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

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

#971

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 1:29 AM UTC

endominus wrote: post #825

rbanffy wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, do you think it is only your outgroup (Fox News, Republican politicians, etc) that would use misinformation? Can you point to any evidence anyone on the Democratic side of the fence has questioned the legitimacy of the last election even though control of the Senate may still easily fall into the hands of the group that prevented legal court nominations by an elected president while, under the very same cond…

The evidence that you request does not match the quote you pulled out. And even if the Democrats did want to further solidify their victory, that would be an extraordinarily foolish way of doing it, as any doubt cast on the legitimacy of the election furthers Trump's agenda, not their own.

You can switch elections to 2016 though, where Obama and Hilary could have been suing to throw out Texas's votes because they didn't like the results

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

#972

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 1:44 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,…

You provide facts while you're applying for the court to take the case.

Not having standing means you haven't argued that there is a case, since you haven't been wronged. These are transparent already - there are documents where the crackpots have shown themselves to be crackpots already. Just because you don't want to read, doesn't mean it has to be presented on your format of choice

They could also take this case to Russian courts or Canadian ones, but what exactly are you expecting them to do? Courts have a limited scope of what they rule on

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

#973

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 1:46 AM UTC

forgingahead wrote: post #941

matt_kantor wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make it easy, here's a summary of the cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related... Be sure to click the links for each case to get details, and from there most of the references are the actual court documents.

Thanks for the link. This seems to prove the point though? The vast majority of official cases were dismissed on procedural issues (standing, filing in the "wrong" court, etc etc). You'll need to click through to each of the sources of why each case was dismissed, but the majority of linked cases seem like no decision was made on the facts presented, if they were allowed to be presented to begin with. So if a crime i…

Huh? You're innocent until you've been proven guilty. While the case is ongoing, you're still innocent. You aren't proven to be not guilty, sure, but you're still innocent

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

#974

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 1:50 AM UTC

smaryjerry wrote: post #964

dTal wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really good analogy. HN is fairly equivocal on the concept of walled gardens as a safety measure, despite the lack of accountability. There's some consensus that it's perfectly fine for e.g. Apple to prevent you from installing something outside the app store, or to put up major hurdles to installing anything unsigned on MacOS, because Grandma and Grandpa can't be trusted not to do something silly and get pwne…

At some point you have to trust adults and allow them to make mistakes. I get protecting children from bad information but adults should be trusted with their own lives. We should trust them to have a basic level of comprehension and logic by a certain age. If they don’t we need to revamp the education system, not cater to the lowest common denominator.

That's to say that adults don't need antivirus software, nor password requirements, etc.

By virtue of being adults, they must always be making the right decisions and thus can never be hacked

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

#975

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

Reelin wrote: post #704

twentydollars wrote: post #674

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…

This is refusing to republish someone else's speech though, rather than refusing to let them speak.

I can't force you to repeat the things I say, that's not what my freedom of speech is

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

#976

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #279

8note wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not democracy. Go is arguing that free speech is required for democracy, and that democracy is why we want free speech. The founders didn't like democracy all that much though

> and that democracy is why we want free speech We don't "want free speech," it exists and a government that represents free people will recognize that. The founders arrived at a consensus with representative democracy. They realized the dangers of democracy.

It's just a made up concept though. It would be physically impossible for YouTube to ban anything if it was a real thing.

That there's a conversation about YouTube censoring people says that it is perfectly possible for free speech to not exist. It's not a physical law of the universe

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

#977

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 1:59 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,…

[deleted]

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

#978

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 2:03 AM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #753

Daishiman wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but trust isn't a binary value. I trust people in my life to be reliable and trustworthy to a certain extent and in certain areas. I don't trust my party-animal buddies to be on time for breakfast a 8 AM, and I don't trust my stressed out workaholic friend to just chill on a Friday afternoon. You cannot simplify trust to a single variable; you have to go case by case. And trust in the masses is partial; fin…

But at the end of the day either you give everyone a vote or you don't. A system where the most trusted people had 10 votes and least trusted people had 0.1 vote might make sense in a society of nerds voting on a software project, but not in general political application.

Given that that's how the us elections work, it seems like plots of people have considered a good approach

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

#979

Post by 8note » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #255

deeviant wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked. Not really. UK has far more limits on speech than the US but is just as much of a Democracy as the US. "Free" speech has be weaponized in the internet age. It is a cancer that is actively destroying democracy.

They are a democracy in a sense that people are allowed to vote. But do people get access to all the information they need to meaningfully vote? And, frankly, stuff like ASBO makes it hard to take UK as a good example of a free society.

Meaningfully voting requires more than just access to information though.

More information with less analysis of it will make less meaningful votes

There was lots of information about Brexit for example but a good portion of it was made up

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

#980

Post by bccdee » Thu, Dec 24, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

scoopertrooper wrote: post #446

bccdee wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doxxing and harassment are already huge problems on the internet; a zero-anonymity policy would be terrible for marginalized groups because it would make spokespeople and activists extremely vulnerable. Imagine that whenever you said anything on the internet, every Trump supporter with a phonebook could find out where you lived. Then imagine you're (eg) trans. Beside, plenty of far-right reactionaries are entirely un…

To be clear, my comments were limited to mass-broadcast over social media. If people want to form small clubs within which to share lived experiences without fear of societal retribution, then I'm fine with that. > make spokespeople and activists extremely vulnerable As you've demonstrated, anonymity is an imperfect system of protecting such spokespeople, so they should have greater legal protections. Reducing the sp…

You're advocating to remove any ability to communicate anonymously online with the intent to shame reactionaries into not saying reactionary things. What you don't understand is that the reactionaries think they're right, and they're proud of their beliefs. They flaunt them; they print them on hats and wear them around. They have no shame.

Meanwhile, the people who are actually threatened by this are the people reactionaries are victimizing — closeted gay and trans people, for instance. They lose their ability to find supporting communities online because as soon as they engage with a forum like that, such as for instance a relevant subreddit, their participation is broadcasted to everyone they know in real life. It's easy to say "they should have greater legal protection," but they already have legal protection. It's already illegal to murder trans people for being trans, but trans people are nonetheless subject to a massive number of hate crimes. Isolating these people and making it impossible for them to reach out when they're in abusive home life situations is a terrible policy.

And this is just one example of a group for whom the loss of online anonymity would be hugely damaging. You've massively underestimated the harm which being de-anonymized online can cause (that's why "doxxing" someone, or releasing their personal details online, is such a serious threat to their safety).