Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 158 posts

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#71

Post by misnome »

oauea wrote: post #62
misnome wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that the government should force HN to host child pornography and not remove it if someone uploads it? Or is that not how it works at all?

Of course not, the government is free to pass whatever laws regulating whatever kind of content is allowed, as they should and have been doing. What is your point again?

It should be easy to work out the point, if you weren't being completely disingenuous.

The topic of forcing platforms to remove illegal content is completely, utterly different to the topic of forcing them to host content, whether illegal or otherwise.

And in the US, the government is _not_ free to pass laws forcing platforms to host, or remove, non-illegal content, without explicitly coming into conflict with the first amendment.

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#72

Post by jameshart »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #2

The video has now been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VidUXZjzNVk Worth a watch. Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check? MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the wor…

The idea that a member of parliament should enjoy at least a a much freedom of speech over private media as the broader public actually deserves some challenge.

In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite.

As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox.

It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian.

When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#73

Post by boffinism »

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #45
basisword wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Badly phrased. I meant inhabitants of all current and ex-colonies. Not just the remaining ones. Although, the talk of blocking another Scottish independence referendum could certainly be used as evidence of holding on to a country against the inhabitants will. You can't know their will if you prevent them from expressing it. Yes, they expressed it 7 years ago but a lot has changed since then, most notably leaving the…

Regarding ex-colonies: Don't we have to eventually "let bygones be bygones"? Otherwise, where do we draw the line? How far do we go back? Those original human perpetrators are long dead. "Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin." ~ Deuteronomy 24:16

"The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation."

~ Numbers 14:18

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#74

Post by CTDOCodebases »

andrekandre wrote: post #7
ColinHayhurst wrote: post #2

The video has now been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VidUXZjzNVk Worth a watch. Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check? MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the wor…

> "Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill” why don't they (govt) open a public video site for anyone to upload to, so they don't have to mess with private sites? forcing private entities to host things they dont want to sounds like a huge can of worms

This is a good point. They could optimise the site to encourage more uploads instead of engagement. Then the government can mine the data for intelligence.

Turn spying on its citizens and data harvesting of their public info into a useful resource for the benefit of all.

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#75

Post by ColinHayhurst »

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #21
mojzu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it seems likely to me to be an overzealous AI decision, given the background noise of anti-vaccine disinformation on youtube these days I wouldn't be surprised if they've turned up their algorithms at the cost of more false and marginal positives What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech on…

> an overzealous AI decision Then they simply shouldn't use AI algorithms to censor people. > What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online It's not obvious to me that the UK government has any coherent idea of what it is trying to do.

Some would say the Bill is a symptom of Facebook Derangement Syndrome https://webdevlaw.uk/2020/12/09/facebook-derangement-syndrom... Based on those they are consulting with that seems justfied.

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#76

Post by CTDOCodebases »

dua2020 wrote: post #5

This is a government which is in the process of criminalising protest under a deliberately vague 'public nuisance' clause. They only want freedom of expression for their views and not for those that oppose them.

Are there any five eyed nations where I can get a group of my friends together then block a major arterial road to protest some issue without expecting to be arrested?

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#77

Post by tored »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #26

Each time the debate about free speech on social media comes up, people say: "well private platforms, they can censor whatever they want, they are not the government". Of course it only applies to the speech the former do not like: expediency. Here is a thing: social media grew that big because governments created a legal environment in which social media could grow that big. DMCA, safe harbor, the fact that social m…

Problem here is that the legislators have skipped making laws on this area because of expedience, politicians have hotlines to the big tech where they can call in ask for content to be removed without any transparency or records whatsoever. And not only that big tech are in many cases subsidized by governments, decided by the same politicians that make the calls. We are talking about massive corruption on the highest level.

This new way of governance is not confined to social media but it also been used excessively during the Covid pandemic, instead of doing the hard work of passing legislation in a legislative body, governments are using back channels to pressure companies, NGOs, cities, etc to do their bidding, without any transparency or records.

It is obviously anti-democratic to its core.

Free speech is not absolute, government has the right to censor, however is has to do it properly by passing legislation, using courts and other transparent institutions.

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#78

Post by mojzu »

hliyan wrote: post #33
mojzu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it seems likely to me to be an overzealous AI decision, given the background noise of anti-vaccine disinformation on youtube these days I wouldn't be surprised if they've turned up their algorithms at the cost of more false and marginal positives What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech on…

Should we be more forgiving of harm done by faulty algorithms than by negligent human beings? It was the company's choice to save money by automating a process that normally only human beings can do reliably. The consequences to the victim are the same regardless of the instrument used in the commission of the wrongdoing.

Given the quantity of video uploaded to youtube I'm not sure human moderation of any significant amount of it is even possible anymore. Humans are definitely better at handling many situations but are also prone to their own biases (e.g. there were facebook moderators a while back who would take down reported content they disagreed with for religious reasons), they are often not given enough time to reasonably review a report, and when exposed to the kind of videos being reported can experience serious mental health problems

Some of these could be dealt with by the companies investing more in moderation (make them employees/better pay/healthcare etc.), but if you want to moderate at the scale of youtube/facebook/etc. then I don't see how you could do it without some automated tools

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#79

Post by lentil_soup »

wizard-beta wrote: post #16
basisword wrote: post #9

"Freedom is the reason the UK has had such a long an illustrious history." I'm sure the inhabitants of the many countries the British invaded and continue to hang on to would disagree. The Online Safety Bill he mentions in his outrage at YouTube taking down his speech is itself an attack on freedoms. He's also part of a political party working to criminalise protests they disagree with.

>I'm sure the inhabitants of the many countries the British invaded and continue to hang on to would disagree. Propose one colony where the indigenous society was freer

is this a new revisionist rhetoric being pushed all of a sudden? I keep hearing the same arguments in Spain about how they brought freedom to the Americas

I understand being unconformable with one's country's past, but the mental hoops to try to get some justification to colonization is so strange.

Even if (and that's a BIG if) those societies ended up "freer" let's not fool ourselves, not a single country went to colonise another for hundreds of years to make it freer, they went there to exploit it. If 500 years later that country is in a better shape now (again a BIG if), that's an unintended side effect.

Re: UK MP speech about freedoms censored by YouTube

#80

Post by zimpenfish »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #39
dua2020 wrote: post #5

This is a government which is in the process of criminalising protest under a deliberately vague 'public nuisance' clause. They only want freedom of expression for their views and not for those that oppose them.

David Davis is a backbench MP, he isn't a Government minister. I would sooner eat my own eyeballs than vote Conservative, no matter who the candidate, but Davis does have a principled track-record in voting for civil liberties.

> Davis does have a principled track-record in voting for civil liberties.

Well, if you're British, sure? If you're an EU Citizen wanting to live or work in the UK, he was very much "they should have ID cards" in 2017.

Post reply on HN