I think there is more nuance to this. The problem is that YouTube literally claim "Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world." not the selectively suppress the views of certain groups. So I think it's closer to false advertising.
You're being snarky, but this is essentially true (as I understand it).
In the US, outside of a few legally protected characteristics, a company is free to exercise its speech to choose not to provide service to customers it does not wish to.
The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights.
Some companies go out of their way to try to be better than that because they recognize the influence they have on public access to platforms. (Zuckerberg cares a lot about this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...), but ultimately all of that is above and beyond what the legal expectations are.
In FB's case it wasn't so much a policy change that lead to them shutting down Trump's account, but that USG's position as a rule of law nation was in question after 1/6 and it no longer met their own policy requirements that give elected politicians in rule of law democracies a special pass to violate their moderation rules.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.
"The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights."
-- True, but the government can institute a bill of rights for digital platforms, and make it mandatory for companies that want to have section 230 protection.
Youtube will be free to choose between following the bill of rights, or becoming a regulated media like the TV, or being prone to defamation lawsuits and be responsible for its content.
What that bill of rights would look like? That's a different story... but google, or any tech company, having the power to just delete your gmail/email account, and erase all your stored data at will it is kinda scary.
There should be a happy medium. We do this for evictions already (i.e. there is a process for the eviction, we should do something lightweight for the digital space as well). Eg, if google has determined you have abused on your email, you will have 30 days to retrieve your data, and contacts and transfer them somewhere else. Losing access altogether is very disruptive.
the government can institute a bill of rights for digital platforms, and make it mandatory for companies that want to have section 230 protection.
Social Media companies actually want this as well because then they can just deflect all unpopular decisions to this bill of rights. That's why Facebook spent $700 million to create their own content moderation "supreme court."
Congress had every opportunity to explore this issue further during the Congressional hearings about section 230. Unfortunately, they were more interested in whining about why this specific issue should be censored or why this specific issue should not be censored.
Some companies go out of their way to try to be better than that because they recognize the influence they have on public access to platforms.
If they have that amount of public influence they should be broken up, or heavily regulated as public utilities, so that they uphold freedom of speech online in the new digital public town square.
It wasn't always like that. We used to have rules like common carrier restricting the phone company, the fairness doctrine restricting television networks, and campaign finance rules restricting other media.
We truly live in the golden age of corporate power.
It's basically an application of freedom vs liberty. You are less free as a result of having to follow the rules of the road but have greater liberty by being able to travel safely and efficiently.
This balance is governance's equivalent of "three hard problems."
When it comes to platform moderation it seems like HN at large overwhelmingly holds the opinion that for speech liberty is maximized with freedom. Which might be right but for me personally I've experienced the reality not being able myself on the internet because of all the hate I've received. The solution has been for my whole life has boiled down to "just pretend to be a straight white cis American man" to the point of having to use a voice-changer to play videogames online. Like it does work and solves the immediate problem. But the truth is also that it has gotten a lot better in recent years. We're finally out of the "there are no girls on the internet" dark ages and I don't know if the ends justify the means but something is working.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.
The other far more notable difference is the baker didn't own all the cake shops.
And the "gay cake case" would also be closer to not just providing cork board space for people to stick pins and messages in; but also to require the engineers or CEO herself to write down the words that they put on the bulletin board, after they're orated to her.
The debate is not whether there is a legal requirement for YouTube to provide freedom of speech (categorically, there is not) but whether that is harmful to society. The concept of freedom of expression extends beyond the bound of US law.
Exactly. It makes me uneasy to see all these people who seem to have no idea that freedom of speech is or could be anything other than a particular law. (That there are benefits to having an unrestricted exchange of ideas in public, and that censoring some ideas is a slippery slope to censoring others.) If that law didn't exist, would it occur to them to create it?
The government compelling speech from private companies is a speech violation.
Arguably private companies and individuals should adapt to choose better services that suit their interests. I'm not sure that compelling company speech is a good idea and gets messy quickly (particularly around moderation).
I'm a fan of Urbit which I think is a clever model that makes all of this largely unnecessary.
I see. Then I think you're misunderstanding the position of those you're arguing against. Well, I don't know exactly what throwaway1959 believes, but he criticized Youtube's CEO for "censoring opinions of other people that she does not agree with". He did not say that the government should do anything about it; that was something you mentioned.
I don't know if this is a common misconception or if something else is going on, but it's fairly common for one person to say it's bad for a company to suppress free speech, and someone else to reply that it's not illegal for the company to do that, as if that were a counterargument. Is it believed that saying something is bad = saying it should be illegal? Not only is that a bad policy, it contradicts the ideal of freedom of speech itself: that bad speech should be allowed. I don't understand how someone could believe a free speech advocate would think that (other than by understanding them poorly or having a low opinion of their logical consistency).
For illustration, here's an entire article titled "The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire", 2300 words—none of which says that Youtube's actions are illegal, or should be, or even mentions the First Amendment. I think this is the position of free speech advocates generally: that suppressing free speech is bad and that those who do it should be criticized and shamed but not punished (unless it's the government, in which case it may be illegal). https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american...
I think I understand the position, but the implication is often that it should not be allowed or that it is bad.
The core idea is I think YouTube should have the power to moderate their platform and that that is a form of legally protected speech (a private company deciding how to run itself).
People can disagree with YouTube's policies or moderation, but that's a personal opinion about their policies with regard to what they allow on their platform. I don't think it's that big of a deal for them to block stuff that makes the platform a worse place to be and they have the power to determine what that is.
If they block stuff I find interesting, for example if they blocked videos about cryptocurrencies, I would think that's a dumb rule and I wouldn't want to support them on that, but they should have the ability to make that decision. If they blocked critical videos about China I would think that's unethical and wrong. Their ability to Block/moderate in general though? That's a tool they should have and should use.
Private companies setting policy on what's allowed on their platforms is exercising a form of speech. I don't think private companies should be forced to allow any speech from any users or that that is even desirable. Communities without moderation suck.
The government should not compel speech - compelling companies to provide services is a form of violating free speech. I find this more objectionable than YouTube blocking stuff that violates their ToS.
