The problem is you’ve just said you won’t address the primary, most compelling reason to take these actions.
Assuming that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” presupposes a lot of things about society that are, in my observation, no longer true. We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contemplation and retrospection into deep topics. We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong. We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.
Your theory of how the world should work is very, almost simplistically, seductive. Woe but for the world to be like that, like the “perfectly rational actor” assumed in economic textbooks or the “perfectly smooth sphere on a frictionless plane” in physics.
So, in order to avoid repeating myself, I believe I addressed that notion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063309
In short, I am not saying that the truth will necessarily "win out" over the false. Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is.
So, my personal belief system - and I know how unpopular this viewpoint is, especially in current times - is just let them have at it. Remove blatant calls for violence, and nothing more. ("nothing more" should include racism and other unpopular beliefs, by the way, in case my viewpoint isn't controversial enough thus far).
So, saying "We should go out and attack $GROUP" should be removed. But saying "I think $GROUP is inferior due to highly discredited scientific-seeming reasons" should not be removed, because however wrong or distasteful it is, it's not directly advocating for violence. Similarly, something like holocaust denial or anti-vax beliefs, etc should similarly not be suppressed.
Again, I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I hope that helps you understand my thoughts on these issues.
Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic (whether it's that it is a hoax, that it is not transmissible, or that you can cure it by drinking bleach) is okay?
It seems to me that, if you're saying calls to violence can be censored because they will inspire people to act badly, then you've crossed the line into saying people can't be trusted to act appropriately.
Why ban that, but not misinformation about the pandemic?
Wearing Mask a few months ago was misinformation by many. Which most of the world finally revert course later but still not agreed by WHO.
So who is to define what is "misinformation"?
For every single downvote I got on HN for stating Hong Kong got it right with mask in March, do I get a brownie point for every single US citizen that is wearing a mask now?
I dont have an answer, but I am leaning towards the same thinking as OP. Because everything I said right now is considered as misinformation by the Hong Kong government. Personally I think "misinformation" is a pandora box that should never be opened / used.
How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc.
The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question it. The right to question is something we can't give up just to avoid bad actors.
The nuance is that they were repeating Chinese propaganda.
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?la...
1) 5G causes COVID-19 2) COVID-19 doesn't exist, i.e. it's all a hoax 3) Aquarium cleaning solution is a cure for COVID
I don't know what makes those different from "masks are worthless" but they seem qualitatively different. Maybe for a couple of reasons.
Maybe for #1, there's no plausible mechanism of action linking 5G and covid. But the people claim there is! Using a nested series of faulty reasoning and unreproduceable evidence to back it up.
Maybe for #2, there's no observable evidence that it's a hoax, i.e. people claiming otherwise are doing so with no supporting evidence, only reasoning that they (subjectively) do not trust government or media, therefore their claim is supportable.
But I don't know. I don't think the answer is that it's unknowable (which you may or may not have been getting at).
As an example of things that can follow into the misinformation umbrella parody, humour, good/bad science, good/bad journalism, misinterpretation of intent, paranormal reports, religion. It done for the greater good. People have done surgeries in their garage, I can't believe it's from lack of credible information, and that making a general policy from the exception is a sign of a bad design.
Could it not be that this is a very complex issue and they were simply wrong in the first place? More data came in and they revised their position.
But they wouldn't have backed off as quickly without pushback from others taking the opposite position that masks were critical. And at the time, that was contrary to the officially espoused position by both CDC and WHO. Even now WHO haven't fully reversed course, they have only stopped anti-recommending face masks as hard. Banning spreading this countervailing opinion would have been a grave mistake.
WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
> If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.
CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
> In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.
Yes, we really can't have it both ways. Either we have free speech for everyone, or we have censorship. There are exceptions, of course: calls to violence, libel against non-public people, and so on. And yes, also inciting panic by crying "fire" falsely in public places. But I believe that's distinguishable from spreading "fake news".
The problem with censorship is needing to trust censors. And even if we have honest censors, how do we know what the "truth" is? Do we trust "authorities"? That seems iffy, given how often we've learned that they've been dishonest or just plain wrong.
Also, authoritarians always start with the edge cases. And then they widen the scope. By the time your position -- which always seemed so reasonable -- becomes unacceptable, it's too late.
Not that this difficulty means we shouldn't try.
Not exactly the best way to convince people that restricting speech is actually good.
Most people agree that shouting fire in a crowded theatre is the sort of speech which should be restricted, wherever the argument came from.
All the more reason to not silence cranks and conspiracy theorists.
From John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html
But still, that's arguably distinguishable from creating a panic by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater that's undoubtedly not burning. In that crowded theater, it's the stampede that gets people killed in the moment. I do see the analogy to Internet meme explosions. But connections between actions and consequences are weaker and slower enough.
> A poll of Americans in 2013 by Public Policy Polling indicated that 4% of registered voters (±2.8%) believed in David Icke's ideas.
But at least some of them were joking, right?
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory
EDIT: Typos
Of course, the lines as always get blurry. To use a random example that comes to mind, when Kathy Griffin posted the severed head of Trump - was that a direct call to violence? That's a tough one to answer. My first intuition is that it does cross the line, but I could very easily see an argument that it's not.
So unfortunately there will always be that difficulty, unless we committed to an absolutist position of not removing ANY speech. I drink a lot of the kool-aid, and even I don't go that far.
That causes genocides to happen though -- are you okay with that or did you not know
To disagree is to argue that human beings are nothing but programmable devices. If that's your position, fine, but we'll have to disagree.
In other words I think that's very much a red herring.
Not ok to kill people via violence, but ok to do the same by (contributing to) spreading a pandemic?
Honestly I don’t have any solutions. I don’t like either option.
Most of us agree anti-vaxxers are ill-informed and that adopting their beliefs causes people to engage in patterns of behavior (avoiding vaccines) that are not in what we think is their best interest.
What about other beliefs? If someone posts a video saying that they don't think seatbelts are effective in preventing injuries during car crashes, should they be suppressed?
What about someone who claims that vaping is safe and popularizes the practice? Do we ban that?
It's easy to pick a few almost-universally hated groups and rally against them: racists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers. Few things are that cut-and-dry. And watching the widespread rise of "benevolent censorship" wrt COVID-19 has really shown me how far we can take the idea of "protect people from information that could harm them".
For example, I recently submitted a highly controversial 7500+ word blog post that advocated for ending lockdown in the US. I got some matters of scientific fact wrong (and have since addressed or am currently working on addressing those), i.e. things like accounting for the phenomenom of "overshoot". Some sections probably did not give a perfectly fair view of "each side" and could be/were criticized as being cherry-picked. And I think I got a lot of things very right. I've now had 9 people e-mail me in the last 24 hours saying that they tried to share my post on Facebook/Messenger and that the entire domain is now blocked for violating the community guidelines. Is that something worth banning? It advocates for a position that could easily be argued will lead to death, and therefore reading it could kill people. So it's a very easy argument to make, if you take the position that we should suppress "harmful" information.
As I said at the start of this thread, I basically reject the entire concept of "disinformation" for that reason; it inevitably gets used to suppress even the most good-faith and well-researched (or in my case, somewhat-well-researched :P) arguments. Therefore I think the entire concept is inherently dangerous to a free society.
Okay, that's enough rambling for one night. I'll let everyone else duke it out :)
This issue will pass but now they have a precedent.
> The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, ..., as amended, created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system. It provides compensation to people found to be injured by certain vaccines. Even in cases in which such a finding is not made, petitioners may receive compensation through a settlement.
> The VICP was established after lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and healthcare providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce vaccination rates. The Program began accepting petitions (also called claims) in 1988.
The current anti-vaccination movement began largely over concern that thiomersal preservative in many childhood vaccines was causing autism. Although multiple epidemiological studies indicated that there was no appreciable risk, "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked vaccine makers to remove thiomersal from vaccines as quickly as possible as a precautionary measure", and it was ~gone by 2001.[1]
0) https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/about/index.html
Also, calling stuff "FUD" is a classic strategy to escape responsibility. For example, the tobacco industry claimed that lung cancer risk was FUD for decades. Other examples include groundwater pollution, asbestos, and lead paint.
Not to mention human overpopulation. Which is arguably the root cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with HIV and Ebola, and likely more to come. And of course global climate change, which may well kick serious ass in coming decades.
Maybe the solution is a law that if someone posts/airs clearly wrong facts. Or if someone's theories/facts... Get later disproven they need to post/air a correction at the same time at least as long (maybe better twice as long) and give it as much prominence. Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.
I am aware that the ad agency behind the "tobacco doesn't cause cancer" campaign got into the "lead paint is safe" and other pro-industry campaigns, including the climate change contrarians. And the Tea Party. Funded by folks like the Koch brothers.
> Maybe then outlets would be more careful about posting obvious untruths.
That's a very slippery slope. As I've said before, you may be surprised when you become the pariah.
The law didn't get enacted just to prevent lawsuits, but also to compensate those who were injured.
> The implications in your comment are actively harmful to the public health.
That way lies totalitarianism.
For example, there's considerable pressure in many countries to outlaw secure end-to-end encryption. To protect against terrorists, child abusers, and other criminals.
So how would we feel if support for secure end-to-end encryption were censored in social media?
The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, but which serve to advance dubious claims accepted by a small but growing and very vocal group of antivaxxers that have had a clear negative impact on our society.
If you have some new evidence or analysis to add, please add it. If all you have is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, please don't throw gasoline on this fire.
> The reason your comment is harmful is because you make implications that have no basis in evidence, ...
That's exactly what attorneys for polluters always say. There's this thing called the precautionary principle. So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.
Edit: If you like, I can probably find defendants' briefs and expert reports from landmark cases, asserting that plaintiffs have provided insufficient evidence of causation to support their claims.
Yes, it's important to consider the risks of any medical treatment. Your comments make it seem like that hasn't been done, as if doctors and public health officials are just pretending that side effects don't exist. That's simply untrue -- rigorous clinical trials and careful reporting mean that modern vaccines are really quite safe. When you lucidly compare the incidence of side effects against the impact of contracting illnesses that vaccines prevent, there is only one reasonable position to take.
Your initial comments about thiomersal are pure FUD. You acknowledge that there's not real medical concern there, but choose to bring it up anyway? What could your motivation possibly be? If you'd like to discuss it objectively, here's how to do it: Someone with a financial interest who is no longer allowed to practice medicine falsified data in an effort to mislead the public about a supposed danger of a preservative in vaccines. Many people siezed onto that lie, despite the clear evidence that it was flawed, and continue to espouse it, causing lasting damage to society.
> So you act when damage is possible, long before there's conclusive evidence.
The damage that's real here is the damage caused by anti-vaxxers. That's actual damage that's caused harm to real people in the real world. Your comments help advance that agenda, which is why they are harmful.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/parents-beliefs-about...
Anti-vaxing is not an organized religion but I could see organized religions adopting anti-vaxing beliefs.
So you are in favor of censorship, just with different parameters.
I Think this should apply to functional social monopolys as well. YouTube/facebook/instagram etc shouldn't be allowed to remove content they deem untrue.
15 years ago the idea of an internet video monopoly didn't even exist and if it did no one would have cared.
What you are suggesting is impossible to enforce or even reason about.
I don't follow how this would be impossible to enforce. The person whose content on youtube is removed for example is going to complain. It's dead simple to slap youtube with a couple million dollar fine for such things.
This is a problem, but how does censorship solve it? You would in fact need to solve that problem for all ideas in order to correctly know what to censor, which nobody has time to do, hence the problem.
> We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong.
This is exactly what the censorship makes worse. You say "not here, go somewhere else" to anyone who disagrees and everyone who disagrees is separated, so that each camp has no exposure to the other side's arguments and whoever is wrong will remain so.
> We are exposed to a staggering volume of information that all seems mostly the same with some slight differences but widely varying outcomes.
The world is complicated. Not everybody is going to understand everything. That isn't possible, but it isn't required. What you need are two things.
One is free and open debate, so that the people who choose to allocate their time to a given specific topic enough to come to an accurate conclusion on that topic are free to do so.
And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.
But you either do the research yourself (which nobody has time to do for everything) or you trust somebody else to do it for you. So now people need to figure out who they can trust to distill the informed consensus. But you don't do that by censoring the debate, you do it by being so consistently right that people begin to trust you over the lies of the blaring partisans. That doesn't come from force, it comes from hard work, which nobody seems willing to do anymore, which is why everything is messed up.
I would argue that this assessment quite strongly examplifies the whole issue. I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy. And that campaign is very clearly politically motivated (funnily enough the most partisan of the big news networks portraits itself as the the upholder of truth, a misinformation campaign itself), and is very strongly based on misinformation and providing easy answers... Largely financed by an ideological opposition to government intervention and fueled by propaganda against global warming action
Both can be true. The large national news outlets can be faltering AND someone could find a partisan advantage by making hay out of that fact.
As an example, major news networks blatantly lied about the Covington kid because it fit their ideology.
Major news networks are untrustworthy, you just happen to support the narrative some of them are selling.
