This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed.

From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software."

This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content.

Here in the UK, Ofcom held their second day-long livestreamed seminar on their implementation of the Online Safety Act on Wednesday this week. This time it was about keeping children "safe", including with "effective age assurance".

Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance on how platforms should implement the regime they want to see. They said this is on the basis that if they give specific advice, it may restrict their ability to take enforcement action later.

So it's up to the platforms to interpret the extremely complex and vaguely defined requirements and impose a regime which Ofcom will find acceptable. It was clear from the Q&A that some pretty big platforms are really struggling with it.

The inevitable outcome is that platforms will err on the side of caution, bearing in mind the potential penalties.

Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold.

Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this while…

There are so many issues with this.

Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities.

The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the reason isn’t necessarily because YouTube has a particularly better UI that keeps viewers and content creators on it. The reason YT has all the content creators is because it leverages Google’s ad monopoly and is able to help creators make money. A decently functioning anti-trust system would have split google ads from the rest of the company by now.

2. The devastation of the promise of the open internet. VCs have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure we remain in walled gardens. Open source, self hosted, software on the other hand, where the benefits are shared and not concentrated in individual hands which can then spend billions to ensure that concentration, has suffered.

We need govt funding for open source and self hosted alternatives that are easy and safe for people to setup.

Combine the two and instead of YT getting to choose what videos are seen and not seen on the internet, major and small content creators would self host and be the decision makers, and still make similar amounts of money because they could plugin the openly available Google Adsense (kind of like how you can on blogs…).

I think their real edge is a practically free and practically infinite bandwidth/capacity global CDN setup. There's no real technical reason for this still to be the case, but bandwidth costs are significant for people relying on other services to provide such. Or they're cheap and slow/capped.

This is the main reason I think alternative sites have a hard time competing. Play anything on YouTube from anywhere and if it's buffering/slow then it's probably your internet connection that's the problem. By contrast do the same on competing streaming sites and it's, more or less, expected especially if you aren't in certain geographic areas.

Monetization on YouTube is mostly just a carrot on a stick. The overwhelming majority of content creators will never make anything more than pocket change off of it. That carrot might still work as an incentivization system, but I don't think it's necessarily the driving force.

Yeah, anybody can make a half-baked CDN, but Google has PoPs inside ISPs across the world [1] and competing with that is essentially impossible.

[1] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en

I have to imagine that YouTube also has massive storage requirements that are a non-trivial portion of Google’s storage costs.

I'm not really disagreeing with you but I have a 700/700 fiber connection that generally works perfectly for anything I do, and youtube craps out pretty frequently. It'll just fail to load videos and I have to refresh up to multiple times before it starts working properly.

Also the frontend is generally very wonky, I'm wondering if its severely over engineered or something. It seems very simple, but it's failing at all kinds of stuff all the time. Shorts fail to load when scrolling, the scrolling just stops working, some times it keeps playing the previous video's audio while the current video is frozen.

Some times if I write a comment and try to highlight and delete some of it, when I hit backspace it deletes the part that wasn't highlighted. A normal does not do that. Have they implemented their own text inputs in JS or something? All you need for that component is a form with a textfield and a submit button. As far as I know that won't behave this way so I'm not sure what they're doing but it doesn't seem great.

I went and checked, it's a div. No idea why they would do that for that simple comment form.

Why should "YouTube" as an entity enjoy freedom of speech? They're a platform for user-generated content. Outside of outright illegal content (which is even tenuous sometimes, I'd like to reserve this for the worst of things), they shouldn't be able to pick and choose which UGC they are willing to allow. They're the modern "town square". They're effectively a monopoly in this day and age (yes, there are other video hosting platforms, but YouTube has the largest share of all by far, and are de facto the place people expect to find video UGC).

Serving video with high availability to millions of people is hard. Few organizations, that aren't already flush with capital, are going to be able to replicate that at any sort of scale.

I'm tired of big corporations using their might to override individual freedom of speech. Once you reach a certain size, you should have to make moderation a more personal thing. Instead of taking videos that aren't illegal in and of themselves down, they should have to empower the user to moderate their own feed. Of course, this is incompatible with the modern drive to use these platforms to push content in front of people, instead of letting them curate their own experience.

I don't have all the answers, but the "corporations = people, and thus corporations have freedom of speech" angle has done a lot of damage to the rights of individuals.

I think one thing that we should be more cognizant about in general is that corporations are a legal construct to begin with, and as such, there's no natural right to incorporate - it's strictly a privilege. So society attaching even very heavy strings to that is not unreasonable so long as they are applied consistently to all corporations. Which is to say, if corporations don't do what we as a society want them to do, beating them with a large and heavy stick until they start doing that is not wrong, and we should be doing more of it.

And if people really want their freedoms, well, they can go and run their business as individuals, with no corporate liability shield etc. Then I'm fine with saying that their freedom of speech etc overrides everything else.

> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities

I simply don’t think this applies to places like YouTube.

But if does then they also must be responsible for the content. It makes no sense that curating content is their free speech but at the same time it’s not their speech when the content could have legal repercussions to them.

The argument that removing videos is their speech implies that hosting videos is their speech. So they should be liable for all content they post.

They are two different things, though. One is actually producing content, and the others deciding which content host and share. And there are all kinds of various legal and illegal combinations, here. For instance maybe they decide that it's okay to host Nazi content, something that is absolutely protected under the first amendment. Or maybe they decide that it's not okay to host Nazi content, even though it's definitely protected under the first amendment.

Also see Gonzales v. Google.

But really the most dangerous thing here is telling a company that they are legally liable for everything their users post. A large company like Google has the legal firepower to handle the massive onslaught of lawsuits that will instantly occur. A smaller startup thing? Not a chance. They're DOA.

Heck, even on my tiny traffic personal website, I would take the comment section down because there's no way I can handle a lawsuit over something somebody posted there.

I should not be required to host content I do not wish to host. And at the same time I must be shielded from liability from comments that people make on my website, if we are to have a comment section at all.

I think using the example of Nazi content and the first amendment is a distraction. What’s relevant is speech that is not legally protected.

Should the New York Times have civil libel liability for what they publish in a newspaper? Should Google have civil libel liability for what they publish on YouTube?

That would make sense if this were a math theorem, but law and liability and society don’t usually work like math.

Theee things can be true:

1. YT and similar give people a platform for speech

2. So long as they make a good faith effort to identify and remove content that is illegal, the hosted speech is not theirs.

3. As platform owner they are also free to exercise speech by moderating topics for any or no reason

What then is the distinction between YouTube and a newspaper?

In your analogy, YouTube is the paperboy and the video producer is the newspaper.

> The argument that removing videos is their speech implies that hosting videos is their speech.

There is no such implication because the first is an affirmative act based on their knowledge of the actual content and the other is a passive act not based on knowledge of that content.

That’s my opinion:

If you exhibit pre-publication restraint, you’re an editor of an anthology — and not an information service hosting user content.

> Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a real solution possible.

