Advertisers, youtubers, users, brands - everyone was happy prior to the era of demonetization. What killed the golden goose was an extremely small set of activists and journalists (specifically Media Matters and Vox) methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of their "support" for controversial niche videos. And just enough brand marketing and YouTube employees were cowed, or at least ideologically sympathetic.
It's stupid, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!
How this somehow translated, in the era of online youtube videos, to the exact opposite is still a mystery to me. So what if your ad appeared next to something radical on youtube? So what if your ads appeared next to some weird sex segment of youtube? People who see it aren't going to confuse the ads with the video, just the same as people watching television isn't confusing the ads with the programme.
>It's stupid, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!
This is simply not true. If you go back long enough shows were often sponsored by specific advertisers making the link even stronger than traditional preroll YouTube ads (this practice goes back to radio, so it is even older than TV). It also ended up with bizarre pairings like "'The Flinstones' brought to you by Winston Cigarettes."[1]
Eventually cable TV came along and it didn't have the type of FCC oversight that broadcast TV does. However you generally only see swearing and nudity on premium cable and not basic cable despite no official rules preventing it. The primary reason for this is that basic cable still relies and advertisers while premium cable does not. Basic cable channels still fear advertisers dropping out if their ads are paired with objectionable content. And that is really all that is happening on YouTube. GM doesn't doesn't want their latest car ad to appear in front of a racist manifesto. I don't think that is a particularly unreasonable desire for an advertiser.
So this may look like I am arguing against you, but I actually have a very similar stance.
Look at it like this:
Nowadays, the ads (and the videos) are targeted. Additionally, the algorithms are - no other way to put it - really fucking dumb and are constantly "overcommitting". E.g., I watched a few episodes of a podcast months ago and my YouTube recommendation has been 98% episodes of the same show since then, because the algo registered I spent a disproportionate amount of watch time for those (who knew, podcast episodes are long). Or look at Amazon grouping every single book I read the untranslated English version of in "International Books" because it determined that English ain't my mother tongue. Now I am constantly getting cultural, cosmopolitan and language learning stuff; because I read Ian Banks and software philosophy books.
I am aggressively ad-blocking, but I imagine ads are quite the same and I am sure you can recite similar experiences. Now based on this shitty, bizarro reality I would say that the fear of an ad bubble heavily overlapping with a content bubble (for absurd reasons) is not irrational. It is weird, it is dumb, and we could probably overcome it, but products would be associated with weird/illegal/controversial niches by...association.
This whole situation is a shit cocktail of misguided KPI's, straight up scams, questionable assumptions (we still don't know whether targeted ads do anything), cancel culture, bad software and US censorship (we can show you two passenger planes colliding and 700 people incinerating but we can't show you the pilot going "motherfucker"). But this specific choice, to aggressively ban to avoid bad association, is actually somewhat rational.
>, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!
This isn't true. In the past, some viewers have always followed the money trail of a tv show which inevitably leads to the sponsors/advertisers that help fund it. Example of tv advertisers pulling out of controversial topics:
As I've mentioned many times before, there is no media institution on the planet (whether private corporate or public government funded) -- that is immune from censorship because every piece of the chain (creation, distribution, broadcasting, advertising, etc) all require money and money is the ultimate lever to apply pressure via government decrees, consumer boycotts, advertiser boycotts, employee revolts, journalists shaming, etc.
Nobody has invented an implementation that can withstand any pressure to filter content but also be available to the mainstream masses. Google even with its billions has to tame Youtube to placate advertisers. Apple, even with its billions has to placate China. Niche/obscure "censorship-proof" tech like Freenet/IPFS is not for the masses and the desirable content creators can't monetize their effort there.
On the contrary, television advertisements have (rightly) always been viewed as inextricably linked to the content they appear between. As such, advertiser boycotts have been a favoured tactic of conservative organisations throughout the past few decades. For example, from 1982:
> For the second time within a year, the Coalition for Better Television is threatening a boycott of one or more companies that advertise on prime-time television, but this time without the support of its most prominent member, the Moral Majority.
