It's scary how many of the systems we were worried about in China (e.g. social credit system, censorship, etc.) are basically being created now in the west through the proxy of critical companies blocking access and/or working together.
I don’t get why people think youtube should be forced to host stuff they don’t want to host. Youtube should be socialized and forced to become a content-neutral storage? But why?!?
We have the internet, where you can rent or run your own server and storage and post your conspiracy theory videos.
Youtube is a major information source for two billion people, that has largely supplanted the online 'public space' of video hosts. No other video site is remotely comparable, and it's not even feasible for the vast majority of individuals, companies or even governments to compete with it. Google also controls the largest search platform, so good luck growing that 'conspiracy theory video' platform.
I don't believe any entity should ever have the power to frame what is and is not acceptable to believe to such a large amount of the world, be it Google, Facebook or a government.
> it's not even feasible for the vast majority of individuals, companies or even governments to compete with it.
You haven't defined what "compete with it" actually means here.
> Google also controls the largest search platform
If it was only a search platform, this would hardly matter, because search engines are not hard to replace. But Google search is merely the entry point to a much larger system (notably, a vast online ad platform and data collection system), and that's a problem.
Companies with monopolistic power and revolving door political hirings need to be held to a different standard as they are beyond competing for views and shape narratives.
It doesn't matter whether they are shaping it politically or profitably or via AI for clicks. It isn't neutral and drowns out or outright eliminates competing views.
Heres an example: Bari Weiss was fired for commissioning an op-ed by a US Senator Tom Cotton calling for the national guard to be called in to break up riots. Note that she did not write the essay, but merely commissioned it. They sometimes have op-eds from varying voices. NY Times apologized and said "This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards"
Pretty extreme view sending in the national guard, right? Except according to a poll around that time, 52% of Americans answered yes to "Do you approve or disapprove of sending in the U.S. military where there are violent protests?" So obviously that op-ed wasn't a fringe belief, but it was enough to end the career of the person responsible to bring it to print, in addition to apologies and a commitment to never do anything like that again.
Being critical of sometimes violent disruptive protests is a view that has been highly suppressed.
Are you arguing that Bari Weiss, who was brought in specifically as part of an editorial decision to appeal to alternate viewpoints, is an example of alternate viewpoints being censored?
By all means argue that they made her feel that it was not possible or sensible to try to do the job she wanted to do. But she resigned, and that's not the same thing.
She's a popular Substacker and left the NYT in a wave of journalists starting lucrative Substacks. I'm sure the NYT Slack was quite inhospitable to her (she's a troll, and they're snowflakey), but she wasn't forced out of the NYT; she was lured out. Either way: good riddance. Just because a bunch of irritating snowflakes got what they wanted doesn't, by itself, make an outcome bad.
That's not been eliminated. Quite a few people believe the election was stolen. Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division.
There's no evidence to support the fact that corporate greed in an otherwise competitive market leads to inflation, yet we have plenty of politicians pushing that.
There's no evidence supporting price controls to be an effective way to fight inflation, as was shown to produce awful results in the 70s among many other eras, yet we have politicians pushing for that.
There's no evidence to support that nominal wages rising, but at a rate lower than inflation leads to people being better off, yet we have politicians pushing this.
I think Google should ban any videos promoting these effectively disproven and dangerous economic ideas.
Agree on the economics, but I think it's weak to compare these to the purely forensic question of whether the election was stolen.
Economic opinions are generally not that clear cut, requiring an awful lot of theoretical harness and qualifications to explain. Evidence is similar, you can quibble about a lot of things in economics.
Whether the election was stolen, well, where is a shred of evidence? It's not hard to define what we mean by stolen.
Most things aren't clear cut, and there have been many times in history where widely held beliefs have been proven largely false.
If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said"
There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.
I believe we should mass purge all these videos proposing that the ex president colluded with Russians. We don't want the public to be misinformed.
Consider which regimes throughout history have used silencing political opposition the most, and whether you want to be aligned with them.
I would hate for people to fall out of the practice of critically thinking about what they see in the news. Our whole open society depends on people practicing deciding what they think it's right.