The ones with money and power (which are effectively the same thing) want it to be this way, as it makes them richer and more powerful. The masses are just pawns literally being moved around on the chessboard of society.

> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities.

Here's some text from Section 230 of the CDA:

> (c) (2) Civil liability

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

> (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1)

...

> (e) (1) No effect on criminal law

> Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.

Now in this case, you have YouTube, a service with obvious market power, taking down content promoting a competitor to YouTube. There are Federal criminal antitrust statutes.

One thing I really wish, is that more people volunteered to moderate things. It’s a volunteer position, it’s needed for most of the communities we are part of, and doing this raises the floor of conversations across the board.

The distance between the average view point on how free speech works, and the reality that content moderation forces you to contend with, is frankly gut wrenching. We need to be able to shorten that distance so that when we discuss it online, we have ways to actually make sense of it. For the creativity of others ideas to be brought to bear.

Otherwise, we’re doomed to reinvent the wheel over and over again, our collective intuitions advancing at a snails pace.

Why would you volunteer your time to a for-profit company?

Probably because they enjoy it. Same reason you and I contribute to a social media service operated by a for-profit company.

The solution would be to revoke section 203 from any platform which acts as a digital public square if they do moderation beyond removing illegal content.

Ofc they would try there best to be excluded to have there cake and eat it too.

The entire point of section 230 is to allow platforms to remove non-illegal content [1].

Basically there were two lawsuits about platforms showing content. One of the platfroms tried to curate content to create a family-friendly environment. The second platform just didn't take anything down. The first platform lost their lawsuit while the second won their lawsuit. Congress wants to allow platforms to create family friend environment online so section 230 was written.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#

If something like that were put in place, any platforms acting as a “public square” should also be required to disable all recommendation and content surfacing features aside from search, algorithmic or otherwise.

Those recommendation features already do plenty of damage even with platforms having the ability to remove anything they like. If platforms are restricted to only removing illegal content, that damage would quickly become much greater.

You need moderation for more than legality though, otherwise you can't have open forums like this, that aren't total cesspits.

Right:

* When a bot farm spams ads for erectile dysfunction pills into every comment thread on your blog... That's "legal content"!

* When your model-train hobbyist site is invaded by posters sharing swastikas and planning neo-nazi rallies, that too is "legal content"--at least outside Germany.

All sorts of deceptive, off-topic, and horribly offensive things are "legal content."

Sadly it turns out that the biggest driving force is politics, and the inability for our institutions to win with boring facts, against fast and loose engaging content.

The idea is that in a competitive marketplace of ideas, the better idea wins. The reality is that if you dont compete on accuracy, but compete on engagement, you can earn enough revenue to stay cash flow positive.

I would say as the cost of making content and publishing content went down, the competition for attention went up. The result is that expensive to produce information, cannot compete with cheap to produce content.

Your premise is incomplete. When someone posts illegal content on YouTube they are not liable if they are not aware of the illegality of that content. Once they learn that they are hosting illegal content they lose their safe harbor if they don't remove it.

Please don't post deliberately false information on HN.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

Let me rephrase, since saying they lose their safe harbor was a poor choice of words. The safe harbor does indeed prevent them from being treated as the publisher of the illegal content. However illegal content can incur liability for acts other than publishing or distributing and section 230's safe harbor won't protect them from that.

I mean what do you think happens? Do you think YouTube employs an army of people to watch and vet every single video that gets posted there?

no i think YT uses an AI to categorize and vet media based on standard rubrick, at a pace that exceeds a human collective by orders of magnitude.

they know about it as soon as you post it.

The reason we're having this discussion this on this particular post because YT's AI is not infallible. There isn't a "standard rubric" - just automated correlation-based scoring derived from labeled training data. In this case, the AI learned that media piracy and self-hosted setups are correlated, but without actual judgement or a sense of causality. So YT doesn't truly "know" anything about the videos despite the AI augmentation.

I am curious what you consider to be a "standard rubric" - would that be based on the presence of keywords, or requires a deeper understanding of meaning to be able to differentiate the study/analysis of a topic versus promoting said subject.

automated correlation-based scoring derived from labeled training data, would be the standard rubric

> Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech.

> But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it.

There is no contradiction there.

Imagine a forum about knitting. Someone, who has it in for the owners of this knitting forum (or perhaps even just a SPAM bot) starts posting illegal, or even just non-knitting content on this forum.

The entire purpose of the forum is to be a community about knitting.

Why is it the legal or moral responsibility of the knitting forum to host SPAM content? And why should they be legally liable for someone else posting content on their platform?

You're equating specific pieces of content with the platform as a whole.

There is no reality where I will accept that if I create something. I spend and risk my money on web hosting. I write the code. I put something out there... that other people get to dictate what content I have to distribute. That's an evil reality to contemplate. I don't want to live in that world. I certainly wont' do business under those terms.

You're effectively trying to give other people an ultimatum in order to extract value from them that you did not earn and have no claim to. You're saying that if they don't host content that they don't want to distribute that they should be legally liable for anything that anyone uploads.

The two don't connect at all. Anyone is, and should be free to create any kind of online service where they pick and choose what is or is not allowed. That shouldn't then subject them to criminal or civil liability because of how others decide to use that product or service.

Imagine if that weird concept were applied to offline things, like kitchen knives. A kitchen knife manufacturer is perfectly within their rights to say "This product is intended to be used for culinary purposes and no other. If we find out that you are using it to do other things, we will stop doing business with you forever." That doesn't then make them liable for people who use their product for other purposes.

This isn’t really what’s being argued. We’re not talking about a knitting forum. We’re talking about content neutral hosting platforms. There is a distinction in the law. If you want to not be liable for the content posted to your platform then you may not moderate or censor it seems like a fair compromise to me. Either you are knitting forum carefully cultivating your content and thus liable for what people see there, or you are a neutral hosting service provider. Right now we let people platforms be whichever favors their present goal or narrative without considering the impact such duplicity has on the public users.

> We’re talking about content neutral hosting platforms.

There is no such thing as a "content neutral hosting platform." I know that people like to talk about social media services in the same umbrella as the concept of "common carrier", which is reserved for things like mail service and telecommunications infrastructure. And that might be what you're conflating here. If you're not, then please point me to the law, in any country even, where "content neutral hosting platform" is a legal term defined.

> If you want to not be liable for the content posted to your platform then you may not moderate or censor it seems like a fair compromise to me.

Compensation for what? The "platform" built something themselves. They made it. They are offering it on the market. If anyone is due compensation, it is them. No matter how much you don't like them. You didn't build it. You could have, maybe. But you didn't. I bet you didn't even try. But they did. And they succeeded at it. So where does anyone get off demanding "compensation" from them just for bringing something useful valuable into existence?

That is a pretty messed up way of looking at things IMO. It is the mindset of a thief.

> Either you are knitting forum carefully cultivating your content and thus liable for what people see there,

Thank you for conceding my argument and shining a spotlight on how ridiculous this is. You agree that according to your world view, the knitting forum should be liable for the content others post on it just because they are enforcing that things stay on topic. Even just for removing SPAM bot posts this would expose them to this liability.

