There have always been limitations on free speech, especially when it presents a danger to others. That’s exactly what the talking heads are doing, and their speech absolutely should be limited.

But as with so many harmful things, we humans tend to only be good at reacting to immediate threats while ignoring those that kill us slowly. Think dietary decisions.

If you call for violence, you get in trouble, but if you spend months pushing propaganda meant to inspire violence, you get away with it. We’ve got to recognize the cumulative effects are the same and react accordingly.

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/media

I was going provide a long list of specific examples but I am very skeptical it would have any effect, I'd rather not waste my time.

What you've now basically claimed, is that none of these protests have any legitimacy - violent or not. What you've explicitly claimed is the notion that police don't disproportionately act violently towards minorities. Why do you say BLM is built on disinformation?

Edit: there is just footage of the Paris protests thrown in there for good measure? Do you even know why people are protesting in Paris right now? Come on, man, I'm willing to look over your sources but don't just throw someone's twitter profile at me, shrug and go: "If you don't believe this then clearly nothing will convince you."

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793#sec-2

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-n...

Advocating violence is not.

Well in effect QAnon is probably spreading crazy shit like this, but QAnon is way way more fringe than the current "won't-admit-Joe-Biden-won" movement, which comprise a lot of the "R"-branded people, a lot of them are even allowed on Fox News.

The President wants his voice to be the loudest, most trusted voice.

The President wants to discredit any dissenting voices.

The President only wants your vote to count if you voted for him.

If you are against censorship, how can you stand behind such a President, who wants to control the messaging that every citizen hears and believes, and whether your own voice even counts?

Who here thinks more people get political information from President Trump than get political news from YouTube?

> If you are against censorship, how can you stand behind such a President

If you are against censorship, how can you be against censorhip of the president and his supporters?

> Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal, fake, distort, or falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the public might receive through news outlets. In the absence of neutral and objective information, people will be unable to dissent with the government or political party in charge. The term also extends to the systematic suppression of views that are contrary to those of the government in power.

I'm against political censorship most of all. I don't enjoy the current state of things in which private organizations are being utilized to spread misinformation that originated from a prominent voice of the government, and are faced with the difficult choice of adopting organizational censorship in order to combat political censorship.

To crowd something out means "to push, move, or force (something or someone) out of a place or situation by filling its space". Youtube videos do not crowd out other youtube videos, there's enough space on youtube for everyone.

Because this supposedly omnipotent being can't even tweet without a warning message attached to it?

Yes - when your own government feeds you misinformation, it should come with warning labels. Trusting your government without any consideration is handing over freedom foolishly.

If anything, this cycle has simply shown that there is massive merit in investing heavily in brazen manipulation techniques.

We ain't seen nothing yet.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

People will trust some fake videos until they see stunningly realistic videos of themselves hanging out with Hitler, or whatever.

Later we will have some video devices that use some kind of encryption and network connectivity to validate frames of video faster than they could be post-processed, creating trustworthy video. However, crazy people will just say the organizations running the validation are illegitimate.

You don't see a problem with that?

Why stop there, why have confidence in anything any longer? Earth is flat, earth is round? Who knows, both are likely.

Any serius actor can make a video of someone doing something that might look real since years.

I can only see this behavior being completely normalized due to its effectiveness. Short of massive bipartisan regulation limiting election fundraising this is the future of America.

Does the tech world really think that electronic voting is reliable when done the way Dominion did it?

Is there is a rational explanation when votes jump from one candidate to another on live public TV?

Are there too many acceptable mail in votes to make sense?

Etc.

The conclusion for someone who does the research may be that things are OK, that all is legit. I don't know, as I have no interest in doing that research.

But if you start removing all the videos that present any arguments in that direction, than I will definitely assume there is fraud going on.

It is far better for all the "proofs" to be out there and available, than to have people saying that all of the "proofs" were deleted by the people with obvious interests.

Given that there is a paper trail in virtually all cases, and that the manual counting of that paper trail almost perfectly matched the electronic version, the answer can only be "Yes!". There's zero evidence of fraud, and abundant affirmative evidence that the machines accurately and completely counted the ballots that were entered.

By all means, continue to have a paper record so we can verify afterwards, but the dominion systems worked very well.

Edit: The fact that this question is continuing to be asked, in spite of all of this mountain of easily available affirmative proof, is a shocking indictment of the general public. I wish people took the responsibility which comes with the right to free speech a little more seriously.

And yet cites no sources to this "easily available affirmative proof". Thanks for setting the example.

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/supporting-the-2020-us-...

While I'm highly skeptical of any of the fraud stuff, I would much rather the opportunity to explore the issue like this myself than have it shut down by corporate gatekeepers.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wja-JMaNXQ

These videos being up isn't contributing to the debate so much as providing a lot of smoke that can be pointed to as evidence of fire by people who mostly haven't watched them and can't be bothered to do their own research (I'm not accusing you of this, to be clear).

But ... from my understanding, a hand-count is not the same as an electoral audit. An audit exhaustively looks at the systems, procedures, and the path that the data has traveled in order to verify the result.

From what I'm aware of, that is what Trump people are disputing? Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

The fundamental problem here is the impracticality of proving a negative. In order to conclusively demonstrate that there was no fraud of any kind we would need to have an audit trail from citizenship being granted (largely at birth) through votes being tabulated. That's impossible. So we have standards for what things we investigate and how we investigate them. Those standards have been surpassed out of an abundance of caution in virtually all cases this election cycle.

As an aside, it's interesting to me that the group which normally screams the loudest about government inefficiency and the waste that comes from the government are suddenly the people screaming that everything needs to be checked and rechecked at huge cost to the tax payer when there is very, very little chance of anything changing. This is going to be in textbooks in the future under the heading "Loss Aversion", which I guess means at least we'll get something out of the money we're lighting on fire?

Why should any random claim be called a "proof"? Should flat earth videos get the same equivalent as NASA programming?

Why should we, as society, give equal weight to people like yourself who have "no interest in doing that research"?

If you are trying to incite a civil war, this is a good way to help push it along by silencing people.

I've been rather unpopularly predicting an eventual civil war for about 5 years on HN, maybe a bit longer. Predicting is one thing; if you're suggesting that others are inciting it, as you did above, then your analysis should be a bit broader and more inclusive.

If you can prevent the former by removing viral reach of the latter, isn't that a net win? It's sad that a private company has to do it, but one could argue that it's the morally correct thing to do, in this case.

These people are free to host their videos on Parler / Gab / etc, and broadcast this nonsense without the free mainstream reach.

It's almost as if they realize they're peddling bullshit.

That actually isn't the question in my mind. If there is fraud it should be investigated and prosecuted regardless of whether it would change the result or not.

I'm more interested in improving things for future elections, and for that reason I don't think it makes sense to dismiss accusations of fraud, widespread or not.

It seems pretty clear that there are lots of things we can do to improve the way in which we carry out elections. Devising systems that are resilient to fraud and are transparent such that accusations of fraud are easily resolved is important for injecting confidence back into the process.

The POTUS's claims are neither true nor rational, and yet they are prominent. We need to think about that rationally.

Fundamentally, what people are saying here is that the current US administration should be able to force YouTube to distribute material containing lies that benefit them. This is obviously just as harmful as someone being stopped from publishing something by the government.

I agree there are cases where private entities can become so important to speech that they need to be regulated, but the kneejerk response to this kind of thing just seems so ill thought out. The right to freedom of expression clearly has to include the freedom to not express something.

The obvious example is, should Google be able to go to Fox News and force them to publish pieces that Google write? Is the line editorial control? That path leads to YouTube ceasing to exist as a platform anyone can upload to, which seems like a large cost as well.

I don't think there are easy answers, and "free speech" tends to end up as a thought-terminating cliche in these discussions, ignoring the fact that there are multiple parties with the right to freedom of speech that can conflict. The question really becomes about the right to platform, and if everyone has a legal right to any platform, everything will be drowned out in noise.

I think this is the part people are overlooking when they talk about censorship and freedom of speech...what are you supposed to do when it's the government of your country itself that is actively pushing large amounts of misinformation? Does it not completely change the situation compared to an individual or organisation doing this?

It takes more effort to show a lie to be false than it does to tell another lie, and the public only have finite time to weigh up the accuracy of information. The government has more power to push out convincing misinformation in vast quantities than anyone else.

A lot of the time of you don't need censorship because truth and open critique will drown out the lies, but there's going to be a breaking point when the misinformation being thrown out becomes overpowering.

Really? You don't think that the mass media is at least in the same league?

If the responsibility has to lie with either one (to police other people's truth, I mean - both have a responsibility not to spew the garbage themselves) then we're screwed. If a majority of the population simply doesn't have the critical thinking and background knowledge necessary to weed out fake news, democracy simply can't work. I would argue we're there in the United States. Too much bias for us to recover from our current politics without very significant changes to our system and / or the population.

One could probably make this same claim about a wide array of things that people are not capable of on an individual basis, yet humanity can typically overcome these with various systemic approaches (why have every individual perform every task, when many can be offloaded to public services).

Does it seem odd that no one's floated the idea that rather than providing information to the public only through a kind of whirlwind of conflicting news flashes and memes, that we also adopt an approach where we endeavour to assemble all important issues into a slowly changing master list, and then off of that we attach news updates, centralized, evidence-based fact checking, public debate & voting, etc? Of course this is extremely far from easy, and is surely impossible to do perfectly, but it doesn't seem at all like a crazy idea to me...and yet, I don't think I've ever heard the idea mentioned.

What I think is happening now is that free speech is actually free. Thanks to tech companies, there is no cost to getting your ideas out there. The problem is, you have nothing to lose if your reputation is destroyed by poorly-thought-out speech. ("Cancel culture" seems to be the workaround for this, but it doesn't seem very good to me.) The result is that we have decided that we don't actually like this whole freedom thing. But, I think it's actually pretty okay; you have to take the bad with the good (or the very bad with the very good).

We should all be vigilant about calls for regulating speech. It looks like a very good short-term solution, but it won't be a very good long-term solution. To have the best possible society, we need to confront the underlying issues head-on. It's not "fake news" or that people are inflammatory on Facebook. It's that they don't have the educational background to think critically about what they read or hear, and can't actually distinguish a flame designed to manipulate them from writing that is designed to inform them. They are also often so isolated they can't even begin to understand other people's perspectives, and so have no mental model of how to even interpret writing they don't personally understand.

As a society, we have to make sure that we fix this problem. We need every human being to get a great education. We need people to interact with people that look different from them from an early age. It will be expensive, it will be hard, and it will take a long time. But I think looking out 200 years, it's where we want to go, and we should get started right now.

Resist the calls to sweep posts you don't like under the rug, or even to make them illegal. It won't fix any of the underlying problems.

Second, I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that we (entities with the capability and responsibility) should be required to allow something fundamentally dangerous to the nation's integrity to be an amplified message.

The reasoning is that to get to "every human being to get a great education", we need a phenomenal, unified, progressive nation that values education very highly. To get people to willingly interact with people that look different from them, we need a shared belief in the value of diversity. I believe we have evidence that large proportions of the population are readily influenced and manipulated by media, and of course peer-sourced media may have become even more powerful than what was once reputation-based journalism.

Now, I don't think cutting off the amplification of substantially dangerous ideas does fix the underlying problem, but it seems rational to believe it is currently contributing to the problem. It's in the causal chain. To reach the better society you envision, we need the same elements we hope to achieve - great education and humanity and valuing diversity. Basically, it's hoping that the majority of individuals flip a switch and embrace the changes we need, and from there we can continue to propagate the change.

I don't feel like I have the answers, because it's a difficult problem, and I don't believe the trajectory is currently positive. Spreading misinformation is getting easier. Accepting misinformation seems to be growing more prevalent. A once seemingly foregone conclusion of the inevitable ubiquitous acceptance of diversity appears to be tragically stalled. The entities we elected to solve these problems are no longer content to work together in civil discussion and compromise in order to discover and implement potential solutions.

If there's a choice between the band-aid of social media trying to put a finger in the dam to stop the flooding, and an effective remedy to the core problems, I'll gladly choose the remedy, but given the apparent non-existence of such a remedy, I'll begrudgingly accept the band-aid.

A plain and transparent democracy would be "everybody votes, the candidate with more votes wins". Instead USA has the electoral college (what for? it has to vote the same as its citizens), winning by districts (what for? districts only exist to allow gerrymandering), and vote by mail without strict controls.

I bet fewer people would complain if the system wasn't so evidently made for gaming numbers.

In order to not give small states too much power they then could do as the EU parliament and give seats based on degressive proportionality.

It's a fantastic book that brilliantly illuminates the false dichotomy of red team vs blue team politics and news media.

We should all be careful of the corporate press. Their purpose is to profit, not inform. This applies both to red team and blue team news media. Comfortable lies are profitable while difficult truths are not.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Silencing voices we don't like only give them credence and power, especially in the age of the internet and new media.

Youtube is _not_ the government but by reigning in falsehoods, is acting in _opposition_ to the government here. So what Youtube is doing is the very definition of _freedom_ of expression. A government pressuring them to carry pro-government messages is the crime, not the other way around.

You are now having the government and pro-government voices pressure non-government organizations to publish pro-government material while claiming that it "protects" freedom of speech. This the exact _opposite_ of freedom of speech, it is in fact forced propaganda.

So indeed there is no "but" because it is _the government_ that is in the wrong by pressuring publishers in what they must include.

A private company doing content moderation & censorship is not a violation of the free speech amendment.

Freedom of expression is not freedom to use any platform or service -- it is protection against state level actors.

But what can realistically be done while maintaining freedom of speech, and especially when the "leader of the free world" is arguably the main culprit?

YouTube viewers are not Google's customers.1 If it is to survive, Google must cater to the wishes of its clients.

1. Yes, I am aware that a small number of people pay Google to remove ads, but that is not a viable business model unless Google is also selling ad space.

When they censor medical doctors for talking about the facts around HCQ. Or I see PHDs censoring themselves on the subject of covid19 vaccinations instead of being able to have an open, honest conversation.

I don't like all the lies and fake news out there and how easily it sucks people in. But censorship isn't the answer in my opinion.

Youtube getting involved and hushing any type of free speech that does not cause physical harm or threatening to one's life is vile and disgusting period!

I am independent who leans republican yet did not/could not vote for the maniac.

I am absolutely no fan of Fox News, but for you to not mention other propaganda-producing, Fake News outlets like CNN and Bloomberg is a huge hit to your credibility.

I'll openly admit I am on the conservative side of politics, but my identity isn't wrapped up in politics; that's not how I identify myself or other people. I'm surrounded by conservatives; that's my world, and guess what? There's a lot of discontent with the way election fraud claims are being handled, and despite almost every single one of them having enough firearms to supply a small militia, nobody is even remotely close to even thinking about some sort of armed resistance.

You say it's dangerous? You need to stop letting mainstream media form your perception of the world. What's dangerous is constantly race-baiting people of color like myself and white people against each other.

To people who truly love and believe in freedom, your comment is disgusting.

Wrong information must be countered and corrected by right information -- not censorship, buddy!

"Mostly" is still completely unknown when it comes to the contents of that laptop, it's provenance, and the veracity of individual emails.