My preference is to leave all content up, but perhaps provide filters to users so they can choose to look at a bubble if they like. Or have an open standard for video data, on which anybody could build a UI layer.
Just saying, there's a clear double standard here. Saying the election was stolen due to collusion with Russians seems to be along awfully similar lines.
I'm happy to allow companies to do whatever they like, but the data needs to be decoupled from the UI then. Otherwise it's a natural monopoly.
I think history will see it that way, though it may take another decade or two.
>If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said"
>There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.
"Ties" are irrelevant. The question was whether the president colluded with Russia. Unless you believe him to be a genius or master of stealth, I can assure you 4 years of all media investigations and official investigations would have uncovered anything compelling were it to exist.
Also, you can tie most government officials to Russia in some capacity. Everybody in politics is well connected.
It was a widely spread conspiracy theory with 0 evidence given a veil of credibility because many talking heads brought it up as if there were something tangible backing it.
Just because many people talked about and bought into it doesn't invalidate that it was a conspiracy theory
Ties are absolutely relevant when the guy is doing stuff like removing Ukraine aid or Russian sanctions from the Republican platform. Look up Paul Manafort.
Nobody is claiming Trump is a genius. The Russian ties are all out there in the open. The only open question was whether they rise to a criminal level. Trump apparently thought they did when he panicked and fired James Comey to halt an investigation. I don’t think the connections were necessarily criminal, just un-American (that of cozying up to corrupt dictators while denigrating allies).
This comment is unrelated to my point. I asked for an example of a viewpoint being eliminated. Instead, I get a wrong answer and a pivot to a request for my views. You're changing the subject yet again to just listing other things politicians have said. That doesn't substantiate the claim that there are viewpoints being eliminated.
It replies directly to your point. You imply that dangerous views shouldn't be kept around.
"Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division."
So I listed some very dangerous economic views that have been proven to fail throughout history, and are widely agreed upon by economists.
So we should silence anybody promoting these views, following your logic. It's for the good of society
We should ban all videos proposing the ex president colluded with Russia too, as it was always a conspiracy theory with no evidence. No matter how much people wanted it to be true. Undermining the legitimacy of a validly elected president should be a silence-able offense. All the better if the party in power or their affiliates are the ones to do the silencing.
Maybe take into consideration which regimes throughout history have used silencing speech the most and whether you want to align with them.
But generally I don't expect holders of these views to acknowledge the hypocrisy of them, or how closely they align to the tactics of authoritarian regimes throughout history.
Let be real here. It's very likely the former guy may run again. You may be against that, as would I. But I think its pretty creepy that a handful of large tech CEOs will be able to get together and prevent that from happening by shutting him off from every social media platform and biasing search results, even so far as censoring our private communications via FB messenger, email or similar chat apps.
You want to argue he did something illegal, should be in prison, should not be allowed to run? Fine, that's what the court system and respective political parties are for. But please don't tell me it's completely cool that tech CEOs get to decide who can and can't run. You may like the side they fall on this time, but how confident are you that you'll agree in the future? What if leadership changes? What do you think would happen when a politician has a credible shot of winning on a promise to break them up?
> But I think its pretty creepy that a handful of large tech CEOs will be able to get together and prevent that from happening by shutting him off from every social media platform and biasing search results, even so far as censoring our private communications via FB messenger, email or similar chat apps.
None of what you've described would prevent him from running. And in fact, thanks to Streisand Effect, much of it centers him in the public eye.
Do you think it was weird that when a damning article about a presidential candidate's son came out a few weeks before the election, every single media company and social network decided at the same exact time not to cover the story? Even so much as censoring the one paper that carried it and on private messages between people? Twitter, Facebook, NY Times, NPR and others.
The former guy got banned on all the services all at once. Even tiktok which he was not on. Hell, even grindr banned him.
There may not be direct coordination (maybe there is), but there's a signal and no one likes to make waves
They all took a different direction about the "pee tape":
Seems a bit weird, there is quite a story there [0]. In the grand scheme of things is looks like a pretty routine case of potential corruption, but that being associated with the president's son like a big deal. Vigorously suppressing the story was a pretty suspect move.
