Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?
MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the worrying trend of strangling free speech"
"My speech at conference was carefully researched, wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence."
"Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill”
"The unambiguous attempt by YouTube to censor my speech is a warning."
"If YouTube is happy to attempt to silence elected Members of Parliament, then they are also happy to censor anyone uploading content to their services."
The idea that a member of parliament should enjoy at least a a much freedom of speech over private media as the broader public actually deserves some challenge.
In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite.
As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox.
It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian.
When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.
>Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?
How is that 'the best'. Only Silicon Valley thinks that is a valid legal excuse for anything. If you can't operate within the law you can't operate.
The US better start regulating their companies or you end up with a trade war due to the whole world including Europe just kicking these vendors out of the market entirely and permanently
> Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI,
Imo that would be the worst, because a human doing it can be corrected (more training, revised check-lists etc.), but afaik AI moderating in its current form is a black hole and it will remain a black hole for the foreseeable future.
Yeah it seems likely to me to be an overzealous AI decision, given the background noise of anti-vaccine disinformation on youtube these days I wouldn't be surprised if they've turned up their algorithms at the cost of more false and marginal positives
What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online (adds massive liability for illegal/'harmful' content if it isn't removed quickly so companies will most likely block more content as a result)
> wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence.
Much of the problem comes down to the fact that the "science" changes quite frequently. When new evidence appears, which updates our Bayesian Priors ( airborne vs aerosol/fomites, vaccine type effectiveness, delta variant transmittivity, ventilator usefulness, lab leak hypothesis, comorbidity statistics, etc ) the Powers That Be rely on the pre-update "science" to determine if censorship is warranted.
One can argue if censorship of "disinformation" is a societal good, and I won't litigate that general matter here, but it becomes a particular point of contention if what is classified as disinformation changes with every Lancet publication.
This is a government which is in the process of criminalising protest under a deliberately vague 'public nuisance' clause. They only want freedom of expression for their views and not for those that oppose them.
Can someone explain to me how this makes sense when they are letting insulate britain block motorways? Like which protests are they trying to stop?
I assume blocking motorways is illegal already, yet the police are doing nothing, which is leading dangerously to vigilante justice as per some videos, which is only a question of time before it turns really violent.
Wtf is the UK government doing? Why do they need more powers when they don't use the current ones? Or is it for "other" types of protests? Shutting down motorways is fine.
David Davis is a backbench MP, he isn't a Government minister. I would sooner eat my own eyeballs than vote Conservative, no matter who the candidate, but Davis does have a principled track-record in voting for civil liberties.
Are there any five eyed nations where I can get a group of my friends together then block a major arterial road to protest some issue without expecting to be arrested?
And just to try and be helpful for the direction of the debate...
The issue isn't that YouTube can do this. They can, that is cool. Free world. The issue that is if they are going to do this everyone should respond. Nobody ever vetted YouTube as the arbiter of truth. They are not qualified for this, and they are going to screw up really badly.
If they're going to set themselves up for failure, we all have to make sure we're standing outside the blast zone when they screw up really badly.
Sadly, YouTube is among Google best products. Myself do lots of cognitive load to avoid google services when possible, but yt has not rival amount quality of content and application. Im even paying for premium now. I'm paying with my dollars because there is no alternative except maybe the internet library..
> The issue that is if they are going to do this everyone should respond
"Everyone should" just doesn't work. It doesn't happen. The vast majority of people don't care, and the few who care are not going to change their habits and jump to a niche platform that maybe solves their problem. Network effects and the comfort of familiarity too big to ignore.
> Nobody ever vetted YouTube as the arbiter of truth.
The institutions we set up to arbitrate truth - the courts - are already swamped beyond belief in many countries.
The problem is that our societal systems of governance have been designed hundreds of years past, when life was focused on a couple dozen kilometers around where one lived. Nowadays, with global instant communication and knowledge available to almost everyone, conflicts and disagreements achieve far, far more reach and impact - and our societal foundations have never been updated to reflect the new reality and its demands.
The US still votes on Tuesdays because of farmers commitments to church and market days in the 19th century (https://www.history.com/news/why-is-election-day-a-tuesday-i...), copyright as a concept dates back to the 1700s, and legal language is so full of Latin and other outdated language it is impossible to understand for normal citizens.
