I say this for emphasis, not to personally attack you: Whenever I read or hear this it makes me extremely suspicious, because it often doesn't come from those who will do the sacrifice themselves.

Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. Perpetrators of lies will even hide behind this, and create a false image of rebellious heroism, instead of facing public discourse and the consequences thereof.

YouTube is a private entity but they correctly assess that they have a significant responsibility here. But curating social media content is not unheard of, Wikipedia manages it surprisingly well. Instead they could for example certify and emphasize content that is grounded in science and verify content creators of such. This is from the top of my head but there are certainly other people who have smarter ideas that don't involve straight up censorship.

Talk is talk. Actions should have consequences, which is why we have rules and agreements in the real world. I also very much doubt that censorship achieves what it is supposed to. People don't suddenly become enlightened (depending on context it might be the other way around) when you ban that stuff. It can easily become worse.

Unfortunately, I think it's a bit of a classical liberal ideal that "the truth will come through and those who were wrong will see the error of their ways".

To some, the truth is a tool. If it's not a useful tool, it will be discarded. Probably a more useful tool, like hyperbole, decontextualization, gross mis-interpretation, or just adding "new facts" will be used.

I think it's naive to say that laissez faire speech is going to solve all issues, just like it'd be naive to say that peaceful protests would be a viable path to democracy in North Korea.

(Personally, I'd like to see bias recognition, propaganda recognition, and the ability to shift perspectives taught. A dumb, noncritical society is going to do and say dumb things)

The only possible remedy in the end is to build our societies, our law, and our culture to be resilient against those cases when people are wrong, because they often will be.

The arguments for free speech are fundamentally the same arguments for democracy itself.

If people can't decide the value of information, why again are we trusting in the decision-making value of each and every voter?

If we filter speech, maybe we should just cut to the chase and filter out voters by testing of some sort?

We don't let non-citizens vote. We don't allow free political speech nor the right to assembly at polling places. We have independent election observers. We have to ensure that the voting process is not polluted by actors who would wish to harm it.

Similarly, there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums, and acting to preserve those open forums is moral, though it will always be fuzzy.

I don't think that anyone is complaining about the filtering of deliberate fraud from outside influences. What people are complaining about are the obvious biases exhibited by the large social media companies. Take this new Hunter Biden example. Twitter claims that they don't want to promote hacking and releasing of private information. Hunter Biden's laptop was abandoned, not hacked. Besides, where was that privacy stance a week or two ago when Trump's taxes were leaked? Facebook claimed unreliable sourcing for the story. Where were such concerns when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had said that our troops were "suckers and losers"? Or when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had been peed on by Russian hookers?

We have independent election observers.

Yeah and we balance things out by letting both major parties watch for funny business. Who watches Facebook and Twitter? Those companies are loaded with ex-Democrat operatives in senior positions. They've run out anyone who even smells halfway conservative. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated time and again that they aren't just getting rid of fake news and bots. They're weighing in on complex political and statistical issues by silencing information sources that they don't like.

there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums

Yeah and evidence shows that some of those people are controlling information from within the social media giants.

The almost free speech on the other side of the ocean seems to be working pretty well. You get to say anything that isn’t actively harmful to others, but you won’t be able to advertise bleach as a way to get Corona out of your system.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[1] https://thenewamerican.com/hate-speech-u-k-political-leader-...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-face...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

"It has been wrongly suggested that Mr Weston was arrested for reciting passages written by Winston Churchill. I understand he was not welcome outside the Winchester Guildhall, the Police were called and he was asked to move on. I also understand that he was not prepared to move on and was arrested for this reason."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weston_(politician)

"I hate indians! They are a beastly people with a beastly religion"

Or "the Hindus are a foul race"

It's highly believable that quoting Churchill can be considered hate speach. There's a lot of races he did not like

you can't do this in the US either if you're actually selling bleach. are you saying in europe ordinary people aren't allowed to publicly speculate about cures for the virus?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/police-say-de...

In any case, the media can't pretend they rely on arbiters of truth because there is bias all around. Trump's statements on disinfectants were not as incendiary as some people made them out to be. Disinfectants can sometimes be used in the lungs or body, but this is a question for the medical field. The media speculated about poison control calls surging after Trump's statements, but any small uptick seemed to already be present since people have resorted to rigorous use of disinfectants in the home going all the way back to March. Finally, with the focus on lockdowns and isolation, we've actually somewhat missed the point of the DHS briefing on disinfectants and UV decontamination. We were supposed to be looking for simple innovations that made going to places like the grocery store safer and more manageable, but I haven't seen much progress in this area.

Working "pretty well?" Sure, unless one tries to talk about things that really matter and strays outside the dotted lines of permissibility.

Some topics are verboten.

When you say "other side of the ocean," I assume you're talking about Europe.

Try to discuss the muslim rape gangs in the UK.

Try to discuss the surge in grenade attacks and many-fold increase in rape in Sweden.

Try to discuss the homeless migrants living on the streets and the Aljerian street wars in France.

Try to discuss Fulan Gong in China. Or tiannamen square.

Try to discuss political assassinations in Russia, or the bribes the wife of Moscow's mayor hands out.

Try to discuss alternative political parties in Ukraine.

I think there are scores of political prisoners serving time for wrongthink who might disagree with your assertion that almost free speech is working pretty well.

If you want to discover who your masters are, learn who you are not allowed to criticize.

When people advocate censorship of any kind, they're really saying, "I have the correct views held by the establishment, so I'm not worried about it."

If the establishment's views are strongly codified and checks and balances are in place to maintain them, is that so bad?

Conversely, I believe there are a lot of people in the US walking around freely that deserve to be locked up.

Russia and China do not have free speech. If you say the wrong thing there, you go to prison (or worse). That's censorship.

And potentially loosing your job is quite a big deal for most people. That's what happened to James Damore for bringing up the wrong subject.

Not saying you think muslims are dangerous is at the same courtesy level as not telling your coworker his hair looks like shit every day. Nobody is going to (immediately) fire you for it, but people will definitely start avoiding you if you do it to an obnoxious degree.

If Christians were targeted by violence on American streets after 9/11 (as they were--along with, you know, completely unrelated Sikhs), "the left" would say that's wrong, too. And the reason that the status quo with regards to anti-Islam sentiment is what it is is because Americans in a whole lot of places genuinely haven't progressed much beyond that mindset.

There's a difference of kind here.

So you're claiming that Sweden has put people into prison because they discussed the increase in rape? Citation please.

Your whole comment is a prime example of unfounded FUD. [1]

[1] With the exception of Russia, China, and probably Ukraine, but in what world do they belong in one bucket together with Sweden or France in terms of democracy?

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

In fact, that quote is on the Wikipedia page!

>> The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

That sounds bad, but I wonder how Chomsky would feel if that wasn't the case and the "spectrum of acceptable opinion" included stuff like literal Nazism.

Like front page newspaper stories, senior politicians and even a dramatisation on the desperate-to-be-inoffensive BBC, you mean? Sure, not everybody approves of people whose take on the cases obsesses about the ethnicities of the perpetrators above all else, but free speech doesn't mean a point of view has to be agreed with.

Why would you not be able to do that in Sweden? How is it limited?

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/839509/Britain-towns-citie...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grooming-gan...

But whatever.

Or how about MPs telling victims to keep their mouths shut for the sake of diversity. It certainly gives me the opinion that they are trying to cover it up.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4813870/MP-shares-T...

So, you just confused the opposition, it is a Labour MP after all, with the government. And you totally ignored the origin of the retweet and the fact that the MP in question re-tweeted and did not write that tweet herself. Nice job, really.

Alternatively, you don't go to jail for suggesting that anybody actually implied injection of bleach as a treatment for coronavirus.

The land of the almost free just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it

"The land of the free, only if you are brave enough to live free."

Also big tech is going to end democracy as we know it unless we get serious. They can decide who gets elected into office and we are on a path to replacing elected representatives with kings.

For the record this is intended in jest

“Defamation is an area of law that provides a civil remedy when someone's words end up causing harm to your reputation or your livelihood. Libel is a written or published defamatory statement, while slander is defamation that is spoken by the defendant.”

> There is no such thing as almost free speech in a free society except perhaps for clear cut physical threats.

I take your point but I think you are brave to rely on the common sense of the entire world to protect you from false or misleading claims against you. Having seen a friend being roasted in the "mainstream media" with a story which was heavily biased against her, and seeing the venomous messages sent to her in the aftermath, I think I'm ok with some limits on free speech.

The Internet has had to deal with trolls and cheaters from day one. If someone sends a packet that indicates they got a headshot in a multiplayer FPS, they could be cheating so we invented anti-cheat. If someone spams an email account claiming to be a Nigerian price, it doesn’t mean that’s true so we invented spam detection. If someone makes a blog post claiming product X changed their life, it could be an ad so we have ad detectors.

Year after year, people find new ways to manipulate online communities. The people who run them have an obligation to prevent them from becoming toxic.

Now we have powerful actors manipulating political discourse and suddenly the rules are different? It’s complicated but that’s what happens when you serve billion(s) of users.

> YouTube is a private entity but they correctly assess that they have a significant responsibility here. But curating social media content is not unheard of, Wikipedia manages it surprisingly well. Instead they could for example certify and emphasize content that is grounded in science and verify content creators of such. This is from the top of my head but there are certainly other people who have smarter ideas that don't involve straight up censorship.

I'm 100% certain that some crank and their followers are complaining about censorship on Wikipedia right now, because that community decided to not present their tendentious opinions or lies as the truth or to not present them at all.

The word "censorship" has been ruined: it's devolved into an epithet to describe any barrier, not matter how justified, between a speaker and his desired audience. It's not censorship for YouTube to ban this content, just like it's not censorship for me to ban anti-vaxxers and white suprecemists from putting signs up on my lawn. The mass dissemination of truth (or our best approximation) has always depended on decisions to not disseminate. You can't expect the common man to sort through a bag of 99 compelling lies and one truth to find the truth. That's too much work for an amateur, and too many will settle for a lie. Everyone relies on others to improve the truth-to-lie ratio to some manageable ratio that an individual can handle.

It's also worth noting is that one of the main reasons Wikipedia does better than YouTube is that it's process is 100% manual. Google's bias towards totally automated processes driven by some quantity of shallow data points greatly reduces how effective they can actually be.

So what can you conclude about the private intent of key decision makers?

I find that imputing malign intent often improves my ability to forecast outcomes. Whether there is actual bad faith almost doesn't matter if the assumption improves forecasts.

The existence of malign intent is hardly mysterious. It's like the Firesign Theater skit with a political guy declaring, "And you can believe me. Because I never lie. And I'm always right." Part of the gag is that the guy picked to read the line is capable of delivering it really, really convincingly. You go, 'wow! He really means that… hey waitaminnit…'

I think it's interesting to see these tech giants react to a repeating pattern of using direct manipulative lying as a weapon. It fits with some of my 'singularity' theories: corporations are like aggregate people, and AI is a still higher level than that, and it's neither easy nor desirable to use these newer forms of intelligence to replicate the worst follies of the individual human.

At some point, tolerating the wilder excesses of the individual 'cell' will kill the 'host' organism, which if it's a corporation depends on living humans, if it's an AI depends on living human societies. If you've got an AI that isn't really an AI and is just a large informational weapon, or a corporation that isn't really an aggregate person and is just the intentions of one human expressed through power, there's no constraint on the actions of the larger more powerful entity. But if you have the larger organism (whether it's a corporation or a proper AI with a broad enough awareness) it's going to eventually resist self-destructive actions even if they're expressed in a complex way. I see this as YouTube as a larger organism recognizing it is being used as a weapon and trying to protect itself against future punishment or diminishment by preventing itself from being used in a particular way.

But threats are talk, and threats often motivate action without undertaking it. So talk is, in a real sense, action. Many forms of speech can have profound effects.

For example, I say, "Pay me $400 more a month or I will evict you." If you believe I can evict you (even if I probably can't) then my talk has changed behavior. Can I then say, "I took no action?"

I think everyone would agree that's not so.

There's no real mechanism to hold YouTube to account for promoting and spreading this stuff, and they are naturally incentivised for that mechanism never to come about. To try and ensure it never does, they're obviously settling for this.

Want "free speech" back? Give it meaningful consequences.

The core point is the same: the platforms want to avoid enforced regulation, so they're self-regulating in ways that free-speech proponents don't like

Free speech is sancrosanct for a reason.

Respectfully, how does this help? My impression is that the majority of the people who believe that e.g. vaccines are detrimental think that credentialing by traditional sources that don't agree with them (e.g. mainstream media) is simply evidence that the party has been compromised.

You'd be creating a subset of YouTube that is easier to ignore for the people who wish to.

The benefit of the tagging would be to make it clear to that set of people that, no, anyone who understands what they're talking about thinks modern vaccines are very safe.

This is of course false. We have hate speech laws for example.

A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.

https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/hco/...

