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YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

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Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#661

Post by jmkni »

whatshisface wrote: post #177
tasty_freeze wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your edit doesn't go far enough. He encouraged hate against the parents of the children killed at the Sandyhook mass shooting. Yes, Jones has a right to be a crackpot, but it ends when it infringes on the rights of the people Jones' audience harassing.

You may be applying an uneven standard by wanting to ban the speech that turns your stomach, but not the speech that turns the Corporate Overlord's stomachs. You could argue that hacking videos encourage computer crime - the counterargument would be that there are plenty of reasons to talk about something other than to actually encourage people to do it. In fact, Alex Jones' defense in one court case he was in was th…

Didn't Alex Jones basically dox the parents of dead children and encourage his viewers to phone them?!

Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#663

Post by paulmd »

whatshisface wrote: post #539
paulmd wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is one of the few countries that believes in a radical, unlimited right to free speech. Most other countries, it is not tolerated, and this has not lead to a slippery slope. Claiming that the families of shooting victims are actually "crisis actors" would not be tolerated under British forms of slander/libel law; Nazi apologism/fetishism or rallying is not tolerated under German laws. These societies aren't ju…

If there was a horrible fact right under the surface, discussion of which was being successfully suppressed by German/UK speech laws, you would not hear about it.

Well, go on. Is there a horrible secret in Germany?

It seems unlikely that there would be. This is the 21st century. Governments can't even get their soldiers to keep war crimes secret anymore.

The odds that nobody would walk away from Omelas in 2019 is... slim.

Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#664

Post by paulmd »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #557
paulmd wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve thought seriously about it; the biggest thing holding me back being the lack of a job waiting for me there. Perhaps I could pick my German back up. Why do you think that’s relevant? In your mind, you can’t comment on something unless you’re personally involved in it? It is plainly evident that Europeans enjoy a high degree of freedom and a broad and open discourse despite the lack of an unlimited freedom of spee…

> In your mind, you can’t comment on something unless you’re personally involved in it? Well, as a German, it's just another instance of Americans who don't know 5% of what is going on here, using simplifications so gross they might as well be completely fabricated memes, to sidestep actually making a solid argument. I'm fine with it, I'm not going to fight that particular windmill. But it's really astonishing how a…

> Well, as a German, it's just another instance of Americans who don't know 5% of what is going on here

Go on then, what exactly "is happening in Germany"?

I suppose this is where you reference the "immigrant hordes" and so on, and the need to "keep Germany for Germans"?

I am broadly familiar with German domestic politics. After all, they are EU politics, which are world politics. Germany is easily within the top 10 most influential countries on the world stage.

> Individuals decide things, "we as a society" is BS, it doesn't exist, though it rings familiar. Nazis "as a society" decided Jews and others don't "have value". You need to be more precise than that.

Oh, "we as individuals need to decide" on whether or not libel or aggression "have value" as constitutionally protected speech? Based on your argument upthread, I suppose you think it should be put up to a vote then?

Again: we can constitutionally decide that people shouldn't vote on whether "jews have value" but also constitutionally decide that Naziism has no value. Even America has decided, in principle, that certain kinds of speech are not protected.

You present a false dilemma here. Why do you think that is not a consistent argument?

Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#665

Post by ajsnigrutin »

edanm wrote: post #648
Liquix wrote: post #117

Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like. Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city i…

> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship? I mean... no? I think it's useful to have a separate concept for actual censorship (government-mandated), and just "someone built a really great way to connect to a bunch of users, that didn't exist 20 yea…

This works in a non monopolized system. If you live in a large city with many different stores, and you get banned for one of them for wearing a blue shirt, that doesn't matter too much.

If you live in a remote city with one wallmart and no other stores, and wallmart bans you, that's a problem.

Yes, there are alternatives, but 97% of the market is definitely a monopoly.

Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#666

Post by lostphilosopher »

edanm wrote: post #648
Liquix wrote: post #117

Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like. Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city i…

> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship? I mean... no? I think it's useful to have a separate concept for actual censorship (government-mandated), and just "someone built a really great way to connect to a bunch of users, that didn't exist 20 yea…

This is a good point. I've been hearing "deplatforming" as the word for what's happening and that seems more accurate than censoring. In part because if we call this censoring and then later the government actually does strictly ban this content - what do we call that?

Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#667

Post by ajsnigrutin »

pgt wrote: post #450
Liquix wrote: post #117

Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like. Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city i…

Ah, but we do know how to navigate the wilderness. You see, we built this city. We built it on ARP and IP. And we can build it again - next time with better foundations. The gatekeepers underestimate how long tastemakers are willing to go without them to discourage long-term bad behaviour. My only regret is that I did not contribute to building DuckDuckGo.

The problem isn't you and me, the problem is "the most".

In my time, we all hung out on IRC (well, some still do, but mostly for technical stuff). But IRC was like ARP and IP, you needed to set some parameters, enter a server address (that you had to look up in a paper magazone or had to ask a friend for it), you had to join a channel, that you had to find first (listing all channels was useless on larger ircnets), and then you could chat. ...and you had to be online to receive messages, which was a problem back then with dialup connections.

Then came "social networks" (myspace, facebook,...), where all you needed to know was "myspace.com", and they offered objectively "more" than irc (chat messages were recorded even if you were offline, photos, profile pages,...), and people started using those. So if you wanted to chat with friends, you had to make an account there. And most people slowly migrated to myspace, and then facebook, and so on.

Anyone can build a website, set up video streaming, buy virtual machines for video hosting, etc. But if "all of your friends" (97%(?) of video watchers) open up youtube, and search for videos there, and your video is not there, it's the same if you were alone on an empty irc channel with two other users on the irc server.

Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#668

Post by edanm »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #665
edanm wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship? I mean... no? I think it's useful to have a separate concept for actual censorship (government-mandated), and just "someone built a really great way to connect to a bunch of users, that didn't exist 20 yea…

This works in a non monopolized system. If you live in a large city with many different stores, and you get banned for one of them for wearing a blue shirt, that doesn't matter too much. If you live in a remote city with one wallmart and no other stores, and wallmart bans you, that's a problem. Yes, there are alternatives, but 97% of the market is definitely a monopoly.

The difference between your example and the YouTube case is in how accessible are the alternatives. If the only store close to you bans you, then it can be somewhere between a major inconvenience and practically impossible to go to an alternative.

On the other hand, replacing YouTube as a hosting platform isn't too hard (I think? I don't actually have much experience with this but there are alternatives).

Of course the big issue isn't YouTube the host, it's YouTube the marketing platform - but even here there are alternatives. Host on vimeo, but use other social media more. More Facebook posts. Get an audience via podcasts. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying that I'm not at all convinced that YouTube really is a monopoly in the sense where we want to do something about it.

Re: YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

#669

Post by sullyj3 »

da_chicken wrote: post #562

I've been trying to argue for awhile that if the major public venues become privately moderated that it would have a chilling effect on free speech. I continually get the rhetoric that free speech only applies to the government (it doesn't; the First Amendment only applies to the government but the ideal of free speech is a universal human right) and that censorship is something only the government can do (also not t…

the idea that a private entity should be compelled to host speech they don't like seems like a massive violation of rights to me.
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