The banning of politicians from any public platform raises questions about the level of influence these platforms hold and their impact on democracy. I'm not sure where things will land but this is a bold move by YouTube. I'm surprised they picked Ron Paul to test this on.
> To clarify: The Ron Paul Liberty Report YouTube account is still available. The Ron Paul Institute's YouTube account has been terminated. It is a seldom-used account and its termination is perplexing.
These aren't wackos. These are mostly serious scholars, tired of a serious problem with Google. I'm giving this as an example; this has been a problem for a lot of people for a long time.
I seem to remember your former president getting banned? His shtick may have been that he entered politics as an outsider but once he was in he surely was a politician, and a famous one at that.
It certainly does not, it makes it all the more clear that it is foolhardy to rely on these centralised corporate entities to carry your message for you unless that message happens to coincide with the current desired narrative - and even in that case it would be wise to not rely on them given that the narrative can and will change.
Every grain of sand leaking from their hands adds to the viability of a decentralised 'net so the more they censor, the more they'll lose. I say let them lose everything, let Youtube become a wasteland of cat videos interspersed with government broadcasts and kitschy music videos, let it become the online equivalent of a shopping mall past its heyday where elevator music echoes through empty galleries, let interesting material migrate to alternative distribution channels. All that is needed for that is a reliable CDN, a problem which might be solvable using p2p distribution like Peertube and LBRY do. Once this is established there will be another fight, this time led by copyright holders who insist on blocking these channels so the system needs to be robust against such attempts.
Will there be fewer 'Youtube millionaires'? Sure, that was a short-lived fad which is unlikely to survive in a decentralised 'net. Is this something to mourn over? Not in my opinion.
Comparing messy AI that will demonetize/remove historic retellings of traumatic events, wars, and hate crimes to 'censoring' Ron Paul is ridiculous.
Most of them moved to because of demonetization... Where swearing can demonetize a video as well as mentioning rape or murder in contexts explicitly. Yes that is horrible to punish literal historians talking about these events that really happened that we should be educated on but, how do you separate those from actually hateful content so charmin/coke/corporation still will pay you to run ads?
Letting people think the vaccine is dangerous without scientific proof when they could die without it, isn't government regulation friendly.
edit: to day I learned there's a down vote feature lol. Didn't know acknowledging a private company has interests beyond letting people saying w/e when want when it can negatively impact their bottom line would be so controversial. Also banning him for being conservative is very different from banning spreading vaccine misinformation. Then grouping that with removing historians incomes due to messy AI implementation to save YouTube's ad friendliness to keep their bottom line is just a victim complex.
If it's just AI, you separate them with actual human oversight.
From what I understand, they moved less because of demonetization, and more because of the chilling effect it had on free speech. They needed to be super-careful in script writing to make sure they didn't anger the YouTube algorithm.
I'll also mention another darker side of this: Google is almost entirely liberal inside. If a liberal channel is wrongly banned, an army of Googlers quickly rushes to fix it. If a conservative channel is wrongly banned, there's internal snickering. AIs are not neutral, and Google's reflects the biases of the people who keep tweaking it.
I think comparing this to free speech is just a losing argument cause legally free speech is for criticizing the government non-violently.
They are private companies that have a monopoly, making a new platform focused on enabling creator's means of revenue is the ideal approach.
>If a liberal channel is wrongly banned, an army of Googlers quickly rushes to fix it. If a conservative channel is wrongly banned, there's internal snickering.
Conservatives unironically have a victim complex for this because lefties have the same issue because they are saying the centerist thing. Democrats or what conservatives call 'liberal' right now are mostly a centerist party, trying to be palatable to the largest audience. The same social media companies want to keep the largest ad consumer base as well as advertiser pool.
> another darker side of this
I honestly think it is a societal shift of the vanilla of politics, I'm sorry conservatism is no longer vanilla and is actually the rocky road of politics and isn't as friendly.
Edit: I challenge anyone offended by this point of view, to look into conservatives that have been 'cancelled'/'silenced' viewership and numbers before and after. It usually helps them get more of a following across the board, they inflate this issue beyond how bad it is to get more attention for a possible loss in revenue.