And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
Meh. Money buys speech has been a thing since day zero. If anything the internet has made this problem smaller because you don't have to buy a TV station to publish video anymore. Then the corporate propaganda isn't the only thing people see, which allows them to see it for what it is, which makes them think this is some kind of novel problem never previously encountered, when it's really a novel solution that makes the old and pervasive problem much more conspicuous through contrast.
You also have to see the irony in suggesting that corporations decide what people can see in order to protect us from corporations influencing the public debate.
> And when it comes to subjects like human rights, there is a definite right and wrong, not a "truth in the middle".
That would be really convenient, but it's still as complicated as anything. There is a truth but it isn't a simple truth and that means getting it right is hard work.
Uncle Google doesn't have a magic wand of righteousness that lets them tell right from wrong over everybody else in the world.
Misinformation spreads like wildfire because it doesn't need fact checks, it doesn't need to be based on research. As long as you can get enough spread, you can get a large number of people to believe anything, simply because they heard it from someone. People are not rational actors.
Witness the demonization of pipeline protestors, people who protest the clear-cutting of forests, people who argue for trans rights. They upset the corporate-run status quo, so they are suppressed by the authorities, who act on the whims of the rich and powerful.
Witness the rise of the alt-right, the so-called "intellectual dark web" and the influence of sites like 4chan and 8chan.
Armed people barging into governmental buildings, and basically being allowed to do so almost unimpeded by police, photo ops for the media, a show of force for their allies. I've seen them ridiculed as yokels, but it didn't matter. What matters is visibility and the "look at what we can do without being stopped" factor.
Imagine what would have happened if BLM, a group of Muslims or any left-wing group had tried to do the same thing. Think Kent State and the National Guard.
The message is clear: Act against capitalism and the powers that be and you will be suppressed, by unlimited force if necessary
Sure, astroturfing and other misinformation campaigns can happen if speech is truly free, but the alternative is far worse. With free speech, if your ideas have merit then at least there is a chance they will be recognized and your audience can grow. With complete censorship, you have no chance at all. Free speech is the least bad of these two options.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. No ifs or buts about that.
In the same breath, it is very important to realize that your freedom of speech does not absolve you from responsibility for what you say. It does not obligate others to facilitate your speech, it does not entitle you to any platform you wish, and it does not obligate anyone to listen to you.
Similarly to the second amendment, which enshrines your right to own weapons (being the foundation of a well-regulated militia and so on) does not obligate anyone to provide you with weapons, nor the facilities to train with and maintain weapons, and it certainly doesn't require anyone to admit your onto their property if you are currently holding any weapons.
There is no legal obligation for YouTube to listen to us, but there is no reason we can't ask for less censorship. If they say no, then they are well within their rights, but we don't have to be happy about it either. Just because we can't legally force change doesn't mean we must abandon the cause. The most optimistic scenario would be if public sentiment changes enough such that YouTube feels they are being seen as unfair and it is damaging to their reputation/bottom line, perhaps we may see a change in their censorship policies. This is an ideal to strive for, and uses social/economic pressure as opposed to legal pressure. It is like your obligation to be a helpful neighbor or to be a caring friend. It's not by force of law, but people are expected to do it because it's "the right thing to do." In the same way, when you're the predominant video platform on the internet, the right thing to do is not to censor opinions you disagree with.
Does that apply to astroturfed reddit comments etc? I don't see why it shouldn't. Of course it's a bit harder to prove, but it's not always impossible.
If you're thinking that 'society used to be able to tell what was a lie from the truth' I'm sorry to say but that was never close to being true.
Newspapers were a pretty strong filter of information and therefore could have some kind of 'rough' credibility, biases notwithstanding obviously.
But with 'every Instagram a source of news' ... we have an existential truthiness problem that we're only beginning to learn to deal with.
Then techsupporter said something like "actually, booting them off does work".
Finally, paraphrasing your comment, "so you're saying you should let private companies decide?" No, that is clearly not what techsupporter's comment meant.
It's ok to disagree with the second half of that first comment ("booting them off doesn't work") without expressing an opinion on the first half. In fact the way the original comment ties together those two things has has led to the quagmire of crossed arguments you're seeing in these comments, so untying them is quite important.
If someone wanted to post about how much they hate a certain race, do you believe the moderators here have an obligation to allow that post to remain?
So given HN's expansive reach, why do you think it deserves to be excluded from the concept of being a provider? Why shouldn't it be forced to house all content?
Some misinformation is just unambiguously harmful and so profoundly incorrect that no reasonable person could see stopping it as a slippery slope of free speech. For example, the misinformation being proliferated by Icke, that 5G spreads coronavirus and that people should destroy 5G towers. People actually went out and set 5G towers alight in response to Icke's posts [2]. It's quite reasonable that Youtube or any other social media platform would not want to be responsible for disseminating information to leads to real-life crimes.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/4/21207927/5g-towers-burning...
> The evidence that COVID-19 is a bioweapon is overwhelming – and so is the evidence that 5G is involved to either cause the flu-like symptoms/pneumonia people have been experiencing, and/or to exacerbate the virulity of the virus by weakening people’s immune systems and subjecting them to pulsed waves of EMF to open up their skin to foreign DNA fragments (including viruses).
So he's been saying both that 5G causes an illness that is mistaken for COVID-19 and that 5G spreads coronavirus.
[1] https://www.davidicke.com/article/564306/coronavirus-5g-conn...
Also he believes that British Royal Family are shape shifting reptiles; he might not have the best judgement on what is backed by evidence.
We already have a solution to idiots vandalizing 5G towers: arrest them.
There is, I suppose, another alternative. If we want to promote fringe ideas, we should make it easier to organize and elect local candidates, abolish "first-past-the-post" voting systems that encourage a two-party system, and so on.
But currently scientific reasoning is an accepted system of analysis for evidence-based decisions, and most politicians rely on it in addition to emotional intelligence to alter and guide their behaviour and decisions, even as they generally do whatever the person with the deepest pockets says to do, whether because that person sponsors scientific research or conducts surveys and campaigns to sway public opinion.
The issue I have is that fringe opinion, like this, would reject cause-and-effect reasoning and evidence to rely almost entirely on emotions instead. And because it's controversial, people click on it and watch it and wonder about it. When there's no actual evidence to it.
We used to and probably still do, have courses in grade/high school on media literacy, or not believing everything you see on TV. We routinely, as an HN community, encourage reading source materials and deciding for ourselves. But we're a small community, and for YouTube, it's easier to say "it's not our problem any longer" than it is to try and provide counterpoints to the material.
There's a serious risk to YouTube to not pull this down, because of how the feedback loop of their algorithms will encourage folks who like this to watch other fringe videos, until eventually they think all of YouTube, or the world, thinks the same way as these commentators. It's easier in the short term to pull down the content than to change how the algorithms work to make them somehow less relevant. And back to my original point, folks who want this content, they will find it, regardless of what platform it's on.
This analogy is misleading, because it does not make it clear that in this situation, everyone has a megaphone.
Ok, except that you 1) just made this up from whole cloth and 2) have missed the point of deplatforming entirely. Deplatforming trashbags reduces their reach. It doesn't need to change their minds. The trashbag is one person. The gullible are many.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
> I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself.
It's very convenient that you then handwave away the very reason why this is wishful thinking.
Keep them on or they will radicalize more? That just sounds silly.
Let them radicalize. See how that works when they don't have a voice.
Vice in this article links to evidential sources while summarizing the findings. You should bother reading it and what it links to.
ALSO, and this is a bug fucking also, that's not how the burden of evidence for claims works! You just argued against falsifiability! OP is responsible for providing evidence for their own made up claim!
The burden of proof is always on the person making an assertion or proposition. When they do not provide proof of their claim, and another person calls it "full of shit", it is not valid to shift the burden of proof onto them to disprove the original claim.
And there's a great reason for this - the bullshit asymmetry principle: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Big friendly looking corporations like Google shouldn't be used as proxies for the government to bypass the rights of Americans(or anyone for that matter). For whatever reason, people see corporations as being different from governments. What is a government but a corporation that owns land? What is a corporation but a form of government? They're quick to should about the importance of dissent, telling the government what it cannot do to our rights, yet corporations get a free pass when they are on the right side and hand out free goodies.
Beyond the likeness of corporations to governments, big corporate censorship should be opposed on the grounds of principle. America and other countries are founded on the principle of freedom of speech, among other things such as the concept that all "men" are created equal. We don't allow businesses to discriminate people by their race, color, sex, or religion because of that principle. Why then can we not apply the principle of freedom of speech to Silicon Valley and Big Media?
It's pretty frightening that the same people who told me how brilliant Nineteen Eighty-Four is(I found it the least convincing of dystopian warnings I've read), easily fall into the trap of believing that we desperately need a centralized Ministry of Truth. In the last year I've been realizing that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more realistic than I had believed.
As you say, they are fundamentally the same argument, except for one thing.
A water company that decided to cut off water to people that its CEO doesn't like would, in short order, have to face both political scrutiny and the proverbial torches and pitchforks, if you will; unlike speech, if the water goes away, people start dying or they are forced to leave.
Speech is necessary, but it's cheap as dirt, and most people don't have a lot to say in the first place. If the speech started going away, even in ways that are fundamentally unfair or flaunt the ideals of the country, not enough people would make a fuss about it. You won't die without speech. It can be comfortable to live without speech, or freedom of speech, anyway.
Otherwise, the argument is the same and, in either case, regulation and the pissed-offedness of the little guy could change the outcome. Such is less likely in the case of speech.
How do you really quantify that in a way that is objective and obvious
Look at the rise of tiktok. On one hand at least where I live they had almost no mindshare but in the past 2 months now they do, and they’re growing in user count. Should they meet the same threshold as YouTube now? Instagram?
This feels intractable to me, I don’t have a good answer to this problem. Not to mention it could easily become a gating mechanism to competition
Also, how do you determine what information is harmful? Some of it feels obvious, but some of it not so much
I don't actually know. At some point, we need to figure out how to address that question. I think it can be addressed... I just don't have a good idea, and I don't know that anyone does. But we've been kicking that can down the road for ages.
Work out the audience share of a service, then work out the audience share of its nearest competitor/competitors. If the former is twice/four times/whatever as high as the latter, then it's counted as a de facto monopoly and regulated.
So YouTube's got 74.08% of the market and Vimeo has 18.02%[1], and the former is definitely twice or four times more than the latter, so regulate the former.
[1]https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu...
We set a number. Done.
These are corporations that only exist because we permit them to. Given enough political will, we can regulate them however we want.
We're now back to square one, because those companies hover below said number and advertisers control what content is allowed on said sites. All of those individual companies ban 5G conspiracy theories because it's bad for business. Next step?
Yet when a platform like YouTube deletes accounts and publicly announces the censoring of information that doesn't conform with the Ministry of Information(aka the World Health Organization), there's no mystery that they're violating people's rights.
I'll give you an analogy. In America, businesses can't pick and choose people on the basis of their skin color or their sex. Obviously, discrimination in hiring still exists to some degree, but because it's covert or the result of implicit biases, there's a limited number of things you can do to address that discrimination. On the other hand, if the PR for a fast food chain goes on TV and says that the company only hires white people, that's unambiguous and has no conflict with the rights of the corporation.
IMHO EU should work on disinformation harm reduction strategy. Similarly how some members deal with drug addicts - contact people infected with bullshit and try to set them straight. I guess that (public mental health) would sound too dystopian for HN crowd.
That would be impossible, since the First Amendment as written explicitly only applies to Congress, and it restricts Congress' ability to pass laws, which is something private institutions don't actually have the power to do anyway.
> What to Submit
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> In Comments
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
These guidelines seem like a private corporation censoring content. Are platform guidelines like these also an example of censorship?
To me, these guidelines shape the content and quality of discussions of the community, but also it's one of the reasons why it's a highly effective community. I don't see why YouTube cannot do the same.
YouTube is different from Hacker News because YouTube is more of a general platform (not focused on a particular topic). In contrast with Hacker News, less censorship on YouTube would not significantly degrade the experience. You can still go subscribe to the channels you like and be completely unaware of the content you don't want to see. On Hacker News, the whole point is that it is focused on particular subjects (I suppose it would be analogous to a curated list of YouTube channels), and its rules keep it that way.
Another factor to consider is what alternatives exist. As far as I know, YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content. YouTube content includes news and politics, and many people use it as their primary source of information. No matter what your politics are, they will likely differ from Google's in some way, and if YouTube begins to aggressively censor opinions they disagree with, you'll find yourself without a platform since no serious alternatives exist.
For the casual viewer, YouTube has unbeatable brand recognition, and if I was trying to build an audience for a mainstream idea, that's the obvious place. However, for dedicated fans of a specific ideology, with YouTube deplatforming that ideology, the usual considerations are fewer.
Normally, the friction associated with getting viewers to install an app would be enough to dissuade a large number of users. For users who believe the government lies and that they're seeking the truth, and only the RushLimbaughTube app can expose them to it, I don't know if there's the same friction.
Secondly rush’s app will be removed, if he says anything that upsets big bro.
Lastly Facebook video will be just like YouTube in terms of enforcement.
Generalized, therein lies the crux of the tension.
