"Disappeared" is not the correct word. People who are disappeared dont write stories about it. If a journalist writes of a witness being disappeared it means a body is rotting in some swamp, not moaning about loss of personal data. It means that a political dissident got on the helicopter, but didnt step off at the destination. This article is about simple de-platforming. Leave the hyperbolic homicide terminology alone.
Depends a lot on context. Here in Chile, you can't be a poindexter with technicalities when people whose dictionaries were incinerated along with all their other books tell you of their uncle's (usually uncles) tragedies. But in this context, HN, it's fine.
And you're right in many ways. So in fact the way Chilean human rights lawyers nailed some, but not all, of the military (but not civilian) torturers of the coup despite their amnesty when the military lost power, was by saying, well you have amnesty, but you don't have the body, so you can't prove you murdered him some time ago, for all we know he's still alive and you're kidnapping him to this day, so it's an ongoing crime, so you're still on the hook. Maybe his family is right in hoping he comes back any day now. And you deliberately wanted the family to hope that, you had decades to tell them you really were terrorising them. Or maybe you weren't, maybe he's in some attic in a jail somewhere, caught in a secret passage in a dungeon (real life dungeon adventure! real secret passages, traps, monsters, minibosses and final bosses!) but you lost track. Oh you looked twice? Look again! Looked again? Look again!
And the subtext is "fuck you, obviously you're an asshole. You put remains into the subduction zone, you must accept the consequences of your actions, if you want to see the light of day again you'll have to take a submarine and then dig, dig with your hands and nails you piece of shit, until you find the body and bring it back. And don't resurface until you find it. If you don't like that, maybe you should have given him a funeral and informed the family of his death."
It does seem problematic that on some level we treat YouTube (and Twitter, and to a lesser extent other platforms like Spotify) as a sort of public square or generic "communications utilities"; the default virtual place we go to hear and be heard, open to all.
Of course, as they exist now, they are technically and legally nothing of the sort, which is a big reason why this specific complaint is tedious, absurd, and self refuting. Obviously he wasn't "disappeared", obviously there's no right beyond the terms of whatever contracts you have signed for arbitrary corporations to host video files for you, obviously all those videos he claims are "gone" still exist on the internet (hosted by a different corporation, at least for now...), obviously almost all of his claims are factually wrong.
Still...
...it feels like it'd be nice if we did have something a bit like the YouTube (and Twitter, and Apple App Store, and Spotify, etc.) that he seems to vaguely imagine exists? If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website. That's good! And yet almost every other area I look, I see walled gardens and closed platforms that can (and do) censor their users at a drop of the hat.
I don't know if the Fediverse, as it exists today, is a step towards a solution for this, but man, I think we need one.
Storing and serving other people's videos still costs money. Suppose we're all just doing this on a federated basis one day, decentralized and anonymous. Shouldn't we each have a right to know what we're paying to host? Just because I'm willing to leave a server on seeding esoteric documentaries from the 50s doesn't mean I'm willing to let people use it to spread hate speech or child porn or whatever someone thinks they have a "right" to be heard saying. It is a shame that control of major channels tends to become centralized and ultimately that weakens free speech on those platforms, but this is a cyclical process. When one falls, there's a period of anarchy before another arises. The underlying reason is that most people don't have the time or patience to run their own servers, so they delegate that, but they also expect whoever they delegate it to to follow certain basic principles, and those become harder to enforce as it scales without causing the initial freedom of the platform to deteriorate.
Like, Elon's idea of making a more free Twitter, or someone else who launches a no-holds-barred Youtube, just won't gain traction right now. That's not because they're going to be suppressed by a hidden cabal bent on silencing unpopular speech. It's because the majority of people who currently delegate the task of weeding out bad things to Youtube are more or less okay with people like this guy being removed. If or when that changes, something else will rise up in its place, but it's doubtful that such a platform won't run into the exact same problems a few years later.
> If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website.
Sure, but good luck getting anyone to see it without promoting it on established platforms (either by paying and/or getting "influencers" to push you)
And then, if you do get an audience but cross an invisible trip wire, expect your ISP/host provider to drop you.
And if you really manage to persist, the DNS police can finally de-platform you for reals (See for ex. sci-hub).
I'm no fan of Russia Today as a source of information, but I do believe people should have the right to speak and be heard. The problem today is there is so much utter shit on the webs that we each have a moral obligation to try to think objectively about our media consumption and stop lazily and addictively searching for data that confirms our biases and gives us a shot of outrage (like coffee) to start the day.
>> good luck getting anyone to see it without promoting it on established platforms
The Russian government already has the ultimate way of promoting their channel: Banning all other channels and imprisoning anyone who shares something not approved by RT/Sputnik.
Again, RT.com is still fully available in America and anyone can go there to hear the Russian government's side of this war. Anyone who wants to think objectively can and should go watch it and make their own decisions.
However, there is nothing whatsoever that obligates an American company to host their propaganda. And no, you don't have a right to be heard. At least here you have a right to speak, which you don't have in Russia.
> If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website. That's good!
But can you really? Didn’t websites catering to ultra right wing content get removed from the internet, because no web host would host then? I specifically remember AWS and others refused to continue hosting a fairly major right wing forum a year or two ago, although I don’t remember the details. Payment processors pressure platforms (see OnlyFans), and the government pressures platforms (look at the Facebook hearings). Even if you host your own website on your own physical machine, your IP might get blocked in Chrome and various other website blocklists (1). The internet involves so many commercial parties, at what point do you draw the line and say that actually, everything is a platform, so maybe we need to figure out a way to enshrine free speech on platforms rather than the easy argument of “it’s not censorship if it’s a third-party company”? How do you protect free speech online when there is literally no way to speak on the internet without involving some sort of 3rd party that might decide to block you?
(1. Just like email spam block lists, hosting your own website on a IP block that doesn’t normally host websites means you deal with all sorts of safety warning issues. I used to host the website for a community theater but I would get customer support issues where people couldn’t buy tickets because somehow we wound up on a block list as a suspicious website. I coded the website myself in basic static HTML, there was no newfangled React server or JavaScript or anything that could have been infected. No matter how many support tickets I lodged with the company that maintained the blocklist, I couldn’t get removed from the blocklist or get any explanation. Now it’s hosted on Digital Ocean. But if it had been something controversial that I couldn’t just throw up on a third-party hosting platform, I would’ve been out of luck.)
So a self proclaimed critic of American imperialism and corporate control is complaining that a trillion dollar American corporation won't help him spread his message.
No, you haven't been "disappeared". Your content still exists. YouTube just doesn't owe you anything. Go find somewhere else to distribute it.
In fact try being a free thinker in your beloved Russia and see how far that gets you.
TBF, he writes "I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow." Now, of course I didn't know Havel, but while he may have had "no love for the policies of Washington", he did want to make his country more democratic and liberate it from Russian influence. So I don't think these mental gymnastics really justify producing a show that provides legitimacy to a channel that spreads Russian propaganda, amplifies conspiracy theories and promotes Russian imperialism (which, as opposed to US imperialism, he seems to be Ok with).
When all of the major distribution systems exclude anyone that is not aligned toward accepted narratives, this becomes less and less feasible. And so the question remains "Are we a more informed and better society because of this censorship?"
It also means having the wherewithal to take the source's prejudices and priors into account, as part and parcel of the meaning and intent you glean from the true portion of their argument. Which is to say, any true thing spoken by an American shill for RT has to also be considered for what specific purpose its inclusion on that channel serves. To accept information without understanding the purpose and bias behind it is even worse than not knowing anything at all.
This is absurd. His RT content was in the same vein as his books, and his work published while at The New York Times. His work is consistent with his principles, regardless of the medium, or the source of funding.
