Historically there's been a burden of proof for wild claims because it's been hard to get a huge mass audience. And people with those audiences were reluctant to repeat whatever wild bullshit was proposed to them if they couldn't vet it themselves.
If you didn't have your own credibility, you had to convince those who did to run your stuff. The cost of this is that it's slower to break things, and some stuff gets missed.
Unmoderated internet platforms with algorithmic jumps between otherwise-unconnected publishers let you borrow and hijack other people's credibility and platforms.
Why those platforms shouldn't be allowed to have editorial control - given that maintaining a certain reputation will still be critical for their long-term success - is beyond me and seems to have obvious un-American problems (infringement on their own private rights).
The trade-off being desired also seems fundamentally bad. More people being misled more quickly seems like a worse situation than slower breaking of news and the ability to suppress some stories, given that we were still able to break those stories you mention in the past. (Of course, I don't know what else might have been more widely reported in the past... I'm having to rely on a "we didn't feel like we were living in a totalitarian dystopia in the 60s-through-80s" assumption.)
The key word is "allowed". YouTube should be allowed to do everything they have the right to do. They have the right to stop providing all free services (unless they have contractual obligations). They have the right to ban all creators whose names start with "K". They have the right to add a 10-second delay to all page loads. They have the right to put Goatse on their homepage.
However, if they do any of the above things, the rest of us have the right to be disappointed, to think YouTube sucks, and to tell everyone else about it.
So, if they demonstrate that they have no respect for the principle of freedom of speech, we have the right to call them cowardly, un-American, probably unfair in their implementation, counterproductive even assuming their goals, etc.
> So, if they demonstrate that they have no respect for the principle of freedom of speech, we have the right to call them cowardly, un-American, probably unfair in their implementation, counterproductive even assuming their goals, etc.*
They aren't just saying it sucks, people and politicians are calling for a repeal of Section 230 of the CDA in a knee jerk reaction.
They want to fundamentally shift the liability for user created content online, effectively ensuring that hosting any speech becomes a massive liability for those without billions of dollars comb through user uploads for illegal content.
As a business owner, I don't want to be raided by the FBI in the middle of the night and then go to prison because someone thought it would be funny to upload illegal content to my servers.
But it's original purpose was to remove civil liability for platforms for making an imperfect but good faith attempt to remove illegal content.
The farther we move away from the original motivating case, the less clear it is to me that Internet companies need or deserve the protection afforded to them under the auspices of section 230.
At any rate, as I doubt you'll be surprised to hear, I am also not in favor of business owners getting raided by the FBI because users uploaded illegal content. That sounds like a mechanism for crushing small websites who can't afford their own legal department, thereby protecting large websites against competition.
Politicians and citizens have the "right" to change the law.
That's how society works. If those companies don't like it, then they can pack up and move to a different country.
Why is it bad? before only a few people could lie to everyone and keep the majority in the dark because they lacked access to information that would expose the lies they were told. Now everyone's voice is amplified and the people who used to have this power are upset because people believe things they don't want them to believe.
> Historically there's been a burden of proof for wild claims because it's been hard to get a huge mass audience.
This seems like a non sequitur. Historically its been hard to spread wild claims for most people because they didn't have a platform. What burden of proof are you referring to?
> And people with those audiences were reluctant to repeat whatever wild bullshit was proposed to them if they couldn't vet it themselves.
Isn't it more likely that they were reluctant to repeat stories unless it benefitted them? Yellow journalism predates the internet by almost 100 years.
> Unmoderated internet platforms with algorithmic jumps between otherwise-unconnected publishers let you borrow and hijack other people's credibility and platforms.
Perhaps. I'm not sure that I could hijack the credibility of (for example) Dr. Fauci by retweeting him. Its more likely that he could voluntarily lend me his credibility by retweeting me.
> Why those platforms shouldn't be allowed to have editorial control - given that maintaining a certain reputation will still be critical for their long-term success - is beyond me and seems to have obvious un-American problems (infringement on their own private rights).
The argument is that they have become large and commonly used enough that they are akin to a public utility. This is an open question and I certainly don't have the answer. Think of it as if the interstate highway system was owned by Procter & Gamble and they began to limit access to the interstate for carriers who delivered their competitors' products, or refused to allow left-handed redheads to access the interstate. A lot of people would say that in that case it would be an appropriate use of the government's regulatory power to nationalize or break up the "P&G Interstate" for the public good. Other people would say that it was within their rights as property owners to decide who they sold roadway access to. You'd have a situation where people's interpretations of fundamental rights conflicted because of technological advancement.
