741–750 of 933 posts
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People responding to someone with "that's racist" isn't censorship. It's others exercising their free speech to strongly disagree with the points raised.
The end effect is the same, shutting down the conversation.
The YouTube suggestion algorithm is the problem! Create a new account, watch any political video, and then click through the suggestions. Keep clicking through the suggestions and in hour you will be on some extremist nonsense. YouTube is the source of this problem, and their solution is censorship? It's ridiculous. Show people the videos they have subscribed or searched for, and that's it. The majority of people don…
Could that simply be the inevitable effect of Youtube being filled with garbage? It seems that suggestions linked to the current video by some keyword match (or whatever) but otherwise random would have this problem.
E.g. if you pick a good political YT video on some topic, and then randomly select half a dozen other YT videos on the same topic, they are probably garbage.
So while the selection process isn't blameless (it could be improved to promote quality videos) much of the fault lies with the quality of the available material.
How would the selection process promote quality? How does the machine know that? You can't tell from the likes and dislikes; such populist metrics would promote garbage all the same. It seems that it would require a large team of workers to curate videos.
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> Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. The almost free speech on the other side of the ocean seems to be working pretty well. You get to say anything that isn’t actively harmful to others, but you won’t be able to advertise bleach as a way to get Corona out of your system.
Sure, arresting people for quoting Churchill seems like a potential definition of "working". [1] There's no way that arresting people for a twitter post [2] could be abused. Nobody needs free speech for reposting rap lyrics. [3] The road to hell is paved with good intentions. [1] https://thenewamerican.com/hate-speech-u-k-political-leader-... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-face... [3] htt…
"It has been wrongly suggested that Mr Weston was arrested for reciting passages written by Winston Churchill. I understand he was not welcome outside the Winchester Guildhall, the Police were called and he was asked to move on. I also understand that he was not prepared to move on and was arrested for this reason."
The YouTube suggestion algorithm is the problem! Create a new account, watch any political video, and then click through the suggestions. Keep clicking through the suggestions and in hour you will be on some extremist nonsense. YouTube is the source of this problem, and their solution is censorship? It's ridiculous. Show people the videos they have subscribed or searched for, and that's it. The majority of people don…
> Show people the videos they have subscribed or searched for, and that's it. I dunno, there's value in suggesting related content. If I subscribe to a woodworking channel, and Youtube suggests other woodworking content... that doesn't seem like a problem.
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How do we know it's harmless for youth and young adults? You know what you've seen. Again, this is a novel virus. It's new. It could be setting up shop in your brain, heart, kidney, liver, semen -- wherever. It could be invisibly weakening your lungs just enough that a flu can come through and kill you. I would suggest a deep dive on mercury poisoning, radiation poisoning, lead poisoning, asbestos, and whatever other…
Well we won’t know what it’s long term effects are for the next 70 years... hell we’re even now figuring out that Herpes virus might have something to do with dementia... And say we get a vaccine next year. Don’t you worry that if we relax lockdowns, we’re just gonna trigger the next devastating virus? Let’s face it, life is a risk, and we accept a certain amount of elevated risk in exchange for comfort/utility (e.g.…
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No, the problem is that extremist content is a nonsense concept. Specifically, there's no reliable way of determining whether content is "extremist content" because a lot of information that the political and religious extremes focus on is actually true information. It often these extreme views that provide unique insights and the most valuable information. So how - and moreover why - should Youtube try to sift throu…
> There's often no way of knowing whether the lecture is being given by a college physics professor or a 9/11 truther, except by examining the contents Exactly this. Your points about extremist content stand as well. We've countless examples of NGOs that fight extremism, that get their content taken down due to algorithmic monitoring. AI aren't capable of this sort of nuanced decision making and there is no evidence…
A free flow of information is a net good. Restricting information is a net bad. Western society learned this 400 years ago.
These are the same arguments which were used against the printing press, now being used against the internet, fighting against a new enlightenment the same way that the church fought to maintain their monopoly on knowledge.
All combating "extremism" does is protect entrenched stakeholders from the truth.
I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…
The argument you're making is common and always boils down to this belief: "most people are too stupid to discern the truth" History shows this to belief to be incorrect, and instead shows that any central power holding this belief will eventually commit terrible crimes against humanity. A small group of "intelligent" people can not possibly out-compute billions of humans' brain processing power.
I think a lot of people are too overwhelmed by the minutia of navigating their own stressful lives to handle a deluge of lies designed by expert propagandists to be easier and more appealing for them to consume than the truth.
The difference is that these aren't leaflets being dropped from the sky on a village of a few hundred people. These lies that span our entire country and they are coming from people that have access to analytical data which allows them to observe how their lie is being received so that they can refine their messaging immediately.
There has never been a propaganda delivery system like this before. History isn't going to be useful here.
The YouTube suggestion algorithm is the problem! Create a new account, watch any political video, and then click through the suggestions. Keep clicking through the suggestions and in hour you will be on some extremist nonsense. YouTube is the source of this problem, and their solution is censorship? It's ridiculous. Show people the videos they have subscribed or searched for, and that's it. The majority of people don…
You don't even have to watch a political video. I have crap popping up all the time, "Watch this professor get destroyed by !" I know youtube is a shithole and yet it still surprises me. My son's favorite kid's show is only on YouTube so I created a new account, subscribed just to their channel and still inappropriate content shows up. How hard is this? I also can't block it for my daughter because she has school ass…
I've been using `youtube-dl` successfully for lecture videos on my TV appliance (supposedly to watch while using the stationary bike). An example command line is in a script that grabs the videos from a conference: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/download-racketcon-2019-v...
I suppose one could automate the process, with a simple UI to approve or submit a URL for viewing, and then automatically youtube-dl it and make it available to the kids' devices.
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Youtube hasn't come preinstalled on iOS for like 8 years (removed in iOS 6).. so I really have no idea what you're getting at.
Fair enough, according to my Apple ID history I did in fact install it a couple years ago. But the point still stands - the app wasn't used, not connected to any account, yet one day it still pushed extremist content to my home screen.
Sorry, I'm not trying to nitpick. But it seems like all you've said so far is "An app which I downloaded and enabled push notifications for sent me a push notification recommending a video I didn't agree with politically". The term "extremist content" can mean basically anything depending on who is speaking.