YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views

Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by Kye on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:32PM (#20106114)

Since when do they need a pretext? Countless videos from LGBTQ+ people and people of color got wiped out due to mass reporting and inaccurate automated removals. All the people who usually cry censorship were silent.

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Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by luckylion on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:41PM (#20106235)

That was a while ago, right? From what I remember, the "usual suspects" (aka libertarians, liberalists etc) weren't that silent, they pointed out the irony that the try to control platforming backfired, but did oppose the bans.

Might be something newer, of course, in which case I didn't see it and can't comment on it.

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Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by Kye on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:45PM (#20106304)

It's an ongoing thing, and not just on YouTube. I see people popping on to Mastodon every day because they said, on their own timeline to people following them, that (for example) "transphobes can fall off a cliff." Banned for threats. Sometimes permanently. Most big instances have the :guillotine: and :trebuchet: emoji because of one such case.

This is way more than the few cases that float up into your attention. It's been going on for years across all these big silos. People who fully endorse actual censorship know they can abuse automated systems to silence marginalized people.

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Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by stcredzero on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:59PM (#20106473)

People who fully endorse actual censorship know they can abuse automated systems to silence marginalized people.

Very true. This statement is neutral with regards to both the left-right axis and authoritarian/anti-authoritarian axis. In order to have a society in which people can speak truth to power, in 2019, we have to be on the lookout for new forms that censorious power can take.

Technology is a double edged sword here. New tech introduces ways of circumventing censorship, but also introduces new forms of censorship not covered by old laws.

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Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views by luckylion on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @02:40PM (#20107775)

That's the problem with policies like this: they might apply them to everyone. If a feminist tweets "men are scum", they are going to get in trouble. If some white supremacist wrote "anti-whites can fall off a cliff", I suppose many would support removing/banning that.

You won't get large companies to officially make value calls and say "no, it's okay if this user says that because they are part of a special group", they will be too vulnerable to public/media/political pressure, especially in a culture that is generally pro free speech.

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