This is a straw-man; that's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I'm arguing that you can probably have both -- by using human moderators.

> Facebook removing a video is not censorship.

It is censorship. They're saying "no one can see this video on our platform." Do you really want to get in some silly semantic debate when you know full well what I meant? It seems you're being purposefully uncharitable.

Reminder: humans lack telepathy and so they depend on body language, tone, and word semantics to communicate.

That's a very extreme point of view.

You skipped right past calling the thing for what it is (censorship), past admitting it's a problem, and you're now arguing against a hypothetical extreme solution no-one has yet proposed.

Can we assume that you now agree it's censorship, and that it's a problem, and it's only the solution you proposed that bothers you?

unishark posted that they believe it's censorship, so I asked whether or not it'd be OK for any content to be removed if that's the case. Does unishark think that Facebook 'censoring' some content is actually OK?

I don't think it's censorship, and I think Facebook removing content is fine explicitly because it isn't censorious. So no, you can't assume that I now agree it's censorship, because it's not and I don't.

The idea that Facebook has a monopoly on video is weird. If someone wanted to grow an audience around their video content would you suggest they post the videos to Facebook to do it?

Maybe if your idea of censorship hinged on govt involvement it might fit a bit better. Though I'd still say we need to be able to talk about censorship by other organizations besides govt, and that the dictionary definition of the word covers this.

I thus generally view an attempt to refute an argument with some pedantic gotcha as a bad-faith responsse.

I would like to propose to not treat the pedantry counter as a sin. Instead think of it as a weak signal: the counter does not rank high on the hierarchy of disagreement. <https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/how-to-disagree-well-7-of-t...> If a strong counter could be made, we would use that one instead of the pedantry counter.

For the same reason that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

> Facebook removing a video is not censorship. They're not saying "no one can see this video". They're saying "we don't want to host this video". Those are absolutely not the same thing.

Facebook has so much market share that they're uncomfortably close to the same thing.

That would require someone to believe Facebook taking down a video is equivalent to someone being found guilty of a crime they didn't commit. No one believes that.

If Facebook deletes your video that's annoying. It might even affect your livelihood if you've decided to Facebook videos is your chosen career. It isn't the same as being found guilty of a crime you didn't commit.

"No false positives at all" is a good and proper goal for the justice system. Facebook's moderation system doesn't need to be held to the same, or even a similar, bar. False positives in video content removal are a very minor problem.

Except it does? For people who make their living from Youtube or whatever video platform, removing a video (usually without an appeals process) is basically a punishment regardless of guilt.

Arguing that Facebook has a near-monopoly on online video is also nonsense - the guy we're talking about posted on YouTube about this. Clearly he has other options.

The number of people who here to argue that they have some sort of 'right' to upload content for Facebook to publish, and that they're being censored and punished if Facebook chooses not to, makes me hope that HN readers never choose to start video hosting platforms. They'd be completely awful.

By that token, if your government decides to deport you, you are not being punished because you have no claim on citizenship you haven't lived yet. It's just the end of a citizenship relationship.

Hopefully you can see how that argument isn't helpful or useful. Would it be any more true if the Government delegated citizenship management to a corporation? Or three?

In an online-only world, where speech (and such livelihood being contingent on access) is controlled by companies, and nation states have no requirement to provide a different mechanism, it could be reasonably argued that a company giving everyone else a platform but denying you a platform has free-speech consequences.

The fact that it isn't managed that way, and that the law doesn't currently see it that way, doesn't change whether we should change our thinking as society changes.

Being a citizen of a country isn't a business relationship. You're not simply doing something and receiving payment in return. So it can be a punishment - the government is taking something away that you've earned through previous actions (eg applying for citizenship or asylum or winning a green card).

If Facebook were to demand an author return the money they'd been paid for videos when they're deleted then it would be a punishment. But they don't do that.

Couldn't the same argument justify segregated businesses e.g. restaurants with "No blacks or Irish".

You might thing racial lines make it a different thing, but TBH, if there is unacceptable harms in discriminating on race, I can't see how it can't also exist discriminating on opinion/speech, which is also important (as Freedom of Speech is considered important, at least in the US).

If private business can be regulated on one topic, why not another? Plus the argument can be flipped: Yes, that is their business, so they can choose who they do business with; but this is our country, so we can choose who is allowed to do business, and how.

> The number of people who here to argue that they have some sort of 'right' to upload content for Facebook to publish

But people do have the right to speak freely. If all public domains where private, they would effectively lose that right. The issue here isn't just that facebook determines who can "speak", but that facebook and only a few other tech giants dominate the "cyber" public domain - and alternatives like parler disallowed one similar ground "why should private hosting not be allowed to choose who they host"; at some point if you allow private companies to monopolize something, and without regulations on how, they end up dictating how people are allowed to use anything in that domain.

Why not? I don't see a practical difference between Facebook wrongfully labelling a video as abusive and city wrongfully labelling your car as illegally parked. Former might even be more financially damaging.

There's the actual problem. Let's work on that, and preserve the freedom of association.

That sounds great until the scandals of the type "Someone reposted SFW segments of this girl's revenge porn video and Facebook is taking days to remove them every time; since they're reposted every 24h they stay up forever" roll in.

Every so often we get another scandal on HN of the type "This horribly harmful content was posted on PLATFORM and PLATFORM didn't remove it fast enough". Augmenting the false-negative rate would make the problem worse.

Attackers can use automation to post their harmful content. There's no way defenders can keep up unless they use automation as well, no matter how decentralized they are.

This line of argument seems uncomfortably similar to "we need to ban encryption because terrorists and pedophiles can use it". The fact that bad people can occasionally benefit from something isn't a reason to not give it to the rest of us.

It actually can be. There's a continuum.

At one extreme are things like plans for nuclear or biological weapons. Nobody distributes those because terrorists really want them for horrible ends and they're of low utility, so we do without them.

At the other extreme are things like junk mail - we all just put up with that minor abuse of the system because having a cheap, flexible mail system is way better than not having junk mail.

Like I said, it's a spectrum, and sometimes bad people being able to abuse something is a good reason for everyone to forgo it.

My understanding is that how to build nuclear weapons is relatively well-known, and the only reason that terrorist groups don't have them is that they can't get their hands on the required raw materials.

In practice we want to pick the course of action that minimizes harm. Having your video demonetized is one kind of harm, having videos of harassment or revenge porn posted online is another.

The kind of people who say "we should never have false positives, ever" are never the people who will have to defend these positions once somebody gets harmed by them and kicks up a scandal.

Not even justice system uses that rule.

I'm not saying which is the case here, but certainly that the argument could be made.

I don't see the value of this distinction. Creating a system where it is more likely that guilty go free is the practical equivalent of creating a system where more guilty go free.

I wasn't commenting on how well the analogy fits censorship. Though I would note that the criminal justice system doesn't set all people free, just that it adopts a more slanted standard of proof than the laxer standard used in some other judicial situations like civil and immigration courts. The discussion over allowable levels of false positives fits better than a dichotomy comparing a world with traffic laws to anarchy or something.

Unfortunately, that is not a mantra that will keep your platform DMCA compliant.

Also, how exactly does it apply to an internet mob calling for someone's head? Do we apply this mantra to protect the mob's behaviour, or to protect the person the mob is targeting?

The platforms do just that, by removing the content in question.

Sorry...market share has nothing to do with their first amendment right to not host content that goes against their policies.

Fox News is the most watched cable news network. I wouldn't want the government forcing them to host people they don't want to host.