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The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

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Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#591

If you don't like YouTube's content policy then use something else; as many other people are now doing. Vimeo, DailyMotion, PeerTube, BitChute and so on and so forth. I'd hazard to say that this marketplace of providers and their variety of policies is quite American.

Because any of those are even close to competitors...there are 2 billion youtube users (80% of internet users).

Posting this reply here since the site says Im posting too fast at a lightspeed rate of 3 comments for the day:

I just dont agree with you that there is a "healthy marketplace" by all metrics youtube has a monopoly on video streaming. For instance Vimeo has 1.5 million subscribers...compared to 2000 million for youtube. Thats .075%.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes you should. Thank you. This is exactly the basis upon which we justify the proposal to force YouTube to host content that their shareholders would prefer not to host. Or the alternative formulation, this is the basis on which we justify prohibiting YouTube from censoring political speech that their shareholders disagree with.

> This is exactly the basis upon... That's not something legally recognized though. You can't say you base this on something when there is nothing equivalent. An education is one thing. It's something that's been recognized in court. Now, if you want to claim that public sites like YouTube should be forced to host content they don't want to from people they don't want to do business with, you'll have to explain how t…

> That's not something legally recognized though.

We're having a discussion about what the law should be, not what the law is.

> You can't say you base this on something when there is nothing equivalent.

The above discussion demonstrates that our society already limits property rights in the service of an informed populace, which is relevant to the issue at hand.

> An education is one thing. It's something that's been recognized in court.

Courts have recognized ballot fraud in the past as well, its not some outlandish theory. Its why people are supposed to maintain chain of custody of the ballots.

> you'll have to explain how that equates with your established rights in the US?

Corporations are chartered by the government in exchange for certain privileges and limitations. We already infringe on property rights because an informed population is a public good. QED there is a precedent for requiring a public corporation to host certain kinds of content. For example, foods are required to meet labeling requirements.

> More to the point: You'll have to explain why you want to take away my rights?

The right to remove content is potentially dangerous to democracy. See recent events, where a bunch of trump supporters are ever more convinced that an election was stolen because people keep claiming there was no evidence and YouTube has a policy where they state they won't allow anyone to post the evidence that the Biden camp says doesn't exist.

> my rights?

As a GOOG shareholder, you exchanged certain rights for other privileges when the government chartered your corporation and allowed it to traded on the public market while limiting your liability for criminal acts that might be performed by Google employees. In a sense you are taking the benefit of profit and legally protected from liability for the actions that might generate that profit. That arrangement comes at a cost of increased regulation by the government.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think this is new or something? The government has a documented history of retaliating against people regarding speech issues. There was a long period, know as "the red scare" in which this happened. There are many forms of "in between" retaliation, that is in between a democracy and an authoritarian government. And it is important to also protect people against these in between consequences, by allowing them…

The red scare didn't end with the advent anonymity, but rather it was ended by the checks and balances within the government belatedly stepping up to the plate. Joe McCarthy was censured by congress and fell out of political favour. Furthermore, the Supreme Court handed down a number of decisions that greatly reduced the scope of the government's ability to penalise supporters of communism such as: Yates v. United St…

More and more, I realize that I've been fed a warped view of the past. Here in the USA, history book authors and history instructors are almost exclusively on one side of the political spectrum. The people that they glorify and vilify are chosen with extreme partisan bias.

Joe McCarthy wasn't the terrible person he is made out to be. Information discovered later, long after his censure, proves that he was correct in many of the cases where he was thought wrong.

Today's lies and censorship will become the supposed "facts" that are taught to future generations. All sorts of falsehoods will be used to created graded test questions.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#594
If I were a foreign actor with malign intent towards the US, I would be very pleased with how things are playing out.

1. Corrosion of formerly stalwart American Institutions 2. The majority of Americans being habituated to mistrust their fellow American 3. The ability for a few entities with concentrated power to harness and control the nervous systems of millions of Americans

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because its dangerous to democracy to silence people who question the integrity of elections. It sends the impression that there is something to hide. And people who suspect that the election was stolen will take this as confirmation of that suspicion. Since they won't be allowed to use that platform to raise their suspicions, no one will be able to respond to them to allay their suspicions. Then as time goe…

>Probably because its dangerous to democracy to silence people YouTube is not silencing anyone. These people are free to espouse these views espouse these views anyway they please just not on YouTube's private property. The New York Times is not a danger to democracy because they refuse to publish my article on why the earth is flat.

> YouTube is not silencing anyone. These people are free to espouse these views espouse these views anyway they please just not on YouTube's private property.

Its dangerous to democracy for oligarchs to have this much control over the discourse.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#596
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lies are toxic to free speech IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant. You don't need to protect speech everyone finds unobjectionable. You need to protect speech that is almost universally opposed. Minorities need protection, majorities don't, and this the basis of the American notion of freedom - insofar as the individual is the smallest minority. > Do y…

> You don't need to protect speech everyone finds unobjectionable. I wasn't talking about objectionable opinions or perspectives. I was talking about lies and falsehoods , which are becoming alarmingly widespread. Even now those things don't full First Amendment protections, which is why there can be laws against fraud and defamation, and the Supreme Court has even said "false statements of fact" do not enjoy protect…

Do note that US v Alvarez did hold that false statements are not a sufficient basis to restrict speech--there needs to be something else to justify restriction of speech.

Or, a better quote from the syllabus:

> Although the Court has frequently said or implied that false factual statements enjoy little First Amendment protection, see, e.g., Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 340, those statements cannot be read to mean “no protection at all.”

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#597
post #2

If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves. Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm

He said that 1958, in an interview with Mike Wallace. Since then the gap between rich and poor (and between rich and mega-rich) kept exploding, media have been consolidated further, people have been uprooted even more, have been shit on and lied to even more, and have even less stakes in the outcome. Just doing more of the same will never lead to different results, yet by now many use current the state of things to argue for exactly that.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#599

I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know. Do you even know where that word came from? The irony is almost overwhelming. But I digress... The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work. A cursory reading of history should make this clear. You canno…

> The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work.

The goal is not to make it disappear, it's to make the knowledge have a social cost. Normal people won't touch it, and they provide the 80M votes you need to win control of the government.

It's a strategy that works exceedingly well.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#600
post #2

If you reject the idea that people are intelligent enough to think about politics for themselves then you reject the idea that they're intelligent enough to govern themselves. Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked.

People are rational most of the times, and act based on the well of knowledge they have at the time. When you choose to promote certain content because of its high engagement benefits you given its controversial nature, then you are poisoning the well of knowledge for each individual. If you do so in a feedback loop, considering what they were interested in before, you accelerate your earnings as well as the poisonin…

> Human brains are hackable, more so if you can control their inputs. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, they all found the attack vector.

(I hate this but...)

...and Hitler before them.

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