> Right now we let people platforms be whichever favors their present goal or narrative without considering the impact such duplicity has on the public users.

The beautiful thing about freedom is that along as people don't infringe upon the rights of others, they don't need your permission to just go build things and exist.

The YouTube creators didn't have to ask you to "allow" them to build something useful and valuable. They just went and did it. And that's how it should be.

I get that certain creators run into trouble with the TOS. Hell, I've tried to create an Instagram account on several occasions and it gets suspended before I can even use it. And when I appeal or try to ask "why?" I never get answers. It's frustrating.

But the difference between you and me, is I don't think that people who build and create things and bring valuable shit into existence owe me something just by virtue of their existence.

> The beautiful thing about freedom is that along as people don't infringe upon the rights of others, they don't need your permission to just go build things and exist

This is hollow sophistry, and it’s not how things actually are.

You don’t have freedom for Self dealing, price fixing, collusion, bribery, false marketing, antitrust violations, selling baby powder with lead and many other things.

In some states you can’t even legally collect rainwater.

Also the government will come after you with guns and throw you in jail if you violate some bogus and fictitious “intellectual property rights” that last for 70 years after creator has died.

It’s u helpful to pretend we live in Wild West of liberty

> the concept of "common carrier"

So then, your actual opinion is Yes a "content neutral hosting platform." does exist?

Its seems very obvious here that people are saying that the laws that apply to common carriers could be changed so they apply to social media platforms.

Problem/confusion solved here, and the world doesn't fall apart. As we already have these laws, and the world didn't fall apart before.

I honestly don’t know what you are spewing off about. At one point you quote me saying “compromise” then proceed to argue as if I said “compensation”. I’m not going to respond to a mischaracterization.

To your challenge:

> In the United States, companies that offer web hosting services are shielded from liability for most content that customers or malicious users place on the websites they host. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (―Section 230‖). protects hosting providers from liability for content placed on these websites by their customers or other parties. The statute states that ―[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.‖ Most courts find that a web hosting provider qualifies as a ―provider‖ of an ―interactive computer service.‖

>Although this protection is usually applied to defamatory remarks, most federal circuits have interpreted Section 230 broadly, providing ―federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service.‖

https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/itl/StopBadware_...

There is clear legal handling in the US beyond common carrier provisions for hosting providers on the internet.

The nuance here is an argument over what constitutes a hosting provider and how far we extent legal immunity.

My “worldview” is that if you want to claim your business is a hosting provider so that you are granted the legal protection from content liability, that you have a responsibility—which I’d argue we should codify more formally—to remain a neutral hosting provider in spirit, because it is in line with the type of liberty (freedom of expression) we aim to protect in the US. You are saying “legally I’m a neutral hosting provider”, and we already tolerate removal of spam and legally obscene/objectionable content so your point there is moot, so if you are making that claim legally then it’s two faced to turn around and say “IMA private entity I can do whatever I want to curate the content on my platform because I’m responsible for the brand and image and experience I want to cultivate in my house”.

I’m okay with hosting providers not being liable for user content, and I’m okay with yarn forums deleting any post that doesn't reference yarn. It’s the mix of both that I feel is partly responsible for the poor state we’re in now where users get demonetized on YT for questioning the efficacy of new vaccine technology.

Hopefully it’s clear what the nuance is here. And if you don’t think there’s a whole conversation that has been happening here read up on Cloudflare’s philosophy and what Prince has written about the topic. Because they were faced with the same dilemma with The Daily Stormer (but not quite as flagrant as Google/YT trying to play both sides for profit).

> There is no reality where I will accept that…

Welcome to the club

> if I create something. I spend and risk my money on web hosting. I write the code...

You can create a forum in 20 minutes, it’s all open source and I did that when I was 14

All the ‘risk’ and ‘writing code’ is about fighting other platforms for attention, not providing a consumer good.

> ultimatum… in order to extract value from them that you did not earn

I am the consumer, the market exists for me and I pay for the whole party. If a business that harms customers is called a crime syndicate.

You might see this ultimatum in other areas too, like “you can’t sell baby food with lead in it, or you go to prison”

The issue is that the knitting forum is a different beast from youtube. The latter is a platform. Its scale makes it QUALITATIVELY different. And there's network effects, there's dumping behaviour, there's preinstalls on every phone, there's integration with the ad behemoth, all to make sure it remains a platform.

This is correct. In the US tiktok is currently being sued for feeding kids choking game content through the algorithm that was earlier judged to be free speech.

Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing say, Muslims on their website? Especially a platform as big as YouTube? I mean, it's essential to their rights to be able to do that, I guess?

Like I understand your point, but this argument is usually not actually useful. Especially since it's usually not coming from "free speech absolutist" types, so it always comes off as a bit disingenuous. Unless you are arguing for big corporations having an absolute right to free speech, which I would disagree with but would at least make the argument consistent.

> Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing say, Muslims on their website?

Depends on the sense of “private”.

If it is, private in the sense that it is a platform run by a Christian Church for the use of organizations affiliated with that Church, and not offering information dissemination to the general public, sure.

If its a private business offering platform services to the public at large but specifically excluding Muslims, then it is potentially engaging in prohibited religious discrimination in a public accommodation. Unlike religion, political viewpoint is not, federally, a protected class in public accommodations, though state law may vary.

(OTOH, under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and similar laws in many states, and case law based on and in line with the general motivation of such laws, laws including state public accommodation laws, are being looked at more skeptically when they prohibit religious and religiously-motivated discrimination, as an impairment of the religious freedom of the discriminating party, in theory irrespective of the religions on each side, but in practice favoring discrimination by Christians and against non-Christians, so possibly the Muslim exclusion would succeed even in a public accommodation.)

I don't think anyone would argue that would violate freedom of speech, however it would still be illegal as it would violate the civil rights act by discriminating based on religion. Theres more than one right involved in your hypothetical basically.

We don’t need the government to throw money at “open source”. That’s silly. Youtube used to be a means to an end. I need to send my friend or a teacher a video but email has a 25mb attachment limit. Need to use youtube or image shack. These days you can just use a text message or whatever platform you’re using to communicate. So youtube has now become a platform for “content creators”. It’s a different beast. To compete with youtube you have to not only make the video stuff work but also break the network effect and figure out how to pay creators.

Further, plenty of VCs don’t give two shits whether your thing is open source or not, they just want ROI. In my experience it’s tech law (or lack thereof) that missed the infusion of “internet maker ethos”. The depth of the average startup legal advice is “here’s a privacy policy and EULA that maximally protect your company at the expense of users”. “Here’s an employment contract template that tries to fuck your employees.” “It’s safest not to share your source code and keep it a trade secret.” “Go have fun.” If you want to see more open source then you need to cultivate that ethos among the people in power running the companies. So often I see the prevailing sentiment even here to be anti-gpl. The gpl may be imperfect, but if you care at all about the proliferation of open-source in a western copyright regime, then pissing on the gpl as “the brainchild of crackpot Stallman” is not the way to get there.

