If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school-children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the scheme of scoundrels.
"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a major cause of spreading misinformation.[1]"
Censorship usually involves removing one side's articles and reasoning and not even attempting to dispute it. True balance by taking account of both sides will include rebuttals of the sides against the other side. Both sides should be free to make their case and also make their rebuttals to the other side. Censorship likes to eliminate one side, so that rebuttal and dissent doesn't take place and isn't known. To what degree a piece of information makes one side's claims baseless is often up to interpretation as well. Our claims are often stronger in our own minds than when spoken out loud to others in reasoned discourse. When we accept any one arbiter as the single source of truth for what is true or fake, we have given up reasoned discourse and dissent. We should think for ourselves, and trust others to think for themselves. No one is more totalitarian than the person who thinks only he and his friends are worthy of thinking for and choosing for themselves and that they must protect others from themselves at all costs.
I happen to agree that false balance is a truly profound problem. And I would go so far as to say it's one of a small handful of ideas I wish could be drilled into the head of every consumer of news. I find it to be one of the most underappreciated and incredibly important ideas of the past few decades.
All of that said, this is one of the last places where I think it is a helpful response. The thrust of Russell's quote is about being informed and thinking critically, which you can value without equating it to false balance.
> [...] present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports.
The idea that some evidence X supports viewpoint Y usually requires some underlying moral assumptions. Many times it's those fundamental moral assumptions that are in discussion, not the evidence itself.
For example: if the scientific evidence is "lockdowns stop the spread of the virus", someone may say: "well, this evidence supports my viewpoint that we should be in permanent lock-down until the virus is completely eradicated". But that starts from the assumption that stopping the spread of the virus is always the most important goal and other considerations (economy, education, etc) should be ignored.
Fake facts are an issue, but once we agree on facts, we're only halfway there, then we need to agree on what to do based on those facts.
GP's quote implores the reader to do the balancing. When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias.
That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance
"False balance" is irrelevant to Russell's point above. He would be the first to explain that the average of two false statements is not necessarily true. The referenced "inference as to what really happened" does not proceed by the method you assume it to do. Indeed, the false-balance problem, where it occurs, is merely another way in which his maxim, "everything in newspapers is more or less untrue" is realized!
What needs to be emphasized, because most people misunderstand it (evidence: all the comments around here): The problematic thing is _false_ balance, that is, making a show of representing both sides while actually doing a crappy job for one side. _Real_ balance is something to strive for. False balance might be equally bad or worse than just representing one side. But a properly balanced article is far preferrable to both. And the right approach to fixing false balance is not to remove one viewpoint, but to add arguments, evidence and (if nothing else is available) trustworthy opinions.
Also, balance doesn't mean that a reader will go away with a feeling of "this issue is 50-50, might as well throw a coin to decide". Balance in this case should mean that the writer has put a similar amount of effort into understanding and representing both sides. And if the writer happens to lean towards one side and naturally know more about it, that means making up for that inherent bias.
I have recently seen two people attacked on Twitter for being balanced and not wanting to take the extreme point of view. I don't think it's healthy to polarize the talk so much.
Not clear to me why false balance is even a thing. It's the job of a paper in its reporting to report things, not to influence opinion. Implicit in "Bothsidesism" is the notion that a paper should have an interest in the direction of influence it provides. That's against the interest of "news" (in the literal sense of the word) and the general proliferation of reported facts. I suppose I'm several decades too late with this take.
People say this like they think they're correct. If it turned out they were wrong, you can bet they'd be the first to demand the censure of anything that went against their careful constructed narrative
How about Covid-19 Pfizer or Moderna vaccine? Can we discuss that? Or we have to accept that it is great because it is great?
Is it allowed to cite Pfizer that in the III tests phase it applied vaccine or placebo to 43 000 people out of which 170 developed COVID-19 - 162 in placebo group and 8 among those vaccinated.
On that base vaccine producer claim that they achieved 95% effectiveness. Can we doubt that number because of the small number of people who developed disease? Is that fact somehow proves that Covid is not that infectious as people thought? And so on.
Should we believe Swiss regulator who refused to accept vaccine? Or maybe Swiss regulator did that since some Swiss company is working on the vaccine?
Can we ask if taking vaccine makes someone non-spreader of the virus? Can we ask if it was tested on older people, people who take a lot of other medicines (like many older people do)? Is seems that people with allergies (what?) should not take vaccine. Was this even testes?
There are many pros and cons and doubts, the evidences is one thing, the conclusions might be different.
Same with election case. Was there at least one case when we have a prove that election result was manipulated? I think at least one can be found. Why can't this be discussed?
Remember the Russian election manipulation? I firmly believe any doubt would have been censored because it didn't align with the narrative for which there was zero evidence in the end. Indeed, this was a false balance as it was political propaganda for a party to safe face and explain defeat.
This Wikipedia article is bad and it should be removed as it doesn't do anything to further knowledge and the message of the sources was daringly misinterpreted and would not constitute anything different than the anecdote I mentioned in the first paragraph.
The article is hostile to thought, thoroughness and honesty at the same time, that is only topped by the shallow word creation that is "bothsidesism", which should constitute assault if written down in earnest.
He wrote that nearly 100 years ago. With an additional century's experience, I think it's clearer that teaching media literacy just isn't enough.
One reason is the bullshit asymmetry principal: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Another is that liars get a lot more practice in selling their lie than people do in analyzing and refuting a particular lie. A third is that people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive; if I blow $10 on a stupid purchase due to lying ads, I'm out $10, but the liar is making a living. And that's before we even get to the asymmetry in mass communication, where a liar can reach millions. Or the modern micro-targeting era, where lies can be tuned to the audience and hidden from debunkers. Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation.
So we really can't expect individuals to keep up on their own. As much as I love cynical skepticism, it's not enough these days.
How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning."
Very little of that is taught because the educational institutions who would be responsible for teaching it have curriculums that cannot withstand it.
Hand-waving to students that "u shuld do critical thinking" is not sufficient to actually teach critical thinking.
Also our educational institutions totally ignore the distribution of intelligence in the population. The curriculum is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator which does an incredible disservice to high (or even average) intelligence individuals.
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
This is true, to an extent. But, that's what journalism is supposed to solve. Instead of spending 1000 hours researching some issue as an individual, have 100 journalists spend 10 hours researching it and collaborate on the reporting. Sadly, we have very little actual journalism anymore, which I'll explain next..
> people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive
This, I totally agree with.
Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. If not through advertising, but by buying the media companies directly. Further, if you give a "journalist" a choice between working for 10 hours to tell the truth or working for 1 hour to tell a lie, getting paid the same amount either way, the outcome is obvious.
Moreover, declining educational standards, and especially lack of critical thinking skills, has led to a deadening of the public palette. The market is not incentivizing actual journalism because objectivity is hard, opposes too many special interests, and the public (at large) doesn't have a taste for it.
The only takeaway from this ought to be obvious. We can't rely on the institutions and corporations who created this problem to solve it. Clearly they're leading us to "thought police" and censorship. I think, however, the lights should be turned on and the public at large should get a crash course in critical thinking.
> Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation.
So... YouTube. YouTube is the arbiter of truth we should accept?
Does that sound any less creepy to you? That a handful of people whose management is headquartered in a few zip codes in San Francisco can determine what people are allowed to talk about?
Here is my heavily biased take. People need to teach analytic philosophy, scientific methodology, logical empiricism, social-psychological dynamics, journalism, jurisprudence, and perhaps a version of initiative (e.g. initiative to try doing journalistic investigation or playing an impartial judge) in middle schools for every student.
I'm not sure if it is too much to ask from folks, but progress doesn't come easy anyway.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
--Bertrand Russell
It's an important skill to independently discern the likely from the unlikely on your own, but any idea repeated often enough becomes "truth", and it's an important function of society to recognize fake truths and purge them.
'It's an important skill to independently discern the likely from the unlikely on your own, but any idea repeated often enough becomes "truth", and it's an important function of society to recognize fake truths and purge them.'
Prove that an important function of society is fake truth purging. And define truth. How big are the fake truths, how much damage do they cause, and how expensive is it to disprove them? If a young child claims that the temperature of a hydrogen atom 52 light years away is 0.1K, but in reality it is 0.01K, shall we:
A. censor the child to stop the spread of misinformation
B. print 8 billion flyers to correct anyone who may have overheard the child
C. put teams of MIT scientists to run experiments to determine the most recent temperature of the atom
D. ignore it
E. claim it's 0K according to god's will
In a more practical example, most people are probably split between C, D and E. The C people might land on the moon sooner, the E people might be more fulfilled. D is watching their son's soccer game. Who is "right"?
Acquiring the true "truth" has a cost, and that cost may be too high, and until we have a proper document from god detailing the worth of each person, we can't know who should live and who should die. If we don't produce enough food, somebody will starve. Who should starve? Perhaps the person with the highest metabolism, to spare as much food as possible. Perhaps the dumbest, to ensure future generations aren't crippled and the problem gets solved quicker. Perhaps the meanest, to spare future conflict. Or perhaps future conflict is good, to weed out the weak. "Truth" might mean maximizing human potential, which could imply minimizing human "drag". Spray peanut dust in stadiums! Shoot people who wear glasses! Gene edit everyone to be 9 feet tall! Kill everyone and create and feed a world-spanning singular ultra-brain (skynet?), for _IT_ shall determine "truth".
The word "truth" almost has a political bias to it, belonging to the party of science-people. I say that with a straight face as someone familiar and trusting of mathematics. It's great that we can build F-22s and nukes with it, but, maybe we were better off worshipping Zeus. Actually, people are a relatively new thing, and the main spreaders of "lies". Perhaps the universe was "truer" before people came around. Perhaps birthing a child is to "lie".
And what is the endgame? What happens after our perfect system of rationalism solves every known fact and theoretical possibility in the entire universe? Did we win? Is our final score 42?
In my 'education', I can't think of a single element of the historical record that was presented through conflicting accounts of contemporary sources. One side is simply labeled as evil and ignored, but, as far as I know, nobody has ever agreed with this characterization of themselves. Evidence too, if at all, was always used to support a narrative account of events, rather than to eliminate possibilities until a particular version of history is proven.
You could never teach a class like this. It would unleash epistemological chaos throughout the school.