This piece lost me the moment I saw the image created to visualize the content.
The big "censored" banner across made me instantly regret clicking it.
If people, and (I need to use it here) so called "journalists" don't know the difference between a private corporation and a nation state I just can't tske anything they produce seriously.
You can't be censored by YouTube. You can be deplatformed if you would like to call it that way. But until a government forced YouTube to not show your content to their citizens you are not being censored.
The outcome might be the same, but there is still a structural difference between me showing someone the door as I don't like what they say on my platform and the government coming and gagging them.
Maybe I am just to sensitive to the usage of the term, but imho it denigrates the victims of actual censorship.
> But until a government forced YouTube to not show your content to their citizens you are not being censored.
You're just plain wrong on that specificity and you threw in a pathetic ad hominem to boot.
Wikipedia:
"Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies. "
Merriam-Webster:
"to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable"
Oxford:
"to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons"
To be clear, you can be censored by government, or by a corporation, perhaps your own editor, or even yourself.
Often when I look at how us works it seems to me that a lot of political action, censorship and coercion is privatised there, so it looks superficially like you have more degrees of freedom because you are limited by private actors and not the state.
I grew up in western Germany. My SO in the GDR (eastern Germany) before the Iron Curtain fell.
Comparing my experience and hers (or her family's) gave me an interesting view of freedom. Namely that I think there isn't one freedom. Not in the universal sense.
For example. In the GDR it was a bad idea to critique the state/government/socialism. But I know quite a few cases of people telling their boss he was an asshole. Without any consequences.
Compared to Western Germany. We could call our politicians names, critique our government, call democracy an idiotic for of representation but tell g our corporate bosses they were idiots could destroy your life.
Just an extreme example of what I mean with different forms of freedom.
In the end I think it always comes down to a society needing to decide where to limit the freedoms of their people to ensure as much freedom as possible for all members of society. And future generations.
Our constitutional court for example declared the climate change efforts of our former government not sufficient to ensure freedom of future generations as doing nothing (or too little too late) now would burden future generations to an extent that is not in line with our constitution. Limiting our freedom right now (taxes, limits to how fast to drive, and so on) to ensure freedom for yet unborn.
That's how it works in Russia and China. It's not how it works in the West. Corporations here have fiduciary responsibility and are beholden to their shareholders. To the extent government tells them to do anything, it's a big public fight in front of elected officials who we (citizens and shareholders) can also vote out of office and replace. That cannot and does not happen in dictatorships, so in China, for example, the government tells corporations what to do. That is not the case in America.
I'll allow that the situation in Australia is a lot cozier when it comes to certain things like mining, but the Australian government has literally zero control over Youtube, so the argument falls flat.
The creators have, or had, all of the data when they uploaded the video to have it mangled by YouTube. Why would they throw out the masters, and why should YouTube (or anyone else) be in the business of worrying if creators still have their masters? Here we are again, counselling users to backup their own shit...20+ years later they are now using someone else's computer to store files and act dumbfounded when their data is lost.
This came up in several subcomments, but it's worth a headline: RT.com and its videos, and this guy's show, are still available and streaming in America, while all of YouTube is banned in Russia.
On one hand YouTube and rt.com are both websites... on the other hand one is the #1 platform for discovering long form video content on the planet while the other is a website, so it stands to reason that being deplatformed from YouTube is similar to having packets to YouTube get blackholed.
on the other other hand, one is sponsored by a government that maintains the world's largest strategic nuclear arsenal, and the other is a publicly traded company.
Seriously though - Russia banned Youtube throughout the country. Youtube banned a channel. America banned nothing. How is removing a channel from your own website even remotely similar to blackholing packets on a national network?
The technical minutia is mostly irrelevant though, if the next generation of "the internet" is IP->TCP->TLS->HTTP->YouTube, getting punted from YouTube is effectively getting punted off the internet. I see incredible symmetry in the two actions once you look past organizational differences:
Youtube is censoring videos and channels that run counter to the Western narrative, for the purposes of this conflict Youtube is a Western mouthpiece, Roskomnadzor bans all of Youtube.
The Russian government shapes the content that RT publishes especially as it pertains to Russia, for anything that pertains to Russia, RT is a mouthpiece, Youtube bans all of RT.
The difference in the above is that one actor is a private entity and the other a government agency.
It's not technical minutiae, it's the difference between government censorship and private property rights.
Almost all web traffic follows the pattern you laid out, and almost none of it in the US is broken in that pattern. Having your content hosted on the end service is entirely up to who runs the end service, and entirely outside the control of democratic government. And it's a privilege, not a right.
Would you have our government force Youtube to host content it's decided it doesn't want to host?! I suppose if your understanding of the world were as simplistic as that of someone who believed RT, you would just assume government makes everything up and creates corporations as shells to put out their message. That's not how it works in the free world.
Youtube is just one site in Russia. RT is one site in America. RT is not banned in America.
Does RT let me post anything I want about Ukraine on their website? When they do, let us know.
Freedom of speech is not protected within the context of corporate employment. Say or do something that crosses advertisers, people in power or generally the wrong persons and you’ll be fired. Same applies to creators who effectively work for youtube.
If they care so much about making this info available then time to re-upload to a new distributor.
Why butcher language like this? Your videos were deleted, you were censored. I get that it’s cute to say you’re ‘adulting’ and got ‘disappeared’ but please stop.
He did not get censored. Did the US government force YouTube to delete his stuff? I doubt it.
It was the (probably algorithmic) decision of a private entity not to provide free hosting and traffic for something they didn't like.
Can we please not denigrate real censorship victims because someone felt entitled to YouTube hosting and spreading their stuff?
Maybe banned, deplatformed or something like this. But technically (and legally) only government can censor you. At least in my jurisdiction free sprach protection does protect you "only" against the government. They are not allowed to use censorship. A private entity doesn't need to accept you on its platform. To me at least that is quite a difference.
1. If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, because Google has made it more than clear there's no guarantee they'll do it for you forever.
2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that.
People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so, and YouTube has made it very clear that they can and will bounce you whenever they like. As of today, you are entitled to free speech, but no one has to give you their soapbox to stand on.
I think there's a valid conversation to be had about whether that's how it should be, but I don't think this article is that.
Not to mention that "to be disappeared" is phrase used in various periods when death squads were active in South America, notably during the Dirty War [1] in Argentina when a number of friends of my parents had their children viciously murdered and when my cousins got out of the country by the skin of their teeth. Using the term for "losing your data 'cause you didn't make personal backups" is pretty pathetic.
This is definitely what I thought this article was going to be about. It’s a false equivocation and really irresponsible of the poster to use that terminology.
The author was disappeared, his articles were literally murdered, and you are promoting a genocide of false equivocations. What a nuclear catastrophe! The false vacuum of our hypocritical society is decaying.
I personally have never heard of this and I doubt this event is constantly in the mind of the public zeitgeist of the article's OP. Such a general phrase as "to be disappeared" is not monopolized for any harrowing event - it's on par with saying you were "brainwashed" despite the CIA nor other intelligence groups being involved.
"Being disappeared" doesn't call to mind any specific event to me but definitely is an idiom for like law enforcement or intelligence removing people seen as troublesome. Just google it!
I know what "being disappeared" has meant historically, and I don't see why the same phrase would be problematic here. Again, I see this the same way as complaining about the term brainwashing being used in contexts that don't involve intelligence agencies
Sure, let's compare a third party removing their archives of my stuff with people being detained, tortured, etc.... can't see any issue!
Brainwashing, for better or worse, has already been weakened. So someone using that term today is using it in a very different context. Time and context matters.
Why be so disingenious about this? Being "disappeared", at least in Western society, conjures the image of being quietly whisked away from society in an unmarked van for expressing views that a powerful body does not like. That is the article's OP felt happened - they were removed quietly from a platform because their views went against theirs.