If you want more open source then founders need to come to fundamentally understand that their source code is not what makes their business valuable, it’s the time and effort they put in to provide a service that others aren't providing or is better than the competition. Too many founders are living the delusion that at a software level their engineers are writing novel patentable or trade secret level code that gives them a true algorithmic leg up. 9 times out of ten their shit is just new and fresh and disruptive. I understand that in rare cases people are doing truly novel things with software, but that certainly isn’t the default case.

I don't see how one necessarily leads to the other. There's obviously already filtering going on in youtube, even before covid, on illegal content and also on legal content that is against the policy (adult content for example).

How is Covid desinfo during the pandemic suddenly a slippery slope for anti-competitive measures, while all the other moderation measures aren't? Whats so special about anti covid desinfo rules?

I think we really need a better argument than 'making any rule leads to making bad rules, so we better have no rules'.

> Whats so special about anti covid desinfo rules?

- The magnitude of content involved.

- The fact that there exists a significant part of the society which is vocal about not endorsing these particular deletions.

- The fact that many people became aware of the moderation ("censorship") that YouTube does and its power.

- The fact that these COVID information videos (despite being perhaps wrong) formed important patterns of opinions, i.e. some opinions considered "extremist" or "wrong" were suppressed.

We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is.

Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service.

Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.

"Some people in Sweden first learned about the US censorship because official news from the Swedish government was removed from platforms."

Citation very, very much needed.

And none of that changes YouTube's liability - caused by misinformation and death.

A company can generally be relied upon to act to reduce their liability in most cases. That involves not pissing off their federal regulatory bodies.

Sweden was not caught up in the early suppression of misinformation. Things changed after a certain tacolike individual called Google's CEO into a private meeting. And expecting them to ignore that, is insane.

>And none of that changes YouTube's liability - caused by misinformation and death.

Doesn’t section 230 protect them from the consequences of words users transmit through their platform.

Only if they "take reasonable steps" to "delete or prevent access" to that content. That is, they filter or suppress the information. Which is precisely the point of this thread. They did.

> Sweden is widely recognized as the example to absolutely not follow in handling pandemics.

Is it? There were some very scathing attacks on their COVID policy back in the first two years of the pandemic, but when you look at more recent retrospectives that have the benefit of hindsight, it seems that they didn't actually do worse than countries which went full lockdown.

As opposed to the US? Like sending infected elderly people to elderly homes to infect more people?

That's your perspective. What if I were to demand it be silenced and only opinions praising its policy were shown?

Let's talk it over in the open, it's not perfect but it's the best way.

but its not about the information, its about who spouts it. For example its possible for the same government entity to be 100% whitelisted in saying "DONT MASK", and also "MASK OR YOU KILL GRANNY", both are 100% allowed, but when some layperson says the one that isnt favored by the regime at the time, well, they are censored at best.

Amazon.com currently carries the "Anarchist's Cookbook", including the Author's Footnote saying that the publication of this book is a terrible and dangerous idea. My local library also carries this book.

Is this disinformation really more dangerous than that book? Is there some reason YouTube should be more liable for user-uploaded content, versus a bookstore being liable for content they deliberately choose to carry?

For a time, the Cookbook was banned. However, due to most of it being common knowledge, and the rest of it being ineffectual nonsense unlikely to harm anyone, restrictions were relaxed.

In some jurisdictions, however, it does remain banned to this day. YT are liable if they broadcast the contents of the Cookbook to the UK, for example.

Which is a great example of companies acting because they'll end up liable. Which is the only point I've made.

> Disinformation got people killed

Back this up with data if you want to keep stating this as fact. How do you know know disinformation got people killed, and what specifically are you defining as disinformation?

In March 2020, an Arizona man died and his wife was hospitalized after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, a substance used in fish tanks to clean aquariums, in an attempt to prevent or treat COVID-19. They reportedly mixed the substance with liquid and drank it, experiencing immediate effects. The man's wife told NBC News she had seen televised briefings where President Trump discussed the potential benefits of chloroquine for COVID-19 and remembered using it for her koi fish. The Banner Health hospital system issued a warning against taking inappropriate medication and household products to treat or prevent COVID-19, emphasizing that chloroquine used for malaria should not be taken for this purpose.

I don't like the president, but I don't remember seeing him say to take chloroquine phosphate tablets. I definitely heard him say that he though hydroxychloroquine might me a possible treatment, presumably referring to hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets.

More importantly though, the then (and unfortunately now) president isn't a doctor and didn't directly tell people to take it. If a person heard that and decided to eat a bottle of pills meant for a fish tank, I don't know who we could lay blame on other than the person that made that choice.

Hundreds verifiably died, after following misinformation [0]. And I would define misinformation as claiming something has health benefits, when very clearly, it will kill you. Like when Gary Lenius believed that hydrochloroquine was a cure.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-52731624

> A BBC team tracking coronavirus misinformation has found links to assaults, arsons and deaths. And experts say the potential for indirect harm caused by rumours, conspiracy theories and bad health information could be much bigger.

The claims in the article, which is notably from very early in the pandemic, are focused mainly on looting, rioting, etc.

There are also stories of people poisoning themselves with household cleaners that they believed to be doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate.

I'm not sure how that's relevant though, they were dosing themselves with household chemicals based on what they heard from the then (and unfortunately now) president who notably has no medical background.

If a person says advil is useful for headaches and someone is harmed when they take a whole bottle, I wouldn't blame the first person for that decision and I definitely wouldn't begin to say speech should have been censored to avoid it.

I think an administration that was happy to spread disinformation and cast doubt on vaccination had an outsized impact. YT ain’t the problem.

> cast doubt on vaccination

This seems like a bizarre retcon. No only did Trump fund "Operation Warp Speed" but he still (occasionally) expresses pride at funding the vaccine research. This is not "casting doubt on vaccination". I think the US right was generally doubtful of vaccination, but I'm fuzzy about whether this started before or after the vaccine mandates. Certainly I remember it being more of a phenomenon once Biden took office - perhaps as knee jerk opposition to a Democrat president.

> Covid disinformation got people killed.

You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You will never be able to show causation like that and we would never allow some controlled trial to see whether giving people whatever information you deem as misinformation actually increases the death rate relative to a control group.

