All: please don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments. Unfortunately the two top subthreads have become so large that they fill out the first page entirely. You have to click 'More' at the bottom to see the rest (there are almost 1000 at this point).
The "more" pagination button appears to only be visible on the first page of comments....you need to update the URL manually to get to comment pages 3+
It might be nice to keep everything mostly collapsed by default, except the top 3 replies for the first level, and 2 replies for the 2nd, 1 reply for the 3rd.
Speaking of meta-issues, this article seems to have just dropped to the second page, and is sitting below older articles with 10-15x fewer votes. Perhaps worth checking whether any jiggery-pokery is going on.
I think a more fundamental problem is a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels, and having financial interests in various global dictatorships.
The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.
At risk of nitpicking, why do say "controls" rather than e.g. "services" or "handles"? When you say "controls" it's like you're saying Google has some kind of monopoly power that makes it hard to switch. And yet anyone can easily switch to e.g. DuckDuckGo. If that's a monopoly, it's not quite the kind of a monopoly we should generally be worried about.
Browsers would be a different issue. In that case, there are network effects like about what standards are supported and how, which make it difficult to launch a competing browser, even with technological superiority, and in that case, it would be reasonable to worry about too much market share.
Tell your legislators you want to see antitrust action taken against Google!
They're abusing the hell out of their status. AMP, removal of adblock capability, driving web standards to potentially be more opaque, walled gardens, automated removal and takedown, etc.
It doesn't even include Baidu, which dominates China and has something like >12% of the world's market share for search engines, so how can Google have 91%?
Honestly about a year ago I decided to switch to an iPhone once the "contract" is up. I have used iOS and I didnt find it anymore special, but it isn't really that much different to me to be bothered by using either one. I will also take that moment to ungooglify my life including email and such.
These numbers are just for the US. Comparing this to the AT&T break-up is not even similar, because Google has but even bigger market share when you consider their international operations as well.
It is not just monopolistic control of their specific areas of interest. They have had pretty tight integration with the State Department, especially under the previous administration, getting involved in negotiations and all kinds of affairs: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems
(quote from there):
> Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.14
But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?"
There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?
Hyper-nationalism is a backlash to globalism due to the recently realized risks of opaque governments exploiting transparent governments.
The intentions were good: Reduce the risk of global nuclear war. The globalism outcome is good for trade and relations with nations that have transparent governments, bad with the opaque.
What if the laws against censoring content would be quite strict, then a censoring Chinese YouTube clone wouldn't even be possible.
(In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).
I don’t consider that likely. There are many Chinese social media properties inside the Great Firewall but they haven’t ever had much success outside of it.
Think about it, if a Chinese social media site could outcompete YouTube, they would just do it already anyway. If they can’t, they have to either block YouTube and have a Chinese clone propped up by an effectively protectionist policy or else try and get YouTube to cooperate with them.
We have loads of communication channel alternatives. People freely choose google and should be allowed to continue freely choosing whatever platform they please. The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.
Ah yes, the idea that profit driven management is a better juror of freedom than our democratic society.
Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street.
To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.
The argument is a popular Authoritarian viewpoint that isn't viewed as such. Meanwhile the work towards decentralization continues, one day I hope it'll get the network effect akin to Bittorrent.
Laws are written for the sole purpose of serving our needs. "Free markets" are also a made-up concept designed to serve us. If they are no longer doing that we should change it as we see fit.
> The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.
It's an elected body that is chosen by the people in a fair and free democratic process. Why would they be incapable of serving their electorate?
Is someone suggesting that a governing body chose platforms? I haven’t seen that yet suggested.
What I have seen is suggesting breaking up giants like Google and Facebook to allow them to compete more with each other rather than allowing the two fold in any possible alternatives as soon as they become popular.
I don’t think it’s about a governing body making that decision for you.
If all the policies and processes around censorship were laid out in the open for that to be considered when weighing up the options, people would be able to make more informed choices.
I’m always really worried about the unintended consequences of having the government regulate what Google can and cannot moderate on their platform. That strikes me as a larger free speech issue than our current system.
I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.
>>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.>>
Sure they could. They had the East India Tea Company.
I'm not a legal expert but it seems like the fundamentals are pretty simple and timeless. If they have a monopoly, then their private get-out-jail-free card no longer applies.
The East India Tea Company wasn't a fully antonymous entity though by the time of the American Revolution; it was more equivalent to a state-owned enterprise found in the likes of modern day China. Because of this any "powerful" moves the company made was assumed to be an extension of British political will moreso than that of some profit-seeking NGO.
That would be why the US Justice department is looking at an antitrust suit, Anti-trust is the remedy that came about in 1890 when the Standard Oil trust seemed unstoppable.
That said, I see this sort of thing a bit differently.
If Google is all powerful and a monopoly and never in danger of being killed, why comply with an authoritarian foreign nation to remove comments that are amplifying an anti-government sentiment? Why should Google care if the government of China is feeling a bit insecure about their own population's loyalty?
I worked at Google during "China Debacle #1", where Google went to China as an uncensored search engine, left in the middle of China Debacle #2, when China infiltrated Google's infrastructure to use it to track dissidents, and watched from the outside (as many here did) for China Debacle #3, when Google tried to create a censored search engine for China.
Why does Google need China so badly, that they are willing to compromise their values (debacle #3 and this comment censoring behavior)?
I don't think you need the antitrust legislation. I think Google is slowly dying and as they die their ideals wash away. Clean user experience, gone, Useful free services with return only positive feelings for the brand, gone. Employee perks, fading away. Lofty slogans of not being evil, gone.
This compliance, sometimes forced by edict in the EU's antitrust case, sometimes forced by coercion, tells me that Google isn't powerful, it is weak. It has lost its way and may not survive if it is unable to find its way back to something good.
Google certainly doesn't need China, but it wants it. It's a heckuva lot easier to do business and make money in a country, when you're chummy with the people in charge. Even if it goes against your ideals, free speech, or public interest.
Even if Google dies, its replacement will still be equally tempted to censor dissenting voices, in order to please the people in charge.
Before 1988 in the U.S. we had "equal time" laws that required that broadcast media present both sides of political debates with "equal time" for each side. That's because for decades there were three sources of content: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Then cable and alternative radio ended that oligopoly for a while and those laws were removed.
Now we have just a few mass media content producers and a few mass social media outlets. The situation is beginning to resemble that which existed for decades, from the 20s to the 80s, in broadcast media.
The Founding Fathers totally predicted this. The USPS existed in some form before the founding of the nation. The postal service was vital for allowing communication and dispersal of news through the nation. Without this neutral party a private mail carrier could opt to not deliver for any reason, like after they've opened your mail and read the contents they find politically disagreeable.
Historically the monopoly of the mail was abused for censorship (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws). If there've been comparable consequences from competing private mail services, I haven't heard of them.
The very first multi-national companies were neck deep in looting India and smuggling opium to China. The American founding fathers were very aware of this.
I don't see what this has to do with this conversation. Those companies were not censoring coffee shop or bar conversations of citizens WITHIN the United States.
We aren't talking about economic monopoly exploitation - we're talking about monopoly control over domestic communications.