It's not about the existence or accessibility of content, but rather its discoverability.
That YouTube's recommendation algorithm is so psychopathically ammoral that they had to rig it (several months back) not to suggest conspiracy video after conspiracy video should have been the alarm bell.
Content + discoverability composes the potential danger to society, and YouTube wholly controls one of those levers.
Are they? There's Vimeo, Facebook, Pornhub's SFW option, Twitter can host short videos, there's a metric shitload of porn hosts, and if you're in for premium service every major CDN offers video hosting/distribution.
There’s no problem hosting wacky content. What people complain is they don’t get free hosting and advertising.
YouTube's dominance is not because video is impossible to host but because YouTube takes care of the advertising/revenue aspect for content creators. Any competitor would need to provide a similar service, and that's hard to do at the same level when you're not run by the world's largest advertising company. A serious alternative to YouTube would need to draw creators like YouTube does, and you need some sort of built-in way to (probably economically) incentivize them to create videos and put them on your platform.
I followed your link, then struggled to find something as you have to choose from a list of thumbnails. I then clicked to view something and immediately hit a paywall.
How are you supposed to "discover" this content? That is where youtube is so strong. Often on youtube I will be directed to patreon, etc - does this work on the same principle?
A lot of large YouTubers (like Wendover Productions/Half as Interesting) have been doing sponsored ads for a thing called 'CuriosityStream' which is basically Netflix for Documentaries/Non-Fiction and as part of a bundle if you subscribe with their link you get Nebula for free as an extra for as long as you pay for CS.
It's mainly existing content from YouTubers but with premium exclusive videos like Patreon has.
To be a little extreme: If we limited your freedom of speech by saying you can speak freely, but only in your own house, then that would still effectively curtail your rights. Whilst being technically true that you'd still have the right to speak, it wouldn't be in the spirit of freedom of speech.
This situation seems similar to me.
I think there's an argument to say, for the biggest providers of web communications, that if you would be allowed to stand on the street corner and say your bit that those providers shouldn't be allowed to prevent you speaking that 'bit' either.
Obviously as with IRL speech you have no right to an audience; none of us need listen. And, the provider has no curtailment of providing counter-points adjacent to your "speech", just as counter-protest is a normal part of protesting.
This ability to speak in ostensibly public forums is a natural and necessary part of democracy. IMO we should act to maintain that.
I'd add a couple of provisos:
# warnings on extreme content are fine
# the platform can demand those who are "speaking" be identified by name and nationality
Disagree. Online misinformation can kill people [0] and act as a recruitment tool for Nazis [1]. Less seriously, it can result in people burning down 5G towers. There's plenty to lose by YouTube hosting this stuff, and they're under no obligation to do so in the name of free speech.
It strikes me as odd that more people seem to want YouTube to permit far-right propaganda on their platform, than want YouTube to permit 'adult content', which just about no-one advocates.
> YouTube is the only serious option at the moment for general video content
People don't have a positive right for their poisonous nonsense to be hosted by, and discoverable on, YouTube. Such content should be forced off mainstream platforms.
> if YouTube begins to aggressively censor opinions they disagree with
'Disagree with' is trivialising the problem. This stuff is serious.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...
edit It's not clear to me whether [0] was the result of online misinformation.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbzzzx/youtube-decides-to...
Media outlets have immense political power because of this ability to keep the demos out of the loop of what can and can't be censored. Politicians have leverage with the media outlets, but The People do not.
I'm not particularly content with that.
This strikes me as a backward way of approaching the problem.
My opinion is that it's not only acceptable for YouTube to ban certain categories of videos, but morally obligatory. It would clearly be atrocious for them to officially permit ISIS recruitment videos in the name of freedom of expression, or in the name of never taking down political videos (ISIS is political, after all).
To put that another way then, my position is that:
1. A video platform like YouTube clearly needs to have, and to enforce, a content policy. It seems obvious that it cannot be a free-for-all. 2. Videos with political content cannot be granted a special exemption from the content policy on the grounds of political videos being special.
The question then is what categories should be on the ban list. It clearly shouldn't include ordinary political videos. It clearly should include recruitment videos from ISIS or neo-Nazi groups. It clearly should include dangerous misinformation about COVID19.
There may be contentious edge-cases, as there are for just about any matter of policy. That doesn't mean YouTube should run a free-for-all. That's just not a reasonable option.
If you want a free-for-all, a centralised platform like YouTube isn't the place to start anyway.
Same as online, officially accepted information. Only the latter can be even more dangerous.
As a reminder, the actual Nazis had the official, state sanctioned, platform on their hands, and they also labelled whatever they didn't like "misinformation" (from Jews, communists, etc).
No war was ever started by David Icke and his conspiracy theories. But NYT "official" and "sanctioned" Saddam's WMDs stories were crucial in building support for the Iraq war. Same for many other wars -- it's usually the state, official, sanctioned, news that are more dangerous...
Nothing. I hadn't meant to imply it was, but I can see how my comment could be read that way.
I'm not about to explain why I believe YouTube should officially oppose neo-Nazism. [0]
> Do you also want the "far-left" silenced?
If there are left-leaning life-threatening lies being spread, YouTube should treat them similarly. It's not the left/right spectrum that matters here.
I suspect anti-vaxxers tend to lean left, for instance (the natural=good branch of human folly), but it's less clear-cut on the left/right spectrum than Nazism.
On a related note, jihadist recruitment videos could be described as 'far right', but that's not normally how we think of them, and it's not especially relevant. YouTube should clearly ban those videos; the left/right question is of little concern.
Censorship can kill people. Look at China's initial reaction to COVID19, to name a timely example. Admittedly, YouTube doesn't censor to the extent that China does, but whenever you have censorship you open the possibility of censoring life-saving speech, which may be controversial at the time.
Yes, if taken blindly without critical thinking, online misinformation has the potential to do harm and even lead to deaths, as you mention. For freedom of speech to work best, you need an educated and thoughtful population. If you think people are sheep and believe everything they read online, then certainly at first pass it sounds like censoring what they see is the right move. But this relies on a critical implicit assumption: that you (or the censor you defer to) know better and are never wrong. Have you ever changed your opinion? Perhaps you from five years ago would censor something important you would say today. There is no flawless human being in the world that can be trusted with this power.
Okay then, how about we just censor the obviously bad stuff, like Nazis or the 5G conspiracy theories? As other commenters have suggested, censorship will just feed into their narrative, further radicalize, and drive them underground. Instead, for things that are indeed so obviously wrong, simply explain why. Counter their flawed ideas with your correct ideas. If they're so obviously wrong and you're so obviously right, this should be trivial. Reasonable people will see that you're right, and those that don't would be radicalized anyway.
> It strikes me as odd that more people seem to want YouTube to permit far-right propaganda on their platform, than want YouTube to permit 'adult content', which just about no-one advocates.
Personally I would have no problem with adult content on YouTube as long as it's labelled as such. And it's not just "far-right propaganda" that falls under free speech, but also "far-left propaganda" and anything in between. True free speech would not discriminate.
> 'Disagree with' is trivialising the problem. This stuff is serious.
Censorship is also serious, and has serious consequences. It is important to think carefully about the consequences of censorship.
The link with Brexit and T you make doesn't make sense either, both of these phenomenon got plenty public exposure, with all information available to those who wanted to find it. The central theme tieing both those developments was the ability for people to use the architecture built by digital corporations to quickly spread misinformation unopposed. People receive the information in isolation, they don't get it side-by-side with other views. People engineering the spread of misinformation know it's not a fair contest, that's why it is so effective.
And that's the point being missed by people who say keep the content up and let bad ideas be exposed by better arguments, the problem is that the ideas aren't being opposed or presented in a robust way. Hosts like Brian Rose and others for instance interview in a way that don't challenge their controversial guests, instead they add credibility to their guests. And because we are thinking of these characters as individuals expressing themselves and exchanging their personal views, people are distracted from the fact that they are businesses operating a money making scheme. And they are only able to do that on this scale because they can use other corporate infrastructure for free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
Of course various US (Chinese, UK, Israeli, Saudi, Indian, Iranian, etc, etc) interests run their own versions, both at home and elsewhere.
And corporate astroturfing is not a new thing.
There's a huge difference between kooks sharing a bit of kookiness with each other, and industrial misinformation campaigns created for political and strategic ends - which may include political destabilisation, radicalisation, and the promotion of extremism and domestic terrorism.
The two phenomena are not even remotely comparable. But at the moment information consumers literally cannot tell them apart, because there is no practical way to do that.
The crucial distinction is between individual freedom of speech, where people with unusual views are allowed to say whatever they want as long they don't incite violence, and industrial misinformation, which is inherently toxic and cannot be excused or justified.
There is no principle that can defend deliberate mass manipulation of the public through lies, exaggeration, and wilfully misleading manipulation.
The challenge is getting that principle enshrined in law. So-called free speech advocates will of course agitate against it, and they will be wrong. Knowingly and deliberately running a campaign to mislead the public should be considered a criminal act with criminal consequences.
In what way were Brexit or Trump "forced underground"? Trump got millions of dollars worth of free advertising from the second he announced he was running because the media could not stop covering him. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox aired 30 minutes of an empty podium for him!
And Brexit was constantly in the media in the UK. There was no "underground" at all. The BBC were almost a full-on propaganda arm with their fawning over Farage and terror that any even slight non-worship of the Tories would be reflected in yet more license fee beatings by ukgov.
If you force them underground you have no idea how prevalent the ideas are, nor do you have any oportunity to genuinely change peoples minds. You cant address a problem you are not aware of.
My mistake, I misfollowed your logic.
> it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist
Well, that's because Trump is an outspoken racist, the GOP is also pretty racist (but better at keeping it quiet), and Brexit was largely predicated on racism.
If you truly believe that then I feel sorry for you, because you live in a really sad world. Is that really the experience you have living in or visiting these countries or travelling around them, that 1 in 2 people you meet are racist?
I think its a bit lazy and easy to substitue fringe views from within these two camps as the views of the majority.
If you agree that they are not the views of the majority of peoplpe who voted in these directions then clearly there are other areas that made them vote this way that could have been discussed and had there minds changed over but werent, because well racist. Everyone loves to complain that trump supporters and brexiters suffer from a lack of critical thinking, and especially conspiracy theorists, but come on. How lazy is it to say all these people are/were racists or that is why brexit/trump won.
So yes, it's absolutely believable to have 15M racist wankers in the UK.
Which is easily demonstrated by their support for platforms and policies that crumble under the merest hint of application of critical thinking.
That's racism/xenophobia, isn't it?
Brexit seems to be predicated on the idea that Brits would rather suffer than risk the possibility that mutual benefit would be weighted towards others in the EU. That's pretty extreme racism (albeit founded on greed) IMO, and is endemic in British society AFAICT.
Obviously that depends on how you define "racist". If you define it as "votes for an explicit racist from a racist party espousing distinctly racist policies", about 62M.
Instead, debate the policies. Explain why they're wrong in a reasonable conversation. You'll actually have a shot at changing people's minds this way.
This seems to be expecting the opponent/interlocutor to be open to having their mind changed, while not being open yourself.
Also, when it comes to values (as opposed to questions of fact), you can't really argue the point, you can just understand the differences between the positions. If someone values sovereignty so highly that it outweighs any possible cost of Brexit, for instance, then they're not likely to change their mind after a discussion.
It was silent to you, because the broadcast wasn’t aimed at you.
Obviously they are. Nominally they censor certain content.
That said, not all instances of censorship are equally bad -- e.g. a parent forbidding their kid to swear at strangers, or some small forum like HN is not comparable to a large platform with big global political influence like FB or YouTube.
Are you saying that the size of the company factors into what policies it can enforce? i.e., smaller companies can have more freedom in policing content, but if an undefined critical mass is reached (perhaps market share), they should have less flexibility on curated content?
Or is it a factor of what it's trying to build? e.g., if YouTube only focused on hosting political content, should they be allowed to censor that content or shape what is permitted?
As much as I dislike YouTube’s policies in general, I find it difficult to argue against their current actions simply because powerful entities are already abusing the system behind the scenes to moderate content themselves.
I'd argue that the nature of the business should factor into it as well. Since Youtube advertises and presents itself as a platform where any user can upload any kind of content excluding pornography and dark stuff (eg. animal abuse), I don't think that censoring on the basis of political views alone is justified (I'm not familiar with David Icke, so I can't speak for this specific incident).
YouTube is pretty clear about their stance on what is and is not allowed. They have made it very clear, in particular, that coronavirus misinformation is not allowed. I see little difference between choosing to censor pornography and choosing to censor coronavirus misinformation. Both are protected speech in the USA but they are both also things that are allowed (and is reasonable to) censor if the platform wishes.
If you believe YT is a monopoly, then it would be far less harmful to everyone if it was just broken up, rather than basically banning moderation on the internet.
* a good portion of the law as it exists is actually a result of people thinking, in legal contexts, about what ought to be, at least insofar as any portion of the law represents values and ideals.
* any new "what ought to be" that turns out to be at some point in the future will need the force of law in one sense or another, which means it must be nested within a legal context, probably one enough like the present legal context that some if not all present constraints will matter.
