YouTube Removes 17,000 Channels For Hate Speech (hollywoodreporter.com) 409
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hollywood Reporter: YouTube says it has removed more than 17,000 channels for hate speech, representing a spike in takedowns since its new hate speech policy went into effect in June. The Google-owned company calls the June update -- in which YouTube said it would specifically prohibit videos that glorify Nazi ideology or deny documented violent events like the Holocaust -- a "fundamental shift in our policies" that resulted in the takedown of more than 100,000 individual videos during the second quarter of the year. The number of comments removed during the same period doubled to over 500 million, in part due to the new hate speech policy. YouTube said that the 30,000 videos it had removed in the last month represented 3 percent of the views that knitting videos generated during the same period. YouTube says the videos removed represented a five-times increase compared with the previous three months. Still, in early August the ADL's Center on Extremism reported finding "a significant number of channels" that continue to spread anti-Semitic and white supremacist content.
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Platform or Publisher? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If only "the public" could voice a clear consensus on what FB "should" do, Zuckerberg might see it in his financial interests to comply.
As a personal matter, I utterly detest FB. Yet I do see here Zuckerberg as damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
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Its not about wanting. The MINUTE they made their first dollar in paid AD revenue, they became a MEDIA company. Hold them to the SAME standards. Both twit parties in congress are guilty of this clusterfuck.
Here be dragons... (Score:2)
Modern social media companies are supported by advertising (and data collection for the purposes of advertising). I imagine that Facebook could take direct monthly payments, but they might be one of the few companies able to convince consumers to pay them for what was a free service. The consequence of this could be regulatory lock-in. They would be taking advantage of controlling a large share of the market before the new regulations, and enjoying a world where upstarts could never compete as long as the r
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it doesnt matter, either you are selling web hosting and are not responsible for the content someone pays you to host... OR you are selling ad space on that content. If you are going around selling ad space based on ISIS beheadings; If your revenue stream is based on the _type_ of content you host, such as the social media version of nielson ratings, the number of clicks, the number of visits, the number of views, you become responsible for the content. If you profit in ANY way more on one type of content
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They don't want to be like MSNBC/CNN/Fox; they want to be like a website that takes user-generated content and removes the worthless shitposts. So they're behaving basically like the phone company, but with convenient shit&spam filters. If your phone provider offered a shit filter, wouldn't you love that?
Maybe there's some downside to this, which I'm not seeing. What phone-like protections are being offered to Youtube, that you think are inappropriate for the kind of service they run? Even with a shit
Re:Platform or Publisher? (Score:4, Insightful)
What Facebook is doing is claiming that certain political views they oppose are hate speech.. They then remove the posts they disagree with, and often also ban the poster.
There are several problems here.
One is that in most cases Facebook refuses to exactly identify the offending sentences, making it impossible to defend against the charge that the material is hateful.
Another is that their political bias is claimed to be just common decency, and that is fraud.
Third, claiming that the poster is making hateful statements when he's not is libel.
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The key difference is that phone spam is something I get pushed upon me. YouTube trash videos is something I actively have to go get. I can very easily avoid nazi crap on YouTube, they're most definitely not shy to declare clearly what kind of rubbish they spew.
Platform. Protected by Section 230 (Score:5, Informative)
I used to think there was only two options too.
And make no mistake, the Internet lives and dies on Section 230. Take it away and only the big, establishment media outlets can survive the never ending onslaught of lawsuits. If you want to turn the Internet into Cable TV and hand the single biggest event in human history since the printing press over to the establishment elites then by all means, go after Section 230.
But if free, independent media is your goal (as it was with many of Section 230's authors) then you know what to do.
Re: Platform. Protected by Section 230 (Score:3)
Please stop posting links to that misleading opinion fluff piece. Link to the law itself. It's short and easy to read.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
Anyone who reads the text of the law can see it was clearly intended to protect children and families from lewd content; and clearly NOT intended to provide cover for Corporate Nazi censorship of overtly political speech.
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No, create and provide [cornell.edu] the content, that is the sticking point.
Problematic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Problematic (Score:5, Insightful)
What's that you say? Censorship has unintended consequences and impacts innocent people? I would have never guessed.
When has censorship ever worked?
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>"I'd say the problem here is specifically automation attempting to make judgements about what is or isn't hate speech."
