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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

#831

Post by pfisch »

headsoup wrote: post #826
pfisch wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jan 6th would not have happened without social media spreading lies about the election for months. It is ridiculous to pretend otherwise.

Wouldn't it? What about the TV stations repeating it, or any other platform available? I didn't realise social media was so new! The situation says more about the deep division and anxiety within society that made it possible than social media being a cause.

The Jan 6 insurrection were organized almost entirely on social media, not the news. The news was barely talking about a "stop the steal" rally in dc on Jan 6 before it happened.

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

#832

Post by tekknik »

brnt wrote: post #662
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the 30-40% of YouTube users who don't have that skill, Who are you or YouTube to make this judgement? More often than not, the "I'm smarter than the average person" types are the ones making the worst decisions.

There is plenty of research supporting this thesis.

When will the egotistical narcissism stop? This type of “I’m better than you” talk is not acceptable when it comes to race, how come it’s acceptable when the subject is intelligence?

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

#833

Post by pfisch »

lliamander wrote: post #656
pfisch wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't their goal to stop the handover of power to Biden? Weren't they using force to achieve that goal by attacking the capitol building to stop congress from being able to proceed? How is that not an attempt to end democracy. An insurrection. The ringleaders seemed to be well aware that the objective was to invalidate the election and keep trump president. How is that not an insurrection?

Leaving aside the fact that these people believe democracy had already ended, and that they saw themselves as attempting to save democracy, how does this plan actually work ? Do they just sit in the capitol and declare Trump king? Maybe hold congress members hostage? Who in the federal government or military is going to go along with that? I just don't see it as a realistic threat to our system of government.

If they killed the speaker and a bunch of representatives Trump would declare martial law and lock down congress. No handover ever took place and it is very unclear what would happen next. The electoral count act is now out the window entirely and Trump has a bunch of the GOP claiming the election is fraudulent based on no evidence but that doesn't matter. Eventually after Trump has it all set up the house reconvenes and picks Trump as president because GOP has the most delegations and the vote was "fraudulent".

All that really needs to happen is to create enough disruption for Trump and his allies to find a way to set aside the vote and let the house pick based on number of delegations.

The brooks brothers riot basically did something similar. Created enough disruption to stop a recount.

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

#834

Post by dataangel »

greyhair wrote: post #755
mark_l_watson wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely blows my mind how many of my friends support soft censorship that supports their points of view. I try to listen to podcasts, occasionally, that are contrary to my own beliefs, not because of free speech but rather to make sure that I don’t end up in a “bubble.” Coincidentally, I listed to something by The Hill on YouTube last week and it was reasonably good because they had three people speculating on…

I tell this to my liberal friends all the time. You don't have to listen to the swill on Fox News, but you should at least listen to valid conservative viewpoints to understand why the disagreements exist in the first place, to understand why there is a range of views on any topic to begin with. Living inside a singular viewpoint bubble doesn't help anyone. The same people that insist that human sexuality is non-bina…

Isn't sexuality obviously objectively not binary? The mere existence of bisexuals seems to punch a hole in this idea.

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

#835

Post by Lascaille »

ComradePhil wrote: post #828
coffeefirst wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could actually use their brains and check if an account in otherwise good standing suddenly gets flagged, why that happened. This would eliminate most the edge cases. The problem is trusting the algorithm to make decisions and then pretending you aren’t responsible for them.

Clearly you have not considered the scale they operate in. What you are thinking would apply if they were handling 10s of hours of video everyday from dozens of individuals. They have about 10 hours of video uploaded every second, throught the day, all week, every month, every year... and their platform has 2 billion users. What you are suggesting would not be possible even if they hired everyone eligible to work in…

>Clearly you have not considered the scale they operate in.

Youtube literally operates walk-in 'creator spaces' where creators with popular channels can go to make use of editing equipment and resources. They can staff a media liaison office. They can staff a media liaison office in every major city of every first world country. They have those offices already existing to sell adverts, after all.

