You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site. Or just go to your local city center with a megaphone and give people your thoughts - perfectly legal.
If YouTube is THAT essential to getting your views heard, you need to take a lesson from business - don't rely on anyone else for critical infrastructure.
It's okay if the East India Company enslaves and exploits the savages and mongrels, murders opponents, rigs elections, installs corrupt politicians and destroys communities; it's a private company and it only hurts stupid people! Just stop buying their tea if you don't like it, amirite? Start your own company!
If we're talking about regulating large corporations because they're monopolizing resources I'd much rather start in the energy sector to set some precedent before we just force youtube and facebook to allow nazis and anti-vaxxers to spout off whatever they want during a global crisis.
I can't speak for what you're paying attention to, but plenty of people are wary of big cats in corporations and big cats in government. You can be against both.
The real false narrative is that choosing team red or team blue is the only interesting question and then you can turn your skepticism off.
I'd rather have an honest discussion about dealing with a global crisis instead of having some asshole decide he's right and shut everyone else out - surely you can imagine the damage caused by a dictator who's wrong?
You do know that those in many places are called "utilities" and they <<are>> nationalized, right?
Censor. The word you're looking for is censor.
Google has immense power, far more than most governments. Governments all around the world are often manipulated by corporations like Google, laws are written based off these influences of power, shaping democracy, all the time.
If they really wanted to they could do almost anything to you. They could easily steal your identity, they could frame you, they could put you in prison, they could do basically anything. Is this legal? Obviously not, but power extends further than what is legal.
The fact is that states and corporations collude and compete with each other for political control internationally, and corporate power outranks the vast majority of state powers. Weirdly though, I can't find Alphabet Inc. in the power rankings.
the same things are said about twitter or facebook, its absurd.
If you want to nationalize all social media and force it to be a public square, that's fine, we can have that conversation. But that's not what people generally argue for, they instead expect private entities to be themselves subject to the requirements of the first amendment. But that isn't how it works. And I think that is a good thing, even when I disagree with the outcome.
https://babylonbee.com/news/skynet-is-a-private-company-they...
YouTube is the profit-driven canary in the coalmine. YouTube's business model naturally incentivizes more speech of all kinds. This crackdown indicates there is mounting pressure - from democratically elected governments, from HN commentators, from our friends and neighbors that regulate & patronize YouTube - to stop being tolerant of certain kinds of speech like antivax.
No other platform offers a competitive audience.
Stay and home and start knitting? If your job or your desire is to be in media, what's your proposed alternative?
At least you admit it.
> You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site.
"If you don't like YouTube, build your own" is a really shitty take. It's very obvious the role that YouTube has right now and why massive censorship is a problem.
If we take a equitable view of the situation, the vast majority of content that they're removing is simply being removed for wrong-think according to the DNC. This gives the Democratic party a leg up through overt censorship and information warfare of a sort they couldn't possibly have achieved through direct government action.
Whether that's legal or not is immaterial to me, they are stifling legal free speech of the de-facto public square, and those who cheer it on now won't be so happy in the future when the alignment of special interests shifts against them, I promise you it will happen and sooner than anyone thinks.
Google is a cancer on public discourse, how many fake media narratives have to collapse before people realize censorship of wrong-think is not a good idea for a healthy society?
Edit: Looks like Twitter finally removed their ridiculous propaganda from the trending section.
The whole “death of free speech” argument is such nonsense
To attempt to equate that with today "The Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" who instead of engaging in robust debate want to engage in robust censorship, these "Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" are more akin to Dark Ages Priests wanting to burn the heretic than they are of Enlightenment thinkers and scientists
I agree, people are denying vaccines work, taking fluoride out of tap water, and saying that the earth is flat. It seems like there's something seriously wrong with our media ecosystem when ideas like this are flourishing. I don't know if banning these ideas is good/effective, but we need some way to incentivize the veracity of ideas and not just their "engagement". What that mechanism might be, I don't know.
I think that is a symptom of the problem not the root cause
>>I don't know if banning these ideas is good/effective
its not, never has been, in fact has been shown to make the idea's spread further and become more extreme as people enter into information echo chambers.