Now, you add in things like torture and detainment. I mean, whatever. Feel free to die on this hill. My post's point is that the vast majority of society does not think of the Dirty War, or any sort of violence, when they hear the phrase "I was disappeared".
> Being "disappeared", at least in Western society, conjures the image of being quietly whisked away from society in an unmarked van
> Now, you add in things like torture and detainment
I'm sorry, where do you think the unmarked van is going? "Now you add in detainment" — detainment at least. If somebody disappears, it's either because they're being kept somewhere secretly or because they've been killed.
The thing is, Chris Hedge is still a well known commentator. I have a book of his on my shelf. I'm pretty sure he can get interviews in a number of places other than RT. This blog post of his is on the front page of HN, a large site.
Hedges hasn't been literally "disappeared", made invisible, any more than he's been a victim of what "to be disappeared" has come to mean.
Being disappeared definitely has connotations of political prisoners and actual government censorship to me. Not a private company deciding not to host your videos for free any more.
But brainwashing doesn't? I really don't see the issue here. "Carted off", "Political assassination", there hundreds, if not thousands, of phrases that are used that have innocuous meanings far beyond any singular event and are used regularly by people of all backgrounds in many contexts. And I don't see why the usage being applied to video hosting somehow detracts from a completely unrelated event
You may have been ignorant of the history and term, but the author deliberately selected that title.
The protagonist here chose to be a useful idiot to help the Russian state attract self-described dissident voices to a Russian propaganda outlet. If you chose to make your living that way and care about your work, embracing backups is a good idea.
Unlike his kremlin patrons, western society doesn’t generally “disappear” people like him, we just ignore.
What is your point? My point is that if, at some point in the last 40 years, the phrase "being disappeared" became synonymous with the Dirty War in Argentina, most Americans did not get that memo. Whether or not I myself was ignorant of the connection is a moot point, the post I replied to claimed that the article's author should have been aware of the connection - to which I say, if that's the hill you choose to die on, be my guest, but I can assuredly say I'm not alone neither is the article's OP in being ignorant of such a connection.
I see from other comments that you don't seem to understand that the commenters here argue that the author himself not only "got the memo" but also the he used the term conscious of the fact what it means to a lot of people in a lot of places.
He deliberately compared the deletion of his stuff by YouTube to people being captured, detained, more often than not tortured and too often killed. He wanted to invoke this image to paint YouTube in as bad a light as possible.
In doing so he not only compared apples to oranges but also showed quite strongly that he is missing empathy and a sense of proportion.
I strongly suggest that he slept in a real bed last night. Ate a good meal. Did not get hurt by prison guards. Wasn't punched in the gut, starved, electro-tortured, got his fingernails ripped out, had to stand on a box with his underpants over his face while wires hung from his hands fearing electrocution. And so on.
I doubt that the victims of being disappeared (nor their families) would see what happened to him and his spinning of the story and say: 'Oh yeah. There is someone who had the same fate as we.'
It actually doesn't matter that you or others did not get the reference. Making this reference is the problem, even if not a single one of his audience would miss it. He intended it and devalued the horrible experiences of real victims to blow his felt victimhood out of proportion and generate more enragement.
To anyone as allegedly historically literate as the author, especially one who's focused on the crimes of US imperialism and foreign interference, there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina (though also applicable to Chile and Uruguay). I too thought it was going to be about a literal black bagging, like what happened to protesters in Portland last summer who were manhandled into unmarked government vehicles by plainclothes officers.
"there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina"
The only way you could justify a statement like this is by ignoring at least two events that both hit closer to home to Americans - the kidnappings done by the Gestapo in the 30s and the Mafia in the 20s. I stand by my statement that the Dirty War in Argentina is not something that comes to mind for most Westerners when someone uses the phrasing of being "disappeared"
> The only way you could justify a statement like this is by ignoring at least two events that both hit closer to home to Americans - the kidnappings done by the Gestapo in the 30s and the Mafia in the 20s.
Both of those predate the invention of the particular use of “disappear”, a passive voice construction implying an active voice transitive use with an animate direct object (the active voice form of which was not actually in use yet, but is sometimes seen since), which was invented in the late 1970s specifically in reference to the Dirty War in Argentina. It has been used since somewhat more broadly, but only because it invokes the intense coverage (including in the American media) of the Dirty War.
While certainly for a large number of young and/or particularly historically ignorant Westerners the specific referent may not be immediately recognized, the upthread comment that “
To anyone as allegedly historically literate as the author, especially one who's focused on the crimes of US imperialism and foreign interference, there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina” is absolutely correct.
>which was invented in the late 1970s specifically in reference to the Dirty War in Argentina.
It was not invented, that was the first time the euphemism was correlated. Having knowledge of the history of "to be disappeared" and having knowledge of what "being disappeared" brings to mind, are two very different things.
> events that both hit closer to home to Americans
Well maybe something else would hit closer to home, like ferrying off supposed terrorists to Gitmo without due process or other secret prisons in quite a few countries should come to mind.
I believe that to be intentioned by the author.
The term "disappearing people" was used for describing the US practices outside the US to describe these practices. And the author for sure knew this.
Still doesn't make the use of the term by the author any better in my book.
But given his agenda I would actually think he intended to associate himself with these cases as much as with the victims of other governments to show once more how bad the US is from his view and to his intended audience/bubble.
I don't want to discuss the actual practices of the US and other governments. Nor compare them. This thread isn't the place for that. Just that the author intentionally conjured these images.
> 2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that.
There wasn't? I remember going through the catalogs in the public library as a kid, looking at the microfilm, even listening to some audio recordings. Even a public library had loads of information, and the thought of it being made inaccessible on an arbitrary whim was unthinkable. Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time.
Maybe in the time of Jim Crow or something certain public libraries would censor this stuff. I honestly don't know. It just seems to not jibe with my experience as a kid getting information at the library.
YouTube isn’t a library or archive. It’s a for profit business.
Also, libraries are very constrained in what they will and won’t archive and bring in to the collection. Budget, politics, space, taste all figure in. Hustler Magazine is a famous anti censorship platform thanks to Larry Flint. You won’t find it at your local library.
So, maybe microfilms would have a record of the fact that the speech happened, but most aren't going to have the full text of the speech. Recordings of every broadcast would also be unlikely to be stored at most libraries that can be described as 'easily accessible' [1]. "I Have a Dream" is famously copyrighted; without MLK and his associates/estate managing the distribution, it would be very difficult to get access to it. I bet the libraries of the South didn't all have it available straight away, for sure.
> Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time.
But I guess that's partially my point, right? The instant broadcast/archive-by-default nature of YouTube is new and unique to our time; trying to refer back to historic figures as your precedent for having access to it seems a little hollow to me.
[1] I grew up in more sparsely populated areas (and, also, in Australia), and perhaps that changes my perspective on what is reasonable to expect for access to libraries pre-internet.
There's no historic precedent until of course there is precedent.
Just like there was no historic precedent of states limiting the size and tactics of corporations until the rise of 19th century monopolies.
And no historic precedent of meddling in what wages could be paid until we decided there should be a minimum wage.
And no historic precedent of forcing businesses to serve all races and ethnicities until we decided that redlining and segregation were wrong.
I think everything you wrote is correct. But I am increasing concerned about the power of a few individuals to control what can be published.
I think it's time to discuss what we should do rather than what the law mandates. It's a difficult question, and I don't have a good answer.
Remember that actors, writers, scientists, and other professionals were blacklisted by McCarthyism--and technically no one did anything illegal, but it's not well regarded now.
I am just saying that sometimes free speech is more of an appeal to a principle than a law.
