YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

We humans may know that, but do the algorithms know the difference between a video describing one voting error and a video describing multiple cases of errors?

It's not a rhetorical point because if you upload a YouTube video with controversial keywords, a banner appears below the video with clarification which may or may not be relevant. I once watched a Rammstein music video and was scratching my head as to why a banner appeared about the Apollo Space Program, as if Rammstein was a conspiracy theory and not a fictional music video. If this same algorithm is being used to censor, a lot of innocent videos will be deleted.

Youtube is the problem. Anyone can put whatever shit they want online, which is fine in itself, but put your snake oil on Youtube and Google's Skynet will expertly find rubes to sell for you and show it to them.

But on a few occasions, like this one, advertisers get nervous.

> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases.

Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to. Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?

An interesting step to be sure, and the responses here reflect similar sentiments elsewhere (some think it's censorship, some think it's stewardship, and still others think it's Google's pool so they get to decide who is allowed into it)

I find the meta question fascinating. That question is "If you have a tool that can influence millions any way you choose to influence them, what role should the state play in regulating that tool?"

With things like, say, nuclear weapons. It seems really easy to say "I don't want just anyone in the country to be able to go out and buy a nuclear weapon and possibly put their entire city at risk of annihilation if they decide to set it off!" And in many conversations we get to that perspective because the "innocent" bystanders who would be killed by this act have no way to realistically protect themselves from that threat. Thus we accept that the state, which has community support to protect the community, is given the right to say who can and who cannot "own" a nuclear weapon. It isn't even all that controversial in the general public even though there will always be people who take the position that the 2nd amendment "right to bear arms" does not exclude any "arms" it's a blanket right. And yet for most people, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of just any individual seems a reasonable limitation.

But what about media? We have seen first hand the destructive effects of coordinated campaigns of disinformation. In the hands of a skilled operator, millions of individuals can be manipulated into actions that they would not have contemplated. Whether it is for giving power to criminals, or killing themselves and their children by drinking cyanide laced Kool-aid.

When it becomes possible for a small group to do great harm to a much larger "innocent" group, what is the right action to take? What consensus does the community come to which supports governance for everyone versus rights for the individual?

I believe it to be a much more complex question than simply "censorship" / "no censorship" and letting individuals protect themselves from these sorts of operators. Just as I believe it is unreasonable for individuals to be held responsible for protecting themselves from one of their neighbors possibly setting off a nuclear weapon, or spraying them with a machine gun.

From what I have read, in the US the sense of "justice" is tied to the perpetrators of an act of harm being suitably punished for that act. And I certainly feel harmed by the egregious disinformation that has made my relationship with my parents much more difficult. But how do I get justice for that harm? I really don't have a good sense of the right and just answer here.

If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school-children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the scheme of scoundrels.

--Bertrand Russell