Sure, a more fundamental problem. But many people don't have enough imagination and foresight and for them concrete examples are more convincing. Same with the country I'm currently in - democracy has been rotting for the last several years as the ruling party has been busy disabling protection mechanisms and pulling out screws. It's only now that the government is blatant in its abuse of law and police fine people with no chance of appeal and straight up beat them, nurses get pay CUTS... that citizens realize what suckers they've been. That laws and procedures exist for a reason.
Maybe they're not just stupid, but have a different way of thinking. Bottom-up versus top-down.
google search is a utility class service at this point, a tier below tap water and electricity. the world would be an objectively worse place without it for billions of people. with great power comes great responsibility is how the saying goes, but i can see them fighting tooth and nail to not be labeled as such. same for facebook and others like them.
You're putting the cart before the horse. Google and Facebook are utilities but the Internet service you need to access them isn't. Seems a bit ridiculous, no?
There is nothing sadder to think of than a desperate man, crawling through the desert, body burned, lips parched, just begging to know what year Ted Nugent was born in.
The suggestion that google search is comparable to water and electricity is absurd IMO. Google search is not needed to survive. There are also alternatives to google. Nothing about google's popularity precludes someone from using bing.com instead.
> a single private company having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels
> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
Financial, political, religious entities controlling newspapers and book publishers is a problem known (and well documented) across thousands of years.
Same for near-monopolies of means of transportation, materials, water, and other.
None of those combined instantaneous planet-wide distribution of spoken word, produced by anyone, shoveled to everyone, individually based on what they would be most likely to want to hear.
If founding fathers had netflix this wouldn’t even make to a black mirror episode of their time.
>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage.
They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas.
The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand.
The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off.
And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.
I don't remember exactly, but originally my comment wasn't top-level. Did the mods do that, or is that automatic with high karma comments or something?
>> The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
HA! The founding fathers were all lawyers and newspaper owners. They were very aware that private interests, through control of available media, could exert influence all manner of public debates.
Right-wingers are afraid of power of governments, while left-wingers of power of multinational corporations. Both are right: we should be afraid of any organization that gets that big. Sadly, there's no political ideology that has a coherent plan to keep both in check.
You forgot socialists and anarchists (also known in the US as libertarian socialists for historical reasons) which advocate for a classless democratic society. The former advocate for a transition state and the latter demands a direct immediate transition as far as I understand it.
I agree with you and the commenter who replied with the market share stats that the numbers are worrisome, but literally no one laid a gun to the commenters’ heads and asked them to leave a YouTube comment. They could embed the video (or link to it) and offer a comment on their blogs.
There was an article about RSS on HN recently — in the end, people voted with their feet away from a decentralised web to the YouTubes and Twitters and Facebooks of today.
Maybe we need more actions like these to remind ourselves of the perils of lease-holding.
It's not "We're a private company" as much as "Google cannot practically force you".
Google also doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly position in consumer markets. YouTube isn't an absolute majority of online video and strong alternatives are right in front of you - Twitter and Facebook offer free video hosting. You could even build a private one, or rent space from Vimeo or Dailymotion.
The Founding Fathers can go &&*k themselves. Invoking their name is literally appeal to authority.
This is a problem with monopolies, not censorship. When private companies are forced to publish content, you have fundamentally lost the notion of a free press.
I don't entirely agree that companies operating public discussion forums is equivalent to "forced speech", but I do agree that the problem can be fixed by eliminating the monopoly/oligopoly.
That is a bigger issue for our society, yes. But it's also understandable that people might be very interested in alleged problems that strike closer to home for them. In this case, if there is an issue worth considering at HN, exploring it could give insight into the larger issue as well.
Total content agnosticism is not going to fly once illegal stuff starts getting hosted, and then you go down that sliding scale of what content is allowed vs what isn't. If you ban some highly illegal content, you'll probably need to ban some other illegal content, and then start picking what countries laws count to enforce (recognizing that you'll be banned in some countries if you dont comply), and you'll end up back where you started. If you decide you dont care and will let literally anything be hosted, you might find yourself in jail, and very few people will feel comfortable hosting their content on the same service that hosts some of the most despicable content in the world.
good luck with that, congress has been trying to slowly kill the real post office for years and now the head of the executive branch is been trying to kill it as a way of punishing a perceived rival/critic. despite the consitution specficly calling out that we need to run it. getting them to build a modernized digital equivalent.
The founding fathers gave the USPS a monopoly on the major communication channel of the time. Maybe it's time to update those laws to give them a monopoly over online communication, too?
It's not only Google, some argue we have been slowly moving from an Internet to a Trinet where GOOG-FB-AMZN control the majority of the web traffic while staying out of each others way [0]
Google can do whatever they like. They're a company, not the government. And as such, they will always bend to the mercurial whims of both rich investors and the government (who is also owned by the rich).
The only way to fix that is a nearly-uncensored#, non-profit& communications and streaming platform that is globally-distributed and doesn't have a SPoF. Trying to get a content creators' union is all-well-and-good, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of reliance on corporate greed that will never assure access to speech.
# There are only a few topics that shouldn't be enabled like child porn and actually planning mass murder.
& Nonprofit itself while it supports monetization for creators with only minimal fees to cover costs.
> having a near-monopoly on various public communication channels
> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply
You're upset that they have a monopoly on their own website/business? What the hell are you even talking about?
Do you even remember the internet before Google? I do. You know how I found new websites? By typing random domain names into the URL bar and trying different combinations of TLDs.
Then I used Yahoo. Excite. AltaVista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Dmoz. Alltheweb. They all kinda sucked in their own unique ways. And then Google came around, and I could actually find what the hell I was looking for in one go.
Your outrage is pure entitlement. You don't like the way the world works, so you think you deserve to change everything to function exactly the way you want. As if that's in any way rational, fair, or ethical. Presumably you think of yourself as a good person. How is it good to demand unreasonable things from people who do not owe you anything? Do you really think this is the best way to effect societal change?
Not that long ago, capability (yes, some dictionarys
show also; skill, appearance, behaivior and other
around orchestrated topics ^^) btt: capability
wons importance, cos growing globalisation and
toughening competition - in terms of the commerce,
with shorter product life cycles, higher
complexity and much more influences.
In such a environment, a premise for life is a
permanent monitoring on all levels of performance,
to have the option to bring on steering and
governance, if a discrepancy in goal-reaching
or goal-setting occurs.
no, that was'nt english enough, let me try better:
"'Sharks' are speaking of 'satisfied'
when a half of the profits result
by dividends and from Performance."
Exploiting the central-bank-agitation
so big on a global scale, more in detailed,... now you...
Do you want to continue to support art, like 'google will eat itself'? (-;
- if they don't take down speech some consider hateful
- if they take down speech some do not consider hateful
共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not. If Youtube bans nothing, then hate speech thrives and they get bad PR. If Youtube bans anything anyone flags as hate speech, then they become de facto as censorship agents for foreign powers. Anything critical can be seen as offensive and taken down by CCP or Russia.
Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
The solution is to realize "hate speech" is mostly subjective and revert back to the clear rules that we had last decade before the current political climate of gratuitous outrage.
I think part of the issue is the power of comments like yours that pretends there's a simple solution.
In some conversations bad actors can gain more power in a debate using misleading information than a good actor can by using the truth.