Some truly terrifying sentences in there. All based on the perception of someone else.

https://reason.com/2019/07/23/jessica-yaniv-da-silva-brazili...

I assume the GGP is referring to the C-16 bill passed by the federal government of Canada in 2016, which added gender expression and identity to existing human rights laws on discrimination.

I have repeatedly seen a perhaps willful misinterpretation, popularly stemming from Jordan Petersen, that this bill criminalizes misgendering people when that's not the case.

https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f...

>"After Bill C-16 amended the Criminal Code, Canadian law prohibited hate propaganda against groups that can be identified based on gender identity or gender expression. The bill also allowed for more severe sentencing if it is proved that a particular offense was motivated by a bias or prejudice against a person's gender identity or gender expression. >

>However, experts say misusing a pronoun would not constitute hate propaganda, nor can it be used as >sole evidence of discrimination. >

>"If it's just the pronoun, not much is going to happen," explained Cheryl Milne, director of the Asper >Centre for Constitutional Rights at the University of Toronto told AFP."

> Does the bill legislate the use of certain language? And could someone go to jail for using the wrong pronoun?

>In the Criminal Code, which does not reference pronouns, Cossman says misusing pronouns alone would not constitute a criminal act. >“The misuse of gender pronouns, without more, cannot rise to the level of a crime,” she says. “It cannot rise to the level of advocating genocide, inciting hatred, hate speech or hate crimes … (it) simply cannot meet the threshold.”

>The Canadian Human Rights Act does not mention pronouns either. The act protects certain groups from discrimination.

>“Would it cover the accidental misuse of a pronoun? I would say it’s very unlikely,” Cossman says. “Would it cover a situation where an individual repeatedly, consistently refuses to use a person’s chosen pronoun? It might.”

>If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time?

>It is possible, Brown says, through a process that would start with a complaint and progress to a proceeding before a human rights tribunal. If the tribunal rules that harassment or discrimination took place, there would typically be an order for monetary and non-monetary remedies. A non-monetary remedy may include sensitivity training, issuing an apology, or even a publication ban, he says.

>If the person refused to comply with the tribunal's order, this would result in a contempt proceeding being sent to the Divisional or Federal Court, Brown says. The court could then potentially send a person to jail “until they purge the contempt,” he says.

>“It could happen,” Brown says. “Is it likely to happen? I don’t think so. But, my opinion on whether or not that's likely has a lot to do with the particular case that you're looking at.”

>“The path to prison is not straightforward. It’s not easy. But, it’s there. It’s been used before in breach of tribunal orders.”

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identi...

[EDIT: added link]

That being said, I think some just near-reflexively reply 'Source? Source?' as a sort of low-effort 'rebuttal' by implying it's just, like, your opinion, man when they haven't necessarily come up with a well-thought-out argument.

I won't disagree that well-sourced arguments add much to a discussion, especially if you're not well-informed about the topic at hand.

--

But don't worry about the down-votes. It happens, who can know for sure why, they don't really matter, and if you're earnest in your comments, you'll almost always going to end up in the black. :)

Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way. (Of course, I'm just guessing the exact numbers)

What's happened is that these folks are using this wonderful new instant worldwide publishing tool we've made to continue their pathologies. And companies are happy to make money letting them do so as long as nobody gets too upset. We are now reaching the point where lots of people are getting upset and those companies are running around like a single fireman in a city on fire trying to figure out how to make their business keep going.

The good news is that we're still the same species as before, and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society. The problem we have is that social media should not exist. It shouldn't be regulated, broken up, or any of that. It simply should not exist. The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species (There's a huge discussion of what to make instead. That's for another day)

I think the problem is not easy to solve, but it's certainly easy to explain. It's not the end of civilization as we know it, at least it doesn't have to be.

Not sure that's true, though. Here's a cloud to cover your sunshine: what if the very concept that beliefs have to correspond to observable reality is a relatively new one, or a relatively unpopular one (with a 10% of the population subscribing to it)? What if it's an unchanging constant that people believe whatever works for them in the immediate, observable way? What if it's natural for people to believe in lies, if these lies don't seem to cause obvious, instant hurt to them, and especially if these lies benefits them socially (going along better with their tribe, finding their in-group, raising status)?

I worry that for most of history, we could get away with believing in bullshit. And now we've scaled up and advanced our societies to the point they need accurate beliefs to function. Problem is, holding inaccurate beliefs doesn't usually hurt you in an immediately obvious ways, so our monkey brains don't connect the failures of our institutions with the bullshit individuals spread to each other.

The key innovation we require, as a society, are better feedback mechanisms to correct inaccurate beliefs. This means more frequent, but smaller, pain in response to mistakes. To those who object, the alternative isn't no pain, but rather, the catastrophic pain of collapse. Society is really a collection of institutions, and somehow in all institutions, loyalty has usurped principle, and accountability fails because the accuser is shunned, hated, feared. So, institution by institution, we weaken.

The solution, for example in academia, is to shun (fire, blacklist, etc) those "researchers" who cheat, lie, and distort their findings. In the justice system, lawyers, police, and judges who break the rules should be punished more, not less, severely than the rest of us. Again, these are not changes born of malice, or a desire to see more suffering, but rather a price we must accept to maintain healthy institutions with high standards, and so, prevent societal collapse.

In some ways I think "cancel culture" is a reaction to this lack of accountability, as an attempt to replace it, to ape it, almost like a cargo cult. Of course, there are huge problems with this, not the least of which there is not an institution behind it, but rather just mob rule that answers to no-one, not even itself.

There is absolutely nothing concrete that I can do on a day-to-day basis to protect my world, my friends, my family from people that I watch lie, cheat, and steal on national television. It's absolutely sickening.

I vote, and I canvass, and I donate. But man, when I see someone on twitter talking about how they think gay people should be shot like animals or something equally insane, it feels like there's one small right thing I could do, which is to make that person feel like shit. I don't, mostly -- it's just a toxic cycle for my personal wellbeing -- but I see the attraction. Yelling at people online (and to a further extent, excluding them from your world) feels like the only thing you can do sometimes.

And then we, the techno-futurists, don't want to deal with what's in front of us because its too small, doesn't scale, or because this problem will go away once we reach the economic Singularity or have flying cars or whatever utopian dream is in fashion.

Personally, I think we need better systems to leverage people's real, concrete pain into actionable change. Like, you should be able to donate money or time to fixing the things that really hurt you. Maybe its the DMV. Or maybe its traffic court. Or maybe its a late fee on a credit card. Or maybe its finding out that a fact you believed was made up. Right now, everything is so siloed. Imagine if everyone hurt by the DMV could pledge money to fix the problem.

I have come to the conclusion that managing our collective delusions is more important than correcting them. Reality is unbearable to the human psyche. Most collective delusions are benign or even beneficial to society.

To this day we know that the medical field is systematically unable to accurately treat black and female patients equivalently to white and male patients. (Unable for example to realize heart attacks in female patients represent differently for decades).

I don’t buy without formal study that the average deviation from basic opinions of reality deviate more in certain fields of study than others. Claiming it without any evidence is itself a form of deviating from observed reality.

I very much agree. However, a largely unrealized ~fact is that people from these professions (well, ones who hold the "right" ideas) are regularly portrayed by politicians and the media as flawless, omniscient, beyond reproach (which is increasingly being physically enforced on the internet, with a net that grows ever larger). The downstream consequences of this likely well-intended behavior are extremely complex - sure, censorship will provide a setback to conspiracy theorists' ability to speak their ideas freely, but how much fuel does this provide to their resolve, and how many mainstream people will see what is clearly happening and dip their toes into the pool, and have their eyes opened even further when they discover the vast amount of actually truthful information that doesn't make it into the "trustworthy mainstream news" (even further reinforcing the idea in their mind that the public is lied to, and illustrating that this is done regularly)?

A meme war approach to governance seems like not the best approach for the sole (for now) superpower on the planet, and they have a very delicate balancing act to truth-proof the internet without the mainstream masses noticing and starting to ask questions.

We've been warned about this behavior many times throughout history by people wiser than ourselves, perhaps as a species it might be an opportune time to pause for a moment and consider where the path we are currently heading down at stop speed eventually leads.

"A liar should have a good memory." - Quintilian

"If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything." - Mark Twain

"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later thousandfold." - Aristotle

Verifiable history of changes teaches to check twice before blaming another.

... have we? Much of the 20th century was spent at war, with a death total somewhere in the region of a hundred million. As were most of the previous centuries. There have been isolated pockets where one might have a lifetime of stability over a wide area, but few of those were also "free".

> The problem we have is that social media should not exist

The challenge is to thread the needle between freedom degenerating into chaos and murder (Rohingya, etc) and total clampdown that also escalates into disappearances and murder.

The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all. I'm struggling to think of large-scale benefits social media has brought us, because the individual ones like talking more to grandma and getting more dates are clear enough. But come on, people should just pick up that phone and go out more.

It's obvious that the Internet and social media wouldn't solve these issues with people, or hide these flaws in humanity. I am baffled why people think it would. It's just another form of something governments or institutions cannot handle/control, which has been occurring since written history began. The only difference is the sheer quantity and ease of having a voice these days.

(For reference regarding my use of these "platforms": I use YouTube periodically to mainly watch the C++ conference videos to further highlight how out of touch I am with the modern iterations of the language, but have nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter since I found it to be a stream of people talking about themselves; by definition that is not a conversation, so is not social and should be renamed "Selfish Media" IMHO).

I disagree. I would lose the ability to contact many good friends.

a surprising number of people don't realize that a) carriers are obligated to port their number and b) it is possible to transfer contacts when they buy a new phone. instead of fixing the original problem, they post "hey new number (xxx)-xxx-xxxx, add me!" or "new phone, send your numbers!" to facebook or instagram. I can't explain how this is supposed to work to every single person I want to stay in contact with, and I don't check social media much so I tend to miss these posts.

if I lost my facebook account, it wouldn't be a huge issue. I'd be able to track everyone down on other platforms. if all social media were shut down, there are at least a couple people I'd never be able to contact again.

And go out.. where, exactly?

"But I didn't mean those!"

OK, fine, now we need to define social media. Clearly everybody wants to count Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But some of the major incidents come from memetic circulation of fake news and racial hatred propaganda etc on Whatsapp. The Christchurch shooter (and others) were radicalised by 4/8chan. Both he and Anders Breivik also cited racial hatred material produced by "traditional", "legitimate" sources such as major newspapers.

(I wonder if anyone's ever done an "impact factor of evil" analysis on the citation graphs of mass shooter manifestoes? Going all the way back to Kaczynski, T and beyond)

> people should just pick up that phone and go out more

You've missed all the "millenials NEVER answer the phone" memes, then?

> The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all

My point is that none of those are new, it's just that people struggle to recognise the warning patterns. Countries that were badly hit by SARS-COV were more attuned to the risks of SARS-COV-2. Countries that were badly hit by 20th century fascism are more attuned to the risks of 21st century fascism. Hence all the endless (somewhat fruitless) discussion about who counts as a Nazi and when it might be OK to punch them.

It's not just the medium, we have to look at the messages. Can we ban certain messages without throwing out the medium?

Here's my definition of the elements of "toxic social media":

1) the automated surfacing of messages from random people because they are "popular" (i.e. highly engaged) mixed in with personal messages. This is the amplifying effect that makes things hot.

2) the immediacy - a message can be spread insanely rapidly, faster than any individual humans can understand or respond to it. This is the fuel.

It's the fact that it happens at an inhuman scale that I think is the biggest part. Email at a human-to-human level is like letter writing. Information can travel through it, but it can't amplify by bypassing the human connections in the way that Twitter trending topics can. Likewise 1:1 or limited-sized groups on Whatsapp.

I'd even put Facebook groups into that bucket, so long as they're full of humans who know each other. It's once you get to groups with millions of people who don't know each other directly that things get out of hand.

Seen in that perspective, social media could be considered a part of the problem simply for being a way for people to voice their opinions, but as you wrote, a "fediverse" would not be more resistant to disruptive opinions. It will be a problem as long a people have a variety of ways to communicate with lots of people.

I think it's naive to assume that a fediverse wouldn't eventually include somebody developing such an algorithm that becomes popular among the average user base.

Blaming algorithims is the "big lie" essentially of repeating something enough that people eventually believe it is true. I noticed it before and dismissed it as the bullshit it was but even computer literate people are falling for the hysteria.

In fact, casualties of war, as a percentage of population, have been more or less constant for hundreds of years.

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...

Perhaps the rules have changed now, due to mutually assured destruction.

It's increasingly difficult to have rational conversations with Americans these days, and this idea is certainly a big part of it.

It just astonishes me that Americans see little difference between a private company forbidding liars from using their free service, and people being rounded up at gunpoint and being killed.

