The problem is the "regular open discussion", which has turned into a cesspool of fact-free ranting, and has created serious societal virality and negative impact.
You can rant against the mainstream media, but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there -- how many independent YouTube sources do the same?
> but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there
No. No there absolutely is not. The fact that you trust the Legacy Media at all is part of the problem. It's independent analysts who have been the only ones to do any real research.
What process exists for fact-checking independent analysts? Most have zero accountability and have even less incentive to verify claims because 1) It takes time and money 2) Often does not serve their own political agendas and subscriber bases/income streams
Yes, placing our complete trust in a few major media outlets to accurately report the facts is naive. But believing that individuals with no independent fact checking department or an editor to enforce journalistic standards will somehow be less biased is even more naive.
They choose how to spin stories based on biases to the point where they are effectively reporting different "facts".
The other week I posted the below, which are headlines for the same 3 stories on the same day from CNN and Fox, arguably 2 of the biggest "news" sources in the U.S. These headlines are effectively opinions with the aim of gaslighting their respective audience. It's not healthy.
How did we get to the point where what we say needs to be factual?
Factually correct speech has its place. But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends, you don't need to be factual. That's not a necessary ingredient to a good conversation.
I have a Youtube channel where I sometimes talk about Space and Biology. I'm not educated in these subjects. No doubt a lot of what I say is factually incorrect. That doesn't mean my speech is misinformation, deceitful, or dangerous.
It's even worse than you describe. Hyperbole is being flagged as "disinformation" or "lies". All the nuance of human communication is being squeezed into a lowest-common-denominator straight-jacket, based on what's easiest to censor. And the "progressives" are the cheerleaders this time. It's depressing.
> But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends
These things are not the same. When you talk with friends or when you write a comment, you have a limited audience and counter viewpoints are readily available. When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.
>When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.
Here's a comment snippet you wrote 3 days ago: "Facebook basically wanted to take monetary sovereignty away from states and give control to private companies.
Are you really doing your 'best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements'? Because I'm sure you have no evidential basis for that statement and therefore promulgating misinformation. Alternatively, we can have YouTube Interns decide what you can and cannot say online.
Regardless, perhaps you should take your own advice?
It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints, such as your comment.
And it's also fun that you took a comment that basically said "channels with big audiences should care about not saying wrong things" and took it as a support of censorship.
Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!
- Facebook wanted to create a digital currency, and wanted it to be used by as much people as possible.
- Monetary sovereignty is the capacity of a state to control what currency is used as legal payment, how much of it is issued and how much of is it retired.
- If Libra became widespread in a country under the conditions that Facebook wanted (i.e., the Libra association controlling issuance and retirement), it would complete and (partially or completely) replace the state's currency and therefore the state would not have power to control its own currency, therefore losing monetary sovereignty to the Libra association.
- The Libra association was an association of private companies, QED.
And all of this brings me again to the point of how comments and videos are different. I made a comment, you made a comment, I made another one, and most people reading will watch the different viewpoints. If this was instead YouTube videos with millions of views, a lot of people would see the video title and take it as fact, another group would watch it and wouldn't care or wouldn't have the capacity to search for the opposing viewpoints, and only a minority (I think) would actually see the full debate. That's why I say that the standards should be different if your potential audience is bigger and they're less exposed to other viewpoints.
>It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints
What is happening with YouTube, is happening with Twitter and Facebook, so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning. Twitter was built for off-the-cuff comment-type communication and Facebook was built for sharing posts and content with close relations. And yet the exact same 'curation' is being done there as well. So no, I don't agree there is some magic difference between video and text.
>Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!
NO it's not. You saying it doesn't make it so. You're impugning a motive on Facebook that you have no evidential support for. But that's not the salient point in this discussion, because your opinion about the level of evidence that you feel you bring to the argument is immaterial to social media 'curation'. What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.
> so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning.
I did not make a distinction between video and text, I made a distinction based on audiences and availability of counterpoints. I used those examples because they were the ones that the parent comment used. I do not know why you're talking about video and text.
> What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.
And at what point did I say I was in favor of social media curation? I said people should try to avoid saying wrong things in their own content when that content has a large audience with counterpoints not readily visible.