I don't care about "legally." I care about whether we live in a society where we have diverse opinions, and people feel free to express themselves. If we have a system where:
- Market forces drive companies to support one point of view in media, and censor everything else;
- Market forces drive everyone to work under draconian NDAs; and
- Market forces drive companies not to hire people who engage in WrongThink
We've got a broken system where no one has free speech, no matter what the laws say.
And no, you can't successfully start a competing company, because market forces mean that companies which optimize to market forces win.
I don't care about conservatives, liberals, or victim complexes. I care about having reason discourse, civic debate, and free speech. If a social, political, and economic system doesn't allow that, we've got a broken system. As a footnote, every conservative I've spoken to thinks I'm a leftwing nutjob, and every liberal, a rightwing nutjob. If you disagree with either party line on anything (even not in the opposing direction), that's how you're viewed. The polarization and stereotyping is crazy.
I agree market forces are largely an issue, just know that when you're saying 'WrongThink' and 'Market forces drive companies to support one point of view in media, and censor everything else;'. Just as a heads up cause I would rather have these conversations than not, just like you said others wouldn't.
It just sounds like the 'reason, discourse and civic debate crowd are more aligning groups known for hate speech or using dog whistles to encourage that type of person to watch their content. For instance a Ben Shapiro, who sounds smart and looks like he wants reasons and facts but really his perfectly crafted throw away statements just take 30 minutes of googling to disprove. Rather than actually providing real fats and logic, it's just the common sense he can placate to and arguments reinforcing a religious agenda. It makes sense why he doesn't notice this as well, because to be cold and analytical it reduces blood flow to the sections of your brain that contribute to emotional thinking which is normally ideal. However, it also turns off your ability to sense when it's seeping into your thoughts regardless. So focusing purely rationality alone, can also dampen your effective rationality because it is harder to tell when you let emotions play a factor in your think
> I'm surprised they picked Ron Paul to test this on.
It's the perfect way to approach it. If what is being said is verifiably false and causes tremendous harm to people why should politicians get treated differently?
What other policies should they be exempt from because they are trying to build a brand for politics?
Yea, this one is to make sure that there isn't going to be regulations on youtube or other social media.
Since no regulator would touch social media regulation because of how that looks, however if it enables people dieing at a unprecedented rate then regulators may feel their hand is forced to do something.(facebook/instagram right now is in hot water with regulators too) I doubt anything regulation wise would help or even be good, this is just youtube making sure it looks like the market is regulating itself.
I think also this is to signal to other users 'see we don't pick favourites anyone can get banned'
They most certainly have a profit motive, they're a for profit business. It's not their only motive, but it's their primary one, and all other decisions they make are judged against their impact on the bottom line, this decision included. They may take risks that they know could negatively impact that profit if (keyword, if) it goes south, but there is still a very clear consideration for cost and profit there.
1. Common misconception is only right leaning views are being demonetized, it's all politics so yea they are also being punished by youtube as well.
2. People aren't dieing/being permanently injured at rates that hospitals can't keep up with because of the lack of police because the movement was so effective that it has vast swaths of the population without policing. So much so standard solvable emergencies that you could normally be treated for at the hospital end up killing you due to lack of availability of doctors.
3. Those beliefs are based on studies that have been upheld and are reproducible how ineffective current policing policies are and are underperforming by numerous metrics and especially over all in areas with poverty or mostly minority population. So not paying them more money (defund)or rewarding them for underperforming, like one would a corporation that is under performing was the original goal. It has spun a vocal minority into more extreme views of abolishing the police entirely after having emotional reactions looking deeper at those numbers.
I'd be with you on this one, but his ban is coming off an announcement they are banning vaccine misinformation as well as all the last posts even on Twitter are relating to the vaccine.
The Republican leaders haven't exactly been beacons of scientific accuracy and review in this emergency. So it lines up, that one would also get caught in a widespread new policy banning vaccine disinformation.
It's funny how we all begrudgingly accept them booting people off for copyright infringement, but when it comes to personal free speech that affects you and I, people want to hold the line.
Everyone has been subtly programmed that lines must be crossed to protect the mega-corp, but if joe sixpack harms himself, hey that's the price of freedom.
