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

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741–750 of 981 posts

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

#741
post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.” Literally nobody is suggesting this. It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.

> It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech. What a snappy cliche. If you prohibit certain people from using the printing press but allow others to do so, then in practice you are limiting their freedom to speak relative to other people. To imply otherwise is either disingenuous or profoundly misinformed.

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

#742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship by definition includes not only banning and deletion, but “suppression,” which fits denying monetization to particular content on a site otherwise designed for it. For example, it wouldn’t get around the first amendment for the government to say “we’re not banning this book, you just can’t charge money for it.” (I understand that Google as a private actor is permitted to engage in censorship while the gove…

Demonetization is not censorship, imho. They support YouTube through their advertisers, and their advertisers don't want to be affiliated with guns. It makes sense that they won't pay you for videos that they can't monetize -- they're just passing on the loss to the video producer. Beyond demonetization, YouTube did categorically ban videos demonstrating how to install and/or fabricate an autosear. In practice, this…

"their advertisers don't want to be affiliated with guns"

Which ones? All of them? Who asked them? What about gun companies, they do not want any ads?

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

#743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the harm model here? After the 2016 election, more than half of Democrats disagreed that the elections “were free and fair.” https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/e... > Of registered voters surveyed, 53% said the 2016 election between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton was free and fair and 33% said it was not.... 39% of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters said it was. Half of Democr…

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…

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

#744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship by definition includes not only banning and deletion, but “suppression,” which fits denying monetization to particular content on a site otherwise designed for it. For example, it wouldn’t get around the first amendment for the government to say “we’re not banning this book, you just can’t charge money for it.” (I understand that Google as a private actor is permitted to engage in censorship while the gove…

I think you should extend this thought a little bit further. If tech companies start deciding that certain gun content (to use the example in the parent) shouldn't be allowed, that will of course have an effect on the general population's opinion about guns and gun rights given their market control of online video. To me it's fairly obvious that this channel of media can be used to control what people think is "norma…

At the risk of Godwinizing the thread, one of the first oppressive operation against Jews in the Reich was a campaign "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" (Do not buy from Jews).

It did not carry weight of the law, you COULD still go to a Jewish shop and buy something, but the message was that the society disapproves, the state disapproves and you are a dirty being for doing so.

The result was severing of an important daily interaction between Jews and non-Jews. Once such casual contacts were severed, it was easier to convince the society that all Jews were evil, without the people having doubts like "but ironmonger Katz is such a nice person!" They did not know ironmonger Katz anymore, only a caricature of his people.

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

#745
post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and Georgia election workers counting suitcases full of illegal ballots have been debunked citation needed

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/dec/04/facebook-p... There you go.

Ya but that debunking has been debunked

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-cou...

Partisan source? Maybe. But unfortunately the fact checkers have lost all credibility over the last few months by debunking things like, in the context of this article, hunter's laptop.

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

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they had proof, they would've shown it in court, where there are real consequences, not on social media where anything goes. This is a great example of why censorship is such a disaster. The Texas case was dismissed today because Texas "has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections". So regardless of whether there was anything to complain about,…

I did know that, thank you for blindly assuming I didn't. First off, the reason why so many of these lawsuits are dismissed for procedural mistakes is because they are taken by awful lawyers, since real election lawyers don't want to touch these with a 10 foot pole. Secondly, again, while they claim fraud on social media and on TV, the lawyers actually don't claim fraud in court, as that's much harder to prove, and a…

> I did know that, thank you for blindly assuming I didn't.

It seems odd then that you're asking them to present evidence in court when that is what they've been trying to do and haven't been able to as yet.

> First off, the reason why so many of these lawsuits are dismissed for procedural mistakes is because they are taken by awful lawyers, since real election lawyers don't want to touch these with a 10 foot pole.

Their lawyers claim their families have been threatened. I would believe that it could be hard to retain effective counsel in that environment.

Mistakes are also somewhat more likely than usual given the time constraints.

> Secondly, again, while they claim fraud on social media and on TV, the lawyers actually don't claim fraud in court

They weren't claiming fraud in the Pennsylvania case, because they had such a strong argument that the state had violated their own constitution. They were claiming fraud in some of the other cases.

> as that's much harder to prove, and affidavits are just hearsay when it comes to proving fraud.

Hearsay means claiming you heard someone else say something. Affidavits can contain hearsay but that doesn't automatically mean that everything in an affidavit is hearsay.

Also, there are hearsay exceptions, like statements against the interest of the speaker. If someone is admitting to backdating ballots or telling others to do it, which I expect is illegal, it's not immediately obvious why that wouldn't qualify.