Most conversations, such as this one about free speech, are so complex that it's tough for a 'good actor' to offer solutions. They may discuss the pros / cons of each side, talk about where further research is needed, talk about experts that are more informed, etc. They can still offer solutions but they shouldn't be pretending an unconfident solution is complete if they really are a good actor.
Bad actors, on the other hand, can simplify the complexities. They can provide confident solutions to complex problems and do so without worrying about the information they don't know or about misleading others.
Fortunately bad actors are often weeded out in discussions, but in conversations that abuse humans fear we become more demanding of answers. Explaining to fearful people "it's complex" isn't satisfying so we become more susceptible to lies / misinformation spread by bad actors. Conversations abusing this fear / anger is where there is an argument about whether misinformation should be limited.
Sadly, can't agree. The rules we had in the last decade weren't actually working; they only appeared to work. They looked like they were creating conflict-free environments, but they were really creating environments where, in general, minority populations hate speech was targeted against weren't using the tools or participating in the forums that had a laissez-faire attitude on such things.
No. The great opening of the Internet brought points of view onto the internet at scales that hitherto were unknown. There are so many asshats on the Internet that old tactics of manual moderation do not work anymore. Doing nothing is a pathetic excuse for a solution.
Those rules applied today would result in indecipherable cesspools of memes at best or a community of authoritarian sympathizers at worst, who would be oh-so-happy to start conditioning their like-minded members to force undesirables away, either explicitly through bans or implicitly through non-stop hatred and coordinated harassment.
Neither one is the type of community I have any interest in participating in, and if some sort of mandate came down enforcing it on any of the large social networks I would no longer participate in them.
That's belittling a very serious issue. A lot of these recent anti-lockdown protests have been fueled out of social media by actors peddling extremely questionable narratives.
Holocaust denial has seen a massive revival in Germany, to such a degree that sentiments like that are intermixing with conspiracy theories about the "NWO" supposedly using COVID-19 to finalize their "2000 years old rule", with the help of Bill Gates who apparently wants to microchip everybody on the planet to "depopulate" it.
Trump is supposedly the last and only defense against this take-over by the "deep state", and will soon end it all when he reveals "Obamagate", he apparently also federalized the FED. Tho none of these people could even tell me when that supposedly happened.
While individually these ideas and movements have been floating around the web for quite a while, it's absolutely scary how they are now merging together [0] and being chanted by people in the streets after they got their "Information on the Internet" which regularly means: Facebook groups, YouTube channels and now even Twitch streams, places they usually arrive at after using search engines in the most misleading way possible.
It's like peak Eternal September where people will just believe the most obscure sources when they confirm their already established beliefs, over well-established data, and factual reality, which apparently is all controlled and manipulated by "dark powers behind the scenes". It's depressing and scary because so far I thought rationality will pull trough, people will learn to properly parse information for its validity and sources for their credibility.
That did not happen, the bad actors are now taking over to a point where they stage events in the meat world, openly threatening democratic institutions. I do not know how to stop this, but this can't keep on going like this, it will take us no place good.
> 共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not
This is where the legal concept of protected classes may be helpful. They're sets of attributes society has deemed one cannot discriminate against. That tends to line up well with said society's line between insulting and hateful.
As a legal definition, these class definitions tend to be precise. That makes them convenient for exporting.
Notably, political affiliation is not a protected class under U.S. law.
I disagree that protected classes line up with the dinstinction between insulting and hateful at all, and it scares me that this US-centric line of thinking will probably conquer Europe as well.
You can absolutely mock people (even groups of people) in a hateful way for their looks, body weight, or success in the sexual marketplace. The obvious solution is to add more protected classes! And I'm afraid that is what will happen, simply because it creates administrative work and a nice distraction from everything else (just like adding new emoji every year). And then people will find new ways to hate someone.
I much prefer HN's moderation stance. Either a comment adds value to the discussion, or it tries to derail it. And even though I hate the CCP, I don't think 共匪 is useful, except maybe in a self-ironic kind of way.
Yes but that is a difficult thing even in our society in the US. Then to project that to the world is harder. In the USA we have values that tend to see political censorship as evil, but in some other countries they see political criticism as insulting and a hindrance to government. I too thought for a long time that any place that censored or punished political dissidents probably was a place that had people yearning to be free. It is not necessarily true as we see in China. I don't agree with it from my values but then again I don't know what is good for the entire Earth.
I like this idea, but it is hard to apply such a criteria across borders. In California, for instance, political affiliation is considered a protected class. The omission of political affiliation from the nationally protected classes in the US is a direct consequence of the persecution of communists during the Cold War. This is actually not a great idea when you consider that it essentially legalizes political persecution of the sort that you find in various dictatorships (a little ironic in this context).
> Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
A few weeks ago the discussion here was about how YouTube is not removing enough content (mostly in relation to Covid-19). The consensus was pretty much that they do it on purpose because it makes them money.
I don’t think YouTube (or any large public content platform) has a winning move in this discussion. Any move will be perceived as nefarious.
This isn't even remotely difficult, and I can't believe people are so obsessed with forcing their opinions on each-other that a live-and-let-live solution does not even occur to them.
Can't we hate, and express that hate? Why can't I say "I hate Scientology, I hate Scientologists. Brainwashed bandits, they are! Hate them so much!". It seems a lot of things we want to express include hating. Isn't speech a lot about getting things off your chest? Can the frustration build up and explode and be worse that just expressing what you hate?
Yep, being able to voice one's feelings, even if they are negative or erroneous, is crucial to mental health.
It wasn't until Dr. King began exposing/revealing the violent hatred of southern white supremacists to the public consciousness through mass media that things began to change.
"Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
Fundamentally, this is the issue with international corporations in the speech realm. People will believe and argue they shouldn't be subject to a given country's laws or have to apply that law globally, but in a real world sense, they must follow all of the laws of any country they want to operate in, no matter how ridiculous or unfair they might feel. Because if you aren't obeying a country's laws, they'll shut you out.
Yep. In some cases, Google has addressed this by Balkanizing their rulesets. Sometimes semi-literally; the territorial boundaries Google Maps shows are contingent upon the request's point of origin in some disputed regions [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/12/302337754...]
Using such an approach on the global channels like YT comments isn't an option (unless they choose to Balkanize them, and let only Chinese commenters talk to Chinese people).
Google isn't the only firm that does this; Twitter will selectively filter some tweets based on whether it's legal to show that content in countries that have outlawed fascist agitation (which makes for an interesting side-effect; doing a request for a tweet stream against a US proxy server and a German proxy server and delta-ing the results can give you a clear signal on "Twitter thinks this person is a Nazi propagandist." I'm wondering when someone will put an API in front of that and make it a service... "DoesTwitterThinkThatGuyIsANazi.com" anyone? ;) ).
Strongly disagree, there are some blurred lines around hate speech, but this isn’t one of them at all. This is a critique of a political party, that’s clear cut not hate speech.
Your comment proves the guy's point. Hate speech is subjective. There is no "blurred lines" around hate speech. All hate speech is protected speech. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled on that.
I am opposed to censorship, and I disagree with your claim. This qualifies as "hate speech". It's derogatory, its directed at a specific group of people, and it can foster animosity. That the group is a political party is not material.
As an aside, I'm of the opinion that selective censorship marginalizes groups that don't readily have representation at companies like Google. I'm talking about with terms like "redneck" or even "dumb American" that we (me included) mention that go with the flow of current mainstream discourse that some groups likely find offensive. Perhaps that is why there can be a divide and we end up with such insular communities like infowars or thedonald.
