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YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

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Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#541

The extent of the "censorship" is getting ridiculous. It is an overreach of the platforms.

Agreed…the hypocrisy of these decisions grows increasingly outrageous each day. For example, the reasoning behind the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter was that his rhetoric was “dangerous,” in that it may have encouraged/not discouraged the January 6 riot. On Tuesday (March 1), a Russian official threatened actual war over the economic sanctions the world is taking against his country [1]. His account is still ac…

It is reasonable to say that Donald Trump caused the January 6 insurrection. The bigger issue for platform owners is that the insurrection represents catastrophic risk to them, and it is within their power to prevent it.

The social media platforms can't prevent if Russia goes to war with NATO. Censoring the russian official won't do anything.

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. Instructions on drinking bleach might cause others to be harmed. This is different because nobody has ever come to harm because of this. I'd imagine if people believed this, there would have been some kind of violence on say, January 6th the day of the insurrection-- sorry, inauguration. Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.

> ” Please let me know if you know how to fix this unfortunate typo.” You can click the edit button. But you’re probably trying to make a snarky point. If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad things. Here’s a scenario: Claiming that people are being systematically discriminated against could lead to violenc…

>>If we are going to say that censorship is justified because you want to prevent violence or insurrections, we open the floodgates to some seriously bad thingsIf it were just as bad as "The censors want to prevent the bad things", I think I might feel that it would be justifiable. This type of thinking also robs the broader public of its agency to reason. The broader public is not comprised of petulant children, regardless of what the media outlets would tell you and what the behavior of Twitter might show (very few of those people display that sort of behavior in actual life, where consequences happen).

This "moral highgrounding", to protect us from the corruption of verbiage that may occur on one platform or another is a ridiculous idea to think that functional adults might need. We are not so weak as to be protected from ideas that "must not be named". Words are not magic, and people cannot be enchanted by their mere utterances. They can be enticed by them being outlawed and the verboten mystique that makes the forbidden seem so savory.

People may be uneducated, but it is impossible to educate them through silence and the silencing of ideas. These verboten ideas will get spread around, major platform or no. They'll spread without any kind of resistance or discussion and no disinfectant light of truth by debate will be shone on them because they will be pushed down to the nooks and crannies, off of the popular platforms where the light of day can show them to be the BS that they are. They'll find their place in small groups and factions, I felt and grow and split people apart. They'll make people not talk to each other and they'll make us a weaker country and a less educated one. A country that tries to run away from hard questions and conversations because it's easier to tell someone or some group to shut up and don't talk about that, rather than address a topic with an open and honest conversation with facts and dialogue.

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#543
post #59

Soave (co-host of The Hill’s morning show: Rising) wrote an article about it here: https://reason.com/2022/03/03/youtube-rising-the-hill-electi... > YouTube has taken the position that merely acknowledging an utterance of the false claim is the same thing as making the claim yourself unless you correct and disavow it elsewhere in the video. It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that…

>It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that a false election claim makes an appearance.

Why not just stick it in every video you make regardless of content if the alternative is potentially the loss of your career?

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even now many on the left insist it was a tie or something. It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote. There are a number of aspects of the US voting system which are less than perfect, and that’s just one.

> It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote This is incorrect. You require a majority of votes in the USA in the presidential election. What you seem to be missing is that people do not vote for the President but vote to direct how their state votes. States vote for President. People vote for states.

I think you have described the problem. More specifically, states vote for the president but not in a way that is proportional to their percentage of the union’s population.

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the solution is better education, not censorship.

Totally, but only one of those things is within YouTube’s power. There are all kinds of decisions to make where “what do we do to mitigate this now” looks different from “what’s the ideal place we want to be?”

Definitely a good idea to let corporate social media behemoths decide what is acceptable speech. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#546

The extent of the "censorship" is getting ridiculous. It is an overreach of the platforms.

Agreed…the hypocrisy of these decisions grows increasingly outrageous each day. For example, the reasoning behind the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter was that his rhetoric was “dangerous,” in that it may have encouraged/not discouraged the January 6 riot. On Tuesday (March 1), a Russian official threatened actual war over the economic sanctions the world is taking against his country [1]. His account is still ac…

Exactly. Lets assume Trump was completely the leader of January 6th and giving direct orders to go into the building and those people were his army. The only death by violence was one person and on a causality on his side. In Ukraine literally thousands are dying. There are people who literally attempted assassinations getting bail and keeping their online accounts.

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#548

The avg. American reads at a middle school level. Many read at an elementary school level, meaning ~1/4 of America will take this video as fact. Couple this with an algorithm that will only feed you things you like and you have a recipe for disaster. 100% unrestricted freedom of speech only works with a highly educated populate which America does not have.

Educated people are more easy to brainwash actually. They’ll believe anything the establishment tells them because they spend more time in school following directions and going “by the book” - they excel at this.

Less educated people need to learn to trust their instincts, and be skeptical at all times.

Politics is about really simple stuff because you can’t over complicate at such a high level of abstraction.

I think there is no relationship whatsoever between education level and common sense. If anything the correlation is negative. Highly educated people don’t need common sense because they deal with complex things.

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the solution is better education, not censorship.

Totally, but only one of those things is within YouTube’s power. There are all kinds of decisions to make where “what do we do to mitigate this now” looks different from “what’s the ideal place we want to be?”

Is it not? I'm sure this would be very difficult to get right, but I've often wondered why there isn't more innovation in the direction of not censorship but rather "gating" behind proof of knowledge. What I mean is, what if there were a series of questions presented to the viewer before they could consume this kind of content? This could act as a way to deter folks from mindlessly viewing the video but also as an educational tool. For this kind of political video, you could ask relevant questions from eg the US citizenship test [0].

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/questions...

Re: YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

#550

The extent of the "censorship" is getting ridiculous. It is an overreach of the platforms.

I disagree, if you don’t like it you can move to another platform. No one is forcing you to use it. For that matter “The Hill” can create their own. Always silly, the entitlement to someone else platform based on some misunderstanding of censorship and the 1st amendment.

At this point, major platforms function like public spaces in online discourse, even though they are legally considered private property. Because of their huge influence in society, Youtube shouldn't be permitted to censor political viewpoints in their platform.

And see, there's always a fine balance between private property rights and other rights. For example: you can't prevent people from a given ethnicity from shopping in your store, even though it is a private property and in many cases you can refuse service to a particular customer - just not for this reason. And this is perfectly okay, because private property rights aren't absolute.

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