Even in science there is not a 'requirement' that you have a controlled experiment in order to have evidence that a claim is true. Following your argument you can't substantiate that humans are the result of evolution because we can't take two groups of early primates, subject one to evolutionary forces and the other not and see what happens. Instead we can observe a chain of correlations with plausible mechanisms that indicate causation and say it's evidentiary. For example, data that indicates unvaccinated people died at a higher rate and data that indicates people who chose not to vaccinate self-report that the reason they made that choice was based on particular information that they believed. That would be evidence that helps substantiate the theory the information led to deaths. It's not 'proof'. We can't 'prove' that exposure to the information actually led to the decision (because people sometimes misattribute their own decisions) and it would be impractical to imagine we can collect vaccine-decision rationales from a large number of folks pre-death (though someone might have) and you can't attribute a particular death to a particular decision (because vaccines aren't perfectly protective) so you have to do statistics over a large sample. But the causal chain is entirely plausible based on everything I know and there's no reason to believe data around those correlations can't exist. And science isn't about 'proof'. Science is about theories that best explain a set of observations and in particular have predictive power. You almost never run experiments (in the 8th grade science fair sense) in fields like astronomy or geology, but we have strong 'substantiated' theories in those fields nonetheless.

A causal chain being plausible does not justify or substantiate a claim of causation.

I absolutely would say that we can't prove humans are the result of evolution. The theory seems very likely and explains what we have observed, but that's why its a theory and not a fact - its the last hypothesis standing and generally accepted but not proven.

My argument here isn't with whether the causation seemed likely, though we can have that debate if you prefer and we'd have to go deep down the accuracy and reliability of data reporting during the pandemic.

My argument is that we can't make blanket statements that misinformation killed people. Not only is that not a proven (or provable) fact, it skips past what we define as misinformation and ignores what was known at the time in favor of what we know today. Even if the data you to point to shows correlation and possible causation today, we didn't have that information during the pandemic st the time that YouTube was pulling down content for questioning efficacy or safety.

Come on, man. COVID deaths per capita were highest in countries that had very active vaccine skepticism. While this is not causation establishment, it is super highly correlative:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... gives good estimates of COVID death impact using a very reasonable methodology.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.27.22271579v... illustrates that it's hard to nail this relationship down since UNDERREPORTING was ALSO highest in countries with high vaccine skepticism.

While establishing causation is the gold standard, dismissing strong correlative relationships where everything reasonably considered conflationary has been ruled out (which a raw death count would ostensibly do much of) is not arguing in good faith, IMHO

Sure, you can absolutely claim correlation there and say something like "information making people hesitant to get the vaccine may have increased risk of death." That's wildly different than claiming that misinformation killed people.

Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate. The populations aren't controlled at all, here you are assuming the only meaningful difference in the populations are vaccination rate. Plenty of other factors could come into play; environmental differences, average health, average number of prescription drugs, preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes, etc. You can't just hand wave away any other population differences and assume that vaccination rate was the key there.

As you pointed out the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing. How can you skip past that and still land on misinformation caused deaths?

> the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing

That is why The Economist used excess-death estimates, skipping right over the whole "death caused by COVID" vs. "death caused by comorbidity" debate. Since COVID was arguably the only worldwide difference between 2019 and the following years, a presumption that the very-statistically-significant excess deaths were largely due to COVID was thus reasonable.

Where even raw death reporting was suspect, they used reasonable estimates. They made their data and analysis public, you can analyze it yourself and counterargue, or have an AI do it these days. Hey, maybe that would be a good exercise!

> Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate

It compares countries with their own prior years first AND THEN to each other, not countries directly to other countries. This should factor anything systematic at a per-country level, out, such as average health.

Hey, I'm not saying it's flawless (does that even exist?), I was just impressed by their work here back when I last looked at this. I am generally a skeptic and enjoy critical thinking, so I do not attribute this lightly.

Measuring excess deaths doesn't skip that debate. e.g. consider a world where the only populations that died were very old people and morbidly obese people, and everyone else experienced mild or no symptoms. In that world, it would be fair to say that being very old or morbidly obese caused people to die from what was otherwise a mild cold; i.e. those comorbitities were "the cause". Then it would be fair to say excess deaths are a measurement of how prevalent those groups are.

Excess deaths is an interesting one, and again can show correlation, but it still can't distinguish cause. Obviously the death numbers were much higher those years, but two major factors were different - the virus was spreading and society responded to it in drastic ways. We can't say how many people died due to lack of access to care for example, or how fear and loneliness factored into death rates.

Excess death rates, at least in the US, are particularly interesting because they didn't follow the pattern I would have expected. Pandemics will effectively pull forward deaths, that didn't seem to happen here. Our all cause mortality spiked noticeably during the pandemic but it came back down to a more normal rate, I would have expected it to be below normal for at least a year or two. Its not as simple as pointing to all cause or excess deaths and saying it must have been vaccine hesitancy - we can't distinguish why those people died and it wouldn't explain the mortality rate after the pandemic.

Right, but covid disinformation != vaccine skepticism.

As a sibling commenter pointed out, a big part of the covid disinformation that was removed at the time was by established researchers in respected institutions or countries such as Sweden whose pandemic strategy was just different from what many US state institutions implemented.

Sweden turned out to have one of the highest vaccine acceptance levels and also lowest deadliness in the disease. One cofounding factor is the purported high trust in institutions, but such trust is built on having clear and direct communication, and the perception of information being filtered for policitcal or personal career reasons can never yield rust.

Pandemic awareness is a much too complicated issue to be simplified into crazies and vaccine skeptics against everyone else.

>We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is.

>Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service.

>Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.

Proliferating attitudes about the restriction of communication like you are doing and advocating for is bad and gets people killed. The history books are chock f-ing full of the recipe and the steps.

I'll take my chances with the plastic explosives and the health quackery.

Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just is" and will keep coming back up.

Russia's official propaganda technique [0], is about spewing falsehoods, because the truth does not keep coming back up. Lie enough, and people do give up.

Hitler and Goebbels did effectively make use of a ministry dedicated to spewing out as many falsehoods as they could, and it very effectively controlled the flow and acceptance of information in Nazi Germany.

Pol Pot and his Little Red Book empowered the Khmer Rouge, and actively buried the truth to the point where people assisted the regime to become one of the most bloody in all of history.

As Orwell warned us, because he lived through Soviet Russia and their propaganda machine, the truth does not survive when there are those dedicated to twisting it or hiding it to fit their purpose.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

> Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

-- Jonathan Swift, 1710 [1]

(very apt that this has an ad in the middle of it)

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=KigTAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Truth+com...

Indeed. In the ages pre-algorithmic social media and pre-generative AI I would agree that about truth. Now I'm not so sure.

funny, I still had this open from when I saw it mentioned in another thread on HN

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Debunking disinfo takes significantly more energy than it did to create it, although I have no more than anecdata to back it up I have yet to find anyone who disagrees.

So, I too would like to believe that the truth prevails but imo it only does so when its champions are incredibly persistent.

> Covid disinformation got people killed.

If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's their problem.

Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual.

Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to it happening.

YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. Their safest option, is to disallow it.

> YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube.

YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also hurt YouTube.

I don't think that is so certain - or a viable alternative would be competing with them.

Evidently not very much.

Even if we assume that's true (everything I've seen says it isn't), then a sole individual always affects others. Humans do not exist as lone monks in the hills, generally speaking. When they are ill, it affects their workplaces, it affects their families, it affects their friends. When they die, it's worse - it affects all of those, but also has tail effects on the health industry.