There is no "buts" regarding freedom. I dont know if you have any experience with authoritarian measures but none of them starts like "This is a bad and permanent measure for no reason"... all of them are "exceptional", "to ensure public safety" ,"only valid as long as extraordinary circumstances are present"..all of them. The democrats were claiming fraud 4 years go due to a supposed Russian influence.The evidence was tenuous and circumstantial at best. I dont remember seeing a similar cry for censorship. The problem that America , and for extension a big part of the world has, is that the world is view through tribalism. People LOVE to say they are objective, but that is rarely rarely the case.

Explain the existence of a heavily militarized police force, then. And the war on drugs. And blue laws. And the existence of borders, and the notion of citizenship.

No, freedom has many limitations. Some of those limitations are justified by reducing or punishing harm to others. Some are justified by reducing or punishing harm to self. Some are naked authoritarianism.

We have a president who's a proud authoritarian who literally celebrates violence against the press and summary executions by the police. He's spreading virulent disinformation with the express intent to overrule the will of the people, and he's consistently signalling that insurrection is the remedy to his failure to do so. Does your "no 'buts' regarding freedom" go so far as to tear down democracy in favor of a would-be dictator's "freedom" to commit treason?

> who literally celebrates violence against the press and summary executions by the police.

He has never done that. Saying those thing undermines any good argument you may have. If you think I am being dense please provide a direct quotation of Trump cheering for summary execution by the police and I will shut my mouth. No, if you provide an actual quote of Trump celebrating a summary execution I will erase my account here and wont never return I promise you that.

Which was entirely predictable.

Spoken at a rally.

So it's less HIS definition than the actual definition.

"The US Marshals killed him and I will tell you something, that's the way it has to be," Trump said, referring to Reinoehl. "There has to be retribution when you have crime like this."

You are changing the goal posts substantially. Wikipedia defines a summary execution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_execution) as being accused and then immediately killed without trial. That is not what happened to Reinoehl. He was accused, a judge issued a warrant. He was given the opportunity to come and face justice. He did not. Instead he shot at police. They shot back.

In order for it to have been a summary execution, Reinoehl would have to have been captured and well under the Marshal's control and then killed. Or he would have had to indicate that he surrendered and been shot anyway. That is not what happened.

Ultimately, this situation would have been easily resolvable had Reinoehl turned himself into police, like Kyle Rittenhouse. Sad anyone had to die, most of all Reinoehl's victim, Aaron Danielson, who for some reason (that we all know) is completely ignored in all this.

Why why weren't there body cams and dash cams? Those readily-available evidence-gathering tools that are so necessary to deliver the accused to justice? Can we corroborate the police's accounts with hard evidence? No, for some reason, none of them thought that would be important. Ain't destruction of evidence if you don't collect it... no, you're not going to convince me that Reinoehl's death wasn't an execution.

Rittenhouse attempted to turn himself in, but was actually turned away. Reinoehl claimed self defense, but his victim was armed with a knife, not a plastic bag. It's true that Rittenhouse got hit by a skateboard later, but that was folks rightly defending themselves from an active shooter.

The problem with the cops isn't just racism, it's the whole authoritarianism thing too. Fascists love the cops and cops love them.

And the president celebrates the "hero" for murdering a person who threw a plastic bag.

> Does your "no 'buts' regarding freedom" go so far as to tear down democracy in favor of a would-be dictator's "freedom" to commit treason?

The United States is not a democracy. It is a constitutionally limited republic, where the federal government is supposed to be highly constrained to protect the rights of the people, including nominally the right to disestablish it (see the declaration of independence). From the American perspective, tearing down a democracy that violates people's individual rights would be acceptable. Indeed, that is the American revolution in a nutshell if you ask the British, isn't it?

Also, it was the Republican DoJ w/Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein that commissionned the Mueller report (Robert Mueller, a Republican as well).

To continue to believe otherwise and post these false claims online only makes you part of the problem, not actually looking for a solution.

I say this as someone who is generally not a fan of the approach that Twitter, Youtube etc. make in terms of censorship like this. I just think we all need to call a spade a spade when we see it though, and the evidence here is overwhelming.

Ok forget about trump Russia collusion. What about when they said Russia was trying to interfere with the Bernie campaign. What are we to believe? Who decides what to censor?

>The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump

>The Committee finds the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case that Russia engaged in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

I'm not sure why people go around saying that Russian interference was not a real thing? The REPUBLICAN senate confirmed this.

And, no one believes that 2020 was any different in that regard. They may have been more sophisticated this time around, but the force of COVID and Trump's utter ineptitude really broke through to a lot of people who sat out 2016.

I imagine that if you dive into the anti-COVID rhetoric, Stop the Steal etc. you'll find the same cast of characters responsible for Lock Her Up, and Emails etc.

Edit: link

The link says:

> People tend to cite the "fire in a crowded theater" quote for two reasons, both bolstered by Holmes' fame. First, they trot out the Holmes quote for the proposition that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. But this is not in dispute.

Which seems to be the reason the quote was used and backs it up? So what's the problem?

Also, I share your sense of feeling like it would have been more constructive to summarize whatever the key argument is supposed to be and how it connects in this thread.

"Fire in a crowded theater, and therefore you cannot claim that the election is disputed". The claim that some speech is not protected is not the same as the claim that because of that some other particular speech is not protected. There has to be a fundamental similarity between two sets of circumstances such that they can both be prevented for the same reason. "Not all speech is protected, that is not in dispute, but the speech you're claiming isn't protected actually is" would be the problem.

"This dogmatic/fundamentalist interpretation of freedom doesn’t make you objective, it makes you an ideologue. There are well-known and widely accepted exceptions to freedom such as curbs on freedom of speech e.g. not yelling “fire” in a crowded space and inciting violence. There are trade-offs between freedom and curbs on freedoms (policies) that benefit the greater good of society. "

To use the "fire" example to make the point that there must be a line somewhere sounds fine to me.

> "Fire in a crowded theater, and therefore you cannot claim that the election is disputed".

Who said that? Obviously you can't use the "fire" example to prove anything you want.

Who has a right to steal or murder? Those are by definition violations of other people's rights.

You don't possess the right to steal or murder, regardless of the existence or lack of a government.

> These liberties you and others have sacrificed are exchanged for common security and self-preservation.

I didn't "sacrifice" my "right" to murder someone because I never had such a right.

> You are forced to abide by these restrictions because of the social contract between yourself and the government which creates and enforces these laws.

People aren't forced to abide by these restrictions, they are punished for violating them. And they are punished because law enforcement has an interest in enforcing them, not because of any social fiction.

You absolutely do, because nothing is preventing you from doing so. Maybe you are referring to a moral right? We are discussing legal rights. These don't exist without a system of governance.

> I didn't "sacrifice" my "right" to murder someone because I never had such a right.

Absent of any political order, who is to say what rights you have or don't have? This is the entire point of government and the social contract. It is a universal and mutually agreed on pact, which takes the form of an exchange of certain individual rights for protection of other rights, that critically, everyone must abide by and that maximize the well-being and security of everyone. It formalizes which universal rights exist and also what limitations exist. This system is what dictates your rights.

> You are forced to abide by these restrictions because of the social contract between yourself and the government which creates and enforces these laws.

I'm not really sure how to respond to this. No, governments do not literally / physically force you to stop speaking in the case of your freedom of speech. Being "forced to" in this context would mean being compelled to abide by the laws of society. This relationship defines the social contract that you, and everyone else in society, has entered into with the ruling authority/government.

Lack of obstruction is not the same as a right.

> Maybe you are referring to a moral right? We are discussing legal rights. These don't exist without a system of governance.

You're contradicting yourself. First you say I possess a right to murder and steal in the absence of a government. Then you say rights don't exist without a system of governance.

> Absent of any political order, who is to say what rights you have or don't have?

Thats an excellent question. Rights are a social construct that emerges on the basis of mutual cooperation and are continued through intentional participation. "who is to say" arises in the event of a dispute between rights-holders. This dispute can be resolved violently or by agreement. At one time, the disputants would take their dispute to an agreed-upon person who was acceptable to both and had a reputation for fair-decision-making. This created case law and is why, many times, the answer to "who is to say" is "precedent." Social order created this system and social order is sustained by it.

> This is the entire point of government and the social contract. It is a universal and mutually agreed on pact, which takes the form of an exchange of certain individual rights for protection of other rights, that critically, everyone must abide by and that maximize the well-being and security of everyone. It formalizes which universal rights exist and also what limitations exist. This system is what dictates your rights.

This is a series of popular misconceptions. Firstly the point of government differs according to who you ask. The social contract is a social myth that analogizes the process of government with an actual agreement as a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that the hegemony of government is neither universal nor mutually agreed-upon. Thirdly, there is no right to commit murder (this would be a contradiction in terms) so there's not a way for me to exchange such a right for the benefit of murders being performed on my behalf. It is clear that well-being a security of everyone is not maximized by every government, so its equally possible that the purpose of government is something else, and government merely claims to maximize the well-being and security of everyone in order to do that something else, and tribalism (among other things) allows the various different governments to divide and conquer while the conquered are fraudulently persuaded that this is in their best interest and something they have agreed to anyway. Finally if government dictated the rights then there would be no logical way to criticize whichever incarnation of rights the government (in their wisdom and beneficence) deemed it appropriate to dictate. Such criticism is ubiquitous and demonstrates that while government may prohibit violations of and enforce upon a community a given concept of rights, the government is not the origin of those rights or that concept.

> Being "forced to" in this context would mean being compelled to abide by the laws of society.

People are not compelled to abide by the laws of society, they violate them every day. In fact violations are so numerous that there are millions of professionals whose sole occupation is to locate these violations, apprehend the perpetrators, and deal with them and their actions in a socially harmonious manner.

> This relationship defines the social contract that you, and everyone else in society, has entered into with the ruling authority/government.

Since we can agree that people are not compelled to obey the government, but choose to obey or suffer the consequences; can we also agree that the social contract is a mythos that relates the process of governance to an actual contract by way of analogy?

Wow... funny how this all works out so convienently.

But really this is dystopia level rhetoric. "Your freedom to speech is not really being restricted. It's just that because you're locked in your house (since being outside talking to your friend is apparently not a fundamental freedom), you can't actually talk to anyone because your private sector companies say so."

"But the hearing instead left Facebook, Google and Twitter facing conflicting pressures -- from Democrats who say they should patrol their sites and services more aggressively and Republicans who felt the companies should have a more hands-off role with most political speech."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/28/twitter...

Social media sites are shutting down left and right wing media outlets in the form of YouTube, Twitter, etc. These sites are getting pressure form the government to do so. The "press" was never supposed to be a large corporate entity with a cozy relationship with the government. The "press" is supposed to be a citizen press.

“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news”

I'm curious what you think about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance.

> We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S.

Why?

> . For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors

Why? Are they going to remove videos like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrJzf6eUSWA or this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBYnJh45WS8

> Limiting the reach of borderline content and prominently surfacing authoritative information are important ways we protect people from problematic content that doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines.

Blessed the day you need "protection" from a corporation.What's next? Will I need protection about how Google Europe is based on Ireland? Or how are they egregiously violating the privacy of the user? Or how they most probable work with NSA?

I am curious what you think about that

There's also the notion that in a free society, companies shouldn't have the freedom to discriminate on the basis of someone's politics. People who oppose discrimination on the basis of certain protected categories have the opportunity to explain why political views are not one of those categories.

So yes there's a discussion to be had but its not easy to get off the ground floor on politically charged issues unless people have a well grounded and mutual understanding of the basics and demonstrate that understanding.

This is a spurious criticism. Websites are already liable for any illegal content they host if they don't make a good-faith effort to have it removed quickly. Fake news isn't illegal, this isn't something that would be improved by rescinding section 230.

> There's also the notion that in a free society, companies shouldn't have the freedom to discriminate on the basis of someone's politics

This has no practical meaning because literally anything can be framed as political issue. For example, the efficacy of masks and vaccines.

> People who oppose discrimination on the basis of certain protected categories have the opportunity to explain why political views are not one of those categories.

Protected classes are the few exceptions to the rule, the burden is on you to explain why politics should be added to the list.

I'm not suggesting that all harmful content is illegal. I'm saying they can choose to spread baseless conspiracy theories when it benefits them with no legal consequence, but they can remove anything they like because they don't want to promote it while calling it a baseless conspiracy theory, also with no consequence. This is an extremely influential position that is created by law and gives them extraordinary latitude at shaping perceptions.

> This has no practical meaning because literally anything can be framed as political issue. For example, the efficacy of masks and vaccines.

Well those are political issues. I agree that "literally anything" can be framed as political, I don't agree that my criticism lacks practical meaning as a result. We don't like people discriminating on the basis of certain categories. I think political opinions are one of the categories. You may not, we can discuss this.

> Protected classes are the few exceptions to the rule, the burden is on you to explain why politics should be added to the list.

Gladly. Its unfair for people to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation, religion. Because we think that all of those are aspects of being human that people shouldn't be punished for by refusal to hire or sell to. Political leanings are often matters of conscience, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, or sex. Political freedom involves the freedom to hold unpopular opinions. Permitting someone to discriminate their provision of services on the basis of someone's gay marriage is just as offensive as permitting them to discriminate on the basis of someone's support for the legality of gay marriage.

This is akin to you saying "they choose to spread cat pictures when it benefits them with no legal consequences". Conspiracy theories, like cat pictures, are perfectly legal, there's no reason why there should be legal consequences for allowing them on the site.

> they can remove anything they like because they don't want to promote it while calling it a baseless conspiracy theory, also with no consequence

Yes, when you own a website you can pick and choose what appears on the site, that's just how property rights work. If I decide I want to create a social network that adheres to a policy of explicit partisan bias I should have that right, the users will decide if that is something they want to use.

> This is an extremely influential position that is created by law and gives them extraordinary latitude at shaping perceptions.

You can't legislate influence, it's not something that anybody owns, it's freely given by individual users and can be trivially revoked at any time. This dynamic is exactly the reason why YouTube is so sensitive to social issues, their influence among target demographics will suffer if they fail to appease certain values. Consider the recent collapse of Fox News' influence as another example of this effect on the opposite side of the spectrum.

> Well those are political issues. I agree that "literally anything" can be framed as political, I don't agree that my criticism lacks practical meaning as a result*

Yet they're not inherently political, the efficacy of masks and vaccines are well established from a medical perspective. The reason why it lacks practical meaning is because there is no agreed upon definition for what meets the standard of political.

> race, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation, religion.

The protected classes are discrete personal qualities of the individual, "political leaning" is an abstract idea without clear boundaries. You might as well say "I'm against discrimination of people based on their ideas", the concept is just too nebulous to be meaningful.

The problem is the undue influence created by the juxtaposition of the circumstances that you have chosen to respond to separately.

> Yes, when you own a website you can pick and choose what appears on the site, that's just how property rights work.

What if the ISP decides not to serve your website to people who want to visit it? Is that also how property rights work? What if the electric company decides not to sell you electricity? Is that how property rights work?

> You can't legislate influence, it's not something that anybody owns, it's freely given by individual users and can be trivially revoked at any time. This dynamic is exactly the reason why YouTube is so sensitive to social issues, their influence among target demographics will suffer if they fail to appease certain values. Consider the recent collapse of Fox News' influence as another example of this effect on the opposite side of the spectrum.

You can absolutely consider whether you're creating circumstances that put a small number of people in positions of disproportionate influence when you write legislation to regulate what they are and are not liable for.

> Yet they're not inherently political, the efficacy of masks and vaccines are well established from a medical perspective.