It would be trivial for them to operate those media liaison offices and ensure that things like this don't happen. They choose to hide behind the 'oops, the algorithm did it, nothing we could have done' excuse.

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

#836

Post by lukifer »

DoctorOW wrote: post #807
lukifer wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar claim of "clear and present danger" was used in 1919 to prosecute anti-war protestors for handing out pamphlets which advocated draft resistance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States While there is certainly a case for criminalizing direct prompts to imminent violence, attaching consequentialism to ideas is a very slippery slope, given enough creative hermeneutics by whoever currently wiel…

See, THIS is incomparable because anti-war pamphlets are ideas being banned. This policy from YouTube is not doing that. It's saying that ideas based on misinformation must be paired with the evidence to contextualize it.

Obviously the context is different (particularly in the difference between a state and a private corporation, quasi-monopolistic or not).

The key comparison is this: who decides what is misinformation? who decides what information/disinformation is "dangerous"? The right consequentialist narrative can frame any idea as dangerous.

Obviously it's dangerous to advise people to drink bleach. But you can find millions who'd make the same claim of vaccines (both "the jab", or pre-COVID childhood vaccinations); or, of ivermectin (while claims of its COVID efficacy are dubious, neither is it categorically unsafe for humans).

I'm not going to lose much sleep over YouTube attaching "The more you know..." links on controversial subjects, paternalism and "the backfire effect" notwithstanding. The concern is algorithmically putting their thumbs on the scale of discourse (and with second-order self-censorship effects). Even if/when they're mostly right (COVID vaccines work; global warming is anthropogenic), that is a disturbing level of unaccountable power.

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

#837

Post by ekianjo »

scarface74 wrote: post #608
ekianjo wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not a monopoly on paper, but a monopoly in terms of reach. When 99% of videos seen on the web are from youtube, can you pretend it's not akin to some kind of monopoly?

if you want to host your own video - pay for it.

and have effectively zero reach. Thanks for proving my point.

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

#838

Post by ekianjo »

ehsankia wrote: post #576
ekianjo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago. Nope, you are misunderstanding something here. Removing what was considered "given" is what becomes perceived as censorship.

> perceived as censorship keyword here being _perceived_

Everything is a matter of perception at the end of the day.

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

#839

Post by lliamander »

Lascaille wrote: post #820
lliamander wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence against innocent civilians is unequivocally worse than violence against the government, regardless of the politics that motivate it. You also seem to miss the point that violence by the pro-Trump protestors had no hope of actually capturing control of the government. Interfering with its operations for a time, sure. But not actual control. That's just not how any of this works. The only hope the pro-Trump fa…

>The only hope the pro-Trump faction had (and a slim hope at that) was to peacefully pressure Mike Pence into refusing to count the ballots from contested states. Which would potentially or eventually lead to the team they supported (Team Trump) capturing control of the government. If Pence refusing to count those ballots wouldn't potentially lead to them capturing control of the government, why would they do it?

Yes, it would lead to Trump being in control, but that's entirely different from a bunch of yokels playing king-of-the-hill with the capitol building.

Again, there's no way that the protestors themselves would be able to take control. And if anything the breaching of the capitol building rather prevented Pence from throwing out votes.

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

#840

Post by yibg »

xigoi wrote: post #825
yibg wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you read my original reply?

I have. Nobody is saying that YouTube should post negative reviews of itself. We're saying that a website which pretty much has a monopoly on hosting videos shouldn't abuse its position by trying to be the “ministry of truth”, and it's fair to criticize it even though it's legally allowed to do that.

Isn't the basic question, should youtube be forced to do something it doesn't want to? In this case, host videos it finds objectionable for whatever reason. Same way they don't allow porn for example. From the way I see it there are only a few options:

1) Youtube hosts everything that's legal, no filters at all

2) Youtube decides what it does and doesn't host

3) Somethings are ok (e.g. news / fake news), others are not (porn). Who decides what's ok and not ok if it's not the legal system or youtube itself?

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