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Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

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Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#71

Post by akomtu »

zugi wrote: post #9

It absolutely can be, and it's absolutely something to watch out for, but I'm not sure that it is government censorship in this case. YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement. That said, a few years ago one of things that kicked off the change from being relatively hands-off to more active content censorship by all of these platforms was being…

All those twitter-like companies have surprisingly uniform list of banned topics and list of topics that get promoted to the front page. If censorship wasn't a thing, there would be a variety of opinion, i.e. things you could say on Twitter but not on Facebook and vice versa.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#72

Post by agency »

naniwaduni wrote: post #69
shkkmo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-destructing messages only really work if you trust every person who reads them AND their devices. They can somewhat limit exposure (especially in obscurity) but also introduce the risk of establishing unwarranted perceptions of security.

People were always able to reproduce things you said—by repeating the words. They can even claim you said something you didn't say!

That is true but I think it can be misleading to apply this kind of logic when technology has fundamentally changed the economics of this kind of recording. For example, it’s always been perfectly legal to station a police officer next to the road and have them write down the license plate numbers of cars on public roads. Does this mean we should allow law enforcement the unregulated ability to deploy automated license plate reader systems everywhere to track all of our movements in real time?

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#73

Post by api »

uniqueid wrote: post #60
api wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I picture a future with hordes of millions of gullible fools who can be commanded like armies by social media demagogues. I watched a stream of a London anti-lockdown protest the other day, and that's more or less what occurred to me. https://youtu.be/hy7bmdDGKZ8 The stream is six hours long, but it's packed with moments such as: 35m — Crowd listens to some conspiracy theorist blame all the world's ills on 'Kabalah'…

It’s depressing as hell. My political DNA is libertarian but I am starting to wonder if there isn’t a subset of humanity that simply can’t handle this level of unfiltered access to information.

Even worse I am having a tough time putting my finger on what the shortcoming of these people is.

It’s not IQ as I’ve seen and met quite a few gullible sheep of this sort who would undoubtedly score high. I don’t see a strong correlation either way with intelligence.

It doesn’t even seem to be one’s metaphysics or epistemology. I know devoutly religious people as well as mystics and occultist types who are nonetheless not gullible in the way that this crowd is gullible, and I have seen atheists and people with scientific backgrounds who are.

Race, nationality, even educational attainment doesn’t seem to map.

All that is a bit anecdotal. Maybe there are patterns if you look at enough data. But from what I can see there is just this subset of humanity who easily falls for bullshit when it’s framed in the right way.

Anyone can be conned of course, but I mean people who seem to just fill up a syringe with this kind of kool aid and bang it into a vein.

A friend of mine thinks it’s a desperate desire to be special that’s rooted in some kind of narcissism.

Another less generous opinion I heard on a podcast is that these people know exactly what is being dog whistled in this stuff and they are closet genocidal racists hoping for their revolution.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#74

Post by api »

inglor_cz wrote: post #54
api wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Who is the modern Copernicus?" History being what it is, we may know around the year 2300. Let us hope the longevity science is onto something ...

I would put my money on the game theorists and complexity scientists, maybe even Stephen Wolfram. None of these have been deplatformed.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#75

Post by maverick-iceman »

akomtu wrote: post #70
maverick-iceman wrote: post #47

Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously. Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territo…

It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world: disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while even massive support is quiet. One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.

That's the best idea I read on how to solve this problem, which sadly means it won't be implemented.... :P

For the record I did upvote you!

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#76

Post by akomtu »

klyrs wrote: post #10
leereeves wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article suggests that government employees may be consulting with YouTube in these censorship decisions. And that consultation would seem to be prohibited by the first amendment, just as police aren't allowed to consult with PIs to violate people's rights, even if the PIs volunteer to do so. (In other words, it's the gov employees, not YouTube, who would be violating people's rights by doing this.)

Is YouTube doing that voluntarily, or is that consultation required by law?

It's the 3rd option: YT follows off-the-record recommendations to avoid potential problems with authorities. There are written, but unofficial, per-country rules and there's a well defined process to squash dissent: ML models analyze videos and comments to find non-complaint users, numerous contractors look at the automated flags and write their summaries, corp employees, up to VP level, review the reports and cancel the non-complaint users.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#77

Post by wonnage »

It's not state censorship. There is no law driving these takedowns. It's the problem you get when one company has monopolized video.

But serving videos for free isn't financially sustainable without advertising and network effects. So you're stuck with YouTube or some regional equivalent whether you like it or not.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#78

Post by kyrra »

Covzire wrote: post #11

Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well for people who will be oppressed during bad times. The first amendment made it clear that not even the government had the authority to use their vast moral authority,…

A possibile solution is changes to section 230. I saw a good approach last year that you can read about here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-...

The key bit was a recommendation from the Trump DOJ, which said:

> The Justice Department, which last month announced recommended amendments to the statute, has suggested that Congress replace “otherwise objectionable” with “unlawful” and “promotes terrorism.”

Which is in detail here: https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-rev...

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#79

Post by dang »

chroem- wrote: post #23
dang wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't repeat ideological boilerplate on HN and please don't use allcaps for empahsis - this is also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

Is it boilerplate? It seems very relevant to the discussion, given that it's addressing a specific point in the parent comment.

Boilerplate has to do with how often something gets repeated, so it's boilerplate independent of where it's inserted; which is kind of the problem with it.

Re: Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

#80

Post by FpUser »

akomtu wrote: post #70
maverick-iceman wrote: post #47

Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously. Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territo…

It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world: disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while even massive support is quiet. One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.

In my opinion this voting system on public sites is bad idea. Simply showing number of upvotes / downvotes is sort of ok. Making downvoted posts loose visibility is the most fucked up implementation I think. It makes for heavy self censoring which in theory should be against the very idea of HN.

Personally I sometimes upvote posts and had never downvoted a single one disregarding how much I do not like it.

I know this one will be downvoted as well but I have better things to enjoy in life vs winning a pop contest on social media.

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