Anti-vaccine activists, or any activists for that matter, are completely free to post their videos anywhere else they want. Hell, they can even set up their own video site, and publish thousands, millions, tens of millions of videos championing their cause. Why does a private company has to feature every agenda, every viewpoint, even ones they deem to be extremely harmful to society? Just because they got big enought to be global? If I set up my own youtube-like website, and I only have one thousand visits a day, will anyone argue that I'm obliged to show stuff I don't want? Is anyone saying the same thing about Vimeo? Youtube doesn't have to show isis beheadings, why should it be forced to show unscientific propaganda? If there were a movement claiming the polio and smallpox vaccines destroyed our immune systems, and we should re-introduce these diseases to the public at large so we could develop our natural defenses, should Youtube be force to publish their videos?
I'm sorry, but what you're saying is not censorship.
You are not getting the point and that you have such a naive mentality towards it is disconcerting because the consequences of your mindset breaking through as it seems to be has dire consequences for everyone, you included. You think dissidents have the ability to "post their videos anywhere else they want" but in reality the system that YouTube is deeply entrenched in and even essentially plays a leading role in actively attacks and sabotages and undermines those very alternatives you claim people can post things to.
This is not at all about the freedom of YouTube, it is about suppression of dissent and really the surreptitious persecution of dissidents.
What is really going on here is no different than when any other tyrannical regime disappears people in the real world, or even when the internet cries out in pain when, e.g., China silences people online. You may think they are being sent off to post and live on the internet somewhere else, but when they leave your sight form the bubble you live in, they are only then even more persecuted and attacked on a constant basis where you aren't even paying attention and are none the wiser to what is really going on.
In the end, "i told you so" will be utterly useless and worthless when the trap snaps shut and they come after you too once they have snuffed out and silenced everyone else they don't like, because this tyrannical authoritarian mindset is never satisfied and will always actively seek out new "dissidents" to persecute and one day you will find yourself on the wrong side too. It's just a matter of time, not whether it will happen.
YouTube can take the videos down, I don't think many people are arguing against that. The issue is that it is a bad idea to. This is one of many rather urgent signals to people who don't agree with Google that they should be setting up or looking for alternatives, and rather urgently.
Oh, I agree that it is a bad idea to do it. I just don't think a private company not putting a video on their site is what censorship is. I wish Youtube would not take those videos down, as they're not illegal. Anti-vaxxers will diminish with better public education, more focused on critical thinking and science literacy, and not because there are no more videos about it on Youtube. The videos will always find their way to reach their audience's screens.
> Anti-vaccine activists, or any activists for that matter, are completely free to post their videos anywhere else they want.
Really? Youtube happens to be the only platform that is restricting content? Even if that were true, the reason this matters is Youtube is a virtual monopoly when it comes to online video. Forget the technicalities. Yes, it's privately owned. Yes, there are other site. Yes, users could set up their own competing website. But, in practice, which is all that matters, Youtube is the one place people go for videos.
I feel like this always gets brought up, as if the slippery slope is a natural inevitability. What if it isn’t? What if you can ban actively harmful content without that ban spreading?
You are right, we need to ban the actively harmful content. Let's start with the stuff you like and want to hear that is problematic. You like cooking content? Well cooking unapproved dishes is associated with obesity. Banned! You like hiking and being outdoors? Well, it disturbs animal habitat and ecosystems. Banned! You oppose and want to speak out about the mandatory microphones and cameras in every room of your house? Well, that clearly interferes with the greater good of catching people trying to commit suicide, avert domestic harm, make sure you are raising your child properly and in accordance with expert approved government requirements, and to make sure you are getting your mandatory amount of exercise of the required energy expenditure every day in order to not be a burden on society ……
But no one is saying these contents should be banned. You can publish it, everywhere! Create a hundred sites and post it, feel free! Now, if I don't want it on my site, why can't I take it down?
You're saying that if I create a video site for videos of healthy dishes, that I should not be able to take down a video recipe for something that I think is very unhealthy.
London, circa 1830. Nobody is saying you have to work 70 hours weeks in a cotton factory. You can grow your own cotton, feel free to process it any way you want! As long as the attention market concentrates in the hands of a handful of megacorporations by virtue of economies of scale, the freedom you talk about is not very tangible.
I wish I didn't have to work 40 hours a week. Can I just go to some random plot of arable land that isn't cultivated and start farming? Can I just process it any way I want? US, circa 2021.
But those are all obviously, patently absurd. You’re proving my point. The slippery slope argument immediately descends into hysteria and pretends like people aren’t capable of understanding context.
You're embarrassing yourself now and you've proving the point about utter hysteria.