Well, I think most people accept it because they really don’t have a choice when it comes to copyright, IP holders will bury them in lawsuits and YouTube will lose most of them.
>The banning of politicians from any public platform raises questions about the level of influence these platforms hold and their impact on democracy.
While the debate about the influence of social media platforms may or may not be relevant (I personally think their influence is all too often overblown to push a political agenda,) these are not and have never been public platforms.
It is called 'the Internet' and can be used to disseminate whatever you want, within or (to a limited extent) outside of the bounds of the law of the land. As long as you remain within those bounds it is generally possible to say what you want although you might have to erect your own platform - in the form of a website, netcast, 'radio' station or video streaming service like Peertube - to be able to speak freely.
Centralised corporate platforms like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook are not public platforms and should not be treated as such. The 'net is the platform and should be treated as such. Just like the old telcos were not allowed to censor the phone lines it should not be allowed for internet access providers and backbone providers to refuse access or transit because they happen to dislike the message. There is a discussion to be had on whether service providers like AWS should fall under this regime, personally I see more in a decentralised approach but there are arguments to be made for including them.
> it should not be allowed for internet access providers and backbone providers to refuse access or transit because they happen to dislike the message.
The key word being "should". If my ISP refuses me access because they dislike my message today, do I have any legal recourse?
If that ISP wants to remain protected as a common carrier you do but it will take a number of such cases to find out whether this holds. This is why I used the term should instead of is - a precedent needs to be set.
On the internet? Not really - every site is privately owned and controlled by some entity with the right to decide what does and doesn't get published on their servers. Even laissez-faire "free speech maximalist" platforms like Gab and Parler are in theory entirely private and centralized, they just choose to allow public access (under their terms of service) and lax moderation. But in practice that decision is entirely arbitrary.
Barring the repeal of Section 230 and some law declaring all social media platforms to be public property, it's true regardless of what the state of California says about shopping centers.
I feel like the term "mistake" must mean something different to you than it does to at least me. Like, we know this isn't some kind of "oops": from just the screenshots in the one linked tweet, we know he filed an appeal and of held up in appeal. I would buy "error", but errors are something that people should attempt to minimize and aren't necessarily excusable with a hand-waive.
> So Ron Paul learned that YouTube is not radically libertarian.
Nothing more radically libertarian than exercising your private property rights to control what ideas are spread by use of that property.
The people complaining on the basis that private parties should not have the right to control what ideas are spread using their own property, OTOH, are clearly not radically libertarian.
Good point. Radically libertarian is a nightmare. In general, radically $ideology usually is a nightmare. Some cultures even have a word for moderation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagom
Please don't take HN threads into cheap flamewar and certainly not low-information ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
You're referring to a comment by a banned user that was blatantly trolling. Copying something like that into a live comment and making firestarter out of it is definitely not a good thing to do here! so please don't.
Not cool. Please don't enhance your mood at the expense of damaging the ecosystem. I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park or enjoy setting fires in a dry forest. Please don't do the equivalent on HN.
im sorry, has something burned here? HN has a moderation system, ive been downmodded, the whole article was flagged, nobody will see my comments, problem solved. the immune system worked. i lit a small campfire that was summarily put out by a firehose, no threat to any forest here.
also, there is some serious hypocrisy on the part of RP and his followers. They are libertarians. They are all in on private indivduals and companies having very little restriction on their activities, with the notion that "the free market" fixes all problems. So why is it a problem that youtube banned Ron Paul? They can do whatever they want, RP merely needs to find the correct market solution to his problem. There should not be any complaints. Yet we see these "libertarian" followers extremely upset.
there's a point here. Which is that "libertarianism" is a fiction. its adherents really want something else, which we often refer to as "freedom for me, but not for thee". they should stop.
You're making a lot of assumptions about the typical Paul fan, why? Also fallacious to take low-effort drive-by comments and apply them to a whole movement. Have an axe to grind?
Most people are dumb (ha hah) so it's easy to make such an argument.
ive been talking to libertarians all my life, nothing is really assumed here. the "drive by" comment spoke to a very real attitude on the part of "libertarians" that anything they don't like is "communist". this is pretty explicitly present in today's political dialogue. as for my commenting i think it's important that hacker news meets at least a little bit of resistance in its otherwise relentless push towards being a right wing echo chamber.