The complaint seems to be that the corruption he was probably involved in is slightly different than the corruption Trump was talking about. Which again, standard political fare but the crackdown on the story seems suspicious. If it had been Trump there is no way such a story would have been quietened down.
Making up a story about someone doesn't make it a story worth reporting until they disprove it, there should actually be some substance as table stakes.
> In the grand scheme of things is looks like a pretty routine case of potential corruption, but that being associated with the president's son like a big deal
If you're making the claim that simply being on a board of directors or part of a venture firm because of who you know or are related to is ipso facto corruption, unfortunately we're unlikely to ever rid ourselves of that short of random work assignments in some kind of scifi YA novel.
He's being subjected to a federal criminal investigation. There is a bit more there than "simply being on a board". It is a big story and deserves public investigation to find out what was going on. The world is currently teetering on the edge of a Russia-Ukraine * war spiralling in to a US-Russia war. It is materially interesting what business connections the US president has with (famous for being corrupt I might add) Ukraine. Especially if they involve cash for influence. These things matter.
And, frankly, the reason these left-leaning outlets were suppressing the story was because to a lot of people the situation does meet the standard of ipso facto corruption. It seems clear that the people who were interacting with Hunter thought they were buying influence in the US political apparatus, probably the executive given his father's position; otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense. To a lot of people that basically is corruption. Although I doubt it is unusual in the US Congress if we poked around a little.
> He's being subjected to a federal criminal investigation. There is a bit more there than "simply being on a board". It is a big story and deserves public investigation to find out what was going on.
It came out in December that his taxes were being investigated and it was widely reported. Easy to see from the wikipedia article where there are multiple citations from major news outlets.
> It is materially interesting what business connections the US president has with (famous for being corrupt I might add) Ukraine.
What is interesting? You're playing connect the dots and taking possible tax issues from business in China and connecting it to made up stories about Burisma and saying "now prove me wrong". Again, the impetus is on the person making the argument to make an actual concrete claim. The Senate republicans already have you covered on the Ukraine part, of course (nothing).
> otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense
Henry Kissinger got a bunch of people to heavily invest in Theranos. You're going to need more substance than "why do rich white people keep failing upwards?" for a story here.
Which lends some rather solid credence to all the people back around the election who were saying this looks like fairly obvious corruption. I mean, the facts haven't really changed much, the only change is that the political establishment is OK with it being reported on in December. Anyone reading the initial story could have told you there was going to be an investigation.
Whether they'll find anything is an open question since the person who controls the executive is currently president - but it looks as shady as anything in US politics. There is little question that the big tech giants were making a political move when they took the story down on its first arrival, it would have swung votes and they didn't want that.
Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
This is a whole lot of words to refer to nothing specific.
> Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
Not finding evidence can't be the story because the original story (which is what had no evidence), er, was a story? Again, an accusation can't pull itself up by its bootstraps. There has to be a there, there.
The son of the president is under criminal investigations and is being offered board positions in a country famous for corruption. There is surely a cash-for-influence scheme going on. There probably is something there.
Now you may not care. I certainly don't think it is the biggest issue, this sort of corruption is pretty small biscuits compared to the damage that US politicians of Biden's tenure typically manage to do. However, the fact that there was a vigorous campaign of censorship leading up to the election is extremely weird. Which is the polite phrase for "this was a partisan lie by omission because big tech is showing their cards and those cards are Democrat".
It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host?
As I suspect you know, his point was that it’s sad that YouTube is making politically motivated censorship decisions, just like China would. While we all know that Silicon Valley leans left, I think that those of us who want good things for the world would like to believe that these companies can check their politics at the door when it comes to running platforms that serve people across the political spectrum. Sadly, that’s not the case.
If YouTube identified itself as a partisan platform where speech that is not left leaning is in danger of being curtailed (which is what it is), I wouldn’t have a problem with these actions. But it masquerades as a neutral platform that is open to all, in the same way that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox masquerade as news outlets. That is a threat to democracy, because it creates the impression that only content which aligns with the platform owner’s political ideology is newsworthy or acceptable for viewing, and anything else is fringe.