That might be this specific example. But the overall problem remains. Exactly what is "hate speech"? That will vary from person to person and over time. It is almost completely subjective. So such filtering WILL have things banned that many of us do not consider "hate speech" and others actually want to see. And these publishers (because they are certainly not platforms anymore) w
Re: Problematic (Score:3)
Does Big Brother Google pay you to shill for Corporate Nazism? Or did you just accidentally sit on a cactus, and this is the result?
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Censorship works very well in China (Score:5, Insightful)
Most main landers genuinely believe that their government is good and free and that, for example, the trouble in Hong Kong is caused by terrorists. Also worked fairly well in Nazi Germany, although I think there were more Germans that were skeptical.
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Define "Okay" first, and then I'll answer.
"Okay" morally? Probably not.
"Okay" as in Freedom of Expression, sure.
The moment you start clamoring for "Moral" behavior, you're literally giving ammo to all the fundamental religious folks to demand their version of "morality". Not only is it scary, it is horrible idea on practicality. But this is the problem with Neo-Liberal Progressives, is that they are extremely short sighted with their "moral outrage" and and are shocked with others use their own "moral outra
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Sure, unless you're in actual Fascism land, where the Private businesses are doing political work on behalf of the ruling party. Censorship is not a community value, is it?
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Re:Problematic (Score:5, Informative)
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When has censorship ever worked?
You, obviously, have no children or you're a horrible parent.
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Re:Problematic (Score:5, Insightful)
What's that you say? Censorship has unintended consequences and impacts innocent people? I would have never guessed.
When has censorship ever worked?
That's absolutely ridiculous. When private businesses engage in "censorship" for business reasons, as in this story, it works out great.
I'll give you an example. If you go into a restaurant and use swear words that are offensive to other patrons, there is a longstanding practice of censoring you by telling you to shut up, or kicking you out. This is also true at most other businesses.
Some taverns just tell people to "take it outside" if they don't get along, but other taverns have bouncers that kick out people saying things to try to upset other customers.
Local food markets often have a bulletin board outside where people can post community announcements, items for sale, etc. If you see something offensive, and you report it to the store, they will usually take it down. Though more often, whoever is offended just takes it down themselves, and if anybody sees them do it they'll say "Thank You!"
If you ever decide to become interested in Free Speech, you'll find that this is well-trodden ground. You'll also find that choosing what you publish or republish is the Free Speech. When you write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, and they publish it, that is not your right of free speech being exercised. It is the owner of the press' right of free speech being exercised. When you write a letter to the editor and they don't publish, you were not censored. You merely failed to get your letter published.
This is the same as a letter to the editor. It is Youtube's speech at issue, and nobody is being censored. Unwelcome participants are merely being shown the door. If you don't follow the rules, Youtube is not going to censor your video to remove the offensive part. They're just going to boot your ass out the door.
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Are you referring (Score:3)
If so, it doesn't say free speech is protected in malls. It says that California can pass laws that extend free speech to people in malls.
I'm gonna guess that Google is incorporated in Delaware, which likely doesn't have these sorts of protections. So your argument doesn't apply.
Now, one surefire way to fix all of this is to create a National Public Access Network. You can tax my internet to pay for it. Go ahead. Then you can have a place to post anything that's not illegal. Ad free too.
Re:Problematic (Score:4, Interesting)
SCOTUS ruled that malls, which are private property, cannot ban free speech (with a few tiny restrictions such as non-disruptive, no blocking the normal flow of foot traffic, etc).
FALSE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In American constitutional law, this case established two important rules:
under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers
under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights
This holding was possible because California's constitution contains an affirmative right of free speech which has been liberally construed by the Supreme Court of California, while the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech. This distinction was significant because the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center.
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Normally, my reaction would be "Good, what the hell took you so long, hate speech may be protected in the public square, but has no place in civilized society online." But it's problematic when we see stories like this, four days ago:
YouTube Bans Anti-Nazi Documentary From 1938 For Violating Hate Speech Policy (https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/youtube-bans-anti-nazi-documentary-from-1938-for-violat-1837436638)
The linked article has an update saying that the video was reinstated just a few hours after the article was posted. This is how the system was designed to work, with appeals allowed with quick resolution.
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Re:Problematic (Score:5, Informative)
It's not, by the way, because Google/YouTube isn't the government.
You keep asserting this over and over. That doesn't make it true. Look up the word censorship. Wikipedia, the ACLU, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Merriam-Webster -- just to pick the first several results that show up when I Googled it -- all agree that censorship is not limited to the government.
