[FeistyOtter]

On the one hand I understand why YouTube does it. On the other hand, as a Russian citizen, I shudder to think what will happen if russian government asks YouTube the same thing in regards to our election results. Turns out, instead of playing hide and seek with different parties by blocking unwanted information on the internet, all a government has to do is notify YouTube/Facebook/whatever that the "truth is this and this and would you be so kind as to block any kind of misinformation for us, thank you". The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[cle]

Indeed, I don't know what the right answer is here. As a civilization, we're struggling to adapt to the sudden fundamental shift in how information flows. I see these things as experiments in ways to mitigate the negative externalities caused by the changes, which to me is a good thing. We should be trying stuff out to see what works. I just fear that we won't be able to understand the blast radius of these experiments and may end up causing something dreadful to happen.

[nightski]

I'm going to be honest I wonder if the censorship and content policing isn't having a worse effect than allowing the content in the first place. Tech companies have demonstrated a very clear liberal bias (which in itself isn't a bad thing necessarily). However by removing/censoring content they are actually legitimizing it because people don't see these companies as a neutral third party but rather a biased dictator of information.

I have distant family that has bought into the conspiracy theories. But now that Youtube has started directing traffic away from their channels and putting up these warnings they feel under attack and have only doubled down on their beliefs. It makes it a lot harder to work with them/discuss these issues.

When 49% of the country voted for a man who is currently the sitting president by law, and you can't even retweet his tweets it's pretty upsetting to them. They feel like they are under attack by the Big Tech companies. I know why Twitter did this. But it's only creating far more polarization between the rich people in power (aka Big Tech) and these people.

[chillwaves]

Trump got under 47% of the votes on Nov 3.

As for the rest, I would think that channeling more people into conspiracy theories (which was the previous status quo) is more harmful.

A woman died yesterday for QAnon.

[SR2Z]

> Tech companies have demonstrated a very clear liberal bias (which in itself isn't a bad thing necessarily).

The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.

Given how difficult it is to build trust in democracy and how easy it is to collapse it, I think that these companies would be irresponsible to continue providing a megaphone for these claims.

Alternative sites dedicated to the people who feel like they are "under attack" fail to launch because it turns out that catering to these people leads to nothing but misinformation, racism, and content that is either borderline or outright child pornography.

My 2c on this issue is that we will not resolve this situation by accommodating conspiracy theories and racism. Instead, the only way that we can reconcile these two groups of people is by ensuring that everyone sees the same news - recommenders that have partitioned the world in half need to be done away with, even if it reduces user engagement.

[nickpp]

That "one man" still has access to the nuclear launch codes. But he can’t tweet anymore.

[kortilla]

> The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.

Yes, and because of the partisanship it’s mainly liberals that don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.

When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.

[chillwaves]

> don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.

There has been no evidence to support any of the claims being made about systemic election fraud.

Zero. What is there to take seriously?

> When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.

I don't think those ideas were mainstream at all on the left, and even if they were, they weren't being made by people in positions of power. There's a difference between someone anon on the internet claiming fraud (because that's meaningless) vs the sitting president doing so.

I don't call Barack Obama spending the time between Nov and Jan drumming up support for an insurrection against the government. Can you show me where that happened?

I don't recall Hillary Clinton ever making the claim of election fraud, or any elected official saying those things.

Right now you have the majority of Republicans in the House making those kind of claims, in addition to the President and several Senators. The fact you would equate the two shows you are too deeply biased to talk neutrally on this subject.

[danaris]

To coin a popular phrase, "reality has a liberal bias."

When one side of the partisan divide has willfully abandoned all pretense at adherence to facts, to protest that people call them out for this, while not calling the other side out for something they're not doing in any meaningful sense is...well, it's frankly absurd, and smacks of the same kind of party-over-reality logic that the aforementioned side is operating on.

It doesn't matter if 9%, 49%, or 99% of the people choose to follow someone who spits on facts when they don't get him everything he wants: the people asserting that reality is still reality are just as much in the right, no matter who or how many dislike it.

[AgentME]

This action is YouTube pushing back against government misinformation! Why would you think it's a sign that they're more likely to push government misinformation in the future?

[ReedJessen]

It's a sign they are willing to chill speech they deem to be untrue. They have become the arbiters of truth on their platform.

[cle]

This is way too strong of a conclusion to draw. They don't arbitrate all truth on their platform, they arbitrate it when not doing so could have dangerous consequences for a large number of people. There's a big difference between that and what you're talking about.

[AgentME]

Everyone is an arbiter of their own platform. They do it when they take down spam on their platform, and they do it when they take down harassment on their platform. And now they do it when they take down calls to violence on their platform. I'd rather they do that than be a place where all of that festers.

[cptskippy]

> They have become the arbiters of truth on their platform.

That's the way it always has been everywhere. If you believe otherwise then you're being naive.