Maybe it‘s because television boards held up a certain level of acceptable truth and decency in the „good old times“?
When theories about child-eating democrats are freely stated as facts and picked up ans spun further in the recommendations so that a conspiracy theorist ends up in Congress (and a significant minority of the population is fine with that), then yes, I as a consumer want to execute on my free speech to hold advertisers responsible for sponsoring that.
I don't know much about TV, but in newspapers print and online, where to put ads has at least for a long time included considerations beyond of just what space is available.
At the news site I worked, the CMS had an per article option to white/blacklist ads from categories or disable them entirely. E.g. so to not show an car advertisement boasting their reliability under an article of an car accident where a child has died.
Or in print news papers (especially weekly ones) you often see that it is structured in a way that the realities about the harsh world and negative stories in general are in the first parts and the paper becomes more and more fluffy and feel-good as you turn the pages. It is in those later sections where most big brands want their ads to be placed.
Also, a lot of things that are pretty normal these days would have caused outrage and protests against the publishers not too long ago.
In my view, people were always easily offended/outraged. Just what causes it, and which views have significant followings and voice changes over time.
It changed with political correct investments. Some 15 years ago people became aware of companies investing in weapon industry, specifically cluster munition and landmines. A signal was sent by publicly shaming companies that shrugged their shoulders. That set a general trend to avoid negative publications and backfire by explicitly distancing from politically or humanitarian questionable practices. It has now escalated to fear-management and rewriting history.
Not in the early days. The Soap in Soap Operas was because you never knew when the ad for the soap company sponsoring the show would show up. There wasn't a break, it was ", and then I used my XYZ soap to"... until you got to the "and" the audience didn't know the ad was coming.
The ad breaks came later as TV realized that the ad was forever part of the show and so they didn't get more money when the did a rerun.
I am sure that you believe it's true, but advertisers have been used to being able to control what content they were put next to for a long time. I don't know whether it matters, or is valuable, but I do know that they have cared for long enough that it has been one of the largest influences on literally what television programs got made (even if this influence appears oblique, it has been one of the primary motivations of the folks making these decisions).
You can make an argument that the Internet allows things to work differently, but I think it was simply a matter of what was practical - once it became ~ practical to start exercising some control over what you're associating your brand with, of course folks would jump to pull that lever.
Your response isn't true. I'm sure you believe it's true, but prior to YouTube we didn't see demonitization happen - TV series were paid for ahead of time. While organizations like OneMillionMoms would harass advertisers to get content pulled, that's not a very effective strategy - they just usually got the spot price reduced.
Things did actually work differently. YouTube doesn't pay for content before it airs, and large amounts of the income for a show happen as it's left up. When YouTube demonitizes - and it can do this for an entire channel - it's not just a single episode either. Nor can the content be shopped around to other platforms as easily.
Even if the station wanted to take down your content, you at least got a station manager calling your production staff and not just a "We're sorry, but you violated our vague ToS." message with no response mechanism in it. It had some element of human review and wasn't susceptible to brigading.
You are missing the point that for years advertisers were accidentally putting commercials in front of garbage (multi-hour long videos that were only used as pacifiers for toddlers, with dozens of ad breaks) or scum (algorithm scammers getting billions of views from children on unlicensed, sexual content like Spider-man groping Elsa or worse).
These videos did very well in both view counts and watch time, driving perceived value (and thus CPM) straight up.
Your complaints about the specifics of the process are valid, and the dogshit content I’m referring to is absolutely YouTube’s fault. Massively popular channels called this content out for years but Wojcicki didn’t make a move until a newspaper called out PewDiePie for some jokes, go figure.
But the scale of what many advertisers would probably call click fraud was enormous. Further, this is probably the result of another YouTube decision to favor outside sales teams (such as Google) bundling views and selling them to advertisers like subprime mortgages.