Medicine is also political and the efficacy of vaccines is not a thing that is established once and for all, each vaccine has to be tested to determine its effectiveness and those tests, how they are performed, and their outcomes are all inherently political. For example, see the allegations against Merck that they lied about the effectiveness of their MMR vaccine.

The effectiveness and allocation of masks is also political, look to earlier this year when the CDC recommended against wearing of masks by the general public.

> The reason why it lacks practical meaning is because there is no agreed upon definition for what meets the standard of political.

Thats not a barrier to practical meaning, it just means that anything could be found to be political. For example, two people could bring similar actions in court and one be rejected because there was no evidence that it was in fact political, whereas the other could be accepted because there was evidence that it was in fact political.

> The protected classes are discrete personal qualities of the individual, "political leaning" is an abstract idea without clear boundaries. You might as well say "I'm against discrimination of people based on their ideas", the concept is just too nebulous to be meaningful.

I am against discrimination of people based on their ideas, and I suppose we'll have to disagree and the meaningfulness of this concept.

I think my earlier example is clear:

>> Permitting someone to discriminate their provision of services on the basis of someone's gay marriage is just as offensive as permitting them to discriminate on the basis of someone's support for the legality of gay marriage.

The fact that people could conceivably disagree on whether a given issue is political and therefore disagree about whether it is a prohibited basis upon which to discriminate is immaterial. Discrimination suits already deal with this issue.

You would think that with such a right-wing userbase, the aspect of Youtube's private property would emerge in the conversation. But that's not the issue, instead, the "CeNsOrShIp" crowd is more concerned about having white supremacist ideas widely marginalized in polite society.

I'm not sure how to respond to this without venturing into semantics. When we talk about a free society, we are talking about the freedom of the people who make up that society to pursue their own interests and livelihood without oppression or undue interference. It doesn't make it ok to aggress upon or oppress people if you somehow define the perpetrator of that aggression or oppression to be "not government."

> We don't mean that every radio station has to play my song, every tv station has to play my show, and every billboard has to show my message.

However we do mean that everyone have access to the airwaves and that everyone have access to telecom infrastructure and other utilities. The reason section 230 of the CDA is at issue here is that companies like youtube are legally protected from liability for content that they display, but there are no legal consequences for their refusal to show any content. This creates the conditions for them to unaccountably promote one side of an issue to the exclusion of another. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this could be a bad thing.

> You would think that with such a right-wing userbase,

The userbase here is not right-wing.

> the aspect of Youtube's private property would emerge in the conversation.

Its been brought up numerous times. Almost every time section 230 reform is mentioned, in fact. Which is good because these issues need to be hashed out.

> But that's not the issue, instead, the "CeNsOrShIp" crowd is more concerned about having white supremacist ideas widely marginalized in polite society.

Poisoning the well doesn't advance the conversation, rather the opposite.

I mean, we used to have this thing called visiting friends or gathering in a public space, which the governments of most states have currently prevented us from doing, leaving the internet to be the only option to reach any audience.

So yes, insofar as the public square is an essential function and since it's been banned from physically being a reality, then the government must assure that there are alternatives, or undo the physical bans on gathering. There is no pandemic exception to basic civil rights.

Unfortunately, what we have here is a major double standard where leftists can freely gather in the streets to protest police brutality, but right wingers cannot without severe media criticism, and police action by governments.

This actually highlights a fundamental question which is at the heart of most disagreements on this issue. As a non-US-ian, looking at the US Constitution there does not seem to be an equivalent of Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." In the UDoHR the right to life and the right to liberty are equated, so how do we manage situations where we have to trade off one or the other (as is the case here)? I recall the old saying, "your right to swing your fists, ends where my nose begins".

Therefore a blanket statement that there is no pandemic exception to civil rights, specifically, the right to free assembly and freedom of movement, elevates those rights above a right to "life" (which presumably provides a limit on others' behaviours that risk life).

Personally, I can't see that being viable, based on the "common sense" aphorism mentioned earlier. Therefore, there must be some balance. Clearly, achieving that balance is a politically quixotic exercise in the sense that you'll be pissing off one group or another. Consensus is probably key here. Good luck achieving that in the US.

EDITED: grammar. Seriously, I should learn to re-read before hitting submit.

Gathering in a public space = Facebook/Twitter/Mastodon/etc != YouTube

Broadcasting = YouTube

And your last sentence about leftists/right-wingers and double-standards is demonstrably false. There have been just as many protests by pro-Trump/anti-lockdown/stop-the-steal groups as there have about BLM/count-the-votes protests. Both have attracted varying levels of police action (BLM the most by my assessment), and both have had various levels of pro/anti discussion/criticism in the media (depending on which you read). On the last point, freedom of assembly does not equal freedom from criticism.

EDITED: to fix formatting.

Youtube is a distributed (as in "many people") media, which is essential for democracy. In some countries, it's the only source of truth about the politics.

Essential services should be provided by multiple providers. That's called competition and ends up serving everyone better.

Were it for profit, yes.

> Essential services should be provided by multiple providers.

I don't think this is demonstratively true anywhere.

Also, "competition" necessarily implies a company can refuse service to a customer, which is not what I (or most people) want with essential services like electricity, water, police, fire protection, etc.

However we have multiple utilities already. They follow regulations to ensure a level of service and reliability, but are often entrenched by these very same regulations which is why others are prevented from serving the same area. If anything we should have even more competition so that we can actually see some progress instead of the regulatory gridlock and decaying infrastructure that exists.

This is similar to ISPs. You can consider network services as essential need in the modern era, but nobody wants a slow nationalized ISP service (look at how Australia screwed that up). Instead multiple local competitive organizations have always delivered the best outcome whenever that's been allowed and encouraged.

Then how does competition address decaying infrastructure if not by running new lines?

What I'm saying is that a single state-run provider isn't a great model for most things, even critical things like utilities. The state can own the rights and build the things that only the state can, while the rest can be leased, shared, operated and maintained by multiple private organizations that compete to offer the best service without the regulatory incumbency.

Allowing use in return for upkeep and updates is a well-known model in many industries, especially real estate. It can be applied to the public sector easily. We're slowly seeing things change as private enterprise finds new ways like hyperlocal co-ops and distributed infrastructure like solar power, but there's still much more progress that can be made.

This idea that only freedom from the state counts is very pernicious, and it's at the root of the inordinate power corporations have in today's world.

Freedom is the ability to do what you want. Any conditions that don't let you do what you want are restraints on your freedom, even if they are being enforced by a private company.

This isn’t a very useful argument when balancing the rights of multiple entities in society though.

This is clearly not true. You are an intelligent person and can probably think of half a dozen counters to this without trying too hard. You may wish this were the case, but it just isn't. Not under any conceivable society that we could structure.

I find this highly hypocritical.

The Reddit hunt for the Boston bomber is a perfect example of how this type of unbridled free for all posting can lead to very bad stuff happening.

Censorship of ideas, even demonstrably false ones, is completely different (and much more dangerous because you have to appoint a censor who decides what is false).

Picking arbitrary facts as somehow political issues is very dangerous waters. I honestly have less problems with someone saying a Holocaust was a good idea than I do when people say they aren’t happening.

I would recommend checking out Professor Volokh's series of YouTube videos on the First Amendment. [1]

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uWzNDKtp9w

It’s the same Doublethink that defines income taxes as exclusive of payroll taxes by naming a subset of income taxes as income tax.

And as for payroll taxes, they are still taxes, but they are not applied on all income. For example, they do not apply to capital gains, or to income above ~$140k. Also, social security is (at least in theory) a forced savings plan, and people who pay into it more over their career then receive more out when they retire.

Income taxes, on the other hand, are not capped at a certain level, and you never get money back later based on how much income tax you paid in the past.

There are times where it is silly to refer to them in the aggregate, but it is not "Doublethink" to talk about them separately. They are different in important respects.

To show why this is a logical fallacy.

The US definition of income taxes also excludes gifts received even though that’s also “income.” As such by your definition they aren’t income taxes. Of course you could just define gifts as not income and things are ok, except if you continue to define income taxes as taxes based on a specific system then the definition is only applicable to that system at a specific point in time.

For example, is money received by tax free investments income? That’s now undecided until you determine the specific source, time period, and country involved. And as soon as you have statements that are both true and false you have a problem.

Even if you want to stick with US definitions, the states and federal government have different rules. As such the exact same transaction can be both income and not income. Which is about the clearest example of Doublethink I can think of.

PS: Instead, if you say for purposes of X it’s defined as Y then you don’t have this issue. But, then it’s very clear that specific things are exceptions. (To be clear I kept adding to this comment.)

Because denying something happened doesn’t physically hurt anyone. Mostly just dumb.

Asking for it to happen again means one is an evil monster that needs to be stopped.

> There is no "buts" regarding freedom.

Is false. People have freedom of speech, but -- "but" -- not freedom to libel people, for example.

Inevitably, someone brings up a counterexample.

Then the original person replies that it doesn't count, because it's not speech and there's a different word for what it is. Libel, incitement, terrorism, whatever word is needed to cover the example.

But in doing that, you've carved out a category for things that are excluded from protections afforded to speech.

Then the next thread comes around, someone declares there's no exceptions to speech, and the cycle continues.

If you're going to confine this conversation to the first amendment, then that's not relevant to youtube. For many the concept of speech in the sense pertinent here is broader than just U.S. law.

I've been on many HN threads where free speech absolutists make explicitly this point because they want to apply the concept of unfettered speech to private platforms, and they square the circle by insisting it's bigger than just the first amendment.

It's relevant insofar as legal distinctions between US and UK are relevant, which is to say, not relevant at all so far as I can tell. I don't think anyone's argument here hinged on such a distinction. If it did, and to that extent, it's relevant. But the heartland of this whole conversation has to do with a conception of speech as a principle that's broader than just U.S. law.

So we should be clear about the extent to which this is, or isn't, speaking to the conversation that everyone else is having.

Ideas about election fraud do not fall into this exception to the First Amendment unless they refer to individuals and make defamatory statements about them.

For the record, I'm not saying there couldn't be a reason to ban these statements, just that a libelous statement is not a good comparison because it is one of the established exceptions to the First Amendment.

In other words, a but. Which is the whole point - the original statement was you can't have freedom of speech with "buts". We already have "buts", and most people would agree we have freedom of speech.

A functioning society can't have the unbridled "freedom of speech" op is insinuating we should have. You aren't free to lie in a court of law, that's infringing on your freedom of speech. You can't falsely accuse someone of a crime - also an infringement on freedom of speech. Add countless other exceptions to the rule. And all of that is ignoring the fact that "freedom of speech" doesn't mean: other people are forced to listen to you or repeat what you said.

You example of accusations of child abuse as a way to insult somebody is actually fine as long as the society can recognize unfounded accusations from actual reality. This is still acceptable for many other insults, like "you're stupid", but somehow, people seem to have elevated sexual abuse accusations to the status of truth. I'd say the antidote to that is to allow more open unfounded accusations so we're all immunized against their effects. We do have the justice system to address real allegations.

For one thing, governments can kidnap you, your family and anyone you’ve spoken and lock you in a cage. That’s one of many huge differences between the two.

We live in a time when the ability to find a platform for your ideas is significantly bigger than it’s ever been in history, even without the couple of tech giants.

And just to reiterate, we should be terrified of the power of some of these tech giants, but I’m skeptical of anyone who fails to see a difference between a company saying, “not on my servers” in a world where governments literally kill people who say things they don’t like.

>For one thing, governments can kidnap you, your family and anyone you’ve spoken and lock you in a cage. That’s one of many huge differences between the two.

Companies used to do that already. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. That's why, in my humble opinion, the time is now to reign in the power of mega corps.

It also misses the point a bit by focusing on the most egregious things like kidnapping, imprisonment, killings. You don't have to kidnap, kill or "vanish" your opponents, there are many ways to repress them, scare them into obedience and so on.

But the laws are very clear on it.

Perhaps you’re not looking?

I know it’s hip in the tech scene to wave off politics, but the rest of physical reality still exists.

You can quit Google. You can quit Facebook. I know lots of people who have.

Try quitting your government. I don't even need to fill in the rest of this story because you know exactly how well it will go.

You may say that so far google wasn't too bad, and I would agree. Regardless, I still find it concerning that they are able to concentrate that much unchecked power. "Don't be evil" was yesterday, "Don't be evil unless it hurts our margins too badly" is today, I think there is a possibility - but not a certainty of course - that tomorrow it might gonna be "Evil is quite alright if it helps our margins". And that's just google. Other companies with massive influence, like the Murdoch or Koch empires, haven't been as nice as google.

Yes, you absolutely can. Switch from YouTube to a different site, or host video yourself.

If you're complaining about lobbying, that's an entirely different matter, for an entirely different discussion. If you're complaining about monopolies or concentration of power, that's also an entirely different matter, for an entirely different discussion.

Right now we're talking about whether the people running a site, who own the servers on which the data lives, can choose what they host, or whether they're forced to host things against their will. Do you believe that the government should be able to force people to host content against their will?

I am doing both.

Also, switching hosting isn't a cure. Google/Youtube and Facebook and reddit and twitter, for better or worse, control much of the audience online. If they decided you do not exist then for the majority of people you do not exist. Not because those people chose to ignore you, but the companies made the decision for the audience. At the same time companies like google do everything to disrupt the "open market of ideas" and replace it with a "walled garden of ideas we can monetize and do not object to", so far mostly to gain a competitive advantage not to push their point of view, but that may well change.

Taking about hosting in isolation is in my opinion not helpful, one has to always consider the larger picture.

In doing so, you have failed to answer the load-bearing question.

We're talking about whether the people running a site, who own the servers on which the data lives, can choose what they host, or whether they're forced to host things against their will. Do you believe that the government should be able to force people to host content against their will?

I am in favor of regulating the very big players like utility companies are regulated: you don't get to refuse customers electricity or clean water just because you do not like them.

In general, you want liability safe harbor (DMCA, section 230)? Then you have to abide by the same freedom of speech contract the government has to abide by. You want to moderate the content on your platform? Go for it, but then you're on the hook for moderating all of it in a timely fashion.

PS: Companies are not people (SCOTUS may disagree). I'd very much differentiate between a for-profit operation and personal stuff when it comes to certain types of legislation.

I’m not saying we’re there just yet, but this Google’s stance is a step in that direction.

That's concerning enough in itself for free speech, but add in pressure from government to "self-regulate," and you arrive at effective government censorship/suppression. When Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey are brought before Congress to testify about what they're doing to stop the spread of "fake news," the implicit threat is that if they don't pro-actively do what Congress wants, then Congress will force them to do so (or punish them in other ways).

It does seem like they are used for "news" way more than (in my personal opinion) is advisable, but they are still each independent organizations, and they do not hold (quite) all of the keys to information, and still want to preserve a reputation of impartiality, as difficult and impractical of a goal as that is.

It's certainly a problem when other sources of information loudly pronounce misinformation as fact. If you only compare YouTube and a single other competing news source, you might feel it's rather odd that YouTube is choosing to stop information of a certain nature. If you look widely enough, you are more likely to find that the information is false, and it was your original comparison source that was, in fact, problematic.

The point of all this is that there needs to be more sources of valid, factual information than sources of the same problematic false information, or we are all going to lose the ability to determine any reasonable facsimile of truth. The fact that is it peer-propagated certainly entangles a complexity that is reflected in the very divided opinion on this issue.

