These slippery slope comments always seem a little naive to me because they imply there is some pure way to handle moderation. In practice, you have to be an extremist to think literally no content should be removed from Youtube with the most obvious example of something nearly everyone wants to be removed being CSAM.
Maybe you would respond by saying that is illegal and only illegal content should be taken down. According to which laws? Hate speech is illegal some places, should that be removed? What about blasphemy?
Maybe you would suggest to closely follow the local law of the user. Does that mean the site needs to allow piracy in places that is legal? And who decides whether the video actually violates the law? Does the content have to stay up until a court makes the final decision? Or what about content that is legal locally, but might be under some restrictions. Should Youtube be obligated to host hardcore porn or gory violence?
There needs to be a line somewhere for normal people to actually want to use the site. I'm not going to claim to have the perfect answer on where that line should be, but there is always going to be an ongoing debate on its exact placement.
The problem is the nature of YouTube, which is a platform with the main purpose of generating revenue based on advertisement while minimizing their own operational risk. YouTube does not care one bit about whether the content they show is informative, harmful or entertaining, they care about maximizing the amount of ad impressions while avoiding legal repercussions (only if the legal repercussions carry a significant cost, of course). This naturally leads them to err on the side of caution and implement draconian automated censorship controls. If the machine kills off a niche content creator then it means nothing in the grand scheme of things for YouTube. YouTube is a lawnmower, and you cannot reason with a lawnmower.
This is very different from past "platforms" such as niche phpBB boards on the old internet, book publishers or even editorial sections in newspapers who at least to some extent are driven by a genuine interest in the content itself even though they are, or were, also financed by advertisements.
The main problem here is that we allow commercial companies to provide generic and universal "free" content platforms which end up being the de facto gatekeepers if you have something to say. These platforms can only exist because the companies are allowed to intersperse generic user-generated content with advertisements. In my opinion, it is this advertisement-financed platform model that is the core problem here, and automated censorship is only one of the many negative consequences. Other problems are that it leads to winner-takes-it-all monopolies and that it strongly incentivizes ad companies such as Google to collect as much information about people as possible.
" ... bit about whether the content they show is informative, harmful or entertaining, they care about maximizing the amount of ad impressions while avoiding legal repercussions"
Close, but no cigar. If you have a sector with giant add spend, you grant them full control, regardless of the add impressions. People talk a lott about 'regulatory capture', but 'media capture' is just as real.
There has never ever ever been a time where you could disseminate your idea to more than about a hundred people for free.
The vast vast vast majority of the good ideas disseminated to the public in human history required someone to go pay a printing press operator to print them hundreds and hundreds of pamphlets.
This is literally how the American revolution happened. Not by requiring existing newspapers to carry opinions they didn't have (though some newspapers were literally owned by friends or people sympathetic to revolution and carried the message).
It's perfectly fine that you have to pay someone to carry your message or print pamphlets. That was always the intent of free markets and free speech together. It wasn't that anyone would be forced to carry your message (which is why the first amendment is extremely clear that you also have a right of association and can therefore not be forced or compelled to carry speech you do not want to), it was always that someone surely would be willing to make a quick buck to cater to your speech, no matter how fringe.
And it's entirely correct. Nobody at any point was unaware that Sweden had a different approach, and there was lively debate about it from day one, primarily about how "just trust people to stay home when they are sick" literally doesn't work here in the US.
It doesn't matter that Youtube took some of that discussion down, because it happened everywhere else too. Youtube is NOT your property.
Youtube cannot prevent you from talking about anything to your family.
And while I loved old forums, they were constantly fighting with being underfunded, there was infighting between the "owners", and each one worked differently, making them a bunch of disconnected little silos.
Especially compared to Youtube, there's just NO WAY IN HELL any non-exploitative company could ever finance a project of even remotely similar scope. There are already, right know, alternatives for all the big monopolists. Most people aren't using them because they don't like the trade offs.
Yes, capitalist forces are incredibly strong, which is why we need regulation to avoid negative externalities to spiral out of control. Regulation that is intended to protect consumers often end up being moats for the monopolies to cement their monopolies even further, because the regulation is too heavy and expensive to comply with for the smaller competitors.
I think that child protection laws is an example of such regulation because it will impose a huge legal and financial risk on small sites and forums which were never part of the problem.
This is why I would rather go for regulation which more or less outlaws or severely limits the viability of the problematic business model. This could also backfire of course, but I believe it will be better even though many will find it inconvenient if YouTube disappeared.
This part at least seems to be no problem. Many platforms already follow and enforce different rules in different jurisdictions.
> And who decides whether the video actually violates the law?
