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

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

#841

Post by TMWNN » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #785

inglor_cz wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

This is not the same thing. The campaign you refer to was created to harm a large group. Demonetization targets only the content makers but not their audience.

What, do content makers make videos purely for themselves? That's the whole point of monetization.

As rayiner said, the government can't get around the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech by only allowing the seller of a work to do so for free. Demonetization of certain topics on a blanket basis means that content creators have less incentive to make videos that they would have made otherwise, harming their potential audience.

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

#842

Post by tptacek » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #652

ceilingcorner wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demonetized.

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…

When's the last time you saw a commercial for a handgun on TV?

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

#843

Post by kill-procrustes » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #833

kill-procrustes wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure being critical of efforts to censor information is part of the hacker ethos ("information should be free"). I think this is actually why the Twitter approach ("some or all of this tweet is disputed") is a good way to go. You're providing more information—links to people who disagree—rather than hiding information.

Misinformation is more akin to me saying that I want gcc to ship my malware. No one is saying you can’t ship malware, but gcc doesn’t have to be your vehicle.

This is a classic problem of "who decides?" Unlike malware, lots of things initially written off as misinformation turn out to be true. I'm not going to argue that YouTube doesn't have a legal right to do what they're doing, but assuming that they're specially knowledgeable about truth and falsity strikes me as an incredible act of hubris.

All of that said, I recognize that disinformation and misinformation is a serious and tricky problem. I think the American right partially has themselves to blame for throwing so much mud at the wall. I understand YouTube not wanting to be hijacked and used as a political vehicle. But at the end of the day they function as a commons, and I think society is worse off when they censor content like this.

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

#844

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #834

UncleMeat wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet you oppose certain kinds of speech outright by virtue of the fact that the population has decided via democratic legislation that they should be crimes, presumably because of the harm that they cause. I don't believe that the intention of the framers was that free speech was a good in-and-of itself but that making it difficult (but not impossible) to restrict speech has positive outcomes. At the very least, that…

The whole “unalienable rights” of individuals suggests that this isn’t a democratic notion, it’s a moral philosophy and conviction.

Yet false advertisement is illegal and you even support its status as illegal speech.

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

#845

Post by lliamander » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:04 PM 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…

> If you don't believe it's a weapon, you're wrong. If you don't believe weaponized misinformation is dangerous, look at the regimes it's toppled. And if you think the "American spirit," or somesuch nonsense, makes us immune, I hope we won't have to find out.

I don't see anyone here arguing those points, so I think this is a bit of a strawman.

> It's not about banning disagreement. It's not even about opinions. It's about combating weaponized misinformation.

The argument, as I see it, is that "weaponized misinformation" and "disagreement" are not cleanly separable categories, and than anyone with the power to ban the former will almost certainly use it to ban the latter.

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

#846

Post by aeternum » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

Reelin wrote: post #761

aeternum wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These aren't singular global quantities. Such censorship reduces spammers' freedom to speak in order to preserve that of the other participants. Spamming closely resembles a tragedy of the commons (overuse of the system to solicit sales) and anti-spam an associated regulatory action. The problem with such an analogy is that spam is inherently off topic - approximately none of the other participants actually want to s…

We should be careful not to conflate wanting to see something with clicks. By that metric, spam about free bitcoins has more interested participants than much of the political speech in question.

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

#847

Post by lliamander » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

kill-procrustes wrote: post #808

kenjackson wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Hacker Ethos is to build your own media platform and stop whining about someone else’s (unless net neutrality is at play).

I'm pretty sure being critical of efforts to censor information is part of the hacker ethos ("information should be free"). I think this is actually why the Twitter approach ("some or all of this tweet is disputed") is a good way to go. You're providing more information—links to people who disagree—rather than hiding information.

The idea of what Twitter is doing isn't necessarily bad, but its application has been terrible.

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

#848

Post by MrMan » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #143

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you are being downvoted. People may not agree with the sentiment, but it seems salient and reasonably stated.

Because people who aren’t radicals have been called radicals, and there’s no way that anyone trusts anyone else to decide who is a radical.

It is true, what used to be radical is now becoming normal. Propganda works.

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

#849

Post by beaner » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #798

beaner wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Weaponized mininformation." The same people claiming this now are the same ones who promoted Russigate for 2+ years. It had absolutely no basis in reality and resulted in no evidence of collusion - at all. But the whole time we were bombarded with claims of it by the media. It wasn't just fringe youtubers or twitter commenters, it was the actual mainstream media. Where was this attitude of yours when that was going…

So Trump’s campaign manager shuffling internal campaign polling data to a Russian Intel Officer (the Senate Intel Committee’s characterization, not mine), while Russian Intelligence is busy waging a directed psyops campaign against the American public, and then lying about it to the FBI is not evidence of collusion? Trump’s close associate Roger Stone had advanced knowledge of hacked DNC materials from Wikileaks and…

To the extent that you think those things constitute evidence (and some of them are clearly wrong/lacking context/misinformation), you should also believe that these things constitute evidence of voter fraud:

- Jurisdictions with more votes than voters

- Dead people voting

- Individual alive people who claim to not have voted, being counted in the voter roll

- Literal videos of ballot counters marking ballots

- Thousands of "mail-in" ballots that have literally one mark, only for president, all in sequence of each other, without even being creased

- Thousands of claims of harassment and blocking of poll watchers

- Thousands of votes being flipped by the polling machines, all in the direction of Trump -> Biden

- Statistical analysis of the unlikeliness of the authenticity of the ballots in the contended jurisdictions, all of which stopped counting in the dead of the night, when they subsequently received mass piles of fresh ballots that leaned unrealistically heavily in one direction

- Non-enforcement of the only way to sort-of authenticate ballots: signature matching

- Not necessarily "evidence," but the unlikeliness of republicans winning literally every single hotly-contended house seat, yet losing support for the president

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

#850

Post by AntiImperialist » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

No, it is very likely that it won't backfire.

If you look throughout history, for every anti-establishment movement that succeeds, they're are many many more that are curbed in various stages.

History has selection bias which may suggest that anti-establishment movements do well. It has happened a lot of times, but if you look at the probability of an individual movement, it is very low.

My prediction is that this will only make the establishment much stronger and they'll be able to curb even more dissidents way before they become a thing.