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).
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?