My public U.S. high school history classes all included conflicting accounts from contemporary sources. Additionally we were several times asked to write position papers from an arbitrarily assigned side, regardless of our own opinions or those of the teacher, using those contemporary sources as a model for the arguments.
I would assume that that level of discourse in a history class is not the most common, but the opposing viewpoints were expressed directly in the textbooks as a standard appendix to each chapter, which were adopted district wide and probably statewide in Texas. This was not a special curriculum that our teachers designed, although they probably expanded on the concept more than most, given that it was a magnet high school.
My history education was mostly one-sided like this in primary school, but not in secondary & post-secondary school. Perhaps the difference is that I wasn't studying in the US, but I don't remember any grave epistemological chaos.
History is full of things that can't be proven. We'll never be able to know for sure if the (battleship) Maine was destroyed by Spanish sabotage or if it was simply a tragic accident. Or take for example, the question "Did Germany start WWI". It sounds like a yes or no question, but the reality is far more complicated. Failure to understand this complication causes real problems (in this case WWII).
edit: removed American sabotage theory regarding the Maine, as it is rather unlikely.
I feel what you’re saying is an exaggeration. In highschool history class we definitely had conflicting viewpoints on the causes and blame for WW1, varying perspectives on the use of gas in warfare, the arguments about the ethics of bombing civilian targets in WW2, and the debates about the necessity and ethics of the conflicts between “western” and communist powers during the Cold War. This hardly unleashed “chaos” - it was an above average but otherwise normal Canadian highschool history class.
We do see students, even at the college level, claiming that the high quality academic writing they are assigned in curricula is "liberal indoctrination". This method does not function because even the most well researched academic study of these topics can be simply rejected out of hand by students who have been fed lies about the very structure of education.
That’s because, outside certain fields where research can be verified objectively, it very often is a liberal take on whatever is being researched. A vanishingly small number of academics have conservative, or even moderate views. In fields where you can’t objectively analyze the arguments that are being made, liberal assumptions and viewpoints get baked into the research. Even when there is a numeric component, the numbers are viewed from the perspective of liberal assumptions about causation and significance.
I got into an argument the other day with a political science professor about colonization. It was completely unrecognizable to me as someone who is from a former British colony and whose father spent a lifetime working on bread and butter issues affecting the developing world, such as maternal health. (I explained the academic concept of “decolonization” to my father. He thought it was the political process of devolving governance from colonial powers to native governments. I said, no, what they mean by that now is removing colonial influences and culture from the country. My dad’s response was “why the hell would you want to do that?”)
It is not indoctrination, in that it comes from a sincere place. However, it does tend to construct a story that is reviewed and conceived entirely by liberals. This is by the very nature of academic research and the people who inhabit it. Especially in non-STEM fields where truth is a very subjective matter.
A clearer example is Economics, where people from certain schools of thought will actively consider what is taught at other schools as indoctrination. People can't even agree on the core axioms of their field.
We are already seeing a lot of weakly researched topics being pushed around as truths, because believing otherwise does not align with the political goals of the institution.
The problem here is that parts of college (any department that ends in "studies") are liberal indoctrination. So this is the college's job to fix before criticizing the students.
"Cornell University announced this week that its faculty has voted to change the name of the English department as part of a broader campaign to eradicate “structural forms” of racism at the university. The department will now be referred to as the “department of literatures in English.”"[0]
When the same people who draft the curricula are responsible for ridiculous stunts like the one above, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the students who reject them out of hand.
This would indeed be excellent. Unfortunately, "surrender to authority and do as you are told" is the main lesson of modern schooling, as they're mostly concerned about controlling (as in keep them physically close and supervised and presumably safe) as many students as possible with a limited budget and staff.
No, that's not what is taught, even subliminally. One might expect a more cowed populace were that true. Rather, public education in the US needs a deep overhaul, and a renewed discussion of what we collectively believe necessary to know and understand, and how best to accomplish that.
The public are not stupid. They have been tragically under-served by US public schools. Need to fix this.
Google is lifting a ban on political ads tomorrow, about a month ahead of a Jan 5th runoff election in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate.
Perhaps the message here from subsidiary YouTube is that potentially viral videos that could damage voter confidence in past elections (and thereby affect their responsiveness to political ads for future ones) will not be tolerated while parent Google is trying to sell political ads for the Jan 5th election.
How much money will Google make selling ads for this runoff election in Georgia.
Incisive and based in clear economic motivation -- that sounds more like the big G these days. George Washington himself warned against the meddling of foreign powers in our democracy, but if we cannot entertain discussion on such things it's unlikely we'll be able to detect it.
This can be very hard to acquire, especially for events that we are far removed from. Then again, maybe it isn't necessary. Simply reading about a story twice with a deliberate bias on each side can be extremely revealing.
Would more people be inclined to do this if we taught it in schools? I hope so. These days it feels like the reporting of the news is more real to the general population than the news itself ..
Not only is it hard to acquire, such viewpoints are impossible to acquire: every attempt to put experience and research into words has a point of view and that point of view colors the story being told. Attempts to be impartial are themselves often a persuasive technique intended to make your appear view more plausible.
> the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true.
Given that YouTube is not school, I read this to understand that Bertrand Russell is here saying that YouTube shouldn't give equal weight to presumed falsehoods.
He is saying that people should be explicitly educated, in a controlled environment, to recognise the schemes of scoundrels - so that decent people can act accordingly.
That doesn't match how good researchers find quality information. Critical thinking is a ponderous tool, and can even be counter-productive in isolation. Efficient research techniques should be taught in school, with attention to awareness about personal biases, assessing sources of information and cross-referencing
During the run up to the Iraq war, my history teacher in high school showed us front page articles and headlines about it, basically reading between the lines and extracting information that the casual reader didn't pick up on.
Just like computer programs are not perfect the first time it's released, printed text is not either. Most people have good intensions, but we are stupid.
Today I had a frightening interaction on Facebook with a friend of my wife's cousin. He claimed "the new COVID-19 virus had never been tested on humans, only animals" and when I called him on his misinformation and pointed out that the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people he shrugged and told me he was entitled to his opinions, and he just had different sources.
Sure it’s dumb and poorly informed. There have always been dumb people spreading bad ideas. It is not our responsibility to force them to agree with us or de-platform them if they won’t agree with a certain narrative. This is called common human decency.
Did you ask for further explanations? What are his sources? "His opinions" may refer to the fact that he doesn't trust the secondary source you quoted in "the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people", or the primary source, or the very process/protocol of this trial...
It's depressing to read this quote and then realize it was delivered in 1922, meaning our media has been suffering from this problem of extreme political bias for likely more than a century now.
A lot of my friends spend all day "Liking" Facebook posts that mocking Trump supporters as ignorant simpletons, then they repeat blatant falsehoods like "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "Trump called Nazis 'very fine people'". The irony is completely lost on them because they're so deep in their own disinformation bubbles.
It's been a lot longer than a century. This is the natural order of things. Bertrand was not criticizing the media as much as he was pointing out its natural tendencies, which originate in the natural tendencies of humans. His solution was not to fix the media, it is to learn how to interpret it.
Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --"
Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
So. Trump admitted that the neo-Nazis are very bad people, but the group ALSO had some very fine people.
To Trump supporters or "enlightened centrists", this is proof that the left is also deliberately distorting the truth, but you're missing the point.
The point isn't that Trump drew a distinction between the Nazis (who were bad) and the non-Nazis (who were good), and therefore he didn't call Nazis good people.
The point is that there people marching with Neo-Nazis are not better than Neo-Nazis.
If you have a political position and you find yourself attracting neo-Nazis, you have to take a long hard look at what you're doing.
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
OK. First of all, let's start with the fact that Trump has a Cult of Personality. His supporters don't just love him, they TRUST him implicitly - more than any other authority figure. More than other politicians, but also more than DOCTORS.
An idea from Trump matters more to his supporters than an idea from any medical expert.
So. You have Trump "just asking questions" that if a disinfectant can be shown to knock out the virus on a kitchen counter (and at that point there were COUNTLESS news articles about how to protect yourself from the virus by bleaching and disenfecting all your things. He goes a step further and says maybe there is a way to do the same by taking the same disinfectant INSIDE the body. Finally, he says I'm not a doctor, but I know things. Which basically seals the deal and confirms he thinks it's a promising idea.
So, no, he didn't say the words "MAGA NATION! Go buy bleach and drink it!"
But he did say that he believes that: Disinfectant inside the body could help with the virus through injection or something like it.
It is a plausibly deniable one, but it is an endorsement nonetheless.
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, Gary Peters of Michigan and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota ask YouTube to commit to removing content with false or misleading information about the 2020 US presidential election and future political races, including the coming, pivotal Senate runoffs in Georgia.
>“We urge you to immediately remove all election outcome misinformation and take aggressive steps to implement prohibitions, as other social media companies have done, regarding outcomes in future elections,” the letter reads.
This isn't a company deciding, this is censorship urged by the government. I thought that kind of thing was illegal down there.
Not saying anything either way about the politics of the election, but isn't this blatant government censorship?
The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan. Nor are they the only political figures to reference the widely acknowledged facts that there was no spread widespread voter fraud. Prominent Republican politicians in positions of oversight have agreed with this outcome.
If YouTube does as good a job as Facebook, then I have zero faith it won't just become partisan censorship. I have seen "False Information" labels on Facebook posts which were linked to "fact checking articles" which confirmed the post as true rather than false.
The facts of this case are quite clearly in dispute, so to make a judgement about which of those facts are accurate and which aren’t is rather clearly taking a partisan political position.
This whole fact obsession has gotten completely out of hand. Presiding over disputed matters of fact is pretty much the core purpose of our entire court system. You can’t just call something a fact and be done with it. What you’ve actually described is a collection of opinions, and then declared them settled facts by referencing some of the people that hold them.
I know people get terribly riled up by politics, but they’re just losing sight of any form of reasonableness. Having an unaccountable central authority decide what’s true and what’s not is literally one of the most canonical forms of dystopia that exists.
The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan.
Of course it's partisan. Had Trump won, and Biden voters were publishing content like this with the same lack of evidence, do you believe that Democratic senators would still be urging YouTube to take it down in the interest of fairness to Trump? I think you know the answer to that.