(I seem to have been misunderstood quite badly, a sibling comment to yours makes exactly the opposite allegation! Also, I'm a Brit)

The risk of any ban system is that true-but-inconvenient stuff ends up getting banned as well. The very real risk that video evidence of murders by police might be banned for "promoting violence", for example. There's already the controversy over removing evidence of war crimes in Syria - kind of understandable, given that those must be pretty traumatic videos.

(yes, this is a pre-crime argument, but crimes against humanity committed by and on behalf of states or warring ethnic factions are qualitively different from ordinary crime.)

I think you’re inflating the views of the few outspoken fools too be that of the majority.

So you are saying we should just get rid of the internet? Social media is not just a few popular sites. It is the entirety of the internet. You get rid of the "social media" sites and people will still connect. Crap will still flow. You'll obviously see a temporary drop until people adjust and reconnect. The internet is about connecting people and making the exchange of information easier. You cannot get rid of "social media" without getting rid of the internet.

The evolution of a species never stops, even if it gets a bit slow. And our brains may have changed in the last 10'000 years too. Possibly even in the last 200.

To your other point, I think that "education" and "critical thinking skills" are often conflated as one and the same, or that perhaps one necessarily leads to the other, but this is certainly not the case. While I think being educated to some degree is important in order to share a "common language" with others and to become a contributing member of society, the ability to think critically, and to act on it, is really necessary if we are to succeed and not fail catastrophically along the way.

To go back to the analogy, having the ability to execute the software faithfully is one thing, but understanding when it might make sense to modify the software and how to do so responsibly given the fixed hardware we have available is really the critical piece.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-are-evolving-an-ext...

Totally static for the last few millennia.

It's a pretty far leap from that to saying something should not exist. But I'll bite. How are they not aligned, and why does it not merit existence?

But it's a good question and I'll try to reply in a brief and somewhat hand-wavy way (due to the medium, space, etc) Everything I'm going to say has caveats. And I can't cover them all. Meh.

If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data. In general, however, I am persuaded that the overall problem is that we've incentivized consumer technology based on a battle for attention span. This isn't new; it's been going on forever. But the network effect has shot it through the roof, and even simple AI is proving quite capable of taking that business model even further. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so much money in it.

+If you accept that premise, then that's how the conversation should generally go. If you don't accept that premise, then we need to back up a bit and talk about the effects of technology in general.

Here's a more detailed explanation and defense of my underlying thesis I published twelve years ago. This just didn't appear overnight; a lot of folks were trying to ring the warning bells earlier. (BTW, when I published it on HN, it got a lot of votes, but it also got a lot of "Well, sure, but 1) there'll be a new startup that will replace big tech soon, 2) we'll just invent some new app that will solve the problems we have from the current apps, etc") It was a sad demonstration of how all of us tech folk have a tendency to do the best we can to deny and ignore any implications of what we're doing aside from wondering whether our server is up. (I exaggerate for effect)

http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUe...

EDITED FOR CLARITY (Addition marked)

What does this actually mean? The world is a very big place, covered by lots of political, economic, and power systems.

The West - primarily, but not exclusively, the English-speaking parts - has seen a big change in the way politics is conducted, with less dignity and more verbal viciousness, but this hasn't really been matched by physical or "kinetic" politics. The sibling comment that there are fewer bombs going off is correct. Even Islamic fundamentalism has got less dangerous in the west - while the great middle eastern war started in 2001 rages on, expanding upwards to Nagoro-Karabakh.

If we want to talk stability, perhaps we should return to control systems theory. The feedback loops of the world have got shorter and faster. This moves the poles of the system around - and, without damping, makes it less stable.

As far as I can tell, the OP is right; It's political instability that can instantly touch the globe, along with WMDs, and a head of the state who seems unwilling to adhere to peaceful transfer of power (see: "Will he go?")

I'm really tired of the word "privileged", so much so that I've become a snowflake and get /instantly/ triggered by its usage. It seems to be the "commie" of our era.

> Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops), and social organizations like churches and civic clubs see fewer and fewer members attend their meetings. The skills that are increasing? Reflex time. Ability to solve abstract, short-timespan problems. Basically the skills we need to interact with our entertainment. More and more, Indians and Chinese – people coming from cultures who have been shut out of the technical world until recently – are writing software for hardcore western appetites to consume.

"Ability to solve abstract, short-timespan problems"

I wonder about this. I speculatively propose that there also seems to be a curious inability (or unwillingness) for people who happen to be blessed with the skill of abstract thinking, to apply that skill to the greater world (the complex system we have built for ourselves to live within). I would say that abstract thinking, done right, allows the one wielding it the ability to step out of the ~axiomatic frame in which they live, and use to evaluate the world with a relatively clean mind - to set their individual political beliefs and preferences aside and consider things from a disinterested 3rd party perspective. At least to some degree. And I think mass social media, including forums like this one, likely contribute in significant ways that we do not currently understand. Whether a change in our aggregate ability has taken place over time, I have no opinion, but an ambitious person could likely pick up on it if it had by reviewing conversations from a decade ago or so.

> If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data.

This seems like the kind of abstract thinking (disconnection from the specific object level characteristics of the problem) that we need more of. Do you happen to have any theories on what steps we should be considering to get us out of this mess, that could plausibly be applied at national or planetary scale (or, know of any formal or informal organizations that are working on such ideas)?

Despite tons of noise in social media, real life up has been incredibly stable for the last couple of decades in the west. The least amount of violence, lowest extreme poverty, highest disposable income, etc etc.

In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today. The headlines and discussions on social media today now heavily surround parsing Trumps words and arguing about how he’s racist and doing things wrong.

Social media is just giving you the impression that things are unstable because people like to complain when by any standard long-term measure it’s just as stable as ever (barring recent economic instability caused by COVID).

Some questions about the US?

- when was the last time a prominent politician was assassinated? - when was the last time a government building was bombed? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assaulted and left in the hospital?

This isn't universally true in the US. Millions lost their homes in the great recession and never fully recovered, it's just easy to forget that the American economy doesn't work for everyone when it does work for you. Now millions more face eviction and starvation amidst a major public health crisis.

> In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today.

True, but mass shootings were unfathomable in the 70's and happen at an alarming rate today. To your point, we've largely become desensitized to those stories because they just happen so often now. I think that the patterns of violence have shifted, not the presence of violence.

> Social media is just giving you the impression that things are unstable because people like to complain when by any standard long-term measure it’s just as stable as ever

I disagree with this too. Wealth inequality is skyrocketing and has been for many years. Average life expectancy has been declining in the US. Our current president has discussed running for a 3rd term and preemptively declined to accept the results of a Presidential election overseen by his own government. Has that ever happened before?

> when was the last time a prominent politician was assassinated? - when was the last time a government building was bombed? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assaulted and left in the hospital?

These questions say more about the government's ability to protect its members than providing insight into the stability of society. Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in 2017 during a practice session for a congressional baseball game, but survived. Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011 and survived. There are numerous attempts at these things that we'll surely never know about.

It's also worth pointing out that a group plotted to kidnap the sitting governor of Michigan and try her for treason. Law enforcement officials interviewed about that case largely said they'd never seen anything like that before.

On a per capita basis, home ownership was at an all-time high during the 2000s before the crisis and crashed down to 90s levels after the crisis and has returned now to a level not ever seen during the 1900s. In the worst of the Great Recession more people still owned homes than during the 70s-80s.

Starvation is not a realistic outcome for anyone in the US who chooses to use social safety nets. Both government and private programs provide meals to people who need them and are available all across the country. What you might be thinking of is “food insecure” households, which are people that would need such programs.

WRT wealth inequality, that is mostly a meaningless statistic for actual lifestyle of the lower and middle class. All it tells you is that the wealth growth was faster at the top than at the bottom. Not that the bottom got worse or even stayed stagnant for that matter.

From the perspective of the data on violence, purchasing power, disposable income, home ownership, etc, society appears to be quite stable. From the perspective of shared stories on social media, I can see why you might be led to think otherwise.

the richest city on earth has a sizable, entrenched homeless population that openly do drugs on the street. Are we not in the midst of the opioid epidemic? Can what happens in Chicago be characterized as a war?

There is deep dysfunction and societal numbness to not see these realities; despite the riches accrued and the definitive technological advance, these problems are apparently unable to be solved.

You'll need a different gauge than that. I'll give you life expectancy. But I'll raise you obesity and other self-induced problems that have gotten worse statistically.

It certainly isn't. But it is more polarized and increasing content control in the last 10 years made everything 10x times worse. We continue on this path...

If people just could run their mouths more freely in the most vulgar form, I think the situation would improve quickly. Some people watch sports for that, but I think really telling you opinion to someone on the internet can also be helpful. I don't think the world is ending from that.

We get quite a lot of Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe still, but they do seem to be getting less effective over time - A man with a knife rather than a man with a truck.

Before the USSR collapsed, when was the last time a prominent Soviet politician was assassinated, a Soviet government building bombed, a prominent Soviet politician assaulted and left in the hospital?

At least 200,000 Americans and probably a lot more have died in the last eight months, most of them completely unnecessarily. Waving this away as "economic instability" shows a lack of perspective.

And over all hangs the grim spectre of the climate emergency, which we as a species are doing nothing to fix.

Sorry, but as a civilization we are fucked.

When was America ever "peaceful" or "progressive"? I lived there for thirty years and my ideas, boring and mainstream by European standards, were constantly considered "laughable", "naïve", "ignorant." Now I live in Europe again, where I again get all the things that Americans thought were laughable and impossible.

In particular, America's been continuously at war for my whole life, and I'm no longer a young man. America's spent more money on weapons than the next ten countries put together. Calling America "peaceful" is totally false to the fact - it's obscene considering you've killed hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people in the last twenty years.

BTW, "slippery slope" was intended to be an example of fallacious thinking. Before it became a popular term, it was intended as a criticism of arguments of the form, "A will lead to B will lead to C, so A is bad."

I'm not bringing this up (just) to be pedantic; the overwhelming evidence to date is that it is extraordinarily difficult to get any of these modern media giants to make any kind of move on any subject at all. You can say very nearly anything you want on YouTube's network, or Twitter's, or Facebook's, and in all cases, the most common forms of censorship are from the DMCA, not politics.

Sorry, this is backwards. Before it became a criticism of arguments "A will lead to B and so on" it was a term used to signify a "slippery slope", that is, something that has the potential to snowball to something much worse.

The name as a "criticism of the fallacy" resulted from the term being used as an argument -- not the other way around.

Slippery slope arguments assume A leads to D and discard any positive effects A could have out of hand. That's why they're a fallacy.

A slippery slope is a inclined surface, a place in space that once you are into, makes you transition very fast to a worse state, like your head hitting the floor at great velocity.

That is you can start well, in a good state, and transition to a much worse state over time. Your definition is also valid but not the only one way to interpret it.

It is an expression that has been used in literature for hundreds of years, not just in english. It is a metaphor.

Do you make youtube videos? I do, and I am very conscious of what I say on my videos because I can not say whatever I want.

I can not say words like "Covid"(extremely forbidden) "negro" referring to someone skin color or something the machine will mistake as me talking about people when I am really not.

And it is also getting worse and worse. In the old times you could say whatever you wanted on youtube, you could even post illegal things like films(posters could abuse). Now you can not, and it is going to become worse in the future and it is youtube who abuses.

The Trump and brexit events were extremely important. People did things that the status quo did not want. Before that you had people like Hillary Clinton or Bezos that believed that because they controlled most media, they controlled people as puppets.

They felt very confident that they could advance their globalist program without serious resistance by the people.

After that it became clear that they had to control Internet too. At least the mass media on the Internet that affects most people.

I don't say that as a Trump supporter, I am not even American, but I have eyes. I see media reaction when someone gets killed by police and the media silence when a Trump supporter gets killed by a democrat radical and it is just disgusting how sectarian they are.

Anyone who felt a jolt when I mentioned the T word should see a psychiatrist.

You can see that with Youtube content policing, Facebook and Google ads accounts, etc. Anyone whose livelihood depends on their services can lose their income at any time for no reason whatsoever. Even spreading the risk will not help much, it still means you might loose 30% or 40% of your income over night at any time thanks to a change of the algorithms. None of this is transparent and the companies will not explain anything, so you will not even know why or how to avoid this. You might claim it's anyone's own fault to depend on such companies, but there are many types of businesses where the dependence is unavoidable. These companies have quasi-monopolies in some areas.

AFAIK, the only remedy is to regulate algorithmic control of people and their content by laws more tightly. At least the appeals process needs to be more transparent and there need to be way more humans in the loop.

In this case it's the same, by the way. I guarantee you that many videos will be flagged falsely and many reputable Youtube content creators will be demonetized once again for nothing. This might be tolerable here and there, but the algorithmic oppression of people accumulates across all domains and also has a strong chilling effect.

In the long run, algorithmic oppression of people by a faceless company bureaucracy may turn out to be a bigger problem for society than what these moderation efforts are trying to solve. It creates strong and effective power structures that govern our lives, work in parallel to democratic power structures, and are not democratically legitimized at all. What's worse, the people who create them sometimes don't even seem to understand what they are creating, which is basically a recipe for creating systemic evil.

