241–250 of 471 posts
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Seems like Germany should simply nationalize the platform if that's what they want.
It's not theirs to take. And anyhow, the GDR dissolved over 30 years ago, I should think their economic policies died with them.
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On a social platform where I'm only seeing content posted by my friends (or maybe content my friends interact with), anything dreadful I see is brought to me by my friends. If my friends bring me dreadful content that I don't like, I'm not sure we'll stay friends. If my friends are spamming, I'll ask them to stop and if they continue, I'm not going to stay friends (or at least I'll unfollow them where they're spammin…
Have you read the HN guidelines? Most rules have nothing to do with legality, and @dang moderates HN on a best-effort basis to ensure quality discussion. Presumably, you don’t notice you’re on a moderated platform, but HN is very much not an unmoderated free-for-all.
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Really? You'd rather your children died of a preventable disease than YT ban antivax lies? Really?
Can’t one frame either side of any controversy using these sorts of histrionics? This makes us all stupider.
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> What else do you call the complete removal of parler? Failure to adhere to terms and services or to express intent to adhere to them going forward. Parler couldn't or wouldn't stop people from breaking their providers' terms of service and didn't show a good-faith effort towards doing so. Other right-wing outlets do do those things, and have not gotten drilled despite their odious beliefs.
at nomemerror (I cannot reply directly) I don't understand why your comment is flagged and dead! You are making a perfectly reasonable point. HN admins, what is unacceptable about what is being stated - I genuinely do not see it.
In this case, with my reply, I preferred to point out the obvious mischaracterization and leave addressing the mendacious falsehoods to others, but it looks like others decided to do something about it.
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> 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. Can you define "reasonable" here in an objective way that we could all agree on? There's no such thing as neutrality. Leaving up a popular anti-vax video is just as political a decision as taking it down.
True, once you start deleting videos, then leaving any up is a political decision. That's why, as a platform, you should not be deleting any videos, other than those that violate the law.
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They (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, even Reddit) act so very much like publishers that it seems to me the mistake was granting "platform" protections to sites that: claim broad rights over posted content; use complex logic to decide what to promote (that they promote anything is alarming, for a "platform"!) and what a visitor sees while also hosting and distributing that content they're highlighting or promoting (which…
Unless you know of a way to do moderation 100%, liability for user-generated content is infeasible. The fulfillment of this fantasy of forcing platforms to abandon their efforts will just lead to all of social media degenerating into cesspits as they fill up with porn and swastikas and all normal people leave.
I agree that highly-public social media anything like what we see now wouldn't work anymore.
I don't even necessarily think that we should kill 230, but I don't think you should be able to curate and promote content, and claim strong rights to posted content, and still enjoy its protections. Yes, this means "algorithm-curation" social media with broad public visibility of content and that claims significant ownership of posted content, would be in trouble. I think services like that should struggle to operate that way. Take ownership or don't, none of this pretending to be one thing while doing another stuff. That doesn't mean we have to crack down on web hosts or ISPs or email providers or anything like that, since they're not doing most of that stuff.
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> Does YouTube's TOS really not contain statements giving them the ability to stop hosting any video, at any time, for any reason? The highest court in Germany (for civil and criminal proceedings) wrote this in one of their rulings: > Depending on the circumstances, especially if private companies - as in this case - move into a dominant position and take over the provision of the framework conditions of public commu…
This is as it should be IMO. When you position yourself to be a de-facto public square, you shouldn't get to selectively operate like a private club when it suits you.
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> If the German government wants to provide a free-speech "safe zone", they should provide it themselves. But that is what they are doing here, no? They just use Youtube as the way to provide it. Governments doesn't have to run businesses themselves, private actors are much better at running the day to day stuff usually. Similarly if you own a huge amount of land and build a city there and let lots of people move in,…
but the government isn't paying YouTube to host videos. eminent domain and related takings require compensation
Whether or not Youtube should have a clause in their terms allowing them to remove arbitrary content is a different question, and yet another is whether they should be allowed to have such a clause.
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 i…
> Their only winning move was to stay neutral and do nothing but comply with legal requests. No? This narrative is a bit ahistorical - and it's fueled by this idea that hyperliberal boogeyman started censoring everything. If you look at what happened in 2017, Google started "censoring" things because advertisers threatened to boycott . The platforms couldn't stay neutral because advertisers became more and more conce…
1. Google definitely censors things on their own as well. Their own search engine turns up a long list of examples, so I won't rehash them all here, but one illustrative example is their censorship of the dissenter plug-in (https://reclaimthenet.org/google-chrome-web-store-bans-disse...), which also seems to be an example of censorship collusion within the tech industry.
2. Google has a long history of internal activism that is highly progressive, and regularly applies pressure on the company, and creates a culture of fear for employees who are either conservative, centrist, or even moderately left-leaning. The James Damore fiasco is a great example of the internal political culture rearing its head and how it impacts who's comfortable speaking up and steering the company's culture (https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/google-fires-employee-for-...).
3. Why do you think advertisers became "more and more concerned"? It's because of left-leaning activist pressure from groups like Sleeping Giants who have made it their mission to organize activists and create a false sense of societal pressure on advertisers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Giants). It's the same as Google censoring things, because typically activist employees will draw attention internally to these activist campaigns, and try to alter the company's otherwise neutral stances. There's also a pipeline from internal activist employees to certain members of the press (like Geekwire) to try to use external pressure to move company stances.
Merkel has stated that she didn't believe it was good that Facebook/Twitter banned Trump from their platforms fwiw.
I don't see why Trump should be above the terms of service that all other users have to abide by.
But I find it hilarious that Twitter/Google/etc. champion "free speech" in Russia, China, etc. yet in US they literally censored the sitting president and many people are OK with this.