I also think "censoring opinions of people that she does not agree with" is misleading enough to be false. Banning people like Steve Bannon or Alex Jones is not some sort of ban of good faith intellectual disagreement - it's just banning trolls.
Well, we agree that the company should be allowed to set whatever policies they want, ban whoever they want, etc., and that it would violate their rights—arguably speech rights—for the government to compel them to unban anyone in particular (unless they signed a contract and the banning violated that contract, but I'm sure they have all the necessary CYA clauses in anything they sign).
That said...
I think I understand the position, but the implication is often that it should not be allowed or that it is bad.
I just said that "it should not be allowed" and "it is bad" are very different things, and I think it's important to maintain that distinction. It's not entirely clear to me whether you do. (If you do, then I think you'd agree that it's a rather uncharitable assumption to make of one's interlocutor that his criticism was meant to imply "and the law should stop them" when it could just as easily have meant "they suck and I want everyone to know that".)
Here's an incomplete list of things that are bad but that the law should never disallow: mediocre parenting, getting unhealthily fat, insulting strangers for no reason, getting into a romantic relationship with someone you know wants something long-term and planning to dump them soon, cutting corners in products, making bloated websites, supporting political causes I don't like, encouraging people to invest in programming languages I don't like, etc.
There are pragmatic reasons to not disallow those things. In many cases, enforcement would necessarily be (a) very subjective, and therefore open to abuse, (b) require a very powerful police state, and/or (c) create a slippery slope of "Well, if we already disallow that, then surely also ..." that tends toward totalitarianism. (I suspect those who think "bad" = "should be disallowed" will end up convincing themselves either that a lot of these things should be outlawed, and become totalitarian morality police, or that a lot of these things aren't really bad, and become amoral. I suspect that this actually happens to some degree, but that the damage is limited because many people don't think very much about their beliefs.)
However, if that's your only defense against such policies, then you're vulnerable to special pleading. "This particular description of 'bad behavior' sounds objective, and at least the first step towards policing it doesn't require any significant police state growth, and of course we have no intention of extending the policy further [or of getting replaced in the next election by those who would]." If you're not as sophisticated as your opponent, or less prepared on a particular issue, or if your audience finds the concept of police state growth laughable rather than scary, then you may be caught flat-footed in a debate.
Instead, we have a conception of legal property rights and what counts as "violence" that more or less decides all these issues. Legal encroachments on these rights are bad, and at the very least they require extremely rigorous justification, which should be rarely achieved in practice. I think this is the only stance that is likely to hold up long-term against special pleading; though I think the majority of people aren't properly educated about the merits of this stance, and they tend to elect politicians that cheerfully grab power to fight the villains of the quarter (Terrorists! Copyright pirates! Child abusers! Insurrectionists! Rioters!).
If they blocked critical videos about China I would think that's unethical and wrong.
I agree, but do you think that should be illegal? (I don't.) And if not, then what recourse do people have? Publicly complaining about it to try to change Youtube's mind seems like an obvious thing to try; beyond that, make or join an alternative to Youtube and try to convince others to do so. This is difficult to make work, partly due to network effects.
I do suspect that there are legal barriers to entry (that strengthen the network effects) that should not exist. For example, what if I made a Mytube, which did its best to interoperate with Youtube? E.g. it would show the like counts and comments of Youtube users, and if you commented on Mytube then it would show up on Youtube. Users could have a unified client that would see everything on Youtube as well as Mytube, and for the most part not notice or care which website stuff was actually stored on. I suspect Youtube would claim that using the unified client violated their terms of service; I think this is where we might say that the website cannot make a legally enforceable distinction between a user clicking buttons on a browser to send HTTP requests to their website, and a user clicking buttons on a unified client to send HTTP requests to their website, and that while they can try to detect when the unified client renders their webpage in an embedded browser and scrapes the DOM for the like counts and such, it's a cat-and-mouse game they might not win.
But if that's impossible, then making very strong public criticism seems like the main tool that disgruntled users have against a monopolistic platform. Do you have other suggestions?
This presumed that private corporations have rights. I’d posit that they do not. They are legal, government created entities, which is different than the individual persons the Bill of Rights was written for. Furthermore, why would we want to grant the power to limit speech to private corporations when we don’t allow governments to do so? The latter is a democratically elected group while the former is almost the complete opposite.
These corporations are as big as governments, but y’all want to give them the rights of individuals. Only they’re run like top-down oligarchies with little to no accountability for their actions.
Your platform may be legally allowed to censor everything, but it's clear it doesn't take freedom of expression seriously.
If we add some more mental gymnastics, we can say the Chinese government supports all legal freedom of speech as well. If this sounds ridiculous
but the former does not, we should evaluate why one type of censorship means freedom but another means oppression.
That element has already been evaluated, and is re-evaluated every time this argument is made.
A private platform is free to censor users as they see fit, as the users are free to A) not use their platform at all, B) use a competing platform, or C) create a competing platform. You are not compelled to post your thoughts on FB, or Hackernews, or anywhere else, nor are you entitled to a platform to do so there.
The flip-side, censorship by gov't, is platform independent. This is where the 1st amendment protects come into play, defending you (and the hosting platform) from gov't suppression regarding political or religious speech. If the USA hosted an official message board, then we could argue comparisons to China.
I always wonder what makes YouTube/Twitter, in particular its so-called reviewers or fact-checkers, think that they are on the right side of the history? They are not necessarily better informed, they are not necessarily better educated, and they are not necessarily better at research, they are not necessarily better at interpreting stats. In fact, I question if many of them understand scientific research at all. Yet they had no problem banning a person for citing a research from Stanford that questions the effectiveness of masks. Yet they had no problem declaring Florida's governor was spreading misinformation in a round-table discussion. Yet they had no problem shutting down anyone a year ago who supported wearing mask or staying at home, and shutting down anyone now who claims the opposite now.
