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Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

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Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#261

Post by chaosite »

raxxorrax wrote: post #235
chaosite wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The document is a showcase of trends, as well as pressures being applied to Google from various groups. Like it or not, Elsagate is a well-documented phenomenon, and this document is treating it like the problem that it is. This is not a generic "think of the children" reasoning to ban things that adults enjoy -- Elsagate videos are targeted at children, they exploit various mechanisms to make children watch them (so…

But the actions of tech giants talk a different language. Alex Jones, crazy as he may be and scamming people with his "man-pills", didn't address children. There were others that have been excluded that were less crazy, just pointing out a prominent example. In consequence I doubt the intentions are as clear cut and restricted to these cases. Children are easily distracted and are easy target for clickbait, that is t…

This presentation covered multiple topics.

Alex Jones was not banned for targeting children, and "Think of the Children"-style arguments were not used in his case.

We're talking about elsagate here, right? "Peppa the Pig" snuff videos? They're aimed at toddlers. They game the algorithm because toddlers select videos from YouTube's suggested videos basically at random, so all someone who wants to monetize a video has to do is make sure to hit as many categories as possible. And they make it snuff, because.. Well, I'm not sure why but they do.

This isn't about teenagers or even pre-teens going behind their parents backs, this is about toddlers vegging out in front of YouTube on a tablet. Basically this generation's TV babysitter.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#262

Post by mike_hearn »

mellow-lake-day wrote: post #44
evilturnip wrote: post #13

I'm actually glad to see the conclusion. Everybody wants to censor what they don't like. There are people who believe free speech is not the ultimate value, but rather to protect people from 'harm'. In this case 'harm' being ideas they don't agree with. The best stance is not to take a side, but to make sure both sides are civil in the expression of their beliefs.

I'm speaking for myself here but I think the Russian bots as well as astroturfing bots need to be censored. And not censored by government regulation but by the terms of service. There are many "active measure" Russian bots active on twitter. Twitter doesn't seem concerned at all mostly because those Russian bots are padding their numbers same goes for FB and reddit.

I've investigated claims of Russian-controlled political bots on Twitter several times. The stories always collapse when inspected carefully. Indeed it's common sense it would be this way because most of these stories appear to blithely assume Russia has built bots that can pass the Turing test, which is implausible.

I don't believe there is any need to censor such "bots" because they don't exist. Instead they're the creation of:

• Bad, agenda driven journalism.

• Bad, agenda driven academics who are looking for topics to write papers about that might have social impact.

• A desire to de-humanise and silence people with conservative opinions.

Clear examples of these three are described in my essay here:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

The third is also quite clearly seen in the recorded conversations with Twitter employees, one of whom said:

https://twitter.com/project_veritas/status/99675939690561945...

"Just go to a random [Trump] tweet, and just look at the followers. They'll all be like, guns, God, 'Merica, like, and with the American flags... like who says that? Who talks like that? It's for sure a bot."

Obviously this Twitter engineer knows full well they aren't bots. What he means is, we ban accounts we think are bots without worrying about it, so if I can create a confusion between "bots" and "conservative Trump supporters" then maybe they'll get kicked off Twitter more easily.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#263

Post by finnthehuman »

etchalon wrote: post #133

I can understand why Google, as an engine, should err towards neutrality of information, without arbitrating even hideous content. But I've never really understand why social networks can't, or shouldn't, say "This is the type of community we are, and what content we find acceptable."

>or shouldn't, say "This is the type of community we are,

Well, for starters, they're not communities. And people shouldn't lie.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#264

Post by tomhoward »

tomp wrote: post #257
zmix wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it feels bad, to get physically hurt. To imply, the only damage, that can exist, would be of material nature (here: the meat of your body) gives me the shivers.

Yeah I agree. But the crucial difference is, physical/meat damage is objective, whereas emotional pain is only subjective (you can't prove it to anyone else, and you can also make it up). Basing policy on subjective whims is bad.

The "reasonable person" is a well-established principle in law, used to test whether someone's subjective claims of harm should be considered valid from an objective viewpoint.

Few would question that a "reasonable person" whose child was killed in a mass murder would be harmed by harassment, abuse, and claims the event didn't happen.

I'm not normally any kind of bleeding heart, but stuff like this isn't difficult.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#265

Post by zmix »

raxxorrax wrote: post #211
toomanybeersies wrote: post #67

Slide 66 is particularly interesting, and articulates an observation that I've made: > Tech firms are performing a balancing act between two incompatible positions > 100% commit to the American tradition that prioritises free speech for democracy, not civility > 100% commit to the European tradition that favors dignity over liberty, and civility over freedom It is a very American view that unrestricted freedom of spe…

As a European I have to admit that the American model is vastly superior. Europe had laws to protect "civilty" even before the great wars. American democracy is also more successful in general. Europe just had the "luck" that censorship didn't become very necessary. In some places it was used extensively and those places are no more today. And lastly, stripping someones voice implicates directly stripping someones di…

I disagree. If with "American" you mean the US, then their democratic system is very weak. It constantly gets bought out by lobbyists (but then, maybe it's just more obvious, more visible than here in EU), they only have two parties, who, judging with a European eye, the spectrum of politics is very narrow. There is much less open discussion, the political shows are more often depending on the personality of the showmaster, rather than the educated opinion of the part-takers. I am not saying, that doesn't exist, but the tendency to make everything into a product is much higher. And thus much corrupter.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#266

Post by belltaco »

tomp wrote: post #228
sagichmal wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has said anything about hurt feelings. They are speaking about the families of children killed at Sandy Hook, and the maleficent antagonists who harass them with lies.

