471–480 of 923 posts
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Who said that? The range of bullshit information you can find at a moment's whim remains extremely high, in fact higher than it ever has been in history.
so what?
Case in point: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/pizzagate-comet-ping-p...
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> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them. Ok, except that you 1) just made this up from whole cloth and 2) have missed the point of deplatforming entirely. Deplatforming trashbags reduces their reach. It doesn't need to change their minds. The trashbag is one person. The gullible are many. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba.…
If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source. And Vice ain't it.
Vice in this article links to evidential sources while summarizing the findings. You should bother reading it and what it links to.
ALSO, and this is a bug fucking also, that's not how the burden of evidence for claims works! You just argued against falsifiability! OP is responsible for providing evidence for their own made up claim!
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> booting people off platforms is a "bad idea" which you wish to "suppress". Not censoring an idea and arguing that an idea should not be implemented are not equivalent. > booting people off platforms shines a light on their "bad ideas" If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibility of b…
> Not censoring an idea and arguing that an idea should not be implemented are not equivalent. I'm not sure this is correct, but I'm willing to be convinced if you can expand a little more. I guess I see it as censoring the act of censoring. > If this is true, i.e. reporting of the censorship increases the visibility of the bad idea, then it completely destroys the pro-censorship argument that it reduces the visibili…
Censorship applies to information. Restricting information can't be justified because it's by definition impossible for the public to evaluate whether what's being censored is appropriate when it gets taken down and they can't see it. "Censoring the act of censoring" doesn't have any such problem -- if YouTube was prohibited from censoring videos, they can do it even when everybody has full knowledge that they're operating under that constraint.
They could even run a banner at the top of videos they don't like that says "YouTube things this is wrong" and link to their own video explaining how, and that wouldn't be censorship. But you don't need to take down somebody else's videos to do that. It's in fact better if you don't, because then more of the people who come to see the video you think is wrong will see the message explaining why you think it's wrong, instead of going somewhere else where there is only the alleged misinformation.
> But youtube censorship is not equivalent to societal censorship, it just signals that youtube does not endorse Icke's ideas and does not wish to publish them, but people can still evaluate them somewhere else.
That would be fine so long as the somewhere else is equally prominent, but YouTube is too big for there to be any such place. If you're a monopoly/oligopoly then you ought to be a common carrier. If they really wanted out of that they could always break themselves up.
> No, the suggestion is they should not be allowed to write their own terms and enforce them.
Enforcing terms as a monopoly is effectively legislating, so they should follow the same rules as the government.
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…
> Hacker News Guidelines > What to Submit > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. > In Comments > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion…
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The WHO seems to have been embarrassingly wrong or overconfident on many accounts: 1. Global air travel does not need to be stopped. 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. 3. There is still a "window of opportunity". 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!). 5. The CFR is like 4%.
> 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point m…
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…
We tend to think of humans as very rational beings, that they should have the ability to make the best decisions for themselves, and that we should not take actions to influence those decisions. Unfortunately, this is not always true, which is why deplatforming works.
Deplatfoming is controversial because it is a "negative action", that involves censorship, but we tend to ignore "positive actions" that can change toughts in exactly the same way, like recommendation algorithms, or simply default choices (because default matters and humans rarely deviate from default choices).
The existence of something like The illusory truth effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect) says a lot about human beliefs and how familiarity can overpower rationality.
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> Hacker News Guidelines > What to Submit > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. > In Comments > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion…
YouTube isn't a 'community' any more than the roads we all travel on. There is no viable alternative to YouTube/Google. There is no way to escape its influence. And being banned from it can ruin you (depending on how your life/work is structured). HN is totally different because of the completely different scale and the existence of viable alternatives.
There is an interesting "monopoly" factor here, but YouTube is also not negatively impacting other groups or organizations from trying to start their own video platforms tailored to general content. In fact, it seems there have been various organizations chipping away at YouTube (e.g. Twitch, TikTok) of people who would normally be watching YouTube have other platforms to visit, watch and host content. Nothing is preventing those platforms from also further expanding into areas where YouTube is traditionally the leader.
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…
> Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them. Ok, except that you 1) just made this up from whole cloth and 2) have missed the point of deplatforming entirely. Deplatforming trashbags reduces their reach. It doesn't need to change their minds. The trashbag is one person. The gullible are many. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba.…
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…
> Hacker News Guidelines > What to Submit > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. > In Comments > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion…
Focus: if a community has a stated purpose, then it's okay to censor things that don't contribute to the purpose. If I ran a forum dedicated to ham radio, then it's okay to censor topics about NASCAR. Usually forums have a miscellaneous section for off-topic discussion rather than prohibiting it outright.
Ubiquity: if a community is small enough or in a limited setting, it is okay to censor things. It is accepted practice in many households to censor profanity. That's okay, because each family's censorship only applies to a few people. It is okay for a school to censor certain disruptive things (some people may disagree on what is okay to censor), because it's limited. Once a kid goes home they can read a banned book if they choose to.
Unfortunately for YouTube, I think they fail on both the focus and ubiquity tests. YouTube's purpose (from a layman's perspective) is to share videos. If someone uploads a video then they are staying within YouTube's focus, and YouTube has been pretty free with allowing any video as long as it isn't illegal. So they shouldn't be censoring crackpot videos, because they aren't illegal and seem to stay within YouTube's norms. [Some economically minded people might argue that YouTube's true purpose is to sell ads and should censor videos that cause fewer ads to be shown, but YouTube's previous behavior is that they demonetize/pull the ads from controversial videos, not deleting accounts]. And YouTube has clearly crossed the ubiquity threshold, with zillions of views all over the world.
I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the minority.
To get back to your actual point- HN's guidelines are technically censorship, but they are good censorship. It's designed to keep a community focused and to foster good discussion. The best part is that HN's guidelines are easy to understand and seem to be applied consistently. It would be great if YouTube adopted easy to follow policies and would terminate accounts based on clear breaches of policy, rather than just playing whack-a-mole with whatever topic is hot at the moment. There are tons of other videos spreading misinformation on YouTube about other public health topics (the anti-vax movement being a big one), why is David Icke's account being deleted and not theirs? There are tons of other conspiracy theorists on YouTube, why are Alex Jones and David Icke the only ones to get their accounts deleted?