Facebook is dealing with some fallout over misrepresenting (or maybe outright lying about) ad performance, YouTube has a parallel reckoning that may never come because the average business user on YT has never posted an ad. The other side of the coin is that many of the YouTube channels that get unjustly punished here presumably have a multi-social network audience that they can complain to.
Obviously advertisers also deserve blame for going along with ad spend that did not include a full breakdown of every video they spent money on, too.
Well, I didn't use the word demonetization, because it means something specific - which is what I think you're arguing here.
But what we did see happens is that shows which were likely to provoke a negative response from audiences or advertisers were never produced, in large part for the exact same reasons.
The specific shape of events may look different, but that's the result of democratization, allowing more people to be part of the game where they spend money, make stuff, and get ads run against it.
In the cases where YouTube does pay for stuff before it airs or offers a guarantee on future ads, I am fairly confident the old TV dynamics are at play - they will ensure that the content they are funding will garner viewers and not offend advertisers.
One example springs to mind. The racism controversy on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007 led to the sponsor and several advertisers withdrawing. The show was "rested" the following year.
Depends on the price the advertiser pays. You can buy an ad, or you can buy and ad in a particular place. You don't get to choose what Dear Abby says in her column, but enough advertisers like what she says (that is the people who read her column and see the ad next to it - they don't care what she actually says, just that it gets eyeballs for him).
News papers have long had a policy that the advertising department wasn't in control of what the news said. The advertisers didn't like it, but they went with it because they knew that it is what the eyeballs wanted.
There is a fine line though - some companies didn't advertise in particular outlets (playboy is an obvious example), which might or might not work out for them.
The question is where is the power. YouTube is acting like they don't have power here, but in fact they do: a large portion of video is on YouTube, and so if YouTube says "too bad, either give us your money or not", the advertisers will need to pay up. Of course there is a cost to youtube in doing that which they might not be willing to pay: some advertisers will say no. Others will tell youtube fine, but we are not willing to pay as much as you could get if we got more control who sees us.
The question isn't where the power is, the question is how much money does YouTube need/want?
Our monkey brains are not evolved to deal with the satisfaction barrage, the microdosed dopamine of incremental reputation tallies and continually met expectations. Social media platforms weaponise the limbic system in support of commerce, and once habituated, regrettably few people display a reflexive defiance when the same mechanisms are hijacked by hostile actors & propagandists.
As any student of history knows, this is hardly a new phenomenon, but it was never before so globally industrialised or automated.
> everyone was happy
"Everyone" ... except for all the people whose lives are made materially worse by the subsequent ease of disseminating hate material & misinformation. Also unhappy: anyone possessing the humanity to feel for others in distress.
> cowed or [...] ideologically sympathetic
Intentional or not, this came across dripping with derision, but it falls flat: the only "ideological sympathy" here is that of being a decent human being.
> an extremely small set of activists and journalists
This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
>> an extremely small set of activists and journalists
>This ratifies the well-known aphorism that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world. It does not undermine the necessity for showing assholes the door.
Wonderful. And the "asshole" designation that these Elect ("extremely small set of ..." as was put above) - how do they get to decide who's an asshole and gets shown the door, what are their criteria and what is the procedure for the rest of us to appeal or ratify their decision-making?
Can we at least agree that censors can make mistakes, or have their own biases? And shouldn't censors be policed as well, so they are accountable to the public?
That's your opinion, that I'm sticking up for the rights of assholes. And by the way, I'm not surprised that someone who favors censorship and calls out wankers, would also interpret for someone else what they believe, before they said anything. But I'll say it now: the argument against censorship isn't a defense of assholes and wankers (and people you don't like), it's an appeal for the very historical, empirically shown problem with censorship that it's hard to have an unbiased, fair and accountable body of censors. Thus, you inevitably end up with good ideas that get thrown out with the bad, if you take a generous argument, and if you want to be cynical about it, you get critical ideas thrown out when they don't match mainstream narrative. This latter matters only little now, but during wartime or times of strife, boy does it matter.