So what’s the harm to the families, except bad feelings? Was anyone actually (physically) hurt?

Is being physically hurt the bar now? How about living in fear and the extreme inconvenience with moving to different residences out of fear?

Also, for example:

>In December 2016, Lucy Richards, a 57-year-old woman from Tampa, was charged with four counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce for sending death threats to Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was the youngest of 20 children murdered

Imagine losing your child and then having to put up with people like that who are fueled by someone trying to get rich off low information people. We as a society can and should do better.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#267

Post by hef19898 »

odessacubbage wrote: post #247
hef19898 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow European I have to disagree. Hiostorically speaking, pernal freedoms have been alot higher in Europe than the US (since the time something like personal freedom became athing), slavery was abolished by Great Britain and France way before the War of Independance for example. Also, where exactly is the US democracy more successfull overall? We do have free election in Europe, don't we? And we don't have suc…

go try to listen to a death in june album or play manhunt or voice any opinion the state considers dangerous and tell me how free you are.

Just listening to Death in June on Google Play Music, thanks for the music tip, it's always nice to listen to non-mainstream stuff, radio in Germany can otherwise become a little bit repetetive.

Not that a game like Manhunt is actually my taste, Borderlands is more my cup of cake, but since I checked I have question: Is it true that, despite being available in the US, it is really hard to actually get? With Wal-Mart not wanting to sell it for a time and Sony as well as Nintendo having had an issue with the un-cut version of it?

Please excuse me that I don't try to voice state-threatening opinions which aren't mine just for fun. But maybe you have experience with that?

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#268

Post by repolfx »

enraged_camel wrote: post #209
evilturnip wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of conspiracies floating around. Should we consider them all harmful and ban them? Who decides when a conspiracy becomes harmful? Should we ban flat-earthers from posting their views? After all, if everyone believed it, we would set science back countless centuries. The way to combat false ideas is with truth; a culture that is always searching for the truth. That can only be facilitated by unhind…

>>The way to combat false ideas is with truth This is extremely naive. As the saying goes, a lie can go around the world before the truth can finish putting on its shoes. edit: maybe rather than downvoting (which is a type of censorship) y’all should provide a response.

I don't think citing a random saying is a great way to rebut an argument, let alone support a claim of naivety.

Here's another saying for you: you can fool some people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. In other words, eventually the truth wins out.

I guess our sayings cancel out.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#269

Post by bzbarsky »

Kaveren wrote: post #98
bzbarsky wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's freedom not to use Google services. Using Google services is now required by many public schools in the US. That's where all the homework is posted, for example. Now in the US there's freedom to not attend public school, of course, so technically you have the right to not use Google services. But in practice the vast majority of people would not be able to exercise that right in this case. Similarly, a numb…

I'd find a private school / homeschool argument disingenuous, so I'm with you that far. Google Classroom is a fair point (schools also use Google Docs and the like as well), but I don't believe it holds water. Governments would be well within their rights not to award contracts to, or use the services of, companies they felt were not respecting the values of free speech. The difference between this and active regulat…

For what it's worth, I don't understand why you're being downvoted... :( I just upvoted you.

I agree that the optimal solution would be for local governments to not rely on Google like this. What's not clear to me is what the best course of action is in the world in which they _are_.

I think having "no propaganda aimed at elementary school students" regulation may be the only way to solve the coordination problem here, but of course that has the obvious flaw of it being hard to agree on a definition of "propaganda"...

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#270

Post by AnthonyMouse »

joshuamorton wrote: post #204
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is liars being about to lie worth a body count? The body count of truth tellers not being able to tell the truth is dramatically higher. Imagine the result if Richard Nixon had put climate scientists in the same box as you would put anti-vaxxers.

I don't really buy "unrestricted free speech is worth letting people die over". Sure, censorship can be harmful, but if the best argument your can put forward is a slippery slope, thats not particularly compelling. Hypothetical harms are generally less harmful than real ones.

> I don't really buy "unrestricted free speech is worth letting people die over".

I don't really buy "restricted speech is worth letting people die over".

> Sure, censorship can be harmful, but if the best argument your can put forward is a slippery slope, thats not particularly compelling.

What slippery slope? Censoring climate scientists is the first thing politicians in the pocket of oil companies would do with censorship powers.

> Hypothetical harms are generally less harmful than real ones.

The actual harms of censorship are widespread and well-documented. If you want to go straight for the serious examples, look at The Great Leap Forward, Stalin's purges or the holocaust. In each case there were not only direct large scale executions of political dissenters, the censorship allowed other atrocities to be kept quiet. Much of the scale and inhumanity of the holocaust wasn't discovered until the end of the war as a result of Nazi censorship, and keeping it quiet allowed it to continue for longer with less opposition both domestically and internationally. For example, the US could have entered the war earlier.

But it also goes all the way down to pedestrian squabbles where people disagree over matters of life and death at smaller scale (e.g. the safety of a building or a bridge). Censoring true facts has literally been fatal countless times.

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