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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

#661

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #495

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…

I think the idea is making things harder to access.

The failed idea behind making drugs illegal is that they'd be harder to access and less people would do them. There's evidence this didn't work.

I think the idea here is the same - if the big platforms ban certain types of egregious and harmful misinformation (that gets recommended to people susceptible to conspiracies) - these companies are hoping less people overall will watch this content, and probably more importantly, if anything bad comes of this, they won't have their brands tarnished because of it.

Will it work? Who knows. They're companies. Why can't they do what they please as long as it's within the law? Does the law require YouTube to keep up all content? YouTube has a Terms of Service and has censored lots of content for a long time. Why is there such a big distinction between beheadings, child porn, anti-vax, hate speech, and election misinformation? These companies already have a history of censoring "political" content for foreign countries.

What is new here?

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

#663

Post by oh_sigh »

Talanes wrote: post #336
oh_sigh wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A vast majority of the people who are too stupid to realize these questionable youtube videos are hoaxes(and therefore need to be protected from them) went to public school.

A vast majority of the people who immediately recognize these YouTube videos are fake also went to public school. Something like ninety percent of America goes to public school, you can cite them as a vast majority for almost any American activity and probably be right.

Sounds like we don't need youtube to protect us then.

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

#664

Post by jmnicolas »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #258
travisoneill1 wrote: post #193

Thank god for all of the people at Youtube working on censoring misinformation. They are so much smarter than me and obviously better than me at figuring out what is true and what isn't! And isn't it great that they always act selflessly in favor of the truth and never in the narrow interest of Google? I don't know what I would do if I didn't have them there to protect me from the dangerous misinformation. I am so he…

I'll take the bait in the spirit of casual friday night internet debating and recognizing your tone as purely sarcastic. I would ask then... What if, there was in fact an organization comprised of people smarter than you and obviously better than you at figuring out what is true or not - and I would go further - one that can tell you how to make better/more optimal decisions than you would have made without them? Wou…

> What if, there was in fact an organization comprised of people smarter than you and obviously better than you at figuring out what is true or not - and I would go further - one that can tell you how to make better/more optimal decisions than you would have made without them?

No, because our interests would probably not converge on many things.

The kind of orgs you describe already exist, but they're not benevolent, they don't act for the good of humanity.

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

#665

Post by lifeformed »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #495

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…

It's not about making information disappear, it's about recognizing that humans are very susceptible to mass manipulation (see cults, mass hysteria), and it is becoming an increasingly powerful strategy and weapon in our age of rapidly growing new communications technologies. How to combat this is debatable for sure - I don't think this Youtube stuff is the most effective solution - but I don't think we can just apply old principles to new problems without first acknowledging the real challenges it's meant to address.

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

#666

Post by twentydollars »

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #163
ardy42 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is literally the foundation of American govt structure namely the respect for unalienable rights of individuals to express themselves. > It’s the first line in our enumerated rights. > This isn’t “oh we should rethink things” this is a matter of natural rights and precedes anything we’ve constructed. I never said anyone shouldn't have the right to express themselves. Do you think it's in the Constitution that…

> 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…

> IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant.

Defending speech I find repugnant is not the same thing as defending a nonexistent right to post lies on Youtube.

Host the lies on your own website. Create flyers and pass them out. Talk to people in public settings. Write to the newspaper (they might not post your lies, but you're free to try to get them). Hold conferences. Do whatever you want. As long as the lies don't violate a few well-established exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

But the right to have your lies hosted for free (and given a valuable, far-reaching audience) on a private platform, no matter the consequences to others or to the platform itself? It doesn't exist.

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

#667

Post by Frondo »

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #579
UncleMeat wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant. I am extremely confident that I can find examples of speech you wouldn't defend. How do you feel about false advertisement? Sharing of confidential military secrets?

I’m arguing about free expression and unpopular speech, not illegal speech.

Well, then, let's make lies illegal, if that's where you're drawing the line.

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

#668

Post by int_19h »

titanomachy wrote: post #454
int_19h wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when all megaphones are either government- or large-corporation-owned, and whenever you try to speak on your own, the nearest megaphone just yells over whatever you have to say?

Was that ever not the case? Was there a time when any person with any message could reach the whole country with their message? The scarce resource here isn't freedom of speech, it's people's attention . As always, you can say whatever you want, and as always, it's hard to get people to listen to you. Before the internet, you basically needed an already-famous person to take an interest in you in order to get noticed…

It's a matter of relative power to spread the message, not absolute. So it's not a question of whether any single random person could reach the whole country, but rather how many people can that single random person reach, and how much can those who control the means of mass distribution of information can use that to reduce the reach of a single person.

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

#669

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #495

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…

>I find it really disconcerting how many people on Hacker News want a corporate entity to decide what information is deemed acceptable to know.

You're saying the label on a forum for the shitshow that is corporate VC & the race for billions is incorrect? That it doesn't embody an authentic hacker spirit? Surely you jest?

Anyway, know your audience. There's no shortage of corporate bootlickers who love their billionaire overlords and the antics their privacy/competition/small business/ethics/human rights crushing companies get up to posting on here all day every day. Some even feign giving a fuck about these things but unsurprisingly not enough to actually do something about it.

Then you've the statists who, well, love the state although it often has the caveat of which side of the coin is currently pretending to run the place.

Then you've got the union of the two who often rear their head and they're... well... fucked, but what are you going to do?

Anyway, as I've said on here before as someone without skin in the game and who is at a safe distance, what seems like the final season of the hit reality TV show "USA" is most certainly an exciting one to be watching.

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

#670

Post by nucleardog »

forgingahead wrote: post #626
ceilingcorner wrote: post #495

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…

It's similar to any other corporate/institutionalised group - imagine the " Anarchists", or " Communists", or so on. "Hacker" News, run by one of the most institutionalized Venture Capital companies out there, is simply marketing at this point. Luckily, the quality of discussion for tech matters, and the players in the industry that participate, still make this place one of the best ones on the internet for technical…

Yeah, it's kind of weird. The technical (and many other discussions) are often quite insightful here. It's always fascinating to get into some obscure topic and have a world-renowned subject-matter-expert suddenly drop in to give their two cents or clarify what they meant in some quoted piece.

I'm quickly learning to just steer clear of the political discussions though. They're usually a very jarring reminder that intelligence in one or several areas does not preclude intellectual dishonesty and intentional ignorance in another.

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