>but we need some way to incentivize the veracity of ideas
Why? in reality the root cause is decades and decades of coddling children and the removal of critical thinking education in favor of memorization education.
The root cause is the failure to teach people how to use critical thinking and logic to assess the validity of data and claims made by people.
The reality is that "Trust the Experts™" is an example of this and really does make the problem worse because people are taught to just trust an authority instead of being able to look at a claim or data set and deiced for themselves if that claim should be accepted. The problem become with the "authority" people trust is wrong, either because they are a charlatan, or just ignorant themselves. However because people have been training to alway trust authority they become locked into this unable to think for themselves.
The more we move to a model of messenger over message, credential over data, the worse this problem will become. The additon of punishments for those that dare to resist "authority" is also going to end badly when that authority is wrong. Keep in mind I have countless examples of authority being wrong I can cite, a big on is that for decades and during my childhood the USDA pushed the food pyramid we now know to be wrong. They were the experts and anyone that dared say "hey maybe all these carbs are bad" were shunned... Vegetable oils are a another where the experts it seems may be been very wrong.
The enlightenment in part was the removal of charismatic messengers in favor of data driven objective truth. It did not matter who the person was it matter what they were saying and if they could prove their claim. All individuals were the same. We have lost that in favor of personality, credentials and authority over data, and proof.
Why is the vaccine safe? "Because the CDC and FDA said so"... that is not a valid response to me. Show me the data, show me the studies, show me the proof... that is the valid response.
Here's an 8-hour press release by the FDA [1]. If you want to understand the logic behind the decision-making, it is absolutely available. It's just boring to watch, I suppose.
They are appealing to the authority not the data, and in doing so they are proclaiming these organizations are infallible and beyond question which we know is false.
Having looked at the data I made the choice for myself that the vaccine was safe for me to consume, I did not do this because the CDC said so, or because the FDA did. I did not do this because YT put a banner under a video proclaiming the CDC is an infallible god that can never be questioned
1. Preliminary research showing masks work contrary to the official positions of CDC and WHO
2. People talking about how masks may not be as effective as original research thought, after the CDC said masks where perfect in every-way and infallible god like barriers preventing all covid. Or talking about how masks may work but masking policies down (the AI could not tell the difference was was shutting down anyone that dared question masks or masking policy)
3. Talking about Lab Leak before it was recognized officially as a possibility by WHO and CDC
4. Any talks about treatments that are not the offical vaccines some of which do have studies showing effectiveness, and I am not talking about the "horse paste" though even banning for that is ridiculous people where banned for talking about mAb treatment before it became blessed by the CDC
5. People that were questioning and talking about actual research that was being done on surface spread, showing it was not as prevalent as "Authoritative sources". People where bleaching their groceries when they got home due to the insanity and if you called that out... BANNED you disagreed with the CDC
I have more than that if you would like? I could probally triple my list of examples
Censorship is always bad not matter what people believe the "greater good" is.
Regardless about whether or not the censorship was justified, my point is that there is an avenue for legitimate scientific discussion, via open forums, that the anti-vax community largely doesn’t participate with. That’s in part because it is so technical, and the barrier to entry is so high. Maybe there is a larger discussion to be had about how to keep these kinds of organizations accountable, given that their decisions are so complex.
Come on. A private company doesn’t want to contribute to people dying. Oh and by the way don’t they have the right to do what they want? You want what, regulation to prohibit this?
1. I think at the end of the day, the problem isn't "does YouTube have the right to do this?" it's "should YouTube be doing this, given their status?" For me even though they have the right to, I think it's just the wrong thing to do.
I personally am baffled by how the US as a society seems to be devaluing free speech principles in the private and public sphere due to some argument that it's needed to combat misinformation. This strategy never ends well, and it belies a lack of strength in promoting alternatives. The way to combat misinformation is with better information. Resorting to free speech restrictions is a sign of weakness in my opinion.
In the end I'd rather have YouTube (and other platforms) modeling a different approach.
2. I also think, regardless of how they got there, at some point a private business functions as a monopoly and should be treated as such. I'm not so sure how I feel about regulations along those lines, but I do think anti-monopoly legal response to this sort of behavior wouldn't be unreasonable. I'm not at all sympathetic to the GOP in general, but if they started coming down on YouTube for this kind of thing under anti-monopoly regulation umbrellas I think it wouldn't be irrational or unreasonable to me.