Freedom of speech means that we must not allow a person to be harassed by the government or by individuals for what they say. Nowhere does the principle say that others are required to provide dissemination of speech gratis; that would be an entirely different positive (obligatory) right instead of the negative (forbearance) right that freedom of speech is considered to be.
I nearly fully agree. I would only ask for clarification of one aspect:
> to be harassed
What is the definition of harassment being used? Because I experience more and more people who feel harassed when having their opinion critiqued in a discussion and claiming freedom of speach. While they are actually claiming that they want the right to say anything they like without consequences and don't want others to be allowed to argue against their voiced views (and in that denying the same level of freedom of speech to others).
I refer you to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, article 19 for a good modern formulation of freedom of speech: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
The above goes against the desires of both the illiberal progressive left and the conservatives in their desire to deplatform those who express beliefs they don't like.
> this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference
Aren't to hold views and to express views two significantly different things?
> seek, receive and impart information
Does information include proven falsehoods like vaccination causes autism?
In general I agree, but people weaponizing this to inoculate against critique is probably not in the ideas of those who wrote this.
Call me illiberal or conservative. I don't care for these weaponized labels.
To me, having grown up in Germany, there are very clear borders to "free speech". Denying the holocaust. Insulting/denigrating/dehumanizing other people. Stating falsehoods as facts.
Exactly as our law sees this. Time and time this imho very sensible approach has proven to be healthy for society.
And freedom of association means I do not have to hire that ethnic group I don't like, right?
I guess I just find this discussion so tiring. Even if I accepted your definition, that still does not answer the difficult question that I am proposing: what do you want society to be like?
I agree with most of what you're saying here - I think it is absolutely concerning that Google in particular has the ability to basically just throw you off the modern internet. There is absolutely a conversation to be had about that, and the position that YouTube should have in it. I'm just saying that you can't make an argument from historic precedent if there is none.
Free speech is always appealed to as a principle by our own government whenever it is convenient, especially when they are, as an example, gearing up for their next middle eastern target for regime change. "They don't align with our western ideals of democracy, freedom of speech" they'll say.
This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles.
> This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles.
Can you explain this? Wouldn't something being enforced by society be an example of it being a principle rather than a law?
The laws merely reflect the principles. The Declaration of Independence outlines the principles. The Constitution codifies it into law, as an example -- a perspective much argued for by Abraham Lincoln. (This is why it's ok to amend the constitution -- because much to the chagrin of a certain political philosophy, it is not the constitution that is the unchanging doctrine, but rather, the declaration. Think creed versus canon law, as another example). From this perspective you can probably deduce the examples I would give.
"People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so..."
We have a choice as societies to fund public archives that are free from (direct) corporate interference.
Corporations and governments aren't clearly distinct entities, as corporate execs work as politicians and politicians often retire from office only to get hired by the corporations they regulated or gave business to while in office, but there's still a big difference between a corporation made to profit its owners/investors and a non-profit government entity supposed to benefit the public good.
We now have so much of the world's cultural artifacts in the hands of these few incredibly powerful corporations at whose whim any/all of them could be lost.
Personally I feel this article strays too far into:
1. Whining and moaning,
2. Other political areas,
3. Intellectually dishonest arguments
to stand as a valuable contribution to the discourse on this topic. In particular the 'The most vocal cheerleaders' paragraph is just an emotional dump on the author's personal political bogeymen.
> If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit,
I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation.
I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics.
On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics.
All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are.
Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users.
Why? Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? The web currently is suffering from an abundance of practically the opposite problem: the perception, though not the reality, that a lot of commentary is "off the record" - aka equivalent to a conversation in a coffee shop - when this could not be further from the truth.
Most social media controversies start from this basic mismatch - the perception of social media commentary as though its like that you might share with your friends, but published, openly accessibly and archived for all the world to see - context which would temper most people from pretending that a comment should stand alone rather then in proper context.
The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem. If people are attached to their content but not backing it up in case of disaster, then I fail to see how that's anyone else's problem - your lack of planning does not constitute anyone else's crisis or obligation.
POSSE is in fact a correct reaction to this issue: starting from the presumption that your "free" hosting will remain so was a delusion that everyone capable of even a little systemic thinking should've seen as a risk - obviously you're going to lose that as soon as whatever invisible accounting applies to you no longer pays the bills.
> Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you?
Uh??? Yes? I seek to understand & learn from myself & my past & what happens. Taking the time to write in, to try to calibrate myself & others, communicate, & having it blown up is very much against the project. Please don't spew this remorseless anti-personal who-cares-about-yourself litter around my or anyone else's grounds, it's callous in extreme.
We all care about who we are online. We invest ourselves. These arguments that we shouldn't care about ourselves come off extremely bad handed to me.
I care about who I am offline even more than online. Should I be pushing for persistent 24/7 video surveillance of public space, stores, malls, parks, etc, so that I can revisit all of that too without making my own effort to preserve what I find important?
Posting content online & expecting it to stick around, and perhaps getting banned years down the road & losing it
To:
Whether or not we should have an expectation of our activity in stores/malls/parks accessible publicly & to us in pereptuity.
Can you spot the difference? Is it clear to others that these cases aren't the same? This is a question of expectation & intent. No one has a reasonable expectation that what we do in a store/mall/park endure & be remembered. When we post into comments & threads in public spaces, and it lasts for years, & gets removed for some fault or issue, obliterated forever, that's a surprising change. What we did in parks has never been part of the public discourse. What we do online always has been. The differences are obvious. What we do online, for many of us, speaks much more closely to who we really are, because we are entailed into the bigger conversations happening, operating in a global sphere. Your local sphere probably isn't that relevant, and it was never going to be preserved anyways.
Generally I just think it's bad form to assert your own priorities & value-systems over everyone elses. I don't think you've allowed room for other ways of seeing things. I think there's a lot of relative merits to both. Our online identities contain a lot of carefully-constructed thought that we would clearly want to be able to access, that most people will be free to access: the denial of that, in a shocking surprising manner, is obviously harmful & traumatic. Trying to steamroll that basic fact with some kind of Real World Real Talk comes off way bad to me.
>The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem
Saying "the web never forgets" is very, very wrong if people interpret it to mean that you can count on anything that happened being preserved.
There's two aspects to that, things that disappear in the sense they aren't easily searchable (or at all), and things that get revised, such that you think they are available, but history has effectively been changed.
A virtue of physical books is that they can't easily be changed without a trace.
Archive.org is something, but very far from comprehensive.
> I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone.
If anything, the strange thing is that life online is unusually durable compared to normal experience. Most of the meat-space equivalences to the ephemeralities you mention-- a discussion here, a note left there, etc, evaporate in days. Online life is weird in that this stuff sticks around for a few years often and occasionally decades.
I too miss previous communities, cultures, and participations. I enjoy the snippets I can find from 2-3 decades ago, and I wish more was still around. But if anything, I think the fact that it could still exist makes me grasp for nostalgia with energy that could instead be spent living for today.
There's a sort-of tech-caused obsession with fighting time and entropy here. Time passes. It always has. You don't need to archive every moment. "There should probably be a law" is one of those regulations that would just give more and more preference to big platforms that could afford to archive things build systems to let you export it that data.
HN, for instance, might be a casualty - how much more investment would it be worth to YC to comply with a bunch of data archive and export regulations? Especially if different countries make different rules?
As for as decentralized syndication and self hosting and all... I'll stay skeptical until someone has a compelling set of products to actually make it easy, since it's been a few decades of mostly unrealized hype at this point.
"Hard problem" vs "tedious and stupid problem" are different things.
But it's real cute that you mock people who don't want to deal with government regulations proposed to REQUIRE making it a burden of a third party to help people do obsessive self-archiving, but you take offense at having this desire questioned.