Why should regular people trust the Bay Area perspective on what counts as "fact-free ranting"? Tech has no legitimate authority to decide what is true. The mindset and moral system that's overwhelmingly dominant in tech is abhorrent to much of the rest of the country and the world. Why should this prominent but fringe Bay Area mentality dominate?
It's simply not tech's place to be making these calls. It's arrogance and hubris and it's going to lead to a backlash.
Who, then, decides what is true? Random YouTube commenters? Joe Rogan? Rush Limbaugh? The QAnon Twitter-sphere? Perhaps we can just vote on whether gravity exists.
The people. They should watch all of it, and decide for themselves. What's wrong with Rogan? His podcast is incredible.
Let's listen to everything. Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again! This continual lockdown has deeply hurt our ability to actually communicate with one another in any meaningful way.
> Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again!
Once there's a viable vaccine, sure. I don't disagree about your point of the damage the lockdown has done, but USA governments and citizens haven't locked down consistently enough to provide the intended results.
Individuals do not have the capacity to inspect facts. Do you inspect how the cake flour met the FDA standards? You trust authority, in this case, the FDA + Store Owner + Distributor + Manufacturer.
This is so ridiculous. I think you mean we need to have the information so if an individual wants to verify, they can and if they can spend the energy and rigor to know the research/data. Please stop requiring individuals to verify truth. Truth has always been escorted by authorities with checks and balances. Reputable media is an authority of similar civic responsibility.
Next time you buy a measuring tape, you're gonna sound ridiculous to ask for a NIST certificate at Home Depot.
This is an absurd and breathtakingly dangerous argument. No, we don't expect people to inspect their own cake flour. But we do expect them to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to the basic political participation of voting. What you're advocating for is a kritarchy, with "reputable media" as the judges.
We've been trusting publishers of books for many decades before the internet. The internet has put in no checks and balances for publishing - any loud voice can rampantly go out and get 200,000k followers.
No one is taking away right to assemble in public. Twitter is a publisher with no quality checks in place.
Who trusted book publishers? What American can even name 3 of them, or could in the 1970s? This doesn't seem like a serious argument, and it gets less serious the further back in time you go and the more all of publishing resembled the Weekly World News.
Tell me more about the checks and balances that exist in book publishing. Publishers --- often mainstream publishers --- published the first editions of Mein Kampf, Camp of the Saints, Architects of Conspiracy, Did Six Million Really Die, and all manner of medical pseudoscience.
- Time to publish, it’s not instant like the internet
- Allows people to editorialize and review, even if they allow publishing
- Allow critics to voice their opinions before the book blows up
I’m in no way saying we need to have a CCP level control over what gets published or not, but I am just pointing out the virality of social media that didn’t exist before the internet.
You can make many arguments around it, the fact is that the internet fundamentally changed the way conspiracy theories propagate.
Even if controversial books are published, someone is going to a bookstore and buying it. There are reviews on ebooks. There is so much discussion. No such thing is exists in echo chambers.
> We had echo chambers long before we had an Internet.
Yes indeed. The Internet, as well as some other more modern communication technologies, has greatly optimized the proliferation and psychological impact of the echo chambers.
Probably a digression from OP's point, but perhaps a useful one:
Suppose two long paths leading home are filled with people.
Path one is a park filled with people reading various physical copies of books, one of whom looks up from their copy of Mein Kampf to say something threatening to you.
Path two is filled with innocuous-looking people, all glued to the screens of essentially the same model of smartphone. One of them looks up from their device just long enough to tell you, "Samy is my hero."
> But we do expect them to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to the basic political participation of voting.
Do we?
Let's address this on two levels: First do we really expect people to evaluate the facts relevant to who they choose to vote for? I mean on the one hand, the system does this, yes. But not because we have any particular amount of faith that everyone is ready to bear the responsibility. Instead, we're resigned to the fact that all the other options are worse. I mean the founders absolutely didn't trust the people to evaluate their leadership, unless you were willing to restrict the definition of "people" to "white male landowners".