There's always a line and it's moved by the platform owner at their will when it suits them. These platforms are a big like cities with eminent domain, most people are aware of it but don't care until the city is taking away their property.

[core-questions]

Zoom out. This action is YouTube controlling the dialogue and acting as though they're the Ministry of Truth.

Here's an amazing suggestion for you: if you don't like someone's opinion, don't watch their videos. Amazing. Super easy to do. Just click that little X button at the top right and move on with your life. No draconian censorship, no 1984 bullshit required. Just walk away.

Adults who can handle contrasting opinions should be allowed to see, read, share, and issue them to their hearts' content. Even if you think they're wrong. It's kind of the whole damned point of free speech, which is being pissed away by childish morons who never understood why people fought and died for it to start with.

[ben_w]

It’s not about what we like, it’s not about “Adults who can handle contrasting opinions”, it’s about a literal mob of armed people who broke into a government building while it was in the process of certifying the results of an election that the armed mob believed was stolen because of videos they watched and believed.

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there is a story behind that analogy — it isn’t bubblebath that hides medieval infants in a washtub’s waste water.

[core-questions]

Pretty sure the mob wasn't armed; you can't go around armed in DC. The property damage was minimal, especially compared to the BLM riots of last summer; did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?

[ben_w]

"""Five of the arrests were related to guns and two were for illegal possession of other weapons, including metal knuckles and a blackjack-like weapon."""

"""Police Chief Robert J. Contee says two pipe bombs and a cooler with Molotov cocktails were also found near Capitol grounds."""

- https://www.fox5dc.com/news/over-50-people-arrested-14-offic...

Normally I consider Fox to be right-wing.

> did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?

My argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.

As it happens, I believe those riots were triggered by people who believe their lives do not matter to the police on the basis of personal experience. You believe I am wrong about that? Sure, ok, now tell me: why does being wrong about that change my argument that misinformation can cause real harm? You consider the BLM riots to be a bigger event, and that it was based on untruths, so tell me: on what basis does your claim mean that I should stop being concerned about mobs being goaded into action by lies?

You don’t need to convince me I’m wrong about the BLM movement to do that.

[core-questions]

Thank you for the information about the armed people. Certainly I don't support anything like that - but then, I'm Canadian, I don't support people being armed in general.

> The same argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.

You make a fair point about the misinformation from a purely argument-logic standpoint (both classes of events being spurred on by some amount of misinformation).

The greater gestalt of my argument is that it's asinine to consider any side of the mainstream media in the USA to somehow not be a biased source of misinformation, malicious and deliberate or otherwise. You can pick your side, Fox or MSNBC or anything else, and get the bias you "prefer", but no matter what you're getting bias, denial of reality when it's inconvenient for the narrative, and propaganda designed to spur you into particular thoughts and actions. If you're going to get mad about it for this event, if you're a principled person, you should have been mad about it for prior events too, even if the results don't run in favour of your own priors.

We can fight about the particulars of the situation, or work together to understand how we're being manipulated into arguing about particulars instead of looking at who's manipulating us, how, why, and in what overall direction.

[km3r]

As another commenter mentioned, we are adjusting to a new form of information flow now in the post social media age. What was easily disproven and dismissed 20 years ago, now is amplified by radicals. I don't think banning the speech is the right choice but we need someway to counter misinformation. Its 100x easier to come up with these lies then it is to dispel them. The information war is already heavily on the side of misinformation. Clearly with the rise of Qanan, antifa, and even yesterdays events, our current approach is not work. I am all ears to hear better solutions but trusting people to be able to navigate the sea of misinformation to the island of truth leads to many shipwrecks.

[mistermann]

> I am all ears to hear better solutions

I've offered an idea for an experiment that could plausibly lead to a (partial) solution here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662949

[core-questions]

What if I think it doesn't matter at all whether people believe the correct, government-approved, blue-checkmark truth vs. their own interpretation? Since when do we all have to believe the same things for the world to function?

You sound like a high-church advocate getting mad that angry parishioners have started to question the orthodoxy. You should understand that America was founded on that kind of questioning and that kind of rejection of power in favour of open discourse, even by people who are wrong.

> amplified by radicals

Meanwhile the propaganda side is amplified by the people who own the media; ten thousand times louder than any dissident.

I pray this sort of thing just ends up pushing people towards decentralized platforms where they can speak their mind without censors, moderators, and goody-two-shoes apparatchiks complaining about "misinformation". It's so patronizing.

[chillwaves]

I agree, hopefully they will leave the social media sites into their own decentralized camps. Sounds like a win for all sides. No more megaphone amplifying ideas that don't have the native support to deserve it.

The rest of us will stay secure in our belief that Coronavirus is real, that 5G isn't a government conspiracy, and that Donald Trump lost the election.