(Does HN even have a GDPR export? I can't find it on their legal or FAQ page. For your proposed "my own content export": would it just be comments w/o any context? What's the point, if so? The comments and replies of others too? What if one of those users had issued a CCPA privacy removal request, say?)
> Sites already have to offer exports to be GDPR compliant
Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR. For one it only covers personal data you provided. Not all content you ever created on a platform. This part of GDPR does not make platforms your free backup.
So if HN fell under this provision (and I am not SURE as IANAL) they would not necessarily be forced to provide all comments you ever made.
>> Sites already have to offer exports to be GDPR compliant
> Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR.
I'm AOK with restricting user-rights to save-the-things-that-are-about-to-be-deleted to sites that meet a GDPR style minimum bar for engagement. Minor minor minor sidebar, I think sites should have to have advertised machine-to-machine accessible metadata on what their site's terms of service are.
It's dead now, not a good implementation, & probably not a good fit in the particulars, but the vague wide-scale idea of P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences, a terrible name for a spec exposing what was more usually data-rights to the content than privacy concerns) kind of has some illumination for what a future path here might look like. It should be known. We should entail ourselves knowingly. This is one place GDPR doesn't really seem to address, that it misses the mark: I believe fully in small scale operators, in letting them do their thing, but as a user we should know what compacts we're entering into. Without having to read elaborate/complex human-authored terms: the machines should be able to tell us what minimum bars are met.
2. Hedges is well aware of history. And of changing times. And of the present heavy hand of SV censors. Go read some of his books before you play him off like a simpleton.
First our prisons, then our military, and now silencing dissidents - the US likes to privatize its dirty work. Those private actors aren't held to the strict legal constraints created for government actors. This is what Americans call "efficiency."
1. Yep. As you say - the guy is smart enough to know better.
2. I'm sure he is - this article comes off to me as a highly intelligent person ranting. I'm calling out that his appeal to precedent is, at best, weakly laid out in this article (and at worst it's dishonest). As I said, I agree with elements of the argument that he's making, but he's made the arguments poorly here.
RT will still have all the original files. He can just pay Vimeo to host them, or stick them on Rumble. If he thinks the content needs to be seen that badly he can do something about it.
Was it preserved on archive.org? The government doesnt want things that allow a Russian entity to profit from it, and YouTube decided to take the same tack. But, without ads paying RT, I doubt any attempt would be made to remove it from the way back machine.
In fact I wonder why YouTube didn’t just remove ads from that content.
Interesting that this post is now flagged, or "disappeared" from HN. Shame, as the conversation around it is enlightening. Just wondering, do people think it's OK to curtail reasoned discussion around a topic prompted by a post of this nature?
From rereading this whole thread now, I notice that about 90% of the commenters are only interested in 2 or 3 of the hundreds of attributes involved in this situation.
It's amazing the lack of diversity in thought, and the amount/rate of simple, unforced(?) cognitive errors, on a site with such relatively high intellect. I think something important and unseen is going on here.
Actually they worked to deliver high quality content on anything which didn't directly impinge on Russian interests. Granted, they did it to give their propaganda more respectability. But most of it was not propaganda.
It can be thought of as the Russian attempt to create an equivalent to Al-Jazeera and the BBC.
Agreed. They are not impartial about Russia, but their coverage of, say, Latin America was pretty good quality.
"Not being impartial about Russia" isn't a crime. Even not being truthful about Russia isn't a crime. If it were, a lot of mainstream Western media conglomerates should be banned.
I really don't get the need to block access to any news channel or conglomerate, no matter who funds them or what's their agenda. I don't want Fox News to be banned, either.
>Agreed. They are not impartial about Russia, but their coverage of, say, Latin America was pretty good quality.
People said similar things about Al Jazeera, but how many people actually were aware that they were state media? I wasn't for a long time, and I still can't remember the country offhand without looking it up.
I'm not saying that they made it a big secret, and I'm not saying that it is shocking that "Russia Today" is what it is, but I dunno, why did KFC start using its initials or Dunkin change its name?
Marketers know there is a benefit to not saying words like "Russia", "Fried", or "Donuts" because a significant number of people will not think of them.
And it doesn't make sense to assume that bias towards something can't affect reporting on anything else, because everything is interrelated.
Well, I like that Al Jazeera exists and their coverage of many things was good.
That RT is "state sponsored" or "funded partly by the Russian state" was plastered all over YouTube, Twitter, etc. Why was that not enough?
I know for a fact RT's coverage of current affairs in Latin America was pretty good. The "interrelated" argument is dangerous, because it cuts both ways -- Western news media wouldn't escape unscathed, for example.
>Well, I like that Al Jazeera exists and their coverage of many things was good.
I'm not criticizing their reporting (because I haven't read much of it) or saying that knowing who finances them necessarily results in a more objective reaction. That is, certainly there is prejudice that comes into play.
I'm saying that it is demonstrably possible to have gone for years generally aware they exist without being aware they are state sponsored, and not encountering any mention of it.
I would expect more people to know about RT, but my point is, regardless of how you view people who are ignorant, the proportion of people who are ignorant matters. It has some influence on how they affect society.
There's a genre of articles that link the CIA to things and makes a big deal about it, like the most sinister imperialist forces in the US government are necessarily controlling it. So it seems to me that the idea of the source of something tainting it is universal.
Saying people should be aware of what RT stands for cannot be taken as an argument that they are.
>The "interrelated" argument is dangerous, because it cuts both ways
So? Rejecting it doesn't produce a license for inconsistency.
If we agree that Fox News is unreliable when reporting on Republicans, does it make sense to expect them to be objective in reporting on Democrats? Does it make sense to expect them to be objective in reporting on Ukraine and Russia?
> If we agree that Fox News is unreliable when reporting on Republicans, does it make sense to expect them to be objective in reporting on Democrats? Does it make sense to expect them to be objective in reporting on Ukraine and Russia?
Two things: Reps vs Dems is obviously two sides of the same coin, so I don't think your example works. You probably meant trusting Fox News is objective about sports or medicine or other unrelated topics.
However, I will agree with you it still makes sense that everything Fox News reports on is permeated by their political stance; e.g. there are obvious political aspects to medicine and health (because of enacted policies that happen to be partisan, or touchy topics such as abortion laws, or healthcare, or the myriad of things that are touchy subjects in the US).
But it doesn't matter whether I think Fox News is reliable on any given topic, what matters is: do I think they should be deplatformed in most of the Western world, removed from YouTube and access severely hindered or completely restricted for most of their audience? No, 100% no. It's for me to watch Fox News and decide they are crap. Make it available. Let me decide. Do you want to plaster all over Fox News streams that they are "partially funded by this or that corporation" or "aligned to this or that political party" -- sure, go ahead. But let me watch and decide for myself.
> Does it make sense to expect [Russia Today] to be objective in reporting on Ukraine and Russia?
I don't think they are objective in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I wouldn't trust them on that subject (still, I'd like to see, unfiltered, what Russian media is saying about it. Not what the West reports that Russian media is saying, which is always filtered). But RT and affiliated channels also reported on Latin America, a subject I know better -- I live there -- and I know for a fact their reporting was good; better than most US media. And it also got blocked/removed.
"There's a genre of articles that link the CIA to things and makes a big deal about it, like the most sinister imperialist forces in the US government are necessarily controlling it. So it seems to me that the idea of the source of something tainting it is universal."
Is this about RT, Al Jazeera, or other media? So far I have read such things about CIA in all kinds of media, including the so-called trustworthy ones, so I would say that a lot of these claims are probably credible.
