If you read a comment in here, and you see the words "obviously" or "clearly", and that's the whole argument... That person is likely experiencing cognitive dissonance.
YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
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Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#922> We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election. How can any honest person accept this state of affairs? What would be the reaction of the gleefully censorious US big tech employees, many here on HN, if non-US social media giant enacted such measures in their locality? I don't see evidence that the 2020 election stolen from the Republican c…
> but this is a huge red flag that something might be going on On the contrary. This is an indicator of the Republican claims being based on no evidence. The fact that these lies happen to be incredibly damaging to the perception of US democracy is a good enough reason for a private company to decide not to host it. It's not part of an even larger coverup, as you seem to believe. Do you know how many people would nee…
> The fact that these lies happen to be incredibly damaging to the perception of US democracy is a good enough reason for a private company to decide not to host it.
This is the narrative, yes. Where is the evidence that Trump and his followers screaming about election fraud has damaged the perception of US democracy? So far, it appears that the system did the thing it was supposed to do: Trump is being removed from his office.
If people telling lies about a system is sufficient to destroy that system, then perhaps the system needs to die and be replaced with something less refutable.
Is democracy really so fragile?
A free society increasingly appears to be, as censorship ramps up.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#923https://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…
I wonder where it's going to end. Once you have started taking sides, started to take down videos you fund spreading incorrect points of view, you can consider to extend it. Videos that doubt the efficaciousness of masks. Videos that say the quarantine is a plot by world government of reptiloid aliens. Videos that promote the idea of flat Earth. Well, this is a dead end. How about videos that Taiwan is in fact indepe…
I would have agreed with you 5 or 10 years ago, full stop.
Today, we live in a society where crackpot ideas are being shared by acquaintances, but unlike 10 years ago there is no common sense and logic being applied at the value and factual nature of the information. The systems are designed and layered in such a way that a person gets a bit of information, that information is highly compounded in their world view, other ideas are not in their funnel. Even if they go and try to validate it (which they may not because everything else in the funnel on their information streams supports/compounds the view) there are whole markets of pseudo news that are entertainment channels masquerading as news supporting the same insane ideas.
These systems act as badly as a schizophrenic thought process slowly detaching the participants from reality as the information they see compounds their world view.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#924It seems like a poor business decision to be so heavy handed on this. They have made it black and white where a shade of gray would've been much better. For instance, they could leave the videos accessible but exclude them from their recommendations engine or apply a "misinformation" ranking factor that will be in effect for those videos.
Now that they're disallowing videos containing this information, why wouldn't broader Google exclude from web search webpages containing the same misinformation? What is the principle that applies to videos about this topic that doesn't apply to webpages about this topic?
I don't agree at all that the US election was rigged, but removing this content entirely still feels heavy handed when they could continue to be a platform for it, but without pushing/recommending it.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#925This thread is fascinating. Same type of troll/sarcasm/meme comments (e.g. "orange man bad") as you find on Reddit, which are normally absent from HN. This topic clearly brings out the worst no matter where it's discussed.
This is the only comment I feel like I can meaningfully respond to (and agree with). Much of the rest of the opinions expressed (especially in the most upvoted comments) are done so in such a way that makes it seems as though there's no debate to be had. You're either for or against free speech. No in between. Of course, counterexamples abound but it doesn't matter in this discussion. Truly a sad thing to witness. As the Chinese proverb goes, we certainly do live in interesting times.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#926This is ridiculous. Regardless of your politics, this is just going the wrong direction. Where was this policy when the other side was pushing the Russia collusion narrative for years?
Wait - was the "Russia collusion narrative" that one totally crazy massive investigation that ended up getting 34 people indicted? One of them Trump just pardoned Flynn for a week or so ago? Are you just gonna sit here and pretend like they're even remotely the same thing to a bunch of people calling for the dismissal of our democratic institution of counting votes fairly? As if people were talking about "civil war"…
Read up on the facts. The investigation found tons of wrongdoing by inept people who really didn’t know election law or the rules around government dealings, and consistently lied under oath. But it didn’t find any evidence of the alleged collusion with the Russians. People were fired or went to jail, but mostly over lying to the investigators and obstructing the investigation.
Note the Russians certainly did meddle in the election. But collusion requires active, willing collaboration by Trump’s campaign, promises of quid-pro-quo, etc. None of that happened outside of a handful of isolated, rogue or accidental, and not very impactful instances.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#927Absolutely nothing about the USA is in danger of falling apart. These conspiracy theories would die by themselves in a month or two. Lets be clear about what's happening here: Google/Facebook and the like are becoming targets of anti-trust regulatory lawsuits (privacy, data-gathering, monopolistic behavior, etc). This is just an attempt to build goodwill with the incoming administration so they can call in a favor la…
> These conspiracy theories would die by themselves in a month or two.
You mean like how the antivaxx and flat earth conspiracies naturally died out?
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#928Regardless of what you believe to be 'The Truth', has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance or convince skeptical people, again, whether right or wrong, that there really is 'nothing to see here'.
> Regardless of what you believe to be 'The Truth', has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance or convince skeptical people, again, whether right or wrong, that there really is 'nothing to see here'.
I suppose that depends on if that dissonance was based in factual accounts of reality. If so, then yeah censorship probably wouldn't work. That's because opinions based in fact are consistent with the rest of the world and that tends to keep them in circulation. On the other hand, completely false and baseless lies don't last long without someone pouring energy into them. That's because they're in conflict with details that are readily observed. They might catch people's attention as a kind of entertainment. But, beyond that, they don't provide much practical value. When they're squelched, they'll just fall out of fashion like a cancelled Netflix series.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#929It's kind of amazing to me that a bunch of people who work in tech, and are ostensibly very smart, seem to think that elections in the United States are somehow uniquely immune to fraud. We believe this despite the fact that on any given day there's an article (several, sometimes) about some event driven by fraud in basically any other human endeavor that goes on in this country or the world that gets upvoted to the front page. Elections in this country are basically based on the honor system. We don't enforce any nation-wide robust protocols to verify anything. We just trust that everything that happens is on the up-and-up at the local level. That's fine, in my book, but it's also fine to be suspicious that there should be more scrutiny.
Is claiming the election was "stolen" part of that scrutiny? Well, I don't know. And neither does YouTube. Tech has made it super easy to amplify claims of scrutiny, but it's really uncomfortable to me that Google gets to decide what kind of scrutiny is okay. This is the company that has a business model that is literally based constant and universal surveillance of its users. Whey the hell should I trust them?
Feels like we should all take a break from the internet for a while after reading this thread.
Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
#930Unpopular 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.
The point of having a critical media is that the electorate can actually punish their leaders for bad things. Leaving those leaders in place because criticism is actually good defeats the point.
You missed the point. It was about media being equally critical to all leaders, not selectively.