In fact, YouTube, according to BBC, bans any coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts World Health Organization (WHO) advice. Yet isn't it true that WHO gave really bad advice in the early days of Covid-19? Isn't true that Taiwan ignored WHO's advice and implemented strict containment policy to a great success? Isn't Thailand representative harshly criticized WHO for their dubious corroboration with Chinese government? What makes YouTube think that they possess moral superiority over other people?
They know they're frauds pushing a political agenda, and they know if they and their conspirators repeat the same lies over and over, the masses will believe them.
I think the reviewers are mostly low on the tech totem pole young people, as ignorant of history or anything outside of their neighborhoods as they are certain about their virtue. You know, as young people have always been. That they get to police what everybody else can say is a serious problem.
The quotes are just to indicate its the general concept of tragedy of the commons.
The parent comment reads as if they are appalled by a decline in virtue these days. And looking at America through the lens of the internet I tend to agree that things are not that great for the median person.
Mass consumer debt is a recent invention. I call it a tragedy of the common because every lender wanted to get in on it ( Its very profitable after all ). Having a saturated pool drives lenders not to compete on price, but on their ability to enlarge the pool of people to lend money to.
I don't believe people are naturally entitled, but (money) stress shortcircuits the brain. It allows people to do things that they know suck for other people. ( And it makes them dumber overall, but that's another discussion entirely )
And i know, one sentence isn't going to cover the infinity complex situation. But i feel that push to normalize consumer debt but the US on an inevitable path of normalizing individual greed. That what andrewstuart noticed.
The citizenry support this stance. The cult of personality around people like Trump on the right, even center-left has a catch phrase "<center/left politician> doesn't owe you anything!" -- uh no, they do: they are public servants!
We live in the through the looking glass world, where things are also upside down. What's next? Google and Facebook receiving Defenders of the Privacy awards?
YouTube certainly allows for a heck of a lot of expression that could reach a lot of people...
As for industry awards I worked at a company that were members of a number of industry award groups. When we were acquired by another company maybe half a floor of people were left in what was a five floor building.
I and some others gathered up all the awards scattered across the building (there were a lot) and decorated our desks with them. To their credit when the acquiring company's CEO showed up, he thought it was pretty hilarious.
For the record, as long as I worked there I held the record for the most "President's Club" awards held by any given employee... at least if you count the trophies at my desk.
As utterly brazen, shameless and just completely and utterly unself-aware as this is, look on the bright side. A quick glance at the like/dislike ratio and comments shows, most people are not impressed with that kind of bullshit.
People aren't buying it and overwhelmingly seem to recognize what shitty hypocritical utterly bullshit behaviour youtube engages in.
I'm honestly surprised the comments have been allowed to remain on for this video. At this point, they're kinda damned if they do, damned if they don't. Turning off dislikes and comments on the video would prove their hypocrisy, but leaving it on shows just how much people hate it.
I've never seen that list before...apparently people really hate cocomelon nursery rhymes...it shows up 11 times in that list.
I have nothing nice to say about any Google-owned company but is this really all that different from $city’s Best $business or literally any other corporate “award” that’s nothing more than thinly-veiled advertising? At least YouTube had the good sense to cut out the marketing middle man and just award it to themselves.
Usually when that kind of corporate feelgood bullshit happens though, it's not publicized and isn't done in such an in your face, 'lol fuck you everybody' kind of way.
Like literally describes while receiving the award how censorship and pandering to corporate advertisers is free speech.
Also, typically, most of the time, the thousands of people directly negatively affected by the reason for the award aren't able to publicly display their disgust.
So they're afraid people will think YT has no freedom of expression, I guess.
Don't they realize this is just them broadcasting an insecurity? Nobody who is really XYZ goes around saying "hey everyone, I'm XYZ :D", it instantly reduces your cred.
*:just to clarify, I neither agree nor disagree with the award, I think it's between really, some areas of YT have nice features, others need work.
Do you just look for headlines that confirm what you want to be true?
"The findings are consistent with previous research. Health experts have long said a mask provides only limited protection for the person wearing it, but can dramatically reduce the risk to others if the wearer is infected, even when showing no symptoms."
Whether or not someone is "healthy" is completely irrelevant when you count that last part, "even when showing no symptoms".
What a bizarre, two faced world we live in. On one level, the fact that an organization exists to give a "freedom of expression" award is peculiar in-and-of-itself. But that same organization which claims to champion freedom of expression doesn't actually do anything to advance the cause of free speech on platforms. In fact, it is awarding a CEO of a platform that expressly forbids the discussion of anything related to possible fraud or lack of integrity in the 2020 election. You can't even talk about it. So on the one hand, they believe YouTube "protect freedoms “in all possible ways” while also "noted that there must be certain limits". How can a contradiction be so blatant?
Ultimately, what is the point of this? Is it some kind of Potemkin award meant to normalize censorship as free expression? Is it some silly thing apologists of YouTube can point to when YouTube is criticized as restricting free speech?
Edit: Even if you despise the people who think the election was stolen, preventing those people from discussing it on your platform directly contradicts the principle of free expression.
One week before receiving this award, Wojcicki appeared at the World Economic Forum’s Global Technology Governance Summit 2021 to discuss how YouTube has ramped up its censorship and called for global coalitions to address content that’s “legal but could be harmful.”
Some recent examples of YouTube's support for free expression:
This award would have made sense when YouTube really took off.
Lately YouTube has engaged in unpersoning - deleting people from the social consciousness. Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones come to mind. Others have their accounts and videos merely suspended or demonetized for inane reasons, e.g Louder with Crowder.
Even doctors merely expressing opinions contrary to WHO officialdom get taken off.
This process has happened very quickly over the past few years and is the reason why alternatives are set to prosper.
Awarding this CEO merely means the award is not to be taken seriously.
Yeah, the underlying concern is about the propagation of "alternative stories", which tend to spread because of well-documented behavioral feedback loops with such stories in social media ("controversial" takes get more engagement, incentivizing more sharing!).
The actual solution is to legislatively neuter the algorithms that power social media. It's harder to do so we're doing the awful, dangerous, strategically-unwise thing (censoring) instead.
