These types of censorship patterns are identical to that employed by China in intent. The practical consequences are the same as well.
In China information censorship is due to the government trying to promote peace and harmony. Aka, the government thinks it knows what’s best for people and forces it on people.
Facebook et al also encounter these same problems, where they see people spreading “misinformation.” It’s a hard problem to solve, but they essentially resort to taking the same types of censorship as China that everyone so easily criticizes.
The irony is Google is now doing it too after claiming to have left the market due to forced censorship.
Some people may cite China’s censorship/banning of Falun Gong. What people don’t bother to look into is that Falun Gong is an anti-gay, really out there cult. Their censorship justifications of that is not unlike censoring “fake news” like this “doctor.” While it may be right (of course their methodology may be questionable), it completely short circuits the ability for critical thinkers to actually analyze all content. It’s done supposedly for the greater good.
As long as you can host your video on your own website, that's not the same. If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want. Now if your government will try to fine or arrest you because you hosted some video on your website, that's censorship. You can avoid youtube, but you can't avoid your government.
That said, I agree that huge websites like youtube, facebook, instagram are something more than just another web resource and probably some regulations should be applied to them. But it's very sensitive subject.
> As long as you can host your video on your own website, that's not the same.
Very few people even within this peer group have the capability of hosting videos on their own website unless the video is intended for a very small audience (say, less than 1000 viewers per day).
If you want to reach any significant number of people, you absolutely need to go through one of the major video hosters or pay for a CDN. And that's before you consider the network effects of YouTube.
Then they don't need to use video, they can use written words.
There's no reason why they should be able to use the infrastructure of private companies to scale their message as much as they want.
Or they can just pay for a CDN as you say. This just highlights the differences between the West and China even more. In the west, harmful messages need to stand on their own two feet. If they don't have support, then they can be kicked off private platforms. No need for the government to intervene.
> the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas.
> CEP has sent letters to Cloudflare since February 13, 2017, warning about clients on the service, including Hamas, the Taliban, the PFLP, and the Nordic Resistance Movement. The latest letter, from February 15, 2019, warns of what CEP identified as three pro-ISIS propaganda websites.
So CF bans even remotely right leaning content but claims terrorist organization's websites are free speech:
CloudFlare is under no obligation to follow a policy you find logical. If you dislike their business practices or find them problematic you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation. Otherwise you’ll have to wait and see if the magic of the free market changes anything.
All I am pointing out is the hypocrisy and false statements CF and others make. CF's actions are much different from their words. They say they need to allow dangerous terrorists because of free speech but then ban other speech which they don't like.
> you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation
Voicing my opinion on a public forum is one way to do that.
And then the CDNs no platform them and and then someone who agrees with the Wojcickis of the world DoS attacks you and then you're gone.
This argument ends with "just build an entirely parallel internet". It incentivises radicalism inside tech and communication companies. It incentivises the "play to win" mentality we see in universities in which the hard left relentlessly attacks anyone they disagree with using any tactic they can get away with, which are often illegal tactics when the rules are enforced by people who agree with them.
This stuff ends with a totally lawless society, a la China. It's the logical end-game of allowing the hard left to dominate: the rules are just words on paper, what matters is your ideological loyalty to authority. We can see it happening before our eyes and it's terrifying.
Video hosting scalability is not the problem it was if you use a technology like Webtorrent, allowing peer-to-peer distribution of your video files. See PeerTube for a relatively easy platform for your private video hosting.
Even putting Webtorrent aside, a simple server with a gigabit connection allows you to handle a hundred simultaneous viewers at once with a reasonable bitrate, all day long. If you're constantly getting more than that, you can surely afford a CDN or a proper infrastructure.
I do agree that the network effects of YouTube are very hard to compete with, however.
I'm not a lawyer; but, relentlessly downloading and then assisting in the distribution of content I've not personally validated sounds like a legal minefield filled mostly with mines and very little green space.
That's actually a really interesting thought. I wonder if you can just serve a tiny JS torrent client and a magnet link and automatically download the content. You would need to have a way for visitors to seed the content too, otherwise you still have to serve everything anyway.
> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want.
The case of the baker refusing to decorate cake for the gay couple comes to mind. He's in court for the third time. Same people who talk about "private company can do whatever they like" attack the baker.
Soon this will evolve into letting private companies being able to censor minority opinions. Don't forget, just few decades ago, LGBT rights opinions weren't mainstream and would therefore have been banned from private companies.
Someone I know rather well is their sysadmin, and their site is still up: https://dailystormer.su/
Admittedly, they’ve had a hell of a time, but the hard data is that it continues to run. I don’t condone domain names or hosting accounts getting shut down based on content (ANY content) but it appears that it is still at least a little bit possible to host the most extreme of incorrect/offensive content, it’s just not convenient.