Yes, dumb people are everywhere. Sounds like you’re influenced from cable news or social media trolls, more than you realize, however.
The doc “the social dilemma” on Netflix is a good intro to the problem.
I personally don’t trust the judgment of “us vs them” overt partisans, and think the worst are suffering neuroses. I like a good fraction of Paul’s stuff. Have no need to hear it from youtube.
> Sounds like you’re influenced from cable news or social media trolls, more than you realize, however.
uh no, from the signs in my own neighborhood proclaiming everything they dont like (yet gladly receive, like medicare) as "socialist" or "communist". I live in a purple district. I have to socialize with people who someday could very easily be burning my house down if they were convinced I was in fact going to war against "their country". We are neighbors with people who are law enforcement, who proudly wear "blue lives matter" garb intermingled with weaponry and show up to Trump rallies as speakers. We go to parties and dinner with these people and have polite and shallow conversations about boating and such which end quickly and back into awkward silence. other neighbors leave their lights on all night as they are afraid of mexican gangs invading their property (we are in New York state). A church features a black lives matter display throughout their lawn, and two doors down is a house with a giant 6x8 foot flag (among many others) waving out into the road of Donald Trump as a flaming skull. it is a very uneasy peace around here. this is not a "only on TV" thing for us here. I am literally afraid to post on more "close to home" sites like Facebook lest the neighbors see them and decide that I'm "antifa" and should be targeted when the revolution is called by their orange leader.
so yes im pretty triggered when people throw out terms like "all communists should be killed" in response to something stupid like RP having his precious youtube channel banned.
If you look at his twitter videos are clips from the channel, and they're all about berating any initiative to take a free and safe vaccine.
Must have spoken in greater lengths about negatives that don't have any scientific bases. Which honestly at this point makes sense to start punishing. Where most of the people against the vaccine (Tucker Carlson/Bret Weinstein) at this point that are popular have taken it but puppet different positions for building a brand and/or money.
As much as I'm offended by many of the things Ron Paul does and stands for, I'm glad he's there. There's a lot of divergent thinking there. Outliers are good. I'd be terrified of a congress with a dozen Ron Pauls, but one is good to have around.
If I had my druthers, we'd have one of him in Congress. And one of each other extremist point of view, left-wing, right-wing, or just off in another direction.
If American politicians had no outside interests than sure. It's currently a fundamentally flawed system: political games, corporate interests, religion and re-elections all cloud actual discussion and turns it into a show.
Nothing in house is driven by real data, both sides don't see the actual reality of what ever situation they're in. They take random data points to mislead voters to their position, each side having different areas they fudge the numbers on.
Yeah, I've been a fan of Paul for a long time. But his group has lost the plot since Covid happened. Perhaps an echo chamber effect.
Early on I was happy someone was fighting back against government overreach. This was around the time they were closing beaches in California, and showing photos in the news carefully taken at a 15 degree angle to make it look like people fifteen feet apart were on top of each other. It doesn't take a tremendous amount of science education to know folks don't get respiratory infections outdoors at a sunny, windy beach.
But that era is long over, govt has mostly stepped back.
Their channel however has since degenerated into sloppy, constant tone-deaf vaccination, CDC, and card bashing. We don't know everything, but one thing we do is that the major covid vaccines are orders of magnitude safer than getting it. We've had vax cards for school, etc for a long time as well. It's just an odd stance for someone with a medical background to take.
That said I wish the government would dial back its spending. Something Paul would do better to focus on. Not sure what to make of Youtube, but it's their network.
In any conversation that begins with framing Ron Paul as a principled libertarian who we can trust to have positions unbesmirched by the normal far-right talking points, we would do well to remember that he ran a deeply racist and homophobic newsletter for over two decades[1].
I'm not saying that he deserved to be banned from YouTube, since I have no idea what he (or others using his brand) put on their website. But I feel it's important to note that Ron Paul (and his son) have spent the better part of the last 30 years attempting to launder their reputations away from their reactionary roots.
