[The New Yorker] Alex Jones, the First Amendment, and the Digital Public Square

Too bad that ThinkRover was taken already.

 

The change my mind is meh, but the QA session is well done.

 

No. The government set standard and practices all the time. It's up to people and companies to follow or not. They aren't forced to do anything.

 

This is not the end of the end nor the beginning of the end. This is the end of the beginning.

 

Ahh, the 'women enjoy being raped' guy finally got banned for hate speech?

Fortunately for you, you can always go to b****ute and watch his 'thought-provoking' videos about how women having the actual freedom to choose their partners is destroying 'western civilization'. This bastion of intellectualism can still post his videos to the internet it seems. Sounds like ISIS would enjoy a lot of his content.

 

There's plenty of places for people to vent with other likeminded people. Discord is now valued 2B and teens are flocking to it without any supervision.

The greater issue for Columbia Journalism Review's op/ed is how Big Dreadful Social Media is determining their rules of censorship. It's more of an ethical standpoint than a legal one imo.

Reshifting OS's analogy, what's the difference between censoring a posted pic of two topless dudes kissing vs censoring posts voicing extreme and hateful displeasure over two dudes kissing?

Tech giants are making these decisions non-stop and use algorithms made up by mostly pasty geeks with a Father knows best attitude.

As consumers, transparency and accountability are definitely things to be valued and to be fought for.

I liken the hubris of Silly Valley to the Quant craze of IBs before 08...

 

Well looks like BPS got his youtube channel back so people are going to have whine about their free speech stuff elsewhere...

Looks like he doesn't even believe in Free Speech himself...

 

Is taking videos with someone's content that same as a free speech issue? I would assume it is more of a copy right violation, but I don't know the context of what was used. He is wrong to threaten someone on that if it was fair use.

 

It is a copyright claim that he was threatening but it's entirely lame to do it. Basically that this person (Shaun) made response videos which included clips/audio from his video which is something a lot of political youtubers do. Youtube has a few rules about how you can do this legally...but this is Youtube so...

 

Bret Weinstein always has cogent thoughts.

 

His entire narrative is built on a premise of selective enforcement based on ideology and gives no evidence for it.

Famous liberals have been demonitized on YouTube plenty of times. The selective enforcement probably is based in popularity and exposure of the channel rather than political ideology. Watch Da is Packman on Crowder YouTube saga. He is more nuanced.

 

I don't think you and I watched the same video. There is no "narrative" here.

That is basically what Weinstein said. His "low posted speed limit" analogy is a useful one. The rules aren't biased, but the rules are also imperfect to the point that is allows for imperfect enforcement. Crowder is facing unusual scrutiny due to his celebrity for certain, but the flaws in the enforcement mechanism leave the door open for bias. This is where the friction occurs.

I follow Pakman. I was not impressed with his subjective take (value judgements about Crowder's remarks), but his objective take (that the rules imposed to squash liberal enemies will ultimately be used against liberals) is correct. This is where Weinstein and most other hardcore liberals align, in that the act of drawing the line is often more harmful than not having a line at all.

His point about how this is only going to get worse as tech improves and consolidates and eats up more of our day-to-day activities also should not be overlooked. We may reach a point yet where corporations give us more of our "freedom" than the government does.

 

I guess we have entirely different paradigms when it comes to human rights at least when it comes to.speech. For me, violation of free speech entails criminal prosecution and punishment. I don't believe we have a basic right to have our voices blasted on a megaphone and make profit of it. It's not an inherent right of humans.

Free speech is hindered when citizens are fearful of types of speech out of fear of detention and prosecution. Being famous and making money from being famous is not a right, it's an entitlement.

 

This is kind of a non-sequitur (doesn't have much to do with the video I posted) and a strawman (does not represent my beliefs).

I've never approached this as a "freedom of speech" issue. I have never said anyone has a "right" to YouTube in any way. I've made that quite clear in the posts preceding this.

My concern here has always been two-fold:

1) The subjective valuation of Crowder's behavior (in other words, are YouTube's actions against him justified by their own rules and previous enforcement of those rules)
2) The ever-growing dependence we have on certain technologies and platforms that puts a tremendous amount of pressure on them as arbiters that they quite frankly don't want and in most cases can't handle

 

I guess I followed your statement incorrectly when you posted this:

Again, we as a society can determine the influence of Youtube. We as a society can decide to read rather than watch content in order to obtain information. I know. Crazy idea. Blame society for giving Youtube so much power in consolidating speech. We can easily resort to reading material and Crowder can author his own compelling books.

 

Imagine a world where there is a book publisher that publishes 99.98% of all books that get read.

That's the world we live in right now with the marketplace dominance of YouTube, Twitter, etc in their respective fields.

Again -- it's easy to just say "go build your own YouTube", but it's not a practical solution.

This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, or they want to dismiss it as a natural phenomenon.

Natural or not, it could be very bad for us as a society, so we should probably think harder about it.

 

Publishers are actually responsible for the content they publish legally. Do you want that for YouTube because that will just increase their censorship due to legal liability.

 

This is another core issue. Platform vs publisher. We're in a situation where our technology has outpaced our legal system and developed new scenarios and issues for which our laws don't have clear (or best) answers for yet. Like I said, this is a really messy problem that has far reaching consequences and I don't think we can dismiss it so easily.

 

LOL!

I see you're back to sniffing paint.