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YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

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Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#851

Post by TomSwirly »

fzeroracer wrote: post #682
pjc50 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly .. people will come out to defend "free speech". But somehow the cause in question is nearly always far right.

I did some very small experiments on such a thing a while ago. One was an example of someone being unjustly detained in violation of their rights [1] and another was an actual example of government censorship [2]. The first one was flagged and killed immediately, the second received zero response. On HN, all of the 'free speech' stories I see always pertain to the far-right and/or incredibly vitriolic individuals get…

Can you explain why either of these stories is at all relevant to this site?

I come here to get away from the shouty people. You seem upset people here won't let you get shouty. I disagree.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#852

Post by jMyles »

pnako wrote: post #782
jMyles wrote: post #113

There's a problem here that is too rarely discussed: When we do finally achieve substantial decentralized agency for ideas and media, which cannot be censored, it will be tainted in its roots by the fact that these jackasses are the people who will flock to it first. How can we build a censorship-resistant society where the most creative, peaceful, unifying ideas are the basis of our dialogue?

I have the same problem with my BBQ. I bought it to keep my food cold, but systematically it heats the food to the point where it becomes burned. Just in case my attempt at analogy is not clear: on a free speech network you'll get free speech.

Maybe the analogy is more like: if you bought a BBQ to cook food, but cooked plastic trash on it for the first 10 uses.

Will you ever be able to get the plastic taste and smell off of it?

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#853

Post by TomSwirly »

thu2111 wrote: post #847
cogman10 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important thing to distinguish is that they protect free speech, not free platforms. People are free to say racist things, produce racist games, setup racist podcasts. What they aren't entitled to is google showing their racist crap, steam carrying their racist games, hacker news keeping their racist comments uncensored. You are free to burn a flag, you can't force someone to watch you burn it. If someone feels h…

They aren't, actually. I guess "WhitePowerTube" would have been Stormfront? I never visited the site but I remember hearing about it when Google seized their domain name and wouldn't give it back. There's a nice fantasy about these parts that the deplatforming left somehow created all these platforms and will stop when people they disagree with go away. No. These platforms were mostly created by people committed to f…

> people committed to free speech

That's quite a euphemism for Stormfront!

> the deplatforming left

Maybe I have a different viewpoint because my grandfather spent some years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but I just see organizations like Stormfront as completely wrong and to be crushed by any legal means.

The endless association of free speech with white supremacy is tiring.

The First Amendment gives a corporation paying to print hateful lies made up on the spot a massive advantage over an honest and thoughtful individual who has spent considerable time and effort to discover the truth.

Now America is facing an epidemic but has a full-time virus misinformation news network. As a result, at least 80,000 Americans have died unnecessarily, and this number grows every day. https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/19/faster-response-prevente...

What will the final death toll be? How many would have been preventable if Americans hadn't been told a pack of lies?

The First Amendment needs to be completely overhauled to deal with this exploit that is destroying the system. Not to patch this terrible security breach "because the Founders" is like refusing to fix a zero-day exploit in Linux "because Linus".

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#854

Post by zapnuk »

DarthGhandi wrote: post #781
zapnuk wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flat earthers don't have the effect that their viewers go around shooting people. Far-right content creators on the other hand enable terrorists like the Christchurch perpetrator.

I've seen dozens of instances of serious racial violence by blm activists recorded in the last few weeks and cheered on by thousands of YouTube videos demanding even more, surely that counts as "enabling terrorists"? Hate crimes units across the country are investigating racially motivated attacks spurring entirely from blm. You won't see these people happily wanting a race war being banned though. https://m.youtube.…

The fact that you don't even reference a popular youtube content creators to support your stupid argument shows its value.

Also, both last links are from a cherry-picking entertainment and blog sites, not news sites that actually have editors and the desire to check sources.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#855

Post by zapnuk »

mantap wrote: post #766
zapnuk wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some content fosters the development of extremists/terrorists. This type of content does not use the platform in good faith. It's only objective is to trap listeners in a spiral of extremist content, basically brainwashing them. In some cases this even leads to violent acts. E.g. there have been multiple terrorist acts where it was determined that this extremist content played a crucial role in the enabling of the pe…

Without free speech, there would be no LGBT Pride in the first place. They were seen as extremists. Having free speech but only for people who say mainstream things is equivalent to saying "I like the world as it exists today". That is conservatism by definition.

Without discrimination there wouldn't need to be LGBT Pride to begin with.

White-nationalism was tried and didn't work to say the least. Content creators, like the ones banned, advocate for a world of 50-200 years ago. They are conservatives. Limiting their reach is anything BUT conservatism by definition.

Also, there are plenty of conservatives content creators who user lies and deception to spread their dated believes. The ban only targeted the worst of the worst, the ones that actually advocate for (white)ethnostates.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#856

Post by syshum »

stillbourne wrote: post #727
syshum wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not sure why people would down vote you Because the entire argument is a strawman that censorship advocates often use "bruh its a private platform they can do what they want" has the implication that people are calling for the government to step in to block YT actions No one has, people are critical of YT's policy, simply because they have a "right" to do it does not exclude them from public criticism Saying "bruh i…

I didn't say that private platforms can do what they want. I said private platforms have a right to moderation of content on their platform. Does that not count as freedom of expression? The ability remove content contrary to the intended audience seems like something anyone should be granted. If I host a website for children can anyone post smut? Well I just have to keep it because the poster has a right to post smu…

Again you are focused on the legal argument that no one is making

Yes they have the legal ability to moderate content under current law. However that does not mean they are beyond criticism, just because they can do something does not mean the SHOULD do something, and if they do everyone has the equal right to voice their displeasure with said action

>>Does that not count as freedom of expression?