"I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."
and ending with
"What’s your point? That we should ignore how the courts and first amendment law actually works?" ?
The power of enforcement follows from policy, in a democracy policy is influenced by public opinion, public opinion is shaped by discussion. We ought to discuss moral issues for which there is currently no enforcement.
The First Amendment is one specific protection of freedom of speech. It does not equal freedom speech, which is a general concept that private companies can also uphold (but I think everyone here acknowledges they are not legally obligated to)
Im still wondering why anyone expects this of youtube but would never ever expect it of the bar down the street.
I haven't been in a bar where the patrons were told they couldn't discuss quack medicine.
That's over specific.
All bars (even the worst ones I could find) usually have unspoken rules about what can be discussed, until you start to talk about those subjects (eg drug dealing, weapons dealing, planned violence, etc) openly. Of course you can't effectively restrict communication between individuals, but that's also not the issue.
Of course “more problematic” is not the bar for anti-trust regulation; I leave that to the lawyers.
See, YT bans all kinds of stuff that the first amendment protects, including pornography, violence, and a lot of other nasty stuff that they don’t want on their platform for entirely clear reasons. Eliminate YT’s right to clear those off their site, and it’ll be filled with the lowest common denominator very quickly, as regular users flee from the torrent of unwanted offensive material.
Of course, it’s easy to imagine that we can give YT the right to ban some “offensive” material, but who defines what “offensive” is? The Government? Giving the government the right to control what can and cannot be moderated on YT is kind of contrary to the entire point of this exercise.
If you believe that YT controls too much of the information in our society, then anti-trust or anti-monopoly law is a much richer area for fostering free speech.
Aside from that, removing the first amendment from my argument changes very little. You’d still be obliged to create a definition of what is and is not free speech and a mechanism for enforcement, which would be subject to the pitfalls listed above.
Yes, that's part of my point. That's an incentive to shoehorn, over-simplify, and strawman the ideas and arguments of others.
If Youtube presented itself as being a video platform for <insert political affiliation> from the getgo, then I wouldn't see a legal problem with moderating videos containing opposing views.
And if you think it's only natural that YouTube disallows "propaganda" that "reasonable people" would object to, why are you surprised that they would remove other varieties of propaganda? Of course, different people will have different definitions of reasonableness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Here’s the entire text of 230, it doesn’t have a “unless they’re biased” clause.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
You're correct that section 230 doesn't require neutrality, but that was part of the point of the legislation. The case law prior to section 230 did result in such a distinction, though not necessarily in those terms.
The cases in question are:
- Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., in which CompuServe was held not liable for content hosted on its systems as it was merely a distributor and did not have knowledge of the content, and
- Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., in which Prodigy was held liable for defamatory content posted on its systems as it performed moderation and was therefore considered to have editorial control over the content
Section 230 introduced a carve-out for internet service companies to avoid liability for user-generated content, but given the case law it does seem like this is otherwise a distinction made in US law.
Focus: if a community has a stated purpose, then it's okay to censor things that don't contribute to the purpose. If I ran a forum dedicated to ham radio, then it's okay to censor topics about NASCAR. Usually forums have a miscellaneous section for off-topic discussion rather than prohibiting it outright.
Ubiquity: if a community is small enough or in a limited setting, it is okay to censor things. It is accepted practice in many households to censor profanity. That's okay, because each family's censorship only applies to a few people. It is okay for a school to censor certain disruptive things (some people may disagree on what is okay to censor), because it's limited. Once a kid goes home they can read a banned book if they choose to.
Unfortunately for YouTube, I think they fail on both the focus and ubiquity tests. YouTube's purpose (from a layman's perspective) is to share videos. If someone uploads a video then they are staying within YouTube's focus, and YouTube has been pretty free with allowing any video as long as it isn't illegal. So they shouldn't be censoring crackpot videos, because they aren't illegal and seem to stay within YouTube's norms. [Some economically minded people might argue that YouTube's true purpose is to sell ads and should censor videos that cause fewer ads to be shown, but YouTube's previous behavior is that they demonetize/pull the ads from controversial videos, not deleting accounts]. And YouTube has clearly crossed the ubiquity threshold, with zillions of views all over the world.
I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority.
To get back to your actual point- HN's guidelines are technically censorship, but they are good censorship. It's designed to keep a community focused and to foster good discussion. The best part is that HN's guidelines are easy to understand and seem to be applied consistently. It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted?
What about the dangerous misinformation regarding the coronavirus? We had Twitter accounts telling people not to wear masks. Do we ban the WHO[1][2] and the US Surgeon General[3][4] from Twitter? Do we delete the account of NYC's Health Council chair for encouraging public gatherings during a pandemic?[5]
Those proclamations led to far more harm than just property damage, yet none of those accounts have to worry about being censored. If you support banning David Icke for his crazy views because it might have led to a cell tower being damaged, you should definitely support banning all of these accounts for causing thousands of deaths.
1. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929
2. https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024
3. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
4. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12456974534138511...
5. https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1226566648729133056
It's easy to find far more harmful information than a stupid conspiracy theory that almost nobody believes. Here's a fun one: Should we ban all pro-life messages? After all, they reliably lead to some crazies attacking abortion doctors. Should we ban all pro-communist sentiment? Communism led to mass death and starvation in the USSR, China, and North Korea. If there's a more harmful ideology, I have yet to hear it.
Getting back to cell phones: Should we ban anyone who says that cell phones cause cancer? The exact same argument applies: It can cause people to damage cell phone towers and threaten maintenance workers.
There is no coherent framework for censorship that allows these things while also banning 5g conspiracy theories. The double-standard could not be more obvious.
Well, that's disingenuous at best. There's still fierce debate as to whether it's worth the general public wearing masks.
Pro life? Communism? You're really digging now. How about capitalism? Lots of people die because of capitalism. Shall we ban any debate about capitalism as well?
Freedom of speech is one of those issues that will never be resolved because there are no clear boundaries. We all agree that there are some things that people should not say. That's why we have things like libel/slander laws. I'm sure you wouldn't like it if someone was going around trying to convince people that your father likes to give blow jobs to dobermans. You would, rightfully, want that person stopped. Is that suppression of freedom of speech?
The question is: where does the boundary lie? This is where we have the debates.
> Should we ban anyone who says that cell phones cause cancer?
Possibly. The difference is we have not (to my knowledge) heard any stories of engineers being attacked because of this whereas there have been a number of stories in the news recently of engineers being afraid to go to work because of idiots attacking them because of these ludicrous coronavirus 5G stories.
Consider that snuff films are illegal regardless of their method of distribution- nobody is complaining that YouTube (and every other law-abiding distribution method) censors snuff films and nobody is crying about the First Amendment in this case. Nobody complains because there is a clear legal requirement to prohibit this content, superseding any free speech considerations.
Consider a gray area- filming an activity that might be illegal depending on your location or age, such as smoking marijuana. At a federal level in the USA and in a lot of other countries this is illegal, but it's okay in some areas. YouTube is pretty lax about demonetizing or taking down videos about marijuana. Joe Rogan regularly smokes and promotes weed with guests on his podcast, but there is very little pressure on YouTube to do anything about him.
Consider another scenario for comparison- simply talking about guns on your channel. Following Sandy Hook, YouTube started to demonetize channels that just talked about guns but clearly stayed within the legal bounds and did not promote unsafe or illegal behavior, and some channels have been deleted. YouTube is bowing to outside pressure without any legal requirement. And there is a clear discrepancy in who demonetization gets applied to- promoters of gun control get off scot free, but people that promote legal and responsible gun ownership get demonitized.
YouTube arbitrarily deciding to do something about discussing legally owned guns but nothing about promoting a federally illegal drug is not really the hill I want to die on, but I think it illustrates the inconsistency that frustrates some people. A principled and fair censorship policy should definitely allow the gun conversation to happen if you're going to allow the marijuana conversation to happen, and I think the best way to call this out (without writing the several paragraphs above) is to talk about censoring "illegal" content.
The thing is it's impossible to devise effective policies that are "clear cut" to the point where an entity like youtube can apply them effectively over a media platform with the scope and throughput of Youtube.
It's always going to be a game of wack-a-mole. It's wack-a-mole even on HN. These platforms should be free to yank stuff and be responsible to some extent if harmful content is spread through them. As it is now, the threshold for being deplatformed is too high.
Conspiracy peddlers are totally free to choose another platform for their garbage or create one for themselves. Info Wars is still up and running through their own website. They would be far smaller, however, if Youtube had done the right thing and pulled the plug early-- like when Info Wars started spreading Sandy Hook conspiracies.
We're talking like facebook and google ARE the internet. They are not. They're merely platforms analogous to a "hyper newspaper". Like any news paper, they should have the right to put content of their choosing on it and be held accountable for harm spread through it. No one is going to stop maniacs or anyone else with strange viewpoints from printing up xeroxes and handing them out on a public corner -or- putting together a weird website, that's their first amendment right.
> I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority.
As an aside to this topic, I would be a bit troubled if YouTube were enforcing policies silently without telling stating what they were. In this case, they are stating what those guidelines are, and how the criteria of how they enforce them, although that brings up another point of yours:
> It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted?
I would surmise it could be a factor of scale, but even if it wasn't I am not sure it necessarily matters. For example, let's say they state their position on an arbitrary policy (unrelated to this latest policy) and let's assume that the users would nearly universally support it. However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first?
Another way I like to look at these sort of problems is switching the position around in how the platform developed. If YouTube still positioned itself as a general platform from the beginning, but at their very start they stated that any health / medical content must adhere to WHO policies, and then YouTube grew to the ubiquity it is today, I am curious what sort of acceptance we would have for it in today's environment right now. Would it have made YouTube less likely to become as popular, opening the door further for competitors to enter the space?
One of the most common forms of discrimination is unequally enforced rules: they nominally apply to everyone but are in practice enforced only against an arbitrary subset of violators. For a rule to be fair, whether it’s a law or private policy, enforcement needs to be against an unbiased sample of offenders that’s large enough for the community to see that it’s unbiased. There also needs to be an effective appeals process that can overturn the enforcers’ actions in the cases where they behaved wrongly. Both of these have costs roughly proportional to the number of potential offences.
In YouTube’s case, that’s the number of uploaded videos. They cut costs along the way by neglecting the executive and judicial parts of this process with regard to copyright violations. Now, when they want to institute a new policy (with good reason), they have neither the trust of the community nor the institutions necessary to implement it in a fair manner.
An easy example is that if YouTube chooses delete David Icke's account instead of just demonetizing him, why are they only demonetizing anti-vax accounts but not deleting them? Surely the anti-vax movement has harmed more people than David Icke. Any cynic would notice that David Icke's supporters are crazy but far-right politically, while the anti-vax supporters are crazy but far-left politically. This is a bad look and lets the far-right crazies play the victim card.
A consistently applied and principled set of policies would either let both sets of crazies have their voice, or neither of them. Letting them both have their voice would let YouTube claim to be more of a "pipe" and not have to spend as much effort moderating their content. Censoring both sides obviously takes more effort but is at least defensible. What they have right now is that they spend effort moderating content, but still take flak for it because it looks like they are picking and choosing based on the political winds (which is great when it's your side winning, but the winds can change direction at a moment's notice).
HN is totally different because of the completely different scale and the existence of viable alternatives.
There is an interesting "monopoly" factor here, but YouTube is also not negatively impacting other groups or organizations from trying to start their own video platforms tailored to general content. In fact, it seems there have been various organizations chipping away at YouTube (e.g. Twitch, TikTok) of people who would normally be watching YouTube have other platforms to visit, watch and host content. Nothing is preventing those platforms from also further expanding into areas where YouTube is traditionally the leader.
I struggle to find a good place to read and talk about interesting tech news other than HN though
People constantly misunderstand "freedom of speech" as something that somehow entitles one to trample over someone else's freedom.
For example every time there's a discussion about "hate speech" someone will say that the laws are routinely abused to punish people for their legitimate free opinions. Yet no such examples of routine abuse are ever given. There's room for common sense when judging a situation. Common sense can't be put in law but you also can't really judge these gray areas without it.
That's rather conclusory.
The other part, the one I was mostly referring to, is moral. I know, it's a company, it doesn't need to have morals. But this shouldn't stop people from holding them to a higher standard.
With a flip of the algorithmic switch platforms like YouTube or Facebook can influence results of elections, escalate social issues over the tipping point, etc. Can you honestly say that my conclusion needed too much explaining?
Some people, after being exposed to misinformation, chose to believe them.
I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)
Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?
It is possible that platforms, being designed the way they are to maximize corporations' interest naturally lead to unintended consequences.
There are billion of youtube video, nobody will be able to watch them all. So the youtube algorithm can recommend videos that are necessarily harmful based on what the person watched before.
You missed my point :) Humans, being inherently limited, are always at risk of being wrong. Being wrong about things is the default state. I simply don't think that we should strive to expunge all forms of "misinformation". That is to say, of course people believe misinformation.
> Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?
Ah, I see my point is easily misinterpreted. I find it very plausible (in fact, I outright believe) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes". Rather, I think the implications of using that fact to justify suppression is inherently dangerous.
