If by "extremist content" you mean religious fanatics beheading people, or calling people to arms, or giving tips on producing bombs or whatever, then you are entitled to treat this as "unpopular ideas" which "need defending in a free society" or whatever, but don't be surprised if sane, rational people take a somewhat different view and decide they don't want to spread hatred, nor leave themselves open to lawsuits for the honour of hosting this content for free. All companies like to talk about fostering freedom or whatever, but as organisations which exist to make profit it's partly because censorship costs them money, and also the more content they have, the more of a surface they have to make money from. They don't really give a shit about you or your freedom, and there's precious little internal conflict about whether to host this months crop of terrorist atrocities.
Parent comment didn't say they were ideas that "need defending in a free society", or anything about freedom. He just said that censoring them might have negative consequences.
I don't know if it's correct in this case. But I know that in general, people see censorship as validation of the ideas being censored, and also as a rallying flag for something to be angry about.
I'm not talking about videos of beheadings (although there's a case for keeping things like that around too to help educate people). I'm talking about suppression of everyday right wing viewpoints. Things like this: http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...
For context, I'm not right-wing myself but absolutely object to censoring content based on political viewpoints such as this.
From reading that, the only criticism that seems sane and fair is that they should have chosen a different string to "trending"; "recommended" perhaps, or "curated". My expectations that i'm going to receive a much-needed education in some topic from occasionally clicking on the "trending" link on facebook aren't especially high; perhaps yours are a little misplaced if present?
Also, I note that that article states that other "curators" denied such a bias exists. Facebook have denied such activities. Ok, being sceptical, they would say that. But it could be bullshit spewed by an ex-exmployee So, where's the study? The data? How do we show whether or not there is a bias, assuming you care enough to investigate? It's just more conspiracy theories and "typing" isn't it.
They need broad rules because whatever rule you come up with, some clown is going to try and get around it. Or just post something obviously against the spirit of the rules then argue about it. Users don't have a stake in Facebook, YouTube etc, but the companies running them do. They'd probably all prefer to just have "don't be a dick" but we live in a world full of pedants and lawyers and professional irritants so by having something a little more concrete it preempts a lot of rather tedious complaints.
If you're a rebel prophet with something exciting to say then no-ones stopping you paying a small amount of money for a domain name and hosting and away you go. If you can't do that then I'd agree there's censorship and there's a problem. Other than that, you should have absolutely no expectation that other people are going to do the heavy lifting for you, whether that's paying for your hosting/bandwidth, or taking the heat when users, advertisers etc complain about your content.
If it's that company's site then I don't see who else has any business getting involved. Do you want someone telling you what (legal) content you can or can't show? Why?
Youtube, Facebook, Twitter all loudly trumpeted their attempts to assist "free speech", especially during the Arab Spring.
And they were only doing that when what they were doing was going along with the cultural democratic zeitgeist at the time.
If they were more open about "Hey, we're providing you a free service, we can shut you down if you don't conform to public opinion" that's fine also. But you can't have it both ways.
Either you support the free expression of unpopular opinions, or you reserve the right to censor anything at all you find objectionable. You can't say "I support expressing opinions, as long as I approve of them, and I support freedom!"
You can absolutely run a company that allows users to communicate in interesting ways, and say you support freedom but also refuse to show content you don't want to.
Beheadings. Child Pornography. Instructions for making chemical weapons. Snuff films. Animal abuse. Recruiting extremists to kill innocent people from your country.
I'm really tired of idealists who refuse to accept pragmatism. If you would really run a video site that willingly hosts those things, then I have no respect for you. At all.
> You can absolutely run a company that allows users to communicate in interesting ways, and say you support freedom but also refuse to show content you don't want to.
You can say you support free speech and ban free speech you don’t like. What?
>You can say you support free speech and ban free speech you don’t like. What?
Actually most countries that have free speech do actually ban certain things that fall under hate speech laws.