The problem is that they get it wrong, all the time, and always in the same direction. I think the solution is complex and includes at least 3 things: 1)treat it as a public health problem, that is have campaigns, just like we did for cigarettes, explaining how toxic online content can be 2) mandate that platforms cannot censor content that is not illegal, but also must provide tools so that users can protect themselves, if they wish, from content they are offended by. 3) and most importantly, start the hard work of building trustworthy institutions. We would not be in this predicament it it was not plainly obvious that our institutions especially media, have rotted beyond redemption.
The biggest problem with starting YouTube competitor is bandwidth you have to pay for. Even Google has physical servers located inside ISPs all around the world with the newest version of their videos to save on transfer. But so does Netflix!
I am surprised we haven't seen NetFlix take on video social network. A YouFlix if you will...
Other platforms banning people doesn’t mean much. Almost all of big tech belongs to either the Bay Area or Seattle - both of which are known for their far left politics. So of course their employees exhibit their same biases and censor the same content.
We discussed and I decided that the most worthy person in this room is me and therefore I award myself with this amazing award. Look at me,you little people,look!
At some point, she'll go home after a long day of executive meetings, crash on a sofa and there will be the award placed in the most prominent place in her home. She'll look at it, sight and say: 'well done me!'.
His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular
In the other thread about this topic here on HN¹, more than one commenter said that they didn’t comment or downvote this on YouTube since it they were afraid it could affect their Google account. I commented this on one of them:
This right here. Many people say things like “Google would never…”, and they might be right. But that’s not what matters, what matters is people’s beliefs about what Google would do. And this is why Google should have absolutely no influence over your web browser, your programming language, etc. Again, that’s perceived influence, not actual influence. The fear exists regardless.
I remember about 20 years ago, I was working at Microsoft, and Visual Source Safe won the best code Source Code Repository from Visual Source Safe Magazine. Quite the surprising outcome.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been granted the title of marshal, state media reported Wednesday, cementing his status as the authoritarian nation's top military official as he makes key changes to the million-man force.
The decision to award Kim, who already serves as supreme commander of the Korean People's Army, was made Tuesday by the nation's top military, government and political officials, state media said in a special bulletin.
The formal move to bestow the title of marshal to Kim comes seven months into his rule and follows several days of reshuffling at the highest levels of the military.
Far from exhaustive, I'm sure this happens quietly to many more small creators who've crossed the wrong invisible line, asked the wrong good-faith question, or gotten too close to a forbidden subject even while covering something else entirely.
But it should be clear even from what little's made it to be documented that what YouTube will suppress has already quietly dipped pretty deep into your personal overton window, if you ever even pretended to care about real free expression.
This is one of those moments in history that future humans look back on and wonder how people were "so much more ignorant, stupid, gullible, corrupt, etc. than we are today".
Praising yourself for things that you did not actually do is analogous to how some ancient kings praised themselves for winning a battle that historians later realized they did not actually win. Like how did those kings really expect their people to just believe that? Because the king's fact checkers verified it, of course.
The many self-generated mythologies of the Kim dynasty of North Korea is a great example of this phenomenon.
Almost like airtags to find airtags
As a CEO of youtube, she is free to express her views freely on youtube, by censoring opinions of other people that she does not agree with.
Came to say the same thing!
Freedom of expression includes the right to supress the views of others! /s
The right to not be forced to spread the views of others :)
I think there is more nuance to this. The problem is that YouTube literally claim "Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world." not the selectively suppress the views of certain groups. So I think it's closer to false advertising.
Right. This is actually how it works. Many of us support this.
You're being snarky, but this is essentially true (as I understand it).
In the US, outside of a few legally protected characteristics, a company is free to exercise its speech to choose not to provide service to customers it does not wish to.
The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights.
Some companies go out of their way to try to be better than that because they recognize the influence they have on public access to platforms. (Zuckerberg cares a lot about this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...), but ultimately all of that is above and beyond what the legal expectations are.
In FB's case it wasn't so much a policy change that lead to them shutting down Trump's account, but that USG's position as a rule of law nation was in question after 1/6 and it no longer met their own policy requirements that give elected politicians in rule of law democracies a special pass to violate their moderation rules.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.
"The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights."
-- True, but the government can institute a bill of rights for digital platforms, and make it mandatory for companies that want to have section 230 protection.
Youtube will be free to choose between following the bill of rights, or becoming a regulated media like the TV, or being prone to defamation lawsuits and be responsible for its content.
What that bill of rights would look like? That's a different story... but google, or any tech company, having the power to just delete your gmail/email account, and erase all your stored data at will it is kinda scary.
There should be a happy medium. We do this for evictions already (i.e. there is a process for the eviction, we should do something lightweight for the digital space as well). Eg, if google has determined you have abused on your email, you will have 30 days to retrieve your data, and contacts and transfer them somewhere else. Losing access altogether is very disruptive.
Social Media companies actually want this as well because then they can just deflect all unpopular decisions to this bill of rights. That's why Facebook spent $700 million to create their own content moderation "supreme court."
Congress had every opportunity to explore this issue further during the Congressional hearings about section 230. Unfortunately, they were more interested in whining about why this specific issue should be censored or why this specific issue should not be censored.
If they have that amount of public influence they should be broken up, or heavily regulated as public utilities, so that they uphold freedom of speech online in the new digital public town square.
It wasn't always like that. We used to have rules like common carrier restricting the phone company, the fairness doctrine restricting television networks, and campaign finance rules restricting other media.
We truly live in the golden age of corporate power.
We seriously need that one back
So that MSNBC could’ve been forced to air pro-Trump defenses?
Yes. And Fox could have been forced to air criticism, and in both cases fewer Americans would live in echo chambers.
Media partisanship is misinforming and dividing Americans.
It's basically an application of freedom vs liberty. You are less free as a result of having to follow the rules of the road but have greater liberty by being able to travel safely and efficiently.
This balance is governance's equivalent of "three hard problems."
