“Only paid subscribers can post.” That certainly is American.
Downvoted! Censorship!
I demand you upvote to extend my reach!
The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
191–200 of 981 posts
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#192for folks with a strong opinion on this, how do you square your opinion on youtube censorship with your opinion on net neutrality? youtube censorship is okay but isp censorship is bad? i have multiple isps available to me without any change to the quality of my life, but no comparable alternative to youtube.
Net neutrality isn't about censoring ISPs, though.
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#193Thank god for all of the people at Youtube working on censoring misinformation. They are so much smarter than me and obviously better than me at figuring out what is true and what isn't! And isn't it great that they always act selflessly in favor of the truth and never in the narrow interest of Google? I don't know what I would do if I didn't have them there to protect me from the dangerous misinformation. I am so helpless on my own.
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#194This is all the result of confusing 1st amendment rights with the right to access the audience that gathers at a particular URL. What Taibbi is asking for is that the guy who tells you that drinking rat poison is good for you should be allowed an audience and that even putting a warning alongside the video would be an infringement on his rights. Looking at the comments here I have to conclude that HN is no longer on…
People are making normative arguments, not legal arguments. We are aware that this is legal, just like it used to be legal to discriminate in hiring practices against black people.
Taibbi is suggesting that if you can't trust the people not to post error and lies, how can you trust the oligarchs and officials? Especially if your access to alternative perspectives is limited. Read for yourself:
>> Cutting down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie. Imagine if these mechanisms had been in place in the past. Would we disallow published claims that the Missile Gap was a fake? That the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged? How about Watergate, a wild theory about cheating in a presidential election that was universally disbelieved by “reputable” news agencies, until it wasn’t? It’s not hard to imagine a future where authorities would ask tech platforms to quell “conspiracy theories” about everything from poisoned water systems to war crimes.
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Election laws have been ignored - on a large scale. Do you have any specific examples? I haven't looked at the claims in any great detail.
This woman's testimony starts at 1:34:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZXkAv7yKgw&list=UU8Ioh4atND... I use this example because I find it particularly blatant, but there are many examples to choose from. According to her testimony, ballots which had two intentional marks (e.g., one for Biden, and one for Trump) would go to Biden. When she raised challenges to this, she was ignored. When she escalated to the super…
Bear in mind that she's a self-described "poll challenger", which is a partisan position. We can reasonably infer that she is a strong supporter of Trump and therefore is not impartial.
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#196This is all the result of confusing 1st amendment rights with the right to access the audience that gathers at a particular URL. What Taibbi is asking for is that the guy who tells you that drinking rat poison is good for you should be allowed an audience and that even putting a warning alongside the video would be an infringement on his rights. Looking at the comments here I have to conclude that HN is no longer on…
Yes. I'm heartened to see that someone in this thread understands what rights the First Amendment actually guarantees.
first amendment != freedom of speech
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#197This is all the result of confusing 1st amendment rights with the right to access the audience that gathers at a particular URL. What Taibbi is asking for is that the guy who tells you that drinking rat poison is good for you should be allowed an audience and that even putting a warning alongside the video would be an infringement on his rights. Looking at the comments here I have to conclude that HN is no longer on…
The first amendment right only bans the government from infringing on free speech. It doesn't say anything about private corporations. There are many practices by US companies concerning free speech that would be illegal in European countries.
Many European countries recognize freedom of speech as a basic right that everyone needs to respect; Neither the government, companies nor individuals can infringe on this. However, these freedom of speech laws often exclude certain kinds of speech and governments have some power in defining these exclusions.
This distinction is what makes censorship such a big issue in the US. When censorship is dictated by an elected government, the people have some power over it. When censorship is dictated by a private company the size of Google, people have very little power over it.
The US constitution seems to be mainly about limiting the power of government, not about protecting people and society. As a result, companies have a lot more power and you get unaccountable decisions about what should be censored and what not.