Third solution: take those people who consider some speech harmful off your platform
Twitter has a choice to be a platform for as many people as possible, or a platform for as much speech as possible. They have made that choice, but aren't too consistent in communicating it.
It seems the problem is often scale. When you can't automate something at the same mistake level a human could, scaling it either requires compromises or extreme resource expenditure via something like tens of thousands of human moderators.
Now is the word "ridiculous" towards Google or Youtube considered as hate speech?
I mean if you look around YouTube, there are lots of name calling, idiots, rude words that starts with F and S. None of the them were considered as hate speech, but all of a sudden every single negative word used to describe Communist "共" ( Which is in no specific to Chinese Communist, after all there are still a few Communist regime around the world ), and that includes "licking" ( "舔" ) communist, which the word licking in itself isn't in anyway "hateful", is now also considered as inappropriate or hate speech and be removed?
Using the Chinese Communist standards, anything that used to support the Hong Kong movement or demand will be considered as an act of attack on China and also as hate speech. Because you are in support of Hong Kong independence. For those who are not aware none of the five demands in Hong Kong specifically mentioned independence or separation, but that label has been used as any disobedience against CCP to be considered as one. So at what point will words used to support Hong Kong, or even US Government in sanction of China considered as hate speech? Especially when Youtube is already removing lots of content that is in support of the movement.
This is not a real thing. It is not based on a standard we can agree to easily or for a long time. The law (in the US) already handled this situation and made certain things illegal. Those laws are good enough.
YouTube only gets bad PR, if it doesn't police "hate speech", among the vocal minority of leftist progressive nitwits that have nothing better to do than complain about nothing. The normal, "everyday person", does not care about such things.
"hate speech" is easily abused because the premise is based on crappy ideas.
Youtube, and Google as a whole, are in for a world of pain in politics. Google pushes "quality and relevance" when they promote news articles, but this leads to them heavily emphasizing established outlets like BBC / NYT / etc. There is an increasing number of calls from official government representatives for promoting "alternative" news. What will Google do when they get a DOJ request to promote or dissuade a specific political viewpoint that isn't endorsed by their chosen "reputable" media outlets? Is the current anti-trust action against Google happening because of their perceived bias against Trump-friendly news?
"Facebook, Google accused of anti-conservative bias at U.S. Senate hearing"
The volume of low quality biased news is set to explode in the coming years, and Google/Youtube will be attacked by various governments (Turkey, Hungary, USA, Brazil, China, Russia) when they avoid promoting this flood of content, and when Google promotes news and speech that various countries dislike.
Youtube will be forced to remove viral videos like "Plandemic" constantly. Imagine when they start getting calls from the Senate for scrubbing some powerful government official's [conspiracy of the month] youtube video. Or when US House members escalate from personally suing Twitter to creating the House Committee on Online Censorship and use official government subpoenas to harass companies that host content that harm their political allies under the guise of "online fairness".
Enough mainstream and fringe politics has now migrated onto the internet that there are no longer neutral platforms, only platforms that have not yet taken a political and editorial stance on speech.
I don't think it would be that tough. They need to make sure their engineers are as objective and neutral as possible, and technically only allow Americans to say anything they want, but they would still have authority to remove foreigner content, especially since many countries will reach out to YT to do so because those countries censor their populace on a daily basis and have an industry around it.
>> I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
No. 1st Amendment protects hate speech ("Effectively, the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed that there is no 'hate speech' exception to the First Amendment."), but this applies only to government, private companies or people can do whatever they want. Not great, but better than the obvious alternatives.
They should honestly consider outsourcing the legal work on their platforms to various law firms around the world. There's clearly no will within the company to do legal heavy lifting and trying to develop tech solutions for this is a band aid at best
I don't know the context behind "communist bandit", but the idea that a term can't be hate speech simply because it doesn't contain any words that are obviously bad when stripped of cultural or historical context is wrong. The recipient of these slurs likely does have that context and will take that into account when interpreting it.
Calling an African American in the South a "cotton picker" is profoundly hateful even though the term itself seems innocuous.
This is why I cannot separate hate speech from free speech. I don't like hate speech. I don't condone it. But I cannot conceive of a safe way to separate the two. The first step must be to define what hate speech is, but we can't even all agree on that.
All speech is free speech, even the parts I don't like - hate, lies, slander, and everything in between. That said, it's okay to regulate speech in some circumstances. You are legally obligated to tell the truth in court. It is rightfully illegal to lie about who you are in many scenarios.
YouTube is private property and Google has the legal right to censor whatever speech they want on it. I don't think we should regulate that. However, who and what they censor shows us who they consider to be most valuable on their platform.
Anyone who depends on YouTube should keep a close eye on Google's censorship patterns and constantly weigh their options. If you want to have any serious discussions about existing communist regimes, you'd be foolish to stay dependent on YouTube.
EDIT: If you can come up with a way to distinguish between hate speech and free speech that can't be easily abused, I'm all ears.
TLDR; the problem is that the tech companies have been flooded with people of a particular political kind after their political factions lost. They went to Facebook and google bringing strong convictions with them.
They try to deal with things like hate without having thought deeply about it. What’s the next human emotion you’ll try to eradicate? Lustfulness? Gluttony? Envy? A war on pride?
Once you’ve decided you’ll take on the self appointed task of eradicating hate you’ll also take out some things that are true. Who is worthy of this kind of power? Who can do it well?
Western civilization has struggled with how to deal with human emotional excesses over hundreds of years, spilling lots of blood and tears, and we’ve learned that we have to reconcile within ourselves that there is something ineradicable about them.
We can expose human excesses, but as long as there is no incitement we just have to live with the fact that at some level people will say things we may not like or find wrong.
Do not conflate this with hatespeech, it leads the discussion away from the issue. Communist bandit
refers to the government, not a protected class. It's not in any way similar to posting a racist/sexist/homophobic comment.
To be clear: hatespeech by definition relates to race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Communist bandit is unrelated to any of those categories.
Compounding this is the veritable explosion of what words which are considered “harmful”, not to mention how vogue it is to be offended (“harmed”) on behalf of another group.
If google is hoping to appease these groups, they’re in for a futile challenge.
I can't fathom how private companies still think that they can make the CCP happy AND their western customers.
The CCP holds values that are completely untenable to western values. As time goes on, companies who don't know this will lose massive brand value in the western world.
The NBA has managed to tight rope this so far, but I doubt they can hold it together for very much longer. The CCP is still calling for the Houston Rockets GM to be fired 10 months after he tweeted vague support for the Hong Kong Democracy movement. They still refuse to show NBA games domestically because of it.
Actually it's super-easy; barely an inconvenience.
Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along." Leaks between rulesets are relatively rare in the sea of regular day-to-day operations.
And honestly, I don't think the CCP's goals are as far different from the goals of, say, the US government's as some believe. The countries are trading buddies. They're both empires with a number of citizens that is too-big-a-number-to-visualize-in-one's-head. If they ever came into direct conflict, these differences would start to put Western-headquartered countries in difficult positions, but that's not the current state of things.
> Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really.
I think this is starting to change and it gives me a lot of hope. The fallout from the NBA and Blizzard incidents was pretty significant and the HK protests received far more attention than any others in recent years.