Nothing you do, ever, is in isolation. So nothing you do, ever, will not affect someone else. Pretending that everyone is a sole unit, to excuse behaviour, has never made sense.

I mean, ok. Everything is connected to everything else, true enough. That seems a bit vague. Do you have a specific example to illustrate what you are talking about? Because the 'disinformation' that I saw being banned was typically people with PhDs in vaguely related fields talking about scientific papers. Disagreeing with them seems like a fair play, deplatforming them seems actually damaging. If I can't listen to people with PhDs to learn about academic papers because everything is interconnected then something has gone rather off the rails.

The disinformation I saw turned into accidental deaths. By attempting to treate the virus with alcohol, horse tranquilisers, and more. And those deaths are verified.

People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.

Even if you don't care about those people, what about the people who would be affected by them? A would-be bomb-maker might only blow themselves up, or they may kill many in a crowd. Somebody walking around with a deadly pathogen infects and kills others. Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense. Individual freedom ends at the point at which it causes real harm to other people.

Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let stupid people face the consequences of their poor choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and their choices.

> Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense

Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught Covid and died from it?

My impression from the official figures is that in most countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.

Well, it's CERTAINLY not ZERO... I recall seeing numerous articles about overweight children dying of it, for example

Remember that even polio only put like 1% of its victims into an iron lung

I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with GP, but I would imagine they would argue that an overweight kid is not "otherwise healthy children."

And I would argue that lives have value even when people have preexisting medical conditions.

> I would argue that lives have value even when people have preexisting medical conditions

(Otherwise healthy) school-age children - and younger adults - always faced a very low risk from Covid-19, and we had solid statistical data on this from at least May 2020 onwards.

Maybe we need to look at where our decision-makers get their information, and their incentives?

Again, that's all fine and great. However, many people are not "otherwise healthy" today, and nobody knows who is going to be "otherwise healthy" tomorrow.

I certainly don't disagree with that, and I would imagine there aren't many people who would, but it is not in any way an argument against how many otherwise healthy children died of covid.

If you want to make an argument that an overweight child should still be considered otherwise healthy, that would be a welcome and relevant argument, and also an interesting one.

I am saying that narrowing the discussion to "otherwise healthy children" is a reductive to a silly degree. The point is to protect all children, many of which are not otherwise healthy, or for that matter, may become unhealthy at some point.

> The point is to protect all children

You'd close schools to protect a minority of children with comorbidities from a virus which doesn't threaten the vast majority of children, knowing that school closures will definitely damage all children?

Umm.

Is it really true about "vast majority"? In US, at least, it seems that the number of children with comorbidities such as obesity would actually be pretty high. You could argue that it's still a minority so long as it's under 50%, but I think that closing schools to protect, say, 20% of kids from a virus that can kill them is eminently reasonable.

Nobody suggested anything of that sort in this entire thread.

Presented as fact without evidence, preemptively dismissing contrary evidence from the most likely source to have the historical data. I'd love to see your sources for the risk of severe lifelong injury or death of polio vs the flu.

So many caveats to this comment...

> "otherwise healthy"

Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their lives matter too.

> caught Covid

You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and what have you.

No, it's everyone's. Herd immunity can only be achieved if a sufficiently large part of the population is vaccinated. Also, and I know basic empathy is a foreign concept nowadays, but what if I wished for my fellow to not die of a preventable disease because a grifter sold them on an insane idea?

there is no long term herd immunity with coronaviruses; which is why they are often use in disaster prevention scenarios...

what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people die and then go "we have herd immunity" as part of your survivor bias

only solution that works most of the time, regardless of pathogen (including covid): air filtration (respirators and/or whole room)

Herd immunity is not a direct goal of vaccination, protection of the individual being vaccinated is. If someone needs protection, then they should get vaccinated!

I am not sure about America but in India, I was a child during covid, 7th grade - 8th grade and i didn't have a vaccine but my school students just one grade above us were called in school and they were asked for vaccine.

Though, to be fair, my whole family caught a "virus" during 2nd phase except my father but we didn't go to hospital and just bed rest for 2-3 days. My family really were skeptical of vaccine but personally I don't mind vaccines and would prefer it.

Even more, why did we REQUIRE them to be vaccinated for COVID.

On the contrary, for the overwhelming majority of children you're absolutely right, they didn't have serious risk from COVID-19, which makes your question a good one, not a rhetorical one.

Regardless, herd immunity was not a serious possibility at any point (given the high Rº and lack of a vaccine that could prevent transmission), which, considering this was known very early on makes your question, again, a good one not a rhetorical one, despite your intent.

Finally, regardless of herd immunity, at risk individuals would still require vaccination, which makes the herd immunity as a goal, again, irrelevant, which is where I started. It's a nice by-product.

Unfortunately, thus far, Covid19 has been through too many rapid changes for natural immunity to be effective. [0] The earlier forms allowed for it, but the evolution of the virus has outstripped most natural defences.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

They attack different things in the virus. Often multiple things at once. Which really should not be surprising.

You got it backwards: the vaccines specifically targeted only the spike protein, while natural infection created different antibodies against all parts of the virus.

Novavax COVID-19 vaccine never targeted specifically the spike protein, and instead focused on boosting the creation of various different antibodies. It is also the least effective.

The current breed of mRNA vaccines targets the spike protein, and the TRIM21 gene. Some of them also attack the S protein directly.

All of them work to boost various antibodies. The "targets" are in addition. By targeting the spike protein, the attack hits the RNA of the virus, not just the protein. The entire cellular structure of the virus breaks down. The same with TRIM21 targets.

The bodies natural defences never targeted the spike protein, and instead focuses on the N-layer, not "all parts of the virus". These natural defences rarely manage to cause the viral cell to decay, they tend to work by slowing reproduction instead.

Novavax's vaccine was also spike-protein-only, the difference between theirs and the mRNA ones was they created it artificially in moths then extracted it for the vaccine instead of generating inside the human body.

sadly getting infected just means the virus will nuke your immune system (not to mention your endothelium)

> Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold.

For example, YouTube currently has quite a lot of really good videos on harm reduction for drug users (and probably also a bunch that are not very good and/or directly misleading). I would expect all of such videos to be removed if such a child protection law was passed, because any neutral discussion of drug use apart from total condemnation is typically perceived as encouragement. That would deprive people of informative content which could otherwise have saved their lives.

All these concerns are muddled by thinking about Youtube as the example, since it is such a blind meta machine optimising for ad revenue, it’s already actively pushing all kinds of harmful content.

The problem with any laws for a good purpose is that, even if you can get everyone to agree on the general statement of a good purpose, there are disagreements on what actually counts as achieving the goal from both a moral and a scientific level.

For example, providing information on how to do something harmful X more safely might increase the risk of people doing X. On the moral side, someone might argue that even 1 more person doing X is worse than the reduction in harm of the others doing X. On the scientific side, there is likely not direct evidence to the exact numbers (ethical concerns with such research and all that), so you'll have some people disagreeing on how much the harm is increased or reduced and different numbers can both be reasonable but lead to different conclusions given the lack of direct research.