When it comes to platform moderation it seems like HN at large overwhelmingly holds the opinion that for speech liberty is maximized with freedom. Which might be right but for me personally I've experienced the reality not being able myself on the internet because of all the hate I've received. The solution has been for my whole life has boiled down to "just pretend to be a straight white cis American man" to the point of having to use a voice-changer to play videogames online. Like it does work and solves the immediate problem. But the truth is also that it has gotten a lot better in recent years. We're finally out of the "there are no girls on the internet" dark ages and I don't know if the ends justify the means but something is working.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.
The other far more notable difference is the baker didn't own all the cake shops.
And the "gay cake case" would also be closer to not just providing cork board space for people to stick pins and messages in; but also to require the engineers or CEO herself to write down the words that they put on the bulletin board, after they're orated to her.
Eh I don’t buy this.
FB isn’t the internet and there are a lot of social media companies with social media apps.
The protected characteristic is the relevant bit.
The debate is not whether there is a legal requirement for YouTube to provide freedom of speech (categorically, there is not) but whether that is harmful to society. The concept of freedom of expression extends beyond the bound of US law.
Exactly. It makes me uneasy to see all these people who seem to have no idea that freedom of speech is or could be anything other than a particular law. (That there are benefits to having an unrestricted exchange of ideas in public, and that censoring some ideas is a slippery slope to censoring others.) If that law didn't exist, would it occur to them to create it?
I think you're misstating my comment a bit.
The government compelling speech from private companies is a speech violation.
Arguably private companies and individuals should adapt to choose better services that suit their interests. I'm not sure that compelling company speech is a good idea and gets messy quickly (particularly around moderation).
I'm a fan of Urbit which I think is a clever model that makes all of this largely unnecessary.
I see. Then I think you're misunderstanding the position of those you're arguing against. Well, I don't know exactly what throwaway1959 believes, but he criticized Youtube's CEO for "censoring opinions of other people that she does not agree with". He did not say that the government should do anything about it; that was something you mentioned.
I don't know if this is a common misconception or if something else is going on, but it's fairly common for one person to say it's bad for a company to suppress free speech, and someone else to reply that it's not illegal for the company to do that, as if that were a counterargument. Is it believed that saying something is bad = saying it should be illegal? Not only is that a bad policy, it contradicts the ideal of freedom of speech itself: that bad speech should be allowed. I don't understand how someone could believe a free speech advocate would think that (other than by understanding them poorly or having a low opinion of their logical consistency).
For illustration, here's an entire article titled "The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire", 2300 words—none of which says that Youtube's actions are illegal, or should be, or even mentions the First Amendment. I think this is the position of free speech advocates generally: that suppressing free speech is bad and that those who do it should be criticized and shamed but not punished (unless it's the government, in which case it may be illegal). https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american...
I think I understand the position, but the implication is often that it should not be allowed or that it is bad.
The core idea is I think YouTube should have the power to moderate their platform and that that is a form of legally protected speech (a private company deciding how to run itself).
People can disagree with YouTube's policies or moderation, but that's a personal opinion about their policies with regard to what they allow on their platform. I don't think it's that big of a deal for them to block stuff that makes the platform a worse place to be and they have the power to determine what that is.
If they block stuff I find interesting, for example if they blocked videos about cryptocurrencies, I would think that's a dumb rule and I wouldn't want to support them on that, but they should have the ability to make that decision. If they blocked critical videos about China I would think that's unethical and wrong. Their ability to Block/moderate in general though? That's a tool they should have and should use.
Private companies setting policy on what's allowed on their platforms is exercising a form of speech. I don't think private companies should be forced to allow any speech from any users or that that is even desirable. Communities without moderation suck.
The government should not compel speech - compelling companies to provide services is a form of violating free speech. I find this more objectionable than YouTube blocking stuff that violates their ToS.
I also think "censoring opinions of people that she does not agree with" is misleading enough to be false. Banning people like Steve Bannon or Alex Jones is not some sort of ban of good faith intellectual disagreement - it's just banning trolls.
Well, we agree that the company should be allowed to set whatever policies they want, ban whoever they want, etc., and that it would violate their rights—arguably speech rights—for the government to compel them to unban anyone in particular (unless they signed a contract and the banning violated that contract, but I'm sure they have all the necessary CYA clauses in anything they sign).
That said...
I just said that "it should not be allowed" and "it is bad" are very different things, and I think it's important to maintain that distinction. It's not entirely clear to me whether you do. (If you do, then I think you'd agree that it's a rather uncharitable assumption to make of one's interlocutor that his criticism was meant to imply "and the law should stop them" when it could just as easily have meant "they suck and I want everyone to know that".)
Here's an incomplete list of things that are bad but that the law should never disallow: mediocre parenting, getting unhealthily fat, insulting strangers for no reason, getting into a romantic relationship with someone you know wants something long-term and planning to dump them soon, cutting corners in products, making bloated websites, supporting political causes I don't like, encouraging people to invest in programming languages I don't like, etc.
There are pragmatic reasons to not disallow those things. In many cases, enforcement would necessarily be (a) very subjective, and therefore open to abuse, (b) require a very powerful police state, and/or (c) create a slippery slope of "Well, if we already disallow that, then surely also ..." that tends toward totalitarianism. (I suspect those who think "bad" = "should be disallowed" will end up convincing themselves either that a lot of these things should be outlawed, and become totalitarian morality police, or that a lot of these things aren't really bad, and become amoral. I suspect that this actually happens to some degree, but that the damage is limited because many people don't think very much about their beliefs.)
However, if that's your only defense against such policies, then you're vulnerable to special pleading. "This particular description of 'bad behavior' sounds objective, and at least the first step towards policing it doesn't require any significant police state growth, and of course we have no intention of extending the policy further [or of getting replaced in the next election by those who would]." If you're not as sophisticated as your opponent, or less prepared on a particular issue, or if your audience finds the concept of police state growth laughable rather than scary, then you may be caught flat-footed in a debate.