Hell, even more, the constitution as written (and federalist 68 explicitly) suggested that the people themselves shouldn't select the president, but only select representatives who ultimately do the selection. The justification for this was that said representatives would hopefully be more capable than the average individual of weighing all of the requirements of the office.
So the founders certainly didn't share your faith. Nor, even today, does the constitution itself. Ultimately though, having a well informed populace is very different from having a kritarchy, and having reputable media is necessary for a well informed populace.
If you're bombarded with two contradictory pieces of information (which I'd argue is in many cases the explicitly strategy of some of the media), you either need to be an expert on the topic, or your only approach is to trust people. Like, are you really saying we expect the average American to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to economic policy? Nobel prize winners disagree!
But that's just the first layer. There's a second layer here:
At this point we're no longer talking about the political participation of voting. That's already happened. The votes are in. What we're talking about is asking people to evaluate the facts of obscure election law that's in most cases never been tested. The average American isn't a constitutional Judge. But, to use your word, the president has asked unelected judges to directly overrule the will of the people literally dozens of times. That's kritarchy (or just raw authoritarianism, your choice). The actual experts, the judges, have resoundingly said no. Like, among the experts, there is no controversy here. And yet the conspiracy theory persists. Why is that?
Do you trust your doctor? Do you consider the court as a misplaced authority? They make judgements, often nuances of interpretation based on their moral compass - they arbitrage truth from application of laws against evidence. In many cases, there is subjective interpretation and the "spirit of the law".
Of course they have the capacity to check facts, the means to do so are found on the same network where the fact-to-be-checked was found in the first place. Some people will check those facts, many others won't. If what is written is patently false this will come out soon enough.
You call to "stop requiring individuals to verify truth" can be phrased in another, more honest way: support specific organisations to decide where the truth lies. For simple facts - the current temperature, the price of petrol at the pump, the energy content of a portion of a given food - this works. For disputed facts - nearly anything related to SARS2, nearly anything related to climate, nearly anything related to nuclear power, nearly anything related to migration, the veracity and validity of identity politics, the absence or presence of "systemic" racism - this patently fails since the gatekeeper gets to impose its own views on the public. When that gatekeeper happens to be the 500lbs gorilla in the field that means the public has to do exactly what you decry to be ridiculous: they have to go check whether the presented facts are true or just the result of the gatekeeper projecting its opinions, a task made harder by that gatekeeper - the 500lbs gorilla - blocking opposing views from its platform.
On your measuring tape comparison I can state that measuring tapes sold in e.g. the Netherlands clearly state that they are not to be used for trading purposes ("niet voor handelsdoeleinden") since they are not officially calibrated. Just like scales, pumps and other measuring equipment measuring tapes/sticks/etc. used for trading purposes need to be calibrated, get stamped that they are, complete with a calibration expiry date. So, yes, if it really matters you do ask for a calibrated measuring device.
Why does anyone need to decide what is true? Each person can decide for himself in his own heart what he believes. We reach consensus through discussion. There is never, not once, in any situation whatsoever a justification for forcing a particular perspective on the public instead of letting the marketplace of ideas function and find the truth organically.
This idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed is the mark of every insecure tyranny. Secure beliefs don't need to be propped up with censorship, and a belief isn't secure, it's because it's just not adequately backed up by facts.
The marketplace is broken. A non-trivial amount of people believe the earth is flat. People are becoming immune to fact-based evidence, because they get to immerse themselves in an alternate universe which tells them that they're right. Soon the ramifications won't be restricted to people shooting up pizza parlors.
And a non-trivial number of people believed that the U.S. has spent decades slashing school funding. Or that Stacey Abrams "should be the governor of Georgia right now." Or that Citizens United was about campaign contributions. Or that we are 10 years away from the end of civilization due to climate change. As a life-long Democrat, I didn't realize how much false received wisdom I had internalized until I married a Republican.
I think it's fair to say that Republicans are somewhat more likely to believe in false information, but Democrats believe plenty of incorrect things as well. And I'd rather have a broken marketplace than one where Democrats just get to decide what's true.