I imagine they might even still be on Cloudflare if they hadn’t promoted the (incorrect) theory that Cloudflare not canceling them was actually a dogwhistle endorsement of their content. Cloudflare cited this incorrect claim as the reason for their termination.
That said, large hosting platforms used by majorities of the population (eg YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) should absolutely have to carry data uncritically, just like the phone company, or at least as long as they are actively trying to kill the federated open web with things like censored native app stores, censored browser extension indices, censored and surveilled messaging platforms, and AMP. Things would be quite a bit different if our hardware didn’t forcibly opt us in to dictatorial censorship of native apps.
It also grinds my gears that they call it “community standards”, which are weasel words to pretend that their userbase likes being forced to watch only what their dictator approves of. They’re unilateral, and invoking the term “community” is a dishonest, unprofessional move.
> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want.
I absolutely agree with you here, but we also have the right to criticize and/or stop using platforms that use this. Your parent post said it was wrong, not that you tube didn't have the right to do this.
These huge web sites are using public right-of-ways and wireless spectrum to transmit their data. It'd be like the phone company censoring your speech. The 1st amendment ought to apply to them unless they are using a fully private means of distributing their information.
Everyone uses public right of ways to communicate. There's nothing stopping someone from setting up their own site using the same public infrastructure.
> The practical consequences are the same as well.
Is YouTube sending people to "re-education camps" now?
If a private platform kicks you out, you can host your stuff elsewhere. If a state censors you, it can use lethal force to silence you. Pretty big difference.
In the good old times of Soviet power, there were other oppression mechanisms besides lethal force. In fact lethal force was only rarely used, especially after Stalin. A couple of examples:
* Send dissenters to perform menial jobs in some remote small city with little impact on the national scale. Technically, the Gulag itself was an application of this strategy, with a particularly harsh destination and a particularly dangerous occupation.
* House arrest. Keep dissenters in their homes, and carefully control whom they get into contact.
The end effect is the same: drastically limit the platform available to dissenters, without outright murdering them.
There is only the simple observation that there is a spectrum: free speech -> deplatforming [ban from youtube & co] -> deinfrastructuring [ban from paypal / aws & co] -> depersoning [physical exile to periphery] -> lethal force.
I seem to remember a time of nuanced conversations. But perhaps online discourse was always an adversarial contest between two strident extremes. Enjoy.
No, you are just playing word games. "Free speech" does not and has never meant "the right to get any letter to the editor published in the New York Times" and therefore does not mean "the right to get any video I want on YouTube." So it is not a "simple observation" that deinfrastructring -> depersoning is a spectrum. There is no such spectrum. There is an enormous gap between "society thinks you're icky and big corporations won't host your content" and "the state sends you to Siberia," since one is clearly a human rights violation and one is clearly not. Likewise there is an enormous gap between "Simon and Schuster rejected my novel!" and "the FBI busted the printing shop I hired to print my novel." YouTube removing this guy's video is very clearly in the former category. I am aware that it is out-of-reach for many individuals to create their own website which can host videos. But a right to free speech does not mean a right to any content distribution platform you want.
It also whitewashes the issue at hand: this professor is a notorious crank and has been a notorious crank long before COVID-19. This is not a free-thinker taking a bold stand against a sclerotic public health bureaucracy. This is a con artist spreading dangerous misinformation during the worst public health emergency in 100 years. YouTube removing his content is not just them suppressing views they politically disagree with, it's also individual employees at YouTube viewing this interview as a imminent threat to their family's health and safety. This is a very reasonable view for private individuals and private corporations running private infrastructure to take.
Look: if he starts his own website self-hosting COVID quackery, and the government shuts it down, then that really is Soviet-level and I will take your argument more seriously (though given the vicious threat COVID-19 poses, I am open to the idea that this is an extreme but necessary use of the government's emergency powers). But it is simply ridiculous to say that YouTube can't moderate their own content, especially when 99% of the world's doctor's and public health officials would describe the video as dangerous misinformation.
But your self-pitying shtick about how you're a lone voice of moderation in a sea of adversarial extremes is nice. It's not quite as nice as bringing back 90,000 Americans from the dead but it probably made you feel nice about yourself.