.. is part of the problem, IMO. That's how the bullshit gets propagated and amplified. Monetized videos, controversies generating comment wars etc.

This sounds sounds like a very good (discrete) idea to me, well worthy of a dedicated HN thread of it's own, something like "What are the plausible societal pros and cons of forcing(!) social media companies to expose the implementations of their filtering and recommendation algorithms? What bad and good may(!) come of such a policy change?"

I think it could be argued that the way we as a community go about discussing world events is suboptimal. As it is, a commonly recurring pattern (here and elsewhere) is that some singular event occurs, a news story gets posted, and then we have the same general discussions/arguments that have been had many times before (here and elsewhere, many of them decades/centuries old), just in a somewhat differing context. Within these discussions, a large number of very important philosophical perspectives on the particular incidents appear in the comments, but are rarely discussed in depth. And then, time goes on, we all go to bed after having "had our say", and wake up the next day to do largely the same thing again. Rinse, repeat, day after month after year after decade.

I wonder...if we A/B tested a new, experimental approach, where rather than the genesis or focal point of the discussion being a news article about a specific event, instead we chose an abstract, philosophical topic as the primary topic of discussion, and then people posted instances of relevant events, and discussed those events in the context of the main philosophical idea...might these conversations bear more fruit, or fruit of a different kind?

Going further with this idea, might it also be plausibly beneficial to have some sort of a modified version of the HN Guidelines in place for these types of discussions, in order to encourage certain types of thinking (open minded, non-axiomatic, exploratory, minimized criticality and dismissiveness), and discourage others (excessive certainty and materialism, etc)?

Does this sound like a generally good idea or a bad idea?

Yes, algorithmic flagging gets things wrong, but there's nothing new in this announcement unless one believes that antivax sentiment, unlike nudity, is something YouTube ought to be obliged to broadcast

I take a different view. We are actively having an open debate and that is a good thing.

YouTube is not part of our government, they are like a magazine or tv station of the past and they can and IMO have the right to choose what content they allow or disallow and this is totally fine and has nothing to do with free speech (in the legal sense)

Now if we past a law that stated I can not speak my mind about covid that would be a law that IMO violates the 1st amendment.

But what is happening today is not bad it’s just one company making a decision on it’s own.

A separate question for the legal system to probably decide is whether YouTube as part of Google is acting as a monopoly to abuse its power. But I do not think anything about YouTubes decision as a business to not allow certain content published is anyway a matter of our 1st amendment rights... hopefully my perspective isn’t too poorly received - but thankfully you can down vote me, or up vote me and I don’t have to worry about being throw in jail for posting - happy hacking

That’s it. No attempt to have a single source of authoritative information is going to work post-Internet. The cat is already out of the bag. This model of the world is outdated and needs to be put out to pasture.

I'm not disagreeing with you on an ideological level, but this solution is pie in the sky.

How do you propose this solution be enacted while the supporters it would need to come to fruition are actively being lobbied by the problem its supposed to solve?

It’s easy to forget that the modern Internet itself is only about thirty years old. We’re still at the very, very early stages.

I've watched the Internet grow and evolve into what it is and spent the majority of my free time participating in it from 1993 until today and probably until I die.

The thing is, the problem has always existed but its now being scaled up. There were kids pretending to be adults and puffing up their chests at the expense of decency. There was child porn. There were racists. There were pockets of criminals. There weren't many flat out idiots because using the Internet required at least a mononom of intellect to participate.

Yes, it's still early for the Internet, but America is just getting dumber while the Internet is getting easier and easier to use. How does it get better before it gets much worse?

Only early adopters use it > widespread usage > simplified, centralized solutions eat the usage market (FB, etc.) > the normal people learn how to be technical users, at least enough to go independent > decentralization takes hold. We’re now in between the last two steps.

Compare it to something like reading and writing or paper. Roughly the same process happened.

This is the million dollar question. For me I came to see how dogmatic ideas like the Intellectual Monopoly system are. How economic theories fall apart in the face of the gift of digital technology and it's zero marginal cost of reproduction.

I am deeply inspired by the writing and work of Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun.

How would this body be formed? What body currently exists that is completely unbiased?

There have been numerous examples of Western gov’ts outright lying to the more citizens, often for decades. That would be the official truth, with any dissenting opinions deemed “illegal”.

This literally sounds like 1984 and the Ministry of Truth.

Edit: replied to subcomment, not parent comment, very regrettable.

At the same time, no company should have the power to decide what content can be shared and spread.

It’s all of our responsibilities to take back the power we always had and give it back to individuals. The other their is through open protocols through decentralized / federated permissionless infrastructure.

If you have the means: Start hosting. Contribute (code, tutorials, docs). Spread the word. Contribute funds to projects. Answer support questions/GH issues/forum posts from people who are having issues.

When it comes to people you know and interact with, start with the “low-hanging fruit” (individuals who have skills/interest in technology or are already agreeing about the problem).

I used to be outwardly and loudly critical of the system and people supporting it, but that got me nowhere, just isolated. When I stopped all criticism and just started aligning my life how I would like others to live, I finally started to get somewhere.

No one doubts Alan Jones identity for example.

We've already gone down a very similar road once we we don't like where it leads. Turns out ignoring the 4th amendment didn't help us stop terrorists and now 20yr later the government is still ignoring the 4th amendment to our detriment despite the whole terrorism thing having mostly run its course and reached a steady state. Why will it be different if we take a similar approach to a different right?

EDIT: IMHO, it would be much better option to flag/warn that video as misleading and provide link to resources with correct information.

In this case, it seems pretty obvious that there aren't microchips in vaccines. I'm not even sure what those chips would do, or how they'd work.

But what if some day the government really did do that, or something else that seems ridiculous? We'll be censoring anyone who tries to tell us otherwise.

And 1 step worse: The government could order YouTube/etc to do that censoring, and it'll look like it's just their normal thing.

The problem with censorship is that legit and valuable free speech will eventually be restricted.

Claiming people believe there are microchips physically inside vaccines is a major distortion of what these people think. In fact even the Reuters article doesn't say that. It's the age-old tactic of making up something ludicrous that sounds vaguely like a group's concerns and then claiming they all believe it so they shouldn't be listened to.

What they are concerned about is the creation of a system that enables rapid marking of people to identify if they've had certain vaccines or not. Sometimes this surfaces as talk about "quantum dots" or "dot tattoos" which is a reference to research into a way to imprint codes underneath people's skin. The microchip idea comes from the fact that this is already done for animals (rfid tags).

This provokes concern in many people for similar reasons to the (supposed) Chinese notion of 'social credit': the point of tagging the population with a physical marker of compliance is to enable very efficient stripping of their rights if they haven't complied. Sort of a step short of imprisonment. For instance, some politicians already talk of blocking air travel for anyone who wasn't vaccinated (against many kinds of things).

Now if you trust vaccines, no problem. But scientists are busy setting fire to their trust in all sorts of ways so the population of people who don't trust them will only increase:

1. Rapid "moonshot" vaccine development programmes that are skipping the long testing process usually involved.

2. Rising awareness of how politicised academia has become. See the other story about Nature magazine.

3. A Swine Flu vaccine that caused neurological damage in a small number of cases (but Swine Flu hurt a tiny number of people too, so the cure was worse than the disease in this case).

4. Insistence on a waiver of liability for vaccine manufacturers.

5. Many examples of low standards or making contradictory statements about viruses and COVID.

6. Demanding that anyone criticising them is silenced.

And so on. The list could go on all day. Point is, it's entirely rational to be lowering trust in scientists at the moment, so any effective system of tracking and enforcement around their decisions is going to be legitimately controversial. You don't have to be a tinfoil hat wearer to observe that standards have been considerably loosened around vaccines this year.

This is the crucial comparison.

YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook do not promulgate free speech. They are driven by algorithms that prioritize certain information over others. Such algorithmic prioritizations are not platforms for free speech and removing harmful content from these algorithmcally-generated feeds is not the same as censoring speech in the domain of free discourse.

Given YouTube's algorithmically-generated feed, removing certain harmful content is more accurately identified as curation than censorship.

The definition of harmful content is already a tautology which belies horrifying implications because it puts agency of the reaction soley upon the "speech". It would mean that in Aparthiad contexts an interracial handshake would be responsible for a riot.

Why do people think this? A few selected anecdotes and some tiny numbers (1000 people liking a post talking about covid causing 5G? Tiny numbers)?

What is the end-game that is so feared?

If the people as a whole can't be trusted to make sensible decisions and judgements then abolish democracy and copy the Chinese system.

Or, if the problem is uninformed people, then adopt a representative democracy where a random sample of 1000 voters are chosen by sortition and metaphorically locked in a room with the candidates for the governing council for a month (as if they were a jury) after which they elect a handful to government.

First, neither copy the chinese system or vote by sortition are currently realistic alternatives.

Second, it's not like free speech exists in purely theoretical space. Free speech in an empty room is not interesting. Free speech before the press is not like free speech after. Free speech now is not like it was in the 90s. Youtube and fb genuinely created a lot more freedom of speech in practice. They also monopolize it.

Lets not pretend that there aren't costs, regardless of what way this happens.

That said, a world where the public, advertisers and politicians lobby a beseech youtube to restrict speech is a nasty one. This is going to be ugly.

I can see why that would help with corruption, but I’m not sure why it would help with a population being uninformed, let alone misinformed.

That's exactly what a bunch of serious and respectable people want to do: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid...

"In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."

This is what influential people in the US actually believe and tech policy people follow along.

Large issue is euphemisms we use and collective inability to call spade a spade. Misinformation about covid does not randomly happen because uneducated Johny randomly something something. It happens, because well educated people intentionally spread it as a way to acquire or keep power. It also happens, because Youtube algorithms are easy to use by smart educated actor in order to promote whatever that person want to promote. And the people who put time and effort into this tend to be overwhelmingly bad actors.

I watched "triumph of will" once and then I was getting holocaust denial videos suggested for months. I was not getting history or lectures tho. After a while that went down. Then, I watched some gaming videos and started to get such materials again.

That is to point out that for whatever reason, youtube itself is promoting these things. It is not "people in general", I sure as hell was not seeking these materials. And maybe if we have been able to admit out loud that it is not just some teenagers cosplaying white supremacists or stupid hippy moms promoting anti-vaccins, but instead well organized political groups pressing for own agenda, we would be better off.

Because current discussion about speech is absurdely naive.

With global climate disasters and large chunks of the population prone to tribal superstition looming, nearly everyone being spoonfed technology they don’t begin to understand much less have any ability to replicate, and the government of the global hegemon inches away from collapse into autocracy, people are afraid of dark ages, but most of them can’t quite articulate it.

Rome fell and a big part of europe and the mediterranean lost the ability to maintain cities many of which dumped 90% of their populations to the countryside. Specialization gone, most people were just doing subsistence agriculture. Literacy plummeted to almost no one outside a very very few people in monasteries.

This whole religious adherence to party aligned mythology about everyday things (say, vaccines) is pervasive in the western world, and it is not some surface defect, it’s a rot that goes through to the core.

But things have been pretty nice as long as almost everybody has been alive so the belief that everything will continue to be fine is about all that holds things together.

People don’t appreciate how precarious civilization is.

Social media is an effective tool which can be used as a weapon, but the problem isn't that Americans have effective weapons; it's that they're incentivised to use them against each other. The solution to me seems pretty obviously a return to federalism. It's the fact that there is only one throne that makes everyone fight for it with whatever is at hand rather than build things up locally.

The pessimist (or realist) in me tends to agree, that a fundamental shift occurred after the second world war. What exactly is the nature of this change is hard to say - something about the dominant ideology of the ruling class, the relationship of wealth, business, politics and governance - maybe.

At the same time, this period has been one of the greatest maturing and flowering of our collective global civilization. Not to go all Pinker ¹, but the optimist side of me wants to believe that the cultural and technological advances we've made have enough momentum to overcome the negative tendencies that are possibly bringing us to the brink of collapse.

¹ https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/international-poverty-line-ip...

Personally, I am afraid of very large media companies making AIs that have utility functions intended to change the behavior of humans without their consent.

I'm not nearly as afraid of the very large media companies doing this as I am of HUMANS taking the controls of such a machine and using it for that very purpose. Very large companies, AIs, nations are aggregates and don't inherently take wild radical positions.

Individual humans do. We're the random factor, the chaos feeding the genetic algorithm, we're supposed to get up to some crazy extreme stuff that will sink or float on the larger scale depending on how it affects society. But when we are able to amplify our individual whims to the scale of companies or countries, which is ALWAYS through using these utility functions intended to change the behavior of humans whether that's exploiting YouTube or radio, there's trouble.

