isn't real. That's a hill I'll happily die on. There are plenty of alternative sources which make that claim, but Google does not aggregate facts from them for presentation to its users. Because they don't have evidence.
Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, this isn't a revolutionary idea. Google does it on its search engine and the sky hasn't fallen. I remain unconvinced it would fail if they pushed it out to YouTube.
Note the solution I posed is something which Google already does on its search engine without calamity. Therefore I don't see a reason why it would fail for YouTube. In contrast the example you're giving seems pretty hard to just link to an authoritative source.
Put another way, I'm not advocating for Google to arbitrate the truth on a case by case basis. I'm advocating for Google to identify ahead of time which sources are well-researched and trustworthy, then outsource its fact-linking system to those sources.
If Google were to supply facts on a case by case basis that would be suspect. But that's not how the company operates, so I'm deeply skeptical they would become some kind of arbiter of truth.
There are many things that are debatable, but flat earth? That falls under verifiable facts, and we shouldn't equivocate about those.
Ex: „If banks stop allowing strangers to withdraw money from my account, how will I ever get my money“
And, no, questions of fact aren’t different. The earth is round, not flat. One tree does not a forest make, but a thousand does. Even if we can’t agree on the specific cutoff (is 15 trees a forest? 50? 500?), that does not prevent us from accurately describing the extremes.
This idea that because nobody has a monopoly on the truth then we can't make decision is utterly futile and silly; I have no idea where it originates, except perhaps in the darkest places where reason has utterly collapsed.
There is no reason behind the idea that because we can't totally differentiate between good and bad where the line is blurry then we can't do anything at all. I'd also question whether free speech is intrinsically valuable, more than other actions are. I have seen no convincing reason to think so.
We can approve of good actions (like putting a Wikipedia link about earth science under a flat earther's video) and disapprove of bad ones (like putting flat earth propaganda underneath a scientific video). I see no issue here.
Here we see the vacuity of the harm principle: one can claim anything is (or isn't) harmful in order to attach their favorite idea to it. As an example, some people may be said to be harmed simply by the knowledge that someone is watching pornography in their house. You'd likely say that doesn't "count" as harm - well then what does? As it turns out, controlling speech under your schema is simply a matter of defining what counts as harm and what doesn't. Yet philosophers such as Joel Feinberg and Catherine MacKinnon have pointed out, very few people (if any) would like to live in a society in which only harmful speech (or acts, since there is no meaningful distinction between speech and acts other than invoking body-mind dualism) is not permitted.
Then we get to ideas: who's to say that threats or child porn can't carry ideas in them? In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too? Some would say the idea that "it's not so bad to have sex with children" is encoded in every instance of child pornography. What if I made my threat into an art piece?
> In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too?
Ideas are by definition abstract and so they should be communicable through some other medium.
Obviously I'm not defending child pornography here, but I think there's a logical flaw in your reasoning.
The fact that ideas can be communicated through other media is irrelevant, since it would mean that we can censor whatever ideas we like in any major category (e.g ideas conveyed in photography and film) but thereby only farcically allow them otherwise (e.g the expression of the idea is only allowed through physical speech).
But censoring one particular medium is not censoring the idea. So your attempt at finding a contradiction doesn't hold water.
>What differentiates the free speech content of child pornography from other pornography, or even art which required harm in its creation?
Consent.
>since it would mean that we can censor whatever ideas we like in any major category
This doesn't follow from my argument that censoring one particular medium is OK. Child porn is a genuine special case (direct harm in its production, lack of consent in dissemination) that doesn't transfer to other mediums that don't have the same problems.
>This doesn't follow from my argument that censoring one particular medium is OK.
It does, since by your own admission, censoring a particular medium does not entail censoring the idea.
>Child porn is a genuine special case (direct harm in its production, lack of consent in dissemination)
So this is what I was getting at - you say it's fine to censor a particular way of conveying an idea due to other harms being associated with that particular way of conveying. In child pornography it's the violation of consent in its production and violation of privacy in its reproduction. Extending this argument from child pornography to regular pornography, some would say there are significant harms involved there too (e.g it conveys the idea that women ought to be subservient to men), and then to hate speech.
The core idea is that speech is not absolute, just like actions aren't absolute. You're free to swing your fist so long as it doesn't hurt anyone, and you're free to say things so long as they don't hurt anyone (or require anyone to be hurt, of course). This means that with a sufficiently convincing empirical dataset, we can outlaw regular pornography and hate speech.
And letting google choose which responses to choose to a search request is essentially also asking them to decide what's true (how many people even go to the second page of results, much less later ones?)
I agree with your sentiment (and am not a gmail user -- yuck!!) but I do sometimes use their search engine...and know that when I use ddg I'm ceding the same authority to them.
My mail and other services run on hardware of mine in a colo. I've had a rack of personal machines in a colo since the mid 90s; before then I simply plugged my machines in at work.
You: sue them out of existence.
We both know what you just typed is bullshit, for good reason.
> You: sue them out of existence.
Well, no, so I wouldn't say that, but, OTOH, saying that might be problematic from an employment noon-discrimination standpoint. And there are other things Google might say that would be problematic from a standpoint of either consumer or securities fraud. Or libel. But none of that is germane to the point under discussion.
- shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!)
- they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate)
- they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all
This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google's.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don't have a technical cure all. It'll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that
Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they're the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don't "care about children", they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation.
(gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented 'controversial' stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)