Really? What's the difference? It's not whether it's public or private making the decisions (they are both considering the amount spent in lobbying), it's the degree of control you ought to worry about.
There needs to be an actual free market where people have a realistic set of alternatives.
Pointing out public versus private is IMO misidentifying the problem.
> It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host?
There is virtually no competition to youtube in the video streaming space (in terms of sheer reach and volume), so choices that youtube make have clear political implications on what voices get heard.
Because, like telephone companies youtube can be considered a monopoly and classified as a common carrier, as some states and proposed federal laws have argued.
not a monopoly on paper, but a monopoly in terms of reach. When 99% of videos seen on the web are from youtube, can you pretend it's not akin to some kind of monopoly?
So because you can’t afford something, that means it’s the responsibility of another private party to publish your video for free?
If you think it is a right that people should have, talk to your representative and get the government to create GovTube where anyone can post any type of conspiracy crap they desire.
Sure it has “reach”. Any user can go to any website. It’s up to the publisher to market it. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of right wing media that wouldn’t be glad to accept the advertising.
> To what extent does that apply to the Internet, which effectively has unlimited spectrum?
It's about having equal reach for different political opinions. If you completely remove one voice without any legal mandate to do so, you are just the same as a political tool.
Broadcasting uses a highly limited resource, local TV freqiencies. Especially until recently, these were really limited to a dozen or so channels per metro area.
There are far more than a dozen websites out there.
Many people historically only had a single phone provider available at their home. Last mile internet isn't competitive for most people, I would agree they should be considered a common carrier. This concept of "common carrier" is important in this debate.
A train line that is the sole means of commerce in and out of a town is a common carrier. There's no competitors really possible to enter into that market. For that train line to decide to not run certain cargo outside of safety concerns is to then control all the commerce with no reasonable competitor.
Literally right now I'm watching streaming video content hosted from some service other than YouTube. I probably spend less than an hour a week watching YouTube content. It's hardly the only rail line in town, nor is it the only way I can view video content. Now if the only viable ISP said "you can't connect to YouTube, if you don't like it sell your house and move to the next town over" then yeah that's a common carrier and shouldn't be allowed to do that.
DNS names aren't limited by the US government. There are lots of TLDs which are controlled by other governments. And largely they're pretty much managed by lots of different corporations. Either way, the government directly getting involved in taking over your domain name without any due process just to silence your speech probably does become a first amendment issue at least for US nationals. Either way, they're massively less limited than how many effective TV freqiencies or phone providers are in a given metro area.
Aside from whether that’s happening here, there’s an argument to be made that an equivalent of common carrier laws make sense for the largest platforms. With the centralisation of attention onto those platforms, deplatforming effectively lets them act as a law unto themselves, and I think there’s a fair argument that in exchange for their outsized impact on society, those platforms have obligations to it as well.
(I don’t necessarily think it’d be the best idea for the most part though.)
Bad outcomes are assured when people who simply don't care make decisions that affect those who do.
Between the trio of media, tech, and government there's enormous control over what we hear and learn about. The filters they apply are powerful, yet inconsistent, and often populist, political, or irrational.
These 3 groups have this control, yet are incapable of using it to optimise for citizenry well-being.
> why people think youtube should be forced to host stuff they don’t want to host
For the same reasons that AT&T can't terminate your phone service if they hear you talking about something that's opposed to the political preferences of AT&T or its leadership. These companies have become the public square and the law needs to be updated to reflect that. If they have to become public utilities fine.
There's a big difference between a small company being coerced by the government into some action, versus the same action on a very small handful of multi-billion dollar companies that have a collective monopoly on our entire public and political discourse.
What's really bizarre is how the left is supposed to be opposed to, e.g. Citizens United, and the establishment neoliberal take is ultra-pro corporate rights and autonomy and 0 government intervention. IMHO thinking a few companies should be free to make a cooperative agreement and shut whoever they want out of communicating on these popular platforms is a radical right-wing position.