I think that attitude of customers is changing as we speak. Before, sure, it was easy to ignore the ramblings of how the CCP was upset at something and a western company just gives into them.
Now, anti-CCP sentiment is growing. I think western people are starting to realize how different we actually are. The CCP will be blamed for the pandemic (which is mostly correct), and you will see a massive decoupling here in the next couple of years.
This is the first real anti-globalization movement in about 80 years. Who knows where it will end.
> Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along."
I disagree, the sentiment in the OP is South Park-tier when it comes to reach.
> “I can't fathom how private companies still think that they can make the CCP happy AND their western customers”
It’s easy. The amount of profits that can be made from China’s 800M and growing middle class is worth the hit of westerners forming a negative opinion. Westerners will forget over time just like everything else.
Unfortunately, for most of the Western would values like democracy, freedom of speech, human rights, etc. are more of a vague ideal than something to live by. They surely support it, in words, but if it costs them more than $100 to uphold these values, if there's any substantial risk in it, if you have to risk losing money for standing up to CCP - forget about it. As a society, we'd rather spend weeks debating whether wearing sombrero, growing cauliflowers and drinking craft beer is racist (yes, that's real debates that people have) or whether it's OK to have a particular picture as a logo of a company, than address people being put in concentration camps and disassembled for spare parts by CCP. Maybe if CCP actions cause a pandemic that kills hundreds of thousands we vaguely consider doing something... but nah, arresting single surfers for "not social distancing" sounds more fun.
So don't put too much hope in "western customers". They'd allow likes of Google to get away with a lot, unfortunately.
Similar happens with the name "Eric Ciaramella", which YouTube instantly deletes. This is a name of a CIA whistle blower. It would be interesting to know what other words are in the YouTube censor list.
No Wikipedia articles on him either, and reports of people getting permanently banned from Wikipedia for trying to create that article, or even mentioning him in another.
If you want to edit wikipedia, you need to know and play their game.
Politically charged topics on wikipedia need multiple reliable sources.
I can’t find any sources, that would pass as reputable on wikipedia, on this guy.
Maybe if there was a script from Senate from Rand Paul, who spoke his name publicly, that could be used. New York Post is the only kind-of-reputable source I can find, I don’t think that’s enough for now
edit: people link Conservapedia etc, but you can quickly see the stuff is full of misinformation. The like to point out, as Rand did, that Schiff daughter was in some relationship with the CIA guy. This is provably false.
Maybe the Wikipedia rule on sources is actually good.
World Socialist Web Site as mainstream press needs very-very big quotes.
And this Eric C character turned out to be a nobody (maybe a CIA analyst). So why censor this name? Could be a NSL? (But can that somehow compel the recipient to censor a name anywhere?)
Are we playing "what censorship is OK censorship" now? Who determines that "pretty clear difference?" Isn't the point of being against censorship is that nothing is above the interests of public scrutiny? Partial censorship seems fundamentally contradictory in terms of the underlying moral justification.
That's a strange equivalence, and a malevolent comment.
Outing whistle-blowers (or supposed whistle-blowers) is bad for democracy. The government is supposed to be transparent to the people. This does not mean that the people should be transparent to the government, or that dissidents should be outed.
The "whistle-blower" was a federal employee making allegations of hearsay and intent identifying other federal employees (not just the President). What is the line that decides that one is immune to scrutiny while others receive the full brunt? Is it partisan lines, or perhaps seniority cut-offs? Carter Page received no such protection from being targeted and publicly unmasked, despite being a long-time investigation informant.
Do you find it implausible that an agent of the CIA could pose as a whistleblower to advance antidemocratic intelligence efforts against US citizens?
Look, I'm not saying that's what happened, I don't know anything about it, but the idea that we should be shutting down inquiry into CIA agents interfering in other parts of our government, given the known history of the CIA, is absolutely crazy to me. And it's not like they've changed! We're talking about an organization that just recently illegally spied on the Congressional illegal CIA torture investigation and then lied about it to Congress (also a crime) - and got away with it!
Even in other branches of the government, we know that "whistleblowers" are not always acting in good faith - the NY Times just did a story about a "whistleblower" lying to the press about what was happening and using that as an excuse to leak people's personal information to the press, all in order to advance his own political agenda. If that can happen at the IRS, surely it can happen at the CIA? And surely we should at least be able to look into whether that's a possibility>
Gotta love this site. Snowden is revered around here yet a whistleblower goes through the proper channels to report wrongdoing by the US government and they still get outed, named, and trampled. Do you want government oversight or not? Do you want whistleblowers or not?
It's more complex than that. Imagine that you are a US company operating in Germany that provides German citizens with an incredible amount of information that wouldn't otherwise be available. You have thousands of people working in Germany. Occasionally, the Nazis ask you to censor things, If you don't, your entire team is at risk and will all loose their employment and citizens of Germany will loose access to an incredible amount of information and services. It's not cut and dry.
A more fitting parabole would be, a US company banned from operating in Germany that could provide German citizens with an incredible amount of information if only the German government didn't block any access to its service.
Because in case you hadn't noticed, Google is entirely blocked in communist China.
How do you feel about the German proscription on Nazi symbolism/speech? It's not absolute; for example, Mein Kampf is still published in Germany, but in academic critical editions which provide extensive historical information to place it in context.
There s no “we” in the IT community, theres the “well funded groupthink” and “the sea of the unknowns”. When did the IT band together to achieve something?
Plenty of times, see the entire open source movement or the cypherpunks, or the browser wars in which Firefox was a major competitor, there must be tons of examples.
Counterpoint: this is (weirdly effective) reverse psychology. We know China runs slave camps near the NK border and slavery is typically demonized here in America. However, no one talks about it because China deplatforms relatively benign topics instead. Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.
> We know China runs slave camps near the NK border
We don't, actually.
> slavery is typically demonized here in America
No it's not, it's just hidden so liberals (including republicans) don't have to think about it. It's the prison industrial complex.
> Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.
Anything you read in the western media about China or North Korea should be second-guessed and double-checked against eastern media, usually chinese language, for facts. The so-called "free press" is really a coordinated operation run by a few media companies in the interests of the capitalist class. People supposedly iced by Kim Jong Un have been magically resurrected many times. Western media tries to put all the blame of the coronavirus deaths in the US on China "not coming forward" when they had months and months to prepare. The US has entire media structures like "Radio Free Asia" to spread anti-China propaganda.
so you think it's smart to look for "facts" in Chinese media with all their censorship? What a ridiculous idea, there are no facts there, only things their government wants people to see.
Can one take out an ad with "共匪" in the text? Adwords against it? Is this censored on Orkut? Would Google consider censoring Gmail? Or Google Voice? Would they consider bleeping Google Meets?
Google will need to be very public about who signed off on this and under what framework.
Readit News
* Page 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219&p=2
* Page 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219&p=3
* Page 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219&p=4
Why not include some basic, numeric pagination links before comments start? Ex:
1 2 ... 5
The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.
Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply.
Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]
G controls 68% of the browser market [2]
G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3]
G has 73% of the search advertising market [4]
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...
Browsers would be a different issue. In that case, there are network effects like about what standards are supported and how, which make it difficult to launch a competing browser, even with technological superiority, and in that case, it would be reasonable to worry about too much market share.