Instead, we have a conception of legal property rights and what counts as "violence" that more or less decides all these issues. Legal encroachments on these rights are bad, and at the very least they require extremely rigorous justification, which should be rarely achieved in practice. I think this is the only stance that is likely to hold up long-term against special pleading; though I think the majority of people aren't properly educated about the merits of this stance, and they tend to elect politicians that cheerfully grab power to fight the villains of the quarter (Terrorists! Copyright pirates! Child abusers! Insurrectionists! Rioters!).
I agree, but do you think that should be illegal? (I don't.) And if not, then what recourse do people have? Publicly complaining about it to try to change Youtube's mind seems like an obvious thing to try; beyond that, make or join an alternative to Youtube and try to convince others to do so. This is difficult to make work, partly due to network effects.
I do suspect that there are legal barriers to entry (that strengthen the network effects) that should not exist. For example, what if I made a Mytube, which did its best to interoperate with Youtube? E.g. it would show the like counts and comments of Youtube users, and if you commented on Mytube then it would show up on Youtube. Users could have a unified client that would see everything on Youtube as well as Mytube, and for the most part not notice or care which website stuff was actually stored on. I suspect Youtube would claim that using the unified client violated their terms of service; I think this is where we might say that the website cannot make a legally enforceable distinction between a user clicking buttons on a browser to send HTTP requests to their website, and a user clicking buttons on a unified client to send HTTP requests to their website, and that while they can try to detect when the unified client renders their webpage in an embedded browser and scrapes the DOM for the like counts and such, it's a cat-and-mouse game they might not win.
But if that's impossible, then making very strong public criticism seems like the main tool that disgruntled users have against a monopolistic platform. Do you have other suggestions?
This presumed that private corporations have rights. I’d posit that they do not. They are legal, government created entities, which is different than the individual persons the Bill of Rights was written for. Furthermore, why would we want to grant the power to limit speech to private corporations when we don’t allow governments to do so? The latter is a democratically elected group while the former is almost the complete opposite.
These corporations are as big as governments, but y’all want to give them the rights of individuals. Only they’re run like top-down oligarchies with little to no accountability for their actions.
I don't think the analogy holds. A mom and pop shop should be given more latitude on who they serve than a communication platform monopoly.
There's the law, and there's the principle.
Your platform may be legally allowed to censor everything, but it's clear it doesn't take freedom of expression seriously.
If we add some more mental gymnastics, we can say the Chinese government supports all legal freedom of speech as well. If this sounds ridiculous but the former does not, we should evaluate why one type of censorship means freedom but another means oppression.
That element has already been evaluated, and is re-evaluated every time this argument is made.
A private platform is free to censor users as they see fit, as the users are free to A) not use their platform at all, B) use a competing platform, or C) create a competing platform. You are not compelled to post your thoughts on FB, or Hackernews, or anywhere else, nor are you entitled to a platform to do so there.
The flip-side, censorship by gov't, is platform independent. This is where the 1st amendment protects come into play, defending you (and the hosting platform) from gov't suppression regarding political or religious speech. If the USA hosted an official message board, then we could argue comparisons to China.
Almost as good as when Blythe Masters tried to be a regulator and a perpetrator (or manager thereof) at the same time.
On Second Thought, JPMorgan Executive Won’t Advise Commodities Regulator
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-07/jpmorgans...
This is how the entire world of big tech works
I always wonder what makes YouTube/Twitter, in particular its so-called reviewers or fact-checkers, think that they are on the right side of the history? They are not necessarily better informed, they are not necessarily better educated, and they are not necessarily better at research, they are not necessarily better at interpreting stats. In fact, I question if many of them understand scientific research at all. Yet they had no problem banning a person for citing a research from Stanford that questions the effectiveness of masks. Yet they had no problem declaring Florida's governor was spreading misinformation in a round-table discussion. Yet they had no problem shutting down anyone a year ago who supported wearing mask or staying at home, and shutting down anyone now who claims the opposite now.
In fact, YouTube, according to BBC, bans any coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts World Health Organization (WHO) advice. Yet isn't it true that WHO gave really bad advice in the early days of Covid-19? Isn't true that Taiwan ignored WHO's advice and implemented strict containment policy to a great success? Isn't Thailand representative harshly criticized WHO for their dubious corroboration with Chinese government? What makes YouTube think that they possess moral superiority over other people?
They know they're frauds pushing a political agenda, and they know if they and their conspirators repeat the same lies over and over, the masses will believe them.
That's a rather cynical view. In my experience, people who make false statements with confidence often believe their own bullshit.
I think the reviewers are mostly low on the tech totem pole young people, as ignorant of history or anything outside of their neighborhoods as they are certain about their virtue. You know, as young people have always been. That they get to police what everybody else can say is a serious problem.
The sense of entitlement is sadly so expected these days.
My current theory is ' tragedy of the commons ' applied to debt.
Please explain that.
And please explain what's going on with those quotes.
The quotes are just to indicate its the general concept of tragedy of the commons.
The parent comment reads as if they are appalled by a decline in virtue these days. And looking at America through the lens of the internet I tend to agree that things are not that great for the median person.
Mass consumer debt is a recent invention. I call it a tragedy of the common because every lender wanted to get in on it ( Its very profitable after all ). Having a saturated pool drives lenders not to compete on price, but on their ability to enlarge the pool of people to lend money to.
I don't believe people are naturally entitled, but (money) stress shortcircuits the brain. It allows people to do things that they know suck for other people. ( And it makes them dumber overall, but that's another discussion entirely )
And i know, one sentence isn't going to cover the infinity complex situation. But i feel that push to normalize consumer debt but the US on an inevitable path of normalizing individual greed. That what andrewstuart noticed.
I don't see how any of these things are connected
The citizenry support this stance. The cult of personality around people like Trump on the right, even center-left has a catch phrase "<center/left politician> doesn't owe you anything!" -- uh no, they do: they are public servants!
The award website.
https://www.freeexpressionawards.org/
Featuring : Colin Powell!
However, I searched but found nothing about the award for Susan Wojcicki, the YT CEO ( she is listed prominently on the site ).
I assume that she just got a regular award.
Lying to the UN security council is protected speech!
We live in the through the looking glass world, where things are also upside down. What's next? Google and Facebook receiving Defenders of the Privacy awards?