Especially when its taken just 5 minutes for the perceived guard rails to evaporate! We're not talking about "the earth is flat" here. We are talking about Hunter Biden emails that still nobody has proven are inauthentic. We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake. Even if I'm amenable to "fact checking" something like "Obama was born in Kenya" I'm sure as hell not going to support Google deciding something is true or untrue before the courts do.
> We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake.
Except we're not. Guiliani said in one of the few courts that asked for an oral argument that it wasn't a fraud case[1]. Fraud requires specific proof which he/they do not have.
This is PR/fund raising disguised as comical legal filings.
I think this is a good example of what happens when you wade into a nest of vipers. 'Fraud' can have different meanings, and sometimes what is used in common language is not the correct legal term.
So is it misleading to call it fraud? Or are you just nitpicking? Depends on who you ask.
The media breathlessly reports allegations in complaints as fact all the time. Stacey Abrams' case against Brian Kemp over the 2016 election was voluntarily dismissed without the court ever reaching the merits. The media reported on the complaint, and an early ruling granting Abrams discovery, but of course never reported the quiet voluntary dismissal when nothing turned up.
Do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases?
Editing to make this a bit clearer:
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.
Google is not deciding what is true or untrue. Google is deciding what they will host on their service.
The mods on this site make similar decisions every single day, but I've never seen you post about that. Why shouldn't youtube have the same ability to moderate their site as Hacker News?
As a life-long Democrat, I didn't realize how much false received wisdom I had internalized until I married a Republican.
As another left-leaning person who has also had this experience recently, and who is rather disturbed by the delusions and hypocrisy from “my team”, I’ve noticed that your posts lately seem to do an excellent job of offering a more complete picture. Often, completing the picture involves clarifying the right-leaning viewpoint. It’s unfortunate that you usually get downvoted for it, even when you aren’t inserting your own opinion and stating things that are objectively true.
Just curious, has the combination of the bad behavior by many on the left in conjunction with receiving additional context from the right, pushed you towards the center or even the right? Or are you merely trying to act as more of an ambassador for Republican views?
No, but if they were so obviously fraudulent so as to merit a media blackout, wouldn't we have established that by now? When there is actually a real dispute over authenticity, that's news.
Yes, by cryptographic signature. DKIM was verified. Some senders/recipients also provided human verification.
Censorship is why you didn't already know this. It should have been major news, being the headline story everywhere for a week. It passed by here quietly, on Hacker News, and was quickly flagged.
You're left with an incomplete view of the world that is very misleading. People everywhere are using this warped view of reality to make world-changing decisions.
The marketplace is not broken merely because one party's goods aren't selling. If I make scratchy toilet paper and people don't buy it, it's my fault, not the market's. The fact is that the media elite have little credibility these days among the general public, their wares suck, and people are investigating alternatives. The solution isn't censorship. It's becoming more credible.
Why should credibility matter? That is to say, how can the average person know that what they're reading is credible or not to make that determination and say "oh, CNN reported this and it's credible! Must mean that CNN is becoming more credible and I should watch it more because they have a better product" rather than "CNN is reporting this but it doesn't line up with what I want to believe, they must be wrong and not credible". Your metaphor doesn't make sense in a world where news stories are looked at skin deep, where someone doesn't even know that the toilet paper is scratchy it just _looks_ scratchy from the label or uncle Joe told me that it must be scratchy because it's made by Proctor & Gamble.
Credibility matters, because people really do want to base their opinions on facts. CNN existed for two decades before Fox News got popular. That wasn't the case because everyone agreed all the time back then. It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.
> people really do want to base their opinions on facts
Not really, confirmation bias is a real thing for all human beings. The issue here is that there's a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes a fact. Objectivity in reporting is also subjective, funnily enough. If I consider NPR to be very objective because the dead-pan monotonic voice of the announcer simply says a direct quote from a member of congress, I can talk to a relative who will tell me that same NPR story is biased because they reported on something they don't agree with.
> It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.
There are _plenty_ of news outlets that still respect their role in society. The difference is that 20-30 years ago, there wasn't a deluge of information or misinformation readily available to get those dopamine hits from confirming biases.
You can rant against the mainstream media, but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there -- how many independent YouTube sources do the same?