Your name-calling should be enough for people to raise their eyebrows at the question: who decides what gets censored.
Since there's no censorship occurring, this foaming-mouthed rant is simply more of the same.
Tip for idiots thrown out of pubs: yelling at the bouncers isn't going to get your name off the landlord's shit-list, and you don't have a right to make everyone listen to your drivel.
> What killed the golden goose was an extremely small set of activists and journalists (specifically Media Matters and Vox) methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of their "support" for controversial niche videos.
Wrong. There are multiple points that come in play here, none of which are as simple as "the activists are protesting against Nazi and conspiracy crap":
First of all, linear TV, radio and newspapers had human reviews in the loop at every stage: client, producer, ad broker, station/paper. That meant that the chance of valuable ads appearing next to bullshit was somewhat next to zero - and also, that "fringe content" was restricted to unscrupulous (or from the same niche) advertisers. Essentially, there was a feedback loop: content that was not mainstream-worthy had no chance of being financed.
Internet advertising and especially social networks with monetization and targeted advertising however, turned up all of that. Suddenly, a Nestle ad could run as a front-roll of Alex Jones lunacy. The result was that an awful lot of really awful content creators had both the technical capability to reach out to millions of people (thanks to the Internet, which eliminated the traditional gatekeepers) and the advertising income that was previously reserved to mainstream-able content.
The result of that, in turn, was an explosion in numbers of these "content creators" and their content (simply because many of them could now actually afford to quit regular jobs)... and thus, combined with the explosion of followers of such content, meant minorities had to suffer from a constant barrage of both online hate speech and real world violence - including many acts of terrorism that claimed human lives, and culminating in the events of January 6th 2021.
What the "extremely small set of activists and journalists" is doing is attempting to rein in the hate and the violence that results of it. And yes, making brands and their advertising agencies aware of what is going on and where their money ends up is a good thing.
Is there somewhere in the middle because you resent these activists and crave even more reasons to be mad at them?
Because these extremely small set of activists include the UK’s government and the newspaper The Guardian who pulled their ads due to YouTube placing them next to “extremist content”. Not to mention the numerous US government watchdogs who have been sniffing out a way to thwart google and Facebook for years now.
I was more referring to the people mentioned elsewhere in the thread, people who declare a new benign thing 'offensive' every month or two and then go on a scolding crusade.
As far as actual extreme reactionary content.. I don't know what the solution is. I'd put "the middle" as stop promoting them because they hit your engagement metrics, but be much more cautious about banning them, giving them martyrdom points and an incentive to organize better.
Ultimately the villain here is engagement-optimizing recommendation algos. The current situation is a small reactionary channel will be promoted for engagement, until it's big and people notice, and THEN it's banned, with a maximum of negative impact. Worst of all worlds.
An Israeli had build a tool to detect anti-semitism in videos and comments. Not being able to sell to YouTube, they pivoted to targeting advertisers ("make sure your advertisements do not appear next to racist content"). Part of this was a PR campaign, where they would mail journalists "scoops" with videos with lots of views, anti-semetic content, and no moderation of YouTube.
With every such news article, YouTube stepped up its game. It culminated with PewdiePie making an "anti-semetic" joke, and this resulted in the Adpocalypse.
So I'd say it was more commercial interests than activism interests, but at times these align.
What a bizarre made-up story you presented here! Of course, one always finds conspiracy theories blaming the Jews. (And it's seeming OK with the management, even though they've professed to the New Yorker that they take an active role keeping the community in-line.)
Everytime this is coming up, I wonder why people were always okay with banning nudity but now that hate speech (that undeniably agitates people and leads to hate crime) gets banned, they oppose content blocking.
Nudity is banned on television, youtube, facebook, twitch, and any public place in the US. None of those had significant outcry when it was banned, and people bat an eye so little at that status quo that I apparently had to write this comment to remind you.