> the government is mandating the injection of untested corporate concoctions
They've been tested. Thoroughly. The results of those tests are public. And what's with the "corporate" scare word, there? Am I suppose to want my vaccine to have been brewed up by my neighbor or my local mom and pop drug store?
> you have been under prison lockdown home confinement for essentially 18 months now
No I haven't. No-one has. The lockdown lasted longer than two weeks but it finished last summer. Since then I've been shopping, eating at restaurants (usually outdoors, but indoors is available) and seeing friends. My children are at school, many people are back in their offices.
> they will come for you too one day, they always do once you have outlived your usefulness.
I'm going to go ahead and quote yourself back to you: you seem to have lost all ability to objectively see what is going on.
But yeah, yeah, I know. We're all idiot sheep, you're the only one with the 20:20 vision to see what the rest of us idiots don't. It couldn't possibly be that we're all informed and came to a different conclusion to you. Nope, not possible.
The problem is, who decides what actively harmful content is? For anyone in favor of this ban, imagine if Google had an anti-vaccine CEO, and was banning all pro-vaccine content for being "actively harmful" instead.
Then pro-vaccine people everywhere could start using google less and start talking about how Google has harmful/unscientific stances toward content, etc.
So what? Let them curate whatever they want. There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others. I can create a mailing list and send to everyone on it. Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?
I've long said, Flickr's solution works pretty well. They have groups, you can form any group you want and set your own group rules. You can set filters and you can opt to view "adult" content or not (take me back to kittens").
It's all about opting-in.
You have certain taste, go find that group or found your own.
You don't like certain groups, don't become a member of such group.
You want to have your own private invite only group, go ahead, create your own invite only group.
Flickr never achieved the prominence of FB or IG, or flash in the pan like Tumblr, but I think they built it from the ground up to provide a decent service for everyone with a light touch. For illegal stuff, yeah, you get kicked out, that's legit. Need to escalate to site admins, that's possible too but only if the group admins are acting in bad faith.
If spam filtering didn't let recipients opt out, and permanently deleted emails instead of putting them in a spam folder, then it would be censorship too.
> Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?
It certainly is censorship, but users opt in.
> There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others.
Its not just YouTube. Its their platform, and your hosting provider, and your DNS provider, and your payment processor, and your bank. Consider what happened to Parler.
Lets not cheer on the loss of a public good because we could theoretically replace it some day.
So, I presume you would be totally okay if Youtube one day decided they just wanted to deplatform anything such as "tax the rich" or "defund the police" or "no child left behind" or any talk about Mark Zuckerberg, just because they can?
What if one day FB is under investigation and FB decides it will only carry FB propaganda and not let any dissenting voices, would that be totally cool?
Yes, I'd be okay, and I would stop using them, as I have done with FB, and start looking elsewhere. Like I said before, I don't agree with Youtube taking anti-vaxx videos down, but I do think they, as a private company, should be allowed to. If they take enough content down, they'll end up losing users.
> What will be the next frontier they take on a their responsibility to curate?
Social Justice. Your very existence as part of society affects others, therefore anything that you say or think must conform to the standards of Social Justice the Platform has deemed necessary. If you don't like it, go found your own Platform.
Your argument is that censorship is good in certain situations. That is true, especially in the beginning. The reason why censorship is a four letter word is scope creep. There are little reasons to believe that Youtube is somehow immune to scope creep, once the mechanisms and the precedent are set.
I'm not for Youtube taking the videos down, I just don't think a private company taking a video down from their site is censorship.
And my take is, if Youtube starts limiting content too much, it will end up losing viewership, which will migrate to competing sites/apps.
"Youtube censors antivax content" is a true statement. It is not state censorship, but censorship nonetheless. Good thing / bad thing, for Youtube / for society at large, short term / long term, we can argue that. But let's get our facts & terminology straight.
This is semantics. In this case HN is censoring opinions right now through its moderation. Every forum on the internet censors. Your spam filter blocks others speech from reaching you etc.
While HN would kindly steer us towards polite curious conversation, the range of topics themselves is wide open. I have yet to see a site-wide blanket ban on, for example, adblockers. It is a contentious topic in the industry, there are entrenched trillion dollar interests that would rather have adblockers dissapear, and yet we can have a hopefully polite and informative conversation about the relative merits of subtopics in this area.
Yep, that's definitely hypocrisy. If you think a law or court ruling should be repealed or overturned, you shouldn't be advocating for other things using it as precedent in the meantime.
How is this hypocrisy? The cake was about whether or not places should be able to restrict access based on protected classes (and in particular sexual orientation).
I'd say yes, this is why. I think that since the FAANG's are so successful that they replaced the public square with themselves, they should have to preserve the freedom of speech just like the old public square used to.
