Re:Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown...
by saurik on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @04:49PM
(#27838232)
But that doesn't solve the problem, as the "political wars" the person I was responding to described all work in the world of increasingly tight laws; you have to avoid being a target in the first place by correctly navigating the space of solutions for how content is distributed in the first place. Take the Apple iPhone example: if Apple is forced to remove an app from their app store by China, it doesn't matter if the user can install it on the side... and somehow China has not managed to force companies to not provide that functionality: Apple going out of their way to centralize both app distribution and even API access (VPN functionality, as a specific example, is hidden behind an entitlement that they don't give to casual developers) is work they chose to do that directly enables the ability to even make "legal requests" quickly and easily.
I maintain the moral equivalent of this for platforms like Twitter and YouTube is to stop conflating their centralized recommendation systems (which should be considered "their speech") with the functionality to publish at all (which should be considered "someone else's speech"): it is going to be way less controversial to stop recommending something that someone else likes if it is still accessible to people who know about it (as they externally discovered the content or author and were directly linked to it/them), and it is also going to be way less controversial to allow people to publish something that someone else doesn't like to their own audience if it isn't being actively recommended to third parties. These recommendation systems have started to conflate "being able to say what you want" with "being able to be granted a large audience" so well that the feature set for moderation fails to separate them, and that's bad for everyone: there is a reason why we talk about "the right to free speech" instead of "the right to be heard".
I maintain the moral equivalent of this for platforms like Twitter and YouTube is to stop conflating their centralized recommendation systems (which should be considered "their speech") with the functionality to publish at all (which should be considered "someone else's speech"): it is going to be way less controversial to stop recommending something that someone else likes if it is still accessible to people who know about it (as they externally discovered the content or author and were directly linked to it/them), and it is also going to be way less controversial to allow people to publish something that someone else doesn't like to their own audience if it isn't being actively recommended to third parties. These recommendation systems have started to conflate "being able to say what you want" with "being able to be granted a large audience" so well that the feature set for moderation fails to separate them, and that's bad for everyone: there is a reason why we talk about "the right to free speech" instead of "the right to be heard".