The scary part of this is that elected officials, who were presumably elected by people that thought they were going to protect the freedoms granted to them by the Constitution, and who must take an oath upon taking office to "support and defend the Constitution," sat down and wrote a letter that gleefully trampled all over one of our most fundamental constitutional rights. Since they were successful in this endeavor, it will happen again, on other, more expansive, partisan issues. Down the slippery slope we go.
The simple fact of the matter is that people are entitled to their opinions, and in the United States, they have a constitutional right to express those opinions in the same way and on the same platforms as those that disagree with them. The only problem is that now we have politicians who believe that those rights should only be extended to those who are on their side. Both sides of the political aisle are acting this way, and it does not bode well for our future as a country.
This isn't a company deciding, this is censorship urged by the government. I thought that kind of thing was illegal down there.
Not saying anything either way about the politics of the election, but isn't this blatant government censorship?
If you think it is, then why are you asking? If you're not sure, why are you asserting it (and suggesting that a party is equivalent to a government because some of its members are part of the government)?
Perhaps you should extend your inquiry, and ask how it is that much of one party and its leader are demanding that an election be overturned or declared invalid, using a variety of extremely tenuous arguments. Please consider that these demands originate with people who have also demanded tech companies be stripped of legal immunity for content publication and regularly expresses a wish to sue media outlets out of existence, topics which seem to have earned little discussion on HN.
>If you're not sure, why are you asserting it (and suggesting that a party is equivalent to a government because some of its members are part of the government)?
Yes, active senators are in fact part of the government. The partisanship system does affect even active member's of the US government and this does seem to be a partisan issue driven solely by politics.
>Perhaps you should extend your inquiry, and ask how it is that much of one party and its leader are demanding that an election be overturned or declared invalid, using a variety of extremely tenuous arguments.
Then the other party should counter those arguments and wait for things to resolve as they will. This will happen whatever the average person believes. The election will be decided by the electoral college, or possibly the courts if any of those lawsuits end up having substance. People posting videos about anything won't change this.
>Please consider that these demands originate with people who have also demanded tech companies be stripped of legal immunity for content publication and regularly expresses a wish to sue media outlets out of existence, topics which seem to have earned little discussion on HN.
The section 230 issue seems like a separate issue being spun as a response to this issue in ways that make no logical sense. But are being pushed as a response to actions like these. I don't support the repeal of this, but I do think this kind of obvious, government urged censorship is good either.
I didn't like when trump went on about fake news and I don't like when the other side of the government goes on about misinformation. I don't believe the government, either side, should be the arbiters of what is real news or real information.
When this happens, all the average person is left with is state sponsored propaganda.
This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem. A lot of these videos are saying things that cannot reasonably be classified as anything other than misinformation. For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with. They also make up vague but scary claims about large numbers of illegal immigrants having voted, etc. All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post.
More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.
>This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem
I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.
>For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with.
Ok, so wouldn't it be the people who seek out and watch these kinds videos that would be the ones that would be too afraid to use mail in ballots? Seems like the people who think those videos are nonsense won't believe them anyway.
>All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post
How? From what I understand, there was a record number of mail in ballots this year, seems like it did nothing of the sort.
>More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.
No, the government should not be allowed to decide what is or isn't real information, that's called propaganda.
You’re going to have to walk me through that line of reasoning. The chain of causation between yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater and someone getting trampled to death while attempting to flee doesn’t require any stretch of the imagination. You claim that YouTube videos with false information about the 2020 election have a “chilling” effect on democracy. What does that even mean? And how would you even begin to establish some concrete chain of causation between the videos and whatever it is you define as “chilling”? Do you see how hand-wavy your argument is?
>they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with
Not "fraud." Illegal votes. In fact, there is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Texas and 17 other states (36% of the United States) alleging this exact thing: that many mail-in votes were illegal, due to unconstitutional rule changes which allowed them to take place[1]. That's not ok to talk about on YouTube?
[1]If you don't know what I'm talking about, just say so and I'll point you to a non-partisan, levelheaded explanation of the argument.
Another good analogy is fraudulent advertising. Freedom of speech does not mean that people can say any old thing without consequence. If people were selling fake Covid-19 cures, Google would be well within their rights to take down ads and videos. And elected officials would certainly be allowed to ask about it if they weren't.
"For context, electoral fraud was and is more prevalent in Corsica than in the rest of the country. The article goes on to mention that in Ajaccio (the largest city in Corsica), one list had obtained 33.5% of the physical votes but 90% of the mail-in votes in the first round, and similar figures in the second round."
Doesn't it feel familiar?
> Here also — observers generally agree on this point — mail-in voting is one of the preferred methods for fraud. The idea of removing mail-in voting and replacing it by proxy voting has therefore been generally admitted in the [parliamentary] legal commission.
Also the counting from some distant area with opaque machines and the fact not everyone is authorized to check the count is ripe for abuse.
Well, that's an easy question. The answer is No. This isn't government censorship since the government isn't doing it. Same as if a politician asks you not to park on their lawn it's not "Government issues diktat against man for parking car".
Mafia coming to you for protection money since "bad things happen" is not extortion. They just ask nicely. The fact that your building burned down after you didn't pay is totally unrelated.
Google has accepted over $600 million in government subsidies from Federal and State governments. Thus Google is effectively a public-private partnership and can be regulated no differently than public schools or any other public entity.
> This isn't a company deciding, this is censorship urged by the government.
Which is not new, the exactly same happened a couple of years ago to force Social Media companies to moderate more strongly on "extremist/jihadist", "foreign interference" and "child nudity" content.
During Senate hearings Google, Facebook and Twitter were faced with the choice to either do it themselves, or be forced to do it trough regulation, those were bipartisan efforts [0].
But even back then it was pretty evident how that whole thing would end up as a slippery slope.
The use of the word "urge", instead of "request" or "demand", seems to imply that Google is within its rights to decide. The letter does not threaten any legal action if Google decides not to remove alleged misinformation. It does not allege that Google has broken any law. What the letter does request are answers to questions. It looks like a standard letter requesting information that we commonly see from US Senators to US tech companies.
yes, it is. Government pressured censorship at least.
One can make a reasonable argument that YouTube is making the decision voluntarily. And the letter is just giving them some cover for what they wanted to do, based on their own biases, anyway.
But private censorship is still censorship. And when a platform is so large that it has effectively become "the public square", well I do not go so far as to say that they cannot legally engage in censorship, but I do believe they are morally obliged not to, and should be publically called out when they do.
I hope people will begin moving to other platforms in droves so that some real competition emerges.
A letter from four people "urging" something isn't blatant censorship. Blatant censorship just happens--there's no asking in between (see China for more).
Google is making a strategic decision. Despite what you may hope, free speech isn't YouTube's main priority--it's profit. Right now they're trying to minimize the possibility profits may be impacted by stakeholder action. They don't care if your particular political views aren't adequately represented. Free speech isn't a mandated requirement for corporations.
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 independent from China? Videos that allege that unelected bureaucrars have more power than elected officials? Videos that suggest that there is trouble with voting counting during US elections?
You can easily end up doing way, way more censorship than strictly required to keep your resource legally clean (hate speech, copyright violations, etc). If I were Google (YouTube, Alphabet, whoever is responsible), I would stay as far away as possible from this kind of censorship, purely because of the cost of doing it, and the constant getting into hot water when not censoring enough, or censoring too much. Being a neutral pipe could be plainly better for the business.
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.
Is it actually the government's agents censoring it, or is it a Zuckerberg owned website removing incorrect information? Do information platforms have any duty or obligation to not knowingly allow false information to spread in a democracy?
It's not censorship because Facebook is a private business, they can delete what they want, and if a post, meme, etc are full of dis/misinformation (from either party!) then it's perfectly within their rights to remove it as it damages their reputation and the enjoyment of the platform by customers. I for one am all for it. If I don't like what's going on I will simply stop using facebook. I stopped using it once for 6 months and they never sent booted thugs to my home, so they're doing just fine by me.
It's a tricky area. The challenge is how to deal with bad actors who use the rules of the game to undermine the game itself.
We also have to acknowledge the context in which this is occurring; the people claiming fraud are also threatening violence against civil servants and their children.
"Georgia officials were similarly reticent until last week, when threats online targeted a young contract worker for Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines were used in the state. One post on Twitter included a swinging noose.
That day, Gabriel Sterling, the Republican in charge of the voting machines, walked to a podium visibly angry and demanded that Trump “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”
In an interview with Reuters, Sterling said that he personally had received a message calling him a him “traitor” that included his home address. Someone else wished him a happy birthday in a tweet saying it would be his last."
Just like it's difficult when and what content to censor when it comes to things like the ISIS recruiting pipeline, it's hard to know where the line is with what is basically a far-right ideology which bleeds into domestic terrorism.
i don't think free speech applies on managed internet apps. If people are promoting fake news, it should be deleted, if they don't like it they can create their own YouTube that doesn't censor fake news.
This has been done before: McCarythy-era government labeled people as Communists. Those people were then voluntarily blacklisted from working in Hollywood by the Hollywood studios.
Not saying it’s right. Just saying it’s happened at least once before and I bet other times.
For it to be government censorship, they'd have to use government power to censor. No formal power was used. It's also not urged by the federal government, which is the organization that Trump runs, but instead by elected representatives.
I also think it's misleading to call it partisan, as if truth and falsehood are just two different flavors of ice cream, or two different sports teams. An informed populace is a necessary precondition for democracy to survive. Google might have the right to profit from misinformation, but I don't think they have an obligation to do so. They are allowed to support free and fair elections, just like the rest of us.
> Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors.
These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.
Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. It took me 2 seconds to find videos claiming that the "GOP hacked/stole the 2004 election.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=batAXTWBjMo
These claims are being slaughtered in ongoing court cases, and many of them are objectively batshit, like the guy who filed an affidavit about being prevented from observing vote counts because he drove to the wrong location, or the woman, central to the Texas suit against PA and MI, who claims the Obamas "funded the Wuhan lab where coronavirus was made". It is not the case that Google has to provide space for a claim simply because it's improvidently featured in a frivolous lawsuit.
As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.