There are myriad laws around the world, and somehow we manage to decide what's legal and follow the law, at least most of the time. This argument is absurd on the face of it: "we can't have a law because laws are too difficult to follow and enforce".
People and corporations make their best attempt to follow the law, regulators and institutions give guidance, courts adjudicate disputes. Do you live somewhere where it works differently?
>There are myriad laws around the world, and somehow we manage to decide what's legal and follow the law, at least most of the time. This argument is absurd on the face of it: "we can't have a law because laws are too difficult to follow and enforce".
Yeah, I agree that argument is absurd. I will also note I never made that argument, so I'm not sure where you got it.
You are also missing half my comment. "Just follow the law" is not a complete answer to the questions raised. Plenty of companies will still want to remove content that doesn't violate the law in certain jurisdictions such as pirated content. Should Youtube be obligated to host that content? What if the actual right's holder threatens to stop advertising unless Google removes that content regardless of local law?
I just don't know why people pretend this is a simple issue with a single straightforward solution.
> In practice, you have to be an extremist to think literally no content should be removed from Youtube with the most obvious example of something nearly everyone wants to be removed being CSAM.
What is extremist about this opinion? (EDIT: with the exception that we indeed remove CSAM and similar things "everybody" wants removed and will (importantly!) otherwise get YouTube into deep trouble, but (basically) nothing else)
> Should Youtube be obligated to host hardcore porn or gory violence?
YouTube can decide to host, or not host, whatever it wants. The challenge is with unclear terms of use. They have a habit of taking down videos with little or no reason given, and it isn't clear what terms the video content would have violated.
Of course they can draw their own lines, but they should be clear and consistent.
As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in Jacobellis v. Ohio [1], "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
I'm not sure how we can expect "clear and consistent" rulings from Youtube when even our law can be vague and inconsistent.
In my opinion that's a better argument against the usefulness of a supreme court than it is a justification for allowing leeway in censorship.
The justice is claiming that said illegal content cannot be described or identified in law, that it must be up to a judge to make that call. Such a system is insane to those being ruled by it - we can't know if we are breaking the law, but at any time a judge could decide of their own accord that we are.
We must live under a system of laws that can be comprehensible enough for a reasonable person to be able to tell when they cross the line and are likely breaking the law.
The first amendment gives them the right to literally be capricious and malevolent in their hosting choices.
Your right is that, if you don't like it, you cannot be forced to use it.
And that is true. Nebula exists because all those people were getting fucked by Google's capricious actions. Armchair historian made his own platform because Google wont pay you ad dollars if you show actual historical war footage, because god forbid you learn history.
Youtube is not a platform where anyone can say anything. There's no such thing as a "digital town square" that is owned by a private company. Even real, actual, public squares have some limits on speech nowadays.
If you want some sort of digital public square where anyone could host literally any video content, it will be funded by taxes and run by the government.
I would however hold strong support for reforms that limit the shenanigans and nonsense in Terms of Use. You shouldn't be able to put utterly unenforceable or even illegal things into a Terms of Use without penalty. Contract law has a principle of separability that means Google can put literally as many scary, illegal, unenforceable claims into it's contracts and a court would still enforce it, just without those specific parts. That gives Google a huge incentive to put even impossible things into their ToU hoping you will buy that they could enforce it, even when they know they cannot.
I also think it should not be possible to make a contract that says "we can update this at any time and change everything about it without your consent" just entirely. All contract revisions should require mutual consent.
IIUC, ToU have also just not been tested in court very well. So we should stop beating around the bush and just make a real legal framework for them.
> In practice, you have to be an extremist to think literally no content should be removed from Youtube with the most obvious example of something nearly everyone wants to be removed being CSAM.
This is not what is being said in the comments you are replying to, you are taking it to the other extreme yourself
Yes, I intentionally included an extreme example to highlight my point. However, that was not the only example included. Would you like to respond to my whole comment or just that single cherry-picked sentence?
> a line somewhere for normal people to actually want to use the site.
Youtube is a private company. They can make whatever additional moderation decisions beyond the law they want. Which are in no way based on what you want but are entirely based on what advertisers want. This control effectively answers every question you raised.
In any case, Youtube is the size where it can grapple with all these questions you just posed, but anyone else hoping to challenge their monopoly or otherwise host a small collection of videos, perhaps for a specific purpose or community, now effectively cannot.
> but there is always going to be an ongoing debate on its exact placement.
Who exactly started _this_ debate? Was there some recent outcry from the citizens that their lives have become unlivable due to the lax content restrictions on social media? Really?
>Youtube is a private company. They can make whatever additional moderation decisions beyond the law they want. Which are in no way based on what you want but are entirely based on what advertisers want. This control effectively answers every question you raised.