Youtube doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on posting videos to the internet.
What they do have is a brand and a social network that surfaces, promotes, and moderates video content to drive engagement and ad views.
They’ve grown large by moderating and curating content but now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content? Makes no sense whatsoever.
You’re pronouncing youtube a “public square”, which should therefore be seized by the government… But what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet.
> Youtube doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on posting videos to the internet
Of course they do. There are channels that can be removed that would instantly lose access to millions of monthly viewers that can't practically be replaced anywhere. They have a monopoly on that type of reach (the most important type), and especially when these platforms decide to blacklist in concert.
> now that they’ve done so they should no longer be allowed to moderate and curate content
Yes, because once your business decisions have the power to decide who gets elected President, for example, it's in a different class and has to be regulated differently than a corner flower shop. There are many examples of laws and regulations that apply to business based on size.
> what is this extremely strong claim based on? youtube is just one of an endless series of options for posting videos on the internet
Again, it's not one of endless, it is entirely unique -- for many channels, their reach on YouTube is not replaceable anywhere. That's like saying, AT&T can shut off your phone service for your political opinions because you can always go meet someone in person to talk. That's simply not how we've historically agreed to interpret the obligations of massive communications platforms, and there's a very good reason for that.
I don't want who gets to speak to the public decided by some faceless, unelected tech oligarchs. That's a dystopia. "They only get to decide if you easily get access to an audience of millions, you can always get an audience of 5" is a deeply flawed argument.
I'm sympathetic, but you're going to have to define some thresholds.
If I set up Paul's Video Hosting Service next week, and someone wants to post videos of kittens being tortured, I'm not hosting their videos. I'm not even hosting videos of a presidential candidate making certain pronouncements. No US court would agree that I should be forced to do so.
To whatever extent it is reasonable for YT to be forced to host any legal content, where's the boundary between the putative pvhs.com and youtube.com?
Utilities haven't been "seized" by the government because there are regulations on them. Telecoms haven't been seized by the government.
YouTube has monopoly level dominance in terms of engagement. Competitors can't gain market share because YouTube is already prevalent, and video is a "solved" problem. Consumer gets no benefit by using a different platform, and there is essentially no product feature that could be invented to make an alternative platform compelling enough to use over YouTube.
Instead of regulating YouTube, we could define an open database/protocol of video content and allow anybody to build a UI around the same set of content. In that way, there is no network effect gating people into a single platform. This is where things will likely trend in the longer run with social etc. And I would bet the free market will get to it eventually.
Then YouTube is just a web UI. And I guarantee you in this world there would be many other widely used sites, as there's no content/network effect lock.
Monopolies appear on the basis where it is effectively unreasonable to expect a competitor to form. E.g. railroads. Anybody can build their own railroad. Is it going to happen in practice? No, because cost to do so is prohibitively high.
A bit different considering the west has alternatives which are not blocked, whereas China doesn't. You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen.
How much does it matter in practice ? If you personally decide to host your own blog from your house, nobody will probably come after you.
If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income.
A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
I probably did not explain enough in my original post. It's not about having an audience even. It's the right to spin up some storage for encrypted data, run an encrypted matrix node for family, use a VPN, have a small blog for people to follow your travels and thousands of other options afforded non-Chinese nationals.
You can't anonymously access information as almost everything is tied to you ID number. You can't buy things, chat, watch TV (smart tvs), or do most anything with any sense of privacy.
Living in China as a Chinese means living with a drastically different mindset when it comes to these sorts of things. It's hard to understand how it changes you unless you've lived there.
This just shows that many of the policies in China are wanted by many, probably the majority, in society there. The policies are not always used for good, but they are indeed used to stop the spread of harmful misinformation or harmful practices (eg. detox via drinking bleach). In the US, you have the right to say something, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you or have to help spread your message; if you try, you might find a (possibly large) niche that people are interested in such as “the 2020 election was rigged” or “COVID doesn’t exist” or “the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage”, and you won’t be robbed of your autonomy of movement and speech by being sent to jail or a “re-education camp”.