But I think in the end it will boil down to something simple. Like other things we've previously agreed should not be free to be amplified on peer networks, likewise demonstrably false information sourced from the government of the people should also not be free to find amplification on those peer networks.

Can they seize your assets? Not directly, but try getting sued by the legal department of a mega corp and see what you have left when it's all over. The end result is the same.

As somebody else pointed out, we already had companies that effectively acted as unelected governments in the past, like the East India Company. They used to execute people.

More likely scenario would be exposing anyone That wants to be anonymous. Actually I think that happens in other countries all the time.

What a low quality response. I'm done with you, please do not reply to me further, here or elsewhere.

If you were implying that I'd actually accuse anyone of doing stuff to kids, you throughly misunderstood the content of my comment.

And nobody would believe it if it wasnt deleted. They'd just be irritated by it.

Nonetheless that's not political speech (unlike the YouTube vids) . It's basic libel.

Goebbels was in favor of free political speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of freedom of political speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise - whether that's Trump or whomever. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

This is beyond political speech. It is inherently dangerous.

The first amendment isn't there to protect you from his lies though. It's to protect you so that you can speak the truth when he or somebody like him wants to stop you.

Be careful what you wish for. The same mechanisms that are used to shut him up will be used to silence you one day.

Once they do start censoring on that basis they become criminally liable for all content posted on the platform though.

If they're willing to take the same legal responsibility over all tweets that a publisher would over every page of its magazine id say let them. I'd like them to take legal responsiblity for the toxicity their platform generates.

What Trump is doing right now is treason against the country. You can call it free speech if you like.

And I have zero worries that any of Trump's legal jeopardy will ever effect myself because I am not a career criminal as he is.

we're talking about an election that was won with razor thin margins in a few specific swing states, with numerous statistical anomalies, hundreds of sworn affidavits, and a pending lawsuit to the scotus with 17 states attached.

prior to 2020 election, the democrats, CNN, NBC, and many others are _on record_ saying that Dominion Voting has the potential for massive fraud & shouldn't be used.

the problem is that they're effectively saying no one can question these anomalies, or the claims, and that "youtube" as the expert has adjudicated the election.

the truth is that it could take years of investigation to resolve whether or not some of the alleged evidence was credible or not, and neither youtube nor the claimants can say it's truth until then.

why does big tech get to decide who's right? that's the problem here & why it reeks Orwell.

Whereas a statist (i.e. someone who is not an anarchist) would basically always concede that there are limits on rights. To use US jurisprudence as an example, even the very pro-2A supreme court justices have ruled that the state has a compelling interest in reducing gun violence and thus is allowed to take guns away from violent felons, etc.

Personally, I take the former position; I think it's better to have a society where property rights (which includes the right of self-ownership i.e. owning your own body) and other natural rights (speech, self defense [technically these are just derived from property rights but I digress]) cannot be infringed upon for any reason. I am very heavily in the minority with that position, and I'm aware of that fact.

---

Anyway, switching back to the original topic of censorship of supposed "disinfo", if you don't buy a natural rights argument at all, then from a utilitarian perspective I think it's still a bad idea. In places like Saudi Arabia or Iran, the idea that women should be able to choose what clothing to wear or not wear would be considered harmful to society and worthy of censorship. In Turkey the idea that the Armenian genocide occurred could be considered worthy of censorship. In America the notion that we should not have warrantless wiretapping of all communications between private citizens could be considered dangerous to society, etc etc.

It always starts with a "good" reason. It never ends with one.

In this YouTube situation, property rights and freedom of speech are mutually exclusive. Either the owners of YouTube have the right to censor whatever they want on their platform/property, or people have freedom of speech and YouTube can't remove speech from their platform/property. In this situation, you can't protect both property rights and freedom of speech - you can only protect one.

I actually like that YouTube is announcing all of this stuff up-front, because it makes it far more clear and crystal that if you have an alternative viewpoint from the mainstream, you will have to build your own infrastructure to support your message. It's best that people learn this sooner, than later. Enough people have suffered by being too trusting of brands like YouTube.

People have forgotten that it's not just good for the people we detest, it's good for us to be able to listen to bad ideas and form rational and compelling counterarguments and defences against them. And since none of us is perfect, there will be times when it is _us_ that is espousing the bad idea, and it will be damn good for everyone that people are able to speak up and correct us.

There are indeed growing pains as the world comes online and starts being able to talk to each other. We're really in our adolescence as it pertains to life online. But we're making the most naive and expedient appraisals and supposed remedies to the discomfort its causing. My hope is that we're able to turn a corner and wrest control away from the reactionaries who currently control the narrative and the agenda.

I agree, and it's quite obvious that if you want this, then you should not go to YouTube.

> But we're making the most naive and expedient appraisals and supposed remedies to the discomfort its causing.

The only naivety being expressed here, is the idea that YouTube is the be-all-end-all online UGC video provider. Why are you placing YouTube on such a high pedestal, assigning such a non-deterministic fate to its decisions and outcomes? They're not even a little important to the dissemination of free ideas - perhaps they once were, but that ship sailed long ago.

Why are you so in love with YouTube? You clearly despise their choices; abandon the platform and don't look back.

> This isn't a tactical debate, it's a philosophical and foundational one.

I agree; you need to change your philosophy. Stop relying on YouTube to be the heroic service that you want it to be, and start realizing that it will never do what you want it to do.

I despise people pushing anti-vaccination misinformation. Would it be good for us to fight for their right to have their message to be uncritically broadcast on say NBC? I might care if the government made a law that was ambiguously too broad that happened to make it so antivaxers couldn't possibly be broadcast on TV at all, and it was clear that antivaxers winning that fight against that overly-broad law would open things up for other groups I thought the law was too strict against, but if it's just the case that every TV station decided of their own will and probably specific reasons to not broadcast them, then even if I thought all the TV stations were generally too strict, I'd pick something I actually liked that they were being too strict against to support to convince the stations to change their opinions.

Also we are discussing the ethical issues surrounding this decision.

On the other side of the coin, the anti-censorship people also want the government to prohit Youtube/FB/etc. from censoring their ideas. That's just as anti-freedom.

YouTube is specifically pushing back at propaganda coming from the government here, so I don't know how it makes any sense to assert that it's evidence they really want to allow government propaganda.

Limitations on rights is precisely the foundation of any society. To claim otherwise is just the semantic game of "oh, I don't mean those rights".

Property rights are entirely a social construct. They are not intrinsic; they are created and granted solely via the formalizations of that social contract in the form of the state.

This is not true, property rights are the human incarnation of territoriality which is exhibited by many species.

> Unless you subscribe to "might makes right", the idea of property rights is inherently a social construct which the state is a formalization of.

The state is a formalization of a particular social construct that is not identical to property rights.

> Limitations on rights is precisely the foundation of any society.

Do you have any support for this statement? It seems to contradict your earlier assertions and despite that I'm not sure how it would be true on its own.

> To claim otherwise is just the semantic game of "oh, I don't mean those rights".

Well, I don't think its a meaningless semantic argument for people to discuss what specifically is referred to by "rights." If you think people have a right to steal food out of other people's homes then I can see why you would think the government was a necessary limitation on that "right." But I think its a reasonable response to say "there is no right to steal food from other people" and then we can discuss what is and is not a right, which is much closer to a necessary conversation than a game (when conducted by sincere interlocutors).

And those species lose their territory as soon as a bigger, meaner creature wants it. Their "right" to their territory is only as strong as their personal ability to protect it. No one else will help them.

Unless that's what your advocating for when you talk about property rights, then rights absolutely do come from the state. Most of us think property rights mean what's mine is mine no matter who wants it, not that I lose it as soon as someone takes it from me or hires someone to do so.

Indeed, and the same for the state.

> Unless that's what your advocating for when you talk about property rights,

I'm not advocating for anything, just correcting some misconceptions.

> then rights absolutely do come from the state.

No, they do not. Rights are a social fiction that arises from mutual cooperation and are continued through repetition and intentional performance. It is true that actors whose actions are colored by state power can participate disproportionately in this process of evolving norms.

> Most of us think property rights mean what's mine is mine no matter who wants it, not that I lose it as soon as someone takes it from me or hires someone to do so.

Yes because the norm of property requires that theft, robbery, and things of that nature are violations of that norm.

aka, the state. The formalization of the social fiction.

No, rights. the state is distinguishable from rights. They are both social fictions but they are not the same social fiction.

> This is not true, property rights are the human incarnation of territoriality which is exhibited by many species.

Do you have proof for that? I mean that is a pretty sweeping statement, and I can think of a lot of counter examples.

> > Unless you subscribe to "might makes right", the idea of property rights is inherently a social construct which the state is a formalization of.

> The state is a formalization of a particular social construct that is not identical to property rights.

Sure but that isn't a contradiction to what the OP said. He did not say the state is identical to property rights.

> > Limitations on rights is precisely the foundation of any society.

> Do you have any support for this statement? It seems to contradict your earlier assertions and despite that I'm not sure how it would be true on its own.

> > To claim otherwise is just the semantic game of "oh, I don't mean those rights".

> Well, I don't think its a meaningless semantic argument for people to discuss what specifically is referred to by "rights." If you think people have a right to steal food out of other people's homes then I can see why you would think the government was a necessary limitation on that "right." But I think its a reasonable response to say "there is no right to steal food from other people" and then we can discuss what is and is not a right, which is much closer to a necessary conversation than a game (when conducted by sincere interlocutors).

But you don't specify what a right is either. In fact you earlier said it's incarnation of territoriality. How can that be a right? I mean maybe a desire, but a desire is very different to a right.

I'm not sure what proof (or evidence really) would be required. You can observe animal territoriality in the wild, or you can trust animal behaviorists to report on it accurately. They have areas they defend against other members of the same species. Behavior varies widely, solitary species don't like any other members of their species (except for sexual partners), social species have different arrangements. Sometimes an elder male will have several females and young that are permitted and when the young get big enough they either leave or fight. Sometimes the males will have a hierarchy and defend the territory against other members of the species who are not part of their group. Sometimes they even make war on another group for their territory. If you let me know what kind of evidence you're looking for I might be able to supply it.

> Sure but that isn't a contradiction to what the OP said. He did not say the state is identical to property rights.

He said that state is a formalization of the social construct of property rights. I'm saying the state is not a formalization of the social construct of property rights, but a social construct of nation and government; and that the two have relation but exist independently of each other.

> But you don't specify what a right is either. In fact you earlier said it's incarnation of territoriality. How can that be a right? I mean maybe a desire, but a desire is very different to a right.

Excellent question, thanks for asking. Rights are a social construct that emerges from mutual cooperation, essentially a social technology that allows people to co-exist and pursue their own interests and desires without needing to establish the same agreements with every individual and without generating unnecessary conflict. This is to say that rights are emergent and arise from individuals agreeing to respect each other.

Perhaps an example would help: I don't like to be the victim of violence. Neither do you. At some point we agree not to do violence to each other. A third person shows up and attacks me to steal my food. You make the rational choice to help me defend myself because if he kills me for my food he may do the same to you. Being that he is outnumbered he stops and we explain "don't do violence on people." He says "you contradicted yourself, you say you're against violence but you used violence to stop me." We say "You're correct, it must be the initiation of violence that is bad, and it would be ok to use violence on someone who has used violence on you." He says "ok that may be the case but you used violence on that gazelle I was trying to take from you." We eventually conclude that rights are a social arrangement between humans as a result of our preference for cooperation with humans and do not apply to inter-species relations.

> you earlier said it's incarnation of territoriality. How can that be a right?

Property is a human expression of territoriality. Property rights are a social arrangement where people customarily or by agreement avoid violating each other's territory. Rights are a social arrangement that allow people to minimize the amount of violence in a community.

This is already kind of long but let me know if you have more questions and thank you for the opportunity to discuss these issues.

>> Do you have proof for that? I mean that is a pretty sweeping statement, and I can think of a lot of counter examples.

>I'm not sure what proof (or evidence really) would be required. You can observe animal territoriality in the wild, or you can trust animal behaviorists to report on it accurately. They have areas they defend against other members of the same species. Behavior varies widely, solitary species don't like any other members of their species (except for sexual partners), social species have different arrangements. Sometimes an elder male will have several females and young that are permitted and when the young get big enough they either leave or fight. Sometimes the males will have a hierarchy and defend the territory against other members of the species who are not part of their group. Sometimes they even make war on another group for their territory. If you let me know what kind of evidence you're looking for I might be able to supply it.

I agree that we can territoriality in the animal kingdom and I'm can also admit that we see territoriality in humans (at least some of the time). However, you claimed that property rights are an incarnation of the territoriality, which is a quite a leap from territoriality exists in humans. Maybe this is related to the discussion of what is a right. Just a side-note I do think it's drawing parallels and conclusions from behaviour in the animal kingdom is fraught with problems. Just one example, I think based on this principle one could make clear arguments that people are inherently egoistic or altruistic.

>> Sure but that isn't a contradiction to what the OP said. He did not say the state is identical to property rights.

>He said that state is a formalization of the social construct of property rights. I'm saying the state is not a formalization of the social construct of property rights, but a social construct of nation and government; and that the two have relation but exist independently of each other.

I somewhat disagree with you here, however I admit we are starting to discuss semantics. But I would argue (and this is how I understood the OP, that the state is a social construct/formalisation of our social interactions, which does guarantee property rights (and others). So property rights do not exist without a social organisational construct such as the state. Now, the argument becomes a bit of a question of how broadly do we define state. I would also argue btw, that the concept of nation is much more closely linked territoriality than the state.

>> But you don't specify what a right is either. In fact you earlier said it's incarnation of territoriality. How can that be a right? I mean maybe a desire, but a desire is very different to a right.

>Excellent question, thanks for asking. Rights are a social construct that emerges from mutual cooperation, essentially a social technology that allows people to co-exist and pursue their own interests and desires without needing to establish the same agreements with every individual and without generating unnecessary conflict. This is to say that rights are emergent and arise from individuals agreeing to respect each other.

>Perhaps an example would help: I don't like to be the victim of violence. Neither do you. At some point we agree not to do violence to each other. A third person shows up and attacks me to steal my food. You make the rational choice to help me defend myself because if he kills me for my food he may do the same to you. Being that he is outnumbered he stops and we explain "don't do violence on people." He says "you contradicted yourself, you say you're against violence but you used violence to stop me." We say "You're correct, it must be the initiation of violence that is bad, and it would be ok to use violence on someone who has used violence on you." He says "ok that may be the case but you used violence on that gazelle I was trying to take from you." We eventually conclude that rights are a social arrangement between humans as a result of our preference for cooperation with humans and do not apply to inter-species relations.

I quite like your definition and largely agree with it. But would you not agree that we need some sort of social organisation to guarantee these rights? If not rights are largely meaningless or one could argue non-existent, because there is not social entity/organisation to construct them. So this is how I understood the OP, when he said (paraphrasing) property rights derive their existence from the state.

>> you earlier said it's incarnation of territoriality. How can that be a right?

>Property is a human expression of territoriality. Property rights are a social arrangement where people customarily or by agreement avoid violating each other's territory. Rights are a social arrangement that allow people to minimize the amount of violence in a community.

So the way I understand this, is that territoriality might be the reason for forming/formalising property rights in society (I still don't fully agree on this, but that's a different argument), however to me that is very different to saying that property rights are an incarnation of territoriality. Maybe a formalisation of territoriality is a better word?

>This is already kind of long but let me know if you have more questions and thank you for the opportunity to discuss these issues.

