Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

NYT Opinion page is not a “public square”

In America at least, there are different sets of rules for different types of business.

A curated opinion piece, carefully chosen by experienced editors, is vastly different from a public swimming pool. For the first, that filter, that exclusivity, that editorializing is part of the draw. It’s good because it’s a filter, not a platform. The public pool should not be a filter, and yes, sometimes there are weird things that float in there, and it takes effort to clean up, but that’s the cost of being open to the public.

Well, in my head (which I'll admit doesn't really match reality), YouTube is a video hoster only, it's not social at all. If something I'm reading or someone I'm talking with links to a video, it's likely there. I might watch that video, but I certainly don't read the comments and I try not to look at the recommendations because both of those areas are a cesspool.

If I'm searching for a video, I try to do it in a web search, and likely it'll lead to YouTube, and hopefully it'll actually be useful content (or Rick Astley, I actually like that song).

Anyway, if I were YouTube, I would turn off comments everywhere, and review videos before including them in recommendations (which would leave a lot of videos out of that section) and probably have a lot lower views.

They probably didn't bother at all. Not long ago Apple got fined because they implied that they would only provide one year warranty unless you paid for more, in the EU two years are the absolute minimum and telling your customers otherwise is not an option. As far as I could tell they just wrote the US version and translated that for every non English speaking country.

Google might also be intentionally lazy, the Google Play licensing terms for example generally fail in front of a court when they are challenged, as they actively violate every law on anti competitive behavior you could think up. Whenever that happens Google just carves out a new licensing region for that courts jurisdiction and keeps the terms unchanged for the remaining world.

>you're gonna end up with grouping all people who think like that in a community

That's exactly what not banning them is doing! Not that I think flat earth content should be banned, as it seems to be mostly harmless. Before the internet, people who believed in fringe conspiracy theories didn't have a good way to coordinate and group together at scale.

Hell, even in the mid 2000s, after the internet had been around for a while, fringe communities tended to self-segregate in their own forums. They group together and formed echo chambers, yes, but they were also insulated from broader society, and therefore had little ability to acquire new converts. It was recommendation algorithms that popularized fringe ideas, by pushing them to bigger audiences that otherwise never would have been exposed to them.

I think that's really the core of the problem, recommendation algorithms. The algorithms don't know how reliable or accurate the content they push is, they just push whatever the machine learning model predicts will keep the user engaged. I would much rather group the people at the fringes into online ghettos than have them roaming the broader web and spewing their nonsense to anyone the algorithm recognizes to be vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking.

As to examples of cracks in the paradigm is respect for empirical knowledge, I don't think you have to look far. The rise of political extremism has resulted in more people on the far right and far left, ideologies that are hostile to the notions of nuance and cool headed reasoning, and thrive on emotionally driven messaging. More than 15% of Americans believe in QAnon, and nearly a third believe in the election conspiracy.

Meanwhile on the left, you have rhetoric that is increasingly hostile to data-driven approaches to problems, instead preferring "lived experience", ie anecdotes. You have cases like David Shor's firing for daring to tweet a study from a respected scholar that appeared to challenge the zeitgeist at the time. Many of these people are highly educated, or even academics themselves.

And that's to say nothing of regular old snake oil that has nothing to do with politics. Essential oils, healing crystals, you name it. Misinformation is on the rise, and most of the population is not equipped to deal with it. Maybe this is a temporary growing pain, maybe not. I don't think there's any way to know for sure right now. But we do know that for most of human history we have lived in the darkness, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if we end up returning to it.