> You explained the two SC ones but still fail to explain how the other 50 or more failed, or why none of them have been able to present any real evidence. Why is it that they all have lack of standing?

Most of the others weren't actually filed by the campaign. Which is one reason they may lack standing.

> Because you can't overturn an entire election based on an affidavit of someone claiming they saw trucks full of ballots, with zero other evidence.

But that's the thing. If you believed them (it was more than one person claiming to see that), you could. Maybe you don't, without more, but that's why there should be a court case. Where you then do discovery and subpoena the others who were there to see what they have to say about it etc. They got shut down before they had a chance to do that.

> I'm honestly curious what YOU think the reason is. Is it just pure bad luck that all 50+ lawsuits just failed in the most miserable way? Is the court system broken?

My impression is that the courts don't want to be involved in the controversy and are willing to take any excuse to get the case out of their courtroom. Can you even imagine what would happen if they actually proved their case?

> In most of these cases, Trump's team is trying to use irregularity with a 1-2 ballots to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots, and that's just not how it works. That's why all those lawsuits are being dismissed without even being heard because even if they prove their point, they cannot overturn the election.

The argument there is that they have statistical evidence of fraud. Which is weak, because the election was so weird with coronavirus and mail-in ballots that you would practically expect statistical anomalies. But if the fraud the statistics say is there, is there, then you should be seeing duplicate ballots and the like. And so then they present evidence of duplicate ballots and the like, to bolster the case that the statistical evidence of fraud is actually fraud.

And there is also another issue with all of this. A lot of these cases are separately claiming that there were 10,000 ballots here, 4000 there, 6000 somewhere else. Well, they were dismissed, because none of those are enough to change the outcome... unless you add some of them together. Which is why it seems wrong to dismiss a case for not affecting enough ballots on its own, before you know the outcome for any of the others. But that seems to be what happened.

> If they have real solid evidence (and no, someone signing an affidavit is not it), then where is it? Why have we not seen any yet?

I don't know what they have. The media coverage of all of this has been nakedly partisan propaganda from both sides. I was kind of hoping they'd make it into court somewhere so I could actually see them present their case, and see the other side defend against it, instead of just having all these depositions and affidavits that only present one side of the story and which I don't actually have time to read because they're a zillion pages long.

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

#747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the difference between "forcing everyone to deal with it" and what we've been doing for the last four years? Or, alternatively, why do we think we'll get a different result by doing the same thing over again? I mean, it seems to me like we already have scepticism in spades. There's two sides, and if one of them said the sky was blue the other would be sure it were green. It looks to me like what is needed is…

One leaves control of speech up to the individual speaker while the other leaves it in the hands of an Oligarchy of people who think they are know better than everyone else because they have more money. There's a degree of arrogance behind the thinking, "I'm smart enough to discern fact from fiction but those less intelligent than I must need my help or else they might believe a falsehood"

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

#748
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as an American who didn't vote for Trump, either time, you've certainly alienated me. You'd (collectively) best hope you're making more friends than enemies. Hope's all any of us have at this point.

Eh when your consider things like this; https://www.fox7austin.com/news/texas-gop-chair-suggests-law... >Texas GOP chair says 'law-abiding states' should 'form a union' after SCOTUS rejects election suit I feel there may be a real point to that. Is he being a bit emotional with his post? Sure. Should that be enough to write off a possible threat to democracy? No. I mean if that alienates you, I expect what the TX GOP…

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

#749
post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes ... That is a complete non sequitur. You say it's not about freedom of speech. Someone responds that, in fact, blatant censorship is occurring. You don't even attempt to refute this point, instead falling back to pointing out that the censorship isn't illegal! Censorship reduces freedom to speak. That statement remains true whether or not the…

Removing spam could be considered a form of censorship. It is removing the speech of others.

Generally anti-spam measures facilitate rather than inhibit freedom of speech. A sufficiently popular internet forum without spam controls would quickly become mostly unusable.

In this case, doesn't censorship enable freedom to speak?

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

#750

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.

This is the kinds of "both-sides-ism" that gives centrists a bad reputation. You're basically saying: "everyone uses media to achieve their goals, therefore all sides are equally bad." No. Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society. Say what you will about the "establishment," but traditional media still bear some semblance of the truth. Now we're seeing t…

I don’t like the word bothsidesism because it implies that in reality only one side is the bad actor. That is a massive implication considering how casually it’s thrown around. Moreover, it’s used like an accusation. Accusing people of acknowledging that things probably aren’t black and white. Full on groupthink.
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