>These claims are being slaughtered in ongoing court cases, and many of them are objectively batshit,
The Mike Kelly case in PA, arguing that the law allowing mail-in ballots was illegal, was ruled by a judge as completely legally valid, but was thrown out of the state supreme court because "they waited too long to complain".
So, no, not objectively batshit. If the GOP had filed that case in January, Trump would have won PA...assuming the same supreme court didn't throw out their case for some other arbitrary reason like "filing too soon."
The Democrats outplayed Republicans. Democrats passed an un-Constitutional law that helped them stuff ballot boxes with ballots that were almost certainly harvested or bought. If we're to believe the election results and voter turnout in, say, mostly black Philadelphia, Joe Biden is a more popular politician than even Barack Obama. Only an idiot would believe that. But still, it serves Republicans right for underestimating the extent to which Democrats would cheat.
Trump is absolutely hoovering up money from his followers since he started on his election fraud rant - he's up to something like $250M, and he personally gets to keep something like 70% of it.
Most of the lawsuits are so ridiculously bad, it makes me wonder if it's just part of keeping up the act in order to keep his followers riled up and throwing cash at him. Inciting such intense hatred with so very many lies all for personal money and power - it's devisive, dangerous, and absolutely terrifying that this is happening in the USA, a country that spent decades forcing democracy on other countries.
> Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections.
Indeed.
I was told by all the right people that Russia hacked the 2016 election for 4 years.
To this day, Stacy Abrams acts like she's governor of Georgia and claims the election was stolen.
All of that content will not be taken down.
But yes, given the fact that 1) "safe harbor" means nothing historically, 2) there have been electoral contests in the U.S. decided within days of inauguration, and 3) there is active litigation being pursued, this chilling of speech can't be seen as anything other that Google pushing their hands on the scale here.
There is evidence[1, 2, 3] of Russian interference in the 2016 election. There is evidence[4, 5, 6, 7] of interference by Republicans in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. That content will not be taken down because it is true.
There is no evidence[8] of fraud in the 2020 election. Trump's own lawyers have admitted[9, 10, 11] that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases.
Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to. Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?
> Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?
No, but we also shouldn’t censor people for making those claims. It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.
> Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to.
> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.
Aren't you an actual lawyer? Do you think any of Giuliani's cases have enough merit that you would argue one and think you had a good chance of winning?
I could probably engineer a frivolous court case claiming Joe Biden's a space alien and is thus ineligible to be president, but that doesn't mean that anyone should withhold judgment on my claim before I inevitably flame out in the first hearing.
The fact that politicians and private actors choose to beclown themselves in front of state and federal judges shouldn't prevent businesses from being able to see the plain truth that is staring them in the face. This is farcical.
I think Trump's behavior is abhorrent. But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened. It's worse this year than usual, because Trump is worse than usual, but the losing side believing the election was stolen has become a feature of American politics during the last two decades: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
After elections, half of people on the losing side now regularly believe the election wasn't free and fair.
What does it matter that suits are tossed out? Do you realize how silly it seems to ban critizing the election process unless you also aknowledge Biden as winner?
There are like, what, a dozen states' Attorney Generals that you can't tape a press release off and put on Youtube according to those rules.
Unpopular opinion: it is much better to have a leader hated by the media and who's every move is scrutinized by the press than to have a leader cowtowed by the press and given a free pass on anything.
How do I know? I'm from Russia. Authoritatism begins with tight control of news sources.
This comment is really weird. There is a good reason why the media publishes more negative articles about some presidents and fewer on others; some presidents are legitimately better or worse than others.
I thought it was a good comment. I don't know why the left fears a legitimately impartial press instead of one that leaks debate questions to the Democratic candidate.
Seriously? This president has not started/entered into a war for the first time since Carter, reformed the criminal justice system to reverse laws that unfairly targeted minorities and non-violent drug crimes (laws supported by Biden when they were passed, btw), presided over a record low unemployment rate and record high wage increases for American workers prior to the pandemic and the media treats him like he's the reincarnation of Hitler.
Imagine if Obama reformed the criminal justice system, wasn't a war monger in Syria/Libya and presided over a record economic boom? He'd be made a saint or something.
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.
I get your point, but given the proximity of Obama, Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party as a whole to Google/Alphabet and subsidiaries, it stands to reason that there's not some wall of separation between Google/YouTube management and the US government. This doesn't seem so hard to believe: we all saw that leaked video after the 2016 US elections where Sergey Brin and several other executives clearly aligned themselves with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
But the "government" (well, several senators, the legislative branch of the power) did just politely ask YouTube to start censoring content.
I'd be fine with videos marked with something like "YouTube believes this video is untrue and spreads dangerous disinformation" put before or even over a video. But taking videos down is quite another matter.
God would I love to live in a world where Youtube videos, facebook comments, instagram stories weren't the _actual_ source of most people's news (and by news I mean baseless things people with obvious biases and insidious motives say).
My understanding of GP point is that majority of social media companies is negative to Trump and positive to Biden. The difference with Russia is that media is controlled by government, but the original point is that it is healthier when media scrutinises government
I live in the US and I've said this for decades. I wish the media were just as hard on the politicians they agree with.
The one thing different about trump is that he purposely provoked the media and responded to petty nonsense that previous presidents would have just ignored. Trump and the media have a symbiotic relationship because they both need the attention.
It seems funny to me that when people say things about the "media" they by implication omit such members as Fox News, the many, many right leaning web-only news sites and "conservative" talk radio (terrestrial and sat). In addition, much of "local" tv news stations are owned by conservative leaning Sinclair Broadcasting, an ownership which has pressed its own views on the reporting of news by its properties.
No, there were other differences. Let’s just go with his most recent example: He’s still refuting election results with no evidence to backup his claim.
This is definitely true when the boss-man doesn't change. But these people aren't against power, or even against power used abusively against the people - they're only against "the other team" and clearly happy to cover up just about any bad actions of their preferred team.
So we should vote for leaders that “the media” hates and scrutinizes? That is a sad, cynical view of the world. Also, you realize that the media in the US includes outlets on both sides, right? As in, every leader pretty much fits both characterizations?
I think this comment is underrated. Even using the term "censorship" is somewhat dubious when/if the "censor" is acting against the interests/wishes of government.
That said, I think google are making a bad mistake here. They've crossed a line that they've been toeing.
Social media isn't just a mass media. Media is always edited. Editing isn't censorship. But social media is also a communication channel. Haphazard interference in a communication channel sits wrong. We have no frame of reference for it.
Meanwhile, there are credible claims that social media fallacies have caused horrible things (including possibly genocide in Myanmar) in other countries/languages. FB (in that case) has no knowledge of the language or interest in getting involved in that. How can you justify one without the other?
How is that an unpopular opinion though? Even the right-wingers keep hammering about fake news, which implies they care about fair, neutral and 'true' news.
I mean it's one of those doublespeak terms that they themselves don't fully understand (apparently), but still.
I have yet to meet a reddit democrat that knows more about Obama than they do about Trump. That's why I thought Trump should've been in office again. Now we've got a dying old man and a pro cop VP.
And I'll take it because I think the alternative is leading to a few greedy assholes using analytical data to successfully weaponize millions upon millions of uninformed people against logic and common sense.
Do we add restrictions to voting to weed out people who habitually vote anti-facts? No. Disenfranchisement.
Do we make fake news illegal? No. Censorship leading to state run media.
Do we have a civil war because it's so bad that people are being evicted and dying of starvation because their neighbors are being convinced by propaganda that they're less than? Hopefully not.
So we're kind of left with this option. We're stuck with speaking with our wallets through corporations because our voices in government have been corrupted.
I’m asking as sincerely as I can, I wish no one harm or to lose their right to vote —
How do we have a higher mail in ballot rejection rate in non-pandemic times than we do in pandemic times?
And then follow up, if we assume incredible voter turnout, how do many of these first time mail in ballots follow the process so correctly that the ballot rejection rate is lower?
Were the standards altered? That’s fine with me. Just say it.
Can we see all the ballot signatures side by side with the rolls? I don’t think that’s too much to ask really — I mean it’s a part of the process (we already check voter rolls in state and local elections).
These questions could really begin a true discussion to build a shared world views. It’s what I imagine a forthright and true partner would do for someone with slight reservations... or at least I’d hope.
Shutting it down with Orwellian tactics rather than hard verifiable data is what feels a bit disingenuous that we are all on the same team.
> How do we have a higher mail in ballot rejection rate in non-pandemic times than we do in pandemic times?
Probably because the rejection rate is exaggerated in normal times because the population that relies on absentee voting in regular times is less able to produce consistent signatures.
Also probably because a lot more effort (both official government and outside organization) went into educating people on the rules for mail-in ballots.
> And then follow up, if we assume incredible voter turnout, how do many of these first time mail in ballots follow the process so correctly that the ballot rejection rate is lower?
That's not a follow-up, it's just rephrasing the exact same question with different and more extensive framing commentary.
> How do we have a higher mail in ballot rejection rate in non-pandemic times than we do in pandemic times?
I mean, here's an explanation for a specific case
> According to the nonprofit, nonpartisan organisation Ballotpedia, Georgia rejected 6.42% of mail-in ballots in total in the 2016 general election and 3.10% in total in the 2018 midterm (here). These totals include rejections because of signatures, but also include, for example, ballots received late or past deadlines, problems with return materials or a voter having already voted in person.
> It may be that Trump was referring to the 0.15% of ballots specifically rejected for "missing or non-matching signatures" when saying that ballots rejected in 2020 were "almost zero", but this percentage is consistent with past years. The higher percentage he mentions for past years is likely based off the total rejected ballots (here) which can not be compared with 2020, as this information is not available.
YouTube’s massively outsized impact is obviously the problem here. This wouldn’t be Orwellian if they didn’t have so much power. We wouldn’t need it if YouTube didn’t allow for such insane manipulation of people.
But if we’re going to have YouTube, by god do I prefer people NOT proliferating this madness freely.
Such a tricky situation, but I think what youtube is getting used for is actually the Orwellian bullshit. The power of youtube videos to convince people of untrue things is quite astounding. I have no idea what the right answers to any of this is. At he moment nearly any action is considered as dire in that it will either make America a communist state or it will bring a right wing dictator to power. Hopefully, what we are witnessing is robustness of the legal system and constitution amongst all the chaos.