Furthermore I think truth, just like the concepts of agency and free will, are useful abstractions for us to operate under. But when examined in their totality, the concepts unravel. Thus I feel that truth is local, not global, and by acting like there is a global form of truth we are only forcing our local-truth onto others in the misguided belief that we can separate truth from our individualized local contexts.
Coming back down to earth for a second, the problem always remains: "who decides what truth is"?
And the Constitution decides that the truth is that the First Amendment doesn't apply to YouTube. That's an objective truth you seem to be unaware of.
"According to myself, YouTube is perfectly capable of objectively and correctly deciding that David Icke is full of shit."
David Icke is not spreading information. He's spreading nonsense about lizard people. That's objectively true.
And just to head this off, the dimension of palatability to advertisers is separate, and if a site chooses to quarantine or whatever, so be it. I'm speaking merely from a framework of, "is this the kind of society we want?", as opposed to, "is it feasible for a profit-seeking corporation to adopt such an open policy"?
This is the issue, if you are saying YouTube should allow all content then you need to be consistent and allow all content. If not you really just disagree on what content should be censored, but then you can't make this out to be a censorship vs free speech debate, because you agree on censorship, just not on what gets censored.
An adult should be capable of consuming information from disparate sources, especially distasteful ones, and formulating logical arguments to deconstruct those positions. It takes some practice. That practice can't be done in an information vacuum. If there are deficiencies in the population's ability to perform the above, then we should be rectifying that through education (whereby I mean improving how people go about mentally solving problems), rather that scrubbing the world of "bad" data or opinions.
Entrusting institutions to ban media is essentially saying "These people know what's good for you, better than you do." and I absolutely abhor that sort of arrogant, misplaced, condescension. It often comes from people who are intelligent, but nowhere near as infallible as they think they are.
What should be protested is that there isn't really anywhere else to go -- and the best form of protest is to build it.
But maybe YouTube's lawyers advised them that the First Amendment doesn't apply to them because they're not Congress, so they booted him for anti-semitism, and inciting terrorism, and being a menace to public health, among other subjective but perfectly legal and valid and morally justifiable reasons.
Just to preempt any question, I’m not saying the First Amendment prevents YouTube from not publishing Icke’s content
I mean, Icke is the most clear-cut of examples. Otherwise you end up backing into "nobody is ever qualified to determine the truth of any statement objectively and correctly". Nihilist anti-positivism.
The thing about the coronavirus is that wrong decisions, both by public health and private individuals, produce real body counts. And quite alarmingly high body counts in those countries which have embraced disinformation.
(Before someone starts in on it, the Iraq war was also a body count produced by the embracing of disinformation)
I'm asking, because I see it as the complete opposite. The rules of physics apply all over the world and outside of the planet. Yes, some patterns of reality are only found in a specific place on this planet (cultural values, for example), but things like whether COVID-19 is caused by 5G does not.
The question should be which set of policies maximizes the power of the informed general citizens relative the incumbents and the irrationals (or very-very boundedly rationals).
This kind of transparent content removal is not what dictatorships do.
Is there some kind of "list of prohibited books" in NK (like the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in the 16th century)? I guess not, because anything that's not allowed is by default prohibited?
Yes, at least for online content. As far as I understand it, a researcher who wants access to some out-of-country material has to manually submit a request. The censors then download the article or page, go through it, and pass it on if it's found acceptable. In addition, no single computer has access both to the global internet and to the intranet.
It doesn't. That's precisely why Icke's ban is necessary: he was incredibly popular.
The existence of technology as well as science.
>The existence of technology as well as science.
Simply put, the second statement is not evidence to satisfy the request in the first statement.
We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" don't go in a desirable direction or end well.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here: the idea that institutions can be mistaken does not mean that we should remove things that are just clearly completely and totally false (and damaging). It's the difference between the idea that a large portion (say, 10-20%) of the population is infected with covid with no symptoms, which is also almost certainly wrong, but there's at least some level of evidence for. Almost all of that evidence is flawed, but like, you can cite real academic papers from people. And the idea that 5g causes covid, which doesn't even make enough sense to create a well founded argument to the contrary. It relies on the audience not understanding what a virus is (or wanting to suspend disbelief).
That's not the actual question we are discussing here. Whether he is correct or not does not change any premises of this post or discussion. We are discussing censorship and deplatforming.
> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" [end badly]
To believe that that statement is relevant you must believe that "covid-19 is caused by 5G towers" is, or could be, the truth. Otherwise you have to defend the much stranger position, that societies which knowingly suppress information that everyone knows is false don't end well, which is silly, I know of no society that has ended badly due to its attempts to suppress things that everyone agreed were false. (and by this I mean factually false, not ethical concerns etc.)
If you don't believe that, then you agree that by suppressing Icke, we aren't suppressing the truth, so there is no danger. If you do believe that, you are misinformed, and it's a good thing we're keeping disinformation away from you.
Now, you might argue that I've constructed a catch-22, and you'd be correct if I thought that this was a generally applicable solution, but I don't. While not every piece of information is obviously untrue, some are. "Covid-19 is caused by 5g towers" is one such piece of information. It is also, apparently, dangerous when people believe it.
There's lots of other opinions that I find distasteful or whatnot that I don't believe should be deplatformed because they are clearly false, that is reserved for things which are clearly false.
There's no issue of censorship here, because on the off chance that Icke is right (which again there isn't), he could do a study and submit a paper to the relevant academic circles, and resolve the issue. In other words, society again, isn't suppressing truth, they're suppressing cranks. Which is reasonable. Cranks are bad and distract us from getting actual work done. Most of the time we can just ignore them, but every once in a while a crank gets ahold of an idea that is both wrong and, when believed by a small but fervent group, can be dangerous to everyone. In those cases, keeping the idea from catching on further is good.
Again this applies only to things that are provable in nature, not things of the form "we should overthrow the bourgeoisie".
So yes, the central point is that nothing Icke says is anything remotely approaching the truth. In other words, libeling a concept should be reasonable to deplatform, since libeling an individual certainly is.
It's harder to say this because of the implied criticism of the common sense and rationality of people now living (including everyone in this conversation), but perhaps there are many truths that sound weirder than that to us, too.
Some people, after being given the opportunity to gamble, choose to place a bet, even when it has a negative expected value. Should Nevada ban blackjack?
Some people, after being given the opportunity to buy insurance, choose to buy insurance, even when it has a negative expected value. Should we ban insurance? If not, what about credit default swaps?
The reason central planning doesn't work is that everything is much too complicated for a central planner to be able to make good decisions about everything. People who are close to a thing know it better than people who are far away, so the decision is best left to the individual. It's their life, they're the one with the best incentive to get it right.
> Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win over lies?
Let us take this question to its logical conclusion and apply it to the censors. If the censors can't tell the truth from the lie then they may end up censoring the truth instead -- oops. But how are they any more qualified to decide this than anybody else?
This is doubly true when you're talking about a platform. As if YouTube has "medical expertise" in its bailiwick.
> It is possible that platforms, being designed the way they are to maximize corporations' interest naturally lead to unintended consequences.
That is absolutely possible. But maybe then the answer is to design them differently rather than keeping the bad design while throwing hatchets at random civilians because somebody who themselves has no unique competence thinks they might be wrong about something.
This argument reminds me of when the WWW first appeared. Everyone thought that at last Truth and Reason would be available to all and "win out" naturally.
And all that happened is that you can now find supporting arguments for any perverse or dangerous theory you are already predisposed towards online. They propagate and multiply because we are primarily emotional creatures, no matter how rational or educated we think we are.
So "shining light" on disinformation only has an effect on people if they are already predisposed to rejecting that disinformation, which makes it redundant.
There's a powerful argument about substantially improving educational equality, which I would wholeheartedly support, but in the intervening generation(s), removing disinformation from platforms that has been shown to be dangerous (ie endangered lives, which David Icke's videos have) is an acceptable compromise IMHO.
What? We have countless examples of it. What world are you living in? It's free speech, facts, ideas that change individuals and society.
> We have the entirety of human history that shows that the liberal idea of a market place of ideas is ridiculous.
Entire human history? What are you talking about. For most of history, censorship was the norm. That's what made america and our concept of "free speech" unique and exceptional. It was new and rare.
> It doesn’t work, if only because for example the far right isn’t playing the same game and isn’t interested in fair debate.
Neither are the far left - which in america is the greater threat. But guess what? Neither the far right or the far left can take over the US precisely because of free speech. We can call them out. Which is what you are really upset about.
The best protection against extremist far right and far left lunatics is free speech. Also, one of the easiest way to spot far right and far left lunatics is their hatred of free speech.
http://ubplj.org/index.php/jpm/article/view/974 In fact we've known this for some time https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0082790
And very likely you yourself are also affected, in this case by your very belief in free speech. You hold it so intimately that it has become a core of your own self.
Thank god for free speech which allows people to burst bubbles.
> but the best protection is not free speech and studies have shown cognitive bias enables people to effectively ignore what disrupts their beliefs.
I know, that's why free speech is important. If people are shown to be cognitively biased, then censorship is the worst thing for society since it keeps people in their bias. Yes, people can ignore whatever they want. It's life. How is censorship an answer here?
> And very likely you yourself are also affected, in this case by your very belief in free speech.
My belief in free speech comes from getting an education and actually thinking about it.
> You hold it so intimately that it has become a core of your own self.
Oh god. This is so obvious and pathetic projecting.
Using your logic, you should be against censorship as it fosters cognitive biases and enables people to live in their bubbles. Without free speech, abolition movement, civil rights movement, lgbt movement, etc can't happen. Without free speech, countries and cultures can't discuss ideas and progress.
Once again, ask yourself why nazi germany, soviet union, north korea, etc love censorship? And ask yourself why you love censorship. It's for the same exact reason. Control and wanting to protect your bubble.
The difference between you and me is that I don't mind my bubble being challenged or bursted. My bubble didn't become a "core of myself". But you, obviously have an agenda and beliefs that you don't want challenged and you want to hold onto your pathetic bubble as long as you can.
You want people think exactly like you, believe things that you believe in and don't want anything challenging it. Just like nazi germany, islamic extremists, communist china, etc.
We tend to think of humans as very rational beings, that they should have the ability to make the best decisions for themselves, and that we should not take actions to influence those decisions. Unfortunately, this is not always true, which is why deplatforming works.
Deplatfoming is controversial because it is a "negative action", that involves censorship, but we tend to ignore "positive actions" that can change toughts in exactly the same way, like recommendation algorithms, or simply default choices (because default matters and humans rarely deviate from default choices).
The existence of something like The illusory truth effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect) says a lot about human beliefs and how familiarity can overpower rationality.
I hear this a lot. Light is the best disinfectant. What evidence do you have for this? I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it. However, I have repeatedly seen the opposite: Sharing bad ideas increases their audience, increases ignorance, hate, fear, and human suffering. You're looking at an article describing this phenomena right now.
More importantly, I've also seen the opposite: Private platforms actively suppressing people trying to harm humanity does work. Deplatforming these people and, importantly, showing social pressure that these are bad ideas and shouldn't even be entertained as valid debate, has shown to work repeatedly. In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.
I don't think you're basing your "shine the light" argument in evidence, which I suspect is ironic because I suspect you believe you're objective and use evidence to judge things.
There is a significant amount of evidence for it. For example, one could measure the effects of showing people fact-checks, and it has been demonstrated that it does indeed work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking#Effects
And there are countless ideas that have died out when more people learn. It's easy to forget about them, precisely because they do die off. A few big ones that were held by the majority but died out:
- flat earth (before Galileo)
- pro-slavery views
- human sacrifice
- caning children
- hanging
- smoking is good for you
- communism
- laws against gay marriage
> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this
It can be used to enforce hate and ignorance as well. It's naive to think that the way you propose enforcing it would be different to all other times in history when it was used.
Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, why didn't this "sunlight" disinfect them?
This is false.
For most of the past several thousand years of history, "knowledge" has been imposed and speech has been restricted by religious and/or political decree.
Freedom of speech, along with the value of the individual, are enlightenment values - i.e., they have only been around for a couple of hundred years, and even then only in a few parts of the world, and even then they have continued to be suppressed and assaulted at every opportunity.
But those of us who have been lucky enough to grow up in societies that have relatively high levels of freedom of speech and freedom of the individual can easily take these freedoms for granted.
But if you look at all the positive societal changes that are espoused by people who believe in liberal values: workers' rights, women's rights (to vote, work, refuse or leave marriage, own property, drive), equality and rights for racial/religious minorities, immigrants, the disabled, gay people, etc; these changes have happened first where there has been the greatest freedom of speech.
Yes I know it's unpleasant to hear speech that feels uncomfortable or dangerous, but be assured it is immeasurably better than the alternative.
Edit:
For what it's worth, I've been paying attention to the David Icke story since he first appeared on London Real a few weeks ago, and I'm a financial supporter of an investigative reporter who has gone deep researching and revealing the possibility that this whole thing looks like a financial scam by London Real.
It looks every bit like The Streisand Effect is at work here, and that YouTube's ban of Icke is only serving to amplify his signal, increase his following and generate huge amounts of money for London Real (and possibly Icke too).