We are witnessing a break-up of society, especially between the old/Boomer generation and the young "digital natives". For us young people, we see the possibilities and dangers of technology - and we see that our societal infrastructure is horribly outdated and the old generation which is in power dragging their feet and doing everything they can to prevent progress.
The only places I can think of that Britain currently "hangs on to" against the will of the inhabitants are arguably Scotland and Northern Ireland, but in both those places about half the population want to continue to belong to the UK.
So it's not obvious to me who you're referring to here.
Smash the tech giants into many little pieces and their market power is reduced to the point that it really is private businesses and none of this matters. youtube_v1 blocks your video, touyube_v2 or v3 or whatever will have it because they are separate and not a cartel as that would be illegal.
The problem is facbook, google, apple, microsoft, etc etc are all vastly too big. If they need to be monolithic (they don't, but let's entertain the argument ) then treat them as a utility the same way we treat natural monopolies of drinking water distribution. Nationalisation is one way. Regulated return and heavily regulated business practise is another. Generally hacking it up into pieces and letting the pieces remain private is preferred when that can be done effectively.
Nobody cares that NBC didn't cover this speech. It's not interesting as a censorship question even if the omission is following the explicit political dictates of their owners (or staff). That's a better place to be all around.
> . youtube_v1 blocks your video, touyube_v2 or v3 or whatever will have it because they are separate and not a cartel as that would be illegal.
You're supposing that youtube_v1, youtube_v2, and youtube_v3 wouldn't all block you. They would, because all three companies would include a cohort of the same activist employees with the same censorious ideology all pushing to cancel the same people at the same time.
And why wouldn't we? That's the situation we have today. People banned from one major social media platform get banned from all major social media platforms pretty quickly. The state even encourages it.
Splitting tech companies won't do any good for censorship resistance on its own. We need common carrier requirements, not more heads on the censorship hydra.
"In PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980), the Supreme Court ruled that California could interpret its state constitution to protect political protesters from being evicted from private property, held open to the public, without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment. In this case, the California court went beyond the federal rule and held that, under the California constitution, a shopping mall owner could not exclude a group of high school students who were engaged in political advocacy. The state court decision has been adopted in one form or another by a substantial minority of states."
It is worth noting, for those outside of the UK that David Davis has an absolutely brilliant track record of saying absolutely asinine nonsense. There's just no substance to what he says. No, I'm not talking about this video (although I have watched it and it's absolutely par for the course). He never talks with substance on any issue, and his main claim to fame was violating a binding vote of the house of commons to provide accurate sector by sector guidance to the house on the impact of Brexit. He was famously quoted as saying "There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside" and equally famous for... editting the reports to remove any references to the downsides of brexit. Needless to say he went on to resign in protest at the deal he himself had negotiated. He's just a hilariously inadequate man.
Having said all this, it sounds like the video was taken down by an over-aggressive automated system rather than some grand conspiracy to censor this incredibly inconsequential (and ahistorical) speech and it was back up within 6 hours.
I'm not surprised. Google cancelled a Ukrainian engineer who had objections to the CRT "fact" that all white people enjoy privilege. Remember that Ukrainians had to suffer Hitler, the Great Famine, Stalin and the Soviet Union.
The insidious mind games that the Google nomenklatura plays are described here, by an honest and harmless person. Highly recommended, also the comment section under the video:
> the CRT "fact" that all white people enjoy privilege
Do you have a source for this? I am very far from knowledgeable about CRT but AFAIK what you've said there is just an incorrect right-wing talking point in the current anti-CRT fervour.
Those who brought out Champagne when Trump was censored... watch out... sooner or later, you'll be the one censored, and no one will be there to help you.
Each time the debate about free speech on social media comes up, people say: "well private platforms, they can censor whatever they want, they are not the government". Of course it only applies to the speech the former do not like: expediency.
Here is a thing: social media grew that big because governments created a legal environment in which social media could grow that big. DMCA, safe harbor, the fact that social media are not liable for the content their users post...
Are these social media entitled to all these favorable laws? My point is, it goes both ways. Yes social media as private companies can censor whatever legal content they want, No the government doesn't have to let them off the hook and doesn't have to keep a favorable legal or fiscal framework for these particular platforms to growth exponentially either...
