YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#721

Post by pknight » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:44 AM UTC

italicbold wrote: post #697

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since YouTube is a general platform and that no serious alternatives exist, we should advocate for less censorship. Disagree. Online misinformation can kill people [0] and act as a recruitment tool for Nazis [1]. Less seriously, it can result in people burning down 5G towers. There's plenty to lose by YouTube hosting this stuff, and they're under no obligation to do so in the name of free speech. It strikes me as o…

And then you wake up one day to Brexit and Trump being elected. Forcing content/ideas underground doesnt stop it spreading, you just become totally unaware of the spread, its not even talked about in social settings. But still it silently spreads. Do you want a situation when it becomes vacine time, half your country revolts? Do you just not care about these people? If thats the case why bother supressing it at all.…

Forcing content out off mainstream media quite plainly does limit the spread of information and does limit radicalisation, we have plenty of examples of that. Conartists rack up millions of views because they can use free infrastructure of companies (companies that in turn convert human attention into profit via advertising, the sale of user data etc.). Without access to the infrastructure they can't have their business flourish as it does.

The link with Brexit and T you make doesn't make sense either, both of these phenomenon got plenty public exposure, with all information available to those who wanted to find it. The central theme tieing both those developments was the ability for people to use the architecture built by digital corporations to quickly spread misinformation unopposed. People receive the information in isolation, they don't get it side-by-side with other views. People engineering the spread of misinformation know it's not a fair contest, that's why it is so effective.

And that's the point being missed by people who say keep the content up and let bad ideas be exposed by better arguments, the problem is that the ideas aren't being opposed or presented in a robust way. Hosts like Brian Rose and others for instance interview in a way that don't challenge their controversial guests, instead they add credibility to their guests. And because we are thinking of these characters as individuals expressing themselves and exchanging their personal views, people are distracted from the fact that they are businesses operating a money making scheme. And they are only able to do that on this scale because they can use other corporate infrastructure for free.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#722

Post by ryankrage77 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:44 AM UTC

I see a lot of comments suggesting YouTube is a large & monopolistic enough platform that they have to be held to a different standard than a private company, more like a public utility.

YouTube is a private company, and they're hosting exabytes of video content for free. You don't need to pay (with money) to upload terabytes of video and have it streamed to millions of people. Just 20 years ago that would have been unimaginable. Even today I think it's taken for granted a little too much.

If YouTube did what we want, I reckon they'd be out of business pretty fast as they get overrun with the kind of content they currently don't allow.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#723

Post by gerland » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

The reason why we cannot get the right balance between freedom of speech and the right to silence the "abusers" is that by trying to do that we are uncovering an inconvenient truth.

It would not be a problem to let the conspiracy theory people or ultra-left, ultra-right people speak freely if an average person would have healthy mechanism to counter the disinformation. Unfortunately those mechanisms were dismantled by the classical media in an conscious effort in the last 7+ decades.

Face it - the average person is taught how he should think not by the educational system, but by the media. Our current predicament is only due to information centers hoarding power that they should never get. Not saying that the educational system is great, I think it's even worse to some degree, but we have given up the control for convenience.

Instead of creating a basis from science, we created a system in which the buzzwords spat out from "journalists" mouths are underlying the whole social discourse.

We cannot get the balance in the "new media" right, because now everybody is granted the power that no one should have in the first place. We are trying to optimize the wrong parameters.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#724

Post by mirimir » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:52 AM UTC

me_again wrote: post #491

mirimir wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather I am saying - and this was my fault for not being clear enough - that I reject the notion that we should try to pick a side to suppress. Because the same part of human nature that leads to rampant spread of disinformation is the part of human nature that tries to decide what the capital-T Truth is. Yes, we really can't have it both ways. Either we have free speech for everyone, or we have censorship. There a…

Isn't spreading dangerously false information about a viral pandemic similar to shouting "fire" in a theatre? I'm not sure it's always so easy to distinguish that actively dangerous conduct from fake news. Not that this difficulty means we shouldn't try.

OK, so I admit that Icke's thing about 5G and COVID-19 is batshit insane. I truly can't imagine how someone could argue that in good faith. He must be trolling, doing it for the lulz.