3. As a more immediate issue, I think this sort of thing always backfires. If you have a bunch of people thinking there's a conspiracy to shove untested vaccines down people's throats, and then you have a major media distributor like YouTube censoring all anti-vaccine discussion, what do you think they're going to conclude? I'm as pro-vaccine as someone can get, and think arguments against them are usually pretty absurd, but I have to say that this kind of thing starts to look like a conspiracy, even if it isn't one. Why give them ammunition? If you can't convince people the vaccine is a good thing, how do you think that shutting down discussion is somehow going to work better?
People asked questions about immigration, sovereignty, participation. These are completely valid topics and asking was basically decried as Russian propaganda. Meanwhile classical EU proponents never even argued that it isn't a compromise of sovereignty and participation! Denying that was denying reality.
The thing is, if that is the wide spread stance on how to deal with "misinformation", the whole thing suddenly isn't worth it anymore and it is not even close. People just basically argue that they want a technocracy that treats them like children. This was the image the pro-Brexit group crafted.
It is similar to what vaccination proponents do. I don't know how to tell them that they are part of what makes vaccination unattractive to many. I wouldn't advocate to ban them of course.
Regarding 3.: I think it will radicalize some but it will also stop the misinformation of many more people. Overall I think it will lead to lives saved.
"If you simply find the treatment of warehouse workers distasteful don't buy anything online"
Just because someone or something's actions are within the letter of the law doesn't mean they are exempt from criticism.
I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. If someone were to do a good job regulating them and make the situation better I'd approve. If someone were to do a bad job and make things worse I'd disapprove.
Whether regulation should stop YT from doing this is a legitimate question. Nothing else will prevent it. Observe that the government telling a private company what they must host on their platform is potentially more dangerous than the government telling a private company to take down a piece of content (neither of these are happening here but if we entertain the notion of regulating YT then these are to be considered).
Monopolies are bad, mmmkay?
They're struggling to even exercise basic human rights (freedom of movement, opinion, peaceful association, speech, etc, etc. There is probably a right for healthcare self-determination slipped in to the Universal Deceleration of Human Rights too it seems like the sort of thing they'd slip in). There is room to argue about whether the UDoHR applies here, but it is very notable that the anti-vaxers have nearly no power to have a quite reasonable interpretation stick.
Their opinions just don't matter. They appear to be on the verge of being confined to their homes while being widely condemned and socially ostracised. They are likely to be fired. Which is why it is so concerning that systematic oppression is being bought in to deal with them - this is Google crossing scary lines that didn't need to be crossed.
As individuals, we shouldn’t trust. We should verify.
This is the kind of answer a 14 year old who hasn’t yet grasped the concept of not-absolutism would give. It’s absurd.
And the best action they can take to that end is to ban all anti-vaccination conversation?
Maybe YouTube doesn’t want that role.
Maybe we can have a sci-debate website that does want these discussions, and maybe that site could tailor the feature set for exactly this purpose.
Maybe it would focus on citation and annotation features like thinkspot or Spotify or genius.
Maybe the site could have multiple ways to evaluate the reputation of someone making claims. Maybe it could have education, popularity, endorsements from other people with high reputation, and like three other dimensions of reputation measurements.
Maybe it could have tools to disclose conflicts of interest, the accuracy of past claims over time, and automatic linking to rebuttals.
Maybe YouTube just isn’t a fit for this information.
Principally, however, there could be a quasi-monopoly that turns out so essential for society that they should be treated as a public utility with a right to access instead of a private company that can enforce whatever house rules they like within the boundaries of law. I just don't think YT (or FB or Twitter or Google...) are there yet and find it hilarious that butthurt Youtubers so grossly overestimate their own importance.
And sure, one might argue that it's for a good cause (even though it's a complex topic). However, the fact is that as this is done once, it becomes something that can be leveraged as the norm. There is a very real danger here, and nobody knows whether it will realize or not.
The question is not whether you can post anti-vax content today. It's whether you can post anti-anything tomorrow.