Please feel free to point us to the evidence of HN howling with outrage about the chilling consequences of our digital overlords succumbing to activist and advertiser presssure to ban porn (and presumed porn) on their platforms. When Tumblr banned porn, the general reaction was "lol, they're not going to have any audience left" and the one person that raised it as a speech violation (as opposed to a bit of a shame for kinky people) was downvoted to nothingness.[1]
Compare and contrast with how this thread, instead of focusing on "lol, algorithms and context!" has turned into questioning whether the real problem is advertisers signalling they don't want to attach their brand to racist videos (and let's not get started on how angry much of HN was when companies decided to manually enforce policies against hate speech). It's difficult to conclude that most US "free speech" advocates don't believe that banning [perceived] racial hatred is somehow more dangerous to humanity than banning [perceived] adult content (which parallels Supreme Court rulings on what speech does and doesn't deserve protection). Given the respective consequences of racial hatred and pornography, I see this simultaneous presumption in favour of the former and against the latter as very hard to justify.
IME few creators on youtube are willing to risk their channels by taking any risks in that regard.
For example, I'm told the character creator in 'Cyberpunk 2077' offers adjustable penis size - but many streamers and reviewers won't risk showing it. Even comedy channels that love creating zany characters.
After all, would you trust Youtube to detect whether nudity is pornographic context, when they can't even tell if 'white threatens black' is in a chess context?
And even that isn't universal, depending on what type (e.g. many will be fine with self made 17 year old nudes, far less with forcible rape of a six year old).
The main purpose of free speech is to ensure the ability to criticize the government. It never meant pornography, free speech and obscenity laws always coexisted together in Europe and US. It's easy to construe the criticism of politicians as hate speech, while construing it as nudity would require some higher level of mental gymnastics.
The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are. The radical left and the radical right both think each other's points are dangerous. And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing. From their respective viewpoints, they're in the "right", just as you think you are.
There's a slippery slope here, and I feel it's one so large that we can't even tell we're already sliding on it.
The obvious answer is a well-informed populace that isn't easily swayed by emotion and fear, and has the time and inclination to do their own fact checking. Trouble is, that's obviously a pipe dream. Other ideas, such as Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction I believe.
>The obvious answer is a well-informed populace that isn't easily swayed by emotion and fear, and has the time and inclination to do their own fact checking. Trouble is, that's obviously a pipe dream.
The other trouble is that one side is actively opposed to a "well informed populace" and unironically calls secondary education "liberal brainwashing camps".
If you want a well informed populace, you have to privilege the side attempting to get there.
Well... the "other side" would oppose informing the populace that the equality dogma is false (or at least unproven), so it isn't just the far right that likes their myths.
Attemps to ban things that are false runs into the difficulty that you need to first determine what is false, which is hard to do if one of the answers might contradict an important value.
I should stop replying to political posts with more politics. :/
More or less the belief that we are all equal with equal potential (it's more or less a consequence of egalitarianism). That if little Timmy just tries hard enough and is given enough support he'll be able to master differential equations.
Do you have an example of where this belief is expressed? Because the common trope afaik is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
What would be the difference in public policy anyways if after-the-fact results differ?
Well, some public policy differences would be continuing to invest ever increasing amounts of money on the worst performers in schools in an attempt to get them up nearer the average.
Another might be seeing the lack of women plumbers (or whatever) and deciding that this is both bad and fixable and investing a bunch of money into advertising how awesome plumbing is to girls in school.
> Well, some public policy differences would be continuing to invest ever increasing amounts of money on the worst performers in schools in an attempt to get them up nearer the average.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that we, as a society, should not invest in worst performers? How would we even know beforehand? And how would withdrawing such funding from "bad" schools not affect the opportunity of all of the children of that school?
What's your point about the gender ratios of certain occupations? That it's a waste of money to try to alter?
I'm not actually advocating for this here. Just pointing out potential policy differences that come from a non-equality worldview.