Al Jazeera is owned by Qatar. They seem to operate very independently, considering their owners. Qatar censors their Internet, and their outward culture is standard Middle-Eastern Islamic fare (i.e. homophobic etc). [this always amuses me because statistically speaking, with no data to back it up, and based only on my observations, I would bet that Qatar has a higher percentage of LGBTQ population than any Western nation]
AJ's journalists in Russia have been doing their best to ignore the insanity of the new media laws and get their message out there, against their own best interests, bless them. Which is weird because most of the Gulf has been neutral or pro-Russia in their stance so far.
Disclaimer: My other half is Qatari and she will now have me "disappeared" for speaking badly of her homeland.
I was aware, and it is part of why I used them as an example along with the BBC. Like RT, they worked to create a reputation as high quality media funded at least in part by a national government.
Long time ago, it was a pretty decent (not perfect) place to get news internationally, especially when it related to War on Terror information that certain US corporations didn't want to touch.
my local news services might support american imperialism to some degree, but I dont think they’re compelled to avoid criticism of the government entirely… I also don’t think they run government-provided stories
1. You're a tankie (in which case, good riddance).
2. You're an anti-Western contrarian.
3. You've got sound criticisms of the US, NATO, etc, and haven't thought about how you can end up a useful idiot (see also: Ed Snowden).
None of these are good arguments for blocking/deplatforming.
"Being a useful idiot" or a "contrarian" is subjective. And don't Western democracies, the US foremost, congratulate themselves on always allowing contrarian points of view? It's in their DNA... allegedly.
A useful idiot? He is an idiot only if you consider heroic acts that reveal unjust violations of the rights to privacy and protection from unwarranted searches as well as the sabotage of public standards and the infiltration of their organization bodies as "idiotic". If anything he showed his loyalty to the residents of America and to a lesser extend to these of Europe.
> I was on RT because, as a critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted.
Looks like he ended up throwing in with en even more imperialistic, militaristic one party crowd.
There's a special niche of perpetually online people who pretend to be liberals while simultaneously entertaining virtually every thought that the alt-right Russian media complex has to push. You'll know them when you see them because they inevitably end as regular guests up on Fox News' primetime shows.
I'm not familiar with the author, but I see he's well known enough to have a Wikipedia page [1].
I just can't help but to appreciate the irony of complaining about censorship on one major tech platform while publishing on another major tech platform. It seems Substack is much looser on censorship than other social media, but at the end of the day, anyone can be "deplatformed" from any managed service / platform for many reasons at any time, and they may never even find out why.
Why not run your own (e.g., Ghost) instance and mitigate that risk to protect your content and business upfront?
> I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin.
I’m a free speech absolutist - i.e. I believe in the first amendment, including the idea it should protect you from corporations. If you host a public square you must allow the speech.
There’s a very simple reason for that, freedom comes at a price. The price is an open, but critical mind. It would and is easy to silence opposition, it has been done for the past few years increasingly in the US. Truly it’s been happening even longer, the internet changed that dramatically.
To those that say “it’s enemy propaganda” who’s the enemy? Those striping you of rights — no? It’s fair to argue aggressors in a conflict are an enemy as well. Both can be true.
The problem is that on the modern internet, there are no public squares for hosting long-form video content. YouTube has a monopoly on the one big, private square. Something pretty much all YouTube content creators have been complaining about for years.
Before computers, I could maybe broadcast in real-life to a few hundred people by talking directly in public square. And it would be fully up to me to convince people to show up somehow. And there would be no archive afterwards, unless I take care of this myself.
"Public square for hosting" was never a thing. I don't see why you expect this to suddenly appear.
Television stations were never under a governmental order to publish the words of every freakshow with an opinion. Neither were the radio stations, telegraphs, or the newspapers. You don't have a right to be heard. You don't have a right to a platform. You have the right to speech. How you go about distributing your speech is entirely on you.
There are no public squares on the internet. Even if you self host you can get your server shutdown since the entire internet requires a private entity to access
Have you considered that you have some autocratic tendencies yourself?
> I'm a free speech absolutist - i.e. I believe in the first amendment, including the idea it should protect you from corporations.
The Supreme Court has repeated ruled that the First Amendment extends towards editorial decisions in the sense that editors can choose what they publish and what they don't. Do you really believe people should be forced to distribute whatever you want them to?
> To those that say “it’s enemy propaganda” who’s the enemy?
The Russian government who would strip me and my fellow man of the right to free speech just like their stripped their own citizens.
> Do you really believe people should be forced to distribute whatever you want them to?
I think there’s a difference between “publisher” and “distributor”. Distributor can make decisions, to a degree, but we have “common carrier” status for a reason. If you’re given a defacto monopoly or monopolize a distribution channel, then no, I don’t think you have any right to block distribution. Again, they’ve taken the public square.
It would be like saying “Well, we sold all the parking meters in Chicago to foreigners (really, they did [1])”. Then that company decides to ban anyone who’s black from parking downtown. That would 100% be considered illegal. If we did it for a religious group, say Catholics - also 100% illegal. Now let’s say libertarians - guess that would be okay? No also illegal. You can’t take the public square from the people. The Supreme Court has ruled as such —- that said, I do think it needs to eventually clarify this; or more precisely legislation should be passed.
> The Russian government who would strip me and my fellow man of the right to free speech just like their stripped their own citizens.
I agree Putin is a tyrant, but two tyrants don't make a democracy. I’d argue the US is no better at this point. Try questioning vaccines, 2020 election, Hunter Bidens laptop, protest at a school board, etc.
Again I’m an absolutist though... I think censorship is a tool of weak authoritarians.
> It would be like saying “Well, we sold all the parking meters in Chicago to foreigners (really, they did [1])”. Then that company decides to ban anyone who’s black from parking downtown.
Stopping black people from parking would basically eliminate access to downtown. A publisher/distributor (I think that line's a lot finer than you make it out to be, but whatever) refusing to publish content just means a writer has to find a different outlet for their media. They could, for instance, start their own website.
Part of free speech is the right to keep your mouth shut, so publishers have the right to not distribute material they don't agree with
> I agree Putin is a tyrant, but two tyrants don't make a democracy. I’d argue the US is no better at this point. Try questioning vaccines, 2020 election, Hunter Bidens laptop, protest at a school board, etc.
The absurdity of this when people are being arrested in Russia for protesting with blank signs. Go down to your local town hall with a sign about Hunter Biden's laptop giving you a vaccine to change your vote in the 2020 election, no goons will show up.
I think it's fair to say, "it's not profitable", but that's not the argument being made. Further, those "hot button" issues are the most profitable content.
The Fairness Doctrine applied to holders of broadcast licenses only, not to publishers in general. Per Red Lion Broadcasting Co v FCC[1], the FCC's power to enforce this rule only applied to mediums where there were limited channels.
That is, the court found that since not everyone could have their own broadcast television channel, the FCC could (if it chose) enforce something like the fairness doctrine. Note, however, that such rules are unconstitutional when applied to newspapers[2], or any other medium where bandwidth is not limited.
> Removing it led to Fox and MSNBC today.
Fox and MSNBC are cable channels. The Fairness Doctrine never applied to cable channels, and a modern reincarnation that tried would be obviously unconstitutional.
You're the best kind of right (technically), that law doesn't even come close to applying here and yet the argument still stands. Broadcasting has been usurped, mass media is not delivered over ATSC, but over a variety of PHYs, with IP/UDP/TCP/TLS/HTTP on top and your channel directory is privatized.
I agree (and have posted elsewhere in this discussion) that there's a problem that needs solving. Nonetheless, the Fairness Doctrine didn't do what the OP claimed, and couldn't be made to do what the OP wanted, and yes, I think that does fatally undermine the argument being made.
(Not to mention which, the current supreme court is much more protective of free speech than in previous decades, and particularly of free speech exercised via corporate forms. Realistically, the odds of an expanded Fairness Doctrine passing muster in this court are nil.)
