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YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

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Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#831

Post by downandout »

jonbronson wrote: post #715
grawprog wrote: post #694

https://www.engadget.com/youtube-election-misinformation-dem... So, i'm kind of curious how it's reasonable a political party can ask for partisan censorship. >YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received a letter on Tuesday from four Democratic senators expressing “deep concern” over the spread of election misinformation on Google’s video platform. In the letter, senators Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii…

The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan. Nor are they the only political figures to reference the widely acknowledged facts that there was no spread widespread voter fraud. Prominent Republican politicians in positions of oversight have agreed with this outcome.

The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan.

Of course it's partisan. Had Trump won, and Biden voters were publishing content like this with the same lack of evidence, do you believe that Democratic senators would still be urging YouTube to take it down in the interest of fairness to Trump? I think you know the answer to that.

The scary part of this is that elected officials, who were presumably elected by people that thought they were going to protect the freedoms granted to them by the Constitution, and who must take an oath upon taking office to "support and defend the Constitution," sat down and wrote a letter that gleefully trampled all over one of our most fundamental constitutional rights. Since they were successful in this endeavor, it will happen again, on other, more expansive, partisan issues. Down the slippery slope we go.

The simple fact of the matter is that people are entitled to their opinions, and in the United States, they have a constitutional right to express those opinions in the same way and on the same platforms as those that disagree with them. The only problem is that now we have politicians who believe that those rights should only be extended to those who are on their side. Both sides of the political aisle are acting this way, and it does not bode well for our future as a country.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#832

Post by hda2 »

tootie wrote: post #809
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #386

Unpopular opinion: it is much better to have a leader hated by the media and who's every move is scrutinized by the press than to have a leader cowtowed by the press and given a free pass on anything. How do I know? I'm from Russia. Authoritatism begins with tight control of news sources.

There's a difference between silencing dissent and silencing disinformation.

Who gets to decide what's disinformation?

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#833

Post by nostromo »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #742
grawprog wrote: post #694

https://www.engadget.com/youtube-election-misinformation-dem... So, i'm kind of curious how it's reasonable a political party can ask for partisan censorship. >YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received a letter on Tuesday from four Democratic senators expressing “deep concern” over the spread of election misinformation on Google’s video platform. In the letter, senators Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii…

This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem. A lot of these videos are saying things that cannot reasonably be classified as anything other than misinformation. For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with. They also make up vague but scary claims about large numbers of illegal immigrants having voted, etc. All of this has a chilling ef…

It's legal to shout "fire!" in a theater if you believe there is a fire in the theater.

And I don't think there's any reason to believe that these YouTubers don't believe their allegations.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#834

Post by hammock »

endymi0n wrote: post #630
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…

"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a major cause of spreading misinformation…

Not clear to me why false balance is even a thing. It's the job of a paper in its reporting to report things, not to influence opinion. Implicit in "Bothsidesism" is the notion that a paper should have an interest in the direction of influence it provides. That's against the interest of "news" (in the literal sense of the word) and the general proliferation of reported facts. I suppose I'm several decades too late with this take.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#835

Post by ardy42 »

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. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.

Aren't you an actual lawyer? Do you think any of Giuliani's cases have enough merit that you would argue one and think you had a good chance of winning?

I could probably engineer a frivolous court case claiming Joe Biden's a space alien and is thus ineligible to be president, but that doesn't mean that anyone should withhold judgment on my claim before I inevitably flame out in the first hearing.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#836

Post by squeaky-clean »

kfarr wrote: post #663
haunter wrote: post #211

Remember about this when the usual "Google blocked my Gmail" post happens here. Interact with content like this on Youtube and you would risk losing your whole Google account. "They are a private company so they can do whatever they want!"

Yes thanks for mentioning this, the comments to this post are unusual even for HN. I'm wondering if there are so many comments that they are not actually sorted by most upvotes correctly

I don't know the algorithm they use, but I don't think HN has ever sorted comments purely by most upvotes, or upvote ratio. There's definitely some sort of recency bonus, newer comments with no votes tend to reach the top above older comments with many votes.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#837

Post by reddog »

Thanks YouTube! Trying to figure out what’s true and what’s not all on my own has been pretty damn hard. Frankly I may not be smart enough to sort it all out. Thankfully you, being at the center of truth in this universe, can help us all out. No election fraud. Got it.

Did you know that there are a bunch of videos that are critical of Apple products and a bunch more that praise Apple? They can’t both be right! Could you pick a side there and let me know before I buy my next laptop? Thanks!

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#838

Post by bird_monster »

syndacks wrote: post #770
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #386

Unpopular opinion: it is much better to have a leader hated by the media and who's every move is scrutinized by the press than to have a leader cowtowed by the press and given a free pass on anything. How do I know? I'm from Russia. Authoritatism begins with tight control of news sources.

YouTube !== Government Your comparison is off.

God would I love to live in a world where Youtube videos, facebook comments, instagram stories weren't the _actual_ source of most people's news (and by news I mean baseless things people with obvious biases and insidious motives say).

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#839

Post by natmaka »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #702
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…

Today I had a frightening interaction on Facebook with a friend of my wife's cousin. He claimed "the new COVID-19 virus had never been tested on humans, only animals" and when I called him on his misinformation and pointed out that the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people he shrugged and told me he was entitled to his opinions, and he just had different sources. This is somehow terrifying.

Did you ask for further explanations? What are his sources? "His opinions" may refer to the fact that he doesn't trust the secondary source you quoted in "the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people", or the primary source, or the very process/protocol of this trial...

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#840

Post by kiawe_fire »

rantwasp wrote: post #803
kiawe_fire wrote: post #509

In a free and fair society, it is not dangerous to ask questions. It is very dangerous to be told that you are not allowed to ask questions. In a marketplace of ideas, with free sharing of information, bogus claims will eventually (usually quickly) collapse on themselves, and true claims will bear themselves out. Attempting to silence ideas, even potentially false and harmful ideas, is the greatest way to build a soc…

Have you heard about the bullshit asymmetry principle? "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a... I personally don't buy this "free speech" speech, since free speech applies to the government, not to a public entity. Youtube is free to make any rules they want and to enforce them however they want…

Sure, making stuff up takes very little effort, and refuting it properly takes more. Makes sense.

But what if it’s not as simple as “this side is making everything up, and the other side is 100% honest”.

You could easily turn that argument around and say that the right is going to great lengths to have their evidence investigated, while the left is just trying to make it go away. Surely “energy expended” is not a great metric for judging bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not making a “free speech” argument. Of course YouTube is free to curate whatever they want to, and competitors are free to provide alternatives for users that want that. THAT is free speech.

My argument was not “YouTube can’t legally do this”, it was more trying to appeal to this notion some folks have that a topic of discussion merely existing is dangerous, and that somehow removing all of that discussion will eliminate that danger.

It also removes any possibility of the side removing the discussion from ever having to assess the validity of their facts, which logically and naturally means the other side will never have to assess and defend the validity of their argument either. Hello tribalism.

You don’t disprove flat earthers by telling them they aren’t allowed to ever talk about the shape of the earth, because naturally people will come up with the idea on their own, time and again, and forbidding it only lends itself to greater conviction.

Instead, sufficiently convince a large enough group of people through reason and evidence that the Earth is round, and those few people who willingly ignore the evidence will be too small and too fringe to be dangerous.

The danger is not in asking questions, the danger is in forbidding questions.

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