Some of the things in the parent comment aren't hate speech. However I think it's certainly possible for a company or government to decide between what should be allowed or not allowed, and to do that in a way that isn't morally objectionable.
Your argument seems to be something along the lines that companies and governments cannot possibly censor free speech in a morally acceptable way. It's a slippery slope argument: "ban ISIS and you'll eventually ban Trump supporters" (that seems to be jimmywanger's argument).
No, no slippery slope argument here. My argument is that hate speech is in the eye of the beholder, and is not well defined.
If we had well defined guidelines, such as pedophilia defined as nude people under 18 years old, that would be one thing. Although ridiculous (see all the teenagers who are put on registries for sending naked pictures to each other), at least it can't be twisted to make something else illegal.
Go ahead, define "hate speech". And if the laws already ban hate speech, why wouldn't we just punish the people who violate laws instead of censoring them?
And since hate speech laws vary from society to society, do we have to create a separate site for each country, where the allowable videos shown differ, and the comments are pruned differently?
(4) I will pretend to champion free speech and reap the good publicity, while simultaneously not allowing you to speak things I think are awful and disgusting.
That's the last point. If you're running a SF Giants' forum, you have the right to ban LA Dodgers' fans. However, you should not say that you're a bastion of freedom and upholding free speech at the same time you're doing it.
(5) Extend "awful and disgusting" to anything that -however mildly- goes against your commercial interests or personal interests of anyone placed high enough in the organization.
(6) Still claim you're a bastion of free speech.
and -lately-
(7) Monetize other's expressions of correct free speech.
Ironically people actually seem to think this is worth doing. Compare youtube comments and people's opinions of them with, say reddit or wikipedia, both of which boast political moderators.
> If they were more open about "Hey, we're providing you a free service, we can shut you down if you don't conform to public opinion" that's fine also. But you can't have it both ways.
That's why articles like these are being written—it's the companies letting everyone know that they're changing their policies. They used to be more laissez-faire, didn't like the results, and now are starting to rethink their decisions. I imagine in a few months' time they'll have figured out how they want it to go, and will publish updated guidelines.
Yes, but they will not be too clear about their elephant in the room: this will have demonstrated that free speech is not possible. Many here seem to believe in free speech, freedom to express anything, is an absolute. But it is not and cannot be. Tolerance has limits, and its limits is intolerance. Tolerance can happen only inside a framework, a common ground where the parts agree on some values, agree to tolerate each other.
Same with free speech: it is possible only inside a framework, with some higher order rules and agreement. One of them could be that you are allowed to tell others your opinions only if you would agree to carry them publicly on your back when waking your kids in the streets. This would certainly moderate a lot. Or, closer to the topic, I should be allowed to upload a video only if I'd be ok with my kid knowing I uploaded this video when they get to be my age.
But we are not talking about formal logic here, we are talking about ethics. We use words that have a meaning, and we all know how to recognize a "sign of tolerance" and it's opposite. There is no need for a formal definition, which is not possible anyway.
Incorrect. We're talking about a computer system now, and you need formal definitions.
The statement "we all know how to..." is problematic. Do we buy into the "we all" that comprises the west, or the "we all" that is east asia (which, btw is far more repressive. See the great firewall of China)?
Ah. What I meant to say is "you can't say that with integrity".
The overthrown governments probably thought that the opinions expressed on Twitter and Facebook were highly extremist, and should be shut down.
The only reason they weren't (And they even built an SMS bridge for Twitter) is because their biggest markets supported the insurrection. And if that were made a bit more obvious, it would be far more honest and interesting.
>Ah. What I meant to say is "you can't say that with integrity".
What companies have time for such quaint notions of integrity these days? They're too busy trying to extract profit! :P
>…And if that were made a bit more obvious, it would be far more honest and interesting.
I think that a lot of people in the western world choose to willingly turn a blind eye to such, and its a shame, because it will eventually be at their own peril if we look to history as any example.
> Do you want someone telling you what (legal) content you can or can't show?