I'm not nearly as worried about AI or aggregate entities like corporations. I'm worried about the existence of these utility functions, and before radio it was 'the broadsheets' and yellow journalism, and before then maybe it was nefarious clay tablets or papyrus.

Power corrupts, and individual whims aren't good models for healthy societies. We keep rediscovering this over and over, and sometimes the civilization collapses, and sometimes it doesn't. Here's hoping if we do get AI, it has some insights into this and why its own existence hinges upon not blowing up the underlying levels (of corporations, of individual people, of cells and the well-being of the individual people).

I feel like the 'thine arm/subgroup/demographic is unclean, cast it out and burn it cos it's eeeevil' is far more often an individual human perspective, amplified by these utility functions because somebody LET that human do that.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/aoa-4oa06241...

From that same link (demonstrating Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines; which is obvious given the high vaccination rates in the US):

"While the vast majority (82%) chose in favor of vaccines, 8% selected responses expressing serious doubt. An additional 9% said they were unsure."

Also:

"In a survey of 1,025 randomly sampled adults, 84% of respondents said they believed that it is extremely or very important that parents vaccinate their children"

"Additionally, 86% believed vaccines are not more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, whereas 89% said they are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of vaccines."

https://www.healio.com/news/pediatrics/20200116/faith-in-vac...

The poll showed that only 45% of Americans believe vaccines do not cause autism in children.

And as the link noted, measles needs a 95% vaccination rate to be stopped effectively.

Wow, I've never seen an argument for fascism so casually mentioned. I'm talking about 'abolish democracy'.

the NYT isn't highly likely to publish things that source to Russian propaganda ops, because they employ fact-checkers, care about pedigree of information, and change their editorial process in light of system failures. They get tripped from time-to-time, but the same trick doesn't usually work twice.

My relatives on Facebook? Not so much. Nor did Facebook (until recently) care to put an editorial eye to advertising as long as the money was green.

It is not a guarantee that a system structured like this is healthy for democracy, nor is it a guarantee that a democracy doesn't destabilize under it.

The people who lied us into Iraq?

In that case, they had multiple intelligence agency sources feeding them the same bad data, so their cross-checks failed. They've down-sampled the reliability of those sources in subsequent years.

The NYTimes role in society is packaging official narratives for mass consumption. Their MO is mindlessly repeating whatever the IC tells them. This is not a new concept [1].

[1] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/orwells-proposed-introduc...

And the alternatives are fantastic, for those who chose to use them intelligently.

> The difference between Orwell and Stephenson is that Orwell spent time as a police officer in Burma, and a solider in Spain. Stephenson does not understand the corrupting influence of power...

So you're saying Orwell has practical experience, such that one should weigh his musings on the subject more highly, while Stephenson is some rando expositing from a place he doesn't understand?

Fascinating. What happens if a bunch of people just disagree with your argumentum ab auctoritate and accept Stephenson's musings anyway? That would result in a bad outcome?

Should we have a mechanism in place to tilt people towards Orwell's interpretation over Stephenson (such as, hypothetically, putting one and not the other on the required reading curricula of schools)? If not, what happens if the Stephensonian interpretation of risks wins out?

That massive (and growing) unaccountable bureaucracy with secret law that types up the talking points the NYT helpfully launders into national security "journalism".

- Those who sacrifice freedom for security, deserve neither.

We shouldn't sacrifice freedom allowing platforms to censor people.

Annoys me the bullshit on youtube on all levels, but I don't want any platform removing the right of those people to say their ideas. People can have bots, but they will never be as strong as normal users. For example, 1mi bots giving likes to a video pro-nazism, this will trend and 1mi users will downvote it :) considering the platform that youtube is, 1mi real users is almost nothing.

Also someone disagreeing with you don't mean that this person is stupid/dumb/lack critical thinking, this is a quite common thing nowadays, consider everyone who think different to be wrong and dumb, instead of analysing that most of the things break down to social, personal and moral values, which differ from people, cultures, and so on...

So let the real democracy happen and downvote what you don't like or don't approve, upvote what you endorse, etc...

Perhaps if there was someone on the other side doing the same for the other party's candidate, we can find balance?

What is the outcome? Democracy?

People are passing judgment for, I think, fully rational reasons.

The Atlantic has had several good articles on how fundamental societal trust is dissociating in America. The election of Trump isn't the only aspect of it, but it did scare about half the country into thinking the other half isn't rational in the same way they are. And the feeling is mutual.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing...

But not the majority of our fellow citizens (by popular vote).

Though you could argue that a large % of democratic voter base (voters looking for handouts) is also uneducated.

If anything, it probably runs higher than it would have if he had been elected by a majority. People feel let down not only by their fellow citizens, but by the laws that govern who is president.

Humans, on the other hand, have proven themselves largely unprepared for the modern media environment. We have consumer protection laws about what can be put in our food, and I think it’s worth exploring what that would look like for media.

Personally, I come down on a power*responsibility compromise. Individual people should have the broadest possible freedoms, but:

1. Wealthy and powerful people have an unchecked ability to amplify their voices, and we should think carefully about how to manage that. Returning to a sane world of campaign finance law would be one example.

2. Media corporations have a lot of power, and many have abdicated the corresponding responsibility. I think we should work towards editorial standards, mandatory complaint resolution and correction at least for those masquerading as news.

3. Platforms like FB and YT have shown themselves capable of algorithmically maximizing engagement, and it seems that for a subset of their users the effect is radicalization and conspiratorial nonsense (Qanon, anti-vax, climate deniers, holocaust deniers etc.) I don’t have the solution, but a bit more gatekeeping against misinformation would probably help.

It seems obvious to me that humans… and I am one!… are not able to handle things that well. Often we have to look at outcomes to populations to really get a sense of what's going on, as we view things in this blindered way and are deeply persuadable in known, exploitable ways. And that becomes a meta-game: become immune to a particular crude argument, fall to a more multilayered argument, and so on.

A key factor here is this (in my opinion): conspiratorial nonsense is not nonsense. Even if it seems bonkers and useless, there's something about it that is serving a purpose, but it's very likely not the purpose that it 'says on the tin'. For instance, there is a great deal of 'nonsense' that exists for the purpose of goading humans on to acts of random terrorism, and for grooming humans to be an extension of an army from somewhere else. Building an army to destroy a country is a VERY high-value activity, but it's not done by showing up and going, HI! I represent the army of Kazakhstan! Please acquire a weapon and shoot your countrymen for me for the glory of country that is not you!

So it's done, by quite a few state and non-state actors, in different ways. And when you've got a global pandemic and the ability to propagandize your country's enemy and get 'em to normalize licking each others' nostrils… well, you do what you can.

Hence 'conspiratorial nonsense' toward nonsensical or nonexistent ends, that happens to fulfill a purpose other than what's argued by the conspiratorial nonsense. The key concept here is that it's possible to misinform on purpose towards a defined goal that's orthogonal to the apparent misinformation.

One VERY IMPORTANT aspect of this, as Facebook and Google have learned, is that if you're doing that and you have access to big data to inspect how your misinformation is affecting POPULATIONS where you can't directly get response data back from the targets, you can use the big data to ask questions like

"Which of these two arguments for hunting lizard aliens that are also pedophiles, most inclines the target towards murdering black people? Which accusation towards this political figure most inclines the target towards inciting civil war and overthrowing the government of the target's host country?"

And that's how it's done. Given sophisticated enough ability to interpret data, you can direct 'nonsense' VERY effectively towards explicit other goals which aren't hard to work out if you're not the target. You need the data, though, otherwise you're fumbling in the dark. Google and Facebook are complicit in this to the extent that they go, 'you gots the money, we gots the honey' and place themselves at the disposal of anybody wishing these services.

The right to freedom of speech seems to bear the cost of education. An educated person should be able to assess the things they hear and make their own choice on what to believe, uneducated people seem unable to do the same.

My view is that attempting to convert facts -- delivered by the scientific method -- to fiction by way of purposeful misinformation is a more corrosive form of censorship than showing the door to a comparatively miniscule number of who-knows-whos seeking to corrupt our agreed upon truths for their own benefit.

Then you simply don't know what the word censorship means.

You can either:

A) Paint over it.

B) Surround the entire space around the message with hundreds of other messages -- lies -- in the same style and color, designed to sway people to an opposing ideology.

The same effect has been achieved in both scenarios. Which is more insidious?

I think it’s worth thinking about this problem by comparing and contrasting social media to traditional public spaces (like a soapbox in a town square).

By comparing these two kinds of public spaces (ignoring for now the fact that social media is privately owned), one can start to identify the mechanisms in social media platforms that are enabling overwhelming bullshit and work to mitigate, modify, or eliminate those mechanisms.

For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the amplification and discovery mechanisms in any media platform (from print to TV/radio to social media) play a key role in the spreading of bullshit. For that reason, I like twitter’s moves to introduce friction into retweeting. Additionally I support efforts of the social media companies to defeat bot farms.

The thing is... solid medical advice does exist on YouTube, so it's not entirely unreasonable to go looking for it there!

"Just go to your doctor"

Yes well, a) that's not free in America while YouTube is, and b) your local doctor could have been bottom of his class, you have no way of knowing. It's like saying don't watch world class programmers on youtube, hire a local programmer instead.

So in the interest humanity and historical evidence, censorship is and will always be a bad idea. The best ideas will eventually win, as history has also shown us.

Source: US constitution, Venezuelan history, Romanian history, British history, Korean history, Vietnam history, Chinese history, Cuban history, Cambodian history, Soviet Union history, German history. That’s just a start.

Good moderation is large part of why this forum is so good in the first place. The history of the internet has shown us that unmoderated spaces turn into dumpster fires.

German history seems to be the classic example of an unchecked conspiracy theory doing massive damage. That is why holocaust denial was made illegal in much of Europe.

I am ignorant of most of the other histories. Would love to hear your take.

(Also as an aside, I upvoted you since I think you make good points and provoke an interesting discussion, even if we don't agree on everything).

Platform has a legal definition, which was litigated in the early 90s. The result was if you’re a platform you’re not legally liable for the content of your website. The legislation calls out that’s speech must be user generated and flow of ideas cannot be restricted unless they are already illegal (eg. how to make a bomb).

Publisher also has a legal definition, which social media companies certainly don’t want because then they’re liable for all content and can be regulated further. Actually these companies don’t want any regulation The business models will eventually come under attack due to overreaching privacy policies and general CEO autonomy.

I’d also like to point out there’s some incestuous situations going on between the staff of Facebook, Twitter and Democratic campaigns including Biden’s. If we’re honest with ourselves we know it’s highly likely collusion and back channels exist between the two. I can provide more information if you’d like.

In principle this sounds agreeable, in practice it is often not that easy because things get muddied fast as soon as politics are involved.

I'm very skeptical/opposed to this particular measure, and others like it, because well-intentioned people are also fallible.

Disclaimer: I work at Alphabet, but this is strictly my personal opinion.

I feel like regarding tech giants handling relatively unprecedented expansions of social media and broadcasting, it wasn't up to you whether politics got involved. As soon as third parties started to work out exploits to your conceptual system, ya got involved.

'The algorithm' has a lot to do with this, but at heart it's an exploit and not the algorithm itself. Until the algorithm is actually intelligent and can think about itself and what it's doing, you and the company you work for are exploitable. As such, you may feel democratization of media and the ability for individuals to broadcast and information-search is vital to societies and humanity as a whole, and you'd be right, but that's not what you're doing. So long as your work is exploitable in this way, you become partisan, you are just blind to WHO you are being partisan for. And we've seen some pretty wild consequences out of the range of possible outcomes this produces.

This is nothing new, look at who possess medias that most peoples read and trust every day.

It is naïve to think disinformation is something new, and oh, disinformation certainly doesn't apply to "ME".

Banning obvious bullshit? Like flat earth? Do you feel the need to ban that? I don't.

(Peoples) Wise or not wise enough to discern truth, you won't make anything better by tasking someone else to discern what is truth and not for others.

Sacrifice some liberty for security, and you will lose both.

Total censorship with total security isn't the answer. Total freedom with the total loss of truth is also not the answer. As anyone should expect, the ideal is not at either extreme.

Is it messy trying to sort it out, will mistakes get made, will some decisions make some people unhappy? Yes. But it's where we're at. It's the price we pay for living in a society that's nurtured fraud and money-driven nihilism for so long.

In this war for democracy, which side of the war do you think wants everyone to be able to access any information and which side do you think wants to control the flow of information?

How can we value each and every voter's input if we don't value their ability to filter for themselves what is true?

We're talking about communication platforms where politically motivated decisions are being made to filter out information that the decision-makers don't like, and the users are saying, "We don't want you to make those decisions for us."

But also think through my original point. Why should we value democracy, the notion that each person has valuable and necessary input in building a society, when we hand control of information over to the very few? Shouldn't we cut out the middlemen and just have our information overlords be in charge of creating and implementing all our policies? Why trust people to vote when we don't trust them to choose and evaluate information?