There is another option: use anti-trust enforcement or similar regulatory actions to ensure a competitive market, so people can be always get access to information, and no single private provider can become a universal censor.
Holy shit, this thread is scary. Sure, there are some implications worth discussing based on this news. However, the number of people directly posting doubts on the election results is way more concerning and shows that Youtube might be doing a good thing in this case.
But rationally I have no way to be 100% certain, because, as a thought experiment, if it really was rigged, what would look different to how it does look?
The fact that "everyone knew" and was expecting the losing side to cry foul means that when they do, everyone says "you see? Told you so."
But if it really was, how would we know? What would look different?
The fact that those who are meant to look out for such things (primarily, the media) are not trusted by one side to do so impartially means that if there really was foul play, their reporting would not necessarily be different. So again, how would you know?
To reiterate, I am not saying I think it was rigged. I'm not American, nor have I ever lived there. I'm just saying that _if it was_, things would look pretty much as they do now. _If t wasn't_, things would also look pretty much as they do now. So how can we know?
Republicans outperformed expectations in Congressional results. This is unusual given congressional results and presidential results have historically correlated. I don't understand the explanation for that if Democrats rigged the election somehow.
It seems more plausible that:
- there was a really high turnout aided by widespread absentee voting
- a large single-digit percentage of voters went Republican in the congressional races but didn't vote for Trump
I can't think of a fraud based scenario with any factual support that is as compelling.
Yes, to think that somebody might have doubts that the most ideologically contentious election in modern history, wherein both sides perceived the opposition to be an existential threat to their lives or lifestyles might have on any scale been marred by political actors attempting to fix the results in their favor is a sign that people are too irrational to be exposed to the idea going forward…
...yes. yes, it's absurd that after the last few weeks, the GOP candidate refuses to concede and is still continually playing with fire by pushing the notion that the result was fraudulent.
Elect a cheater, and then claim the next election has the "most cheating in history." Amazingly, that's an accurate statement, because of the cheater.
I am willing to be "exposed to the idea" as you say. I have to ask which is more likely, a massive undetected fraud across multiple states, or the guy with 40% approval rate losing the election?
All you have to do is bring a specific claim with credible evidence to a court. If after 5 weeks you still cannot do that why do we need to continue to entertain these doubts? How long must we doubt? Is there any possible way Biden could have won this election without these doubts? The president began making these claims at 2:30 AM on 11/4 when he didn't know anything except what Fox News had told him: he was going to lose. And that was all the proof required for him and his followers to determine "a massive fraud" had been committed. So how could it have gone any differently?
I think a lot of people just know once done, this is not the last time a tech company will get letters from senators asking for content to be removed. This time, I happen to agree that the claim the election was stolen is actively harmful but I also remember when Covid was officially not spread human to human and if Covid misinformation had been a banned thing earlier in the pandemic we would have been probably removing content from actual doctors that ended up being right. Remember when "masks wouldn't help"?
I think youtube is doing a "good thing" in terms of getting us past this silliness faster, but I don't think it'll necessarily be a "good thing" next time so I'd rather it happen never.
> shows that Youtube might be doing a good thing in this case.
All youtube did was fan the flames of political division. Imagine after 2016, youtube decided to ban everyone accusing Trump of cheating. Do you think that would make the democrats "see the light"? Or do you think it would galvanize the democrats?
This election is ultimately going to be decided in the supreme court. Not on youtube. Youtube should have just kept out of this issue.
Trump is celebrating this right now because not only does it rile up his base, it makes independents and even some democrats take notice and sympathize with Trump.
Even if youtube had good intentions ( and I'm not sold on that ), they ultimately are damaging the country. But I guess that's why they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Trump did cheat, in a way. Foreign actors clearly influenced those elections and Trump won with a minority in the popular vote. Democrats accepted that outcome and conceded the election. Many democrats gave Trump the benefit of the doubt. Barack invited him to the white house and allowed him to start the transition. All this even though many people already hated the idea of a Trump presidency.
I don't have to imagine the democrats did anything like the republicans are doing now, because it didn't happen.
Edit: here's a link to show you how small the margins were in swing states in 2016:
In a free and fair society, it is not dangerous to ask questions. It is very dangerous to be told that you are not allowed to ask questions.
In a marketplace of ideas, with free sharing of information, bogus claims will eventually (usually quickly) collapse on themselves, and true claims will bear themselves out.
Attempting to silence ideas, even potentially false and harmful ideas, is the greatest way to build a society that is not free, fair, and based on fact, but only one that is based on the opinions of the gatekeepers of the ideas.
I personally don't buy this "free speech" speech, since free speech applies to the government, not to a public entity.
Youtube is free to make any rules they want and to enforce them however they want. They don't owe you anything and you can stop using it at any point in time (which I actually encourage you to do - but for a completely different set of reasons). You watch content, they show you ads and get money for the ads. That's it. You don't like the content or the lack of content you are free to, again, move to another site/platform/social network/etc.
It's amazing to me how much people are willing to entertain this charade that was started after the elections. It's also amazing to see the mental gymnastics involved to explain some of the things that were done and/or said. This is not 4D chess.
Youtube should get to do what they want as long as they operate withing the laws of the countries they are running their service within. I still have not seen the law that was broken here.
Sure, making stuff up takes very little effort, and refuting it properly takes more. Makes sense.
But what if it’s not as simple as “this side is making everything up, and the other side is 100% honest”.
You could easily turn that argument around and say that the right is going to great lengths to have their evidence investigated, while the left is just trying to make it go away. Surely “energy expended” is not a great metric for judging bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not making a “free speech” argument. Of course YouTube is free to curate whatever they want to, and competitors are free to provide alternatives for users that want that. THAT is free speech.
My argument was not “YouTube can’t legally do this”, it was more trying to appeal to this notion some folks have that a topic of discussion merely existing is dangerous, and that somehow removing all of that discussion will eliminate that danger.
It also removes any possibility of the side removing the discussion from ever having to assess the validity of their facts, which logically and naturally means the other side will never have to assess and defend the validity of their argument either. Hello tribalism.
You don’t disprove flat earthers by telling them they aren’t allowed to ever talk about the shape of the earth, because naturally people will come up with the idea on their own, time and again, and forbidding it only lends itself to greater conviction.
Instead, sufficiently convince a large enough group of people through reason and evidence that the Earth is round, and those few people who willingly ignore the evidence will be too small and too fringe to be dangerous.
The danger is not in asking questions, the danger is in forbidding questions.
Imagine, for a second, that you saw something concerning. For argument’s sake, say you saw your boss doing something you perceived to be illegal.
Imagine, then, that you were told that asking about those things was dangerous, because it would cause everyone to lose faith in who they work for.
Now imagine that HR or a PR firm comes, only after trying hard to convince you that you shouldn’t ask any questions at all, and then tells you that they investigated and found nothing wrong.
Then imagine that, while some of the explanation given made sense, some of it did not, and maybe led to more questions.
Finally, imagine then being told that not only should you no longer question, but that anyone caught talking about it would be removed.
Now, we don’t know that something illegal did or did not occur.
But be honest... would that scenario convince you that nothing illegal happened, and that you should move on as instructed?
> say you saw your boss doing something you perceived to be illegal.
Keyword being "perceived".
But let's examine the premise.
Do I have any evidence of this act? Do I have sufficent expertise to determine if what I saw was actually illegal? Where are my biases? Can I argue my case in a coherent and believable manner?
and most importantly in this particular case, are there literally thousands of other people who contradict my position?
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=5
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003&p=6
Corporate press releases tend to be an exception to HN's rule about original sources (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) because they are invariably self-serving and usually obscure. This one seems ok, but I think I'll pilfer the title from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25361291, which gets to the point more directly.
--Bertrand Russell
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
All of that said, this is one of the last places where I think it is a helpful response. The thrust of Russell's quote is about being informed and thinking critically, which you can value without equating it to false balance.
The idea that some evidence X supports viewpoint Y usually requires some underlying moral assumptions. Many times it's those fundamental moral assumptions that are in discussion, not the evidence itself.
For example: if the scientific evidence is "lockdowns stop the spread of the virus", someone may say: "well, this evidence supports my viewpoint that we should be in permanent lock-down until the virus is completely eradicated". But that starts from the assumption that stopping the spread of the virus is always the most important goal and other considerations (economy, education, etc) should be ignored.
Fake facts are an issue, but once we agree on facts, we're only halfway there, then we need to agree on what to do based on those facts.
That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance
Also, balance doesn't mean that a reader will go away with a feeling of "this issue is 50-50, might as well throw a coin to decide". Balance in this case should mean that the writer has put a similar amount of effort into understanding and representing both sides. And if the writer happens to lean towards one side and naturally know more about it, that means making up for that inherent bias.
It was a suggestion to actually read articles from both sides.
Not read one article badly providing 1.25 sides.
Is it allowed to cite Pfizer that in the III tests phase it applied vaccine or placebo to 43 000 people out of which 170 developed COVID-19 - 162 in placebo group and 8 among those vaccinated.
On that base vaccine producer claim that they achieved 95% effectiveness. Can we doubt that number because of the small number of people who developed disease? Is that fact somehow proves that Covid is not that infectious as people thought? And so on.
Should we believe Swiss regulator who refused to accept vaccine? Or maybe Swiss regulator did that since some Swiss company is working on the vaccine?
Can we ask if taking vaccine makes someone non-spreader of the virus? Can we ask if it was tested on older people, people who take a lot of other medicines (like many older people do)? Is seems that people with allergies (what?) should not take vaccine. Was this even testes?
There are many pros and cons and doubts, the evidences is one thing, the conclusions might be different.
Same with election case. Was there at least one case when we have a prove that election result was manipulated? I think at least one can be found. Why can't this be discussed?
This Wikipedia article is bad and it should be removed as it doesn't do anything to further knowledge and the message of the sources was daringly misinterpreted and would not constitute anything different than the anecdote I mentioned in the first paragraph.
The article is hostile to thought, thoroughness and honesty at the same time, that is only topped by the shallow word creation that is "bothsidesism", which should constitute assault if written down in earnest.