This appeared earlier on HN but got squelched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26875971
more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26875971
notably, the title of that post was changed to omit the fact that it was sponsored by youtube.
Are you sure about that? Currently it is consistent with the Youtube title, which is the HN etiquette ( don't editorialize titles ).
The last one linked directly to the video
Colin Powell, Mr "weapons of mass destruction" himself side-by-side with Jimmy Lai of Hong-Kong fame.
I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/250/ in a way.
http://www.viruscomix.com/page482.html popped into my mind.
Snopes? ok lol
https://archive.md/Wy4GT
https://archive.md/wrEXO
https://archive.is/AqkNf
http://archive.is/HNgc9
I have decided to award myself with the Best At Irony Award.
YouTube certainly allows for a heck of a lot of expression that could reach a lot of people...
As for industry awards I worked at a company that were members of a number of industry award groups. When we were acquired by another company maybe half a floor of people were left in what was a five floor building.
I and some others gathered up all the awards scattered across the building (there were a lot) and decorated our desks with them. To their credit when the acquiring company's CEO showed up, he thought it was pretty hilarious.
For the record, as long as I worked there I held the record for the most "President's Club" awards held by any given employee... at least if you count the trophies at my desk.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/510/176/e33...
This must be some sort of objective measure of society entering into a new era.
The Cretinaceous.
We got a movie about that! Idiocracy (2006)... I’m a huge fan
This film wins my prize for "most accurate prediction of the future".
The older I get the more horrified I am about how well this movie is starting to parallel life.
The post shame era
is that a joke? this gotta be some kind of prank right?
This is ridiculous in too many ways. Don't know where to start.
Congratulations!
As utterly brazen, shameless and just completely and utterly unself-aware as this is, look on the bright side. A quick glance at the like/dislike ratio and comments shows, most people are not impressed with that kind of bullshit.
People aren't buying it and overwhelmingly seem to recognize what shitty hypocritical utterly bullshit behaviour youtube engages in.
Dislikes will not be possible in the future: https://nypost.com/2021/03/31/youtube-is-testing-removal-of-...
Also, somewhat interestingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_...
I'm honestly surprised the comments have been allowed to remain on for this video. At this point, they're kinda damned if they do, damned if they don't. Turning off dislikes and comments on the video would prove their hypocrisy, but leaving it on shows just how much people hate it.
I've never seen that list before...apparently people really hate cocomelon nursery rhymes...it shows up 11 times in that list.
There's a really plausible explanation for huge dislike ratios on videos for children:
Very young children don't understand the UI, they just randomly mash buttons.
So a 50/50 like/dislike ratio would represent that randomness.
Fair enough, that does make sense, still, they seem to show up in particular. I'm guessing there's many channels for children's music.
"may not be possible."
I have nothing nice to say about any Google-owned company but is this really all that different from $city’s Best $business or literally any other corporate “award” that’s nothing more than thinly-veiled advertising? At least YouTube had the good sense to cut out the marketing middle man and just award it to themselves.
Usually when that kind of corporate feelgood bullshit happens though, it's not publicized and isn't done in such an in your face, 'lol fuck you everybody' kind of way.
Like literally describes while receiving the award how censorship and pandering to corporate advertisers is free speech.
Also, typically, most of the time, the thousands of people directly negatively affected by the reason for the award aren't able to publicly display their disgust.
No, it would be a lot more like a city creating a Best City in America award and then awarding it to themselves.
So they're afraid people will think YT has no freedom of expression, I guess.
Don't they realize this is just them broadcasting an insecurity? Nobody who is really XYZ goes around saying "hey everyone, I'm XYZ :D", it instantly reduces your cred.
*:just to clarify, I neither agree nor disagree with the award, I think it's between really, some areas of YT have nice features, others need work.
next step: youtube to be renamed 'YouTube: The free democratic republic of the internet'
""" Wojcicki said that the Google-owned video streaming platform would be “removing information that is problematic”.
"Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy." """
April 2020.
https://www.verdict.co.uk/youtube-coronavirus-ban-who/
Considering that last year the WHO said that healthy people don't need to wear masks, that seems ike a pretty stupid policy for YouTube to keep.
Not to mention the contradiction between the CDC and the WHO regarding asymptomatic spread.
That recommendation turns out to be pretty good advice:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-facema...
Do you just look for headlines that confirm what you want to be true?
"The findings are consistent with previous research. Health experts have long said a mask provides only limited protection for the person wearing it, but can dramatically reduce the risk to others if the wearer is infected, even when showing no symptoms."
Whether or not someone is "healthy" is completely irrelevant when you count that last part, "even when showing no symptoms".
It's not good advice.
Turns out, cloth masks are barely effective (2% reduction in case growth after 100 days!). They should have kept their original stance.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm
No need to link to past censorship: She celebrated and promoted youtube's content restriction in her acceptance speach.
Youtube unironically, whole-heartedly believes that "Censorship is Expression". Now the award makes sense. Add it to the "War is Peace" list.
What a bizarre, two faced world we live in. On one level, the fact that an organization exists to give a "freedom of expression" award is peculiar in-and-of-itself. But that same organization which claims to champion freedom of expression doesn't actually do anything to advance the cause of free speech on platforms. In fact, it is awarding a CEO of a platform that expressly forbids the discussion of anything related to possible fraud or lack of integrity in the 2020 election. You can't even talk about it. So on the one hand, they believe YouTube "protect freedoms “in all possible ways” while also "noted that there must be certain limits". How can a contradiction be so blatant?
Ultimately, what is the point of this? Is it some kind of Potemkin award meant to normalize censorship as free expression? Is it some silly thing apologists of YouTube can point to when YouTube is criticized as restricting free speech?
Edit: Even if you despise the people who think the election was stolen, preventing those people from discussing it on your platform directly contradicts the principle of free expression.
https://twitter.com/GordonDimmack/status/1384067464368033800
"Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips." (Proverbs 27:2)
From Reclaim The Net's article on this award (https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-ceo-freedom-of-expression-...):
Some recent examples of YouTube's support for free expression:
1. YouTube’s policies block ad targeting on Black Lives Matter videos https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/youtubes-policie...