You're just trying to redefine the word so that you don't have to admit that you support censorship.
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Context is everything. A dictionary definition of 'censorship' isn't necessarily how it's used in this context,
Considering that you're whining about how other people are using the word "censorship", your argument that it does not apply in this context is ... really, really weak.
You don't like the connotations of the word "censorship" and so don't like to admit that you support it. We all get it. But I'm going to continue to call bullshit on your attempt to redefine the word to mean something else.
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Part of the reason I like and use YouTube is because people can lay out why they think a certain way about something; watching videos like that widens my perspective, even if I disagree or even find it outright offensive. I think that Google silencing certain political videos because they're offensive at the very
WTF is "Hate Speech" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you follow all the links you eventually end up:
* Hate speech policy [google.com]
LOL. Because we can "trust" the bots to do this job.
Notice how there is ZERO exceptions for Humor, Jokes, or Parody. In other words you can express your opinion as long as it agrees with OUR definitions and opinions of what we think you can say. There are ZERO exceptions. WTF?
I love race, nationality, and religious jokes about MY race, nationality, and religion. If a joke go to far then guess what -- I stop fucking listening. I don't get butt-hurt and attempt to censor everybody else because humor is a PERSONAL thing.
Censorship is NEVER the solution. It is precisely the problem. You have a brain and ears. Fucking use them.
Attempting to "delete the problem" doesn't make it go away. People have various boundaries. Trying to apply a "one size fits all" leads to an echo chamber of group think. We have 20 years of social media like usenet, /. and reddit to show that censoring "taboo" subjects is akin to pissing in the wind. People will ALWAYS have contrary and "offensive" opinions.
Sometimes it can be good to laugh at difficult subjects like death. It helps us cope with traumatic experiences. Attempting to put up artificial "categories" of "this is bad" always leads to the question: WHO decides what is tasteful ?
As I heard this cliche on /. a long time ago:
One man's fetish is another man's disgust.
Where does it end until we have every possible category added as this bullshit "hate speech".
When did America turn into a bunch of wussies?
I guess it takes too much to press "next" or "back" for something I don't like. :-/
Re:WTF is "Hate Speech" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Great example -- and fantastic movie! Funny. As. Hell.
If we can't laugh at "serious" things then maybe we shouldn't be so serious about them.
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Re:WTF is "Hate Speech" ? (Score:4)
What gives you the right to determine what someone else should find funny? Nazi's mock themselves. Their videos are fun to laugh at. By attempting to ban them you only give them power.
Don't look now but you've become the totalitarian in your quest for virtue-points.
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By turning away, plugging your ears, and going "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR THEM THEY'RE NOT THERE!" you just let their cancerousness fester and grow. You really want them thinking that what they want for this world is okay? Is that the world you want your kids growing up in, where if you're not lilly-white, you're not a human being? Remember who it is we're talking about here.
Freedom comes with certain responsibilities. Mainly:
1. Tolerance of those with whom you disagree.
2. Duty to work to build consensus for your own ideals and sensibilities.
Freedom is not about pretending people don't exist. Nor is it day dreaming about how the world would be if x, y or z were not in it. It's about hard work and discipline.
That may suck ass but there isn't anything that sucks less. When you abdicate your responsibility for #2 and start using the states monopoly on use of violence to force
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Also go see if you can find something even older: Little Rascals [wikipedia.org]. You tell me if the depiction of blacks in that show would still be considered appropriate today.
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Heck, what about Married with Children? MASH? Barney Miller? WKRP in Cincinnati? Three's Company? Lawrence Welk? Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom? Sesame Street from the 80s? HR Puffenstuff? Star Trek? Shakespeare? Dante's Inferno? You can find offense in ANYTHING, if you look hard enough.
The problem isn't the offensive nature of historical texts, movies, songs. It's that people today CHOOSE to be offended and want to demand others change their behavior accordingly. Your right to not be offended
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Again, who the F are you tell anyone else what humor they should find appropriate? People like you are scarier than the Nazis. You're just like them.
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The problem isn't so much the humor.
The problem is that there is no humor at all.
Then problem is that some of these channels, some of these videos, prey on the weak minded, or those who lack a sense of belonging.
It's sociology 101. People like to feel part of something. If there are a bunch of people intentionally misleading you for their own agenda you will be inclined to adopt their views in order to achieve a sense of belonging.
Then you have the argument , I like Yellow, well i like purple fuck you.
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WHO decides what is tasteful ?
