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Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

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211–220 of 471 posts

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#211
post #8

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…

How does “staying neutral” prevent people from pressuring you? Is there any doubt that YouTube et al have and always had the ability to remove anything they wanted from their platforms?

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#212
post #113
post #13

What's the law in question? If someone posts something that (in my opinion alone) is ridiculous as a comment on my blog and I remove it, would I have to pay a fine in Germany? Why is it okay for the government to compel speech? Edit: Looks like it's for not upholding its terms of service.

What would you think about a telecom that prevents you from calling someone because of the things they’ve been saying over the phone?

I’d say I’d find a new telecom. Or I’d start or invest in a competitor. At what size and revenue does one lose the ability to remove speech they don’t agree with? If someone posts publicly viewable speech, is it my rite to bear that speech forever?

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What about telling advertisers that if they want to boycott, go ahead, find another Youtube to advertise on. They make 15 billion a year in advertising and 3 billion on subscriptions. I'm willing to bet with that much advertising it would be very unlikely any advertising boycott could make a significant difference.

>What about telling advertisers that if they want to boycott, go ahead, find another Youtube to advertise on.

Yeah, it's called Facebook. Regardless these weren't some no names who were boycotting, it was pretty much the whales like P&G and CocaCola who were complaining. (Just those 2 spend $8BN/year). At the very least having any of them pull out would cratered at least one exec's bonus.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#214
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until the very end, when I feel like you threw away the argument by seemingly being open to "legal requests"; the "political wars" you get dragged into tend to be from politicians that are certainly making "legal requests": hell, if they aren't legal, they change the law! I feel like the core problem in many cases was building a system where someone gets to be arbiter of content in the first place: App…

If a website does not honour legal request, it'll get blocked, so its entire content will be effectively removed for all citizens. The proper approach IMO is to honour legal requests, but provide transparency and display some information about blocked content, like who made the request to block it and so on. Of course content must only be blocked for requests originating from that specific country.

But that doesn't solve the problem, as the "political wars" the person I was responding to described all work in the world of increasingly tight laws; you have to avoid being a target in the first place by correctly navigating the space of solutions for how content is distributed in the first place. Take the Apple iPhone example: if Apple is forced to remove an app from their app store by China, it doesn't matter if the user can install it on the side... and somehow China has not managed to force companies to not provide that functionality: Apple going out of their way to centralize both app distribution and even API access (VPN functionality, as a specific example, is hidden behind an entitlement that they don't give to casual developers) is work they chose to do that directly enables the ability to even make "legal requests" quickly and easily.

I maintain the moral equivalent of this for platforms like Twitter and YouTube is to stop conflating their centralized recommendation systems (which should be considered "their speech") with the functionality to publish at all (which should be considered "someone else's speech"): it is going to be way less controversial to stop recommending something that someone else likes if it is still accessible to people who know about it (as they externally discovered the content or author and were directly linked to it/them), and it is also going to be way less controversial to allow people to publish something that someone else doesn't like to their own audience if it isn't being actively recommended to third parties. These recommendation systems have started to conflate "being able to say what you want" with "being able to be granted a large audience" so well that the feature set for moderation fails to separate them, and that's bad for everyone: there is a reason why we talk about "the right to free speech" instead of "the right to be heard".

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform shouldn't have the right to an opinion on content. Same way that when you open a store you can't pick and choose your customers. Platforms should just obey law and at most create a process where users and lawmakers can express and enforce their opinion on content.

If YouTube is a store, them taking down a video isn't them picking and choosing their customers it's them picking and choosing the product they put on their shelf. Which is generally a thing left up to the store owner and not the government.

No, whitelists vs blacklists. A store blacklists some customers from entering, but in general most can enter. A store doesn't let most people put wares on its shelves, that is a whitelist. Youtube blacklists video uploads and otherwise allows everything, so it follows the same logic as customers entering a store.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#216
post #102
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platforms that claim to be open content systems (i.e it is not topic limited like say a Mac Forum) should only remove content that is illegal in nature, i.e Sexual Exploitation of minors, True Threats, etc. > popular anti-vax since Anti-Vax has now been refined to include anyone that opposes government mandated vaccinations, I am a Vaxxed Anti-Vaxer as I oppose all government mandates. People should be free to choose…

You are of course free to create a platform that only removes illegal content, just as Twitter or YouTube is free to to remove content they don't like. But I think you'd find two problems: determining what could be illegal is really hard (what's a "true threat" and what's a tasteless joke?), and also you'd end up with a community that looks a lot like 4chan or parler. Not a place I would choose to hang out.

Many well regarded distributed platforms are like that too (the web and blogosphere, email, mastodon, xmpp&matrix). The common feature is federated islands that can somewhat form filtered views of the global system.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#218
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because the difference is that they are essentially immutable personal traits. The parent was presenting this scenario as an equivalent one and I don't think they are.

Personal traits are always mutable. What seems (and may be) immutable to you could be mutable to others.

It's technically true that you could find some way to dye your skin a different colour, but I don't think most people would find that to be a realistic solution to anything.

Re: Germany fines YouTube for removing video of anti-lockdown protest

#219
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers objecting to content is as old as television, and even older, and is certainly not owned by "hyperliberals." For example, Conservatives demanded radio stations stop playing the Beatles, and, only slightly more recently, the Dixie Chicks. They called up advertisers as well. You could probably find people complaining to artists' patrons in Medieval texts, if you looked.

If you look at people on an axis other than liberal/conservative, you find that the people that object are the same people regardless of their politics. They're the people that can't stand the idea of other people seeing reading/hearing/seeing things, that they themselves wouldn't want to. It's the people that are hurt and scared when they see behavior that is actually harmless to them, but maybe spotlights a differe…

Amen! Turns out people are complicated and brains/thoughts/ideas don't exist on a single purple spectrum from red to blue.
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