2. Scientists From Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton Talked COVID With DeSantis. YouTube Deleted It https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/04/1...
3. YouTube Is Wiping Trump’s CPAC Speech — Unless The Videos Discredit It https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/05/youtube-is-wiping-trump...
3b. Bonus round: misleading/gaslighting fact check trying to claim that YouTube was not censoring CPAC speeches: https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-youtube-ban-all-copi...
She definitely seems deserving of recognition for defending the freedom of expression /s
The lack of self-awareness from tech elites is somehow still astonishing.
This award would have made sense when YouTube really took off.
Lately YouTube has engaged in unpersoning - deleting people from the social consciousness. Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones come to mind. Others have their accounts and videos merely suspended or demonetized for inane reasons, e.g Louder with Crowder.
Even doctors merely expressing opinions contrary to WHO officialdom get taken off.
This process has happened very quickly over the past few years and is the reason why alternatives are set to prosper.
Awarding this CEO merely means the award is not to be taken seriously.
Yeah, the underlying concern is about the propagation of "alternative stories", which tend to spread because of well-documented behavioral feedback loops with such stories in social media ("controversial" takes get more engagement, incentivizing more sharing!).
The actual solution is to legislatively neuter the algorithms that power social media. It's harder to do so we're doing the awful, dangerous, strategically-unwise thing (censoring) instead.
The problem is that they get it wrong, all the time, and always in the same direction. I think the solution is complex and includes at least 3 things: 1)treat it as a public health problem, that is have campaigns, just like we did for cigarettes, explaining how toxic online content can be 2) mandate that platforms cannot censor content that is not illegal, but also must provide tools so that users can protect themselves, if they wish, from content they are offended by. 3) and most importantly, start the hard work of building trustworthy institutions. We would not be in this predicament it it was not plainly obvious that our institutions especially media, have rotted beyond redemption.
The biggest problem with starting YouTube competitor is bandwidth you have to pay for. Even Google has physical servers located inside ISPs all around the world with the newest version of their videos to save on transfer. But so does Netflix!
I am surprised we haven't seen NetFlix take on video social network. A YouFlix if you will...
I agree with almost everything you said, but the two people you mentioned are legitimately bad examples (other platforms have banned them as well).
Other platforms banning people doesn’t mean much. Almost all of big tech belongs to either the Bay Area or Seattle - both of which are known for their far left politics. So of course their employees exhibit their same biases and censor the same content.
Yes, other platforms have targeted freedom of expression as well. In the same situation, they would receive the same comment.
because freedom of expression is only for those people you like?
Giving yourself awards is kinda awesome. We need more of this. Silicon Valley has been a bit boring lately.
I'd be curious to see how Musk or Jobs executed on that idea.
Musk would do it as a joke and get crucified in the media for it. Jobs would somehow convince people he deserved it
15 likes vs 15.000 DISLIKE, the ratio speak by itself.
https://youtu.be/xDcvPf78g1k
We discussed and I decided that the most worthy person in this room is me and therefore I award myself with this amazing award. Look at me,you little people,look!
At some point, she'll go home after a long day of executive meetings, crash on a sofa and there will be the award placed in the most prominent place in her home. She'll look at it, sight and say: 'well done me!'.
That's the spirit. Yesterday I won the man of the living room award sponsored by myself.
This is real pravda stuff
you cannot make this up
Am I the only one that finds it particularly scummy she selected a famous blind woman to introduce her sham award?
This feels begging for fan and sympathy likes, though it does not appear to be working.
Maybe subconsciously she knows that she should be embarrassed at receiving the award and doesn't want to be seen receiving it.
At 22:45CET this submission dropped from #1 to #26.
In the other thread about this topic here on HN¹, more than one commenter said that they didn’t comment or downvote this on YouTube since it they were afraid it could affect their Google account. I commented this on one of them:
This right here. Many people say things like “Google would never…”, and they might be right. But that’s not what matters, what matters is people’s beliefs about what Google would do. And this is why Google should have absolutely no influence over your web browser, your programming language, etc. Again, that’s perceived influence, not actual influence. The fear exists regardless.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26875971
This is Galvin Belson level of narcissism.
I remember about 20 years ago, I was working at Microsoft, and Visual Source Safe won the best code Source Code Repository from Visual Source Safe Magazine. Quite the surprising outcome.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been granted the title of marshal, state media reported Wednesday, cementing his status as the authoritarian nation's top military official as he makes key changes to the million-man force.
The decision to award Kim, who already serves as supreme commander of the Korean People's Army, was made Tuesday by the nation's top military, government and political officials, state media said in a special bulletin.
The formal move to bestow the title of marshal to Kim comes seven months into his rule and follows several days of reshuffling at the highest levels of the military.
https://old.reddit.com/search?q=youtube+shadowban
https://old.reddit.com/search?q=youtube+ban
Far from exhaustive, I'm sure this happens quietly to many more small creators who've crossed the wrong invisible line, asked the wrong good-faith question, or gotten too close to a forbidden subject even while covering something else entirely.
But it should be clear even from what little's made it to be documented that what YouTube will suppress has already quietly dipped pretty deep into your personal overton window, if you ever even pretended to care about real free expression.
At 23:07CET, this submission dropped to #31, and off the frontpage. Finally!
This is one of those moments in history that future humans look back on and wonder how people were "so much more ignorant, stupid, gullible, corrupt, etc. than we are today".
Praising yourself for things that you did not actually do is analogous to how some ancient kings praised themselves for winning a battle that historians later realized they did not actually win. Like how did those kings really expect their people to just believe that? Because the king's fact checkers verified it, of course.
The many self-generated mythologies of the Kim dynasty of North Korea is a great example of this phenomenon.
The First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence was comedy, not a suggestion.
The English in this article reads like it came from a GAN
The English in this article reads like it was written by a GAN
To quote Sam Kinison, "It's like Christians against Christ."
Isn't this sergei brins wife?
ex-wife's sister.