"misinformation" is indistinguishable from "thinks I think are false" which in turn is hard to distinguish from "things I disagree with".

Only if you believe the post-modern claim that there's no objectively verifiable truth and that all narratives are equally valid.

There is a huge difference between "vaccines contain microchips" and "water retains the essence of homeopathic ingredients" on the one hand and "COVID spreads through droplets" on the other.

EDIT: I do agree billionaires shouldn't be the final arbiter, though.

In the absence of the tech giants choosing what's permissible, you get different other billionaires who can define a benefit to pushing a 'you should drink bleach and overthrow the government' narrative, because THEY are not the 'you' referred to, plus it ain't their government.

Acting like that's an organic social narrative is malpractice.

a. there is objective truth

b. it's not a good thing for billionaires to determine what is censored

To me, there isn't an inherent conflict.

I think we (the collective) keep dancing around the issue. Essentially, perhaps it is time for advertising agencies and corporate users of social media to be regulated like news publishers. At least there, there's some expectation that they don't misrepresent facts. One could argue news regulation is also on the decline.

The next step is asking ourselves whether social media made everyone a "journalist" of sorts, and how that should be regulated. After all, taking on corporate entities alone wouldn't have stopped QAnon.

YouTube choosing what you can see is as far from democracy as it can get. Not sure how you get from that to saving "democracy".

> up to know they just raked in the profits and gave shit about anything else. Them now changing that is a good thing.

Censoring unpopular and controversial views on their platform makes it more attractive for advertisers, which is good for YouTube's bottom line. This action in no way indicates an renunciation of a profit motive.

To me, this is theoretically similar as if a massive video campaign was messaging you to drink bleach. I’m sure that sort of video is against YouTube’s terms of service — at least, I would hope that it is!

The difference is really that some lunatic could stand in Times Square and scream that we should all drink bleach. But in that public forum, no one would take them seriously, and plenty would deride them. But with a great production value, paid influencers, just the right wording and messaging, you can manipulate social networks into spreading very dangerous information and actually making people believe things that can kill them. I think that problem, gone unchecked, leads to serious consequences and it would be in the best interest of society as a whole to fix it.

Clearly, you’d need an arbiter that is immune to such influences. Someone who knows what’s really true and can sensor the misinformation despite its high production values. I think the interesting question is where you’d find such an oracle, and how you’d convince it to work for YouTube.

I would definitely agree that if all viewpoints except mine were eliminated the world would be a better place.

And up to now, Youtube and FB gained from contrversial content, not the other way round.

You are entitled to your opinion and to say it in public. You are not entitled to be protected from the social consequences. And if what you say is true, that this move drives the add revenue, that is only because people want to distance themselves from these views. Which would tell us something about public views. I just don't thin that is the case.

I agree but it's not selfless or altruism. In the EU they are one law away from being effectively shut down.

The EU commission is eyeing the behavior of social media networks for a while now and the increasing misinformation and radicalization of groups like white supremacists or QAnon pose a very real threat to democracy and society.

If the social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. don't do anything against this, the EU will make a law that will make the social networks check each and every post for unlawful content.

Since we've seen a considerable amount of what you get when somebody is able to pay YouTube, and pay Facebook, to specify what you're going to see, on a very granular and Big Data level, in a targeted way.

In a real and practical sense YouTube having access to extremely effective social media tools and just hiring them out to any bozo offering money, with no accountability for who's trying to accomplish what, is the thing that's as far from democracy as you can get.

I feel that the people most hot to argue for a 'unmediated' world, and most freaked out if this is challenged, are the people who are in fact putting a lot of time, money and effort into mediating and manipulating this 'unmediated' world to be unrepresentative of reality in a way that benefits them and their intentions.

Then if you do challenge them, they simply lie to your face and say it's all about freedom versus censorship… because to win, they need to retain the ability to mediate the world to their liking, and even to acknowledge that this is possible suggests the possibility that they are already doing it as hard as they can, and know it.

If you want to support it, you actually have to make an argument for it.

If you call up Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern in the middle of afternoon drive hour and he doesn't like what you have to say, he's going to hang up the phone on you (assuming you could get through in the first place). This is no different - google has absolutely no obligation to host your garbage on their site.

If you want to post conspiracy theories, go buy a server from dell, pay for a business line from your ISP, and setup your own site, and host your own content. If the content you're hosting violates laws, it'll probably get taken down.

You're free to say whatever you want, nobody else is REQUIRED to listen to you, host you, or advertise you and never has been. About the only way out of that box is if you can prove they were discriminating against you because you were a member of a protected class (in the US) and not because of the content of your data.

"I said some garbage on Rush Limbaugh's show, so he hung up on me"

"So then I put it on Facebook, but Facebook censored it"

"So then I put it on Youtube, but Google censored it"

"So then I self hosted, but then Cloudflare censored it"

"So then I hosted it out of my own house, but then Comcast blocked it"

"Oh well, I'm not in jail so that means I still have free speech I guess"

I would say the above are signs of a decaying democracy.

I will die of thirst though if every source of water has a megacorp in the supply chain that can cut me off from it.

Imagine a world where your tap water is ultimately sourced from Dasani. And imagine Dasani can cut off my water if I say bad things they don't like. That is the world we live in: s/tap water/information/g, s/Dasani/tech megacorps/g

To reach a significant audience on the internet, you must go through a tech megacorp at some layer in the stack. And that tech megacorp can decide to cut you off from the internet at their layer in the stack if they don't like what you are saying or if Twitter mobs put pressure on them to do so.

No it isn't. Again, you can rent a VPS for under $10 in almost any country in the world.

> To reach a significant audience on the internet

This is not necessarily true, but it isn't really the point. You can put stuff up and people can access it.

You are not entitled to maximum easy discovery. You are not entitled to be advertised and promoted to a significant audience. The internet is a pull medium not push. If people want to hear what you have to say they can.

I'll agree with your plan for banning "obvious bullshit" so long as I get to decide what constitutes "obvious bullshit". Don't like that idea? Then why should I like it when you get to decide? Or when some Google policy goon gets to decide? I never voted for you or for that policy goon.

Whenever you give anyone power to censor b"obvious bullshit", it takes a few milliseconds for "obvious bullshit" to become "political positions I dislike". That's how people work. The disruption to the free flow of information is more harmful than any amount of bullshit. Your "war for democracy" is in fact a war against democracy, since democracy is about building a distributed consensus about what constitutes truth, not about letting unelected censors control the public.

Anyone who tries to control what strangers say to each other is someone who wants to control your thoughts and rule over you. No thanks.

Social media is not some kind of existential problem. What you're claiming is a massive civilization-scale problem is what people claimed about the printing press. Oh no! Anyone can make a pamphlet! This terrible danger must be dealt with! We can't allow the bible to be published in lay people's language! They might misinterpret it if they can read it without the help of priests! Smash the presses! -- this is what people actually thought. Now we think this attitude is ridiculous, because it is.

The real danger we have right now is a few people using their influence over social media platforms to control public conversation and subvert democracy by manipulating the conversation. I am completely opposed to all SV attempts to decide for themselves what is true and what is false and censor eight billion people based on the result. No. They do not get to have that power.

Also, when FAANG eats the world, Google/Facebook's moderation team becomes a de facto arm of the local government.

The solution is, imo, to break those corporations up - to ensure competition and to break open these walled gardens which allow nonsense to thrive.

I would seriously hazard against any attempt to restrict individual freedoms regarding free speech. The US, for all its problems - is significantly better than many countries on earth in terms of the ability for any random citizen to say what they like without fear of retribution. Granting politicians and mega-corporations the right and ability to effectively negate entire sets of views and opinions will only ultimately benefit the worst people on earth.

It's a tricky problem but to my mind the issue is one of forcing capitalism to fulfil its promise; competition is the key to preventing tyranny in a capitalist system.

>>I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However...

The first spade is free speech itself. Neither the custom nor the law applies to YouTube. In theory, it's a private site that chooses what videos it shows. In practice, youtube is a newly powerful monopoly. Both YouTube and Alphabet. There's a tension here.

In 2020 reality, political freedoms such as speech, association and even religion are realized on Google, facebook and co. When a politician or activist speaks to voters, it's on youtube. Whether or not breastfeeding is obscene is a Youtube decision. This isn't absolute, but it is to a large and increasing extent true. Your freedom of speech is violated in all but the most technical sense when fb, twitter, and/or youtube shut your mouth.

Social media is not a market, or marketplace of ideas. At best its a strip mall where two jovial consortiums own all the stores. This is the place where people decide to vote for X, that the virus is a hoax, or that climate change is real. It's at the heart of freedom of speech.

The second spade you called out well. These sites are corruptible and corrupted. Malicious misinformation spreads well here. This is already causing societal harm. They did this.

Another spade is reality regardless. I'm pretty confident that more, less powerful players, open protocols and such would be serving us better. This wouldn't have fixed everything though. Shared narratives have to be enforced somehow: culture, religion, media. If everyone is on a different stream, the shared narrative is broken. This would probably be true regardless of monopoly, though I think the consequences would be less severe.

Shared narratives are not necessarily true. Truth is not necessarily known, or necessarily in Google's best interest at any given time. In fact, truth is expensive. Formal truth seeking systems are the legal system, scientific method, drug approval process...

Going down this path means that Youtube (also fb, twitter) will be deciding and implementing the shared narrative. Religion? How about cults? Fringe activists? How about fringey elected politicians.

The final spade is inevitabilities.

These aren't could bes. The really hot current issues (eg the pandemic) are also hot political and even religious issues. This isn't nudity, which works as a canary for freedom of speech. This goes to the heart of political life on day 1.

Gotta make the star wars warning. The galactic republic fell to raucous applause. Chaos, and the need to suppress it.

This has been the case for the last 100 years friend

> “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

...

> “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”

- Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927

Does this really come close to diagnosing the root problem? I am frustrated when I see this argument.

”Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.”

— Mark Getty

The root problem is that the Intellectual Monopoly system destroys the potential for democratic use and understanding of protocols - as well as everything else. Intellectual Monopoly means we are kept stupid because there are gatekeepers - usually people belonging to families with inherited wealth. The idea of the ‘Intellectual Property system’ is the newest means of production, whose function is to enclose and monopolize ideas, which should in fact belong to all children of the world. Especially when digital breaks the rules of economic theories, with it’s near-zero marginal cost of reproduction. So the modern Bougie both 1) parasitically extracts economic rents for something that has been made artificially scarce in the first place, as well as 2) unorganically stemming the rate of innovation - setting a limit on deeper cooperation and coherence/alignment, and harmony. But this reality is obscured by the cultural myths of Magical Voluntarism, Meritocracy and more. We are gaslighting people by telling them they have ‘mental health issues”, when in fact the system has evolved to put a limit on their learning and growth, and which sucks them dry.

We need to get rid of closed corporate supply chains and move to Sensorica-type Open Value Networks that use the Resource Event Agent (REA) accounting system. There’s people working on implementing this using Holochain’s distributed data-integrity engine.

In using such a system (compared to an internal corporate network), we transparently measure the actual material scarcity of the wonderful resources our Mother Earth provides. And then we can both 1) democratically decide who gets to use which resources (and where, when, how and why, etc.), and 2) we don’t have to use the Intellectual Monopoly system to pretend that having a monopoly is what is needed for successful innovation.

What this leads to is a symphony of scalar gift economies.

We owe it to ourselves and our children.

What do you see? What's high(er) on the priority list for you?

> Social media is currently poisoning our country

What IP has to do with a kid joining extreme right (or left) groups, higher rates of teenager suicides and people believing anything you put in front of them?

All these happen because of social media, at least in part, and I do believe there is another kind of problem at the root. But I cannot associate it with IP. That's it.

It's a bit boring when you say you disagree but put forth no alternative argument.

I did said that I cannot understand the relation between social media problems and intellectual property. This was a chance for you to explain better (I you were willing to). But... nevermind.

I think it is summed up well by this:

"According to Bauwens and Franco Iacomella, late capitalism is beset by the twin structural irrationalities of artificial abundance and artificial scarcity:

1. The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance. We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system.

2. The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits."

Source: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/artificial-abundance-and-arti...

Does that help you understand my argument?

History shows this to belief to be incorrect, and instead shows that any central power holding this belief will eventually commit terrible crimes against humanity.

A small group of "intelligent" people can not possibly out-compute billions of humans' brain processing power.

I think a lot of people are too overwhelmed by the minutia of navigating their own stressful lives to handle a deluge of lies designed by expert propagandists to be easier and more appealing for them to consume than the truth.

The difference is that these aren't leaflets being dropped from the sky on a village of a few hundred people. These lies that span our entire country and they are coming from people that have access to analytical data which allows them to observe how their lie is being received so that they can refine their messaging immediately.

There has never been a propaganda delivery system like this before. History isn't going to be useful here.

The people on facebook get weak waves of brainwashing targeted via algorithm; people in universities get a more powerful version of the same.