I thank you, this is definitely an interesting discussion.

Perhaps I was unclear. Property is the human incarnation of territory. This is an observation based on their similarities, treating humans as animals. When one animal claims an area and reacts with hostility to the conduct of other members of the same species in that area, it is said that the animal defends a territory. Property rights are a social norm that some humans use as a means of defending their territory. Rights are merely norms that allocate to individuals certain activities, behaviors, or other social goods. The territory (or property) exists because an animal believes that it exists and acts as though it exists. Of course this can be violated, its just an idea in someone's mind that manifests as territorial behavior. Property rights are a social arrangement where people respect each other's property.

Please note that I'm not assigning any moral weight to this notion. I'm merely describing human behavior in these terms and letting the reader come to their own conclusions. Rights (and property rights) take different forms in different communities. Thats because norms are social constructs and therefore intersubjective.

> Just a side-note I do think it's drawing parallels and conclusions from behaviour in the animal kingdom is fraught with problems.

Perhaps so. I think it can be problematic to consider humans as separate from the animal kingdom. Probably both perspectives have strengths and weaknesses.

> But I would argue (and this is how I understood the OP, that the state is a social construct/formalisation of our social interactions, which does guarantee property rights (and others). So property rights do not exist without a social organisational construct such as the state. Now, the argument becomes a bit of a question of how broadly do we define state. I would also argue btw, that the concept of nation is much more closely linked territoriality than the state.

This is conflating norms with the state that enforces them. Norms exist in all communities, most of them are not state-enforced. Frequently communities have norms that conflict with the formal statutes. In fact, the idea that there are agents of the state who you "are supposed" to obey is itself a social norm. Sometimes those social norms change but the people with the guns still attempt to enforce statutes.

Just as a side note, I find formulations of the type "the state guarantees property rights" to be problematic. The state may enforce some laws and fail to enforce others. The state may enforce some norms and fail to enforce others. The state may engage in widespread and long-standing violations of property rights (civil asset forfeiture). People can resolve this by considering those rights to be "whatever the state says they are" but this equivocation leaves us with no basis on which to criticize state actions related to rights.

> So property rights do not exist without a social organisational construct such as the state.

Property rights do not require an organization to enforce them. They (can) exist as community norms. Organizations enable large-scale coordination of actions that can shape those norms.

> I would also argue btw, that the concept of nation is much more closely linked territoriality than the state.

I agree but this also depends on how one defines terms. Some scholars use "state" and "government" differently as well.

> But would you not agree that we need some sort of social organisation to guarantee these rights?

No I don't agree that is necessary in all cases. In some cases its clear that an organization would be necessary to enforce the norms that I prefer. Perhaps a criminal organization seeks to expropriate all the left-handed redheads in an area. But then how would someone respond logically if we considered the organization that seeks to expropriate as the government? They're enforcing a concept of rights, just not the one I like. If rights are just what the government says they are, and we have people ready to enforce a particular concept of rights, how are we justified in determining who is the government and who is the criminal? It does us no good in this case to define rights with respect to the rights-enforcers because we have no basis to criticize the rights-enforcers for enforcing a different concept of rights. It must be that norms exist independently of the enforcement organization.

> So this is how I understood the OP, when he said (paraphrasing) property rights derive their existence from the state.

Couldn't we equally consider the state to have been derived from property rights, if we imagine the state to have arisen in order to enforce those rights?

> So the way I understand this, is that territoriality might be the reason for forming/formalising property rights in society

Territoriality is human nature, the purpose of formalizing it and enforcing it is to enable large scale coordination and minimize the amount of violence. People are going to have territory and they are going to have territorial conflicts. Rights are a social construct that enables people to have similar theories of acceptable conduct without having to know each other or agree as individuals on everything. Property rights allow people to have their territory and then settle territorial disputes in a way that creates (non-binding) precedents. This allows people to live in greater densities and avoid coming to violence over trespasses.

> property rights are an incarnation of territoriality. Maybe a formalisation of territoriality is a better word?

Territoriality just means that people are built to have an idea that something belongs to them. The specific property norms of a society are what determines what specifically they consider to be property. Property rights are just the rights surrounding places and things. Rights are social arrangements that allow people to live inc lose proximity and make arrangements with a reasonable security and reasonable expectation without having to get everyone to agree to everything all the time. Someone has the right to life, that means if someone deprives them of their life we already know it was wrong, we don't have to wonder if they had some verbal agreement that made it ok or if it was ok for Arthur to kill Bradley because Bradley was "in the way." Many norms are tacit and not formal. We could say the body of law is a formalization of the social norms.

> I thank you, this is definitely an interesting discussion.

Likewise, thank you for replying.

> First let me say I appreciate your non-confrontational arguments (you have been admittedly much better than myself) in a thread which is really quite a "sh*tshow".

LOL no kidding, but thanks for your non-confrontational approach as well. The world may burn around us but if we can keep our heads perhaps we can set an example for the lost and hopeless.

So hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons? (I realize this is not a practical concern today, but I'm trying to find out if anyone truly believes there are no lines to be drawn on property rights.)

How does this generalize and fit into the framework of property rights in general? What makes, say, manufacturing guns not strong enough evidence of trying to do something terrible? Is it mere history, or is it the defensive uses of guns, or does the magnitude of the terribleness matter, or something else? (In practice, I think purifying U-235 takes huge facilities and no one can do it in their backyard—it's probably a few orders of magnitude more expensive and complex.) Also, if it's 100% established that this one guy making the nukes is a trustworthy pacifist who won't use them, but the problem is he won't keep them in a particularly secure location, can one defensibly call his actions illegal? ("Planning to be neglectful"? How about someone who will guard them as heavily as he can, but that's just not heavily enough?) There would be a lot to explore there, but I think it may be possible to resolve the issue of nuclear weapons while keeping a pure system of property rights.

Only 2 nuclear weapons out of the 10,000s made have ever been used. Almost no one announces they are building a nuclear weapon, it is usually done in secret. So this argument does not really hold.

What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework.

The entities that have, so far, made nuclear weapons are nation-states. I think most people would agree with the following statements on that: (a) it's hard to prevent nation-states from making them (not for lack of trying), (b) many of them already made them long ago (U.S., Russia, France, China, etc.) and we're not trying to say that was illegal, (c) the concept of "illegal" at the level of nation-state actors is ... to say the least, very different in implementation, and possibly in concept, from that of "illegal" at the level of individuals. Many people think that nations making more nukes is bad, and some are in favor of disarmament treaties, but I don't think they believe international law either does or should mandate disarmament for all nations. Some would say it's hypocritical for the nuclear club to try to prevent other nations from developing nukes; I suspect others agree it's hypocritical but also don't want those nations to develop nukes.

The question in this case was, "So, hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons [personally]?" It would be impractically difficult for one person to make nuclear weapons by himself, without essentially buying or stealing all the important stuff from elsewhere. And if it were easy for one person to make nukes, then probably no ideological system could resolve that easily. There might be some middle ground of possible scenarios that's important to resolve—e.g. if a company wants to make a nuke to use for, I dunno, their own Project Orion or mining a mountain or doing an interesting underwater experiment, then should that be illegal?

We may end up facing the "one madman can create a superweapon" scenario with biotech. Perhaps, by that time, everyone will have their own hazmat suits and their houses will have UV decontamination chambers to fight off SARS-COV-5 or whatever.

> What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework.

Yep, I cheerfully admit this is what I'm doing. At least I stated it as "I think it may be possible to resolve the issue" after mentioning problems with my proposal, instead of asserting "my ideological framework resolves this easily". Though I probably should have made the "how would an individual get access to nukes anyway, and if that were easy, then what would any legal system be able to do about that?" point first.

> Property rights and other natural rights cannot be infringed upon for any reason

I am not squaring the circle. If we don't allow someone to build a nuke with materials they purchased, we are infringing on their property rights. If we say you can build a nuke only for mining a mountain we are infringing on their property rights. Which in my mind is a good thing. Property rights are not absolute, we just are just arguing about where to set that line. But as long as we decide to not let individual's own nukes I am fine with pretending property rights are absolute.

In the case of explosives, that means you need enough property to contain the effects. In the case of nuclear weapons, it basically requires an entire planet.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/topics/2019/youtube/

Private entities can't censor anything, anyhow. Independently and freely choosing which sentiments to platform on a private service is not censorship, no matter how far anyone tries to stretch the definition of the term.

Censorship is going around to all the platforms and forcing them to remove content which has already been or is on the way to being displayed to the public.

>Censorship is going around to all the platforms and forcing them to remove content which has already been or is on the way to being displayed to the public.

No, actually, that isn't the definition. You guys just had a back and forth on this. You're artificially trying to limit the definition of "censorship" to fit your sentiment because your sentiment is not based in objective reality.

While I would agree with you that YouTube should not be compelled by law to host any content and can censor whatever they want (and we can, and should, refuse to use YouTube to host our videos and inform ourselves), it is still censorship, plain and simple.

If you send me a DM asking me to repeat your claims in a public-facing comment, and I refuse, that is not censorship. Ditto for any and every private entity which exists.

>Censorship is going around to all the platforms and forcing them to remove content which has already been or is on the way to being displayed to the public.

That is your own personal definition. What happened to meeting people where they are?

"From the consumers’ point of view, net neutrality is a guarantee that all connections are treated equally and ISPs won’t censor the internet."

https://nordvpn.com/blog/net-neutrality-pros-and-cons/

" Some notable incidents otherwise have included Bell Canada's throttling of certain protocols and Telus's censorship of a specific website critical of the company."

" Deep packet inspection helped make real-time discrimination between different kinds of data possible,[49] and is often used for Internet censorship."

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

>While it is true that extortionary tactics can be used to effectively censor particular sentiments, that is not what is being referred to in discussions surrounding net neutrality.

Maybe it wasn't being discussed around you. I certainly remember discussions on HN about comcast blocking torrents or whatnot and 'censoring' the internet. But I guess you have a different definition of censorship, so we never did achieve common ground on that.

1. the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. 2. (in ancient Rome) the office or position of censor.

Modern capitalism has replaced the public square and a huge number of face-to-face communication opportunities with communication mediated by private corporations, and it uses those (and they take liberties themselves to for their own purposes) to outsource censorship and stiffle public discussion...

The idea of restricting freedom of speech to the state is an antiquated idea, belonging to pre-internet times, when a huge part of social interaction didn't happen through social media...

How are you defining "freedoms" and "fundamental natural rights"? This sounds good in theory, but once you start enumerating what they are for the purposes of encoding them in law, or if not a law, then some form of social contract other than "might makes right", the counterexamples immediately flood in, and for good reason.

Humans are social and always form affinity groups.

Groups have more power (by any definition) than individuals.

Absent enforcement, groups will invariably infringe at will on the rights of individuals or minorities.

QED a defining purpose of any "state" is to defend individuals' liberties, on their behalf, against such actors.

There are many mechanisms and descriptions of this activity, but, the bottom line is always the same. This is as true for the "free market" as it is for the "free market of ideas" or the contemporary ordering of law and punishment.

The state has to be the ultimate authority, to prevent smaller aggregations from stripping minorities and individuals of their own liberty.

No proposed alternative system has so far demonstrated stable viability.

That the examples we live within are terrible does not mean they are not also the least bad viable alternatives.

Personally I may think this is a shame, but, oh well.

Heinlein loved to portray rationalist societies in which ad hoc aggregations formed just long enough to enforce a purported majority-recognized rational moral order, without need for formal constitutional law or persistent institutions with formal institutional memory.

When I was 15 I thought this was how things should be.

At 50 I am certain that it shall never be so, not with the limitations of our actual evolved embodiment.

Not actually demonstrated. you should say "QED a state is a group organized to infringe at will on the rights of individuals and minorities."

The post doesn't appear to be disputing that the fire in a theater example is a legitimate illustration of the limits of speech under the first amendment. They just proceed from there to make a more general principle that this example can be invoked by people who intend to suppress speech. Which I also don't think is in dispute.

So I don't think that post has anything to do with anything, insofar as this comment thread is concerned.

It certainly does say that, and that's really broad and vague. And it's hard to keep track of this whole thread, but I'm pretty sure the branch we're on sprouted from a categorical claim that there are no "buts" when it comes to free speech. But your article doesn't dispute that there are exceptions, and so it's fair to invoke the fire in a crowded theater to illustrate the principle for that purpose.

For anything beyond that, the value and relevance will depend on what point is being made by whom and how well you are doing in your responsibility to interpret and respond to those charitably. But linking to a long blog post and vaguely warning that it's "bad" without doing any further work to connect that to a contention in any given comment is just confusing and unconstructive.

And people should not be idiots to be panicking from someone yelling "fire" when they can't see one in the theater...

There are definitely places in a theater, out of the view of spectators, but likely fire hazards, e.g. the projection room.

Most building fires cannot be seen until it is too late. Smoke is an early indicator of a fire, but it cannot be seen in a pitch dark room.

And even in perfect conditions to determine if there is a fire or not, the audience may not be capable to judge if there is one or not, e.g. children.

I should be immortal, all knowing and beautiful but I'll have to make do with what nature gave me.

It can very well be a principle of law. In certain legal codes, it actually is.

As for reality, that's a pretty low bar.

We have many "shoulds" (e.g. you should not cross a red light lest you get a ticket / prison) that are not some inherent property of reality or physical law, but things we've decided upon.

In fact, those are the only things that makes sense to consider as "shoulds". The constraints of reality are not negotiable, so should there is superfluous.

1. You can't publish child porn.

2. You can't publish copyrighted work. [EDIT: For which you don't have the rights. I thought that was sufficiently implied.]

3. You can't defame another person.

4. You can't threaten someone.

5. You can't use your speech to invade someone's privacy.

6. You can't use obscenity freely.

And this is just freedoms of speech and isn't even including the whole controversial money is equal to speech opinion.

Freedoms and rights are rarely binary. There is often a spectrum and there are often complexities regarding where your rights end and mine begin. All of the above (with maybe the exception of number 6) involve one person using a right to take away someone else's rights. As a society, we have decided to side with that other person in these cases.

2-> This is a civil violation. The FBI poster before movies says it's criminal, but it's very rarely persued as such (unless you're Kim Dotcom).

3-> Civil, not criminal

4-> Reasonable limit to speech and it's specific. You have to threaten specific harm to a specific person (or group in a specific time frame). There's a lot of very complex case law here, test for 'call to action' ... a lot of it going back to the Red Scare

5-> Like publishing Trump's tax returns? That's a federal crime by the way.

6-> Obscenity has some very specific and narrow definitions (see #1). Although people like to throw around the "I'll know it when I see it," there are certain tests to determine obscenity in the US.

If expressions are deemed unlawful after-the-fact and via due process, the speaker may be punished.

It is anti-freedom to bar expression w/o adjudication or due process. E.g., alleged threats or alleged defamation are protected speech until a court determines them to be unprotected. Emergency injunctions or the like may be temporarily enforced if the court feels it is likely that the expression in controversy will be found to be unprotected speech.

Also, courts can issue narrow and temporary gag orders but they are limited and specifically targeted for reasons unrelated to the viewpoint of the speech.

2. You can, people do it all the time. You cannot publish it if you dont own the rights same way you cannot enter my house if you are not invited. What supposed freedom you are renouncing to?

3. Same as 2

4. Same as 2

5. I dont have any idea what is that supposed to mean.

6. In TV, I supposed you are not, at your home oh yes you can. In the street unless you are being a prick that is rarely if ever enforced.