So it's the Hydra myth playing out yet again. Be careful what you wish for.
That is absolutely not in evidence.
For example, the idea of a nobility class.
If your claim is that we shouldn't expect this to continue in the future, that's a whole new claim that you need to support.
I mean, even the example used ("the noble class") is preposterous on face because:
1. The Russian Revolution? Germany 1849? Even the American Revolution? None of these are about ideas, or "shining the light on ignorance" -- they're about putting the nobility up against the wall. If there's some kind of teleology at play here, it's not that we thought about it in the marketplace of ideas long enough and decided to do away with the concept.
2. Nobility still exists! At best, this just means we live in a secular society, where we no longer believe the Word of God justifies massive inequality.
Only as formality in some countries. In America, there are some people who call the Kennedys "America's aristocracy", call JFK's white house "Camelot", and make references to members of the Kennedy family being "entitled" to office, but there's no legal basis for it.
Apartheid in South Africa is also gone.
It was one-line discussion-board summation of what is widely accepted by historians (as you said, "trivially true"), but if you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press did, I'd be intrigued to to read it.
> patently absurd
So far, three of your replies in this thread alone have contained the word "absurd".
They probably all break the HN guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation", and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says").
But more importantly, you're too busy sneering at other people's comments to make any positive assertion of your own.
So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world?
History is more complicated than a single invention! It's needlessly reductive.
I could also say: "how could have the revolutions of Europe happened without mercantile capitalism challenging the economic structures of feudalism?" But that's just imposing a post-hoc narrative on history that happens to fit my existing views.
> So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world.
My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.
(P.S. it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech.)
Yes, of course, I never claimed otherwise. But some concepts are more fundamental and influential than others, and the flow of information is more fundamental and influential than most.
> My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.
If that's all you're trying to say, then, OK, thanks for pointing that out.
> it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech
Fine, have your free point :)
But dismissing everyone else's comments as "absurd", "preposterous", "hilarious" etc whilst not making any effort to construct a solid assertion about the main topic is just a waste of everyone's time.
America literally has a nobility class right now. The UK isn't far off.
Literally nope. For example, there is no law that says the word of one group of people is worth more in court than another group. There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors. There is no law enshrining divine right.
And yet.
> There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors.
And yet. Just because there are no explicit written laws does not mean this doesn't happen every single day in multiple ways.
[1] e.g an extremely unpopular incumbent against a popular challenger with excellent ground game.
Obama - commoner
Clinton - commoner
Reagan - commoner
Carter - commoner
Ford - commoner
Nixon - commoner
Truman - commoner
Sounds like routinely to me.
This is somewhat true of course (though Obama is a notable recent exception).
Indeed it's pretty true in most countries and systems of government (though my closest experience is here in Australia, where all our prime ministers going back almost 40 years, and most others in our ~120 year history, have come from modest origins).
But the topic at hand is freedom of speech/expression.
Whose interests are likely to be served, ultimately, by constraints on speech/expression?
Those already holding power, or those seeking to reform/subvert the system?
The mere public existence of an idea (like in some dusty old book that nobody reads) is not sufficient to change majority option, no.
> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years
That's not true. People didn't know about it. When the sunlight came, people changed their beliefs relatively quickly compared to how long the false beliefs were held. Sometimes within a few years, but generally within a generation.
Then suddenly there were factories who would hire anybody who showed up and pay them real money and plantation workers started running off to work in the factories left and right. It was no longer that people stayed because they had no better option, they were then being forced to stay against their will. The dynamic changed. Chains and beatings entered the scene to keep slaves from running off. They did anyway, so their replacements had to be forcefully kidnapped because there were no longer any volunteers.
The whole thing collapsed and was dismantled in a relatively short period of time after that.
There's no natural inclination of humans towards justice or injustice, beyond the limits of our own psychology. To me, the idea that there is some internal teleology towards justice is absurd. These are material struggles and material gains that must be defended materially.
We should reject this kind of naive idealism.
It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.
My opposition to censorship derives from the fact that it tends to require an unjustified hierarchy (i.e. the violence of the state).
However, I have a real problem with imparting some kind of magical quality to ideas. I'm particularly annoyed by the way in which free speech advocates act like social norms are a form of censorship. More specifically, that free speech requires platforming -- i.e., rejecting a freedom of association.
While I do think that the power companies like Google exert of society is well wroth investigating, in general I find that these are much weaker examples of the use of force to censor ideas.
stevebmark said "I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it"
So I gave examples of some ideas that did in fact die out when people learned about them and scrutinized them. My argument was that it's naive to think censoring ideas this time will be on the right side of history.
I believe this isn't true - the sphericity of the Earth was widely believed well before Galileo.
> - human sacrifice > - laws against gay marriage > - caning children Were these ever views held by the majority? As opposed to, say, a minority of religious zealots in power?
That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.
> pro-slavery views
In 1776, America is born with its Freedom(TM). In 1829, Mexico abolishes slavery. In 1835, Texas revolts, resulting in Republic of Texas (1836), which then merges with the US (1846), which triggers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which leads to, among other things, recognition that Texas is a part of a slave-holding nation. Slavery won't be abolished until the Civil War (1861-1865).
In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.
> communism
Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in London while writing articles for New-York Daily Tribune. Whatever its merits are, his ideas were widely known throughout Europe, and still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union.
And no number of people saying this seems to make this meme go away.
Well knowledge wasn't spread as easily, and could be lost. People knew, then they didn't and so on. It doesn't detract from my point that flat earth is an example of an idea that died off when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.
> In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.
Abolishment of slavery took many angles since it was a massive change of society. Sure, you can pick one country where it required a war. But that doesn't mean the battle of ideas aspect is any less important. Even to rally troops you need to convince them their ideas are worth fighting for.
> (communism) still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union
Sure, and then we saw the results, and the bad idea died off (mostly)
And the USSR, #4 was Communist until it collapsed economically, not intellectually?
I'd say it died off for generations because of active deplatforming of anyone involved rather than an open debate on the merits. For instance it was literally illegal to be a communist in the US due to the Communist Control Act of 1954.
Google "do facts convince people" and you'll see lots of stuff about this. Here's one, from scientificamerican.com...
> In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s...
I might also ask why you aren't protesting Hacker News having moderators? Content is deleted from this platform all the time.
You don't see the difference between debating whether there should be moderators and debating what those moderators should do?
Nobody is questioning whether YouTube should moderate its platform. We are questioning how they moderate it.
At some point, the laws that protect us from government, must also apply to these massive quasi-government monopolies - or they quickly become worthless.
Except that Google cannot arrest you, prosecute you, sentence you to prison or limit any other right you might have. The best that they can do is no longer letting your voice be heard on their service because you have violated one of their _stated_ guidelines. If corporations were doing this in secret, that's a little bit different, but Google is being very forthcoming on the guidelines they are setting.
We are becoming what we used to oppose against to.
This is the proverbial slippery slope, albeit a bit anachronistic as the more egregious case is the latter (5G conspiracy), so the escalation is unable to be painted by the sequence.
I’d also ask you consider that your line of thinking as a framework has been misused throughout history, often in the context of censorship.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
Of course, the obvious retort is that these people aren’t Galileo, but I’m arguing that this framework is bad on a societal level.
> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" don't go in a desirable direction or end well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063531
> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?
You can socially suppress the obviously wrong without any danger. The marketplace of ideas doesn't need to make an effort to hold on to cranks.
> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?
vs. a reformulation, to capture your stated intent:
> Are you saying that we should allow the circulation of obviously wrong ideas like "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?
Just because some of the 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers' crowd also believes censorship is a bad idea, we can't infer that everyone / a majority of people that believe censorship is a bad idea are also believing 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers'. Alas, our brains are very prone to this kind of elementary logic error, which makes the broadbrushing mechanism so powerful.
I, personally, don't see how this leap in logic is implied, and it certainly wasn't intended. Thanks for the explanation, unfortunately I can't change the original post.
Hopefully it's clear that that wasn't my intent. To be a bit defensive though:
> your reply accused them personally of believing that 'Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers'. They never even mentioned Covid19 or 5G.
No, I didn't. I asked them a very pointed question that forces them to either take on a ridiculous position or to confront a flaw in their line of reasoning. I find this to be a valid strategy when discussing with people. I certainly don't believe that the person I responded to thinks 5g causes Covid. I think basically no one believes that. Hence why I thought that the question would be interpreted as I intended: that there's a difference between censoring "truth" and "untruth". This was apparently missed.
Canceling the spread of ideas itself because you disagree with it or fear that others may agree is downright scary.
Leaded gasoline, phlogiston, cold fusion, phrenology, scientific racism, basically the entire history of the progress of science.
But let's also not forget that you're asking for a list of discredited ideas, so you wouldn't have heard of them, by definition, if things are working as they should, because they're wrong and the former proponents have long since abandoned trying to disseminate them to you.
> Deplatforming these people and, importantly, showing social pressure that these are bad ideas and shouldn't even be entertained as valid debate, has shown to work repeatedly.
If all you're doing is defining "work" as "the censorship target was censored" then you're not claiming anything. When you kick these people off of major platforms, they don't cease to exist, they break off like an extremist splinter group and go to a place with no moderating influences to fester. You don't see them anymore, but they're still there, and then suddenly somehow Donald Trump is the President of the United States and people can't believe it and don't understand how it happened.
> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.
Censorship isn't social pressure, it's force. Social pressure is telling wrong people why they're wrong, every time.
People who are wrong need to be made right, not made frustrated and angry and yet not only still wrong but now even more convinced that their wrong ideas are right because they now have real evidence that they're not getting a fair public debate.
The progress of science wasn't driven by nutjobs delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. Almost all of it was driven by careful peer review of ideas -- which is the exact opposite of unrestricted speech.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the... has some indications that peer reviewers generally don't do a great job.
Not everybody is a traditional upperclass gentleman and not everybody who isn't is wrong.
First you show the world you exist and convince your friends it's worth trying to change things, then you convince the moderates, then you win the fight, then you wait for your bitter enemies to die because they'll never be convinced but at least their kids are open to new ideas.
Pissing off your bitter enemies can be hard to avoid and still get the job done.
And the parades are still full of weirdos, but they won, so now it's okay.
Please, explain: how do queer ideas harm society, in the longer run?
His contemporaries were not particularly impressed, but he probably wouldn't have been censored, if he also didn't try his damned hardest to personally piss off everyone in his social circle.
His 'efforts' probably set the adoption of heliocentrism back by decades.
https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
I encourage you to review some of the early to mid 20th-century publications on the topic. "Science" backing segregation. Americans pontificating about whether Hitler was right or that blacks should be sterilized, and then actually doing it. Doctors. In hospitals. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" from the US Supreme Court.
If you think we're in the same state now as we were then, you don't know where we were then.
> I'm not sure how effective a disinfectant sunlight is if it takes centuries to work.
You would prefer the alternative where anything contradicting the then-prevailing doctrine of racial supremacy and eugenics was censored? How long does the truth take to get out in that case? And what happens in the meantime?
A lot of time hate is already there, just it doesn't find a way out untill someone shows there is no consequence of doing so.
Hitler is one example of this who harnessed anti Jewish sentiments, he didn't create it, you can't make so many people change their beliefs.
Sure but who decides what ideas are bad or immoral or harmful? Everyone pretends like this is some simple problem to solve but come on. It's incredibly complex and it seems that both sides of this argument that want to anoint an Arbiter of Truth are only okay with it insofar as it's their Arbiter.
Simple, whoever owns the platform.
"We just can't know if the polio vaccine will work, because it's just fundamentally impossible to decide what is true and false."
"What about the trials the scientists did?"
"No, grandma, believing the scientists would be picking a side."
The only reason that anybody thinks deciding the truth is impossible is because we're currently living with the greatest amount of free speech in history. It's a slippery slope but in the exact opposite direction than everybody thinks.
Communism.
The propensity of totalitarian governments to censor dissidents is proof of it.
/s if it wasn't obvious.
But in terms of speech, a better quote is: the best response to bad speech is good speech.
For example, the "good speech" counterpart of David Icke is a number of real experts who are taking to Twitter and blogs. I've seen a few. They usually have single digit reach. In five minutes, Icke can reach a larger audience than all of them combined throughout their entire lives.
Indeed, the fact that we're here discussing Icke's massive popular impact is proof that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000, when he was mostly ignored. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.
As for the internet, I think of it as technology that brings advances also brings new problems. Sometimes we just have to accept them.
Not that I'm against YouTube censoring their content as a private company, by the way. Just defending a quote here.
> Perhaps you'd prefer a quote like: the best response to bad speech is an authoritarian censor with unlimited powers to silence and imprison people?
This is literally the slippery slope argument.
And you've misused "literally".
I think YouTube is a lot closer to AT&T than to the New York Times.
If this was true, all bad or immoral or harmful ideas from all of human history should currently be vigorously alive.
That is obviously not the case.
Really? Seems to me like there is a resurgence in hate and ignorance right now and deplatforming seems to only be adding fuel to the fire.