They're abusing the hell out of their status. AMP, removal of adblock capability, driving web standards to potentially be more opaque, walled gardens, automated removal and takedown, etc.
It doesn't even include Baidu, which dominates China and has something like >12% of the world's market share for search engines, so how can Google have 91%?
DuckDuckGo - search
Brave - browser
Android - you've got me there; but I might switch to Apple next year.
Gmail - ditto, but I'm hoping to switch to proton or similar
Youtube - alternatives like Bitchute exist for banned videos
Fortunately, although the GOOG does have a lot of best-in-class products out there, competition is rising. Consumers benefit from lots of choices.
For example Android is ~52% of the US market.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
(quote from there):
> Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.14
Over 75,000 people are happily working for G with many more eager to join
There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?
The intentions were good: Reduce the risk of global nuclear war. The globalism outcome is good for trade and relations with nations that have transparent governments, bad with the opaque.
Why have the hypercorporatists and hypernationalists not replaced it???
Because fuckers in both those camps think it has to make money as a condition to exist. It's their weakness. Requires imagination to exploit.
(In the countries where it's strict. Which could be the EU, US, Kanada, Japan and more. Through it would be more tricky for smaller China dependent countries or autocratic powers. But the other countries could push that through in the way they currently push through commercial interest like copy right).
Think about it, if a Chinese social media site could outcompete YouTube, they would just do it already anyway. If they can’t, they have to either block YouTube and have a Chinese clone propped up by an effectively protectionist policy or else try and get YouTube to cooperate with them.
You know YouTube is already banned in China, right?
Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street. To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.
> The idea that some governing body can better choose my communication platform for my personal needs than I can for myself doesn't seem logical from my point of view.
It's an elected body that is chosen by the people in a fair and free democratic process. Why would they be incapable of serving their electorate?
What I have seen is suggesting breaking up giants like Google and Facebook to allow them to compete more with each other rather than allowing the two fold in any possible alternatives as soon as they become popular.
If all the policies and processes around censorship were laid out in the open for that to be considered when weighing up the options, people would be able to make more informed choices.
I’d recommend just breaking Google’s monopoly; which is an idea that has more benefits and less downside risk.
Would an independent YouTube be less susceptible to these requests?
Sure they could. They had the East India Tea Company.
I'm not a legal expert but it seems like the fundamentals are pretty simple and timeless. If they have a monopoly, then their private get-out-jail-free card no longer applies.
That said, I see this sort of thing a bit differently.
If Google is all powerful and a monopoly and never in danger of being killed, why comply with an authoritarian foreign nation to remove comments that are amplifying an anti-government sentiment? Why should Google care if the government of China is feeling a bit insecure about their own population's loyalty?
I worked at Google during "China Debacle #1", where Google went to China as an uncensored search engine, left in the middle of China Debacle #2, when China infiltrated Google's infrastructure to use it to track dissidents, and watched from the outside (as many here did) for China Debacle #3, when Google tried to create a censored search engine for China.
Why does Google need China so badly, that they are willing to compromise their values (debacle #3 and this comment censoring behavior)?
I don't think you need the antitrust legislation. I think Google is slowly dying and as they die their ideals wash away. Clean user experience, gone, Useful free services with return only positive feelings for the brand, gone. Employee perks, fading away. Lofty slogans of not being evil, gone.
This compliance, sometimes forced by edict in the EU's antitrust case, sometimes forced by coercion, tells me that Google isn't powerful, it is weak. It has lost its way and may not survive if it is unable to find its way back to something good.
Even if Google dies, its replacement will still be equally tempted to censor dissenting voices, in order to please the people in charge.
Does Google rise to this level? Facebook, Twitter, cable TV and every newspaper and blog would seem to present a decent front of competition.
Now we have just a few mass media content producers and a few mass social media outlets. The situation is beginning to resemble that which existed for decades, from the 20s to the 80s, in broadcast media.
We aren't talking about economic monopoly exploitation - we're talking about monopoly control over domestic communications.
Maybe they're not just stupid, but have a different way of thinking. Bottom-up versus top-down.
Financial, political, religious entities controlling newspapers and book publishers is a problem known (and well documented) across thousands of years.
Same for near-monopolies of means of transportation, materials, water, and other.
If founding fathers had netflix this wouldn’t even make to a black mirror episode of their time.
It can, should, must and most importantly, will.
What's really not acceptable is their monopoloy position on information, not that they, as a private company, have a right to decide what to publish.
The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage.
They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas.
The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand.
The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off.
And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223555#23225685
HA! The founding fathers were all lawyers and newspaper owners. They were very aware that private interests, through control of available media, could exert influence all manner of public debates.
There was an article about RSS on HN recently — in the end, people voted with their feet away from a decentralised web to the YouTubes and Twitters and Facebooks of today.
Maybe we need more actions like these to remind ourselves of the perils of lease-holding.
Google also doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly position in consumer markets. YouTube isn't an absolute majority of online video and strong alternatives are right in front of you - Twitter and Facebook offer free video hosting. You could even build a private one, or rent space from Vimeo or Dailymotion.
The Founding Fathers can go &&*k themselves. Invoking their name is literally appeal to authority.
I see no way this could go wrong.
That's why envelopes were sealed.
The question was historically then how do teenagers (or the developing world for that matter) pay for electronic services and cue Facebook and Google.
Since when did Google became the defacto public communication channel?
Dead Comment
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
The only way to fix that is a nearly-uncensored#, non-profit& communications and streaming platform that is globally-distributed and doesn't have a SPoF. Trying to get a content creators' union is all-well-and-good, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of reliance on corporate greed that will never assure access to speech.
# There are only a few topics that shouldn't be enabled like child porn and actually planning mass murder.
& Nonprofit itself while it supports monetization for creators with only minimal fees to cover costs.
> Google's "We're a private company" get-out-jail-free card cannot continue to apply
You're upset that they have a monopoly on their own website/business? What the hell are you even talking about?
Do you even remember the internet before Google? I do. You know how I found new websites? By typing random domain names into the URL bar and trying different combinations of TLDs.
Then I used Yahoo. Excite. AltaVista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Dmoz. Alltheweb. They all kinda sucked in their own unique ways. And then Google came around, and I could actually find what the hell I was looking for in one go.
Your outrage is pure entitlement. You don't like the way the world works, so you think you deserve to change everything to function exactly the way you want. As if that's in any way rational, fair, or ethical. Presumably you think of yourself as a good person. How is it good to demand unreasonable things from people who do not owe you anything? Do you really think this is the best way to effect societal change?
In such a environment, a premise for life is a permanent monitoring on all levels of performance, to have the option to bring on steering and governance, if a discrepancy in goal-reaching or goal-setting occurs.
no, that was'nt english enough, let me try better:
"'Sharks' are speaking of 'satisfied' when a half of the profits result by dividends and from Performance."
Exploiting the central-bank-agitation
so big on a global scale, more in detailed,... now you...
Do you want to continue to support art, like 'google will eat itself'? (-;
- if they don't take down speech some consider hateful
- if they take down speech some do not consider hateful
共匪 is seen as an insult by a group, but others do not. If Youtube bans nothing, then hate speech thrives and they get bad PR. If Youtube bans anything anyone flags as hate speech, then they become de facto as censorship agents for foreign powers. Anything critical can be seen as offensive and taken down by CCP or Russia.