Human freedom does not mean,"I will treat the universe like my personal minecraft game" it means, "These rights are universally agreed to be indispensable for the human condition and we will agree to gran them universally"

2, 3, 4 - I don't know how "people do it all the time" is supposed to be a defense. People jaywalk all the time too. It doesn't invalidate the law. The fact is these forms of speech are illegal and people get in trouble for them all the time.

5. People have a right to privacy and you can't use your freedom of speech to infringe on that. For example, I can't publish photos of you that I captured from a camera in a public restroom.

6. Yes, you are right this doesn't apply in your home. However it does apply in several public spheres. In most of this country, women can't even take off their shirt in public. You are right that obscenity laws aren't universally enforced, but this is a common charge levied against undesirables.

>Human freedom does not mean,"I will treat the universe like my personal minecraft game" it means, "These rights are universally agreed to be indispensable for the human condition and we will agree to gran them universally"

But these examples prove we don't "grant them universally". We grant them conditionally as long as you don't use them to interfere with the rights of others.

When talking about freedom of speech, we use the US as a gold standard simply because we aren't talking about what is legal, we are talking about what should be legal, and the US has the least restrictions on speech anywhere in the world (my above paragraph serves as an example of this).

Otherwise I'm just enjoying this back and forth, you're both making coherent points and it is a productive discussion.

I don't think this is true. Since "child" means anyone under 18, "child porn" therefore includes teenagers sexting their boy/girlfriends; some of those relationships could be called abusive, but surely many could not be, unless you think a teenager taking pictures of him/herself is inherently (self-)abusive. But I'm sure no internet content moderation policy, nor likely any police raid, would look into the background of a nude picture of a 14-year-old and determine that no abuse was involved and therefore the picture is permissible.

See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22144707/ . "The cases involved "youth-produced sexual images" that constituted child pornography under relevant statutes according to respondents. ... US law enforcement agencies handled an estimated 3477 cases of youth-produced sexual images during 2008 and 2009 ... Two-thirds of the cases involved an "aggravating" circumstance beyond the creation and/or dissemination of a sexual image. In these aggravated cases, either an adult was involved (36% of cases) or a minor engaged in malicious, non-consensual, or abusive behavior (31% of cases). An arrest occurred in 62% of cases with an adult involved, in 36% of the aggravated youth-only cases, and in 18% of the "experimental" cases (youth-only and no aggravating elements)."

Then, if, say, someone still has naked pictures from age 15 (of herself in her bedroom alone) when she turns 18, and decides to start selling her own pictures online (or even posting them for free), and some guy buys them, and at some point the guy gets raided and the police find those pictures... I'm pretty sure the guy will get charged for possession of child pornography based on those pictures (assuming one can tell by looking that the girl was 15), and "no one abused this girl in the process" will not be accepted as a valid defense in court.

The analysis I have seen in the past disagrees with this, but honestly I am not looking to plug the necessary keywords into a search engine to find a source. I believe the specific example was regarding deepfaking completely fake computer generated children's faces onto adult porn.

2,3,4. You misunderstood the point. I said people publish copyrighted material all the time (if they have the rights to it). Not at all what you are saying here.

5. You have no right to privacy in any public space. That's why paparazzi exists. In most civilised countries a public bathroom gives you total privacy so that is not even an issue.

> But these examples prove we don't "grant them universally". We grant them conditionally as long as you don't use them to interfere with the rights of others.

You are mistaken. Those are orthogonal concepts, universally just means: to everybody. And yes we grant them conditionally, with the unstated assumption you lose them temporarily if your actions stop other people rights. It certainly not the case of these youtube channels, they are not restricting anybody's freedom.

2, 3, 4. I thought not owning the rights was implied by my comment. I edited that to make it more specific. I don't know how potential for people owning a copyright and publishing their own works applies to issues 3 and 4.

5. You do have certain expectations of privacy even while in public. Laws against upskirt photos are one example.

>And yes we grant them conditionally, with the unstated assumption you lose them temporarily if your actions stop other people rights.

So do you know agree that there are "buts" on freedom?

> It certainly not the case of these youtube channels, they are not restricting anybody's freedom.

I have the right to vote and have my vote counted. These Youtube videos are trying to invalidate my vote from being counted.

I never talked about truth, I talked about freedoms. I think you should revise your definition of "universal" it seems you dont understand it. The whole idea of my original point is that you cannot say OK this is an universal(for everybody) agreed upon freedom but.... No but here, restricting freedom to an specific subset of the population who has not commited a crime is a big no-no. I mean, did you actually read the post, it's bone chilling:

> Limiting the reach of borderline content and prominently surfacing authoritative information are important ways we protect people from problematic content that doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines.

They acknowledge the content doesnt violate any community guideline(even less any law) and yet they want to "protect" us from it. Sorry, I will be on the other side every single time. If that means to be next to Alex Jones, so be it.

Youtube says: " For example, while problematic misinformation represents a fraction of 1% of what's watched on YouTube in the U.S., we know we can bring that number down even more. " This is what I oppose to, to selectively curtailing universal rights. I dont care about any pedantic discussion on semantics, I will gift you them all.

> Laws against upskirt photos are one example.

Same case with fictional animated child pornography, this is not a settled issue(https://www.hindustantimes.com/world/top-us-court-rules-upsk.... Let me repeat that the point is not that. You could still argue for years what it is the best course of action. What you cannot do is selectively enforce those rights or prohibitions against certain sets of the population.That is the problem, that is the violation of the universality of a right, Not the complexity of a legislation.

> So do you know agree that there are "buts" on freedom?

If you call freedom do whatever the hell you want , yes there are buts. If you say freedom as universally granted rights, "But" let's stop this group of having them. There is no valid buts, sorry. I wont never ever be on favor of censoring people who has not commited any violation by expressing their points.

> I have the right to vote and have my vote counted. These Youtube videos are trying to invalidate my vote from being counted.

This a pretty weird, and frankly out of character for you, argument. Some loonies doubting the election, asking for recall or even a repeat are not violating your right at all. I am dumbfounded for such a jump of logic here anyway. Any decision about the election will be taken by the authorities not random youtubers. Go search in youtube "Trump should be impeached, jailed,judged" you will find thousands of videos, are those videos invalidating the votes of the people who vote for Trump. Because from my POV either your vote is safe and you have nothing to worry about or your vote is discarded and you will have to take that with the authorities, not Johnie P Schmuck in youtube, who ironically has many more things in common with you and me than with Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg.

Governments get their power from the people. That is the foundation of the US political thinking. The larger the percentage of the population that supports overturning this election, the more pressure elected officials will feel to comply. Therefore allowing this misinformation to spread increases the odds that my right to vote will be infringed. Is it an immediate and direct relationship like in some of the other examples we have discussed? Obviously not. However there is a clear causal line from someone advocating that my rights be taken away to the potential of my rights actually be taken away.

> You cannot publish it if you don't own the rights

Who gave YOU the right to take away MY ability to publish anything? Stay consistent with your arguments, at least.

> same way you cannot enter my house if you are not invited

Who gave YOU the right to take away MY right and freedom to enter a place?

----

Often times, when you find someone making such absurd claims, you must argue back with the same nonsense logic they use otherwise there will be no end

Would love to hear your answers to the above points I made please and thanks.

There are no good answers to a point that absurd.

> Often times, when you find someone making such absurd claims, you must argue back with the same nonsense logic they use otherwise there will be no end

---

Thanks for proving my point!

amazing! my technique works, as per usual. :) thanks for proving my point.

I think you know exactly what is meant. You even say it in the second sentence of your comment.

Free speech does not allow copyright infringement. Yes, "people do it all the time". That doesn't mean it's allowed.

People does it all the time. Disney does it, any editorial house does it. If you have the rights you can publish the material. Same as you have the right to enter your house. Not mine, yours.

"You can't publish copyrighted work."

I thought it was very obviously implied that they meant "You can't publish copyrighted work that you don't have distribution rights to."

I find it hard to believe that you didn't actually know this and took a strong stance against an incorrect understanding of the comment because you want to be pedantic.

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

Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot). This seems reasonable.

Consider a hypothetical with the current election and baseless claims of fraud. A month from now as Biden is sworn in, the drumbeat of fraud continues. There are now collectives of militia groups who claim they cannot "stand by" anymore and the election must be overturned or they will secede from the union. Trump decamps to Mar-a-lago and continues to claim he won. Then one day, local county governments in northern Texas band together and take the side of the militias, saying they will not recognize the current federal government until Trump is declared the winner. This action spreads like wild fire and triggers the same revolt in most rural areas of the country. Trump incites them and declares himself leader in exile. Most red county governments back the militias and declare they will not recognize the current government, as they have no choice at this point. We are now at civil war.

Is this scenario likely to happen? In the current state if disinformation and cult-like following of Trump supporters, I honestly think it is. Look at how Kyle Rittenhouse is now a hero of the right.

So at what point does disinformation reach the level of "imminent lawless action" and should not be protected speech? The government is weak and severely limited here. Any action against disinformation will immediately back fire. It will not happen.

But YouTube as a private company can. And I think they should. It is fair that they see this disinformation campaign as getting very close to "shouting fire in a crowded theater" and are acting on this threat.

Now you can argue the points of what has literary value, but the written word has always had literary value, no matter how grotesque.

We don't burn books in this country.

The evidence and conclusions were provided by more than a dozen US agencies, as well as from a bi-partisan investigation conducted in the Senate.

> The democrats were claiming fraud

"Fraud" is a strong word, especially when the Democratic candidate literally came out the same night as conceded. Sure, Russia influenced the election, I don't remember countless law suits after the election trying to change the will of the people.

> There is no "buts" regarding freedom

You say that, but Republicans are very much in favor of denying people their right to bear arms because of "buts".

Current front pages from CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, BBC (for future reference)." [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1336788393884323849?s=20

News stories about this development have appeared by the time of writing this comment. This twitter poster, and you, seem to have forgotten that it takes time to write a story.

> The evidence was tenuous and circumstantial at best. True. But that’s a step up compared to the made up lies that go on nowadays.

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communications_Decenc...

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

And probably more...

>The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump

>The Committee finds the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case that Russia engaged in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Why do you say "supposed Russian influence" when a Republican led senate confirmed this?

>There was no influence

Go here again https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/senate-intel-relea... and open up the 4 PDF's Volume 1/2/3/4

Open Volume 2.

Search for the word "influence". You might notice you have about a billion matches. Here is one significant quote

>Arriving at a similar conclusion, an Oxford Internet Institute study-of 17 million tweets posted during the 2016 election found that bots "reached positions of measurable influence," and "did infiltrate the upper cores of influence and were thus jn a position to significantly influence digital communications during the 2016 U.S. election."

So, you are going to continue to state "there was no influence" even though hundreds of pages of reports from the Senate Intel say otherwise?

Just not YouTube’s.

America is built on private property rights.

Americans LOVE to go on about freedom while selling themselves, their time, body, ideas.

Say what you want. There is no physical law or social that obliges others to carry your message or submit to your expectations.

Change the ownership model.

There are always "buts" in all of human rights. No right is absolute because we don't live in a world of absolutes. Free speech, without any limits at all, becomes libel, harassment, hate speech, incitement to violence, sedition, etc.

Absolutism in rights is a thought-terminating cliché, evidenced by the fact that there are literal lifetimes of scholarship in regards to when rights begin and when they end, and which right to prioritize when multiple people's rights are conflicting with each other.

> The democrats were claiming fraud 4 years go due to a supposed Russian influence.The evidence was tenuous and circumstantial at best. I dont remember seeing a similar cry for censorship.

There was a claim that ended up in a Special Counsel investigation in which _multiple_ people associated with the Trump 2016 campaign ended up going in prison for, including Michael Flynn.

Comparing claims of potential fraud, followed up by investigation and mostly finished when such investigation discovered some things and disproved others, is an eminently healthy level of questioning over the complete insanity of fraud claims.

The current claims of fraud are not of anyone with a sound mind. Do not conflate one thing with the other; they're not anywhere near the same league.

>The report was the culmination of two years of investigation by Mr Mueller which saw some of the president's closest former aides prosecuted and, in some cases, imprisoned, although not on charges related to the alleged Russian collusion.

I am glad that we investigated and charged people with crimes that they would have otherwise gotten away with but if the same standard was applied the investigation would have been shutdown as a conspiracy.

[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47688187

Edit to add: I have not followed the news that closely, so I am open to new information. But I think this exchange proves the overall point on censorship, there were extraordinary claims that were refuted for having no evidence. Investigations were had, preliminary reports said no misconduct but now you say that later reports are more damming.

If we treated the situation the same, the news and twitter would have not amplified the voices but silenced them and we would have had no investigation.

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

Note the second paragraph:

"... the report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion" but was welcomed by the Trump campaign as it expected to benefit from such efforts. It also identifies links between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government, about which several persons connected to the campaign made false statements and obstructed investigations."

YT isn't propagating it. Its a result of people searching for, and watching conspiracy videos. If you watch a lot of Alex Jones videos, then the algorithm by design will recommend other conspiracy videos as well.

> YT isn't propagating it.

You contradict yourself.

I have never once searched for conspiracy content, ever, and was fed conspiracy videos in feeds for over a decade. That is by design. I imagine many other users would report the same.

The algorithm favors conspiracy videos and youtube is responsible. They have known this forever and chose to do nothing. Hysteria and insane tin-foil hat content pays out.

TY isn't propagating content - meaning there are no people who sit in front of a computer and choose what people are seeing in their "Feeds" or what they see when they land on the front page.

That is completely different than an algorithm specifically designed to recommend content to you based on what video's you have watched in the past to maximize your time on the site.

IF you have one, you don't need to the other.

Also, the content you see when you are logged in to google vs. logged out is also completely different for reasons that shouldn't require any elaboration.

I think I made it clear that this is not what is happening, and not what the problem is.

Every element of this sentence is incorrect. Democrats were not claiming fraud - they were claiming that Russians interfered in the election and Trump / members of his campaign participated in that effort. Russian interference is undeniable - Dutch intelligence literally has it on tape [1]. And the report issued by the Republican controlled senate concluded that members of Trumps campaign and other people in his orbit were exchanging information with Russian intelligence and coordinating with cutouts like Guccifer 2.0.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/ef3b036949174a9b98d785129a93428b

The big irony to me is that supposedly the biggest Russian bit of mischief, involving the Guccifer person you mentioned above, was to expose the DNC emails showing the corruption going on there, how back-room deals screwed over Bernie and a lot of Democrat voters. I have a hard time understanding why this is not talked about more.

"The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership's publicly stated neutrality,[6] as several DNC operatives seemed to deride Sanders' campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton's nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

"A new leak of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee appears to support the long-held suspicions of some Bernie Sanders supporters that the DNC was working against him." - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-sanders_...

"DNC Apologizes to Bernie Sanders and Supporters Over Leaked Emails" - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-sanders_...

I'm not meaning to be partisan about this. My point was that everyone is trying to manipulate the American public - both political parties, big companies, other countries, etc.

Second, if you read past the headlines, and look into the individual emails, you'll see the contents aren't all that shocking either, nor do they paint the elaborate picture of conspiracy against his campaign the headlines infer.

Of the thousands of emails that were leaked, only a handful of conversations even mentioned him, and none are evidence of any specific actions taken to thwart his campaign. Some idle chatter, sure, but nothing to the degree of "rigging!" that was often claimed at the time.