One reason is the bullshit asymmetry principal: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Another is that liars get a lot more practice in selling their lie than people do in analyzing and refuting a particular lie. A third is that people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive; if I blow $10 on a stupid purchase due to lying ads, I'm out $10, but the liar is making a living. And that's before we even get to the asymmetry in mass communication, where a liar can reach millions. Or the modern micro-targeting era, where lies can be tuned to the audience and hidden from debunkers. Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation.
So we really can't expect individuals to keep up on their own. As much as I love cynical skepticism, it's not enough these days.
> media literacy just isn't enough
How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning."
Very little of that is taught because the educational institutions who would be responsible for teaching it have curriculums that cannot withstand it.
Hand-waving to students that "u shuld do critical thinking" is not sufficient to actually teach critical thinking.
Also our educational institutions totally ignore the distribution of intelligence in the population. The curriculum is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator which does an incredible disservice to high (or even average) intelligence individuals.
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
This is true, to an extent. But, that's what journalism is supposed to solve. Instead of spending 1000 hours researching some issue as an individual, have 100 journalists spend 10 hours researching it and collaborate on the reporting. Sadly, we have very little actual journalism anymore, which I'll explain next..
> people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive
This, I totally agree with.
Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. If not through advertising, but by buying the media companies directly. Further, if you give a "journalist" a choice between working for 10 hours to tell the truth or working for 1 hour to tell a lie, getting paid the same amount either way, the outcome is obvious.
Moreover, declining educational standards, and especially lack of critical thinking skills, has led to a deadening of the public palette. The market is not incentivizing actual journalism because objectivity is hard, opposes too many special interests, and the public (at large) doesn't have a taste for it.
The only takeaway from this ought to be obvious. We can't rely on the institutions and corporations who created this problem to solve it. Clearly they're leading us to "thought police" and censorship. I think, however, the lights should be turned on and the public at large should get a crash course in critical thinking.
So... YouTube. YouTube is the arbiter of truth we should accept?
Does that sound any less creepy to you? That a handful of people whose management is headquartered in a few zip codes in San Francisco can determine what people are allowed to talk about?
I'm not sure if it is too much to ask from folks, but progress doesn't come easy anyway.
That makes a lot of sense.
--Bertrand Russell
It's an important skill to independently discern the likely from the unlikely on your own, but any idea repeated often enough becomes "truth", and it's an important function of society to recognize fake truths and purge them.
Prove that an important function of society is fake truth purging. And define truth. How big are the fake truths, how much damage do they cause, and how expensive is it to disprove them? If a young child claims that the temperature of a hydrogen atom 52 light years away is 0.1K, but in reality it is 0.01K, shall we:
A. censor the child to stop the spread of misinformation B. print 8 billion flyers to correct anyone who may have overheard the child C. put teams of MIT scientists to run experiments to determine the most recent temperature of the atom D. ignore it E. claim it's 0K according to god's will
In a more practical example, most people are probably split between C, D and E. The C people might land on the moon sooner, the E people might be more fulfilled. D is watching their son's soccer game. Who is "right"?
Acquiring the true "truth" has a cost, and that cost may be too high, and until we have a proper document from god detailing the worth of each person, we can't know who should live and who should die. If we don't produce enough food, somebody will starve. Who should starve? Perhaps the person with the highest metabolism, to spare as much food as possible. Perhaps the dumbest, to ensure future generations aren't crippled and the problem gets solved quicker. Perhaps the meanest, to spare future conflict. Or perhaps future conflict is good, to weed out the weak. "Truth" might mean maximizing human potential, which could imply minimizing human "drag". Spray peanut dust in stadiums! Shoot people who wear glasses! Gene edit everyone to be 9 feet tall! Kill everyone and create and feed a world-spanning singular ultra-brain (skynet?), for _IT_ shall determine "truth".
The word "truth" almost has a political bias to it, belonging to the party of science-people. I say that with a straight face as someone familiar and trusting of mathematics. It's great that we can build F-22s and nukes with it, but, maybe we were better off worshipping Zeus. Actually, people are a relatively new thing, and the main spreaders of "lies". Perhaps the universe was "truer" before people came around. Perhaps birthing a child is to "lie".
And what is the endgame? What happens after our perfect system of rationalism solves every known fact and theoretical possibility in the entire universe? Did we win? Is our final score 42?
Truth is a lie.
You could never teach a class like this. It would unleash epistemological chaos throughout the school.
I would assume that that level of discourse in a history class is not the most common, but the opposing viewpoints were expressed directly in the textbooks as a standard appendix to each chapter, which were adopted district wide and probably statewide in Texas. This was not a special curriculum that our teachers designed, although they probably expanded on the concept more than most, given that it was a magnet high school.
History is full of things that can't be proven. We'll never be able to know for sure if the (battleship) Maine was destroyed by Spanish sabotage or if it was simply a tragic accident. Or take for example, the question "Did Germany start WWI". It sounds like a yes or no question, but the reality is far more complicated. Failure to understand this complication causes real problems (in this case WWII).
edit: removed American sabotage theory regarding the Maine, as it is rather unlikely.
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We do see students, even at the college level, claiming that the high quality academic writing they are assigned in curricula is "liberal indoctrination". This method does not function because even the most well researched academic study of these topics can be simply rejected out of hand by students who have been fed lies about the very structure of education.
I got into an argument the other day with a political science professor about colonization. It was completely unrecognizable to me as someone who is from a former British colony and whose father spent a lifetime working on bread and butter issues affecting the developing world, such as maternal health. (I explained the academic concept of “decolonization” to my father. He thought it was the political process of devolving governance from colonial powers to native governments. I said, no, what they mean by that now is removing colonial influences and culture from the country. My dad’s response was “why the hell would you want to do that?”)
My advice to students is to pay lip service and keep quiet.
It is not indoctrination, in that it comes from a sincere place. However, it does tend to construct a story that is reviewed and conceived entirely by liberals. This is by the very nature of academic research and the people who inhabit it. Especially in non-STEM fields where truth is a very subjective matter.
A clearer example is Economics, where people from certain schools of thought will actively consider what is taught at other schools as indoctrination. People can't even agree on the core axioms of their field.
We are already seeing a lot of weakly researched topics being pushed around as truths, because believing otherwise does not align with the political goals of the institution.
When the same people who draft the curricula are responsible for ridiculous stunts like the one above, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the students who reject them out of hand.
[0] https://campusreform.org/article?id=16112
And "often enough" here is drastically less, or fewer, than people appreciate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger
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The public are not stupid. They have been tragically under-served by US public schools. Need to fix this.
Perhaps the message here from subsidiary YouTube is that potentially viral videos that could damage voter confidence in past elections (and thereby affect their responsiveness to political ads for future ones) will not be tolerated while parent Google is trying to sell political ads for the Jan 5th election.
How much money will Google make selling ads for this runoff election in Georgia.
This can be very hard to acquire, especially for events that we are far removed from. Then again, maybe it isn't necessary. Simply reading about a story twice with a deliberate bias on each side can be extremely revealing.
Would more people be inclined to do this if we taught it in schools? I hope so. These days it feels like the reporting of the news is more real to the general population than the news itself ..
Given that YouTube is not school, I read this to understand that Bertrand Russell is here saying that YouTube shouldn't give equal weight to presumed falsehoods.
He is saying that people should be explicitly educated, in a controlled environment, to recognise the schemes of scoundrels - so that decent people can act accordingly.
This is somehow terrifying.
Sure it’s dumb and poorly informed. There have always been dumb people spreading bad ideas. It is not our responsibility to force them to agree with us or de-platform them if they won’t agree with a certain narrative. This is called common human decency.
A lot of my friends spend all day "Liking" Facebook posts that mocking Trump supporters as ignorant simpletons, then they repeat blatant falsehoods like "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "Trump called Nazis 'very fine people'". The irony is completely lost on them because they're so deep in their own disinformation bubbles.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...
The exact quote:
Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --"
Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
So. Trump admitted that the neo-Nazis are very bad people, but the group ALSO had some very fine people.
To Trump supporters or "enlightened centrists", this is proof that the left is also deliberately distorting the truth, but you're missing the point.
The point isn't that Trump drew a distinction between the Nazis (who were bad) and the non-Nazis (who were good), and therefore he didn't call Nazis good people.
The point is that there people marching with Neo-Nazis are not better than Neo-Nazis.
If you have a political position and you find yourself attracting neo-Nazis, you have to take a long hard look at what you're doing.
This is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_German fallacy. Silently and tacitly accepting fascism because you benefit from it is still fascism.
So in conclusion, yes, Trump called Nazis "very fine people". It's just that you and Trump don't consider those people Nazis, when they are.
> "Trump told people to drink bleach"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
The exact quote:
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
OK. First of all, let's start with the fact that Trump has a Cult of Personality. His supporters don't just love him, they TRUST him implicitly - more than any other authority figure. More than other politicians, but also more than DOCTORS.
An idea from Trump matters more to his supporters than an idea from any medical expert.
So. You have Trump "just asking questions" that if a disinfectant can be shown to knock out the virus on a kitchen counter (and at that point there were COUNTLESS news articles about how to protect yourself from the virus by bleaching and disenfecting all your things. He goes a step further and says maybe there is a way to do the same by taking the same disinfectant INSIDE the body. Finally, he says I'm not a doctor, but I know things. Which basically seals the deal and confirms he thinks it's a promising idea.
So, no, he didn't say the words "MAGA NATION! Go buy bleach and drink it!"
But he did say that he believes that: Disinfectant inside the body could help with the virus through injection or something like it.
It is a plausibly deniable one, but it is an endorsement nonetheless.
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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, Gary Peters of Michigan and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota ask YouTube to commit to removing content with false or misleading information about the 2020 US presidential election and future political races, including the coming, pivotal Senate runoffs in Georgia.
>“We urge you to immediately remove all election outcome misinformation and take aggressive steps to implement prohibitions, as other social media companies have done, regarding outcomes in future elections,” the letter reads.
This isn't a company deciding, this is censorship urged by the government. I thought that kind of thing was illegal down there.
Not saying anything either way about the politics of the election, but isn't this blatant government censorship?
Politics requesting censorship is always partisan.
This whole fact obsession has gotten completely out of hand. Presiding over disputed matters of fact is pretty much the core purpose of our entire court system. You can’t just call something a fact and be done with it. What you’ve actually described is a collection of opinions, and then declared them settled facts by referencing some of the people that hold them.
