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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

#731
post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For traditional publishing there is at least one person that is ultimately responsible for publishing it. The person is in the vast majority of cases subject to the same jurisdiction. On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I can push my agenda worldwide. Russia, China, Iran, and other non-democracies can make insane amounts of propaganda for very cheap to reach millions of people. The engagement algorithms even help t…

seems youtube is blocked in china and iran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube

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

#733
post #653

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 Maybe it didn't work in the old days. But now maybe the CEO of Cloudflare will wake up one morning, decide he doesn't like your politics and block your DNS. Now you might wake up one morning and find that Mailchimp have terminated your account because they don't like your politics (Molyneux). Now yo…

You have an incredibly well put message here, but then you went and tacked on those last two paragraphs that border on uncivil, are polarizing, and (IMO) fail to add anything meaningful.

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

#734

It is amazing to me that there are so many people, smart people even, that are adamant that we shouldn't have free speech in society.

Why does YouTube not also get a shot at free speech? You have a right to free speech until it infringes on someone else. The real problem is that people falsely think YouTube is the only way to publish a video on the Internet...

yeah but i wonder... the main argument here is that youtube is private and it can do whatever it wants.

but if it's true for youtube, why it cannot be true for an hosting company or a service provider? can't they just shut down my server or my ip? they are private after all...

is there a legally safe to speak freely on the internet? or our freedom of speech is limited only to photocopies?

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

#735
post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work Maybe it didn't work in the old days. But now maybe the CEO of Cloudflare will wake up one morning, decide he doesn't like your politics and block your DNS. Now you might wake up one morning and find that Mailchimp have terminated your account because they don't like your politics (Molyneux). Now yo…

>Because, you know, they're "private companies" or something. Wait so are you for them being able to do whatever they want, where you can be banned from their service? Or do you want them under the arm of the government where they could be regulated? I think you're just mad at the culture. Trump isn't gonna fix that

I want them to, of their own volition, uphold the principles that a liberal democracy is meant to hold dear.

No one has a monopoly on the truth.

Things like this have really happened: https://twitter.com/JeremyVineOn5/status/1239512626134224896

And you've all just memory-holed it.

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

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overa…

I don't disagree, but the difference with drugs is that people specifically seek them out and there is a lot of effort and involved to make it happen through the whole supply chain. The problems with social media are largely around removing all friction from the process, and adding a huge dose of virality and highly specific targeting. The former means people get a vast amount of information with minimal effort, and…

Some people actively seek drugs out.

Some other people actively seek out suppressed information, even in face of higher barriers. Otherwise, we would still live in an ossified world of aristocracy and Church; the secular and republican ideas were once banned and persecuted by the powers-that-were. But they failed, all over Europe.

You are right that bans increase the friction of the process, but they also act as evolutionary pressure. After some time, the best dissenters will get really good at conveying information against all odds. A good example is Iran, where pretty much everyone can find out what is going on despite all the efforts of the Islamic Republic to crack down on unauthorized news.

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

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, at this very moment, Facebook and Twitter prevent you from sending certain links via private message.

They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes which would be legally protected speech.

[deleted]

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

#738
post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work Maybe it didn't work in the old days. But now maybe the CEO of Cloudflare will wake up one morning, decide he doesn't like your politics and block your DNS. Now you might wake up one morning and find that Mailchimp have terminated your account because they don't like your politics (Molyneux). Now yo…

>Because, you know, they're "private companies" or something. Wait so are you for them being able to do whatever they want, where you can be banned from their service? Or do you want them under the arm of the government where they could be regulated? I think you're just mad at the culture. Trump isn't gonna fix that

Those aren't mutually exclusive. The government can simultaneously regulate specific behaviors of large entities where there is reason for concern while otherwise largely leaving them to do whatever they want.

I don't think GP is necessarily suggesting that Trump will address their objections or that they personally support him. Rather, I read it as suggesting that much of his support may in fact be due to backlash against such cultural trends on the left.

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

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cannot turn the entire world into West Coast USA by banning everyone that disagrees with you. You’ll only create further echo chambers, both on your own platform and on the (new) platforms inevitably created by the exiled. And in the process…

The half of the country that voted for Trump is already alienated. They're fully prepared to destroy every American institution, simply because Trump them that they should. As we've already seen countless times, there is no amount of rational discussion or documented evidence that will persuade them otherwise. The question is, do the rest of us have to go along with it, or are allowed to fight back?

Is being alienated the same as being dead, e.g. a final, irreversible state?

I would say no. There is always a lot of fence sitters. Say "fuck you" to their faces and you lose any chance of winning them back.

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

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, YouTube censored guns?

A couple months ago I watched a video of Wranglestar where he spoke about his "ammo dispersion units" in an attempt for his video not to be demonetized / banned.

This reminds me of Polish dystopian sci-fi, where people spoke a language incomprehensible to automated systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang

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