This is effectively the same thing. Advertisers care because the users have different moral judgments on different types of content which impacts their opinion of the companies that advertise on that content. If users were happy seeing Ford ads on porn, Ford would likely be fine advertising on Pornhub.
>In any case, Youtube is the size where it can grapple with all these questions you just posed, but anyone else hoping to challenge their monopoly or otherwise host a small collection of videos, perhaps for a specific purpose or community, now effectively cannot.
I'm not sure where this logic leads. Are you suggesting that a company needs to reach a certain size before they can be expected to moderate their content?
>Who exactly started _this_ debate? Was there some recent outcry from the citizens that their lives have become unlivable due to the lax content restrictions on social media? Really?
Isn't this question answered by your first paragraph? Users and advertisers started this debate. There was definitely public pressure for Google to take down Covid discussions that mainstream sources believed were misleading. Was there consensus? Maybe not, but there was definitely a public debate about it.
> Advertisers care because the users have different moral judgments on different types of content which <...> If users were happy seeing Ford ads on porn, Ford would likely be fine advertising on Pornhub.
Was this hypothesis ever actually even remotely tested or is it advertising agencies deciding what content is no bueno?
We don't need to hypothesize. If you pay attention to this space, you will see it play out in real time in the news. Over the last several years, there have been multiple public pressure campaigns against the advertisers on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Business accounts that list porn sites tend to get banned by the processor. There are very few payment processors willing to work with the major porn networks.
In 2022, both Visa and Mastercard banned Pornhub, leading to major shakeups as the network tried to get off the blacklist.
I don't see most advertisers being happy with spend on such a volatile target - even before the agency debates if it will affect brand image.
I submitted that users have no power and advertisers have it all. So, no, not "users and advertisers," _JUST_ advertisers.
> There was definitely public pressure for Google to take down Covid discussions
There's public pressure for Google to take down information about abortion. So what's the difference? When does "public pressure" reach a point where they act? And is the pressure truly public and organic? Or fake and astroturfed?
At least in the context of Covid, the real issue I saw was not the taking down of content, it was that a very small group of people dictated what content should be taken down.
Generally speaking in the world of "science" (any field) there will always be a level of disagreement. One scientist will come up with one theory, the other will come up with another theory, they will endlessly debate until the topic is "settled" and then the whole loop repeats if another scientist thinks that the settled topic is not actually settled. Overall I would say this is a very healthy dynamic and keeps society moving forward.
What people go so mad about during Covid was not the content being taken down, it's that you had had various scientific organizations around the world straight up break what I described in the previous paragraph. During covid you had one group make endless rushed decisions and then when other scientific groups challenged those findings, the response was not what I outlined above but rather an authoritarian "I am the science" response.
This "main group" (NIH, CDC, etc) painted all those challenges as conspiracy theories but if you actually listened to what the challenges were, they were often times quite reasonable. And the fact that they were reasonable arguments highlighted the insane hubris of the "main group" and ultimately led them to loose virtual all credibility by the time Covid wrapped up.
It is a logical fallacy if used as part of an absolute claim, but it doesn't make it always wrong when used in general statements. Some slopes are slippery, we can look at history to see this. We can't claim all slopes are slippery, this doesn't mean that no slope is slippery.
People aren't starting with axioms and then defining what absolutely will happen. People are discussing trends that appear to happen generally, but there will be exceptions. Going to college leads to a better job is a slippery slope, it doesn't always happen, but going to college is still good advice (and even better advice if one is willing to go into detail about the degree, the costs, the plans at college, and so on).
If we want to reject something as a logical fallacy, we need to consider if the other person's argument hinges on something always happening as some sort of logical proof, or if it hinges on it happening only at or above some threshold. If the first case, pointing out a slippery slope argument is a valid counter, but in the second case, it isn't and instead leads to two people talking past each other (one arguing X happens often enough to be a concern, the other arguing that X doesn't always happen, both statements that could be true).
Maybe you would respond by saying that is illegal and only illegal content should be taken down. According to which laws? Hate speech is illegal some places, should that be removed? What about blasphemy?
Maybe you would suggest to closely follow the local law of the user. Does that mean the site needs to allow piracy in places that is legal? And who decides whether the video actually violates the law? Does the content have to stay up until a court makes the final decision? Or what about content that is legal locally, but might be under some restrictions. Should Youtube be obligated to host hardcore porn or gory violence?
There needs to be a line somewhere for normal people to actually want to use the site. I'm not going to claim to have the perfect answer on where that line should be, but there is always going to be an ongoing debate on its exact placement.