On who, really? David Icke and the dude from infowars? Are these the big players in the harming humanity business? I don't think so. I'd go as far as to say they're irrelevant. David Icke was a crank on youtube and now he's a crank off youtube-- which might sound significant until you remember he was a crank before youtube, and could well be a crank after youtube.
The big players, the significant forces harming humanity, they won't be challenged by private platforms, because the private platforms need their money, or need access to them, or in some other way have their interests entangled.
If you de-platform people, you no longer have a way to pressure them. Declaring them "beyond the pale" means giving up further rational influence on them. Nothing is left but violence.
The people we revere as history's greatest moral leaders never took this approach.
Apparently, that's not true. I initially had that strong impression too, from the way estadounidenses talk on here, (like as if everyone in the world lives under US constitutional amendments etc) but I heard the majority are non-US. Last I heard, HN might have another survey on that question soon. I hope so, I'd love to know what the numbers actually are.
The first amendment is like 50 words long, you should read it.
If someone puts up a cardboard box on my property and begins a speech, I have the right to kick them off of my property. We have 'Free Speech Zones' which we kick protesters into so that their exertion of their rights doesn't bother other people. We have cases of senators getting people arrested solely because they laughed at them.
And that's ignoring our long history of suppressing people based on their race or origin. Black Americans are the first ones that come to mind, but we treated Italians and Asians as second-class citizens not that long ago as well. We've had this 'freedom of speech' right enshrined but not at all interpreted like people seem to think it was.
Which is actually extremely funny, since Youtube directly links to all WHO content as it were the Word of God, and WHO just a month and a half ago was crying on all rooftops that masks were useless and should not be used before completely reversing their stance. So by their own standards WHO is propagating disinformation/negligence and harming society as well.
The truth often doesn't get the chance to fight for itself on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. They are designed to keep showing you more of what they think you want to see because that drives engagement and engagement is what's profitable. You simply won't see opposing views. You go further down the rabbit hole and your existing ideas are reinforced, no matter how faulty they are.
Sometimes the truth doesn't have the resources to fight for itself. For example, this woman has been falsely accused of starting the coronavirus pandemic:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/27/tech/coronavirus-conspira...
It's a lie concocted by one of her fellow Americans. It's a lie that's now been spread all over the world resulting in death threats to her and her family. She simply doesn't have the resources to stop it. The police haven't helped her. YouTube hasn't helped her. She doesn't have the money to pursue a civil lawsuit. The best she can do is get in the media and hope that somehow helps.
Once a lie is spread far enough it will eventually find someone who believes it and is unstable enough to act on it. We've seen that before as well:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sente...
A contest of ideas presupposes a level playing field, a balanced presentation, equal voices, and a basic agreement of the facts. That is, unfortunately, not the practical reality.
Your argument is flawed on many counts.
(1) You’re forgetting that the people subscribing these 5G conspiracy channels on YouTube by definition already have access to YouTube and likely the rest of the web. A plethora of true information is already available to them.
(2) Stop anthropomorphizing truth: people fight to promote what they think is true.
(3) Even if the first amendment applied here, recall that it has been established that the first amendment does not protect shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater.
(4) How can you claim that the truth will fight for itself when you’re unwilling to even address the very convincing counter argument you so helpfully included at the end of your comment?
> I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), but that's different from saying that we as a society should want our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.
In other words, do you see how your response is taking exactly the "well, technically it's legal" attitude that I was talking about, and how my point was about that there is a difference between what is legal and what we actually want in a society?
I disagree that "platforms" answer to a higher calling than I do. The first amendment is a contract between a US citizen and the US government. I'm not shrugging off your argument as "this is how things are"; I believe this is how things should be.
Many of the comments in this thread focus on large players' significant influence on the information that Americans consume. I don't think this has anything to do with free speech law; if anything, it's an anti-trust issue. Forcing for-profit, non-governmental organizations to publish all speech of all Americans sounds like a nightmare. I don't want to live in that society.
United States v. O’Brien?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._O%27Brien
Edward Snowden?
One is the government prosecuting you for destroying government property. The other is the government prosecuting you for sharing information that you are not allowed to share.
It has always been the case that certain forms of protest are legal, and certain forms are not. Protesting in ways that are illegal doesn't mean that your right to free speech is curtailed. You can still say whatever you want, you just can't say it while burning cars or whatever.
Really?
> One is the government prosecuting you for destroying government property.
A draft card is not government property.
> The other is the government prosecuting you for sharing information that you are not allowed to share.
Which is protected under whistleblower protection laws.
Maybe I’m not convincing you? What about Schenck v. United States? In this case, all the prosecuted did was distribute flyers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
Abrams v. United States?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrams_v._United_States
Dennis v. United States?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States
> It has always been the case that certain forms of protest are legal, and certain forms are not. Protesting in ways that are illegal doesn't mean that your right to free speech is curtailed. You can still say whatever you want, you just can't say it while burning cars or whatever.
All four cases involve some form of protest against the government. All four were peaceful; They did not harm others. All four involve the Supreme Court upholding their convictions.
> Your speech is not illegal. The government cannot persecute you for your opinion or beliefs.
Don’t you tell me that the government doesn’t try to censor speech or that they can’t.
Employers may not discriminate based on these things. They can let you go for what you say. It's called employment at will and I should have the right to remove someone from my private company who is toxic to our culture. If someone is acting unprofessional, I can see no way to force the company to retain them.
This is completely separate from private publishers and platforms. Should a magazine or news paper be forced to publish anything? Does YouTube not charging you for producing content somehow change their relationship?
It does not "merely" do that. It also prevents their message from reaching others.
This is such a knockdown argument that I can't believe you just refused to address it!
The mirror image of David Icke is the genuine experts that are trying to get good, nuanced information out there, often fresh out of research papers. Most of these people have single digit reach, i.e. so little that they could spend their whole lives getting less reach that Icke gets in 5 minutes.
The asymmetry in potency between good and bad information is far higher today than at any time in the past, and I applaud Youtube for doing a tiny bit to stop the bleeding.
This is just not true. Or rather, it may be true, but it is entirely irrelevant.
We as a society don't care who radicalised David Icke is. It just doesn't matter. What matters is that letting him spread his misinformation causes harm and death. Actual people die because of this. And that can be stopped by denying him a platform. If it makes him more angry, that is absolutely irrelevant.
1. Government passes law that websites that get a million eyeballs a day and display user-generated content are forbidden from curating the content on their site.
2. Government produces propaganda, or through some legal indirections, arranges the production of propaganda.
3. Producers of above propaganda publishes or arranges astroturfing of the propaganda onto every large platform.
So this is a situation where the government has the power to dictate speech of private parties. Is that seen as a positive outcome by free speech advocates?
And what happens when the government lowers the bar? With precedent set that the government has the right to halt censorship by private parties, will they stop at a million views per day? Will they expand to things such as messaging services?
And what will happen to spam content? After a website crosses the million views threshold, must its genuine content be diluted into oblivion?
A newspaper had no obligation to publish some crazy letter to the editor. Nor does YouTube have an obligation to publish some crazy video.
freedom of speech gives adversaries a way of saturating the information channel to capacity with at best noise, at worst actively incorrect but otherwise coherent data (see conspiracy theories). end result is people either believing the misinformation (because truth is impossible to discern) or stopping the use of the channel at all (same cause, different rationale). it's a losing proposition in the age of information. it was a great idea before while technology didn't allow capture of the channel at such a low cost.
freedom of speech is now a tool used against democracy with great success. yes, i'm super pissed about it and no, i don't have a solution. i believe we're witness to a crawling fall of rome scenario which is carefully helped by nation states outside of the west.
- booting people off platforms is a "bad idea" which you wish to "suppress".
- booting people off platforms shines a light on their "bad ideas"
I'm sympathetic to the spirit of your comment, but I think Mr Icke has plenty of other ways to publish his ideas, and I don't believe youtube is suppressing them in a way that necessitates suppression of theirs.
Not censoring an idea and arguing that an idea should not be implemented are not equivalent.
> booting people off platforms shines a light on their "bad ideas"
If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibility of bad ideas. It would also immediately cease to be true if censorship ever became uncontroversial, in which case you couldn't claim that it's giving the allegedly bad idea a chance at a fair debate.
> I'm sympathetic to the spirit of your comment, but I think Mr Icke has plenty of other ways to publish his ideas, and I don't believe youtube is suppressing them in a way that necessitates suppression of theirs.
Is somebody suggesting that YouTube should be prohibited from creating and distributing their own videos?
I'm not sure this is correct, but I'm willing to be convinced if you can expand a little more. I guess I see it as censoring the act of censoring.
> If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibility of bad ideas. It would also immediately cease to be true if censorship ever became uncontroversial, in which case you couldn't claim that it's giving the allegedly bad idea a chance at a fair debate.
In this case, it is true. But youtube censorship is not equivalent to societal censorship, it just signals that youtube does not endorse Icke's ideas and does not wish to publish them, but people can still evaluate them somewhere else.
> Is somebody suggesting that YouTube should be prohibited from creating and distributing their own videos?
No, the suggestion is they should not be allowed to write their own terms and enforce them.
Censorship applies to information. Restricting information can't be justified because it's by definition impossible for the public to evaluate whether what's being censored is appropriate when it gets taken down and they can't see it. "Censoring the act of censoring" doesn't have any such problem -- if YouTube was prohibited from censoring videos, they can do it even when everybody has full knowledge that they're operating under that constraint.
They could even run a banner at the top of videos they don't like that says "YouTube things this is wrong" and link to their own video explaining how, and that wouldn't be censorship. But you don't need to take down somebody else's videos to do that. It's in fact better if you don't, because then more of the people who come to see the video you think is wrong will see the message explaining why you think it's wrong, instead of going somewhere else where there is only the alleged misinformation.
> But youtube censorship is not equivalent to societal censorship, it just signals that youtube does not endorse Icke's ideas and does not wish to publish them, but people can still evaluate them somewhere else.
That would be fine so long as the somewhere else is equally prominent, but YouTube is too big for there to be any such place. If you're a monopoly/oligopoly then you ought to be a common carrier. If they really wanted out of that they could always break themselves up.
> No, the suggestion is they should not be allowed to write their own terms and enforce them.
Enforcing terms as a monopoly is effectively legislating, so they should follow the same rules as the government.
You can bring megawatt lasers to bear on a bad idea from all angles and fools will not budge. Many people are not rational, it's impossible that you've not realised that yet you push this POV.
Saying we can deal with idiot ideas with rationality is itself disinformation because for some groups it clearly doesn't work.
> ...whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here
Odd that you won't, because this is the exact forum to address that argument. Please address it.
Someone I know has repeatedly told me that "they[0] added HIV to covid to make it so dangerous" and telling them for the Nth time there's no evidence of that has not changed anything, nor will it ever I suspect.
[0] Unstated who 'they' are but implication is the chinese.
-- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html
I used to think this too, but I think the decentralised nature of the internet has broken this notion. There is no universal “light” shining on disinformation because there’s no universal anything. You can spend your entire online life in a very strict filter bubble that means the disinformation you consume never gets corrected (Facebook and YouTube have implemented algorithms that opt people into these bubbles without them even being aware). The only way it gets fixed is if people actively try to find information that disagrees with their preconceived notions, and very, very few people are interested in doing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism#/media...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-...
Again, the distinction here is that I don't think being wrong (even if you think it's intentional) is something we should try to suppress. And the reason I think that is because right/wrong is ultimately a value judgement, and thus opens the door for equally flawed individuals to castigate a viewpoint as false while conversely spreading their own falsehoods (which they themselves view as truth).
As far as advertising revenue is concerned, I understand that business incentive. So, if they want to use Reddit's quarantine concept - or even boot them off their platform as they are doing now - they're free to do so, but I don't think that it's the _right_ thing to do.
In other words, we can agree that a business is acting in its own self-interest and thus would want to get rid of these types of people. I believe that they have the legal authority to do so, as well as all the incentives. But where I don't agree is that I don't cheer them on when they do it. Rather I think it's very dangerous.
So in other words, I suspect the difference between our beliefs here is that you are cheering on YouTube for doing this. You're (correctly) seeing that David Icke is a total fucking wacko and saying to yourself "good riddance". I certainly understand that inclination. I just don't believe in it myself, for the reasons that I've outlined. (I hope I haven't mischaracterized you there - sorry if I did)
What about cryptocurrency scams, what about media co-coordinating assassinations of targets they don't like?
Yes. There is. If you only have free speech for things other people think are true, that's hardly free speech.
> You're entering propaganda territory.
Absolutely, and yet, free speech means you can do that.
I think the troubling thing is that binding corporations to the first amendment would have all kinds of troubling consequences, including eliminating the ability of moderators to ban people for misbehavior.
I mean flat Earth is an actual thing. That proves to me that there are no limits.
What I don't know is whether this is new or an eternal part of the human condition that was just masked in the past. I know there have always been gullible fools, but have there always been this many?
I personally wonder if there might be more today due to too many people being too insulated from the "real world" beyond the easy cushy paths of school -> college -> office job. There are too many people who have never deviated from these paths and thus have never seen the "real world."
