by snomad on 3/4/22, 11:42 PM with 813 comments
by w14 on 3/5/22, 9:44 AM
The legislation is based on the principle that everyone has the right to say what they want to say, but they have no right to be heard by others. This phraseology was used by several during the recent committee hearings, including by Facebook employees for example. So it will effectively enshrine in law: shadow banning, delisting from Google search etc.
Also enshrined in the legislation is the principle of banning content which is 'legal but harmful to adults'. 'Harmful', amongst many other terms, is not defined.
Also enshrined in law will be the principle that certain types of 'journalistic' content will be protected from this censorship if it meets criteria to be decided upon by the new regulator, Ofcom.
This will be an enabling act. It is full, from front to back, of opportunity for scope creep through secondary legislation.
As I said, the UK is leading the charge with this, but the EU has been keeping pace [1]. I haven't seen similar in the US as of yet.
[0] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... [1] - https://ec.europa.eu/info/digital-services-act-ensuring-safe...
by ok123456 on 3/5/22, 5:06 AM
Actions like this have turned this into political red meat for some. These companies really need to learn how to read the room. Ratcheting downward the ability of people to freely use these platforms just feeds into whatever persecution complex they have, and justifies it. You don't get rid of bad ideas by allowing them not be spoken no matter how well meaning you are.
by mathogre on 3/5/22, 5:24 AM
by stereoradonc on 3/5/22, 1:16 AM
by imnotlost on 3/5/22, 5:06 AM
You can’t force people or businesses to listen to you or broadcast your speech. That’s American liberty. That’s freedom.
You can’t claim that a business is “the public square” and then force them.
If you do want a digital public square look for something run by the government with a mandate to publish everything.
I’m pretty sure people wouldn’t be too happy with that either… too many libtards, too many nazis, too many racists, too many whatevers…
by zpeti on 3/5/22, 6:24 AM
I was basically addicted to YouTube a few years back, first thing every day was go there, I could stop going to it many times a day, even when I felt it was too much. Now, I maybe actively go to YouTube 2-3 times a week, otherwise I just watch embedded videos on websites or Twitter.
I’m not surprised tiktok has taken over.
I think YouTube have basically neutered themselves over trying to “do the right thing” politically
by eyelidlessness on 3/5/22, 5:13 AM
by mabbo on 3/5/22, 6:50 AM
You could automate moderation with ML, automatic recognition, user-flagging but the sheer number of false positives, and alleged false positives, means you basically need to have a full human moderation team to have real accuracy.
You could just use human moderators, but then you have to pay for them all. Ads based websites can't afford that.
You could charge users money and not be purely ads-based, but then you won't be a top web destination because people aren't willing to pay for the internet with money.
So the only remaining option is to automate, ignore the false positive problem entirely and rake in money while abusing your content creators and users. This is 'The Google Strategy'.
by spacexsucks on 3/5/22, 2:56 PM
If these idiots were taking just themselves off the cliff, then sure. But they are taking villagers who cant tell the difference between legit or not off the cliff too.
Even worse, those idiots are turning these misguided villagers onto the rest who know better to not listen to these idiots.
This is a failing of the education system here. But no one is talking about how to really distinguish propaganda from real. Sure they misguided people have freedom of speech, but they are growing like a virus and a virus needs to contained. Social literally has the term "viral" for crying out loud.
The other more important thing to contain would be the medium on which this infection is spreading. Which mean reducing the impact of the feed algorithm. Access to the feed should be limited. Also, facebook and youtube dont want to give up the feed. That is what keeps the humans hooked.
If one part of the body is cancerous, you cut it off. You dont stand around arguing if that part of the body has right to free speech.
by rtpg on 3/5/22, 1:42 AM
by godmode2019 on 3/5/22, 1:04 AM
In my opinion all elections are rigged, why on earth would you risk losing power to the whim of the 'unwashed'.
Both parties are two sides of the same coin and go back and forth to give everyone the illusion of choice. But when people mass together and demand social change, BLM ect its allowed to happened only until it starts working, then the authorities crack down with a iron fist.
Its well documented that the USA rigs elections in other countries. So if the technology exists and the appetite exists, what's stopping them? Laws? Morals?
Do we really think that the intelligence community is going to let a random popular citizen have command of the biggest military in the world and a finger on the nuclear button, just because a couple of extra people put their name on a piece of paper?
I think that is absurd, all elections are rigged and to suggest otherwise is naive, holding on to a romantic notion that we choose our leaders.
by sergiotapia on 3/5/22, 3:10 AM
Much better alternatives exist. Support decentralized internet ideas, save the internet for future generations.
by freedomben on 3/5/22, 12:22 AM
particularly appropriate quote:
> What casual observers might not understand, however, is just how far the policy goes. Not only does YouTube punish channels that spread misinformation, but in many cases, it also punishes channels that report on the spread of misinformation. The platform makes no distinction between the speaker and the content creator. If a channel produces a straight-news video that merely shows Trump making an unfounded election-related claim—perhaps during a speech, in an interview, or at a rally—YouTube would punish the channel as if the channel had made the claim, even if no one affiliated with the channel endorsed Trump's lies.