On YouTube, Google gets to decide
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You can please some of the people some of the time (Score:2)
A world society doesn't work too well, this is but one example.
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and all of the people none of the time. That old saying has a ton of merit. The problem is that on a world stage, there will always be someone that considers something as bad and wants it removed. Now, if you listen to what every individual wants removed, you wind up with no individual having anything left. A world society doesn't work too well, this is but one example.
Meh. This is an Appeal to Extremes [logicallyfallacious.com] argument. You don't need to remove everything any individual wants removed, just things that sufficiently-large groups of people can reasonably argue are actually harmful. Note the two layers of filtering there: (1) sufficiently large groups (hundreds of millions to billions, I'd say) and (2) reasonably argue are actually harmful. Yes, there is inherently a lot of subjectivity there. Welcome to the reality of dealing with large social issues; there is always more gray
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Telling people to merely ignore content they don't like in this case is like telling people to ignore their cancer diagnosis. It'll just get worse and worse if you do nothing about it. A private company has decided to do something about it on their own websites. Why is this a problem for you?
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I'ts not censorship if it's a private company.
But if that private company is pressured into adopting goals and policies at the behest of either the government or populist political groups, then it's ..... National Socialism. [mises.org]
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I love race, nationality, and religious jokes about MY race, nationality, and religion. If a joke go to far then guess what -- I stop fucking listening. I don't get butt-hurt and attempt to censor everybody else because humor is a PERSONAL thing.
So, you're claiming that the 17,000 removed channels were full of jokes about Naziism and the Holocaust? I wouldn't be shocked if some small number of channels were taken down erroneously, but I'll bet the vast, vast majority of them were deadly serious.
Censorship is NEVER the solution. It is precisely the problem.
Pre-Internet, I'd have agreed with you. The problem is that some characteristics of the net collide in rather destructive ways with some characteristics of human cognition.
Specifically, people judge truth of facts/ideas they can't personally check in lar
Lots of complaints, No solutions.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with all of this is that people are conflating hate speech and hateful ideologies.
There is a big difference in saying "I don't like antifa" in response to an article about Antifa throwing veggie shakes at police, and immersing ones self into hateful ideologies and spending your entire life trying to be a professional hater because its US vs. THEM.
Without context, both can sound the same. These companies are not the government, they are private companies that rely on money from investors and donors while serving the majority of people that simply have no time for this rhetoric.
I help moderate all sorts of discussions across the internet. People have bad days all of the time. That is OK. People say things they will regret tomorrow. That is OK. When I see people try to recruit others to their hateful ideology, that is a different category. It all starts the same... "I hate ." The difference is one comes back with "I'm sorry" the next day while the other comes back with "We're going to DOX you now."
The difference is that when Sally gets pissed at George and says something flippant, it ends there. It crosses the line when people try to recruit others into spending their time bullying others.
Moderating speech is a fine, and wavering line. Going down the rabbit hole of hate is never a solution. Moderation is full of messy solutions. In my experience, crying fascist, and socialist and conservative and communist doesn't help, but that seems to be the go to line for large swaths of people on all sides of these discussions.
What are these companies supposed to do when they see this stuff spiraling out of control?
--
Your silence will not protect you -- Audre Lorde
They're trying to save disk space (Score:2)
The meaning of words (Score:2, Insightful)
Welcome to the book burnings of the new millenium. (Score:2)
Hate speech == speech that YouTube hates (Score:4, Insightful)
I think putting it that way would make things clearer for many people.
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Re:You have a right to .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google has a right to be a platform or a publisher, not both.
When Google operates a public platform, it is free from certain responsibilities and culpabilities regarding what occurs on its platform.
When Google exercises editorial control, it instead operates as a publisher. It becomes responsible and culpable for the content they publish. They are still subject to the same rules that any businesses open to the public would be. They cannot engage in discrimination against protected classes, and they cannot implement policies that disproportionately affect a protected class even if the policy itself is non-discriminatory. For example, banning all who believe homosexual marriage should not be allowed is discrimination against a protected class just the same as banning people who follow any of the Abrahamic religions.
Disagree? Take it up with SCOTUS.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have only ONE viable option going forward, and that is to allow any and all speech and only act when there's a court order or something that threatens the platform itself on a technical level (such as removing malware people are posting via an XSS exploit or making spam bots prove they're human).