This all becomes supercharged when it comes to children, and you'll find people not even be consistent in their modes of thinking on different topics (or arguably they are consistent, but basing it off of unsaid unshared assumptions and models that they might not even be consciously aware of, but this then gets into a bunch of linguistic and logic semantics).

Big tech censorship disgusts me. Everything is completely backwards from what it should be, and the sheer scale of those platforms (bigger than many countries by population or money) prevents individual people and even governments from exercising meaningful democratic oversight. So these platforms congregate hundreds of millions of people and whatever their CEOs and/or douche tech bros in SV decide is what becomes law.

Another example: videos about the holocaust or WWII atrocities. Every one of them demonetised and hidden from recommendations because it touches a horrifying topic. Harms the children? On the contrary, nothing more important in an age of global fascism waves than a lesson in how it went last time.

Meanwhile the whole platform is a cesspool of addictive brainrot, gambling ads, turbo-consumerist toy unboxing videos, etc. Things that are actually truly harmful to kids. These are not restricted, these are promoted!

War is peace etc etc. Good is evil and evil is great. Everything is backwards.

I hate this so much.

The thing to understand is your last paragraph: everything big ads does is unsurprisingly focused toward making people into worse versions of themselves. You wouldn't let kids go to a casino or porn site for educational material. Don't let them use youtube either.

It could be that someone happened to post educational videos to the porn site. If so you'd might as well download them while you have the chance, but don't mistake their existence for some indication that that's what the site is for. They're still less than 0.1% of the videos, and you'd need to specifically search for them or be linked to them to find them. Assume you'll need to look elsewhere for educational material. e.g. there are 10s of thousands of results for videos for "Holocaust" on worldcat.

There's extensions to remove or hide recommendations. Problem solved.

YouTube has too much information to just ignore for education. It's the most efficient method of learning for many topics and for many people.

It's closer to PBS than a porn site imo. (The idea of a porn site with YouTube's puritan guidelines sounds pretty funny.)

Problem is still not solved because search also returns a lot of garbage, and you don't want kids to be on a site that's 99% garbage. Xvideos could have a large library of science and history videos while still being 99% porn. Like I said, adults should download and curate the good stuff but recognize they're still in the seedy part of town, shouldn't let kids go there, and shouldn't expect it to be a platform for learning. That's just not its purpose. In fact youtube's purpose is basically the opposite of personal growth.

You can get literal pbs at pbs.org for $5/month, or your local library for free.

The problem is that YouTube and Google on a whole actively encourage the use of YouTube in schools, home schooling, and education in general. Google workspace for education is free for educational institutions. They also have a curated YouTube kids app with a giant feed of brain rot that they consider to be safe for kids, but only because the content doesn’t show anything graphic or have bad language.

On the other hand, porn services are (generally) actively blocked in educational institutions, so the content, regardless of its educational quality will never be suggested to kids because they are not a target audience. (Not to mention the legal trouble these services would have from actively enticing minors) I doubt we’ll see “PornHub for kids” our RedTube signing a contract with Blippi or Miss Rachel.

Half their business is propaganda (the other half being surveillance); of course they represent themselves as something positive. Recognize them for what they are. Point it out to others. Advocate for banning them in schools. Warn parents that youtube kids is not appropriate for children. They do near zero curation. They don't commission creation of educational content. They are nothing like PBS (as another commenter compared them to). More generally, ads are not child appropriate. These platforms have some useful content, but on the whole they undermine teaching virtues, and in fact their entire purpose is to push the opposite.

I agree 100%, and in another comment I also suggested an alternative to child protection laws, namely that we should severely restrict the viability of the ad tech business model altogether. While it does make certain niche content creation financially viable which otherwise wouldn't, in the grand scheme of things the negative externalities outweigh the good.

Once you normalize vague enforcement around "problematic" content, the net just keeps widening

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.

I mean, this is just capitalism.

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.

> According to which laws?

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.

> 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.

>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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

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.

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)

Being in favor of CSAM on YouTube would definitely be an extremist opinion in nearly all societies and cultures, I believe.

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?

>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.

> you will see it play out in real time in the news.

Which is always fair and accurate and is in no way under similar pressure from advertisers. So this is an awesome yardstick to use.

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.

> Users and advertisers started this debate.

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?

You ignore more than you answer.

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).

But that's the thing, when have hate speech laws led to repressive censorship, ever? It is a slippery slope, since there's no example to point to.

I'll link another comment of mine which expands on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200533

What confuses me is how TV App providers are going to make this work. How is the interface going to work to allow me to use YouTube on the TV whilst checking my age, and ensuring that it's me using the TV each time it's turned on? And how is a TV different to a computer? It's completely impractical.

In my experience with OFCOM, Child Safety is just the gateway to a vague list bullet points including “terrorism” and “hateful” content (vaguely defined); what could go wrong??

UK's predator network was also built to protect kids but in the end is only used for copyright infringement

If you replace "Covid" with "child porn" or "animal cruelty" or "anti-semitism" you'll see how bad this argument is.

Those 3 are not even comparable to each other...

Oh you don't think a plague that killed over 7 million people rates w/ animal cruelty?

You sound like the people who argue for disallowing any communist speech or ideology from being discussed because "communism killed 100 million people" or something.

Like yes covid killed millions. What's your point exactly? Do you have any proof that YouTube taking down videos that didn't agree with how the situation was handled actually saved lives? Or is your argument just that if anyone disagreed (even for stupid reasons) publicly with covid policies, they are somehow causing people to die? Again, do you have any actual proof?

I'm gonna skip way to the end of this:

* masking saved lives

* vaccines saved lives

* kids could spread COVID-19

* even young, otherwise totally healthy people died from COVID-19

We knew all these things basically immediately, but because of intense brainrot tons of misinformation spread on the internet. YouTube pulling down videos about COVID-19 misinformation saved lives. The end.

So, no actual proof? And actually no, at least where I live, for the first two weeks masks were strongly discouraged and were said to be useless by our local government (Quebec). That was for the first 2 weeks of the pandemic, which were the most important in terms of spread. Even hospital staff were told to not wear them. I'm glad YouTube didn't ban anyone who didn't agree with our local government's opinion on masks then.

Also, that's funny since again, here in Quebec and in most of the world kids were back to school by autumn 2020. Yet it took more than a year after that for children in the US to go back to school. I guess American experts just knew more than everyone else. It's as if things aren't as cut and dry as you make them out to be.

It's truly bewildering how people on HN can have powerfully strong beliefs that are dispelled by the simplest of Google searches.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258979182...

https://www.afro.who.int/news/implications-social-media-misi...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10578995/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10122563/

etc etc etc etc

These are two different, but slightly related topics, which are being conflated with a third.

Google is not censoring based on moral grounds here. Its purely financial. If they are caught hosting "how to circumvent DRM", then a number of licensing agreements they have with major IP owners that allows them to profit off music, video and other IP disappears. Most of the take down stuff is either keyword search or automatic based on who is reporting.

