[tombert]

Because people view it as harmful. If even one person thumbs their nose at science because some idiot on YouTube told them that gravity can't be real because "water always finds its level", that is causing harm. If even one person takes Alex Jones's ramblings about the Sandy Hook victims seriously, and perhaps starts sending texts threatening the victims (which actually happened), that is causing harm.

It's not hard to see why recommending false and/or misleading information is dangerous, and you'd have to be purposefully ignorant to not see that.

I don't think that the NY Times or the YouTube executives would ever advocate that you arrest people for spreading this misinformation, short of direct harassment, but they don't want to be party to the purposeful dumbening of society.

[rjf72]

The thing you are not considering here is that in this world of censorship you now need a 'Ministry of Truth.' Let's consider Google and the NYTimes. The NYTimes was one of the loudest cheerleaders for the war in Iraq. They unquestionably ran stories advocating and spreading our likely fabricated "evidence" even though a critical examination would likely have revealed some serious questions, but they chose either not to investigate or not to ask those questions. They, years after the fact, wrote an article condemning their own lack of scrutiny [1]. But did they really learn anything? They returned to the exact same pattern of unquestioning cheerleading for war in Syria, and I predict we'll likely see something similar should our actions in Venezuela culminate in yet another invasion.

Google is a massive multinational corporation that profits by harvesting and exploiting personal individual on people. They have shown an eagerness to expand their operations to countries such as China. They planned to launch a censored search engine and were happy to agree to record and track individuals by tying their search to their phone number. Such behavior would enable convenient tracking and 'correction' by Chinese officials if they so desired. Among the list of terms they included in their prototype for China was literally "human rights." [2]. A company literally censoring information on "human rights" is like something out of bad dystopia fiction. This should not be reality - but it is.

I'm sure you see the point I'm making. By claiming that the average person is too stupid to be allowed to access whatever information they would like, you are implicitly asking somebody to be the gatekeeper of truth who decides true vs false, right vs wrong. But nobody is capable, let alone deserving, of this right. And the most ironic thing of all is that the typical gate keepers of truth that people would nominate are some of the worst actors in society that certainly have caused unimaginably more harm than all the total sum consequences of all the absurdity spread by individuals. And that's because when individuals spread fake stuff around, they might fool a few people but it mostly goes without notice. By contrast when the current gatekeepers spread misinformation, hundreds of thousands of people die at cost of literally trillions of dollars.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

[2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/google-china-censorship-...

[pjc50]

It's amazing how "the US government successfully misled everyone to invade Iraq" now justifies the world being flat.

This seems to be being mentioned more and more these days, too. It's as if it's the only thing people learned from the war, and they blame the media for it.

[tombert]

Sure, but this is under the assumption that the information is being censored, which I don't think anyone in this conversation is calling for. I'm certainly not suggesting that flat-earthers be jailed for believing in something really stupid, and certainly I'd never support them being shutdown in a public venue unless they got violent.

That said, and as I've kept repeating, YouTube and Google are not government entities, and they aren't required or even given incentive to platform horrible people, or people that they view as horrible. While I agree that it's a bit disturbing that Google is releasing a censored search in China, I don't live in China, and I was talking largely in regards to the United States, (since that was where the whole freedom of speech thing came up).

We draw the line all the time. If someone was in my house and started spouting off Neo-Nazi propaganda, I would tell them to leave, and I would be completely unimpressed with their argument for freedom of speech, as I think you would as well. Am I an evil totalitarian dictator because I don't want to give an audience to people I think are disgusting? Am I anti-free-speech because I'm denying the other members (especially children) of my house the ability to hear opposing viewpoints? Of course not; it's my property and I don't want disgusting people in there.

I would definitely prefer to keep open discourse, but my point is that I don't see how it comes down to the evil dystopian world that your comment indicates because YouTube doesn't want to recommend stuff that they view as dangerous.

[rjf72]

YouTube has 1.8 billion monthly users - nearly one quarter of the entire human species' population. They have about 550% the population of the USA inside their 'house.' They have hundreds of millions more users than the largest country in the world has citizens. I think the only thing analogs to household (or even most business) rules emphasize is how inappropriate they are to considering what the most reasonable action in this sort of scenario is.

YouTube is a natural monopoly which changes the whole picture. It even works as a bypass for literal first amendment infringement from the government. Imagine a government entity wanted to prohibit discussion of a given topic. In past times, their only option would be to try to pass legislation against it. That's where the first amendment kicks in. In modern digital times, however, there's another option. They can simply apply pressure or offer incentives to e.g. Google and Facebook to ensure it ends up on their black lists. It's a clear violation of the spirit of the constitution without clearly violating the constitution. None of these issues came up when considering the constitution as the concept of things such as a private company having a monopoly on public discourse would be completely nonsensical.

I think it's completely unavoidable that the next socioeconomic movement of society will be to an overt corporatocracy. That's disappointing, but it is what it is. The only thing I wish is that people would realize is that these steps are exactly how we get there. This all effectively comes down to not only simply accepting a monopoly of this scale, but now further suggesting that this monopoly begin ensuring that the discourse is 'corporate approved'. I'm certain YouTube will be thrilled to comply.

[tombert]

I feel like you pivoted on your point.

Sure, I have an issue with YouTube being a near-monopoly too, and if the discussion came down to "YouTube is deleting videos for ideological reasons", I think your point would stand.

In this case, however, the issue came down to their recommendation engine. Even if you did view YouTube as a government entity, which I do not, I don't think it says anywhere in the constitution that the government has to give recommendation to every side of the argument, just that you're allowed to say it.

All that being said, I actually have been working on and off on a clone of YouTube using distributed hash tables, so maybe we'll be off of it soon enough :)

[rjf72]

I definitely did pivot, but you did as well. You swapped between Google should censor to Google can censor. These are quite different issues, though they frequently end up intermingled, as in our chat.

Efforts at competition should not be neglected, but I think it will likely prove futile. There are already plenty of alternatives to YouTube, but that doesn't matter with a natural monopoly. Content producers want to go where viewers are. Viewers want to go where content producers are. Whoever becomes the 'big one' first, wins.

There's a fundamental problem. That is that content intended to be free by users is something that private companies then claim effective ownership of as a condition of being able to say anything. This is an interesting 'trick'. I call it a trick because let's say the average person posts something to e.g. Facebook or YouTube. Would they mind if another site, with attribution, also shared their content? In the vast majority of cases, the answer would be no. Most people are just posting things for enjoyment or to express themselves, they'd love if it got shared as much as possible. But other sites cannot share these users' content because e.g. YouTube or Facebook claim and defend exclusive ownership of what is posted on their site. You'd need to get a user's express permission to share their content, and that's not really viable.

Imagine for a second that we killed this trick. Companies that provide user generated content for free, or with a free account, could only publish content under non-free licenses if the content creator specifically opted in to that agreement. However, even if they chose to not opt-in the company would still be obligated to publish and treat their content identically to how they would have if the user had opted in. This would all go away if the company charged even $0.01 for access. The company could also incentivize users to opt-in, such as by paying them up front for their content.

The idea is to turn "free" into simply free. This would enable real competition since free access means somebody could simply start copying content created by users who wanted to post free content on e.g. YouTube or Facebook and share it in a different venue. The exact same would be true of comments and other such user generated content that was always intended to be free, and not "free", to begin with.

But so long as a monopoly is able to claim effective ownership of material users meant to be free, this system will likely only grow larger.