The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire • Hacker News Board

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#851

Post by gnusty_gnurc » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

twentydollars wrote: post #666

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lies are toxic to free speech IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant. You don't need to protect speech everyone finds unobjectionable. You need to protect speech that is almost universally opposed. Minorities need protection, majorities don't, and this the basis of the American notion of freedom - insofar as the individual is the smallest minority. > Do y…

> IMHO you're not interested in free speech unless you're willing to defend speech you find repugnant. Defending speech I find repugnant is not the same thing as defending a nonexistent right to post lies on Youtube. Host the lies on your own website. Create flyers and pass them out. Talk to people in public settings. Write to the newspaper (they might not post your lies, but you're free to try to get them). Hold con…

The whole point is the sanctimonious, heavy-handed nature of a platform that otherwise likes to act like they're concerned about the public good.

I recognize they have a right to do it, but I have a right to make noise about it and criticize them.

We got so many pop-ups, accounts suspended, etc. around the Hunter Biden stuff, and what do you know - it turns out there was substance to the story.

This never happened around the Russian collusion stuff and I suspect most of the city lib elite that inhabits tech companies wouldn't find that a sanctimonious.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#852

Post by bmn__ » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #752

hackyhacky wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you mean that sarcastically, but you shouldn't. It's fun to complain about "the establishment," until it isn't there anymore. In the current case, "the establishment" means American democracy, which is built on people's faith in the institution of elections. If you erode that faith, democracy no longer works. That may be fine with you, but it's not fine with me.

Then why base it on faith? Make it impossible to vote multiple times/places, or as someone else. Invalidate registration [6] for , and immediately flag when, a dead person tries to vote. Make it so you can instantaneously see that your vote was entered and confirm it to help with the anomaly detection. I think this is what everyone wants, and I think it would appease many worries. Unfortunately, this would almost cer…

> harden these electronic voting machines

Make that voting computers, and abolish. If even HN readers can't get this right, there is no hope of electoral reform in the USA to raise it to an acceptable democratic level:

ODIHR election observers must not be blocked anymore.¹ Elections are to be held on a Sunday to not disenfranchise the working population. Votes are always counted and tallied manually.² Postal votes that arrive after the election date must be invalidated. Amend the constitution to require elections to be universal, direct, free, equal, secret, transparent and effective.³

If anyone is against these reforms, well, I'm certain Taibbi will not hesitate to call you too un-American, wrong and other things.

----

¹ The USA are a member state.

² This must be done so that the proper following of the procedure can be verified by anyone. Voting computers cannot be verified by just anyone. –– Using voting computers, being general purpose computers, are inherently easy to manipulate. Cracking just one model enables wide-spread fraud. Counting manually however means that wide-spread voting fraud requires undermining each location separately which is much harder to pull off and also multiplies the risk of detection.

³ These words have a specific legal meaning.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#853

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #773

dredmorbius wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing an argument the other party didn't make, ("You are assuming that the regular media is the default, the truth"), and choosing to rebut that strawman then their actual key point ("It's about combating weaponized misinformation"), is disengenuous in the extreme. The weapons now are bigger, faster, have greater reach, higher fidelity, multimedia appeal, vastly more intelligence and data, can be tuned in rea…

People have been killing each other and themselves for the supremacy of fairy tales since the beginning of time, but please tell me how getting someone to believe a conspiracy theory and vote "badly" is somehow a society-breaking new invention.

Scale. Anonymity. Impunity. Rate. Effectiveness.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#854

Post by Talanes » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #558

Talanes wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the solution to a negative can still itself be the cause of equal or greater negatives. Hence why I was asking if you believe it is a NET gain. Because the Government cracking down on speech, even obvious lies, will erode some people's trust in the system as well.

> And yet the solution to a negative can still itself be the cause of equal or greater negatives. Cracking down on anti-election rhetoric is an obvious net positive, and needs no further explanation. > Because the Government cracking down on speech, even obvious lies, will erode some people's trust in the system as well. Too late for that. Dozens of millions of Americans have lost faith in the 2020 election. The only…

>Cracking down on anti-election rhetoric is an obvious net positive, and needs no further explanation.

Yes, it does. Cracking down on speech would further enrage all those people, while also pissing off a great deal more. I think riots are a more likely outcome of your solution than anything positive.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#855

Post by skyzyx » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

My7thAccount wrote: post #747

JellyBeanThief wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the difference between "forcing everyone to deal with it" and what we've been doing for the last four years? Or, alternatively, why do we think we'll get a different result by doing the same thing over again? I mean, it seems to me like we already have scepticism in spades. There's two sides, and if one of them said the sky was blue the other would be sure it were green. It looks to me like what is needed is…

One leaves control of speech up to the individual speaker while the other leaves it in the hands of an Oligarchy of people who think they are know better than everyone else because they have more money. There's a degree of arrogance behind the thinking, "I'm smart enough to discern fact from fiction but those less intelligent than I must need my help or else they might believe a falsehood"

You’re missing a key point — journalistic integrity. It’s something that can be measured and validated.

Second is experience in discerning fact from fiction — not everybody has it. And example is that guy who believed that the earth was flat, so he jury rigged a rocket and shot himself straight up in the air. He then died from his injuries. Elementary school mathematics taught us that he wasn’t going to be successful, yet he chose to reject even the most foundational verified truths.

Third are the mathematical concepts of probability versus possibility. People who choose to believe things that are untrue tend to lean on the idea of “possibility“ without considering it’s likelihood (“probability“).

And there are people who question things simply for the purpose of questioning them. This is where fear, uncertainty, and doubt comes from. These are things that hold us back rather than pushing this forward. This is also known as “conspiracy“.