More and more I have the feeling that we focus a lot on the freedom to say some political things (“the 2020 election was rigged”), and accept stuff like jail for breaking DRM or life breaking monetary amounts in penalty for copyright infringement as some benign issue we should strive to solve, but if we can’t that’s just too bad, gotta live with it.
I’m not saying I’d live in China, but I feel we’re putting too much credit in our own system. Even comparing ourselves to China doesn’t feel productive, we all have our local issues and should probably focus on solving them.
Streamers on twitch were getting banned for saying the word cracker, temporarily losing their livelihood because of joke outrage from some loosely organized people on Reddit/Twitch. Meanwhile Covid variant Omicron was just about to peak and the amount of misinformation about Covid peaked too.
Sacrifice another ~350k Americans and countless others around the globe from our refusal to stop misinformation, I sleep. Save some gamers' mock wounded pride; real stuff.
Every single day on HN, people mix up giving someone a platform to censoring someone. Social platforms are megaphones. Up until a decade ago, it was impossible for nearly everyone to reach out a large audience, especially worldwide. Nowadays, anyone can make a video accessible by billions of people with a single click.
If people banned from that is "censorship", then by that definition the whole world was censored 2 decades ago.
Before the printing press most people couldn't mass produce their written word. The printing press was a megaphone and a platform. Is taking away someone's access to a printing press censorship?
Not too many years ago no one had the ability to call anyone with a telephone. That service is provided by private companies in many countries. Is denying someone the ability to call their associates censorship?
And that’s fine. Not everybody can or has to be heard by everybody else. There no such as a thing as an expectation to be heard by others.
That becomes more problematic and debatable once infrastructure companies such as a DNS provider or a hosting company refuses to deal with some content given that you remove the ability to create your own soapbox.
Just to note, the US legal definition of free speech, at least according to the courts, includes the expectation to be heard by others. There is actually such a thing as a right to an audience; free speech is not fulfilled if someone is excluded from any space where someone may hear them.
But that doesn't mean, for example, that I'm allowed to force myself on your house and shout at you because I have a right to you being my audience. You're not entitled to Youtube hosting your content, just as you're not entitled to NYT hosting your opinion, just as I'm not entitled to have my words on your private blog.
The US definition of free speech also recognize companies freedom of speech. Which is exactly what makes them able to decide what content is shared or not on their platform. You’re using their properties, you have no entitlement to them relaying your message.
Well, the public forum doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_(legal) holds that the point of free speech is communication among citizens. I don't have a cite for the direct quote I wanted (it's lost in my browser history), but the idea was that free speech is not satisfied by just making available a space in which one is not going to be heard by anyone. This doesn't imply a positive right to a particular audience, of course.
You said, specifically, that "US legal definition of free speech, at least according to the courts", included the expectation to be heard. That it implied an audience be made available to you.
You need to be able to cite a source, ideally a case or specific law, on such a claim because no one else I know holds to that definition. A link to a Wikipedia article about a different concept does not satisfy, because it does not cite a legal definition of free speech by US courts.
I don't think it's a heavy claim? Consider the notion of having free speech standing alone in a room. This is obviously pointless. Why would it be a stretch for a court to make the observation that the point of free speech is that people hear you?
I remember thinking "oh yeah, that makes sense, they wouldn't view free speech in isolation but as a tool of the democratic process."
It is a heavy claim, because it implies you can coerce others. It implies you can grab someone passing by your hypothetical room and force them to be your audience.
No. That's never been the case. Your room is open to all and people who want to listen aren't prevented from going into it.
However, I'm also not obligated to host you in a room I own. The government guarantees my freedom of association as well. You want to opine, do it in your own room, or do it in places owned by the public at large.
Your recollection of what you were supposedly thinking doesn't mean you didn't misread what was written either. If you want me to even consider your claim, you are going to need a source on it. Because, like I said, it's a heavy one.
