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YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

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Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#221

We are very fortunate to have the algorithms, employees & management of Youtube/Google watching out for us. We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment. Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people with even more content moderation. Thank you Google - you're the nanny the American people and the world always hoped f…

What a crap comment.

Instead, yes, let's be happy that there are at least some entities out there that will not let themselves be willingly used to subvert a democracy.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#223

Regardless of what you believe to be 'The Truth', has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance or convince skeptical people, again, whether right or wrong, that there really is 'nothing to see here'.

I'm pretty anti-censorship; specifically I believe that sunshine/debate is the best disinfectant. However, we aren't having a healthy debate right now because the election fraud conspiratorialists are shouting their message without regard for the rebuttals. I think there's something to be said for bringing the volume down to manageable levels so that we can actually have a debate. That said, I'm not remotely convince…

>we aren't having a healthy

So ultimately you prioritize what might be described as "collective health" over generalized notions of freedom. Is that "pretty anti censorship", as this question of negative externalities is always the point of contention for censoring anything is it not?

I'd agree with this framing, though if one goes down this route, all sorts of instances of "freedom" and individual choice would be called into question on grounds of it's effect on overall societal health. I think it means simple frameworks of censorship, free speech, and facts cannot be generalized or universalized, as ultimately many of these will run into value judgments that aren't easily answered by questions of objective truth.

>I'm not remotely convinced that there's any kind of evidence

And this calls into question the efficacy of "truth" and objective facts. At some point people simply have different value judgments about what is true, or for which other things to carve out exceptions which take precedence. Or which debates or opinions are healthy or which are off limits. We see this with COVID where it's hard enough to assess the specific health risks while balancing the trade-offs of other health risks and economic impacts of lock-downs etc. "true" is too broad to encompass all the variables.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#224

We are very fortunate to have the algorithms, employees & management of Youtube/Google watching out for us. We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment. Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people with even more content moderation. Thank you Google - you're the nanny the American people and the world always hoped f…

While the sarcasm is dripping, it's also true. There clearly are people that can view a video and realize that it's is 100% BS. Yet, at the same time, there are other people that will watch it and 100% believe it. If it wasn't effective, it wouldn't be used.

Americans largely have trouble distinguishing facts from opinions, sadly.

https://www.journalism.org/2018/06/18/distinguishing-between...

>The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#225

With apologies to H.L. Mencken [1] "Freedom of video publishing belongs to those who own the platform." The good news is that anyone can own a platform these days. If you want to publish something, you can do it yourself very easily. You don't have to have youtube do it for you. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/21/free-press/#:~:text... .

I suspect that will be the next problem. By basically disenfranchising conspiracists they will (and in some cases have) formed their own platforms.

Maybe it will be a net good to separate out the hardcore conspiracy types, but given how relatively widespread sympathy to this idea is, I wonder if it won't just create more and more polarized platforms, which I personally think will only worsen things.

I don't really have any alternative suggestions, and I do think the way ideas spread on the internet is pretty frightening, but I'm not how good the long term results of this are gonna be.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#226

With apologies to H.L. Mencken [1] "Freedom of video publishing belongs to those who own the platform." The good news is that anyone can own a platform these days. If you want to publish something, you can do it yourself very easily. You don't have to have youtube do it for you. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/21/free-press/#:~:text... .

This is a really dangerous line of argument for an example where one platform has a de-facto monopoly on views, whose censorship is fine-grained enough that people open to these other ideas simply won't be able to find them. It makes a lot of sense for individual publications, or even Reddit banning certain communities, since people looking for alternatives will know to do so. It's a lot more insidious in a case like…

All of these alternatives are just a search and a click away. If people want to find them, they can.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#228
post #143

Doesn't this just feed into people's fears about conspiracies? I can't understand why people are signing off on this. Let the Like/Dislike button do its job.

Youtube's recommendation algorithm means that the people who see these videos are already predisposed to believe what is in them. That overrides the usefulness of the Like and Dislike buttons.

So perhaps the problem actually lies with the recommendation algorithm, and youtube should do something about that.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#229

We are very fortunate to have the algorithms, employees & management of Youtube/Google watching out for us. We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment. Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people with even more content moderation. Thank you Google - you're the nanny the American people and the world always hoped f…

It's a private company. If you don't like their slant, use another private company. I swear, it's like people have never had to cancel a newspaper subscription before.

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Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#230

We are very fortunate to have the algorithms, employees & management of Youtube/Google watching out for us. We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment. Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people with even more content moderation. Thank you Google - you're the nanny the American people and the world always hoped f…

It's a private company. If you don't like their slant, use another private company. I swear, it's like people have never had to cancel a newspaper subscription before.

> If you don't like it, use another private company.

Who are YouTube's comparable competitors?

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