[1]: https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-electi...
by pengaru on 3/5/22, 4:29 AM
by blunte on 3/5/22, 1:13 PM
The state of our world is comically broken, and it’s getting worse by the year. I cannot fathom any viable solution to turning things around. Roger Waters album “Amused to Death” was astonishingly prescient.
by cryptonector on 3/5/22, 1:27 AM
If it's not nonsense, then why censor it?
by Overtonwindow on 3/5/22, 2:34 AM
by thinkingemote on 3/5/22, 10:00 AM
Thus they censor because they cannot claim to be impartial anymore.
But there used to be platforms on the internet.
But they got threatened by the left and the right for different reasons. Censor or be broken up.
We will see more ex-platforms this year but for different reasons.
by scantis on 3/5/22, 12:00 AM
Imagine in a totalitarian regime, you would like to inform people on system critical thoughts others have been executed for, so people can avoid them.
by fdgsdfogijq on 3/5/22, 12:55 AM
by hanniabu on 3/5/22, 12:19 AM
by dayvid on 3/5/22, 1:12 AM
by alkonaut on 3/5/22, 8:24 AM
by choward on 3/4/22, 11:59 PM
by dukeofdoom on 3/5/22, 3:57 AM
https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1495146891646013443
This is a path where all this censorship will lead to if they don't stop it. It will be as bad for the modern day Oligarchs as it was for the French nobility during the revolution, if they can't control it. But the problem is during the last year only more and more trust has been eroded. All week on twitter Pfizer, and vaccine side effects has been trending. Today on twitter it's "They lied" is trending. You can see how alarming this is to some at the top.
by syspec on 3/5/22, 1:49 AM
It's one thing to have people making false claims, but covering the former president tying of election his claim to the current Ukraine crises should not fall into that category.
by fredgrott on 3/5/22, 1:36 AM
When did Youtube become A Russian censor?
by bfung on 3/5/22, 12:52 AM
Perhaps the right answer is to “divide” it up and set requirements for each category of video, similar to how “YouTube kids” is a thing now. News and podcasts would go under its own section and have some level of sanity checks while home videos can be as random as they want to be.
by lmilcin on 3/5/22, 3:47 AM
Once you start compromising on principles, the rest is just slippery slope that we are observing.
by Thorentis on 3/5/22, 1:06 AM
by jorgesborges on 3/5/22, 12:35 AM
The WEIRD world is becoming increasingly more authoritarian. I’m already detached from real conflict and scarcity, knowing nothing but peace and prosperity, and the TikTok generation behind me meming about WW3 doesn’t inspire much confidence.
by ComradePhil on 3/5/22, 2:30 AM
They keep removing videos to keep their advertisers or customers happy. If they are not allowed by the government to delete videos that are not illegal, they can just blame the government.
Of course, they should not be forced to keep every video. It has to be profitable for them.
by adamredwoods on 3/5/22, 1:34 AM
1. At what point will the information on the internet become so obfuscated that communication and "truth" is difficult to discern from "lies", if not presently today? Consider a person using the internet for the first time in order to find more information on a current event. How many sources (and what qualifies as one) does one have to traverse to weigh what one can consider to be "truthful enough"? Does a person have enough time to sift through all the available sources? To me, this is why media outlets filter their content, in order to protect their version of "truth". News outlets have always been biased, I don't see why YouTube or Twitter or FB cannot do the same thing.
2. Democracy will always be a thin line. There must be a point of "truth" of recording votes that the population is willing to accept. If the majority consistently challenges results or insists that the results are false, then democracy cannot exist, and another form of governmental control, possibly an evolution of authoritarianism or dictatorship, will take its place. Is that more acceptable than less-than-perfect democratic outcomes?
by ZeroGravitas on 3/5/22, 9:43 AM
This is a good thing.
Basically every media outlet mentioned here has a long history of publishing really big lies about important stuff they know to be false for monetary gain.
The Hill had to quietly oust one of their own top propagandists recently because of how badly his obvious lies about Ukraine helping to steal the US election from Trump went down with people familiar with objective reality.
Here's their own internal review:
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/483600-the-hills-review-of...
We're seeing on a big scale where this leads right now, and it is no coincidence that all these people seem big fans of Putin and dislike democracy.
And we've got all these people on HN carefully avoiding mentioning that they believe, or worse? support, these lies, and taking the pure and noble stance that we should never censor lies. Which would be a bad stance even if that itself wasn't just another obvious lie for political gain.
by j_walter on 3/5/22, 12:22 AM
by CamperBob2 on 3/5/22, 2:34 AM
When reached for comment, YouTube policy communications
manager Ivy Choi confirmed that the channel had been
suspended for posting content in violation of YouTube’s
policies. “We removed content from and issued a strike
to this channel for violating our election integrity
policy, and as a result, this channel is suspended from
publishing new videos or livestreams for seven days,”
Choi told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We do allow
for content with sufficient educational, documentary,
scientific or artistic context, which the removed content
did not contain.”
by bombcar on 3/5/22, 12:24 AM
by justnotworthit on 3/5/22, 3:35 AM
by morpheos137 on 3/5/22, 12:49 AM
by Khelavaster on 3/5/22, 8:04 AM
by russellbeattie on 3/5/22, 3:27 AM
If you're Republican, conservative or "libertarian" (riiiight), you need to be quiet and go sit in the corner while the rest of us decide what to do with you.
by selfhifive on 3/5/22, 4:39 AM
Removing the dislike count was YouTube's renunciation of democratic ideals.