The Online safety act is utterly flawed, to the point that even ofcom really don't know how to implement it. They are reliant on consultants from delloite or whatever, who also have no fucking clue. The guidelines are designed for large players who have a good few million in the bank, because in all reality thats how ofcom are going to take to court.

There are a number of thing the act asks to happen, most of them are common sense, but require named people to implement (ie moderate, provide a way to report posts, allow transparent arbitration, etc, etc) along with defined policies. In the same way that charities are allowed to have a "reasonable" GDPR policy, it seems fair that smaller site should also have that. but this would go down badly with the noise makers.

As for age protection, they also really don't know how to do it practically. This means that instead of providing a private (as in curtains no peaking) age assurance API, they are relying on websites to buy in a commercial service, which will be full of telemetry for advertising snooping.

Then there is moral/editorial censorship, which is what you go to a media platform for. Like it or not, you choose a platform because the stuff you see is what you expect to see there, even if you don't like it. Youtube is totally optimising for views, even if it means longterm decline. (same with facebook, instgram and tiktok)

I think your position is quite simplistic and completely ignore all the issues around YT pushing all kind of scam/misinformation which has tremendous impact (EX: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10226045/ or https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/12/youtube-i...)

Could try to separate the pure hosting part of YT from the recommendation but since the home page heavily mix recommendations and the subscription page see almost no usage (Technology connection mention 4% traffic), I'm not sure if it makes sense to still consider YT as simple hosting.

And last point I'll make, I believe the fact that their moderation is such a crap shot job is mainly a reflection that it's not a priority.

You already need to remove content if you don't want to be overrun with endless gore and porn videos and that type of thing.

> Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance

But, short of such an obvious breach, the rules regarding what can and can't be said, broadcast, forwarded, analysed are thought to be kept deliberately vague. In this way, everyone is on their toes and the authorities can shut down what they like at any time without having to give a reason.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41523073

read this report:

"The White House Covid Censorship Machine"

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115561/documents/...

During the pandemic there was a lot of content taken down if it in any way went against the mainstream narrative of the virus or the vaccines. You couldn't discuss concerns or risks of the vaccine, or discuss any alternative therapeutics or treatments.

I want to say you also couldn't discuss the lab leak hypothesis for a while, but I can't remember a specific example for sure so maybe I'm misremembering that one.

Good. We should be praising Google for that decision. That made many bad ones but that seems obviously good and saved a number of lives

> obviously good and saved a number of lives

You would really have to show your work on that claim.

"Good" is a judgement call, it may be obviously good to one and obviously bad to another.

Claiming that a number of lives were saved by aggressive YouTube censorship of specific content is also quite a claim. What is the number, and how can you show a direct link between censorship and any one life saved?

It's really quite simple, and we don't even require proof, just logic.

It's plainly true that less masking, less isolation, and less vaccination leads to increased risk of death or injury to Covid. Therefore, having more content promoting those things must lead to increased risk of death or injury to Covid.

We really don't need to over-intellectualize these things. Saying things that are just not true, which increases someone's risk, results in lives lost.

It would be the same as if I made a PSA telling people to not wear a seatbelt. Or to not wear sunscreen. But if I did that, there would be zero dispute, no? So I think we all understand the concept.

> It's plainly true that less masking, less isolation, and less vaccination leads to increased risk of death or injury to Covid.

When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.

Our vaccine tests done during the pandemic also not focused on risk of death or injury, they were focused on the frequency of participants notifying of symptoms.

> We really don't need to over-intellectualize these things. Saying things that are just not true, which increases someone's risk, results in lives lost.

I don't see it as over intellectualizing. To claim something is not true requires knowing what is true. We still can't make such claims on many of the pandemic issues, but in the middle of it we absolutely couldn't make such claims.

We also can't make an assumption that a claim being false directly leads to deaths. I can make plenty of false claims that would have absolutely no impact on anything, to say such claims must have led to deaths is ridiculous.

> When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.

Well... they exist. All the covid vaccines were tried against placebo, and I mean true placebo as in saline. But even if you're distrustful of that it's just common sense.

I don't want to get the flu. Okay, the less people I'm around the lower the chance I have of getting the flu.

When I was immunocompromised during cancer treatment I greatly limited the amount of people I'm in contact with because that obviously lowers your risk of contracting an illness.

Again it's just not... rocket science.

If I say "you don't need to wear seat belts" and then that results in a bunch of people not wearing seat belts, then there's gonna be a lot more brains on the interstate.

Well... we know seat belts are effective. We know isolation is effective. We know vaccines are effective. So put two and two together. After a certain point it feels like being contrarian for the sake of it.

And, as an aside, most people are truly unbelievably bad at risk-assessment. People can't get it to click in their head that doing risky thing doesn't mean bad things will happen to them.

You can party, ignore all the vaccines, have people spit in your mouth, whatever - and be perfectly fine. Everything in life is risk analysis. I'm not saying that not getting a vaccine or not following guidelines will kill you. But it will increase your risk.

But you, your family, hell, everyone you know, might be perfectly fine. Or they might end up like that guy I knew in highschool who died at 20 MPH because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. It's all risk analysis.

"Think of the children" is the primary justification for so many abusive laws and efforts. The public is buying into it, despite the simplest solution being: parents should pay more attention to how they're raising their kids.

"We don't have the time". True. We've improved the efficiency of an average worker by orders of magnitude each $TIME_PERIOD for about two centuries; yet the length of a mean working day has long remained the same. "You dirty communist". Sure, go suffer.

This system is abusive. We continue to agree to the status quo, because we're constantly being manipulated over the much less important things, like religion, the gays, or the immigrants. You can't get spiteful over the ruling class if you can be kept happy through being spiteful to your neighbor.

The debate shouldn't be "to remove or not". The debate should be "who should decide what to remove".

We've had media laws for decades. Internet is underregulated to a crazy degree, so the people who make the decisions are unaccountable and even unknowable. It would be much saner if the people deciding this were judges and elected officials.

The way we allow a few oligarchs to decide what information 99% of the world consume for hours every day, and just let them do whatever they want, and don't even tax them in practice - it's just absurd.

Free speech is for people not for corporations. And it's certainly not for corporations to enforce.

People defending hacker ethos and free internet pretend internet is still like in 90s. If you do have your own self-hosted blog - sure - be a free hacker.

But if you have million customers - you're not a free-spirited hacker. You're a media mogul abusing unregulated loophole. States should act accordingly.

> children should be protected.

I get how this sounds unambiguously good - but I hate this excuse. As I see it, if you don't allow kids some danger (unmonitored play, freedom of movement) you end up with adults that are completely unable to assess dangers correctly and want themselves (and everyone else) to be nannied by the government/legislation/etc.

There really are dangers out there, and it is not a bad thing to engage with them to be able to build independence, rather than trying to edit the world to conform to a (mistaken, protected) idea of reality.