It doesn't really matter that much if you want to use the word "banned" in preference to "censored"; the facts of the matter is that the entire right wing's viewpoint is under threat on these channels to the point where people have been decamping and moving on to other platforms in large numbers. There have been quite a few notable social media plays (thinking Gab, Parler & Truth Social) that may as well have started in response to the 2016 election.
So we don't have to use the word censorship but there is a lot of voting with feet going on that suggests some sort of speech suppression. The persistent banning of private opinions by American big tech is probably the major cause of that.
And that's perfectly fine. If anything, that's proof that there is no censorship, the fact that they can go and make their own platform. Also, the fact that you're not allowed to say anything bad about Trump on those platforms without getting banned.
> You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen.
It's difficult when the backbone of the internet isn't available to you. For instance, AWS can be denied cutting off vital internet infrastructure we take for granted. Further payment processors like Visa can cut off access. Even banks could cut you off and even seize your funds if they got the directive.
You can spin your own service is a nice fiction we tell ourselves but with financing getting cut off it becomes impossible to build a service that reaches a lot of people without a lot of money and a disregard for profit.
In China maybe someone would come knocking on the door to take you away to jail. But in the US, we don't need to go that far. All it would take is the press secretary telling big tech they need to help fight "misinformation" and pointing them in the right direction.
I'm sceptical that is technically possible. If it was, it would have been deployed against the torrent websites by now. Despite countless attempts to shut them down, trackers are still easy to access with only basic technical knowledge and no specialist software.
Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
That's a good point. It just keeps moving upstream. I'm especially worried about the tie between big tech and the government. There's open communication between the two and the current administration is helping tech companies craft their "misinformation policy". On a certain level its inevitable. If you want to make sure people have reliable resources, someone needs to identify whats reliable and what's not (usually a three letter agency).
But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
You can do this in China too - just get a VPN. If you think a VPN is too high of a hurdle for the average Chinese citizen, I'd argue it's just as high for American netizens as well.
Note all the attempts in the article to paint them as "armed" and "extremists". There was no violence, no destruction of property. It was a legal demonstration until it was made illegal by invoking the Emergencies act. And this use of the law in my opinion was an abuse as it clearly is for terrorist threats. Not Canadian working class people peacefully demonstrating.
Using the emergency act was abusive, I would agree. But I don’t believe it was a peaceful protest the way you describe. They were clearly blocking critical infrastructure and hurting the neighborhood.
But I don’t see how that’s related to the discussion about YouTube suspending a channel.
Blaring horns and blasting music continuously through the night and day, keeping thousands of people from sleeping is not "peaceful" nor legal.
Blocking a nation's highways and borders for weeks is not legal.
People screamed blue-bloody-murder when BLM and Occupy protesters chained themselves to barrels across interstates, disrupting traffic for an hour or two...but the Canadian government tolerates a complete shutdown of a border, along with near continuous public disturbance for weeks - before finally clearing the protesters, and that's somehow an example of oppression?
ANTIFA and BLM riots caused billions of dollars of damage, destroyed buildings, including federal ones, burned down multiple businesses and involved extensive looting. There were also multiple cold blooded murders and rapes during the riots as well as occupations. The US and Canadian governments did not enact anti-terrorism measures as they did with the truckers.
The Canadian truckers picked up the trash. I never saw a cleaner protest.
Honestly, we are so far into what was considered dystopian in the past century, I don’t know if that even make sense to still use that type of categorization.
But to actually answer your comment:
1. A company removing proven disinformation is quite far from what censorship is. Also not really something that would be considered dystopian.
2. I would disagree that Orwell work is about “censorship is bad”. His work is IMHO more about exploring risks caused by attempt to do population surveillance and control. Spreading lies and falsehood consistently to destroy any understanding of an actual situation, the way Trump does by lying about election fraud, is way closer to the Orwellian nightmare than YouTube removing that content.
2. It's more extreme than that though. YouTube banned a reputable news source for reporting on a story in which Trump tangentially mentioned election fraud. That's pretty Orwellian imo.
Some political websites have been blocked on the hosting level and even the ISP level. I can't defend these website's political views, but I can defend their right to at least host their website somewhere.