Now it's a media outlet just like the others.
by FooBarBizBazz on 3/5/22, 2:32 PM
(This feels meta: HN links to a Tampa newspaper, which links to a Twitter thread, which embeds a clip from a video released by The Hill, which contains a clip from Fox News, where one half of the audio comes from a phone line to Donald Trump. Pointers to pointers to pointers. Oh, and now you get me, talking about it.)
The framing is interesting. (I have always found it hard to pin down The Hill.)
First, what Trump said: Mostly, he tried to take credit for cancelling Nord Stream 2. This is a little weird, because it didn't seem especially cancelled. Related to this, he told an unverifiable but plausible anecdote about giving Angela Merkel a white flag, to say that she was "surrendering" to Russia: I say "plausible" because he was pushing Germany (and Europe in general) to increase its defense spending (by threatening not to defend NATO, which you could say emboldened Putin, but you could say that about other things too, like Obama's "red line". "Mistakes were made."). And at the end of the Trump clip, a little unnecessarily, they leave in one sentence from him to the effect that "this would have never happened if I'd been re-elected", which of course he expresses in terms of a supposed "steal".
Could the Hill have cut the clip just before that last sentence? Yes. They would have lost none of their main message. They would have lost something to react parenthetically to, though.
Did they include that one sentence simply because it was adjacent and it gave them some shock value? Or was this their way of smuggling the message to their (not-so-Republican) audience? ("We are ostensibly laughing at Trump, but at least this gets you to listen to him"?) I don't know.
Their reaction is one of implicit mockery. They also imply that Trump typically would also insert some talking point about his supposed healthcare plan (which never happened). Which again they laugh at, because everybody knows there was nothing there.
They also refer to Trump's supposed "defense" of Putin: From context, it sounds like Trump said that Putin's use of the word "peacekeepers" was clever. But there is a weird moment where the host repeats the word "peacekeepers" several times, almost unnecessarily. A paranoiac could say he was trying to reinforce the message.
So what is The Hill's slant? With Rising they lean towards a kind of moderate populism that I have always associated with Russian propaganda. Though that has only ever half- made sense to me: Sure, Russia would want to get support away from the more interventionist centrists ("first choice Trump, second choice Bernie, last choice Hillary"), but you'd think they'd also want to push division, and The Hill's moderate populism is actually not so inflammatory (it does not shove wedges into cracks between identities, like, honestly, CNN/BBC/(CIA?) do. Or did until Biden got them to moderate themselves, a little?)
And The Hill has tended to give time to writers like Matt Taibbi who emphasize that they think "Russiagate" is fake. (Maybe they're right though?)
So then how do we put it all together?
Maybe I should just take The Hill at face value: They're trying to do an "inside baseball" thing, and this really is the compromise political position they've decided they believe in (presumably because it looks like a way forward that seems "good" to them while also protecting their interests).
Anyway, I guess the lesson for The Hill is that, if you're using sarcasm to deal with Trump's claims, you're being too subtle. And if I can write a post this long wondering what their angle is, then they're being too subtle.
Which might be necessary and true, but would still be a little sad: "We can't have interesting things because the other people are too stupid."
by coolso on 3/5/22, 12:33 AM
[0]: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/13/breitbart...
by jrobn on 3/5/22, 3:00 AM
We've only had nuclear weapons for 70 years. We used them to blow each other up on day 1. The odds are not in our favor that nuclear warfare will be contained.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 3/5/22, 2:06 AM
by epa on 3/5/22, 4:00 AM
by qndreoi on 3/5/22, 3:17 AM
by jmyeet on 3/5/22, 1:31 AM
I imagine many of these same people championed the rights of private businesses to decide who they did and didn't serve when it came to the infamous cakeshop [1] yet when Youtube or Twitter or Facebook makes exactly the same choice not to be a vehicle for disinformation, those same people lose their minds.
The point here is that the majority of people complaining about this aren't standing up for principle. They just want to get their way.
Live by the sword.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
by awb on 3/5/22, 12:48 AM
https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-electi...
> YouTube has taken the position that merely acknowledging an utterance of the false claim is the same thing as making the claim yourself unless you correct and disavow it elsewhere in the video. It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that a false election claim makes an appearance.
Not saying it’s a smart policy, but just to be clear, YouTube does allow you to play a video of Trump saying the election was rigged, provided you warn viewers about it.
by empressplay on 3/5/22, 12:15 AM
by FollowingTheDao on 3/5/22, 1:55 AM
This authoritarianism is powered by the people, not by direct Government action.
What should you be fighting for? Making these platforms public utilities so using them would confirm protection of the 1st amendment.
by JoshTko on 3/5/22, 4:48 AM