Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

blog.youtube

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#361

Post by comeonseriously »

enumjorge wrote: post #259
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #110

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…

Once again a thread about censorship invites comments that ignore the nuance of the situation. Having companies dictate what information is widely accessible is dangerous for democracy. Having the sitting president make completely baseless claims in an effort to delegitimize the results of an election because it didn’t go his way is also dangerous for democracy. That’s what we call a tricky situation. We don’t have a…

I also think some of the arguments against Google's actions here don't take into account the engagement algorithms. If this content is left up and people watch it, the algos will feed them more of it. I think if we're going to have the discussion about Google "censoring" content, we have to include in the discussion engagement algos.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#362

Post by craigc »

ryandrake wrote: post #326
rayiner wrote: post #23

This is an enormous overreach. > Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to…

> 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?

> Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?

No, but we also shouldn’t censor people for making those claims. It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#363

Post by Blikkentrekker »

enumjorge wrote: post #259
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #110

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…

Once again a thread about censorship invites comments that ignore the nuance of the situation. Having companies dictate what information is widely accessible is dangerous for democracy. Having the sitting president make completely baseless claims in an effort to delegitimize the results of an election because it didn’t go his way is also dangerous for democracy. That’s what we call a tricky situation. We don’t have a…

There is indeed no easy solution on what is “good for democracy”, but that ideal can be damned to me because the idea of voters making ”informed choices” is laughable and they will always primarily vote based on simple tribalist allegiance, not to mention that the concept is silly in a two-party state.

It has nothing to do with what is and isn't “good for democracy” and indeed simply that I find it scary that powerful companies play arbitrary referee on fact policing.

YouTube is of course constantly filled with videos that contain falsehoods and it's arbitrary to only police it here.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#364

Post by MGGJFU »

bbg24 wrote: post #338

> We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election. How can any honest person accept this state of affairs? What would be the reaction of the gleefully censorious US big tech employees, many here on HN, if non-US social media giant enacted such measures in their locality? I don't see evidence that the 2020 election stolen from the Republican c…

> but this is a huge red flag that something might be going on

On the contrary. This is an indicator of the Republican claims being based on no evidence. The fact that these lies happen to be incredibly damaging to the perception of US democracy is a good enough reason for a private company to decide not to host it.

It's not part of an even larger coverup, as you seem to believe. Do you know how many people would need to be involved on a coverup of this scale? How is that even remotely close to being the right explanation.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#366

Post by cromwellian »

titzer wrote: post #347

Yet another sign that Google has too much power .

Only 1/4 of Republicans surveyed believe the election wasn't fraudulent according to a poll today. Clearly, not objective reality. Do you think that this is

a) the result of Google or

b) the result of FoxNews, and other Mercer/Koch/Murdoch owned media/radio continuously amplifying and echoing these claims?

If Google has so much power, why can't they convince 3/4s of Republicans that water is wet? Like literally, 42 lost court cases, court dockets where the Republican governors and secretaries of states conducted investigations and debunked all of the specious "evidence" (e.g. the "suitcases from under the table" video), and yet this gaslighting continues.

The Trump administration has undermined the credibility of all of our institutions, the latest being the scientific / medical community and democratic institutions. He does this by spreading baseless lies on social media with made up facts, some of them so preposterous that they've essentially 8chan/8kun posts. This then gets spread far and wide on social media and conservative TV and Radio as a mind virus.

And yet, the problem is Google has too much power to fact check this motherlode of bullshit.

Well clearly, this power sucks, because for all of its scary capability, it clearly can't burst the bubble of people who have been gaslit into a shitgibbon's cult.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#367

Post by smm11 »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #110

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…

If I created a massively popular social media platform, and a large volume of posts found there were outright lies about you, would that be okay?

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#368

Post by inglor_cz »

gtrhtrhtrhtr wrote: post #89
PeterStuer wrote: post #64

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'.

in France you can get fined or go to jail for saying fascist stuff, works pretty well.

This goes so well that Mélenchon (far left) and Le Pen (far right) command about 50 per cent of the total vote together.

Or they did in the last presidential election.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#369

Post by [deleted] »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #110

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…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#370

Post by titzer »

singlow wrote: post #330

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…

"I love the poorly educated."

- Donald J. Trump[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpdt7omPoa0

Post reply on HN