All of which means that whatever the solution ends up being, it's really not going to look much like the old Fairness Doctrine. Which, again, doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist!
Individuals are still quite capable of publishing material in the ole Web 1.0 way. Get a server, get some storage, and serve the data.
The commons of "being able to publish your own content" is still as available as it ever was.
YouTube (and others) monetized a single spot to host and discover content - but the commons still exists for anyone who wants to serve it.
YouTube itself isn't a publisher - they are a distributor. Publishers publish to YouTube for it to be distributed and monetized. The Fairness Doctrine applies to YouTube no more than it does to AT&T to insist that the phone calls that it carriers are balanced.
Fox and MSNBC are publishers. Charter, Comcast, AT&T, and Dish are distributors.
> but the commons still exists for anyone who wants to serve it.
How do you go to the public square and take a speaker phone and start talking in the internet?
Google: blocks content
Twitter: blocks content
Facebook blocks content
DuckDuckGo: Deranks (possibly blocks) content
Reddit: Blocks content
... do you see the problem?
Company towns still had to allow free speech, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc are the defacto town squares and if I can't pick up a microphone and speak my mind; then it is not as it once was.
Claiming I can "start my own town" doesn't work in this context. Worse, if I do how do people find my town? Can I advertise on these locations (nope, probably not). What if I use AWS? Well probably like parlor infrastructure would be pulled, if it becomes popular.
These are all private companies that have some space that they pay for from common carriers and open up to people with constraints. They are more akin to shopping centers were the teenagers use to hang out in than public spaces.
It is not reasonable for random people to declare that some private company's comment section is a public square and thus can't or shouldn't be moderated.
If you want to grab a microphone and speak your mind, stand up your own server and do it. However, no private company owes you a thing.
Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so.
If you want to have the government compel private companies to do things, then say it. If you want the government to takeover private companies to provide the services you desire, then again, say it.
As it is, the companies that you are listing are working as private companies in a context of "they're not breaking any laws" and "it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying."
I also believe that going down that path of "you must host all content that isn't illegal" to a private company is as equally authoritarian as "you must not publish any content about X".
As it is, the companies are making decisions about their ethics and bottom lines (from however their content is monetized) and working from there to decide what is and is not appropriate to host on their systems.
> They are more akin to shopping centers were the teenagers use to hang out in than public spaces.
That is literally a public space and you can protest there depending on the district (New York for instance). The better analogy would be banning a store from a state. Sure people can move to a new state, but you’re still banning discourse in the region everyone lives in. Then banning any advertisements, and you’ll actively take the wealth and infrastructure from the other state, if you can.
> Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so.
It’s devoid from any of our opinions. The question is where can I conduct commerce on the internet? The answer is one of these companies is almost certainly required to make a profit. That makes it the public square. It’s where commerce and information is shared. I can’t go to an alternative, I can’t build an alternative.
Technically true, but I have yet to see someone who actually believes it. Everyone has a limit somewhere, for some people that limit is wedding cakes for gay marriages, for others is discrimination on some certain characteristics of a person. The point is that this kind of policy at the end of the day makes our society slightly worse.
"it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying."
They are doing that but indirectly as to not break any law. See the senate hearings about facebook for example. They can force that via blackmailing (if you do not restrict X we will make a law that increases your tax or responsibility for what users post or whatever, deny funding or provide funding to competitors, prosecute crimes that we ignored before, etc)
At some point in the development of democracies, free speech will be recognized as a civil right. For now, as long as it’s a private company, your right to free speech can be ignored.
Free speech absolutism has literally never been a thing anywhere on this planet at any time in the history of the world because it is neither thoughtful nor practical.
I am quite certain they do not oppose laws against making false statements to investigators, lying about income/losses on tax returns or shareholder reports, making violent threats, and etc.
Those things are unlawful because of the effect they directly cause to the real world.
Speech, in general, is just sharing information - it does not cause any direct effect on the real world (actions of other people with whom we have shared the information do not count as direct effects, or otherwise the legal system would get really messy).
Every action has effects on the world. If we go down that path we might as well ban thoughtcrime, because criminal thoughts have effects on your mind, making you more probable to actually commit a crime.
Note the word "direct" in the sentence you have qouted.
Doesn't the US make a point that even Nazi speech is protected, as long as they don't directly incite violence or commit violent acts? How come RT is less protected than Nazi speech, then?
Before you claim "they do incite violence" -- no: many of the now censored podcasts like Ahí Les Va never incited violence.
It's not less protected. RT has the same protection from the state and the judicial system as Nazi speech does. RTs problem isn't that their speech isn't protected, it's that others refuse to help them distribute it - which is generally their legal right (and if they broke contracts saying otherwise in the process, RT is free to sue them).
If speech is deplatformed in the Western world, even if not outright illegal, it is effectively banned. You don't get fined or arrested for watching, you just can't access it.
It's still not there -- you can still access RT's website and there are alternatives to YouTube... for now. How long till you cannot access them either.
It boggles the mind. So Russia blocks Facebook and Twitter, and we rightly repudiate it. Though I guess when we make RT and affiliates inaccessible it's ok?
I believe the difference between the author not having some of his distribution channels anymore and being able to complain about it vs the author being in jail (or worse) is quite relevant. As is the difference of being able to take his content and give it to people in other ways or not.
And if you talk "protected", it's pretty clearly a legal argument, and that works as outlined (in the US). "Should Google/... have banned them" is a good and interesting question, but not quite the same.
Yes, you are right. It's not legally banned, it's just being gradually made inaccessible to Western audiences. Whatever happened to the marketplace of ideas, plurality of voices, and other liberal ideas?
> Whatever happened to the marketplace of ideas, plurality of voices, and other liberal ideas?
Nothing happened to it. You're perfectly within your rights to go stand in a public marketplace and yell until you're blue in the face about whatever you please. "Free speech" does not and has never meant that any company or individual of your choosing is compelled to amplify what you have to say.
I don't think the analogy fits, since these are voices and outlets that are being effectively made inaccessible to Western audiences.
There's the purist view of free speech and then there's the practical one ("is it free speech if none can hear it"?). I'm obviously talking about the most important one: the latter.
> If speech is deplatformed in the Western world, even if not outright illegal, it is effectively banned. You don't get fined or arrested for watching, you just can't access it.
Sure you can. Any loon can run a website or do things the old fashioned way (standing on a soapbox in a public square). You're perfectly entitled to seek the loons out; what you aren't entitled to are private subsidies that lower the otherwise basic level of effort required on your part.
I'm not sure you will always be able to, if current trends continue. Deplatforming from everywhere that matters is effectively banning. We worry when Russia and China do it, and we should also worry when the US and Europe do it too.
PS: we are talking about news coverage and outlets, not "loons". Please don't add unwanted "color" to this debate.
You'll note that in countries like Russia and China, you can end up in prison for contradicting the state or publishing information that doesn't comport with its narrative. I don't think there's any meaningful sense in which a nastygram from Facebook telling you that you've been banned can compare to the material threats that such countries hold over the heads of their citizens. Our worry (which often feels performative) is largely rooted in that.
If you want to fight against "current trends," then you need to stop delivering undue power to private corporations and expecting the government to haphazardly legislate you out of your problems (the basis for that legislation is left as a continued exercise, given that there is absolutely no 1A basis for compelling companies to distribute speech.)
> You'll note that in countries like Russia and China, you can end up in prison for contradicting the state or publishing information that doesn't comport with its narrative.
Yes, in the West we're not quite there yet. We are just simply removing access to dissenting voices. Only for those we deem "enemies", of course. For now.
> you need to stop delivering undue power to private corporations and expecting the government to haphazardly legislate you out of your problems
I'm not sure where this non sequitur comes from, but regardless: which government? From which country do you think I'm from?
