Here come the deepfakes for streamers to be deplatformed by their rivals/competitors!
Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
161–170 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you want the government to force private companies to continue doing business with someone they no longer wish to provide services to? We aren't talking protected class here, we're talking private companies picking and choosing who to do business with via non-discriminatory means. That's called a free market. Will they be restored if they're proven innocent? Maybe. Maybe not. Again, that's called a free market.
At a certain point, these platforms have such enormous, unprecedented influence and control over public discourse, that they aught to be thought of differently than, say a restaurant refusing service to a guy without a shirt or shoes on. We're clearly in uncharted territory, when it comes to the control and release of information. Just using Twitter and Facebook for example - they've silenced the second-most voted fo…
They didn't "silence" him because his brand of politics. Their stated reason for banning him from their platform was literally " due to the risk of further incitement of violence."
Their TOS have specific "Glorification of Violence policy", which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate.
Further, the claim that Twitter "Silenced" the President of the United States, a man who literally has a press room in his house, and could have a room full of reporters convened at any hour of the day to speak to. He could issue any statement from official whitehouse channels and it would instantly be disseminated across every news outlet around the world.
He chose not do those things, because he is a coward. The quintessential Keyboard Warrior/troll who likes to rile up people safe from any counter argument.
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some time up until people started getting the internet on their phones, roughly. Of course, no definition is perfect.
Before people had internet it was ~5 media companies that decided what could be said in public and who could say it. It was hardly as "free" as people imagine.
This was never true. Anyone could stand on the street corner and say anything. Anyone with some spare cash could print up political booklets or flyers and hand them out, and many did.
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#164Quite a few Twitch and Youtube streamers are moving to their own platform. I think the only thing holding them back was finding a way for people to make payments or to have advertising. Apparently people are finding ways around this obstacle?
sponsored content, their own advertisements in their content, and patreon?
I think that part is easy, but making the tech stack affordable is the problem. Serving a 5Mbps stream to 10,000 users for 8 hours a day is 120TB of data, and if you do the naive thing and just use AWS for that, you're looking at egress costs in the range of $180,000 per month (that's 5 cents per gigabyte). So you need some specialized solution, and that spirals into being a hard problem for content creators to solve.
Having said that, you can certainly build a CDN that pays less than $200k/month in transit costs (the ISP I worked at charged $1000/month for 10Gbps IP transit) -- obviously that's not what it costs Twitch to provide the service. But then you start hiring software engineers and network engineers to build all that, maybe take some VC funding because you have an actual business model and tech stack now, maybe sign some advertising deals to placate your board and attract more streamers that want revenue share, and then the advertisers start being upset about content, and you create a content policing team, and boom! You're Twitch! You ban someone, the Internet hates you, and all you have to show for it is a 8 million dollar per month AWS bill :)
Thought long and hard about how to build an open source tech stack for streaming video and somehow monetize it, and it always seemed like either I would become Twitch, or I'd just be UNIX helpdesk for some gamers with million dollar AWS bills. Didn't do it, but I wish those who are doing it the best of luck.
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#165"The company said users will be able to report such behaviors but it may also investigate cases proactively, for instance if there is a verified news report that a user has been arrested." So we've arrived at "innocent until accused" instead of "innocent until proven guilty"? And if proven guilty, they will both be punished under the law, and again by companies like Twitch? If proven innocent will they be restored? W…
We may be arriving at a time and place where we must consider broadening the scope of the First Amendment to not just apply to government. I'm fully aware there's good reason for organizations and companies to limit free speech, but it often (lately) has gone way too far, dabbling in political witch hunting. I can think of few things less inline with classical American Constitutional ideals than to cheer on organizat…
> We may be arriving at a time and place where we must consider broadening the scope of the First Amendment to not just apply to government.
It would be a violation of the 1st Amendment to require Twitch to host objectionable content against their will. Freedom of association and freedom not to speak is part of the 1st Amendment. I am very doubtful a proposal that mandated that Twitch had to host certain streamers would survive a court challenge. This is like looking at declining church membership and arguing that the only way to preserve Freedom of Religion is to mandate that everyone needs to go to church.