Is it an actual threat to your right to vote? Or is it just a threat to people voting the way you like? In which case isn't the answer just to put out equally salacious information in the opposite direction? That seems like the democratic option to me.

then look up cases in history when such a vote took place.

free speech here is used as a tool to convince people to vote against democracy (and/or free speech itself).

To be blunt, the only time I noticed people complaining about it was when Trump got elected. Barack Obama if I remember was actually praised for his usage of social media and targeting. A lot of this anti-social media is a reaction more against him than anything and the left is trying to lock things down to prevent a Trump from ever happening again.

What a comically cliche and stereotypical error that people keep making. 20 years ago it was the Bush and Cheney saying the same thing. Now its the liberals saying that the "poor, ignorant masses" need to be saved from themselves. For the record, I'm also a liberal, but old school liberal, not the contemporary liberal that eschews giving the same rights to those that I disagree with.

Who gets to decide what gets sacrificed? You? What happens when The Other Side gets control? The laws that protect their free speech are the exact same laws that will protect our rights when the opposition gets control.

Never, ever, ever mess with the ideals of Free Speech. No one is smart enough or uncorrupt enough to navigate that properly. The only thing that will save us as a society is completely unadulterated free speech. What we do as a society is to educate as best as we can and let the chips fall where they may. Which is hard, because we have the worst levels of education in developed countries, so we are reaping what we sowed for the last few decades. But basically it's herd immunity for information.

I really want this to be true, but I have doubts. Do you know any resources that expand and elaborate on this point?

[0] https://youtu.be/ZggCipbiHwE

This is only true for censors. There is no such thing as a "right in itself," there are things we agree will be rights, and that we choose to guarantee. You choose to not guarantee freedom of speech, and rationalize it as some sort of natural law.

Poisoning how? Can you be specific? What impact are we seeing outside of social media that can be directly attributable to what happens online?

For one, while the scale of information is at a new level than in the pre-internet era, I don't think the fundamental lessons from the Renaissance or the Enlightenment change because of that. This "I hate it but it's justified because of dire circumstances" position is not new, and has, as we learned from the above, been the primary tool of abuse by totalitarians and tyrants. Forgetting those lessons and falling for the same trap again is naive at best.

Second, any discussion on this topic inevitably brings out everyone shitting on the most obvious surface issues as brought to the mass conciousness by the mass media, but almost never do I see discussion about nation states, corporations, military, and other non-individual actors and their actions in this realm, which means to me either people are ignorant of this, or they are purposfully omitting them. Sockpuppetry and other fine tuned military psyop techniques are at play and if they get ignored what will happen if the pro-censorship people get their way is they will silence individual voices but end up doing almost nothing to stop the more sophisticated and much more dangerous things going on. I'll know I've shown up for a good conversation when it isn't me who is bringing up Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays, operation mockingbird, the church commitee, sockpuppetry, OCA (online covert action), media conglomerate ownership, etc.

Third, I think the claims that "this is a fight for democracy" are misguided, and likely to be abused in the search for justification of the censorship push. To me it's just another "we have to stop the terrorists!", a lie which I experienced the real consequences of in the form of war, one the country has never recovered from in the realm of freedoms and rights. Lies we now know were about control and not about protection.

I'm telling you now, so please listen, on this topic, this is a patriot act moment (decade). Please, please don't fall for it, and have the courage to allow people not just to speak their minds, but as RMS talks about, read what they wilt, as it's just as much about the freedom to read as the freedom to speak.

As for the particular topic dejour, if you want some credible reporting that slightly bucks the mainstream narrative, I suggest Whitney Webb[1][2] as a good journalist doing this work. I've been consistently impressed at not just her scoops and insights, but her willingness to say "I'm not going to speculate, lets stick to the facts." when being interviewed.

1. https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/whitney-webb/

2. https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb

Our common, absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment dates only to the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling in 1969. If we didn't have conservative presidents unbalancing the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative justices, we might have a Supreme Court willing to re-evaluate the First Amendment's applicability in light of widespread hate speech. But alas, this Is Trump's America...

Now, it seems to not work. It is patently the case that a lot of people simply cannot think.

One issue is that there's too much noise, as you mention. Money comes into it as well.

But underlying that is a lack of education. Western European constitutions tended to be written just about during the early industrial age, with updates up to about the mid 20th century.

That world is gone, but it left a lot of baggage for the world we live in today. In the old world, you had one chance to be educated, and it tended to be for a short period. Let's not forget that this was also a highly polarized world, where kids needed to be told which side of the great struggle between ideologies they were meant to support. So it's not as if we had a world of free thinking before the current abyss was reached. But importantly this world, especially in the West, also pretended that everyone was free to speak as they liked. We did educate a few people in how to think critically, but most people just got told what to think. If you ever heard your gran spewing out some pnemonic like ROYGBIV or the times tables, you know what I mean. As soon as you ask a question that is slightly inquisitive, there's no answer.

We had authorities back then too, and the system kept them on a pedestal, to make it easy for everyone to think as they were supposed to. The authorities got all the air/paper time, but also they made sure that the Overton window was kept a certain size.

Now there is so much airtime that everyone can have a say, and it turns out a large number of people simply can't think for themselves, because school is still pretty parochial. "Learn your times tables, here's your new opinion about helping the planet". (I don't hate the planet, and I agree with some of the things they tell the kids, but the way I see schools talk about it... it isn't thinking, it's indoctrination.) For an example, when I'm on FB looking at the US system, some older person will inevitably say "You kids don't know anything, we have a Republic not a Democracy, each state gets 2 senators". Which completely misses the point of discussing whether that's a good idea.

School never taught people how to think critically. The closest we came to it (I did the IB Diploma) was a bit of math and science, and only the fortunate ones figured out that it's not about learning a bunch of facts, it's about how humanity came to learn those facts, and how we could potentially learn more. Nobody examines you on "how would you find this out" because it's hard to fit into the industrial school system. I'm good friends with a statistician, and he says even phd folks have problems in this area.

What I see online is this world where a lot of people are simply trying their way at thinking critically. A lot of stuff reminds me of high schoolers at debate club. There's this void into which you put conspiracy theories, and people try their way at arguing one way or the other. Only thing is, they are adults with the right to vote, and with little guidance. In a way it's funny, like that flat earth documentary where the people actually buy a gyroscope and actually try to measure the flatness of a canal.

So what should we do? There's no satisfying answer. Democracy was thought up by some men-of-letters who didn't think most people should have a say. I'm not an expert but it sounds they only thought smart people should have a say. It would be sad if the only way to move forward is to beat it into people what they are supposed to think, or who the authorities are, because ultimately we want reason to be the authority, not specific people.

I think it's important to think about what the actual purpose is of the rights that we value. The right to free speech is simply a shortcut to a more fundamental right to allow people to live freely without undue influence from others. It may be that the absolute right to free speech might not be the best way to achieve that.

You are asserting a series of very controversial points here:

1) Some rights are more important than others.

2) Positive rights can override negative rights.

3) 'Living freely without undue influence from others' is more important than 'the right to free speech'.

Which philosophical or moral framework are you using? This may be compatible with utlitarianism and Rawlsianism (though you'd have to do the numbers on the long-term impacts, not just your short-term goals), but I'm not sure how other ethics would support it.

Now take the example of promotion of terrorism - it's possible to argue that by allowing someone to post certain types of messages to a group on Facebook, they are creating an undue influence on the people in that group. For example by asking his followers to reject the views of outsiders (a common tactic in many religions, cults and conspiracy groups) a terrorist could be argued to have taken the freedom to hear other viewpoints away from his followers.

Now you can of course say that any terrorist or religious or cult leader is acting within a system of free speech - no one has technically had their freedom taken from them. That is true, but the reality of how humans choose who and what they listen to create the same effect as if they had lost those faculties.

I am not sure how you would define your 'undue influence' test, as it seems internally inconsistent:

>"For example by asking his followers to reject the views of outsiders (a common tactic in many religions, cults and conspiracy groups) a terrorist could be argued to have taken the freedom to hear other viewpoints away from his followers."

Do you see the inconsistency here? You are looking to forcibly silence one group, so they can listen to 'outsiders'. From the other side, it would look like you're the one advocating in favor of an even more extreme 'undue influence'.

I can see why you think there is an inconsistency here but I don't think there is.

Most people would say that the right to free speech includes two parts. Firstly we have the right to say what we want, to express those ideas to others and to be able to reach others without being censored. Secondly we have the right to hear the ideas of others without them being censored by the government. The first part of this right allows us to change and hopefully improve the world around us. The second part of this right allows us to use the best information available in order to lead the best life that we can. Free speech is the best tool that we know of to achieve these outcomes but it is still simply a means to an end.

When I give the example of a terrorist leader influencing his followers, I am trying to give an example of someone who uses the first part of the freedom of speech to improve the world around him (in his opinion) but who takes away the second part of the freedom of speech from his followers. That of course depends strongly on whether or not those followers would be able to lead better lives outside of his influence. It's a very fair argument to make that we as a society cannot know for certain whose ideas are right or wrong and therefore there is no kind of censorship of ideas can be justified. One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter etc.

As another example, imagine a scientist who is interested in the genetic differences between races. He may decide based on years of research to conclude that one race has a genetic advantage over another and present the evidence that formed his conclusion. However, being a scientist, he would be open to different interpretations of that evidence and accept new evidence that may alter his conclusion.

Alternatively a racist keen to promote his race as superior to others may present the same conclusion, but present it in a way that discourages critical thinking or alternative interpretations. He may encourage those who listen to reject the views of others as biased. His followers would become closed to the new evidence. This doctrine could be considered a violation of his follower's free speech right to use the best information available in order to improve their lives.

As with other freedoms we often decide to restrict them as soon as they limit the freedoms of those around us - for example, you are perfectly free to sing loudly in your own house during the day, but as soon as you start to disrupt the sleep of your neighbours when you practice your songs at 3am then you should have that freedom limited.

In the same way, it could be argued that we should allow people the freedom of speech only in so far as it doesn't limit the freedom of others to benefit from that same freedom. In a world where people can be deceived or oppressed purely by speech alone, you have to consider when and how it should be limited. In an absolutely ideal world, we would make no topic of speech off limits - we would simply rely on people's education and critical thinking abilities to allow them to make the correct choices. However, in the real world, many individuals such as children cannot be trusted to think critically, or not to be deceived by misinformation.

To bring this back to the original query - what are your thoughts on the UK and German government approaches to free speech - my view is that our governments have absolutely no way to control how ideas are presented - they cannot ensure that ideas such as differences between races are considered in purely scientific context. They cannot control how someone may use that information to cause harm. Their ultimate goal is to prevent people from being harmed by these bad ideas but since they have no ability to control how someone presents their ideas, they fall back to censoring the ideas themselves. That is not to say I necessarily agree with this policy - but if you consider how simply limiting certain ideas can increase the freedom of those who might hear them, it's possible to see some kind of justification.

My view is that government authority is at its perigee when it comes to free speech, and that any regulation is both problematic and suspect. This stems from Huemer's convincing arguments in "The Problem of Political Authority".

If you've been found not guilty of a crime in the US and admit to it afterward, you cannot be prosecuted again by protection of Double Jeopardy, correct?

Is that not the same thing as saying some rights are more important than others?

And is (2) and (3) not just variations on (1)?

I would say that (2) and (3) go further than one. You could say that they are subsets of (1).

I was thinking, for example, one person's right to freedom from violent crime over another person's right to not be put on trail again for the same crime.

> I would say that (2) and (3) go further than one. You could say that they are subsets of (1).

Agreed.

I would say there is a moral duty not to commit violence against others, and there is a moral right to defend one's self, but I don't see how you really guarantee "right to freedom from violent crime", so it really seems more like a dubious promise. This may be a consequence of my general skepticism of positive rights.

The US version of freedom of speech was created based on personal experience with the British model. The American version is broad and almost absolute. The British model was a document that said you had it and a crown that would execute you or take your property for your words (usually when those words were against the crown).

Freedom of speech is fundamental to freedom of conscious, which is different than "live freely without undue influence from others". I'm very happy with American style freedom of speech, where the cure to speech you don't like is more speech instead of jail and violence.

However, if you're a communist or an ISIS sympathizer or want to publicly display some nipples you won't necessarily have more free speech in the US than in Germany.

Philosophically, I'm in a weird place right now to be honest. If you told me that our country was going to round up all propagandists, science deniers, and white supremacists and throw them in jail based on hard evidence of purposeful misinformation or credible threat -- regardless of how those things are defined and by whom -- I think I would respond, "k"

I acknowledge that I would be resolute in lazily ruining people's lives based on a perceived threat to the greater good out of some longing to be bored again. That's scary to me.

I'm a nerd, wholly driven by logic (to this point), and I can feel the boundaries of its apogee being prodded. It's not just the country that's sick -- my ideologies are also under the weather.

