The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire • Hacker News Board

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

#721

Post by DubiousPusher » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:05 AM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #648

andrei_says_ wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is not an argument for giving powerful weaponized mass disinformation tools to more people, including foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society to the point of inciting conflict and dismantling democracy. Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution. What are some better alternatives?

I’m not arguing for that, but it might actually be an indirect solution. By forcing everyone to deal with it, skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise. As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.

In the U.S. we did actually have this system prior to TV news and especially prior to radio.

Newspapers were the preferred news media then and they were numerous, sensationalist and partisan (literally often party owned). Misinformation was abundant and often inflammatory.

I'm not implying we should want to return to those times. (Personally I think this is largely about trade-offs.)Just that this is not the weird time. 1950-2000 was the weird time when there was a majority or at least a plurality consuming most their information from a very small and concentrated media sphere.

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

#722

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

forgingahead wrote: post #692

kenjackson wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very different situations though. Hillary conceded. And no one I personally knew really thought that Trump would not become president. Most people believed there was Russian interference, but most didn’t believe they were literally changing votes. The Senate agreed with that assessment. While I’m no fan of Trump and vote mostly Democratic I do think Trump won in 2016 and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. I have a much…

So why not then support the process of: 1. Signature matching on mailed ballots 2. Broadcasting the hearings in the accused states (MI, PA, GA, WI, AZ, etc) 3. Actually hearing the cases at both the state and federal level, and then throwing them out on the facts presented , instead of refusing to hear them on "lack of standing" to begin with? Win in the court of transparency. Make the crackpots look like crackpots,…

> Actually hearing the cases at both the state and federal level, and then throwing them out on the facts presented, instead of refusing to hear them on "lack of standing" to begin with?

Standing is a threshold issue without which there is no legally cognizable case to hear, but I suppose if you are backing a campaign against democracy being against the rule of law as well isn’t surprising.

It's not anyone’s fault but Trump's that the main party that actually has standing to bring a case challenging the results as improperly reached (the candidate who claims to be improperly defeated) keeps voluntarily dismissing the ones they initiate rather than trying to get them to trial, almost as if they are filing cases as a PR strategy with no intent to actually litigate them.

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

#723

Post by xg15 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #695

foepys wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise And you are willing to sacrifice democracy for just the chance of this happening?

This rhetoric makes no sense to me. People are already subject to incomprehensible levels of propaganda from every angle and have been for over a century. When and where was there a perfect democracy?

But you do acknowledge that certain changes in society have taken place during the last few years, do you?

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

#724

Post by DangitBobby » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

aww_dang wrote: post #690

ceilingcorner wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that the regular media is the default, the truth, and that propaganda didn’t exist prior to 2016. Read Manufacturing Consent for a brief overview of this history of widespread weaponization of information by innumerable actors. Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed. What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.

>Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed Agreed. The poster above invokes the special pleading fallacy. >What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility. There's a historical precedent for this in creation of moveable type printing presses.

You have invoked the fallacy fallacy. Unfortunately, special pleading is only a fallacy if something isn't actually different from the thing it's being compared to. So I disagree fundamentally that it's special pleading.

The hostility is not just from establishment, it's from normal people like me, GP, and millions of other Americans that feel like we're taking crazy pills because of all the stupid shit people now inexplicably believe due to weaponized misinformation at a scale never before seen.

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

#725

Post by greenflame7 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

hackyhacky wrote: post #607

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 banning disagreement. It's not even about opinions. It's about combating weaponized misinformation. It's strange for Americans to be on the business side of a propaganda weapon, as we're more used to using against our enemies. Technology has finally made it feasible for malicious actors to cheaply and effectively manipulate people with lies, here in the US. If you don't believe it's a weapon, you're wr…

What if you did all that and you were wrong? What if you accidentally censor something that was true cough Hunter Biden's Laptop cough

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

#726

Post by xg15 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

Reelin wrote: post #689

andrei_says_ wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is not an argument for giving powerful weaponized mass disinformation tools to more people, including foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society to the point of inciting conflict and dismantling democracy. Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution. What are some better alternatives?

> foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society > What are some better alternatives? I have no idea if it's mathematically possible but I'd be optimistic about the potential of a (hypothetical) privacy preserving web of trust metric. It would be really nice to have at least some limited indication of how the person behind the account fits into the world at large. Right now you can't reliab…

But web of trust is still something you have to know and consciously decide to use. What if a majority of people would simply ignore it because it conflicts with the opinion formed in their own bubble - or if they simply don't know about it or don't know how to use it?

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

#727

Post by xg15 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:16 AM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #648

andrei_says_ wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is not an argument for giving powerful weaponized mass disinformation tools to more people, including foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society to the point of inciting conflict and dismantling democracy. Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution. What are some better alternatives?

I’m not arguing for that, but it might actually be an indirect solution. By forcing everyone to deal with it, skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise. As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.

Sorry, you are in fact arguing for that.

But that won't work. It's well-known that misinformation propaganda works even if people know it's propaganda. People won't magically build up some kind of immunity and suddenly trust the scientific method - they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. If employed by a state, this is often the goal of that propaganda.

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

#728

Post by disgrunt » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:16 AM UTC

noetic_techy wrote: post #532

I actually agree somewhat and hear me out. I think these people don't realize the juggernaut they are creating. I'm a political centrist but even I see it. Suppression of the message will only amplify it. Prediction: Trump will run again in 2024, no doubt. Consider the implications of that for a second. He already said he will be holding a major 2024 rally in DC during the Biden inauguration. Imagine the shadow that…

Much like Andrew Jackson after the election of 1824. After losing, campaigned as a populist candidate accusing Jon Quincey Adams of stealing the election and won in landslides in the next two elections.

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

#729

Post by slaymaker1907 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

The main problem is that debunking conspiracy theories takes far more effort than spreading them. Not sure if YT has the right balance of rejecting things outright, but I do think there is a line. For example, most people wouldn't criticize YT for taking down holocaust denial theories so they should at least do that much.

However, they should probably avoid being the arbiter of truth except where truly necessary. I voted for Biden, but I'm not sure if we have hit the threshold quite yet where you should stop discourse on fraud. This should be done after the EC votes, but right now feels a little early.

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

#730

Post by Reelin » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:20 AM UTC

nucleardog wrote: post #670

forgingahead wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

This mirrors my experience perfectly. Conduct on HN is uncommonly civil (for the internet) across the board - props to Dang and whoever else moderates things. Insightful discussion, however, is almost entirely limited to the extremely technical submissions. From biochemistry to compilers to machine learning, they consistently attract participation at a truly impressive caliber.

Sometimes I wonder what HN would be like if it were somehow possible to preemptively block the majority of the "fluff" articles that make it to the front page. I guess there's no way to automate such a determination though, and even if there were any such action would probably anger the majority of the user base.