> The trade-off being desired also seems fundamentally bad. More people being misled more quickly seems like a worse situation than slower breaking of news and the ability to suppress some stories, given that we were still able to break those stories you mention in the past. (Of course, I don't know what else might have been more widely reported in the past... I'm having to rely on a "we didn't feel like we were living in a totalitarian dystopia in the 60s-through-80s" assumption.)
Consider that Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988.
While this is an interesting conversation, you don't even have to go this far. You can just argue that rebutting bad ideas is more effective than censoring them and a good video hosting platform should value open discourse, and so YouTube should try to be as content-neutral as possible. If you convince enough YouTube users that open discourse is more important than censoring perceived falsehoods, then it might make more sense for YouTube to commit itself to open discourse.
Not making a comment on the validity of their claims, just trying to understand what you are saying - a private organization should be legally compelled to spend money to host ideas that they think are harmful? How does that work in practical terms?
Should I be forced to pay for public schools if I don't have kids or disagree with what they are being taught? Should I be forced to pay for roads if they will be used to support activities I disapprove of? What if I passionately and sincerely disagree with what people are using the roadway access to facilitate? Should I be forced to subsidize activities that I reasonably believe are harmful to the environment? What if I can produce peer-reviewed academic evidence supporting my point of view? Should I be forced to hire a qualified individual at my company if I have an opening if I don't like their religious beliefs? What if their religious beliefs involve arranged marriage or female genital mutilation?
Hopefully the list of rhetorical questions serves the purpose of highlighting the fact that our society and our system of government already compels people to support things they oppose, including terrible lies, harm to people and the environment, and various forms of abuse. Yet we haven't chosen to abandon this form of government for anarchy. For this reason I am unmotivated by absolutist private property arguments when applied to this issue. Thank you for your excellent question as it draws attention to a central part of the issue.
> Not making a comment on the validity of their claims, just trying to understand what you are saying - a private organization should be legally compelled to spend money to host ideas that they think are harmful? How does that work in practical terms?
I don't have the answers here, I'm participating in the conversation with the aim of moving it forward. How does it work in practical terms to require that companies hire and serve people even when the owner doesn't like their religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation? In theory we write laws on the basis of balancing the values we hold dear. In practice lobbyists donate money to lawmakers for influence and lawmakers compromise with each other on things that they think are going to be practical to enforce and get them re-elected or some other form of benefit. Perhaps not in that order.
Yes you should. An informed populace is the basis of democracy. If you choose to continue living in a democracy, you have to help pay for its upkeep.
I hardly imagine that a government can really be held to account by its citizens if it also takes for itself the role of educate their children.
Thank you. This is exactly the basis upon which we justify the proposal to force YouTube to host content that their shareholders would prefer not to host. Or the alternative formulation, this is the basis on which we justify prohibiting YouTube from censoring political speech that their shareholders disagree with.
youtube isn't the gov't. Public schools and roads are funded by taxation.
If youtube is to host content that their shareholders don't want hosted, then youtube needs to be paid a portion of gov't taxes.
No actually. The way society works is we can just force them to do it, via the law.
It is our right as citizens to change the law.
A misinformed populace acts to destroy democracy.
who is to be trusted with the authority to decide what counts as misinformation? Is it possible that a gatekeeper of information would find it easier to misinform the populace than a prominent person who had to contend with other dissenting voices?
So, yes, of course it's possible a gatekeeper would find it easier to misinform the populace. Over the long term, it's almost guaranteed. Yet it's also possible -- in fact, one can argue the probability is essentially 1.0 -- that refusing to have any gates will also misinform the populace. If we're looking for a blanket rule that will cover all possible situations in this new information reality, we're probably looking in vain.
That's not something legally recognized though. You can't say you base this on something when there is nothing equivalent. An education is one thing. It's something that's been recognized in court.
Now, if you want to claim that public sites like YouTube should be forced to host content they don't want to from people they don't want to do business with, you'll have to explain how that equates with your established rights in the US?
More to the point: You'll have to explain why you want to take away my rights?
We're having a discussion about what the law should be, not what the law is.
> You can't say you base this on something when there is nothing equivalent.
The above discussion demonstrates that our society already limits property rights in the service of an informed populace, which is relevant to the issue at hand.