Youtube is more and more siding towards removing content. I wonder, can US regulators do something about it?
In some conversations bad actors can gain more power in a debate using misleading information than a good actor can by using the truth.
Most conversations, such as this one about free speech, are so complex that it's tough for a 'good actor' to offer solutions. They may discuss the pros / cons of each side, talk about where further research is needed, talk about experts that are more informed, etc. They can still offer solutions but they shouldn't be pretending an unconfident solution is complete if they really are a good actor.
Bad actors, on the other hand, can simplify the complexities. They can provide confident solutions to complex problems and do so without worrying about the information they don't know or about misleading others.
Fortunately bad actors are often weeded out in discussions, but in conversations that abuse humans fear we become more demanding of answers. Explaining to fearful people "it's complex" isn't satisfying so we become more susceptible to lies / misinformation spread by bad actors. Conversations abusing this fear / anger is where there is an argument about whether misinformation should be limited.
Neither one is the type of community I have any interest in participating in, and if some sort of mandate came down enforcing it on any of the large social networks I would no longer participate in them.
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Dead Comment
Holocaust denial has seen a massive revival in Germany, to such a degree that sentiments like that are intermixing with conspiracy theories about the "NWO" supposedly using COVID-19 to finalize their "2000 years old rule", with the help of Bill Gates who apparently wants to microchip everybody on the planet to "depopulate" it.
Trump is supposedly the last and only defense against this take-over by the "deep state", and will soon end it all when he reveals "Obamagate", he apparently also federalized the FED. Tho none of these people could even tell me when that supposedly happened.
While individually these ideas and movements have been floating around the web for quite a while, it's absolutely scary how they are now merging together [0] and being chanted by people in the streets after they got their "Information on the Internet" which regularly means: Facebook groups, YouTube channels and now even Twitch streams, places they usually arrive at after using search engines in the most misleading way possible.
It's like peak Eternal September where people will just believe the most obscure sources when they confirm their already established beliefs, over well-established data, and factual reality, which apparently is all controlled and manipulated by "dark powers behind the scenes". It's depressing and scary because so far I thought rationality will pull trough, people will learn to properly parse information for its validity and sources for their credibility.
That did not happen, the bad actors are now taking over to a point where they stage events in the meat world, openly threatening democratic institutions. I do not know how to stop this, but this can't keep on going like this, it will take us no place good.
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/neo-nazis-qanon-nuts-and-hardc...
This is where the legal concept of protected classes may be helpful. They're sets of attributes society has deemed one cannot discriminate against. That tends to line up well with said society's line between insulting and hateful.
As a legal definition, these class definitions tend to be precise. That makes them convenient for exporting.
Notably, political affiliation is not a protected class under U.S. law.
You can absolutely mock people (even groups of people) in a hateful way for their looks, body weight, or success in the sexual marketplace. The obvious solution is to add more protected classes! And I'm afraid that is what will happen, simply because it creates administrative work and a nice distraction from everything else (just like adding new emoji every year). And then people will find new ways to hate someone.
I much prefer HN's moderation stance. Either a comment adds value to the discussion, or it tries to derail it. And even though I hate the CCP, I don't think 共匪 is useful, except maybe in a self-ironic kind of way.
A few weeks ago the discussion here was about how YouTube is not removing enough content (mostly in relation to Covid-19). The consensus was pretty much that they do it on purpose because it makes them money.
I don’t think YouTube (or any large public content platform) has a winning move in this discussion. Any move will be perceived as nefarious.
Opt in/out features.
This isn't even remotely difficult, and I can't believe people are so obsessed with forcing their opinions on each-other that a live-and-let-live solution does not even occur to them.
It wasn't until Dr. King began exposing/revealing the violent hatred of southern white supremacists to the public consciousness through mass media that things began to change.
"Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
-Letter From The Birmingham Jail, 1963
Using such an approach on the global channels like YT comments isn't an option (unless they choose to Balkanize them, and let only Chinese commenters talk to Chinese people).
Google isn't the only firm that does this; Twitter will selectively filter some tweets based on whether it's legal to show that content in countries that have outlawed fascist agitation (which makes for an interesting side-effect; doing a request for a tweet stream against a US proxy server and a German proxy server and delta-ing the results can give you a clear signal on "Twitter thinks this person is a Nazi propagandist." I'm wondering when someone will put an API in front of that and make it a service... "DoesTwitterThinkThatGuyIsANazi.com" anyone? ;) ).
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
If we don't have hate speech, we necessarily don't have free speech. All speech should be allowed. Hate speech should be criticized but not banned.
Twitter has a choice to be a platform for as many people as possible, or a platform for as much speech as possible. They have made that choice, but aren't too consistent in communicating it.
Now is the word "ridiculous" towards Google or Youtube considered as hate speech?
I mean if you look around YouTube, there are lots of name calling, idiots, rude words that starts with F and S. None of the them were considered as hate speech, but all of a sudden every single negative word used to describe Communist "共" ( Which is in no specific to Chinese Communist, after all there are still a few Communist regime around the world ), and that includes "licking" ( "舔" ) communist, which the word licking in itself isn't in anyway "hateful", is now also considered as inappropriate or hate speech and be removed?
Using the Chinese Communist standards, anything that used to support the Hong Kong movement or demand will be considered as an act of attack on China and also as hate speech. Because you are in support of Hong Kong independence. For those who are not aware none of the five demands in Hong Kong specifically mentioned independence or separation, but that label has been used as any disobedience against CCP to be considered as one. So at what point will words used to support Hong Kong, or even US Government in sanction of China considered as hate speech? Especially when Youtube is already removing lots of content that is in support of the movement.
Edit: Yes Keep up with the downvoting.
This is not a real thing. It is not based on a standard we can agree to easily or for a long time. The law (in the US) already handled this situation and made certain things illegal. Those laws are good enough.
YouTube only gets bad PR, if it doesn't police "hate speech", among the vocal minority of leftist progressive nitwits that have nothing better to do than complain about nothing. The normal, "everyday person", does not care about such things.
"hate speech" is easily abused because the premise is based on crappy ideas.
"Facebook, Google accused of anti-conservative bias at U.S. Senate hearing"
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-socialmedia-...
The volume of low quality biased news is set to explode in the coming years, and Google/Youtube will be attacked by various governments (Turkey, Hungary, USA, Brazil, China, Russia) when they avoid promoting this flood of content, and when Google promotes news and speech that various countries dislike.
Youtube will be forced to remove viral videos like "Plandemic" constantly. Imagine when they start getting calls from the Senate for scrubbing some powerful government official's [conspiracy of the month] youtube video. Or when US House members escalate from personally suing Twitter to creating the House Committee on Online Censorship and use official government subpoenas to harass companies that host content that harm their political allies under the guise of "online fairness".
Enough mainstream and fringe politics has now migrated onto the internet that there are no longer neutral platforms, only platforms that have not yet taken a political and editorial stance on speech.
No. 1st Amendment protects hate speech ("Effectively, the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed that there is no 'hate speech' exception to the First Amendment."), but this applies only to government, private companies or people can do whatever they want. Not great, but better than the obvious alternatives.
There will always be "some people" to consider anything hateful. Maybe we should just all stop communicating with each other, so nobody gets "hurt".