I don't have the time to give an in depth discussion on education etc the attention it would need.
Though to elaborate on the education policy difference, you can invest variable amounts into the bottom performers, even eventually giving up on them. As I understand it, schools currently have various legal obligations towards students that lead to them spending disproportionate resources on the least performant.
Even with accepting that rather cynical view, I don't understand how you could even accurately determine who is a "hopeless bottom performer" without at the same time removing peoples equal opportunity.
Well, yes, everyone feels that way, but whose feelings are well-founded and whose aren't?
This is the difference between "we are banning substance X because we did a controlled experiment and found it to be carcinogenic", and "we are banning X because we are afraid of ghosts".
> whose feelings are well-founded and whose aren't?
This is the gist of it and is really hard to tell, even though some people claim it’s easy.
I would measure what side makes sense based on their recommended interventions. For example, if one side is so certain they want to ban speech that contradicts them then they are probably wrong.
It takes pretty clear evidence for what is right and wrong and lots of effort to determine. So it’s usually hard to dedicate those resources to topics.
Of course there are lots of sides and not just two so it becomes harder and harder.
> This is the gist of it and is really hard to tell, even though some people claim it’s easy.
It seems to me that people are nearly universally assuming that this is easy, and that obviously their side is always absolutely correct, and questioning that is basically heretic. This is how we end up always blaming the evil other side, and with "you're either with us or against us".
I used to think this was easy until I had to implement even really simple versions for small populations. They devolve quickly and aren’t very valuable compared to other activities.
That and as much as people complain, there’s a magical thinking that technology can do anything they see in sci-fi or an AI consultant has told them is possible.
So I would like to hear back from people after they’ve tried for a while.
> The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are.
The other guy is also claiming that Trump won the election, global heating is a hoax, COVID-19 is a hoax, Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, and his wife Michelle is a man.
> And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing.
Sorry, this just isn't so.
Your answer boils down to this: "There is no truth. If one person says Michelle Obama is a transsexual man, and the other says she isn't, then both truths are equally good."
Have you personally seen Michelle Obama's sexual organs that you can 100% be certain with your claims?
Every since the ban on free speech, I really haven't followed what the conspiracies are. What I do hear is 3rd party reports on what those conspiracies are and what 'they believe'.
You listed off a bunch of nonsense - do you really think people actually believe that crap or are you the one fooled into thinking someone actually believes that? The more outlandish they sound, the better case for censoring, right? These cases just sound like a reporter went on 4chan, decided they dont like this so they must be the 'other side'. And it was enough to convince the majority that censorship is the way.
Better phrased, let's stop giving attention to a desperate media who's only function in this past decade is cancelling culture they don't approve. (culture censorship)
Both sides are extremely polarized, only one side seems to be able to share their opinion online. One side believes this is proper because they answer to the 'science'. What does the science say about censorship? We've seen it before.
> You listed off a bunch of nonsense - do you really think people actually believe that crap or are you the one fooled into thinking someone actually believes that? The more outlandish they sound, the better case for censoring, right? These cases just sound like a reporter went on 4chan, decided they dont like this so they must be the 'other side'. And it was enough to convince the majority that censorship is the way.
I personally know someone who believes about half of that. It sure doesn't feel unusual.
GP identified 3 groups of people, each defined by a belief. You have announced that you subscribe to one of those beliefs. You haven't disagreed with the argument.
Many of those things have pretty neat analogues in the extreme left - the extremists didn't accept that 2016 was legitimate, they've been fighting the science on nuclear power for 50 years and they wasted a lot of everyone's time trying to argue that Trump was a Russian asset.
Neither wing of politics is a shining example of sane ideas.
The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are.
Then I hope I win. Cause the other guy really likes firearms and believes Bill Gates is some sort of satanic reptilian timelord.
Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways.
I don't see that model making anyone happy because I believe true impartiality is impossible. The honest and less bureaucratic approach for FB to take is to admit the process is subjective.
