It's been sad watching Silicon Valley evolve from Apple's 1984 Super Bowl commercial to this.
YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#522We 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…
>We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment
Um, it's pretty clear that this is literally true. Most people are too ignorant to reject absurd conspiracy theories.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#523Corporations with monetary incentives (i.e. all corporations) should not be the entities responsible for deciding what information can and cannot spread within a democracy. I don't care what side of the fence you're on when it comes to censorship - allowing corporations to wield power previously solely held by the government is a step in a dangerous direction.
What to do about it? This is very tricky. The best solution I have been able to think of, is inline with "anti-discrimination" laws that exist with hiring. Corporations should not be able to discriminate in terms of what information is spread via their platform. If the government can enforce that law when it comes to hiring (even if that restricts a private company's "freedom") then they can certainly do it for information.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#524I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly , ridiculously false), and has millions of people…
Note it is backwards to think that if a platform _fails_ to carry the regime's message then _the platform_ is impeding freedom rather than noting that it is _the government_ that is applying anti-freedom pressure on a dissenting _non government_ organization.
Youtube is _not_ the government but by reigning in falsehoods, is acting in _opposition_ to the government here. So what Youtube is doing is the very definition of _freedom_ of expression. A government pressuring them to carry pro-government messages is the crime, not the other way around.
You are now having the government and pro-government voices pressure non-government organizations to publish pro-government material while claiming that it "protects" freedom of speech. This the exact _opposite_ of freedom of speech, it is in fact forced propaganda.
So indeed there is no "but" because it is _the government_ that is in the wrong by pressuring publishers in what they must include.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#525I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly , ridiculously false), and has millions of people…
lol. you're brainwashed if you believe the lies of the legacy media. this election was stolen. there's so much evidence. video evidence, affidavits, forensic evidence of voting machines, proof of tens of thousands of underage people voting, and so much more. Pennsylvania: 1.8 million ballots mailed out, 2.5 million ballots received. Hello? Trump won and Biden stole it.
Why should we believe you if you don't cite any evidence for your claims?
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#526I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly , ridiculously false), and has millions of people…
> But... There is no "buts" regarding freedom. I dont know if you have any experience with authoritarian measures but none of them starts like "This is a bad and permanent measure for no reason"... all of them are "exceptional", "to ensure public safety" ,"only valid as long as extraordinary circumstances are present"..all of them. The democrats were claiming fraud 4 years go due to a supposed Russian influence.The e…
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Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#527I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly , ridiculously false), and has millions of people…
>we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such I think that mainstream news has been doing this for the past 4 years. Here are 3 examples: 1) Trump Russia collusion hoax. 2) Trump saying that neo-nazis and white supremacists are "fine people" hoax. 3) Trump recommending people "inject bleach" ho…
1) the Meuller report is conclusive: there was collusion.
2) Trump did, in fact, say that. It’s recorded video.
3) Trump did, in fact, suggest that injecting disinfectant might be a treatment for COVID-19.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#528I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly , ridiculously false), and has millions of people…
> But... There is no "buts" regarding freedom. I dont know if you have any experience with authoritarian measures but none of them starts like "This is a bad and permanent measure for no reason"... all of them are "exceptional", "to ensure public safety" ,"only valid as long as extraordinary circumstances are present"..all of them. The democrats were claiming fraud 4 years go due to a supposed Russian influence.The e…
Are you in favor of allowing anti-vax and election fraud lies to be spread unchecked on FB, Google, YT, Twitter?
Talk all you want of freedom, but freedom is already reigning on these platforms, and SV's techno-libertarianism has clearly failed our democracy.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#529I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly , ridiculously false), and has millions of people…
I think the difference between now and the past is that everyone can exercise their constitutional right to free speech. Free speech used to be somewhat expensive -- by the time you've gone to journalism school and have been hired by someone with a media outlet, you've become the establishment. You want to tell a good story and hold those in power to account, but you know that you have a reputation and you can throw it all away if you don't think carefully about which stories you write and publish. All of this care has made free speech look pretty good and that's it's a must-have for society. (Using your words, to some extent this is "private companies getting to decide what's truthful and what's not"; Facebook doing it is not a whole lot different than the New York Times doing it. The Times doesn't publish every "letter to the editor", and Facebook doesn't have to either.)
What I think is happening now is that free speech is actually free. Thanks to tech companies, there is no cost to getting your ideas out there. The problem is, you have nothing to lose if your reputation is destroyed by poorly-thought-out speech. ("Cancel culture" seems to be the workaround for this, but it doesn't seem very good to me.) The result is that we have decided that we don't actually like this whole freedom thing. But, I think it's actually pretty okay; you have to take the bad with the good (or the very bad with the very good).
We should all be vigilant about calls for regulating speech. It looks like a very good short-term solution, but it won't be a very good long-term solution. To have the best possible society, we need to confront the underlying issues head-on. It's not "fake news" or that people are inflammatory on Facebook. It's that they don't have the educational background to think critically about what they read or hear, and can't actually distinguish a flame designed to manipulate them from writing that is designed to inform them. They are also often so isolated they can't even begin to understand other people's perspectives, and so have no mental model of how to even interpret writing they don't personally understand.
As a society, we have to make sure that we fix this problem. We need every human being to get a great education. We need people to interact with people that look different from them from an early age. It will be expensive, it will be hard, and it will take a long time. But I think looking out 200 years, it's where we want to go, and we should get started right now.
Resist the calls to sweep posts you don't like under the rug, or even to make them illegal. It won't fix any of the underlying problems.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#530I don't like what YouTube is doing. But... What is going on in the US just now is unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such. The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis (many of those lies just brazenly , ridiculously false), and has millions of people…
> But... There is no "buts" regarding freedom. I dont know if you have any experience with authoritarian measures but none of them starts like "This is a bad and permanent measure for no reason"... all of them are "exceptional", "to ensure public safety" ,"only valid as long as extraordinary circumstances are present"..all of them. The democrats were claiming fraud 4 years go due to a supposed Russian influence.The e…
> The democrats were claiming fraud 4 years go due to a supposed Russian influence.The evidence was tenuous and circumstantial at best.
Every element of this sentence is incorrect. Democrats were not claiming fraud - they were claiming that Russians interfered in the election and Trump / members of his campaign participated in that effort. Russian interference is undeniable - Dutch intelligence literally has it on tape [1]. And the report issued by the Republican controlled senate concluded that members of Trumps campaign and other people in his orbit were exchanging information with Russian intelligence and coordinating with cutouts like Guccifer 2.0.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/ef3b036949174a9b98d785129a93428b