I know people get terribly riled up by politics, but they’re just losing sight of any form of reasonableness. Having an unaccountable central authority decide what’s true and what’s not is literally one of the most canonical forms of dystopia that exists.
Of course it's partisan. Had Trump won, and Biden voters were publishing content like this with the same lack of evidence, do you believe that Democratic senators would still be urging YouTube to take it down in the interest of fairness to Trump? I think you know the answer to that.
The scary part of this is that elected officials, who were presumably elected by people that thought they were going to protect the freedoms granted to them by the Constitution, and who must take an oath upon taking office to "support and defend the Constitution," sat down and wrote a letter that gleefully trampled all over one of our most fundamental constitutional rights. Since they were successful in this endeavor, it will happen again, on other, more expansive, partisan issues. Down the slippery slope we go.
The simple fact of the matter is that people are entitled to their opinions, and in the United States, they have a constitutional right to express those opinions in the same way and on the same platforms as those that disagree with them. The only problem is that now we have politicians who believe that those rights should only be extended to those who are on their side. Both sides of the political aisle are acting this way, and it does not bode well for our future as a country.
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Not saying anything either way about the politics of the election, but isn't this blatant government censorship?
If you think it is, then why are you asking? If you're not sure, why are you asserting it (and suggesting that a party is equivalent to a government because some of its members are part of the government)?
Perhaps you should extend your inquiry, and ask how it is that much of one party and its leader are demanding that an election be overturned or declared invalid, using a variety of extremely tenuous arguments. Please consider that these demands originate with people who have also demanded tech companies be stripped of legal immunity for content publication and regularly expresses a wish to sue media outlets out of existence, topics which seem to have earned little discussion on HN.
hartator answered this pretty well.
>If you're not sure, why are you asserting it (and suggesting that a party is equivalent to a government because some of its members are part of the government)?
Yes, active senators are in fact part of the government. The partisanship system does affect even active member's of the US government and this does seem to be a partisan issue driven solely by politics.
>Perhaps you should extend your inquiry, and ask how it is that much of one party and its leader are demanding that an election be overturned or declared invalid, using a variety of extremely tenuous arguments.
Then the other party should counter those arguments and wait for things to resolve as they will. This will happen whatever the average person believes. The election will be decided by the electoral college, or possibly the courts if any of those lawsuits end up having substance. People posting videos about anything won't change this.
>Please consider that these demands originate with people who have also demanded tech companies be stripped of legal immunity for content publication and regularly expresses a wish to sue media outlets out of existence, topics which seem to have earned little discussion on HN.
The section 230 issue seems like a separate issue being spun as a response to this issue in ways that make no logical sense. But are being pushed as a response to actions like these. I don't support the repeal of this, but I do think this kind of obvious, government urged censorship is good either.
I didn't like when trump went on about fake news and I don't like when the other side of the government goes on about misinformation. I don't believe the government, either side, should be the arbiters of what is real news or real information.
When this happens, all the average person is left with is state sponsored propaganda.
OP made a rethoric question.
More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.
I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.
>For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with.
Ok, so wouldn't it be the people who seek out and watch these kinds videos that would be the ones that would be too afraid to use mail in ballots? Seems like the people who think those videos are nonsense won't believe them anyway.
>All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post
How? From what I understand, there was a record number of mail in ballots this year, seems like it did nothing of the sort.
>More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.
No, the government should not be allowed to decide what is or isn't real information, that's called propaganda.
Not "fraud." Illegal votes. In fact, there is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Texas and 17 other states (36% of the United States) alleging this exact thing: that many mail-in votes were illegal, due to unconstitutional rule changes which allowed them to take place[1]. That's not ok to talk about on YouTube?
[1]If you don't know what I'm talking about, just say so and I'll point you to a non-partisan, levelheaded explanation of the argument.
And I don't think there's any reason to believe that these YouTubers don't believe their allegations.
"For context, electoral fraud was and is more prevalent in Corsica than in the rest of the country. The article goes on to mention that in Ajaccio (the largest city in Corsica), one list had obtained 33.5% of the physical votes but 90% of the mail-in votes in the first round, and similar figures in the second round."
Doesn't it feel familiar?
> Here also — observers generally agree on this point — mail-in voting is one of the preferred methods for fraud. The idea of removing mail-in voting and replacing it by proxy voting has therefore been generally admitted in the [parliamentary] legal commission.
Also the counting from some distant area with opaque machines and the fact not everyone is authorized to check the count is ripe for abuse.
Which is not new, the exactly same happened a couple of years ago to force Social Media companies to moderate more strongly on "extremist/jihadist", "foreign interference" and "child nudity" content.
During Senate hearings Google, Facebook and Twitter were faced with the choice to either do it themselves, or be forced to do it trough regulation, those were bipartisan efforts [0].
But even back then it was pretty evident how that whole thing would end up as a slippery slope.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/40489793/senators-grill-facebook...
The use of the word "urge", instead of "request" or "demand", seems to imply that Google is within its rights to decide. The letter does not threaten any legal action if Google decides not to remove alleged misinformation. It does not allege that Google has broken any law. What the letter does request are answers to questions. It looks like a standard letter requesting information that we commonly see from US Senators to US tech companies.
One can make a reasonable argument that YouTube is making the decision voluntarily. And the letter is just giving them some cover for what they wanted to do, based on their own biases, anyway.
But private censorship is still censorship. And when a platform is so large that it has effectively become "the public square", well I do not go so far as to say that they cannot legally engage in censorship, but I do believe they are morally obliged not to, and should be publically called out when they do.
I hope people will begin moving to other platforms in droves so that some real competition emerges.
Google is making a strategic decision. Despite what you may hope, free speech isn't YouTube's main priority--it's profit. Right now they're trying to minimize the possibility profits may be impacted by stakeholder action. They don't care if your particular political views aren't adequately represented. Free speech isn't a mandated requirement for corporations.
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 independent from China? Videos that allege that unelected bureaucrars have more power than elected officials? Videos that suggest that there is trouble with voting counting during US elections?
You can easily end up doing way, way more censorship than strictly required to keep your resource legally clean (hate speech, copyright violations, etc). If I were Google (YouTube, Alphabet, whoever is responsible), I would stay as far away as possible from this kind of censorship, purely because of the cost of doing it, and the constant getting into hot water when not censoring enough, or censoring too much. Being a neutral pipe could be plainly better for the business.
Edited: typos.
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.
"Our observers could not see anything"... then they could not see any fraud taking place either. It is a dumb narrative.
We also have to acknowledge the context in which this is occurring; the people claiming fraud are also threatening violence against civil servants and their children.
"Georgia officials were similarly reticent until last week, when threats online targeted a young contract worker for Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines were used in the state. One post on Twitter included a swinging noose.
That day, Gabriel Sterling, the Republican in charge of the voting machines, walked to a podium visibly angry and demanded that Trump “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”
In an interview with Reuters, Sterling said that he personally had received a message calling him a him “traitor” that included his home address. Someone else wished him a happy birthday in a tweet saying it would be his last."
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-threats/electio...
Just like it's difficult when and what content to censor when it comes to things like the ISIS recruiting pipeline, it's hard to know where the line is with what is basically a far-right ideology which bleeds into domestic terrorism.
Not saying it’s right. Just saying it’s happened at least once before and I bet other times.
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I also think it's misleading to call it partisan, as if truth and falsehood are just two different flavors of ice cream, or two different sports teams. An informed populace is a necessary precondition for democracy to survive. Google might have the right to profit from misinformation, but I don't think they have an obligation to do so. They are allowed to support free and fair elections, just like the rest of us.
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> Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors.
These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.
Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. It took me 2 seconds to find videos claiming that the "GOP hacked/stole the 2004 election.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=batAXTWBjMo
How do you know the more non batshit accounts haven't already been taken down?
The Mike Kelly case in PA, arguing that the law allowing mail-in ballots was illegal, was ruled by a judge as completely legally valid, but was thrown out of the state supreme court because "they waited too long to complain".
So, no, not objectively batshit. If the GOP had filed that case in January, Trump would have won PA...assuming the same supreme court didn't throw out their case for some other arbitrary reason like "filing too soon."
The Democrats outplayed Republicans. Democrats passed an un-Constitutional law that helped them stuff ballot boxes with ballots that were almost certainly harvested or bought. If we're to believe the election results and voter turnout in, say, mostly black Philadelphia, Joe Biden is a more popular politician than even Barack Obama. Only an idiot would believe that. But still, it serves Republicans right for underestimating the extent to which Democrats would cheat.
Most of the lawsuits are so ridiculously bad, it makes me wonder if it's just part of keeping up the act in order to keep his followers riled up and throwing cash at him. Inciting such intense hatred with so very many lies all for personal money and power - it's devisive, dangerous, and absolutely terrifying that this is happening in the USA, a country that spent decades forcing democracy on other countries.
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Indeed.
I was told by all the right people that Russia hacked the 2016 election for 4 years.
To this day, Stacy Abrams acts like she's governor of Georgia and claims the election was stolen.
All of that content will not be taken down.
But yes, given the fact that 1) "safe harbor" means nothing historically, 2) there have been electoral contests in the U.S. decided within days of inauguration, and 3) there is active litigation being pursued, this chilling of speech can't be seen as anything other that Google pushing their hands on the scale here.
There is evidence[1, 2, 3] of Russian interference in the 2016 election. There is evidence[4, 5, 6, 7] of interference by Republicans in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. That content will not be taken down because it is true.
There is no evidence[8] of fraud in the 2020 election. Trump's own lawyers have admitted[9, 10, 11] that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714810702/muellers-report-sho...
[2]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-report-russian-interfere...
[3]https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
[4]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/georgia-elec...
[5]https://apnews.com/article/fb011f39af3b40518b572c8cce6e906c
[6]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18068492/g...
[7]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/30/18118264/...
[8]https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-election-fraud...
[9]https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/
[10]https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/trump-lawyers-no-ele...
[11]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/us/politics/trump-electio...
Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to. Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?
No, but we also shouldn’t censor people for making those claims. It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.
And, yet, YouTube isn't censoring flat earthers.
Aren't you an actual lawyer? Do you think any of Giuliani's cases have enough merit that you would argue one and think you had a good chance of winning?
