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Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

mediaite.com

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Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#4

Post by ocdtrekkie »

cauliflower2718 wrote: post #3

The article calls this a "historically high fine". It's also really small compared to the scale of YouTube dollars, i.e. for YouTube to care (about this fine in isolation).

So generally what has been happening is there's a fine that's meager by Google's standards, but also a demand for a change in behavior. If compliance isn't met, the government will start fining them daily. I believe the announcement France made yesterday came with a large single fine, a window for compliance, and then a daily fine of nearly a million Euros per day if they don't comply in time.

The goal is to incentivize change, not extract financial benefit for the country. So your first penalty isn't huge in itself, but it's designed to make it clear that noncompliance in the long run will be less profitable.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#5

Post by boring_twenties »

I'm not sure I like the notion of a private entity being forced to host content they don't want to host.

If it only applied to effective monopolies like YouTube, I would be more inclined to agree with it, but the article doesn't seem to know anything about that.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#6

Post by chapium »

throwawayswede wrote: post #2

Good. I'd rather live in chaos than a world controlled by these technocrats. Let's do Twitter while we're at it.

I don't understand this, is controlling youtube's database that google hosts equivalent to controlling the "world"?

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#7

Post by ntrz »

> The German court held that YouTube failed to make its enforcement authority clear in its contract with the account operator who posted the video.

Does YouTube's TOS really not contain statements giving them the ability to stop hosting any video, at any time, for any reason?

Edit: I guess not: the only content removal clause I see is this one, which is definitely not "we can remove your video for any reason, as long as we feel like it." I'm a little surprised they don't seem to have included anything like that.

> If we reasonably believe that any Content is in breach of this Agreement or may cause harm to YouTube, our users, or third parties, we may remove or take down that Content in our discretion. (from https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms)

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#8

Post by anm89 »

Naval Ravikant seems to be a divisive figure here but I think he made a profound point when he discussed this topic on Joe Rogan's podcast.

The point was that, as a platform, you cross a line which is very difficult to ever revert when you optionally censor your platform in response to political pressure because both sides are then forced from a game theory perspective to aggressively pursue censoring your platform in their favor lest the other does it first. The platform ends up being collateral damage in some political war they never cared about in the first place and they can never win because no matter who they bend too, it automatically enrages the other side.

This seems like where youtube and twitter and facebook are at now. They caved to censoring things that were reasonable, but now anyone can make them censor anything as long as they have some poltical power somewhere. It's not going to end well for them. Their only winning move was to stay neutral and do nothing but comply with legal requests.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#10

Post by xxpor »

throwawayswede wrote: post #2

Good. I'd rather live in chaos than a world controlled by these technocrats. Let's do Twitter while we're at it.

State violence is being used to force a private company to host content it finds objectionable. Who's the technocrat here?
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