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I mean, I know a word that Google Translate defines as "a Jewish person" - do you think you can tell me if it's offensive or not based on that?
Calling an African American in the South a "cotton picker" is profoundly hateful even though the term itself seems innocuous.
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All speech is free speech, even the parts I don't like - hate, lies, slander, and everything in between. That said, it's okay to regulate speech in some circumstances. You are legally obligated to tell the truth in court. It is rightfully illegal to lie about who you are in many scenarios.
YouTube is private property and Google has the legal right to censor whatever speech they want on it. I don't think we should regulate that. However, who and what they censor shows us who they consider to be most valuable on their platform.
Anyone who depends on YouTube should keep a close eye on Google's censorship patterns and constantly weigh their options. If you want to have any serious discussions about existing communist regimes, you'd be foolish to stay dependent on YouTube.
EDIT: If you can come up with a way to distinguish between hate speech and free speech that can't be easily abused, I'm all ears.
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https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/jun/all-blocked-keywords-...
TLDR; the problem is that the tech companies have been flooded with people of a particular political kind after their political factions lost. They went to Facebook and google bringing strong convictions with them.
They try to deal with things like hate without having thought deeply about it. What’s the next human emotion you’ll try to eradicate? Lustfulness? Gluttony? Envy? A war on pride?
Once you’ve decided you’ll take on the self appointed task of eradicating hate you’ll also take out some things that are true. Who is worthy of this kind of power? Who can do it well?
Western civilization has struggled with how to deal with human emotional excesses over hundreds of years, spilling lots of blood and tears, and we’ve learned that we have to reconcile within ourselves that there is something ineradicable about them.
We can expose human excesses, but as long as there is no incitement we just have to live with the fact that at some level people will say things we may not like or find wrong.
[1] https://youtu.be/YmNfm88pIe8
To be clear: hatespeech by definition relates to race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Communist bandit is unrelated to any of those categories.
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If google is hoping to appease these groups, they’re in for a futile challenge.
The CCP holds values that are completely untenable to western values. As time goes on, companies who don't know this will lose massive brand value in the western world.
The NBA has managed to tight rope this so far, but I doubt they can hold it together for very much longer. The CCP is still calling for the Houston Rockets GM to be fired 10 months after he tweeted vague support for the Hong Kong Democracy movement. They still refuse to show NBA games domestically because of it.
One vague tweet in support of democracy.
Most Western customers really do not care. Like, really-really. The default attitude is "Well, China has its rules and the Western nations have theirs. They can get along." Leaks between rulesets are relatively rare in the sea of regular day-to-day operations.
And honestly, I don't think the CCP's goals are as far different from the goals of, say, the US government's as some believe. The countries are trading buddies. They're both empires with a number of citizens that is too-big-a-number-to-visualize-in-one's-head. If they ever came into direct conflict, these differences would start to put Western-headquartered countries in difficult positions, but that's not the current state of things.
I think this is starting to change and it gives me a lot of hope. The fallout from the NBA and Blizzard incidents was pretty significant and the HK protests received far more attention than any others in recent years.
Now, anti-CCP sentiment is growing. I think western people are starting to realize how different we actually are. The CCP will be blamed for the pandemic (which is mostly correct), and you will see a massive decoupling here in the next couple of years.
This is the first real anti-globalization movement in about 80 years. Who knows where it will end.
I disagree, the sentiment in the OP is South Park-tier when it comes to reach.
It’s easy. The amount of profits that can be made from China’s 800M and growing middle class is worth the hit of westerners forming a negative opinion. Westerners will forget over time just like everything else.
So don't put too much hope in "western customers". They'd allow likes of Google to get away with a lot, unfortunately.
No Wikipedia articles on him either, and reports of people getting permanently banned from Wikipedia for trying to create that article, or even mentioning him in another.
Politically charged topics on wikipedia need multiple reliable sources.
I can’t find any sources, that would pass as reputable on wikipedia, on this guy.
Maybe if there was a script from Senate from Rand Paul, who spoke his name publicly, that could be used. New York Post is the only kind-of-reputable source I can find, I don’t think that’s enough for now
edit: people link Conservapedia etc, but you can quickly see the stuff is full of misinformation. The like to point out, as Rand did, that Schiff daughter was in some relationship with the CIA guy. This is provably false.
Maybe the Wikipedia rule on sources is actually good.
It's almost like the missions of popular websites fall in line with protecting individuals against government-sponsored attacks on whistleblowers.
Witness protection isn't some flashy thing in movies. It's real and society benefits from it.
[0] https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Eric_Ciaramella [1] https://www.conservapedia.com/Eric_Ciaramella
And this Eric C character turned out to be a nobody (maybe a CIA analyst). So why censor this name? Could be a NSL? (But can that somehow compel the recipient to censor a name anywhere?)
Anyone at google want to be a whistleblower and share this list?
Outing whistle-blowers (or supposed whistle-blowers) is bad for democracy. The government is supposed to be transparent to the people. This does not mean that the people should be transparent to the government, or that dissidents should be outed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/while-were-talking-a...
Such ambiguity fosters an environment of pre-emptive accusations, rife with alternating investigations and immunity.
Look, I'm not saying that's what happened, I don't know anything about it, but the idea that we should be shutting down inquiry into CIA agents interfering in other parts of our government, given the known history of the CIA, is absolutely crazy to me. And it's not like they've changed! We're talking about an organization that just recently illegally spied on the Congressional illegal CIA torture investigation and then lied about it to Congress (also a crime) - and got away with it!
Even in other branches of the government, we know that "whistleblowers" are not always acting in good faith - the NY Times just did a story about a "whistleblower" lying to the press about what was happening and using that as an excuse to leak people's personal information to the press, all in order to advance his own political agenda. If that can happen at the IRS, surely it can happen at the CIA? And surely we should at least be able to look into whether that's a possibility>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/business/media/ronan-farr...
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And dang is nowhere to be found
Hard to see how you could miss such an important distinction between the two unless you had some other motive.
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We in the IT community need to disassociate with google as much as we possibly can.
Free speech is more important than ever.
Because in case you hadn't noticed, Google is entirely blocked in communist China.
Yeah, it actually is. You tell the Nazi's to fuck off and if they kick you out, they kick you out.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_bandit
We don't, actually.
> slavery is typically demonized here in America
No it's not, it's just hidden so liberals (including republicans) don't have to think about it. It's the prison industrial complex.
> Do we really think they wouldn't prefer a Winnie the Pooh image of their leader over slave camps? Even Tiananmen Square is preferable to forced human organ harvesting.
Anything you read in the western media about China or North Korea should be second-guessed and double-checked against eastern media, usually chinese language, for facts. The so-called "free press" is really a coordinated operation run by a few media companies in the interests of the capitalist class. People supposedly iced by Kim Jong Un have been magically resurrected many times. Western media tries to put all the blame of the coronavirus deaths in the US on China "not coming forward" when they had months and months to prepare. The US has entire media structures like "Radio Free Asia" to spread anti-China propaganda.
Can one take out an ad with "共匪" in the text? Adwords against it? Is this censored on Orkut? Would Google consider censoring Gmail? Or Google Voice? Would they consider bleeping Google Meets?
Google will need to be very public about who signed off on this and under what framework.