And there are ways to attack censorship that don't require throwing out the Constitution. Ways like antitrust, like expanding Internet access and building infrastructure to make self-hosting easier, like providing government-run alternatives to certain services like financial payment networks -- services that would be subject to the 1st Amendment. We could revise copyright so it's easier to build content mirroring sites and migrate people off of social media/streaming sites into other services. We could revise the CFAA so that it's easier to build migration tools without getting sued by Facebook. We could start putting even a tiny bit of effort into not allowing Amazon/Apple/Google to look at new markets that are attractive and just buy the entire space.
I don't think you're mad that Twitch is moderating, Twitch has to moderate to some degree. You're mad that there are realistically only 2-3 usable streaming services and that our Internet infrastructure and Internet laws are set up in such a way as to encourage that kind of consolidation, to allow companies like Amazon to buy anyone who competes with them, and to sue anyone who builds compatible wrappers and services in a way that might make it easier to migrate off of Twitch.
And sometimes I bring up antitrust and decentralization and people accuse me of not being realistic, but honestly, does anyone really believe that antitrust is harder than passing a Constitutional amendment? Because it's not, antitrust doesn't require 38 states to ratify it. I genuinely do not understand the point of view that looks at mass media consolidation and says that revising the 1st Amendment is a preferable alternative to breaking up Amazon.
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#166Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you want the government to force private companies to continue doing business with someone they no longer wish to provide services to? We aren't talking protected class here, we're talking private companies picking and choosing who to do business with via non-discriminatory means. That's called a free market. Will they be restored if they're proven innocent? Maybe. Maybe not. Again, that's called a free market.
At a certain point, these platforms have such enormous, unprecedented influence and control over public discourse, that they aught to be thought of differently than, say a restaurant refusing service to a guy without a shirt or shoes on. We're clearly in uncharted territory, when it comes to the control and release of information. Just using Twitter and Facebook for example - they've silenced the second-most voted fo…
> they've silenced the second-most voted for President in American history, because he isn't their brand of politics
1. The second - and third, for that matter - most voted for President is Obama (69.5 and 65.9M votes). Trump is the fourth (62.9M votes)[1].
2. He was not banned because he wasn’t ‘their brand of politics’, he was banned for inciting violence against the terms of those platforms. You can certainly argue Twitter and Facebook had - and have - a very inconsistent enforcement approach for those policies. But that’s not what you are saying.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#168Quite a few Twitch and Youtube streamers are moving to their own platform. I think the only thing holding them back was finding a way for people to make payments or to have advertising. Apparently people are finding ways around this obstacle?
People are learning to start on youtube and twitch but if you want to make money you have to transfer your audience over.
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, mob justice and public humiliation are very useful when people do and think things you don't like. Just what we need to deeply heal our damaged society.
Except there was no "mob justice" here; you are overreacting and using terms that should be reserved for violent consequences in situations that do not justify such words. I understand why you have to exaggerate, though.
You don't wait for a violent consequence you prevent it. In classical realism or game theory you prepare your defenses according to what your adversary COULD do, not what you think they're going to do. Any and all pushback against giving tech companies the power to do something awful they haven't done yet and may never do is justified. You don't just roll over and say "oh, don't worry, it'll be fine they'd never do that."
Re: Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you want the government to force private companies to continue doing business with someone they no longer wish to provide services to? We aren't talking protected class here, we're talking private companies picking and choosing who to do business with via non-discriminatory means. That's called a free market. Will they be restored if they're proven innocent? Maybe. Maybe not. Again, that's called a free market.
At a certain point, these platforms have such enormous, unprecedented influence and control over public discourse, that they aught to be thought of differently than, say a restaurant refusing service to a guy without a shirt or shoes on. We're clearly in uncharted territory, when it comes to the control and release of information. Just using Twitter and Facebook for example - they've silenced the second-most voted fo…
> they've silenced the second-most voted for President in American history, because he isn't their brand of politics.
I think that is disingenuous. Twitter said "specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter" [0]. It wasn't his brand of politics it was how his supporters were interpreting him and incitement of violence like what was seen when his supporters stormed the Capitol.
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...