I'm sympathetic to Chinese-style censorship, at least in theory before it degenerates into the state trying to suppress anything it considers embarrassing to itself. "The government thinks it knows what’s best for people" because it does know better than most people. Facebook, as the lowest common denominator for American public discourse, is a cesspool of misinformation, pseudoscience, hate, deceptive advertising, and people losing their skin in MLM scams. In India, fake stories on WhatsApp have whipped up violent mobs into a frenzy of xenophobia, resulting in tragic murders of innocent migrants. We should be more aware of the enormous costs associated with a lassie-faire attitude toward speech, even if we decide it's worth the cost. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
All that being said, the practical consequences of YouTube moderation are not even remotely the same as those of the Chinese censorship that everyone criticizes. The worst thing that can happen to you on YouTube is that you can't comment or upload videos anymore. YouTube is not sending people to prison or calling up your employer to tell them you're a dangerous agitator.
Why on earth does this have to be compared to China? And Falun Gong?!
This is long form journalism with establishment figures such as university professors.
YouTube censors clearly overstepped their "mandate" here. And Unherd has other ways of publicising this particular interview and drawing attention to YouTube's censorship.
Yep. It seems to have started with the 2016 election which left popular opinion being that there's a huge part of the population who are too stupid to think for themselves and must be shielded from bad ideas in case they believe them and harm the rest of us with them. Now that such an idea is readily accepted, censorship is easily seen as the morally right thing to do in lots of cases. The feeling is that we're protecting ourselves from real harm by people who really don't have the ability to correctly evaluate the information they receive. Just like China doing it for social harmony. It's not just terrorism and child porn that people tolerate censorship for anymore, it's for 5G and flat earth conspiracy theories, anti-religious ideas, nationalism, and all sorts of "misinformation".
That a huge part of the population choose unwisely and footgun themselves and the rest it's quite obvious. But the real, longterm solution is education, not censorship. But we have to admit that we are in an ultra-connected world like never before and fake, easy news are even more easily spread. So, critical thinking is a necessary skill to be taught.
> That a huge part of the population choose unwisely and footgun themselves and the rest it's quite obvious.
Twitter and media hyperbole aside how exactly is the current admin that much different than the previous? Bush #2 had fake WMDs and leveraged that to go to war. A war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and a ridiculous amount of money. The last admin bailed out Wall Street (with few concessions), re-signed and expanded the Patriot Act, floated the Paris Climate Accord as a victory (but Naomi Klein tells otherwise). Over both of these admins and prior income inequality has increased.
We've been getting shot in the foot, the head, the arse, etc. I'm not a DJT voter or fan but the idea that he's the problem is naive. If W.DC had been doing their job there would have been no opportunity for DJT to rise. Trump is a symptom. Let's not be foolish and blame the symptom.
I didn't dismiss them. I asked how those are so much worse than the transgressions of the previous two admins? I'd like to remind everyone that an estimated 100,000+ non-white skineed _civilians_ were killed in Iraq. Alledged hate crimes vs real war crimes.
Bush caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with the Iraq war, and you're upset about some tweets?! Why do people have such a distorted view of right and wrong?
Agreed. As for why, it's obvious. It's the media. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when Trump signs off on extending the Patriot Act. A law that was renewed and expanded by the previous admin.
Maybe they shouldn't have been forced to choose between Hillary/Biden or Trump if you wanted them to choose "wisely". The responsibility for losing to Trump falls solely on the Democratic Party, and the talk of footguns and education comes off as extremely snobbish. Stop blaming others for your failures.
Consider that it is far easier to spread misinformation/disinformation than it is to educate, and that over time there are going to be even more powerful forms of disinformation in the form of deep fakes. People have a hard time distinguishing real from fake now, it's only going to get worse from here.
On one hand you can say that nothing should be censored and the onus is on the viewer to critically evaluate information. But the reality is that misinformation/disinformation is causing real harm to people, populations, and civilization itself.
For example, propaganda on Facebook in Myanmar has fueled mass killings against the Rohingya. Anti-vax misinformation is lowering vaccination rates and causing a resurgence of diseases that were almost eradicated. Should companies like Google and Facebook just turn a blind eye to all of that and watch brutality and backwardness thrive and tear down progress? At what point should the line be drawn?
Make no mistake, there are malign actors out there who are weaponizing misinformation as we speak. If we choose not to do anything about it, they will have an out-sized role in shaping the future to their ends.
It certainly is a very difficult question to figure out where the line should be drawn, and even then it's a moving target. But it's a question worth wrangling over, and ultimately if mankind is going to meet the challenges of now and the future, the threat of disinformation has to be met one way or another.
>These types of censorship patterns are identical to that employed by China in intent.
At the end of the day, Youtube's intent is to make as much money as possible. If Youtube didn't censor a lot of misinformation videos, people would get mad and demand advertisers to stop advertising on Youtube.
> These types of censorship patterns are identical to that employed by China in intent. The practical consequences are the same as well.
True, if you ignore the fact that China is a government and YouTube is an internet video portal. And that there are sites like HN that can point it out. And that YouTube isn't taking steps to cover up what they've done.