I don't think it's stupidity. A lot of these people seem relatively intelligent. They just seem shockingly naive.
I used to have a very similar opinion to yours until I found out the truth rarely fights for itself if there's an alternative, much more convenient lie — preferably one that plays into peoples' confirmation bias or makes someone richer.
We've got an aysmmetry here that never existed before in human history. Any kind of large scale public addressing: newspapers, TV, books, had some kind of controlling mechanism and instances who stood in for the quality with their reputation: Editors, printers, TV stations.
All legislation, including the First Amendment (which, just picking nits here, is probably too simple to slap onto YouTube as a global content platform as a US-only law) was written regarding these conventions.
YouTube goes out there and hands everyone a big fat mike who wants to be heard, and then amplifies this voice to believers via recommendations.
I used to think the Internet would be a net benefit to the world. After witnessing Cambridge Analytica, the "Internet Research Agency", large scale online harrassment and Anti-Vaxxers, I'm not so sure anymore.
I don't claim to know what the answer is.
I just claim I'm pretty sure it's not the unbounded freedom to anonymous and partly highly maliciously motivated actors to spread their message without oversight.
"In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libeling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded, as they generally did, the liberty of the press, and that a newspaper was like a stage-coach, in which anyone who would pay had a right to a place, my answer was, that I would print the piece separately if desired, and the author might have as many copies as he pleased to distribute himself, but that I would not take upon me to spread his detraction; and that, having contracted with my subscribers to furnish them with what might be either useful or entertaining, I could not fill their papers with private altercation, in which they had no concern, without doing them manifest injustice. Now, many of our printers make no scruple of gratifying the malice of individuals by false accusations of the fairest characters among ourselves, augmenting animosity even to the producing of duels; and are, moreover, so indiscreet as to print scurrilous reflections on the government of neighboring states, and even on the conduct of our best national allies, which may be attended with the most pernicious consequences. These things I mention as a caution to young printers, and that they may be encouraged not to pollute their presses and disgrace their profession by such infamous practices, but refuse steadily, as they may see by my example that such a course of conduct will not, on the whole, be injurious to their interests."
From "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin", written between from 1771 to 1790, now in public domain.
I do believe strongly that people should be held responsible for any act caused by them spreading lies.
I mean, this is testable. Look at websites where "bad ideas" aren't suppressed, and instead anyone can chime in with their reasoned or unreasoned opinion and duke it out without any real-life consequences.
...and you end up with 8chan, the site where people discuss the best ways to murder Jews.
Science, facts, truth, those don't matter on chan boards, what does is virality, fear, anger, emotion. Or since it's Star Wars day, The Dark Side wins unless people are willing to stop it.
> The outcome described by Aristophanes is common in competing human groups or organizations: When bad behavior has taken root, and that bad behavior has a “survival advantage” against good behavior, it becomes difficult, and occasionally impossible, to drive out the bad behavior; a process akin to natural selection.
This is the mental model reference I was thinking about when posting.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“
Could be argued that this is a covenant of sorts the federal government is making with the people and/or states. In a sense, could be argued individual states wouldn’t need to honor it to individuals provided they don’t include such language in their own constitutions (I’d assume there is said language, but don’t know).
The only issue I see with the “bad ideas” thing is that it requires a lot of effort on the part of the person doing the debunking. They have to provide data points, citations, etc. to counter whatever was put out and in a lot of cases, it is just ignored in favor of the bogus bit that started the whole thing (which in some cases requires some degree of effort on the part of the originator, in other cases spitballing gets them there).
I’m somewhere in the middle. I worry about cases where seemingly the only wrong committed is to hold an opposing view, but in cases where someone willfully put forth bogus information, I’m not terribly opposed. Would rather that the sources for where the conclusions were drawn were similarly provided, at least then I could assume some degree of good faith. But if you and I are looking at two pieces of data and come to differing conclusions, that in and of itself should not lead to either of us being “silenced.”
There is no right conferred by the constitution that guarantees you a public platform in a private forum, it is simply an exemption from persecution by the government for statements made on any platform. That does not mean that the private owner of a forum must provide a platform of statements it does not endorse or condone for content that would be contrary to the forum owner or administrator's intended audience. That would be like forcing a restaurant that has been vandalized with graffiti from washing the exterior because the vandal has the right to have his work displayed regardless of the content, audience, or message.
> COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation".
This is not in any way a new concept. Furthermore this kind of disinformation can destroy the lives on innocent bystanders. Don't believe me? Ask all the people that have been effected by Sandy Hook truthers, Pizza Gate, and if you want to go back to the 80s, the daycare satanic moral panics.
i'm not sure suppression is the answer either but i have sure not seen shining light winning this war.
In David Icke's case, he directly threatens telecommunications carriers' ability to sell 5G services. That's directly counter to said carriers' marketing goals.
Not to anthropomorphize YouTube too much here, services like them derive their morality from profit. If something threatens profitability, they'll do what's required to correct that problem. Moreover, there are a number of feedback loops in place that reinforce this behavior. This isn't a matter of YouTube judging a bad idea on its merit; this is a matter of them judging a bad idea on how it affects advertising revenue.
Put in a somewhat more uncouth manner: Money talks, bullshit walks.
The platform existing for everyday people to disseminate their views is secondary to using user-submitted content as a vehicle for advertising revenue. Another way of thinking about it is that the popular content subsidizes the not-so-popular content.
As a corollary: The more popular your content is, the more advertising revenue it needs to bring in. There was even some controversy somewhat recently about this very thing.
Corporations are just people. You are suggesting that when people speak in groups (e.g. enforcing the Youtube EULA) that is not protected free speech but when an individual speaks it is.
Good luck translating this half-baked idea into a legal framework that is consistent and sensical.
That is not to say that all ideas are valid forms of scientific inquiry. But suppressing all but the "blessed" opinions of the WHO goes against the scientific process.
It is taking the man on the corner who is shouting "Ducks are responsible for your failure!" and "Letting the blacksmith build a second shack will cause insanity in all the children!" off to a quiet room where he no longer causes people to throw stones at the blacksmith, or shoot ducks on sight.
Icke was that special kind of conspiracy nut who wouldn't dare fact check his own bile because he'd find his whole worldview based on nothing.
Slippery slope questions aside, we tend to put controls on things like schizophrenic rambling and people having psychotic breaks... I consider him in that same category. He should be isolated for his own protection and those around him.
If you had read his work first hand you would be aware of how much research, references and citations are included.
It's amusing that you say David Icke doesn't fact check, as this only highlights that you haven't..
What is a "bad idea" is also hard to know sometimes. If I was there in the time of Galileo I would probably be fighting his "the earth goes round the sun" argument as well.
Many times great ideas first appear seemingly as "bad ideas". Which then are the good "bad ideas" and the bad "bad ideas"? It is unclear if corporates can answer that better than the world as a whole.
Maybe they should just explicitly mark the content with "this may be a bad idea" and leave it online - trusting the users?
People literally are using the mis-information about covid-19/5G and setting 5G towers on fire. Mis-information is dangerous. It's a tool used by governments and terrorist organizations alike, information can be propagandized to create upheavals that benefit specific groups.
Suppression doesn't really sit well with me either, but "disinformation" is nothing new. There are plenty of ideas that are similar to David Icke's nonsense and most of them predate 2020. Things like "the moon landing was faked", "the Earth is flat", and "the government is controlling us through chemtrails". The difference is, someone else believing the Earth is flat doesn't affect me the same way a measles outbreak does.
This isn't a conversation to have in the abstract. The idea that David Icke is spreading is that the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to 5g cellphone service. 5g being deployed in Wuhan is somehow evidence of the link between the two.
What light can you shine on that idea, to get people to stop shooting telecommunications workers and burning cellphone towers down?
On HN bad comments get very light. Still readable but everybody knows they were downvoted.
YouTube could add labels over the videos like "this content contains false and dangerous information". Then the content can still be discussed but everybody will be alerted to be very sceptical about the information.
I guess the expense would make that an unrealistic option, but it would be much more effective than chasing folks away to their own uncensorable corner of the web.
If you are an engineer at a tech company you really don't have a grasp of how unfathomably dumb most people are because you only associate with smart people all the time.
Not to mention the "first amendment" is a US thing.
We need better global laws imposed upon them, because those private corporations operate globally, and have influence (as social media platforms, etc) in all countries, not just the US.
umm, that's a very nice thought, but we've seen it doesn't work, and it actually causes more harm than good. i.e Fox News
'Bullshit Asymmetry Principle' states the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. Bullshit can be propagated quickly, but can be more difficult to disprove.
see https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...
YouTube is a public platform because it is viewable without an account or membership.
If you had to log in to view a video or read an article, then it would truly be private.
I think we’ve gotten to the point where we need to define a clearer set of rules with stronger protections of speech on these open platforms. (Closed platforms can do whatever the they want, as always.)
The difference is, if you think that WalMart's practices are bad for small businesses, you can stop going to WalMart and only shop at small businesses, and pretty much get the exact same products. You can vote with your wallet.
But on YouTube, you have no power as a consumer. You are the product. And boycotting YouTube traps you in a world of YouTube rejects, forced to construct their own platforms, who more often than not are right-wing extremists pushing violence, intolerance, and misinformation.
YouTube is a town where WalMart is the only grocer. You can give in to the large corporation to get what you need, or you can eat out at fast food joints for every meal.
So really, you have only three choices:
1. Get the laws changed so that the First Amendment applies to private companies, stripping them of their own freedom to cull what they publish, and making misinformation and violent speech much more difficult to address.
2. Accept that there is nothing you can do to compel Google to do or not to do things that they aren't legally compelled to, especially when the decisions they are making revolve around selling as many ads as they can to their customers (the advertisers) not making the product the sell (you, the viewer) happy.
3. Accept that Capitalism is why you have no power here, and work towards a future in which large corporations don't have the power to control and suppress you without recourse. Or sell your data and attention as a product as they act as the largest VoD platform in existence.
Not all people are rational animals that objectively acquire and then review all the information in front of them to weigh the merits of "5g versus virus." Sometimes, when you see a guy gaining a following by telling others that vaccines have secret microchips in them and that humanity has to fight 5g in order to survive, you tell him to go to hell and host his vile videos somewhere else.
What about alternative facts?
Since then, antisemitism has risen, and prominent antisemites still fills up theatres, garners millions of views of their videos, always speaking in transparent allusions to keep barely out of the reach of law (Don't say "Jews rule finance worldwide", say "'The organised community' rules the world's finance"). In retrospect, that looks like an utter failure to me.
Democracy is necessarily a battleground of ideas. The alternative is battlegrounds between groups with competing ideas.
For this reason, the by-any-means-necessary aspect of modern wokeism is terribly dangerous. What if these fuckers are wrong? Whenever we are urged to discard debate and the free exchange of ideas so that truth may prevail - watch the hell out.
(Ditto for nationalistic battle, which I add because made an appearance in your previous comment.)
Look at all the experts trying to fighting the lies Trump has been spreading. All that effort, and yet almost 50% of this country believes him. Every moment they have to spend debunking yet another lie is time they can't spend on something useful.
Look at all the people blaming 5g for COVID19. Every person that acts on that rumor and damages property or makes terrorist threats is drawing police attention away from something more useful.
Sometimes, you can't fight bad ideas by debunking them.
Become a semi-monopoly of public discourse and obey the rule of free speech!
I would prefer to add an amendment to allow to censor extreme views contradicting modern science knowledge.
It is, indirect, what happens and to be honest, i do believe that people doing the youtube videos about aliens and flatearth have often enough some agenda.
It hurts our society and we need to find a proper solution.
Don't forget that the 'lipid hypothesis' was everywhere just a few years ago and everybody believed it. Now you have more chance of finding somebody who will admit to be being a member of the Stasi.
Science is, at its base, the rejection of hypotheses by experimental validation. Quite a lot of what is touted as science either hasn't or can't be experimentally validated. The non-falsifiable stuff dressed up as science, when it is really philosophy (or perhaps religion) is just flat earth thinking with better PR and credentials.
This is the reason free speech has to be defended. Remember Cromwell's Plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Not every nutter turns out to be nuts.
If the science is so shaky as to be blown over by some crackpots then it is no science good at all. Interestingly, some among the flat earthers have independently verified the curvature of the earth. This is a beautiful outcome for these true skeptics and critical thinkers. These are true scientific minds in my opinion.
The science for 'we are not on a flat earth' is here. We still have YouTube Channels saying otherwise without being able to prove it at all. And they do create issues in our society.
It looks specious right now ... but in reality, they and everyone else have been doing it from the start.
It's really easy to garner attention, and even easier to buy it.
Foreign agents, like governments, can use this as a tool to nudge populations, and in many cases, that's all that's needed to change outcomes, particularly in things like elections.
As just one example.
I do however believe that platforms of sufficient scale also become a platform of public, like 'papers of record' have a special status, maybe some sites should as well.
What we need for the 'big platforms' is some kind of smart, modern regulation that maximizes freedom of expression, maybe flags the rubbish as rubbish and very rarely moves stuff off-platform.
Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.
COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content".
Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of "disinformation" entirely. I don't believe in fighting "bad ideas" by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking)