YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views

You can generalize to ethno-national supremacy. Which covers Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and US White Supremacists.

Who, me? Never.

>So you think the uninformed conversations occurring in a video entertainment cesspool are more impactful than the discourse between the engineers, founders and investors that actually built, maintain, understand and operate these platforms on a day to day? That's totally absurd. You're so hung up on popularity that you seem to have lost sight of relevance.

Each of those people engaging in uninformed conversations gets a vote that matters just as much as the vote of the people that built these platforms. I don't think many people are overwhelmingly concerned with making sure their message reaches the tiny number of people on this site.

>So in summary, if the site isn't a top 10 alexa ranking you regard it as politically unimportant.

I regard websites as being unimportant as far as this topic goes if they're not one of the most popular sites for people to participate in the public political debate. Banning an ideology from being espoused on HN isn't going to make people that subscribe to that ideology feel like they're being prevented from peacefully advocating for their interests. Banning that ideology from YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter might. Banning it from all three almost certainly will.

>No, I'm demonstrating that YouTube is primarily and overwhelmingly an entertainment platform

What I'm trying to tell you is that I don't disagree with that statement, but that it doesn't matter.

>and your attempts to suggest that it's so important to the fabric of political discourse that YouTube should not be allowed to ban people is not supported by the evidence of the activity on the platform.

I've explained what I mean by substantial/important, and why I think YouTube qualifies. You keep saying it doesn't qualify because there are other videos on there and/or because the quality of discussion is low, but that doesn't address my argument.

Setting aside the fact that this culling has nothing to do with Neo nazi content... maybe islamic extremism is a greater threat because we've had decades to implement countermeasures to a resurgence of white supremacy, whereas islamic terrorists exploit existing gaps in our society's trust model? I'm confident that had the KKK employed trucks of peace in the 50s, civil engineers wouldn't have assumed that nobody would be insane enough to drive down a pedestrian thoroughfare at full speed.

Now back to the issue at hand. This is a purge of alternative media at the behest of Vox Media, of which Comcast is the majority shareholder. This has been going on for well over a year now, the old media making demands for Youtube deplatformings and policy changes. I started listing them, but the list of crybullies is effectively a list of all media companies founded before Youtube. It is really amazing how stupid Google has been in all this, because it seems that they don't understand who their competitors are in the attention market, and how those competitors have effectively transformed them from a relatively low maintenance and legally protected platform - into a legally exposed publisher full of upset content providers. Youtube has been a loss leader for a long time, which might explain the leadership selection and the lack of corrective action for laughably stupid executive decisions... but it is well beyond the point of just being a money hole - it is in the precedent setting legal liability zone at this point. They aren't even subtle about being a publisher anymore, selectively editorializing user generated content with editor's notes under the guise of fighting disinformation.

Just the one right, actually: The right to decide how the property is used. That's both necessary and sufficient. There are no obligations beyond reciprocation, respecting that same right when it comes to others' property.

> Your nose is not your property by the way, because the rights you have towards your own body are very different (and a lot stronger) than the ones you have towards your property.

No, they're exactly the same. Your body is your property. The only difference is that you can't give up ownership of your body as a whole (it's inalienable), and that's simply because there is no practical way for you to relinquish control over your body to anyone else short of your death. Even if you agreed to it you would still remain in control, which would render any such agreement void. Certain individual parts, of course, are a different matter. In every other respect your body is just like any other kind of property.

> What they actually might do is be in conflict with the rights of the owner.

Any use of others' property against their wishes conflicts with the right(s) of the owner. This is a distinction without a difference.

>> There are no significant barriers to entry in starting a video streaming site.

> Of course there are and you even state one of them three sentences later.

DMCA complaints are a problem created by the government. If you want to do away with copyright, I have no objections. However, this is not a significant barrier to entry because it only starts to become a burden at scale. Small sites with user-submitted content regularly deal with such matters manually, while large ones have had time to implement the needed infrastructure for automating the process.

> ... starting such a site will not change anything about youtube's monopoly.

Because YouTube doesn't have a monopoly. What it has is popularity. Anyone can start up a site that does what YouTube does, but that won't automatically make it popular. The responsibility for that is 100% on the prospective competitor.

Popularity is fickle. Sites everyone turned to yesterday may be deserted wastelands tomorrow. (E.g.: MySpace) If your site is actually better at giving people what they want, it will win. Your problem is that YouTube actually is giving most people what they want. If you broke it up you'd end up with a bunch of YouTube-clones with basically the same policies, because they're trying to attract the same audience YouTube has now. You want to change what people want, which is naturally unpopular and likely doomed to fail.

In short, despite your complaints about "natural monopolies" and the difficulties of competing, you don't really want to compete with YouTube, just leverage its existing popularity to push your own agenda. The problem with this is that its popularity is a product of its audience-pleasing policies, not any sort of monopoly, natural or otherwise. If you did manage to force YouTube to follow your preferred policies it would become less and less popular until it was eventually be replaced by a competitor that looks more like the YouTube of today. So breaking it up wouldn't help you at all. Regulating it and actively preventing competition, or regulating all such sites the same way regardless of "monopoly" status, would better serve your purpose, but that's just exchanging one (non-)monopoly for a much larger monopoly, namely the government.

There is a very big difference between your rights ending or being in conflict.

> Popularity is fickle.

The only examples I know for this are myspace and digg. I don't think popularity is that fickle once you have the content.

> Because YouTube doesn't have a monopoly. [...] If your site is actually better at giving people what they want, it will win. Your problem is that YouTube actually is giving most people what they want.

So how exactly is youtube now not a monopoly and it is possible to successfully compete with it?

> You want to change what people want, which is naturally unpopular and likely doomed to fail.

I want none of these things, I was explaining how rights to free speech relate to someone else's property.

> In short, despite your complaints about "natural monopolies" and the difficulties of competing, you don't really want to compete with YouTube, just leverage its existing popularity to push your own agenda.

Where is this even coming from?

> The problem with this is that its popularity is a product of its audience-pleasing policies, not any sort of monopoly, natural or otherwise. If you did manage to force YouTube to follow your preferred policies it would become less and less popular until it was eventually be replaced by a competitor that looks more like the YouTube of today.

I highly question your theory that Youtube's popularity is a product of it allowing extremist content.

> but that's just exchanging one (non-)monopoly for a much larger monopoly, namely the government.

Now you're just trying to be clever with words, but I'll bite. As I wrote before

> Society has a vested interest in either regulating or breaking up monopolies.

The government is democratically elected by society and highly regulated.