I could probably engineer a frivolous court case claiming Joe Biden's a space alien and is thus ineligible to be president, but that doesn't mean that anyone should withhold judgment on my claim before I inevitably flame out in the first hearing.
The fact that politicians and private actors choose to beclown themselves in front of state and federal judges shouldn't prevent businesses from being able to see the plain truth that is staring them in the face. This is farcical.
Of which what % have been tossed? 95%+? And the one (!) that hasn't have had zero impact on the results.
The election is over. Biden won. The votes will be certified, but not after Trump's team has done a great deal of damage to the American democracy.
After elections, half of people on the losing side now regularly believe the election wasn't free and fair.
There are like, what, a dozen states' Attorney Generals that you can't tape a press release off and put on Youtube according to those rules.
How do I know? I'm from Russia. Authoritatism begins with tight control of news sources.
Imagine if Obama reformed the criminal justice system, wasn't a war monger in Syria/Libya and presided over a record economic boom? He'd be made a saint or something.
Go figure.
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Your comparison is off.
I'd be fine with videos marked with something like "YouTube believes this video is untrue and spreads dangerous disinformation" put before or even over a video. But taking videos down is quite another matter.
The one thing different about trump is that he purposely provoked the media and responded to petty nonsense that previous presidents would have just ignored. Trump and the media have a symbiotic relationship because they both need the attention.
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That said, I think google are making a bad mistake here. They've crossed a line that they've been toeing.
Social media isn't just a mass media. Media is always edited. Editing isn't censorship. But social media is also a communication channel. Haphazard interference in a communication channel sits wrong. We have no frame of reference for it.
Meanwhile, there are credible claims that social media fallacies have caused horrible things (including possibly genocide in Myanmar) in other countries/languages. FB (in that case) has no knowledge of the language or interest in getting involved in that. How can you justify one without the other?
I mean it's one of those doublespeak terms that they themselves don't fully understand (apparently), but still.
And I'll take it because I think the alternative is leading to a few greedy assholes using analytical data to successfully weaponize millions upon millions of uninformed people against logic and common sense.
Do we add restrictions to voting to weed out people who habitually vote anti-facts? No. Disenfranchisement.
Do we make fake news illegal? No. Censorship leading to state run media.
Do we have a civil war because it's so bad that people are being evicted and dying of starvation because their neighbors are being convinced by propaganda that they're less than? Hopefully not.
So we're kind of left with this option. We're stuck with speaking with our wallets through corporations because our voices in government have been corrupted.
It sucks.
How do we have a higher mail in ballot rejection rate in non-pandemic times than we do in pandemic times?
And then follow up, if we assume incredible voter turnout, how do many of these first time mail in ballots follow the process so correctly that the ballot rejection rate is lower?
Were the standards altered? That’s fine with me. Just say it.
Can we see all the ballot signatures side by side with the rolls? I don’t think that’s too much to ask really — I mean it’s a part of the process (we already check voter rolls in state and local elections).
These questions could really begin a true discussion to build a shared world views. It’s what I imagine a forthright and true partner would do for someone with slight reservations... or at least I’d hope.
Shutting it down with Orwellian tactics rather than hard verifiable data is what feels a bit disingenuous that we are all on the same team.
Probably because the rejection rate is exaggerated in normal times because the population that relies on absentee voting in regular times is less able to produce consistent signatures.
Also probably because a lot more effort (both official government and outside organization) went into educating people on the rules for mail-in ballots.
> And then follow up, if we assume incredible voter turnout, how do many of these first time mail in ballots follow the process so correctly that the ballot rejection rate is lower?
That's not a follow-up, it's just rephrasing the exact same question with different and more extensive framing commentary.
I mean, here's an explanation for a specific case
> According to the nonprofit, nonpartisan organisation Ballotpedia, Georgia rejected 6.42% of mail-in ballots in total in the 2016 general election and 3.10% in total in the 2018 midterm (here). These totals include rejections because of signatures, but also include, for example, ballots received late or past deadlines, problems with return materials or a voter having already voted in person.
> It may be that Trump was referring to the 0.15% of ballots specifically rejected for "missing or non-matching signatures" when saying that ballots rejected in 2020 were "almost zero", but this percentage is consistent with past years. The higher percentage he mentions for past years is likely based off the total rejected ballots (here) which can not be compared with 2020, as this information is not available.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...
https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/number_of_absentee_ba...
Edit: And just for fun, I pulled data for 2020 and 2018 statewide, November elections from https://elections.sos.ga.gov/Elections/voterabsenteefile.do
I looked at a largeish file (didnt want to deal with the 1gig state wide file), ended up being CHATHAM county. (file name 025).
In 2018, there were 351 rejections for 40683 mail in ballots. In 2020, there were 321 rejections for 110831 mail in ballots.
The interesting thing to me was that in 2018, 286 ballots were rejected for being late, but in 2020, only 191 were rejected for being late.
Which tells me at least some of the higher acceptance rates can be attributed simply to people being more diligent about mailing their ballots in.
YouTube’s massively outsized impact is obviously the problem here. This wouldn’t be Orwellian if they didn’t have so much power. We wouldn’t need it if YouTube didn’t allow for such insane manipulation of people.
But if we’re going to have YouTube, by god do I prefer people NOT proliferating this madness freely.
Just the madness you happen to agree with, right?
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But rationally I have no way to be 100% certain, because, as a thought experiment, if it really was rigged, what would look different to how it does look?
The fact that "everyone knew" and was expecting the losing side to cry foul means that when they do, everyone says "you see? Told you so." But if it really was, how would we know? What would look different?
The fact that those who are meant to look out for such things (primarily, the media) are not trusted by one side to do so impartially means that if there really was foul play, their reporting would not necessarily be different. So again, how would you know?
To reiterate, I am not saying I think it was rigged. I'm not American, nor have I ever lived there. I'm just saying that _if it was_, things would look pretty much as they do now. _If t wasn't_, things would also look pretty much as they do now. So how can we know?
It seems more plausible that:
- there was a really high turnout aided by widespread absentee voting
- a large single-digit percentage of voters went Republican in the congressional races but didn't vote for Trump
I can't think of a fraud based scenario with any factual support that is as compelling.
I am willing to be "exposed to the idea" as you say. I have to ask which is more likely, a massive undetected fraud across multiple states, or the guy with 40% approval rate losing the election?
I think youtube is doing a "good thing" in terms of getting us past this silliness faster, but I don't think it'll necessarily be a "good thing" next time so I'd rather it happen never.
All youtube did was fan the flames of political division. Imagine after 2016, youtube decided to ban everyone accusing Trump of cheating. Do you think that would make the democrats "see the light"? Or do you think it would galvanize the democrats?
This election is ultimately going to be decided in the supreme court. Not on youtube. Youtube should have just kept out of this issue.
Trump is celebrating this right now because not only does it rile up his base, it makes independents and even some democrats take notice and sympathize with Trump.
Even if youtube had good intentions ( and I'm not sold on that ), they ultimately are damaging the country. But I guess that's why they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don't have to imagine the democrats did anything like the republicans are doing now, because it didn't happen.
Edit: here's a link to show you how small the margins were in swing states in 2016:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
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In a marketplace of ideas, with free sharing of information, bogus claims will eventually (usually quickly) collapse on themselves, and true claims will bear themselves out.
Attempting to silence ideas, even potentially false and harmful ideas, is the greatest way to build a society that is not free, fair, and based on fact, but only one that is based on the opinions of the gatekeepers of the ideas.
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a...
I personally don't buy this "free speech" speech, since free speech applies to the government, not to a public entity.
Youtube is free to make any rules they want and to enforce them however they want. They don't owe you anything and you can stop using it at any point in time (which I actually encourage you to do - but for a completely different set of reasons). You watch content, they show you ads and get money for the ads. That's it. You don't like the content or the lack of content you are free to, again, move to another site/platform/social network/etc.
It's amazing to me how much people are willing to entertain this charade that was started after the elections. It's also amazing to see the mental gymnastics involved to explain some of the things that were done and/or said. This is not 4D chess.
Youtube should get to do what they want as long as they operate withing the laws of the countries they are running their service within. I still have not seen the law that was broken here.
But what if it’s not as simple as “this side is making everything up, and the other side is 100% honest”.
You could easily turn that argument around and say that the right is going to great lengths to have their evidence investigated, while the left is just trying to make it go away. Surely “energy expended” is not a great metric for judging bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not making a “free speech” argument. Of course YouTube is free to curate whatever they want to, and competitors are free to provide alternatives for users that want that. THAT is free speech.
My argument was not “YouTube can’t legally do this”, it was more trying to appeal to this notion some folks have that a topic of discussion merely existing is dangerous, and that somehow removing all of that discussion will eliminate that danger.
It also removes any possibility of the side removing the discussion from ever having to assess the validity of their facts, which logically and naturally means the other side will never have to assess and defend the validity of their argument either. Hello tribalism.
You don’t disprove flat earthers by telling them they aren’t allowed to ever talk about the shape of the earth, because naturally people will come up with the idea on their own, time and again, and forbidding it only lends itself to greater conviction.
Instead, sufficiently convince a large enough group of people through reason and evidence that the Earth is round, and those few people who willingly ignore the evidence will be too small and too fringe to be dangerous.
The danger is not in asking questions, the danger is in forbidding questions.
Imagine, for a second, that you saw something concerning. For argument’s sake, say you saw your boss doing something you perceived to be illegal.
Imagine, then, that you were told that asking about those things was dangerous, because it would cause everyone to lose faith in who they work for.
Now imagine that HR or a PR firm comes, only after trying hard to convince you that you shouldn’t ask any questions at all, and then tells you that they investigated and found nothing wrong.
Then imagine that, while some of the explanation given made sense, some of it did not, and maybe led to more questions.
Finally, imagine then being told that not only should you no longer question, but that anyone caught talking about it would be removed.
Now, we don’t know that something illegal did or did not occur.
But be honest... would that scenario convince you that nothing illegal happened, and that you should move on as instructed?
Keyword being "perceived".
But let's examine the premise. Do I have any evidence of this act? Do I have sufficent expertise to determine if what I saw was actually illegal? Where are my biases? Can I argue my case in a coherent and believable manner?
and most importantly in this particular case, are there literally thousands of other people who contradict my position?
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