But yeah, let's compare the policing of bad information in a pandemic that gets people killed, where YouTube doesn't benefit from the "censorship", to what China's government is doing. At least you get to feel good about your purity when you're posting comments on HN, secure in the knowledge that you don't have a teenager or a parent that might die as a result.
This comment breaks the site guidelines by being snarky, crossing into personal attack, and taking the thread further into flamewar. That's not cool here, regardless of how right you are (or feel) or how wrong someone else is (or you feel they are), so please don't.
> At least you get to feel good about your purity when you're posting comments on HN, secure in the knowledge that you don't have a teenager or a parent that might die as a result.
What's this ad hominem crap doing here?
I don't know anything about the poster you're replying to, but I think I'm safe in assuming that they don't want your teenager or parent to die either. It's acceptable--essential, even--to be concerned about more than one thing at a time, even during a pandemic.
> as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting.
But that's not actually true. It's nearly impossible to express concern for children in any context on the internet without being mocked and dismissed for having invoked a "won't someone think of the children" ad hominem.
It's strange how deeply that particular meme has dug into the psyche of internet culture, and has become almost an unwritten rule.
> True, if you ignore the fact that China is a government and YouTube is an internet video portal.
That's the way the west perceives the situation - although over there they might see this as 'powerful unelected corporation which is legally mandated to maximise profits arbitrarily censors with no oversight, in a country where these unelected corporations control parts of the government'.
Firstly, I agree with rcoveson; there are a lot of complaints to be made about your second paragraph. Including that "a teenager ... that might die" is emotional misinformation - they almost surely won't.
The difference between governments doing it and YouTube doing it is that people do have the practical choice of leaving YouTube if the situation is deemed intolerable. Up until that point there isn't a practical difference between YouTube and China if they employ the same censorship methods.
> And that YouTube isn't taking steps to cover up what they've done.
The Chinese government isn't exactly subtle; they are promoting peace and harmony through censorship. A lot of people died in the last Chinese revolution & aftermath - they do have a reasonable argument that unstable government will kill people. It is just we know from experience in the west that transparent democracies are more stable because problems tend to get dealt with when they affect large groups of people.
> where YouTube doesn't benefit from the "censorship"
Of course they do. You think they're spending all that money out of the kindness of their hearts?
Way to dodge actually engaging with the principles at play here. You can certainly assert your consequentialist/utilitarian arguments, but not everyone agrees with that ethical framework.
Consequentialism also yields insane results. Look up "the repugnant conclusion". If ethics were settled, it would no longer be a philosophy but a science.
Stop this "bad information gets people killed" nonsense. You can justify any kind of censorship with that. That's what China does too. If they allow protests, they'll get violent and people will get killed. If the government is overthrown, millions of people will probably be killed or die from the ensuing chaos.
Youtube, Facebook, etc. in some ways have more power than the government because they can influence public opinion. They also set the standard for what's morally acceptable and people carry that standard with them elsewhere in their lives. Eventually, they'll probably vote for the government to enforce it because it's so popular.
I once met an American who believed hate speech was a crime. It turns out that a lot of young people believe that. No doubt because it is a "crime" on all their social media platforms. Some of them already want to make it a real crime when the discover it isn't yet.
Given Google's size and power it's only natural the Chinese and plenty of others would have insiders. How far up the influence ladder they've climbed is another matter.
Just the same, the US is doing it as well, abroad as well as at home.
It's impossible to produce a search engine compatible with the Chinese market without having some fairly high-placed contacts in the Chinese government, because it would take some very high-level approval to allow such a product.
Legislators puts pressure on them. E.g. by threatening to repeal CDA or bring other regulation if they do not self-regulate and "do something" about content they deem problematic for one reason or another.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. Politicians ask for things that make them look good, companies ask for things that benefit their bottom line. As long as conspiracy theorists are not youtube's cashcow and tax cuts can be sold as improving the economy for everyone both sides benefit.
In China information censorship is due to the government trying to promote peace and harmony. Aka, the government thinks it knows what’s best for people and forces it on people.
Facebook et al also encounter these same problems, where they see people spreading “misinformation.” It’s a hard problem to solve, but they essentially resort to taking the same types of censorship as China that everyone so easily criticizes.
The irony is Google is now doing it too after claiming to have left the market due to forced censorship.
Some people may cite China’s censorship/banning of Falun Gong. What people don’t bother to look into is that Falun Gong is an anti-gay, really out there cult. Their censorship justifications of that is not unlike censoring “fake news” like this “doctor.” While it may be right (of course their methodology may be questionable), it completely short circuits the ability for critical thinkers to actually analyze all content. It’s done supposedly for the greater good.