You seem to be conflating racists with believing Bill Gates is a lizardman. While there may be some overlap I don't think that's an accurate look at the world.
We don't disagree there. I wanted to echo the 'other guy' phrase in the comment to which I was replying, but 'other guys' would be less ambiguous. On social media today, there are several different potentially violent movements that concern me.
I'm not on either side. I don't even live in the United States.
But one side, the Republican side, is batshitinsane and believes things that are provably untrue - Obama is a Muslim, climate change is a Chinese hoax, COVID-19 is the flu, that sort of thing.
The Democrats are just run-of-the-mill, low-energy centrist politicians.
I have a hard time lumping in swathes of people into these tiny slivers of beliefs. How is it not obvious that one side did a better job of demonizing the other? I'm pretty sure I can comment 'And would like to be able to eat babies' and I will be seeing it on similar posts as yours by tomorrow.
The media did one hell of a job this past election cycle, I wonder what batshitinsane things we will be allowed to talk about on the next one. I doubt much.
Now that we haved moved censorship officially online as well, I can only hope some wonderful people are busy building the next workaround medium.
I'm sympathetic to that, but by 'Then I hope I win' I certainly wasn't thinking in those terms. The 'side' I was thinking of is reasonable people, not all of whom are left-wingers, let alone Democrats.
Yes, as a general thing saying the other side is wrong and my side is right is just silly, because the other side is saying they're right and your side is wrong, but in the specific case where one side is demonstrably wrong then it isn't silly anymore.
But the other side believes they are demonstrably right too, just as strongly as you do. The way to "win" is to argue against the opponent's viewpoint and persuade the general population of the strength of your argument. To do that you need a platform for open speech. This is Democracy 101.
What you are arguing for is not democracy but "safetyism". You seek a shortcut whereby you can persuade a powerful gatekeeper to silence your oppositon and make you feel better.
The point I had in mind is that ideology is well and good, but sometimes pragmatism is better.
If a desire for free speech, to pick a contemporary example, leads to defending the 'right' of the Myanmar military to use Facebook for their coup to oppress the Burmese, pragmatism is probably better.
Consider Qanon people, or NeoNazis, or Boogaloo Boys, etc. It is impossible to prove beyond any doubt that are more dangerous or more wrong than 'normal' people. But if we're being pragmatic, there isn't a reasonable doubt.
There isn't enough substance in that comment for me to rebut. People often spout platitudes about liberty and democracy without understanding either. With apologies, I will assume that is the case here.
How is that accurate? More, like, exaggerated to make a point but missing it by a mile.
Soviets did not give airtime to pro-party ideologues to validate their position. There was no competition between ideologues to get more airtime. The program was _dictated_ by the powers that be.
It's still a bad analogy, but it puts fewer words in my mouth. If there is a line from 'Youtube deleted my video' to 'the government rounded me up and threw me in a sanitarium' it's not a direct one.
Yes but that won't stop you from drawing/rationalizing _any_ conclusions from a set of facts. Not all of them will be right and fewer even will make any sense.
Which is indeed your prerogative until you mess with the laws of physics and start believing that because you move your arms very quickly you can fly, and that will stop you from falling off of a cliff.
There is a five-whys strategy to go to some bottom of an issue but even this strategy will fail you when you cherry-pick the answers to your convenience.
I think there's a misunderstanding? The comment 'Soviets put their dissidents into mental hospitals' was a reply to a comment by me. I provided an example (with which I, naturally enough, disagree) of a criticism of my original comment that would be, at least, somewhat fair.
I think I replied to assimilation of the idea of totalitarian regime institutionalizing otherwise mentally healthy people for dissidence to merely not letting them vent on radio.
Indirect lines explaining seemingly unrelated concepts are everywhere. They even made some shows about that.
However, linking these two particular concepts together is strange.
This started long before. Remember when outlets like Bloomberg made a big deal because ads were running on random 5-view YouTube videos with objectionable content? It’s about money, not your culture war.
