Google, Facebook quietly move toward automatic blocking of “extremist” videos

I disagree. In the extremely unlikely event I have to disarm an IED I would like to be able to google this from my mobile. I also own a copy of the anarchist cookbook, and I have for about a decade (acquired around age 16). To date, I have not committed any acts of terrorism.

> This is what causes naive easily-influenced youth to radicalize. They do not even have to seek it out on the deep web, their social feeds are filled with such extremist content.

If being aware of (or actually downloading) torbrowser was the only impediment to terrorism with an IED I would be very uncomfortable. Luckily, I do not accept your appraisal of the situation.

> Driving them underground would make anyone seeking them out a solid suspect.

If we accept that interacting with terrorist online should make you a suspect, surely having them be easily accessibly would help lop off the low hanging fruit. I don't actually believe this would be a great course of action, but the logic of keeping terrorists (and potential terrorists) in plain sight is largely pretty sound. Also, how would we verify who was seeking out these terrorists if channels of communication are largely asynchronous and offline as well as executed with varying degrees of obfuscation?

> The bill of rights and American standards of free speech do not have to apply everywhere though.

Correct. I indicated they do not have to follow the bill of rights, it is a bill of rights garunteed to be provided by the U.S. Government to its citizenry. However, the point I was making is that many sovereign nations allow for free speech because it is fundamentally important. So important, it is at the cornerstone of the culture of a young and extremely prosperous nation: America.

edit: I respectfully disagree with almost every comment you have made. I don't want to levy an accusation that you are somehow complicit (or actively involved) in perpetuating myths about terrorism, free speech and the tornetwork but if you are not, I find your rhetoric painfully ignorant.

An organization doing what Google and Facebook are doing must therefore (a) clearly articulate the position on which their judgments are based (b) openly assert that their position is fundamentally superior and preferable to the moral order that accepts the practices that are being suppressed (c) provide a open and defensible argument for selecting one set of values while forcefully rejecting another and (d) be willing to modify this position in the event that fatal contradictions appear, or excessively negative consequences result.

In short, these platforms must not just govern, but do so from a well-considered and articulated philosophy of liberal governance.

Fortunately, they need not start from scratch. There is an abundance of data to support the idea that nations that have broadly inclusive economies with widely and equitably representative policy making bodies are the most prosperous, stable, and desirable places to live. (For details, see "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d...)

By adopting for themselves the governing principles that underpin the most successful societies, Internet platforms can become greater forces for good. At the same time this empirically grounded approach will better shield them from maliciously self-serving people who want to see political and economic power concentrated in the kinds of small and closed sets of hands (specifically, theirs).

As any number of examples from Egypt to Russia to Venezuela to Zimbabwe have shown, those who dominate closed economies and the political systems that reinforce each other invariably make life a living hell for everyone. To the extent that these systems are maintained by way of retrograde social norms, any platform committed to a more open, just society should have no qualms about disarming those who view civil society as anathema.

"Hate speech", "cyberbullying" are both ill defined terms that can apply to both every type of speech and no type of speech.

It's interesting how quickly you leap to suicide, explosives, and pedophilia as your examples. Those are all absolute worst case scenarios, and all these things are currently illegal.

Nip this in the bud? Is this minority report? Last I checked, you had to do something substantive to get penalties, not "Your thought patterns don't agree with public opinion, therefore private companies should as a public service suppress them."

If we had well defined guidelines, such as pedophilia defined as nude people under 18 years old, that would be one thing. Although ridiculous (see all the teenagers who are put on registries for sending naked pictures to each other), at least it can't be twisted to make something else illegal.

Go ahead, define "hate speech". And if the laws already ban hate speech, why wouldn't we just punish the people who violate laws instead of censoring them?

And since hate speech laws vary from society to society, do we have to create a separate site for each country, where the allowable videos shown differ, and the comments are pruned differently?