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?
> 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.