But there is a dramatically smaller group which aims to _seek truth_. These are the people who not just have an opinion, but are willing to put in the effort to evaluate evidence and allow their opinions to be changed by what can be proven. They recognize that it’s easy to want to look for patterns which support their existing biases, and they do their best to guard against that. They also recognize that psychology has taught us the humans like to look for patterns in data which suggest cause-and-effect, even if none exists. An example of this is when someone correlates the will of God to finding a $20 bill on the ground, when in reality it’s simply coincidence.

When you see hoof prints, you should think horses, not zebras. The simplest conclusion is usually (has the highest probability of being) right. One simply has to look at Trump’s track record with the truth to realize that he’s probably just lying.

And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. It does not apply to your relationship with YouTube. YouTube is a corporation that has an entirely separate agreement with its users, which does not include freedom of speech. Therefore, it’s not censorship — by definition. You’re not being censored, if you’ve broken the rules of that agreement. And in the end, it’s YouTube’s decision since it’s their platform you’re using.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#856

Post by Reelin » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #815

Reelin wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech. What a snappy cliche. If you prohibit certain people from using the printing press but allow others to do so, then in practice you are limiting their freedom to speak relative to other people. To imply otherwise is either disingenuous or profoundly misinformed.

Everyone has access to the modern equivalent of a printing press. Anyone can buy a domain name and a VPS and "print" as many leaflets as they want. Publishing on YouTube is more like, well, publishing. There's a middleman. They own their own press, they have a reputation and an audience, they bring the eyeballs, they make the money and they give you a cut. It has never been censorship for a publisher to decline to pu…

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc (and to a lesser extent search engines) are the modern equivalent of the printing press in terms of the effect they've had on how we communicate. A domain and VPS are simply not a viable substitute for access to mainstream social networks; to claim otherwise is disingenuous.

They are not at all similar to publishing. There's no editor. There's no approval process for the typical use case, only a retroactive removal process. They don't have an audience in the traditional sense of people paying someone to curate information for them but rather depend on network effects to maintain a monopoly on their segment of the market. To that end, they have more in common with a dating app than they do with the New York Times. The presence of advertising revenue is the only legitimate similarity I see to a traditional publishing model.

In spite of your claim that YouTube isn't infrastructure, it appears to me to have far more commonalities than differences with it. That it isn't (yet) regulated as such is merely a legal peculiarity from my perspective.

(And the above doesn't even begin to consider the effects that dumping VC and megacorp funded free product has had on the market. Good luck starting a competing platform when there's no viable way to operate a subscription model and your direct competitor has a monopoly on the relevant advertising market.)

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#857

Post by hackyhacky » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

lliamander wrote: post #845

hackyhacky wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about banning disagreement. It's not even about opinions. It's about combating weaponized misinformation. It's strange for Americans to be on the business side of a propaganda weapon, as we're more used to using against our enemies. Technology has finally made it feasible for malicious actors to cheaply and effectively manipulate people with lies, here in the US. If you don't believe it's a weapon, you're wr…

> If you don't believe it's a weapon, you're wrong. If you don't believe weaponized misinformation is dangerous, look at the regimes it's toppled. And if you think the "American spirit," or somesuch nonsense, makes us immune, I hope we won't have to find out. I don't see anyone here arguing those points, so I think this is a bit of a strawman. > It's not about banning disagreement. It's not even about opinions. It's…

They are definitely separable, based on intent.

The marketplace of ideas works only insofar as everyone involved operates with good faith. Weaponized misinformation is the opposite of that: expressing what appears to be an opinion, but is actually a manipulation tactic. Look in particular for arguments that appeal to emotion (especially anger), nationalism, and in-group/out-group. The fascists understood, and still understand, these strategies.

If you can't tell the difference between a genuine opinion and a misinformation tactic, you are ill prepared to participate in today's media environment.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#858

Post by Gibbon1 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #531

Gibbon1 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascists killed something like 70-5 million people during WWII. The neocon/neoliberal wars in the middle east have killed a couple of million.

I’m pretty sure Nazi propaganda is banned on YouTube?

Amusing no. HN which hates censorship. Instinct is to censor hard facts that don't fit their preferred narrative.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#859

Post by michaelmrose » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #648

andrei_says_ wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is not an argument for giving powerful weaponized mass disinformation tools to more people, including foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society to the point of inciting conflict and dismantling democracy. Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution. What are some better alternatives?

I’m not arguing for that, but it might actually be an indirect solution. By forcing everyone to deal with it, skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise. As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.

Half of people have a below average IQ. More like 65% of older adults are both below average thinkers and above average voters.

Why would you think skepticism would be a suitable response to misinformation? The only mathematically viable way to combat such misinformation is to disenfranchise people too stupid to be in charge of anything that effects other people's lives.

Re: The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

#860

Post by thu2111 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #727

ceilingcorner wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not arguing for that, but it might actually be an indirect solution. By forcing everyone to deal with it, skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise. As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.

Sorry, you are in fact arguing for that. But that won't work. It's well-known that misinformation propaganda works even if people know it's propaganda . People won't magically build up some kind of immunity and suddenly trust the scientific method - they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. If employed by a state, this is often the goal of that propaganda.

Basically everyone trusts the scientific method.

However, there are a lot of people who don't trust certain types of 'scientists' because they've observed that those people don't seem to use the scientific method, even though they claim they do. That's a very reasonable and correct form of skepticism.

The lazy assumption that anyone who claims to be scientific actually is has been exploited by demagogues throughout history. Karl Marx was famously keen on presenting his own views as 'scientific' although there is of course nothing scientific about Marxism. Lysenko justified his beliefs on the grounds that they were scientific, and all sceptics of this claim were suppressed (i.e. jailed).

The way to tackle scepticism about the scientific method is to recognise that it's not scepticism of a methodology but an academic sub-culture.