I'm not saying governments should crack down on these platforms, I'm just saying that ultimately, the legislator makes the laws...
The platforms make money at scale, well how about they become liable "at scale" if the content is public?
Problem here is that the legislators have skipped making laws on this area because of expedience, politicians have hotlines to the big tech where they can call in ask for content to be removed without any transparency or records whatsoever. And not only that big tech are in many cases subsidized by governments, decided by the same politicians that make the calls. We are talking about massive corruption on the highest level.
This new way of governance is not confined to social media but it also been used excessively during the Covid pandemic, instead of doing the hard work of passing legislation in a legislative body, governments are using back channels to pressure companies, NGOs, cities, etc to do their bidding, without any transparency or records.
It is obviously anti-democratic to its core.
Free speech is not absolute, government has the right to censor, however is has to do it properly by passing legislation, using courts and other transparent institutions.
> I'm just saying that ultimately, the legislator makes the laws...
Almost always when this debate is had, it's in the context of the US, where the First Amendment is a _hard_ stop against this sort of thing, but otherwise suggesting that the government have the final say over whatever you are allowed to say isn't historically a very popular suggestion.
Of course, in other jurisdictions, they can pass whatever laws they want, and platforms can choose to comply, comply only locally, withdraw, or pay whatever fines to keep going as they are.
Concerns about liability is why platforms like Youtube are blocking stuff, they're trying to self-police before the government hits them with a big liability hammer.
So I'm not sure really what you're trying to say. You seem to be against safe harbour and laws that make them not liable. You argue that they should 'become liable at scale'. However you seem to be against their attempts to block content such regulations are likely to make them liable for.
Yes of course, I know perfectly well this is an inappropriate example. None of us want it to have been blocked. Probably nobody at Youtube actually wants to block it either, they're just applying their rules inappropriately. In fact it looks like it's already unblocked. But who gets to write the rules and objectively define what is or isn't appropriate?
If you want regulation and liability, edge cases like this are absolutely going to happen and we're going to have to find ways to manage that.
[+] [-] ColinHayhurst|4 years ago|reply
Worth a watch.
Should we "assume the best" by assuming this was taken down by AI, and without human check?
MP says: “This is an outrageous attack on free speech. Throughout the pandemic we've seen blatant attempts by Big Tech to silence opposition voices challenging the conventional wisdom. This episode serves as a further example of the worrying trend of strangling free speech"
"My speech at conference was carefully researched, wholly accurate & backed up with the latest scientific evidence."
"Govnt must stop the erosion of free speech online. That starts with looking again at the wholly inadequate proposals in the Online Safety Bill”
"The unambiguous attempt by YouTube to censor my speech is a warning."
"If YouTube is happy to attempt to silence elected Members of Parliament, then they are also happy to censor anyone uploading content to their services."
[+] [-] jameshart|4 years ago|reply
In the UK tradition, political speech in the private sphere is somewhat tightly regulated. As an MP he can’t buy advertising space on terrestrial TV; during election cycles if he is featured on TV the broadcasters are obliged to give equal time to his opponents; there are strictly limited amounts of time permitted for ‘party political broadcasts’ and they are allocated to all parties equally. So the precedent in UK law is not that MPs have unfettered access to broadcast their private speeches. Quite the opposite.
As a member of parliament he does enjoy parliamentary privilege, and the ability to put his views on the permanent public record of Hansard by delivering a speech in the Commons. That should give him quite enough of a soapbox.
It certainly doesn’t entitle him to oblige a private entity to carry his speech without comment - and any legal regime which required such a thing would be dangerously authoritarian.
When political campaigners show up at a radio station and demand to be put on the air, we don’t call that ‘normal exercise of free speech’, we call that ‘the first step in a coup’.
[+] [-] andrekandre|4 years ago|reply
forcing private entities to host things they dont want to sounds like a huge can of worms
[+] [-] ralfn|4 years ago|reply
How is that 'the best'. Only Silicon Valley thinks that is a valid legal excuse for anything. If you can't operate within the law you can't operate.
The US better start regulating their companies or you end up with a trade war due to the whole world including Europe just kicking these vendors out of the market entirely and permanently
[+] [-] thrwyoilarticle|4 years ago|reply
Isn't that exactly the problem?
Social media platforms' business models depend on not being able to moderate all content. Examples like this are an inevitability of the concept.