But it looks like they're all trying to go with the other, non-viable option. They all want to cozy up to the legacy media dinosaurs. Google keeps artificially boosting videos from cable news networks, late night talk shows, etc. Twitter and Facebook do the same. They want to control the message so they can sell that control. The only ones buying are legacy media and dictatorship governments.
They think they'll be able to keep your eyeballs on the new shit that those clowns are paying to put in front of you. They don't understand that users are fleeing from that shit just as they fled from print and cable and broadcast media TO the internet in the first place. If they ratchet all the way to full publisher mode and only allow approved content from major players, then the platform dies. Facebook is already fucking dead aside from Instagram. Twitter is a ghost town of blue checkmarks echoing each other to their army of bot followers. YouTube is a bonfire made of money and compounding lawsuits.
I for one can't wait for it all to burn down so the other platforms, which operate as actual platforms, can get more attention.
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You have a right to speech, not necessarily a platform.
Hopefully Youtube and Google can fine tune their filters to catch more white supremacist and nazi content.
So you admit they aren't a platform. That makes them a publisher, right?
no it's the exact opposite? He's implying they are a platform and that's why it's ok to kick NAZIs off .
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Of fucking course they are. They arent charging you to host videos. They are selling advertising space. Thats like saying NBC cant get fined for showing janet jacksons titties during the superbowl because they are just airwaves and not responsible for the actions of their halftime show.
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"What does it matter if they're a """platform""" or a """publisher"""? "
It makes all the difference according to the law. Both are legal terms of art. A platform is given legal protections that publishers do not. As a publisher - which Youtube has now voluntarily become by choosing which content they explicitly endorse by not removing - they can be prosecuted and/or sued for the content that they leave up. As a platform they were immune.
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That would certainly explain a lot of things now wouldn't it?
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Re:I'm sure this is the same as always for Google (Score:4, Funny)
Just came here to laugh at the butt-hurt
Thanks, your pathetic whining made my afternoon
Re:I'm sure this is the same as always for Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I'm sure this is the same as always for Google (Score:2)
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Re:I'm sure this is the same as always for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
>"There are plenty of commentors on this subject who are up in arms over Google/YouTubes' policy decision, and you have to wonder why; do they support neo-naziism/white supremacy? Seems likely, since I doubt they'd be so upset if Google/YouTube decided to ban the opposites."
I hope you are kidding. People who support the free exchange of ideas and oppose filtering aren't "likely" supporting ideas they don't want to see banned. For every example one shows that purports to be "neo-naziism/white supremacy" I can probably point to a dozen other examples of things a minority of people might consider to be "hate speech" while a majority of people don't. It is the slippery-slope, incarnate.
And we aren't even talking about a softer approach, like labeling things, or modding things up/down (like we have on Slashdot), or "demonetizing". We are talking about total removal with no visible trace. So there is absolutely NO WAY to know what Google is removing, when, how much, or exactly why. I think that is a big problem on such big systems on which so many depend. Zero transparency. And zero accountability (because they are STILL being treated as a platform instead of a publisher). It might be legal, but it doesn't make it "right."
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It is fundamentally anti-free-speech to demand that people listen
Except, that's not what's being talked about. You're right in that you can't demand that people listen to you...but what's being argued is that they should have the ability to speak. Just because something is on YouTube doesn't mean that anyone is forced to watch it.
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... but what's being argued is that they should have the ability to speak.
No. What's being argued is that a private company is forced to give them a platform for their speech. Make no mistake, they can speak whenever they want.... just not where ever they want when the "where" is someones private resource. That's not free speech.
Youtube pays for their servers, and they have the right to place rules on it's usage. If people are so incredibly fucking stupid they can't read AND OBEY those rules, then they only have themselves to blame for having their asses kicked off the p
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Re:I'm sure this is the same as always for Google (Score:4)
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Re: This is Google's duty to the world (Score:3)
"Maybe we need a social credit score."
Three cheers for totalitarianism! Hup hup hurrah!
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Old Soviet joke:
Don't think.
If you think, don't speak
If you think and speak, don't write
If you think, speak and write, don't sign
If you think, speak, write and sign, don't be surprised
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maybe we should do to these modern puritans what the church and king did to Cromwell's supporters..."
It was indemnity (forgive) and oblivion (forget) with limited exceptions.
That's probably the practical option but it's not ideal.
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Google owns Youtube. The CIA and DoD were both original seed investors in Google, using tax dollars.
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You do understand that one of the key elements of a discussion is that BOTH sides get to talk, yes?