But still, that's arguably distinguishable from creating a panic by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater that's undoubtedly not burning. In that crowded theater, it's the stampede that gets people killed in the moment. I do see the analogy to Internet meme explosions. But connections between actions and consequences are weaker and slower enough.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#725

Post by PureParadigm » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:53 AM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #719

italicbold wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well thats my point, they werent forced underground. It was clear for anyone who looked to see what was going to happen. My point is there was an oportunity to engage and faciliate real conversations around these things. That oportunity was squandered with these two instances, because despite them not being outright supressed it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being l…

> Well thats my point, they werent forced underground. My mistake, I misfollowed your logic. > it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist Well, that's because Trump is an outspoken racist, the GOP is also pretty racist (but better at keeping it quiet), and Brexit was largely predicated on racism.

Sure, you may think all these people are racist. Does calling them racist change anyone's mind? No, it just makes them and their supporters mad at you and just poisons the well.

Instead, debate the policies. Explain why they're wrong in a reasonable conversation. You'll actually have a shot at changing people's minds this way.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#726

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:56 AM UTC

ryankrage77 wrote: post #722

I see a lot of comments suggesting YouTube is a large & monopolistic enough platform that they have to be held to a different standard than a private company, more like a public utility. YouTube is a private company, and they're hosting exabytes of video content for free. You don't need to pay (with money) to upload terabytes of video and have it streamed to millions of people. Just 20 years ago that would have been…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#727

Post by DaedalusPsyk_ » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:00 AM UTC

giantDinosaur wrote: post #131

stolen_biscuit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's been pretty conclusively shown that removing extremist content from mainstream channels pretty much prevents the ideas from propagating in the mainstream. If the cockroaches want to crawl under the fridge there's not much you can do to stop them but you can stop them from breeding on the table.

What if that 'extremist content' is pro-LGBT content somewhere else? What if it's criticism of religion? There's no consensus that those aren't equivalent to extremist content around the world, so such censorship does just as good a job at stopping what we once, in the West, considered abhorrent and obscene, as whatever we consider abhorrent today. I don't get how you can consistently square that circle.

What is the point of arguing that? In places that do designate pro-LGBT content as extremist such as Russia, they already perform censorship.

Yet in places such as UK which does have censorship and hate speech laws, they don't.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#728

Post by someguyorother » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:01 AM UTC

pas wrote: post #657

colordrops wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is who censorship "works" for . In most cases it works for despotic dictatorships.

They too switched to misinformation, direct control of media, supression of independent media, etc. This kind of transparent content removal is not what dictatorships do.

It depends on how much control they have. You'll find no pro-free-market content on Kwangmyong.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#729

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:05 AM UTC

ryankemper wrote: post #46

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…

> I believe in shining a light on [bad ideas]

You can bring megawatt lasers to bear on a bad idea from all angles and fools will not budge. Many people are not rational, it's impossible that you've not realised that yet you push this POV.

Saying we can deal with idiot ideas with rationality is itself disinformation because for some groups it clearly doesn't work.

> ...whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won't address that argument here

Odd that you won't, because this is the exact forum to address that argument. Please address it.

Someone I know has repeatedly told me that "they[0] added HIV to covid to make it so dangerous" and telling them for the Nth time there's no evidence of that has not changed anything, nor will it ever I suspect.

[0] Unstated who 'they' are but implication is the chinese.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#730

Post by italicbold » Mon, May 04, 2020, 10:08 AM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #719

italicbold wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well thats my point, they werent forced underground. It was clear for anyone who looked to see what was going to happen. My point is there was an oportunity to engage and faciliate real conversations around these things. That oportunity was squandered with these two instances, because despite them not being outright supressed it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being l…

> Well thats my point, they werent forced underground. My mistake, I misfollowed your logic. > it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist Well, that's because Trump is an outspoken racist, the GOP is also pretty racist (but better at keeping it quiet), and Brexit was largely predicated on racism.

Do you really believe there are 15,188,406 racists in the UK and 62,984,828 racists in the USA?

If you truly believe that then I feel sorry for you, because you live in a really sad world. Is that really the experience you have living in or visiting these countries or travelling around them, that 1 in 2 people you meet are racist?

I think its a bit lazy and easy to substitue fringe views from within these two camps as the views of the majority.

If you agree that they are not the views of the majority of peoplpe who voted in these directions then clearly there are other areas that made them vote this way that could have been discussed and had there minds changed over but werent, because well racist. Everyone loves to complain that trump supporters and brexiters suffer from a lack of critical thinking, and especially conspiracy theorists, but come on. How lazy is it to say all these people are/were racists or that is why brexit/trump won.