I can tell you’ve never read the constitution and any of the founding documents. The US makes a point that even nazism is allowed to be discussed here. Or was until very recently.
It has at times been stripped away, but the ideals are always something to strive for
I can point to three separate 1919 USSC court cases alone that blow a giant hole in your theory. What YOU think is free speech in this country didn't actually even begin to exist until 1969.
It's a fun delineation. In 1968, the banning of draft card burning was ruled to not be a denial of speech rights. In 1969, black armbands were allowed as political speech for the first time and the KKK was allowed to preach in favor of violence as long as they didn't specifically mention when or where the violence was gonna happen.
The modern interpretation of what constitutes free speech in this country is less than 60 years old. We're less than 80 years from another case where they ruled that kids had no choice but to recite the pledge of allegiance.
Just because you have this pipe dream of the US being founded by some infallible saints doesn't mean they weren't a bunch of selfish pricks who were interested in protecting their own interests.
It depends on which of the founders you read, it was always hotly contested and depending who was in power pre-1830 which policies were followed. I agree after the civil war free-speech was effectively eroded. BUT as you pointed out free speech started to be reconstituted after WWII. I personally would argue free speech started to degrade again in the 90's and has continued until today.
It's an ebb and flow, largely based on politics at the time. That said, it's also not uniform across the country.
It literally didn't exist in its modern form until the civil rights movement and the liberalization of the Court. The idea that it's "started to degrade again" is ridiculous. We even allow money to be speech now.
I guess I disagree? I was pointing out that throughout the history of the United States it’s actively supported discussion of topics disallowed elsewhere; including nazism which is banned as “hate speech” throughout the rest of the west.
But being able to discuss Naziism isn't free speech absolutism. You admit that your "absolutist" views are far beyond what the US protects, and so the US today isn't a free speech absolutist nation, despite having what are probably the most significant speech protections of any nation in history. Parents point remains true.
There are many naive and misinformed posters in these comments, as well as many thoughtful ones.
The basic truth is, you are entitled to free speech in the US, but you are not entitled to a platform from which to speak it. This is especially true if the platform is privately owned, as just about all platforms are. (I can't think of an exception offhand.)
It doesn't matter in the slightest if some platform has monopolized the market. They are still not obliged to carry your speech. End of story.
YouTube is allowed to make content moderation decisions, and we are allowed to talk about why we think it's wrong for them to make the decisions they did.
Or, to slightly paraphrase another pro-censorship cliche, freedom not to carry someone's speech is not freedom from consequences.
I waffled on my response to this piece, or rather if it even deserved one.
First of all, you are not disappeared -- just by the mere fact of you being able to post this. Want to give it a go and redeem yourself? Try writing some anti-war stuff in Moscow (you can even join your role-model).
Second, you are not Edward Snowden. And your comparison to him in the latter parts of the article do not do your point any justice. You risk very little by posting this, whereas Mr. Snowden became exiled from his home country by exposing illegal surveillance and is now wanted for treason.
Third, pick better friends and maybe don't work for propaganda outlets? I'm no saint myself, and I understand sometimes you have to put food on the table. But don't claim you're innocent (no snowflake ever feels responsible in avalanche, as the saying goes). Move on, do something better and be remembered for doing good things?
So many people use YouTube as their archive - particularly if they're naive about their relationship with YouTube. He may not have his own copies.
This doesn't necessarily imply total naivety - plenty of journalists would be used to it being the publisher's role to archive the work, not their own.
As a content producer it’s baffling to me when people don’t have local backups of exports and original media. Storage has never been cheaper. 3-2-1 is so easy to implement.
Not everything on RT is a 100% propaganda. Maybe the low watermark is around 60% (as defined by Dr. Joseph Goebbels), and this channel accounted for the majority of the content in that 60%.
However, the world is currently at war with Nazi Russia. At war, you do not risk reviewing the enemy propaganda content. You block anything related to this propaganda, and deal with it later. Sorry. Also, you should have picked your friends better.
Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about.
Not everything in RT is propaganda, indeed. The Spanish language edition is pretty good, and its affiliated podcasts such as Ahi Les Va are definitely good and are very insightful about Spanish language events and politics.
"However, the world is currently at war with Nazi Russia. At war, you do not risk reviewing the enemy propaganda content. You block anything related to this propaganda, and deal with it later. Sorry."
"Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about."
I agree with the sarcasm here, but I must elaborate on how terrible a person Mr. Hedges is. There's a whole saga behind how he went from being a noted journalist to whining on Substack, and I've been tracking it for quite some time.
* Then came the self-plagiarism revelations (many of his Truthdig columns are rewarmed passages from his books). He's apparently also been editing his own Wikipedia page to remove critism, and at one point got into an edit war with another longstanding contributor. All the while, he's called Wikipedia a "tool of the elite". https://twitter.com/Mathlover2/status/1499650487481683968?s=...
* Finally, we have his aforementioned show on RT. While it may not be on YouTube, it's still very much available on rt.com, which I can access from the US as of this writing, and which allows people to download individual episodes.
I didn't know much about him before this, so thanks for the links. I have, though, made a study of the kinds of coverage propaganda outlets like RT, Press TV and CCTV show to western audiences (versus what's allowed or aired domestically); their constant attempts to wash their own dictatorship's warlike and repressive agenda through a melange of pseudo-progressive-sounding moral positions that are cynically designed to appeal to disenchanted Americans who have no clue how those same positions directly conflict with said dictatorship's actual policies; and the revolving menagerie of useful idiots, lunatics and traitors they employ to put a patina of believability on it through "arts and culture" with a heavy emphasis on the oppression of any group of people besides, obviously, the citizens of their own country or others they themselves currently make a career out of oppressing.
I'm hopeful this gimmick on which they've wasted vast resources is obviously bunk to almost everyone, at least in America. Even here in Portland, it would only spare you a few minutes before your lynching if you said you worked for RT rather than for Fox News.
I really don't understand the audience for articles like this. It's so blatantly disingenuous, and just... stupid. I guess there's a lot of suckers in the world who fall for stuff like this though.
RT didn't block Youtube. The Russian government did. And up until the minute it did, RT continued to make money from advertising on it.
The reason one would be okay and the other wouldn't be is, to the extent that RT is a "private" enterprise, it's their right to determine what content is on their own platform, just as it's Youtube's right to determine what content is on theirs. It is not the government's right (in a free society) to determine what sites citizens can or cannot access.
RT's actual website with videos is still available in America.
Complaining about censorship when you've thrown in with the Russian state media is just absurd.
Here's an experiment for Chris Hedges: try doing a show on RT denouncing Putin and his war on Ukraine. At the very least RT will do exactly what Youtube has done and refuse to carry it. Or how about doing a show on RT denouncing the much worse censorship going on inside Russia right now?
Hedges is practically the definition of the "useful idiot".
RT allowed editorial control; it was not controlled by the Russian government.
It allowed people effectively blacklisted by US mainstream media to have an outlet.
I think the talking heads who parrot government propaganda, stenographers to the powerful, on CNN or MSNBC would closer fit the definition of "useful idiot."
I can only imagine how 'free' and 'uncensored' it will be. I bet it's gonna host everything from ISIS beheadings all the way to porn or straight-up conspiracies to overturn the US gorvernment, but nothing bad about the great leader Kim Old Musk and his endeavors.
I think it’s also that such a service would be wildly unprofitable. Almost nobody wants to advertise over ISIS beheadings. LiveLeak existed, but eventually shut down due to not being profitable.
People do, but advertisers don't. It doesn't help that these "anything goes" platforms pretty much devolve into right-wing themed racist gathering points at best, or a den of scams and prosecutorially interesting media.