No I do not believe that moderation is "speech" that is dangerously close to the "silence is racist" mantra we are hearing in the wider society. Silence / lack of moderation is not speech, nor is it "endorsement" or anything else

Simliarly defense of the concept of free expression is not an endorsement of the speech being defended. Society it seems have lost the axiom of "I disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it"

Today you and many others take the approach of "I disagree with what you say so I will pressure platforms to prevent you from saying it"

That is the danger in society, because before too long either you (and people that think like you) or the platforms will push for government limit speech.. As I said in another comment, the Law is simply a reflection of the society, it just takes the law awhile to catch up.

There are still enough of us that do respect free expression to hold off legal changes, but we diminish in numbers every year which to you I am sure is a good thing.

The problem is we are playing chess looking 5 moves ahead and seeing the logical conclusion, where cancel culture people (like yourself) are playing checkers and only looking 1 move ahead

I want to pressure the platforms to uphold free expression as an ideal. you want to destroy that.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#857

Post by Yizahi »

thu2111 wrote: post #846
fzeroracer wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some very small experiments on such a thing a while ago. One was an example of someone being unjustly detained in violation of their rights [1] and another was an actual example of government censorship [2]. The first one was flagged and killed immediately, the second received zero response. On HN, all of the 'free speech' stories I see always pertain to the far-right and/or incredibly vitriolic individuals get…

all of the 'free speech' stories I see always pertain to the far-right and/or incredibly vitriolic individuals getting removed from platforms That's because getting people shut down, cancelled, censored, is a left wing tactic, so of course it always seems to be the right getting censored. Free speech is a value the right hold and the left do not, systematically so throughout history.

That is incorrect. Censorship is on the orthogonal spectrum to to the right-left one. It is in liberal-authoritarian spectrum, where authoritarian end usually has state censorship and liberal end usually has freedom to individuals/corps to their own selective "censorship" (by definition censorship is only by state entities, so the term should be different). Both left and right can be liberal and authoritarian. And in the middle are centrists.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#858

Post by syshum »

stillbourne wrote: post #706
syshum wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure why you believe that case refutes my statements in any way. Clearly you did not read my statement at all. My entire post is about the different between Free Speech (a concept) and the 1st amendment (the law)

Sorry its taken me so long to reply because everyone has been downvoting me for having an opinion HN says I am posting too fast even after 2 hours of waiting... Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988) basically states the first amendment did not protect the students from printing articles in the school newspaper over the objections of the school administration. > Clearly you did not read my statem…

>>Sorry its taken me so long to reply because everyone has been downvoting me for having an opinion HN says I am posting too fast even after 2 hours of waiting...

Yes rating limiting here is annoying and counter productive. I have been rate limited many times.

However it is ironic that a person advocating for censorship is complaining about that. That is what you want right?

>You said you agreed with everything I said up to this point: The only thing that the first amendment provides you with is freedom from prosecution by the government for statements you make.

Ahh I see you misunderstood what I was disagreeing about. That was not to imply you were legally incorrect. No the disagreement was conflating the clear free expression issue and censorship issue with the US 1st Amendment

YT actions are censorship even if they are allowed by law. 1st amendment protect people in the US from censorship by government

Censorship supporters like yourself often point to the 1st amendment as the only protection for free expression. The US Constitution is solely about creating a government and then limiting that government, it holds no power or authority outside of the that context nor should it

This is why I disagree that the 1st amendment should even be mentioned in the context of private censorship. It is a red herring and a straw-man

People that advocate for upholding the ideals of free expression in private contexts normally do not use 1st amendment law as the foundation. Free Expression ideals predate this document and were added because the population at large demanded their right to speak

This is what I want to see a return of, the public demanding corporations uphold free expression as a virtue

Instead we see cancel culture mobs demanding platforms create a safe space where their opinions, statements, and belief are beyond criticism (provided you are in a member of a protected group) because any criticism must be on its face an ism or phobic

as Jonathan Haidt coined this is safetyism – the idea that people are weak and should be protected, rather than exposed, to challenges.

I am firm believer in confronting "bad speech" with "good speech" not simply exiling bad speech off the public square, or in this case large mainstream platforms.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#859

Post by patrickaljord »

pjc50 wrote: post #568
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, while a low point even for a high-functioning schizophrenic with a talk show, that is still small potatoes compared to the journalists who repeated the 'WMD's line. And no one is calling for them to be deplatformed.

Publishing official government statements is bad, including when there is no sane way to independently verify them, but slander you've just made up is fine?

They did a bit more than publishing official statements. They were very vocal about denouncing and shaming anyone doubting those statements including my whole country France was attacked, boycotted and more by these people.

Re: YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech

#860

Post by krageon »

rayiner wrote: post #626
skinkestek wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN: tptacek shared some interesting research he'd done a couple of hours ago and it might be of interest to everyone here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681929

Wait? We have a a “rep” on Twitter? HN is like one of the most civil places on the Internet insofar as ones where any debate of substance happens.

HN is pretty well known to be a cesspool of terrible far-right ideas. What's more, they're not mocked or booed off but enabled. You don't endear yourself to the general public by doing so.
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