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
Imo that would be the worst, because a human doing it can be corrected (more training, revised check-lists etc.), but afaik AI moderating in its current form is a black hole and it will remain a black hole for the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] protomyth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mojzu|4 years ago|reply
What's strange however is them seeming to use this to try and 'strengthen' the online safety bill which in it's current form would already be damaging to free speech online (adds massive liability for illegal/'harmful' content if it isn't removed quickly so companies will most likely block more content as a result)
[+] [-] caeril|4 years ago|reply
Much of the problem comes down to the fact that the "science" changes quite frequently. When new evidence appears, which updates our Bayesian Priors ( airborne vs aerosol/fomites, vaccine type effectiveness, delta variant transmittivity, ventilator usefulness, lab leak hypothesis, comorbidity statistics, etc ) the Powers That Be rely on the pre-update "science" to determine if censorship is warranted.
One can argue if censorship of "disinformation" is a societal good, and I won't litigate that general matter here, but it becomes a particular point of contention if what is classified as disinformation changes with every Lancet publication.
[+] [-] dua2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zpeti|4 years ago|reply
I assume blocking motorways is illegal already, yet the police are doing nothing, which is leading dangerously to vigilante justice as per some videos, which is only a question of time before it turns really violent.
Wtf is the UK government doing? Why do they need more powers when they don't use the current ones? Or is it for "other" types of protests? Shutting down motorways is fine.
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
Is it just because they really want to, compared to people with a more "live and let live" attitude?
[+] [-] CTDOCodebases|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
The issue isn't that YouTube can do this. They can, that is cool. Free world. The issue that is if they are going to do this everyone should respond. Nobody ever vetted YouTube as the arbiter of truth. They are not qualified for this, and they are going to screw up really badly.
If they're going to set themselves up for failure, we all have to make sure we're standing outside the blast zone when they screw up really badly.
[+] [-] lucasverra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxfluff|4 years ago|reply
"Everyone should" just doesn't work. It doesn't happen. The vast majority of people don't care, and the few who care are not going to change their habits and jump to a niche platform that maybe solves their problem. Network effects and the comfort of familiarity too big to ignore.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mschuster91|4 years ago|reply
The institutions we set up to arbitrate truth - the courts - are already swamped beyond belief in many countries.
The problem is that our societal systems of governance have been designed hundreds of years past, when life was focused on a couple dozen kilometers around where one lived. Nowadays, with global instant communication and knowledge available to almost everyone, conflicts and disagreements achieve far, far more reach and impact - and our societal foundations have never been updated to reflect the new reality and its demands.
The US still votes on Tuesdays because of farmers commitments to church and market days in the 19th century (https://www.history.com/news/why-is-election-day-a-tuesday-i...), copyright as a concept dates back to the 1700s, and legal language is so full of Latin and other outdated language it is impossible to understand for normal citizens.
We are witnessing a break-up of society, especially between the old/Boomer generation and the young "digital natives". For us young people, we see the possibilities and dangers of technology - and we see that our societal infrastructure is horribly outdated and the old generation which is in power dragging their feet and doing everything they can to prevent progress.
[+] [-] basisword|4 years ago|reply
I'm sure the inhabitants of the many countries the British invaded and continue to hang on to would disagree.
The Online Safety Bill he mentions in his outrage at YouTube taking down his speech is itself an attack on freedoms.
He's also part of a political party working to criminalise protests they disagree with.
[+] [-] PontifexMinimus|4 years ago|reply
The only places I can think of that Britain currently "hangs on to" against the will of the inhabitants are arguably Scotland and Northern Ireland, but in both those places about half the population want to continue to belong to the UK.
So it's not obvious to me who you're referring to here.
[+] [-] wizard-beta|4 years ago|reply
Propose one colony where the indigenous society was freer
[+] [-] postingawayonhn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jikbd|4 years ago|reply
The political systems of every one of those countries are freer today than they were before the British “visited”.
[+] [-] harry8|4 years ago|reply
The problem is facbook, google, apple, microsoft, etc etc are all vastly too big. If they need to be monolithic (they don't, but let's entertain the argument ) then treat them as a utility the same way we treat natural monopolies of drinking water distribution. Nationalisation is one way. Regulated return and heavily regulated business practise is another. Generally hacking it up into pieces and letting the pieces remain private is preferred when that can be done effectively.