The whole story amounted to "The Democrats didn't like the not-Democrat that ran, and a few said so."

“The agreement — signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook with a copy to [Clinton campaign counsel] Marc Elias— specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised,”

“[Clinton’s] campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16599036/d...

We found out about this thanks to Guccifer, and to a lot of people what the DNC did was a big deal.

My original point was that everyone is trying to pull a fast one over on the American public, not just the Russian's. Republican's also, in case you are offended that we are talking about Democrats at the moment.

Do you disagree?

This is incorrect. The Democrats alleged a Russian disinformation campaign to interfere in the 2016 election. The truth of this claim is beyond debate, and is different from alleging widespread voter fraud. Whether Trump was directly involved is the only part up for dispute, because he and so many witnesses refused to answer questions or lied to protect themselves and/or the president.

On the other hand, Trump has been complaining of election fraud since before he even became a politician. He claimed election fraud in the republican primary [1]. He complained of election fraud when he won the 2016 election. And finally, he complained of election fraud when he lost in 2020. He even alleged election fraud in 2012 [2]. A key difference here is he has absolutely no evidence to back up his claims.

The claims and their respective credibility are not equatable in good faith.

[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/69487990025635430... [2] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/26603550916230349...

Talk all you want of freedom, but freedom is already reigning on these platforms, and SV's techno-libertarianism has clearly failed our democracy.

This is just bad whataboutism.

Your argument distils to "saying something that is true and saying something that is false are clearly not the same thing"; you are basing your argument on your own belief that one is true and one is false. What we are getting at here is, regardless of whether either is true or false, they are fundamentally the same types of claims and yet one is amplified and another is banned.

The idea that I can't regulate what goes on in my community because "free speech" is absurd. The same goes for Twitter and YouTube.

I’m not a fan of either party in the US — they both have glaring fatal flaws — but this comment is an irresponsible level of whataboutism.

The folks commenting on Russian influence in 2016 were doing it with some basis in reality, and it turned out that the facts were confirmed by the current administration’s DoJ. I will add that Russian interference was not their top beef — Comey’s statements seemed to be more disconcerting for these people.

The crazy shit that Trump is saying is a figment of his own imagination and nothing more. There is no basis in reality. No one will come in later and confirm that any of his ramblings were actually correct.

Free speech has always had limits when it has had the potential to harm others. While the line is not always clear, undermining the mechanics of US democracy with verifiably false accusations can easily be seen as something that is harmful to others.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/senate-intel-relea...

>The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump

>The Committee finds the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case that Russia engaged in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qODProeRQ4c

The DoJ literally published a report outlining the Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The Republican control Senate Intel Committee also published a report outlining the Russian meddling the 2016 election. If you don't believe either of these organizations, then there is nothing left to talk about.

Journalists qualify as "folks" I would think. But it's true I suppose, much of what they said had some basis in reality. Nothing to see here.

> If you don't believe either of these organizations, then there is nothing left to talk about.

There's this: "Is it composed of an aggregation of all(!) the "facts" asserted by all respectable, trustworthy journalists and politicians in the last few years?"

This holier than though "how dare you!" culture when someone asks legitimate questions about legitimate wrongdoing (here I refer to journalists and their tendency to wildly speculate, which clearly exerts psychological influence on belief formation in the public) is annoying. And on top of it I get a [reported]. Nice.

>I don't need Youtube to tell me what I should and shouldn't watch

I was wondering if that extended to youtube banning porn. If you don't want to engage that is fine I will go reply to some other comment.

> Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.

And according to Giuliani, Trump's own attorney, in the actual court filings:

> the Campaign “doesn’t plead fraud. . . . [T]his is not a fraud case.” Mot. to Dismiss Hr’g Tr. 118:19–20, 137:18

When your own attorney says "this is not a fraud case", do you think maybe there was no fraud?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-third-circui...

This means that there are enough voting members on HN motivated enough to downvote a comment describing reality - and an insufficient number of voting members motivated enough to upvote it - that a comment describing reality is downvoted.

That's... highly disappointing.

To grandparent commenter: at a certain point you have to use a bit of your intelligence and see for yourself whether a claim is full of shit or has merit. Unfortunately this might be an example of Dunning-Kruger in action...

Yeah, don't see a political slant here...

You can be a conservative and acknowledge the President states falsehoods at an unseen pace.

Oh, please. Following the constitutional process for disputing an election is Weimar now? Could this be more Godwin's law?

Sometimes reality just reaches that point where Godwin's law references are not funny anymore.

Therein lies the rub. If a court is not the venue, then what is the venue?

I think the parent poster was referring to the link they posted which says:

"Arizona GOP asks followers if they'd die to overturn Trump loss".

That seems to go well beyond a court challenge.

> In a three-minute video posted to her Facebook page, the Democrat from Detroit said "This is just a warning to you Trumpers... be careful. Tread lightly. We ain't playin' with you..." > Johnson then added "And for those of you who are soldiers... you know how to do it. Do it right. Be in order. Make them pay." [0]

[0]: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/make-them-pay-michigan-l...

Filing frivolous lawsuits based on not one shred of evidence other than "too many Dems voted!" is the "constitutional process" now?

Trump is arguing that (a) SCOTUS should (b) order several states to have their legislatures appoint new electors (c) on the basis of a suit brought by Texas against several other states (d) alleging that state court rulings modifying electoral law (in accordance with state statutes) are unconstitutionally overruling state legislatures' ability to determine their electors. (See http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163234/20201...)

There are 4 separate elements in that assertion that are each unprecedented in terms of disputing an election. SCOTUS is not the venue for election disputes; state courts are. No one has ever before argued that state legislators can appoint electors in lieu of popular vote, and as some briefs have pointed out, several state statutes (including some of the states involved here!) expressly forbid that. No state has ever before tried to challenge the election procedures of another state. And the legal basis for doing all of this is itself without precedent.

This is not normal.

"No evidence" is the lie here.

I wonder if the people you disagree with would say the exact same thing?

Yes buddy, sorry to be hard about it, but sometimes you're right and the other side is wrong. It's not about partisanship; it's about objective reality.

And the objective reality is that for anyone who's not stuck on the Fox/OANN spin cycle (which includes the billions of US outside the US watching from afar) the results are clear, conclusive and bright as day.

You have to draw the line somewhere. Imagine someone buying all the toilet paper in a town and then running targeted adds on-line to start panic buying. So they can sell theirs. At some point Google becomes an accessory to price gouging law.

What if Trump ends up in prison for violating the oath of the office? Does Google have no liability in helping him commit his crimes?

What's more is that the language used by the losing party is extremely dangerous. Just yesterday, the verified Twitter account for the Arizona GOP asked its followers if they were ready to die for the cause of keeping Trump in power. Disinformation does not exist in a vacuum, and it is being used actively to cultivate violence.

as much as the current occupant of the office would like them to have loyalty to him personally, they don't

still, Congress has given up too much control and needs to take it back

* blinks *

Yes, they do. He's their commander in chief, authorized by Congress to attack anyone or anything in the name of "fighting terrorism" with zero immediate accountability to anyone. (And yes, as you suggest, this is a problem Congress created for itself.)

POTUS also has the ability to invoke something called the "Insurrection Act," which effectively deploys the military on domestic soil for law-enforcement purposes.

Oh, and speaking of Federal law enforcement, that's an executive branch function as well.

as much as the current occupant of the office would like them to have loyalty to him personally, they don't

An idealistic perspective that isn't always borne out by reality. [1]

still, Congress has given up too much control and needs to take it back

That's for darned sure. Of course, a complicit Congress is arguably worse than an impotent one, because it opens the door to a captive judicial branch as well.

[1]: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/dod-report-reveals-details-s... :

    “[The convoy commander] was also 
    aware of the rules precluding 
    Department of Defense (DoD) endorsement 
    of political candidates during an election,” 
    the documents stated. “However, he believed 
    that flying the flag was not inappropriate 
    since the election was over and since the 
    candidate was now the Commander in Chief 
    of the Armed Forces.”

Pennsylvania: 1.8 million ballots mailed out, 2.5 million ballots received. Hello?

Trump won and Biden stole it.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9787630...

I never truly understood how demagogues gained power until this election. I see history in a completely different light now. No matter what you say to these people, they'll either ignore it, or find some other lie to hang their hat on. If you point out the facts, they'll deny the source, or say, "How do YOU know? Did YOU count all the votes?" or some other nonsense.

What's the cure for this? (Not asking OP, he's one of the zombie hoards. He'll go to his deathbed convinced of his own delusions.) We used to just ignore these types of stubborn, brain washed conspiracy theory wackos, but now there's tens of millions of them.

It's truly frightening.

Almost as if it isn't actually true.

Now, they would be committing all kinds of other misconduct besides perjury, but then, Trump's (remaining) attorneys have been committing all kinds of other misconduct (that the campaign being waged requires that explains why so many have left.)

Btw, 2 seconds of googling shows that PA sent out 3 million absentee ballots and received 2.5M.

Who cares?! As you said, Fox is crappy news so they don't get my business. Same thing with (generally) MSNBC and others. To answer the next question: The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Shepard Smith

> it's one of those "least worst" choices I respectfully and completely disagree. This is policing thought. Things are not worse than they have been before. The communist witch hunts of the 50s is one example. A lot of the things FDR did were marginal (turned out alright though). Once you start controlling freedom of expression, you own all expression. No one is smart enough. The free market may suck in the short run, but in the long run it will work out.

One perfect example of this: > The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis Yep, and HE LOST! His lying was a significant factor in this loss. Come January he won't be the POTUS.

I wish I could brush it off so easily, but the truth is that, well, the truth, does matter. You or I might choose to consume "news" from the likes of Fox, but many millions do. At that scale, the lies and fake news have an undeniable impact.

I think we are much better off with the misinformation and lies out in the sunlight for all to see and refute.

Citation needed?

The founding fathers owned newspapers & regularly fabricated stories about opponents. Ben Franklin openly wrote about it and he was far from alone.

William Randolph Hearst controlled a significant portion of newspapers & blatantly used used that power to manipulate public opinion, frequently with suspect information.

We went through a whole era of questionable news -- referred to as "yellow journalism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

The fake news around the Gulf of Tonkin escalated the conflict into a relatively minor to what the US would call the Vietnam War.

The fake news about Iraq WMDs led to the disastrous second golf war.

Bill Clinton stood before the camera & said "I did not have sex with that woman" and his wife, HRC, said it was all "a ring wing conspiracy."

Obama said "if you like your health plan, you can keep it", which several newspapers defended & fact-checked as true, as until much later rating it as lie of the year.

Don't get me wrong. I despise Trump, I despise what's he's doing, and I want to see him removed. But if we're too be critical of him playing loose with facts, we can't be ourselves. And saying this is "peak" when it's likely only a local maxima seems dubious at best.

I think what we are seeing now is different. People like Trump don't need doctored satellite photographs and elaborately constructed propaganda that the press will fall for - they can use social media platforms as a very public podium from which to spew lies. And, perhaps because of the viral nature of social media, and perhaps because of the inherent terseness of Twitter, people are bombarded by these tiny nuggests of "truth" from "trusted" people who "obviously" wouldn't lie, and the become "truth" for those people.

I think the key difference now is that it's never been so easy to put out "news", and it's never been so easy to consume so very many sources of "news", or so frequently.

I don't like what YouTube is doing either, but it's really hard to say what any other alternative is at this point.

"The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly, ridiculously false), "

I've paid fairly close attention to Trump's statements since 2015 or so, and I have not seen any such, certainly not one a day or hour.

If there are such lies, then I'd sure like to know about them. As part of that, I'd like to see credible references, hopefully to primary sources, that is, just following common high school term paper writing standards.

I will grant that maybe Trump (1) exaggerates and (2) says things to gauge reactions, e.g., the common "run it up the flag pole to see if anyone salutes".

But actual lies, you have one an hour for four years, and so far I don't have even one.

As you are an HN contributor, I'd believe that you want to stick close to what you can document.

Maybe you could document three of his serious lies?

Extreme exaggeration is endemic to his character. It's not a maybe. He exaggerates everyday, all day.

"Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!"

"Nobody has more respect for women than I do."

"Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody."

“Nobody reads the Bible more than me.”

"Nobody loves the Bible more than I do"

"Nobody does self-deprecating humor better than I do. It’s not even close"

“Nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.”

"Nobody knows more about trade than me"

"Nobody knows the (visa) system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me."

I count such statements as personality characteristics, unpolished, maybe gauche behavior, not welcome in country club society unless are worth > $5 billion!

I'm really sensitive to lying, but such statements don't even start to raise my fur.

Gee, I was worried that you'd found some actual lies, e.g., like we have heard nearly daily (I won't say hourly) from the FBI about Page, Flynn, and Manafort and from Pelosi and Schiff about Trump. For the mainstream media, I gave up on them after the gang up, pile, party talking point collection in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ab6uxg908&feature=youtu.be

That is from 1-2 years ago and fun to watch now.

For what the next few weeks holds, I'm finding some interesting reading in

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163215/2020...

with

     In the Supreme Court of the United
     States

     STATE OF TEXAS,

     Plaintiff,

     v.

     COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE
     OF GEORGIA, STATE OF MICHIGAN, AND
     STATE OF WISCONSIN,

     Defendants.

     On Motion for Leave to File Bill of
     Complaint

     BRIEF OF STATE OF MISSOURI AND

     16 OTHER STATES AS AMICI CURIAE IN
     SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
     LEAVE TO FILE BILL OF COMPLAINT

     Article II requires that each State
     “shall appoint” its Presidential
     electors “in such Manner as the
     Legislature thereof may direct.” U.S.
     CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 4 (emphasis
     added); see also id. art. I, § 4, cl.
     2 (providing that, in each State, the
     “Legislature thereof” shall establish
     “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of
     holding Elections for Senators and
     Representatives”).

Both you and Youtube might be circumspect about betting the farm on Biden taking office on 1/20/2021.

"It ain't over until ..." whatever that saying was!

The problem is if you're going to move the goalposts so that lie means something else then what is there to say? The idea that Trump hasn't told a single lie in 5 years is so comically false that one scarcely knows where to begin. You are living in a fantasy world and it's not our job to cater to that and try to play by the rules that you are changing on the fly. It's the job of your family and friends who care about you to reach out to you and try to bring you back to reality. I wish them luck and I wish you all the best.

> "Nobody loves the Bible more than I do"

okay at

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/23/trump_cru...

is

"You know, when you hold up a Bible, and nobody loves the Bible more than I do, when you hold up a Bible, you don't then put it down and go around lying and doing a lot of things that are wrong," Trump scolded Cruz.

So, the source is not the best, but, still, the quote seems accurate.

Sorry, I don't call that a lie. It's not even as bad as "This car was driven by a little old lady only to church on Sundays."

The usual startup seed round pitch deck predictions are worse than the bible quote.

If you want to find an actual lie, maybe you can. I'm surprised the media apparently has not tried. One place to start is what he has said about spending money to rebuild the US military. IIRC he has mentioned some $trillions. I'd like to see the INCREASES over what the DoD has been getting right along, and those might not be $trillions. I.e., a significant fraction of the DoD budget, maybe his $trillions, went for just on-going, routine expenses and not rebuilding.

Even if I'm correct here, I still don't call that a 100% lie -- it's more like bending some definitions in budgeting and accounting.