Don't get me wrong, I think censorship is necessary, but you have to admit that there is a real danger when companies are in charge of it.
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Democracy and free speech are intrinsically linked. Not really. UK has far more limits on speech than the US but is just as much of a Democracy as the US. "Free" speech has be weaponized in the internet age. It is a cancer that is actively destroying democracy.
"Not really. UK has far more limits on speech than the US but is just as much of a Democracy as the US." They have a literal "House of Lords" which is "... by appointment or by heredity or official function."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords
So you are attempting to make the point that the UK is not an equivalent democracy?
The house of lords can not create bills nor stop them. They can look over the elected parliament's shoulders and whine, that's it. It is a vestigial leaving of the monarchy system that, like the Monarchs themselves, the UK keeps because it's cute.
While in the US, un-elected corporations do very much the same thing, except when they whine, they get their way.
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Authoritarians always justify silencing speech for the greater good. You can reject lies with counters to those lies, or do it your way, and end democracy.
Eloquent, but... YouTube isn't an authoritarian (over anything except their own platform), and their policy, whatever it is, isn't going to "end democracy".
Obviously, YouTube has the right to do whatever they want with their servers. My point wasn't that YouTube's policy was the end of democracy, but that the ethos espoused by the parent commenter, if shared by a majority of the electorate and leaders, results in the end of democracy.
Democracy requires trusting people to not be complete morons. Unfortunately, the polarized nature of political discourse in the US has caused people to think that the 50% of the country that doesn't think like them is too stupid to be trusted with speech and videos.
Despite the fact that my brother has been sucked into the world of Alex Jones, I don't think most Americans are too stupid to resist dumb conspiracy theories. In decades past, this brother was a radical leftist, regularly arrested for trespassing in the late 80's at nuclear power plant protests, and later a radical in Greenpeace in the early 90's. This was long before the internet. He didn't believe the moon landing was real, and always believed in dumb ass conspiracy theories. (He's 11 years older than me, and by the time I was 11, I knew he was a moron.) My other 4 siblings aren't like him.
His new shift was, honestly, not that weird. He happened to shift to the right, but it's a horseshoe as you know, and crazy is crazy.
There have been, and always will be, highly illogical people looking to indulge their desperate desire to have symmetrical, orderly views of the universe that aren't real. The big, disastrous outcomes must always have been carefully plotted, large, grand plans (like 9/11 being a false flag operation, which my brother also believed then). My brother is one of these people, but most people aren't like that.
This huge drive for censorship didn't occur when a large portion of the American left thought that 9/11 was an inside job, because the normal people on the left knew that it was a large, but still fringe, group within their own sphere. The problem is that the same normal people on the left don't know normal people on the right. Why? Because they don't know ANY people on the right. They are in bubbles now. So they are unable to draw the same conclusion that people like my brother are a fringe on the right. To them, voting for Donald Trump is evidence of a massively delusional person, rather than the grim reality that the vast majority of Trump's voters don't like him, and simply chose a lesser of two evils in their worldview, due to a corrupt, oligarchical class at the top of both major political parties resulting in highly polarized policy positions that force them to do this.
Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
#200Noam Chomsky on Anti-Americanism: "In Soviet Union, people calling out crimes of the state against it's own people were called anti-russian: Sakharov, Solzhanitsin. That's a sign of totalitarianism. America is the only other country that does that. Imagine someone calling someone anti-italian -- they would be laughed at." (paraphrasing) Every time I hear "anti-American", I'm reminded of this Source: https://www.youtu…
I don't think that saying anti-American is the same as saying un-American.
Plenty of people say un-Australian, and I imagine other English-speaking countries say the same thing (e.g. un-Canadian). It's a way of trying to portray a certain set of values as intrinsic to a particular national identity. In the context of free speech, it makes sense to frame something which some might consider to be a restriction on free speech to be un-American, given that the American constitution explicitly protects free speech. Calling it anti-American would be a different sentiment.