Nobody cares that NBC didn't cover this speech. It's not interesting as a censorship question even if the omission is following the explicit political dictates of their owners (or staff). That's a better place to be all around.
[+] [-] quotemstr|4 years ago|reply
You're supposing that youtube_v1, youtube_v2, and youtube_v3 wouldn't all block you. They would, because all three companies would include a cohort of the same activist employees with the same censorious ideology all pushing to cancel the same people at the same time.
And why wouldn't we? That's the situation we have today. People banned from one major social media platform get banned from all major social media platforms pretty quickly. The state even encourages it.
Splitting tech companies won't do any good for censorship resistance on its own. We need common carrier requirements, not more heads on the censorship hydra.
[+] [-] anamax|4 years ago|reply
From https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/583/pruneyard-s...
"In PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980), the Supreme Court ruled that California could interpret its state constitution to protect political protesters from being evicted from private property, held open to the public, without running afoul of the Fifth Amendment. In this case, the California court went beyond the federal rule and held that, under the California constitution, a shopping mall owner could not exclude a group of high school students who were engaged in political advocacy. The state court decision has been adopted in one form or another by a substantial minority of states."
[+] [-] Traster|4 years ago|reply
Having said all this, it sounds like the video was taken down by an over-aggressive automated system rather than some grand conspiracy to censor this incredibly inconsequential (and ahistorical) speech and it was back up within 6 hours.
[+] [-] 0xy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airpoint|4 years ago|reply
Same with this guy. Another lies-spewing Tory was autodetected as talking nonsense. Colour me surprised.
[+] [-] vfred|4 years ago|reply
The insidious mind games that the Google nomenklatura plays are described here, by an honest and harmless person. Highly recommended, also the comment section under the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs27FtYKEos
[+] [-] sudosysgen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimpenfish|4 years ago|reply
Do you have a source for this? I am very far from knowledgeable about CRT but AFAIK what you've said there is just an incorrect right-wing talking point in the current anti-CRT fervour.
[+] [-] icare_1er|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valdiorn|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
[+] [-] t43562|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_m239339|4 years ago|reply
Here is a thing: social media grew that big because governments created a legal environment in which social media could grow that big. DMCA, safe harbor, the fact that social media are not liable for the content their users post...
Are these social media entitled to all these favorable laws? My point is, it goes both ways. Yes social media as private companies can censor whatever legal content they want, No the government doesn't have to let them off the hook and doesn't have to keep a favorable legal or fiscal framework for these particular platforms to growth exponentially either...
I'm not saying governments should crack down on these platforms, I'm just saying that ultimately, the legislator makes the laws...
The platforms make money at scale, well how about they become liable "at scale" if the content is public?
[+] [-] tored|4 years ago|reply
This new way of governance is not confined to social media but it also been used excessively during the Covid pandemic, instead of doing the hard work of passing legislation in a legislative body, governments are using back channels to pressure companies, NGOs, cities, etc to do their bidding, without any transparency or records.
It is obviously anti-democratic to its core.
Free speech is not absolute, government has the right to censor, however is has to do it properly by passing legislation, using courts and other transparent institutions.
[+] [-] misnome|4 years ago|reply
Almost always when this debate is had, it's in the context of the US, where the First Amendment is a _hard_ stop against this sort of thing, but otherwise suggesting that the government have the final say over whatever you are allowed to say isn't historically a very popular suggestion.
Of course, in other jurisdictions, they can pass whatever laws they want, and platforms can choose to comply, comply only locally, withdraw, or pay whatever fines to keep going as they are.
[+] [-] simonh|4 years ago|reply
So I'm not sure really what you're trying to say. You seem to be against safe harbour and laws that make them not liable. You argue that they should 'become liable at scale'. However you seem to be against their attempts to block content such regulations are likely to make them liable for.
Yes of course, I know perfectly well this is an inappropriate example. None of us want it to have been blocked. Probably nobody at Youtube actually wants to block it either, they're just applying their rules inappropriately. In fact it looks like it's already unblocked. But who gets to write the rules and objectively define what is or isn't appropriate?
If you want regulation and liability, edge cases like this are absolutely going to happen and we're going to have to find ways to manage that.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]