> An education is one thing. It's something that's been recognized in court.
Courts have recognized ballot fraud in the past as well, its not some outlandish theory. Its why people are supposed to maintain chain of custody of the ballots.
> you'll have to explain how that equates with your established rights in the US?
Corporations are chartered by the government in exchange for certain privileges and limitations. We already infringe on property rights because an informed population is a public good. QED there is a precedent for requiring a public corporation to host certain kinds of content. For example, foods are required to meet labeling requirements.
> More to the point: You'll have to explain why you want to take away my rights?
The right to remove content is potentially dangerous to democracy. See recent events, where a bunch of trump supporters are ever more convinced that an election was stolen because people keep claiming there was no evidence and YouTube has a policy where they state they won't allow anyone to post the evidence that the Biden camp says doesn't exist.
> my rights?
As a GOOG shareholder, you exchanged certain rights for other privileges when the government chartered your corporation and allowed it to traded on the public market while limiting your liability for criminal acts that might be performed by Google employees. In a sense you are taking the benefit of profit and legally protected from liability for the actions that might generate that profit. That arrangement comes at a cost of increased regulation by the government.
> that would be the basis for the US to stand up its own video publishing platform.
Why not just nationalize YouTube? As a corporation, Google already enjoys special privileges enshrined by law. Lets not pretend to be private property absolutists when the government already limits the liability of shareholders for the actions that bring them profit.
Why not nationalize YouTube is irrelevant to the conversation, but the end result would be the same. The government would then be providing a self publishing platform.
Of course YouTube does also take a editorial role. As both a platform and a publisher, we should allow them to stop giving recommendations for things that don't align politically.
By taking the more extreme step of taking down videos, they are balking on their self expressed purpose of being a platform for digital expression.
There are several people in my life who I completely disagree with politically. At the same time, I'm grateful that I can hear their perspective. YouTube is no longer supporting this dynamic.
I'm already seeing folks signing up for social networks that have less censorship, I think alternative video hosting platforms may increase too.
More specifically, YouTube has a practical monopoly on publishing and promoting user-generated video in the US.
Anybody can generate video and a great many do. Promoting your video to millions of viewers is a bit more challenging, though can clearly be done wihtout YouTube: https://www.lifewire.com/videos-that-went-viral-before-youtu...
This doesn't even get into the really early viral videos like the charcoal briquettes lit with liquid oxygen, or the massive viewership of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact way back in the day.
"YouTube is wrong to do this" and "the government ought to force YouTube to act differently" are two distinct arguments.
However, YouTube should be shamed for the bans, and everyone should be encouraged to think worse of them for it.
YouTube is not silencing anyone. These people are free to espouse these views espouse these views anyway they please just not on YouTube's private property. The New York Times is not a danger to democracy because they refuse to publish my article on why the earth is flat.
Its dangerous to democracy for oligarchs to have this much control over the discourse.
Yes, a group of people attacking democracy.
For the sake of novelty, I'll make a different point: I see one way in which YouTube may have promoted democracy: by making their odiousness more clear (and in a public, "everyone knows that everyone knows" way), they may have encouraged quicker production or adoption of alternative platforms. This seems unlikely, because websites like them have done lots of crappy stuff before, without usually causing much effect; but it is possible that this may be seen as enough of a "They've declared war on the entire right wing" to motivate a significant migration. Two partisan platforms is better than one, for democracy and just for competition. (Better yet would be either a platform that has made some kind of enforceable and very-painful-to-break commitment to neutrality, or some kind of decentralized system that no single company or party can decide to censor. We may get there eventually.)
No.
> If so, why? If not, why should YouTube?
Because I am a person and YouTube is not.
Should Youtube have taken down videos saying face masks were effective given the CDC said they weren't?
Should Youtube have taken down videos about Li Wenliang. After all, there was no new SARS problem, according to china?
Taibbi is suggesting that if you can't trust the people not to post error and lies, how can you trust the oligarchs and officials? Especially if your access to alternative perspectives is limited. Read for yourself:
>> Cutting down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie. Imagine if these mechanisms had been in place in the past. Would we disallow published claims that the Missile Gap was a fake? That the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged? How about Watergate, a wild theory about cheating in a presidential election that was universally disbelieved by “reputable” news agencies, until it wasn’t? It’s not hard to imagine a future where authorities would ask tech platforms to quell “conspiracy theories” about everything from poisoned water systems to war crimes.