Each of those three items have very specific dangerous implications for the people spreading disinfo about them.

Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America. Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?

[core-questions]

> the rest of us will stay secure in our belief that Coronavirus is real, that 5G isn't a government conspiracy, and that Donald Trump lost the election.

Saying this demonstrates the false dichotomy. I believe all of those things, too. Guess what: I also believe that flyover Americans deserve a shot at the world their forefathers were working toward. Wedges have been put into place to make it difficult to hold a position like this politically; who represents me?

> Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America.

Which country is that, and why make the assumption that it comes from outside your own borders?

> Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?

Seems like this is a mandate to produce a more secure election. Shouldn't that make both sides happier? Isn't it possible to believe that the election systems are rife with opportunities for fraud and miscounts? Did you live through the 2000 Gore/Bush election? America can do better.

[AgentME]

People just stormed the capitol yesterday based on misinformation and propaganda. People avoid masks and vaccines based on propaganda and cause countless deaths.

If I can criticize a tv channel for running dumb shows, then I sure as shit can criticize a website that knowingly chooses to spread lies that predictably get people killed and destabilize democracy.

[tylersmith]

I agree with you 100%, but the people that push for these kinds of policies are not concerned with what they choose to watch, they want to limit what others watch. Simply being able to not watch a video won't be sufficient for them.

[Negitivefrags]

There is a distinction between the government and the people who are elected and work in the government.

The position of the government is that Trump lost the election.

The position of the sitting president is that he won.

If Trump signed an executive order saying “Actually I won” that would then be him acting as the government, but I suspect that such an order wouldn’t actually succeed and so the position of the government would still, at the end of the day, be Trump losing.

[im3w1l]

Youtube is pushing back against the Republicans. They will keep pushing back against Republicans after Biden's inauguration.

[chillwaves]

You are making this into a partisan issue when it's not.

One side is detached from reality and they happen to have the same political allegiance. Doesn't give any more merit to their claims.

[im3w1l]

Both sides are spreading misinformation, but only one side faces pushback.

[chillwaves]

Tell me the other side's misinfo.

And the thing is, the reality of the situation is so apparent that I don't even have to specify which side I am talking about!

[im3w1l]

The big foundational lie is that there are no biological differences. This is demonstrably false, but you will not see it, or any of it's many corollaries censored.

[nr2x]

If Republicans continue to spread dangerous lies and falsehoods, tantamount to falsely claiming a theater is on fire, YouTube should push back. If Republicans post policy proposals or comments on cultural issues, YouTube shouldn’t. Courts in the real world have already addressed this issue, YouTube is catching up to the extant rules of society, not making new ones.

[kortilla]

Courts have addressed the issue indeed. The reason youtube is acting independently is because this is way beyond what courts have decided is dangerous speech.

If this was driven by courts, they would have an order to show it.

[im3w1l]

This is exactly how I expect it to play out.

[disown]

Did you even read the tweet? It's not youtube pushing back against government misinformation. It's about youtube punishing their users who express "misinformation" or wrongthink. Youtube is doing the opposite of what you are claiming. They are making the government/establishment ( "and given that the election results have now been certified " ) narrative the default narrative that you cannot stray from on youtube.

I swear, the amount of people here blatantly and blindly support everything tech media does is rather interesting. I'd almost say there is a concerted effort here to push a pro-censorship and pro-tech narrative here backed by a political faction.

Oddly enough, you can still say Trump stole 2016 on youtube.

[jschwartzi]

Nothing is stopping the Russian government from doing that today, so I don't see why it matters.

I could say the same thing about your ask that YouTube allow a free-for-all on their platform but that's only because I'm witnessing the logical conclusion here in the US. We have to do something different or these events will repeat themselves.

[s3tz]

Maybe the path of least resistance isn't the best answer. This sets a very dangerous precedent.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I think we've pretty conclusively proven that there's no non-dangerous option available. Maybe this isn't the best answer, but speaking as someone who's very consistently opposed these kinds of content policies in the past, I no longer think it's tenable to take a hard line against information control here.

[picardythird]

But Youtube is actually defying the government. It’s the opposite of what you’re saying.

[raverbashing]

Let's say your case happens and that there is a case to suspect of election interference and results tampering

The way to make the population aware is not through videos that people "MUST SEE!!11". Or typical manipulative ways of steering the masses.

Of course the winners write history, if they were correct or not is in the end "less important" in some ways and more important in others

[staplers]

While I do believe we are at a "benevolent dictator" stage of social media, what happened yesterday should be feared by every democratic nation and regardless of the "side" you are on it should be avoided at most costs.

It's quite literally the seeds to fracturing a society.

[yongjik]

Slippery slope works in both directions. If the president is spreading misinformation on an election he just lost, and if everybody's OK with that, what happens when a more capable wannabe dictator comes next and spreads misinformation? We just let them seize the power?