The tl;dr answer would be that personally, I'd be fine with banning Holocaust denial or the promotion of terrorism because at the end of the day, I'm just a everyday liberal software engineer. Neither of those bans would ever apply to me.

That is, unless someone decided to attack me with false or shaky accusations. Therein lies the problem, eh? But what's the alternative? There's no winning.

"Neither of those bans would ever apply to me" is a pretty revealing statement. In fact, it's almost so perfectly comical that I would give way better than even odds that your post was a parody if someone just read it to me out loud randomly.

This term itself is bunk. Part of science--science being imperfect and reliant on experimentation--is arriving at contradictory results. It is a natural part of the scientific process and is codified in the scientific method.

What is the lesser evil here? Are some scientist so beyond reproach that any incongruent findings are illegal? What if they're right? What if they're wrong but there was no intent to mislead. What if the authority that anoints untouchable scientists is compromised or otherwise acting in bad faith?

Nothing good is going to come from giving credence to a ridiculous notion like "science denier."

Ironically the former seems more prevalent than ever with every nutjob on social media voicing their opinions, while Trump has been systematically eroding the latter with his "fake news" campaigns and reporter biases.

As much as I disagree with Trump, the news orgs have done that to themselves. And I'm not talking about crap like Fox News

— Mister Gotcha (https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/)

However, a war for democracy - democracy is about what the people want, not what the self appointed overseers want. Unfortunately if the majority want to indulge in corrupt thinking then that's democracy. That's how you end up with Trump.

If you want to fight for democracy then you have to let people express themselves. Free speech is the cornerstone of democracy so a fight for democracy is a fight for free speech.

What you seem to be asking for in terms of sacrifice is an authoritarian intervention where we appoint people to determine what is truth and ban alternative thinking. This obviously is just as bad as what is going on now. Once you have the truth committee in place you can predict where that goes once "misinformation" is under control. Start with enforcing scientific truths, and then leaders will abuse this power to further their own truths. Imagine corporations lobbying the Department of Truth.

We are fked for now. I imagine a lot more pain and difficult change is ahead of us. I lament for pre-internet times. I used to champion the idea of the internet giving equal platform for all but I never foresaw the internet being such a huge part of everyday life, and with that comes the good and the bad of humanity.

The 2020 US elections are a storm coming at us, and no one knows just how bad the west will be ravaged after it's done.

A certain Philadelphian would say your deserve neither.

If it is the case then you have two options, ban YouTube or add more government regulation.

Let them, with the poison, regulate themselves doesn’t make sense if you agree with that premise except if you think some poison is ok.

The reaction is based on unsubstantiated axioms. Does COVID-misinformation do significant damage? I don't think so. Are there concrete examples?

Information gets censored, while simultaneously political information gets censored on Twitter because it implicates a presidential candidate. The reason is that it is information obtained by a hack. Good for democracy? A form of government where voters should hold representatives accountable? This is not a Trump endorsement but I feel driven to state the fact.

> Truth, facts, and hoping that people can apply logic to find their way to them isn't enough anymore and the people exploiting this advantage are getting better at it.

Again, I don't think so, are there concrete examples where this happened? And if so, an advertising company which has some easy ways to distinguish itself by removing unpopular opinions (yes, they are actually unpopular)? It doesn't really make sense to me in any way.

Who are these manipulators? Putin? Trump? Cambridge Analytica? Communists? Capitalists?

Where do we actually see dangerous misinformation? The worst decisions are made from fear and I believe your point of view adds to panic reactions.

> say whatever we want, regardless of our status or wealth. This has been corrupted.

Who do you think would would be able to speak freely if you put constraints here. It won't be low status or low income people.

Disinformation on the internet is not a real threat. Not even compared to Nigerian prince scammers. Not having a authoritative voice might look scary, but it is actually a good development. Otherwise I would suggest church or something with more rigid believe systems.

It's not that the masses are dumb or smart. The few deciders from Youtube are not truth dispensers that we should all trust above all else.

Do I need to mention the "kicking babies out of incubators", or the "Iraq has chemical weapons" bits?

Do you honestly prefer to give the manufacture of consent machinery to the exact same people that had it before hand? The very reason why people don't trust the media is because the old "guardians of the news" thoroughly failed at their supposed mission

But aren't Youtube doing this specifically because of pressure from government?

No, more like reducing risks to their brand. Covid is historic and will soil the public image of all these ones whom don't take it as the public health hazard that it is

YouTube is simply minimizing brand risks which can very easily escalate into costly legislative fights, therefore they are maximizing profits on an uncertain time

They decided this move is less damaging to them than not doing it

If your mode of government can't withstand fake twitter bots, you should probably just toss it and start over with something else.

place this within the flow of information or at the intake of the government, take your pick. but it's obvious to me that democracy/universal suffrage gives incentive to actors (both foreign and domestic) to wage a mind-control war against the population.

if people are legitimately willing to question something as foundational as free speech, they should really consider the other parts of the foundation too.

Think about this: would you rather have the power to decide what speech you allow in your house, or would you rather the government decide for you? Because those are really your choices.

People will always have that power, at least at a technical level, but they should be discouraged to use it.

Really the example chosen was harmless - what makes the bullshit believed isn't plausiblity but because /they want to believe it/ and you cannot censor the inner desires, fears, and self-justifications. But the facts don't stop being true even if they believe the bullshit. That is what makes successful rationalizations so dangerous as reality comes home to roost as they insist it is safe to play in the street because cars always swerved out of the way before.

Really

__Any__ qualified individual/institution that deviates from the "authority" falls under this guidance. That means no dissent is tolerated, regardless of qualification of the source.

Authoritarianism is authoritarianism.

> The ability for one person to amplify their voice or ideas via hundreds or thousands of bots, paid assholes, and gullible people who lack the capacity for critical thought is a problem. It's a big problem.

The problem is, actually, "gullible people who lack the capacity for critical thought". It doesn't really matter if it is "one person", or a tightly knit group, or even one's own government.

> The ability for one person to amplify their voice or ideas

A wonderful ability, and a cherished Human Right.

> Truth, facts, and hoping that people can apply logic to find their way to them isn't enough anymore and the people exploiting this advantage are getting better at it.

That is your opinion, and imo highly likely not even an original opinion. Where did you first read that "truth, facts, and [logic] isn't enough anymore"? It a very 'interesting' meme, don't you agree?

Since you can't wave a magic wand and expect people to get smarter in the matters of public health, you have to come up with a solution that works for todays populace. IMHO the only solution is to artificially amplify the voice of experts. Yes, some may call this "gatekeeping", but yeah we don't want to give equal time to crystals and homeopathy as we do to established accepted science.

There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion as “officially correct science”, YouTube is seriously damaging humanity.

Logic would dictate that a novel virus -- novel in that we don't know everything about it -- is a threat to the survival of our species as a whole until disproven otherwise and that we should collectively do everything that we can to minimize its spread.

What I know to be true is that to curb the infection rate, we should stop spitting in each other's mouths. Yes, there is science at the base of that assertion, but mostly it's just common fucking sense.

If you can tell me how basic common sense is being subverted on a massive scale without the use of a platform of social manipulation, I'm willing to hear you out.

I’m strongly on the Swedish/Trump side here. We know that the virus is practically harmless for youth and young adults. If immunity persists, we should let them get infected ASAP while protecting the old/vulnerable. If immunity fades, then waiting for the vaccine is pointless anyways. As a young person, I won’t be taking the vaccine anytime soon anyways, not because I have anything against vaccines, but because I have many doubts about barely tested drugs in general (I’ll take it after it’s been tested for a few years).

But hey, say this on YouTube and I’ll be banned!

It could be invisibly weakening your lungs just enough that a flu can come through and kill you.

I would suggest a deep dive on mercury poisoning, radiation poisoning, lead poisoning, asbestos, and whatever other reminders you may find throughout history that assuming you know what nature is up to without the benefit of lengthy scientific review never turns out well for the cocksure.

And say we get a vaccine next year. Don’t you worry that if we relax lockdowns, we’re just gonna trigger the next devastating virus?

Let’s face it, life is a risk, and we accept a certain amount of elevated risk in exchange for comfort/utility (e.g. unprotected sex, industry-produced food, driving). This virus seems in line (at least for young adults). So the only real risk here, is government repression.

Seeing the downvotes, I suppose the majority here disagree with the statement. But at least the comment is still readable/visible. I think it's healthier for public discourse to have differing sides and points of view expressed, to argue in a good sense of the term, by logic and evidence, to hopefully arrive at some common understanding.

"Fact checking" and judgements of "misinformation" are necessary, I can see, but a question remains - who checks the fact-checkers, and judges the censors?

I don't trust Google to be a neutral party in such decisions - maybe in this particular case they're right, but we shouldn't depend on a for-profit corporation to be a trustworthy judge of anything in general.

Do they have the right to ban whatever they see unfit on their platforms? Yes, I think so.

To not saturate the healthcare system.

> practically harmless

We still don't know the long term effects of the disease, or please define the term "practically harmless".

> If immunity persists... If immunity fades

So you want to expose an entire healthy population to a deadly virus and stop looking for a vaccine based on a couple of "if"?

> But hey, say this on YouTube and I’ll be banned!

Saying it here wouldn't get you banned (probably) but your comment will probably go grey (whenever you care or not).

This is demonstrably untrue. There is measurably more bullshit on Facebook groups than there is coming from the WHO and other institutions.

They did a horrible job that has cost many, many lives. I've been in Taiwan and was gritting my teeth while diffing what they were saying vs local reporting from December through March.

I'm not sure what one would expect from an organization that voted in a director general with this track record: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-dire...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/coronavirus-sp...

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳.

There is nothing false or misleading, and they updated the public as new information came to light.

I can't emphasis enough how correct this behaviour is for a scientific organisation.

And for the sceptics who will claim China was covering something up: why didn't they shut down Wuhan until 23 Jan?

Their co-lead on COVID-19 even went so far as to hang up on a journalist[2] who asked about Taiwan.

If this is your idea of "correct behaviour" for a scientific org, I cringe to imagine your vision of a poorly run one.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi....

[2] https://youtu.be/fASh2_RzMuE

Your link says (about the Dec 31 email): "Public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease. However, because at the time there were as yet no cases of the disease in Taiwan, we could not state directly and conclusively that there had been human-to-human transmission."

That's no different to what China or the WHO were saying in this timeframe. The constant "no confirmed human transmission" were because everyone was watching for it.

Again, there is no evidence China hid anything here, and Taiwan doesn't say anything different.

Here's more background:

Dr. Li Wenliang's email warning colleagues about the outbreak was sent on December 30th. Multiple Taiwanese doctors were working in Wuhan at that time. Taiwan's very early and very small outbreak was from people evacuated from Wuhan. The CDC warnings weren't about what was seen in the Covid positive evacuees in Taiwan. The warnings were based on direct experience in Wuhan and they did suggest human-to-human transmission.

There was no hard proof, but there was a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Yes, it's possible Taiwan's CDC was overly suspicious due to memories of how SARS was covered up in 2003. However, given the way epidemics spread, the wiser course is to take circumstantial evidence of transmission very seriously.

I agree with this entirely. But I don't think there is any evidence that the WHO - or China - thought otherwise.

I'd note that the WHO bulletins from both Jan 5[1] and Jan 12[2] mentioned "Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported." (Jan 12, Jan 5 was similar).

Now this turned out to be wrong, but that doesn't indicate a cover-up. As your link from Taiwan said, no one definitively knew.

I'm very aware of the messages (not emails) shared by the doctor. I know he was forced to retract them by the regional government, and later exonerated by the central government. I think the dates here are important - as you mentioned it was Dec 30 he sent them, and by Jan 20 the central government had taken over. I do think the Wuhan regional government did try to minimise news of the outbreak, and I think criticism of that is fair - but needs to be tempered by acknowledgement that the central government acted relatively quickly and didn't try to hide things.

I think it's likely that external pressure from Taiwan, Japan, Korea and elsewhere made it clear to the central government that they needed to intervene.

[1] https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk...

[2] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...

The WHO is a politically captured organization lead by a man who covered up three separate cholera outbreaks in his own country. I have little respect for or interest in them.

They were talking about it a lot then: they had daily situation reports on the WHO website. I know because I was reading them!

Ok then!

There’s a lot of alternative sources, including actual doctors, you don’t get to pick out only the lunatics to strenthen your point.

It is still not possible to tell whther the Swedish way was the bast way or not. Lockdowns worked in the early days, the goal was to avoid overloading hospitals. Stuff like SARS and MERS didn't spread by planes to a large extent, did they? So not banning them kind of made sense, until people learned more and their opinion changed.

Lockdowns helped halt the spread when the virus wasn't already everywehere, at least much better then they would now where the virus has spread across the globe, more or less.

And just yesterday, Germany and France reinstituted lockdowns. Things change, and I'd rather listen to people who change their minds with changed facts instead of broken clocks that a right twice per day.