But, again, much of the mainstream media seems eager to find Trump lies, so if Trump was wrong here the media should have gotten some headlines about it.

> The idea that Trump hasn't told a single lie in 5 years is so comically false that one doesn't even know where to begin.

I'm still willing to hear, wanting to hear, waiting to hear about three good lies.

I get it: You don't like Trump so attack me because I do like Trump.

So, why do I like Trump, a lot, regard him as by far the best POTUS since Washington. The main reasons are his policies and results. Here are some examples, from typing quickly:

He got a really good start on peace in the Mideast (a) among the Islamic states and (b) between Israel and some of the more progressive Islamic states.

He has Iran's international mischief calmed down.

Assad was really slow as a chemistry student, and Trump gave him a good chemistry lesson and a good repeat of the course. In this, no US people were harmed. For the second lesson, no US or Syrian people were harmed.

Trump got some US military leadership that used mostly existing US forces in Iraq to lead a joint US-Iraq attack on the ISIS land holdings. The US did the intel, operated the artillery and airplanes, and trained the Iraqis. Some ISIS fighters are still loose, but basically the ISIS landholdings have been cleaned of ISIS power.

Trump got head of ISIS, al Baghdadi. No US blood was shed.

Trump got Iran terrorist leader Soleimani. No US blood was shed. IIRC O. North said that the vehicle was hit by 4 Hellfire missiles -- IIRC one can kill a tank!

Supposedly the US was on the way to a shooting war with North Korea. Trump had some sit downs with Kim Ding Dong Dung Jong Un in Ping Pong Yang, and since then no nuke tests and no long range missile tests.

The US is energy independent now with quite a lot more energy on the way from the Permian Basin, offshore, various fracking sites, ..., ANWR.

Supposedly Foxconn will be building plants in the US after some state level politics settles out.

Trump seems to have slowed US companies and jobs moving out of the US and workers and products being shipped into the US -- that is all good for US workers.

The economy seems to have low interest rates, high growth, low inflation, high stock market. I'd like to see more details about the macro economy, but it looks good.

The Opportunity Zones sound like a good idea, but I don't know how far they have gotten so far.

The Warp Speed Covid vaccine development looks to me like some terrific, unique, world class Trump leadership. Also the early shutting down travel with China, where apparently Trump was the only one in the room ready to do this, looks like a prescient masterstroke. The attack that he was being xenophobic was dirty pool -- that looks like a lie.

Trump has gotten some really big rallies, truck parades, boat parades -- maybe CNN, NBC, NYT, ... and the Democrats don't like him, but a LOT of citizens do, a lot.

I like that Trump does emphasize Christmas again.

Trump gave long term funding for the Historically Black Colleges. I'm not Black, but that funding sounds like a good idea to me, better use of money than rushing to lock up Biden's "predators" and Hillary's "superpredators" -- details in

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-pr...

Trump worked hard, did what was necessary, and made a great start on The Wall which will help a LOT keeping criminals and illegal drugs out of the US. That illegal drug situation is big stuff, e.g., 72,000 US deaths in 2017 as in

https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o...

E.g., those illegal drug deaths in a few years exceed the Covid deaths, maybe over the whole time of the Covid pandemic the illegal drug deaths will exceed the Covid deaths.

Trump got a lot of the NATO countries to put their ante in the pot.

I'm not Jewish, but I approve of Trump moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and getting the deal with the UAE, etc. done.

Apparently he has responded well to the various natural disasters, hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires (maybe from poor forest management), etc.

Trump claims to have rolled back a lot of excessive, absurd, wasteful regulations. I haven't seen a good list, but the anti-Trump mainstream media, e.g.,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ab6uxg908&feature=youtu.be

which is eager to criticize him doesn't seem to contradict his claim on regulation rollbacks. His claim sounds good to me.

Apparently a LOT of voters like him: IIRC so far in all the House toss-up races, the Republicans have won them all. A bit amazing.

Boeing got into deep sticky stuff. We need Boeing. Apparently somehow Trump helped Boeing, and now their Max is about to fly again.

Trump wants to tweak FCC or some such Section 230 or some such. If Facebook, Twitter, Youtube are publishers, then they can be sued for libel, slander, etc. But if they are just a straight wire with gain, then they transmit nothing of their own but nearly everything their users send. Or some such. I suspect he is correct that 230 needs tweaking.

The US was in deep smelly stuff with our most important ally, England. Trump patched up the problem, got the bust of Churchill back in the Oval Office, etc.

I'm not a woman, but I like the idea of women leaving behind the pearl necklace twisting, the smelling salts, the delicate flower that needs to be cared for, etc., and Trump has a lot of very capable women around, Melania, Ivanka, DeVos, Kelly Conway, etc. Those are good examples for girls and women everywhere.

I typed this quickly. There's a lot more I like that he's done.

The list of policies and results I care about. The list of lies you gave don't bother me at all.

My reading of his intentions is that he really cares. Certainly he doesn't need the job.

There was E. Bernays and his idea of a narrative as the basis of a propaganda campaign. Well, the mainstream media (MSM), e.g., ABC, AP, Boston Globe, CBS, CNN, LAT, MSNBC, NBC, NYT, Reuters, The Atlantic, WaPo, WSJ, seem to have signed up to push the Bernays narrative. In a few words, the narrative is "Orange Man Bad". No meaningful data, no reasonable rationality, just an attack. Next there is the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr. Josef Goebbels with his

"If you tell a lie often enough, then people will believe it. Eventually even you will come to believe it."

So, the second part of the propaganda effort is to repeat the narrative lies over and over. Eventually a lot of people come to believe, or come to believe that others believe so that there must be something to it or that they must at least fit in. Here is an example of the media pushing the narrative with repeating lies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ab6uxg908&feature=youtu.be

I hope that right away you saw that you were watching propaganda and refused to watch again. The MSM is desperate and about to go out of business. Apparently they sold out cheap.

Some people stand to get big money and power if Biden will actually do all he has proposed, e.g., sending US companies and jobs out of the country and bringing cheap products and labor into the country.

Really the people to get the benefits from Biden are under 1% of the population -- essentially everyone else in the US will be worse off, much worse off than with Trump. Still the MSM keep pushing the Bernays narrative with the Goebbels repetition.

Now a lot of people have bought into the propaganda or are just being paid off to be trolls for the propaganda.

Apparently there is a lot of money involved, enough to buy off the MSM and a lot of people.

If you are being paid to help destroy the US, it's not enough. If you are not being paid, it's time you woke up.

A lot of social media, sadly including HN, is fertile ground for trolls. It is important for the rest of us to down vote the trolls.

You mean lies? They're called lies.

This is the crux of the issue and why Google's action are sadly necessary: The stereotype regarding Americans is mostly true; around half of them really are quite, quite stupid.

Agreed about Fox, but conversely - the three liberal networks supported the Russiagate conspiracy theory that alleged Trump had colluded which the Russia to win the 2016 election. Let's not pretend brazen lying is somehow a new thing created by Donald Trump.

I think that mainstream news has been doing this for the past 4 years. Here are 3 examples:

1) Trump Russia collusion hoax.

2) Trump saying that neo-nazis and white supremacists are "fine people" hoax.

3) Trump recommending people "inject bleach" hoax.

That’s not some MSM lie, that’s just what he said. Why deny it?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/24/america-p...

I have personally watched a press conference where Trump said that live on TV in front of millions of people. I don't understand how you can call this a "hoax" when it came from the mouth of the POTUS himself.

> Trump recommending people "inject bleach" hoax

I have personally watched a press conferences where Trump embarked on an embarrassing, demented, rambling adlib where he has suggested injecting bleach. I watch some of these, and I genuinely have to wonder about both his mental capacity and his mental faculties.

TBH, your comment is demonstrating the problem facing the US just now - you are asserting that easily demonstrable facts are a "hoax", even when they have been broadcast by Trump himself to millions of people.

Thank you for bringing this up. This is the press conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs

At time 1:58 Pres. Trump specifically excludes neo-nazis and white nationalists from his 'fine people' description: "And I'm not talking about the neo-nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally."

https://youtu.be/JmaZR8E12bs?t=118

You're experiencing a false memory, which is completely normal for anyone, even intelligent, well informed and accomplished people.

It's my personal opinion that this false memory was implanted in millions of people by corporate media and big tech.

https://youtu.be/zcoYKuoiUrY?t=1862

If you're okay with marching alongside a swastika, are you really a "very fine person?" As Shaun puts it, "the acceptable number of swastikas at the rally is zero."

Another excerpt (https://youtu.be/zcoYKuoiUrY?t=2538):

Speaker: "Did Hitler do anything wrong?"

Crowd: "No!"

Speaker: "I love my people!"

Crowd: "I love my people!"

Speaker: "One more, one more. I want everyone to repeat after me, pay close attention because this is the first precept of the true alt-right. Remember it. Gas the [slur]s, race war now!"

Crowd: "Gas the [slur]s, race war now!" "Sieg Heil!" "Sieg Heil!" "Who brought the ovens?" "[Laughter]"

Do these people, or anyone who associates with them, seem like "very fine people?"

The issue is the denial of people like this who were also there:

>“Good people can go to Charlottesville,” said Michelle Piercy, a night shift worker at a Wichita, Kan., retirement home, who drove all night with a conservative group that opposed the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/politics/trump-republi... NY Times Aug 17, 2017

And this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqXWhG6IZ50 Associated Press Aug 15, 2017

I think that all these people are misguided, but they aren't neo-nazis or white nationalists.

>If you're okay with marching alongside a swastika, are you really a "very fine person?"

Are people marching in the same area as looters or antifa 'very fine people'? Yes, of course they are. No one has control who shows up at these huge public demonstrations.

> No one has control who shows up at these huge public demonstrations.

This demonstration was intended to be a white-supremacist, neo-Nazi demonstration. End of story. If you disagree, I encourage you to watch the Shaun video I linked for more information, or to read the linked Wikipedia and Vox articles.

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

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/26/18517980/trump-unite-the-right...

Trump praised these people. You may argue that he didn't mean to. But the fact is that Trump praised white supremacy, intentionally or unintentionally, and these white supremacists use that praise to justify the continuation of the movement. Even if Trump later condemned them, white supremacists interpret such a move as Trump merely "pretending" to condemn them.

Trump is saying the people who don't want the statue taken down are fine people. He explicitly exludes neo-nazis and white nationalists. I am simply reading his words. No mind reading required.

>But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

>and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

And in a previous post I showed you people who went to the rally with the removal of a statue in mind. Don't assume Trump knew everything about the event, and it's make up as it happened. The news will show the extremists because peaceful protesters don't get eye balls so selective coverage isn't proof of anything.

It did so because of the very high bar Muller set himself given that the accused was the sitting president, that the DoJ under Barr claimed wrongly that the president is immune (=he were a king), and that he wanted the democratic system to act on the findings in the report.

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

To quote The Intercept:

In fact, the Senate report dismisses many of the most outrageous accusations involving Trump and Russia even as it provides overwhelming and damning evidence of Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win and the Trump campaign’s eagerness to embrace the Russian intervention.

But the Senate report goes much further than election interference and provides the first detailed examination of the broader and complex network of relationships between Trump, his ever-shifting circle of personal and business associates, and a series of Russian oligarchs and other Russian and Ukrainian figures with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/03/trump-russia-senate-repo...

Read the report yourself: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

This in no way suggests coordination.

What exactly is unwitting coordination?

They were being used by Russian agents without being aware of it.

Micheal Flynn was being charged for lying to FBI investigators about sanctions, when the transcripts of the calls were finally released by the FBI, it turns out he didn't even bring up sanctions with Kisylak at all. The FBI also withheld the original 302 from the interview with Flynn, and Peter Strzok, who was later fired for bias, had re-written the second 302 that was used to imply that Flynn had lied to investigators.

What's not proven, but suspected, is that the entire call to Kislyak was orchestrated by the Obama admin. Expelling the Russian diplomats/spies when Flynn was already under surveillance prompted the calls between Kislyak and Flynn. Flynn was in a foreign country when this happened, and given his place in the upcoming administration as well as his role under Obama's admin, it was a near guarantee that he would be in contact with Kislyak. He called Kislyak on an unsecured line while in a foreign country. Flynn would have known absolutely that the call was being surveilled, but he didn't believe he was doing anything untoward. What he didn't know was that the FBI would use this as a point to attack him. Comey even jokes about how sending agents to interview a WH staff member alone without legal counsel would never have been acceptable, but that Trump's young and inexperienced administration didn't realize it in time.

But that's all conjecture. What is not conjecture is fact that Flynn did not lie to the FBI, and should not have been charged as such.

This is untrue. Specifically, "lying about sanctions" wasn't what he was charged with. He was charged with lying about asking Kisylak to refrain from escalating the situation, and a large part of his call was about sanctions and the Russian response to them.

Here's the Statement of Offense[1], and the direct quote is:

FLYNN falsely stated he did not ask Russia's ambassador to the United States to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions the United States has imposed on Russia.

In the transcripts of the call[2] he says:

But I ask Russia to do is to not, if anything, I know you have to have some sort of action, to only make it reciprocal; don't go any further than you have to because I don't want us to get into something that have to escalate to tit-for-tat. Do you follow me?

and later:

I know, I -believe me, I do appreciate it, I very much appreciate it. But I really don't want us to get into a situation where we're going, you know~ where we do this and then you do something bigger, and then you know, everybody's got to go back and forth and everybody's got to be the tough guy here, you know?

and

And please make sure that its uh - the idea is, be -if you~ if you have to do something, do something on a reciprocal basis, meaning you know, on a sort of an even basis. Then that, then that is a good message and we'll understand that message. And, and then, we know that we're not going to escalate this thing, where we~ where because if we put out-ifwe send out 30 guys and you send out 60, you know, or you shut down every Embassy, r mean we have to get this to a -lefs, let's keep this at a level that uh is, is even-keeled, okay?

So it's pretty clear his original statement of offense is correct - he did talk Kisylak and ask him not to escalate, and then lied to the FBI about it.

[1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4320055/Flynn-Sta...

[2] https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/FlynnTr...

I think all of this is bad, but I refuse to accept that this is a bad behavior that just came up and is the monopoly of a single side of the political aisle.

All this is, is Youtube picking a side in this fight.

By the way, on the back of the David Fincher's movie I re-watched Citizen Kane. I love the part where Kane's newspaper prepared two alternative front pages the night of the elections: "Kane elected governor" and "Massive fraud at the polls". 1942. Nothing new under the sun.

the mueller report stated "while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges."

That and they also found many cases of obstruction of justice that could be charged and would have said that he was cleared if they could clear him. so obstruct justice numerous times and then the outcome of that obstruction makes it so that they can't find sufficient evidence of a crime. Reporting on that is not "fake news."

That covers a very large range of possible realities. It also describes the expected relationship between every US president and the Russians - diplomacy doesn't happen by telepathy. If there is a point there, it needs to be made more explicitly.

this specifically was way before anyone held any power and it also covered many connections that were covered up and lied about to the investigators.

The only people I've seen bringing the Russia stuff up for the last year have been right wingers in a told-you-so style. It was a political dud because there was nothing there. The Muller report was so weak when Trump was impeached it was for a completely different made-up scandal.

And based on the Democrat response to the 2020 elections, it seems that under the Trump presidency has seen the voting system secured beyond all reproach. Without anyone making any actual changes for the better as far as I can tell. The whole thing was always frivolous.