No. As a citizen, I have rights. Corporations do not.
I'm always amazed at this attitude that hates government power while willfully turning a blind eye to corporate power. The usual argument about governments having a monopoly on the use of force merely demonstrates the naiveté of the speaker. Corporations regularly use no only physical force but are masters at economic manipulation. With the amount of corruption and regulatory capture that now thrives in government, corporate and government power are not easily separated.
When corporations become large enough that it becomes impossible to avoid, they de facto become another layer of government. Except this layer doesn't even pretend to be democratic. With their claims that profit motive trumps all else, corporations are a layer of government that is explicitly working against the interest of the general population.
If corporations want to become so large that they are acting with the powers that are normally reserved for governments - such as being the arbiter of free speech - then they need to take on the responsibilities of acting in the public interest and protecting basic rights.
If they choose instead to act without public buy-in, then this is going to end badly. Populism is on the rise and people are starting to revolt against what they perceive are the powers that have ignored their needs for decades.
As a citizen you have rights. Your printing press doesn't. Nevertheless, preventing a printing press from printing hinders your rights. Same with a corporation and it's owners.
Nevertheless, you are correct that corporations and self-organizing groups have a large amount of power to manipulate citizens and voters. The blogger Mencius Moldbug wrote about this back in 2009 (https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.in/2009/01/gentle-...) - I've been rereading his blog on kindle whenever I have an 18 hour flight and it's quite prescient. (Just longwinded, why I reserve it for flights.)
There is also significant evidence that FB and Twitter are using this power.
In much the same way, Gawker's power was unchecked and unbalanced until Thiel and Hogan stepped in.
I don't know what the solution is or what solutions would be morally acceptable, but there definitely is a problem. The best I can come up with is reducing democracy so as to make manipulating the public a less valuable proposition.
> As a citizen you have rights. Your printing press doesn't. Nevertheless, preventing a printing press from printing hinders your rights. Same with a corporation and it's owners.
The printing press by itself is not engaged in commerce. I think the logical extension would be that if you're selling printing services, you can't discriminate based on message. But you can print whatever you choose on your own time.
Why do people confuse legality with morality? I can't legally stop Youtube from censoring videos. But I can criticize the practice, think it's unethical, or be concerned about the consequences.
I'm not confusing the concepts. And I'm not stopping you from saying what you want. I don't see the point though. There's no content there.
"This company is legally allowed to deny random user #24232's attempts to get us to stream video #198284, but I don't agree with that; I think they should be allowed to upload it". Well, so what? Who cares?
If you felt that strongly about it - not just "i'm going to type a really angry comment about it" strongly but "actually do something about it" strongly then you'd be hosting content yourself. Or at the very least trying to show why it's so important that this particular company should be hosting it. Or you could find another company which would host it and tell people they should be using that site instead. A lot of the complaints I read about freedom and censorship just seems like empty posturing about what companies should or shouldn't do. It's just lazy. These companies only do it at all to make money. Your statements about whether a company should or shouldn't host something would be better phrased as "this company should be hosting this video because it will make them more money". Of course, with a lot of this content the opposite is likely true; complaints from advertisers, users etc will cost them more money (and hassle) than any money they'd make from the average video. It's time to stop thinking of facebook, youtube etc as being a social media version of the First Amendment and more like a conservative pension fund.
If you really don't care then why are you here? Do you not care so strongly that you feel the need to write a 3 paragraph comment on how much you don't care? I dont get it.
I do care. Internet censorship has real world consequences. Maybe censoring ISIS stuff is good, but what if they start filtering other political content? What if that leads to fewer followers of that idea, or pushes it out of discussion entirely?
I think it's unethical and worth protesting. I think Google especially has more responsibility than a random website. Given their overwhelming market share to the point they are nearly a monopoly in some areas. And I think this sets a terrible precedent, that tech companies will work with the government to censor political speech.
I think protesting it has value. People working at Google might read this and change their mind. Or at least be aware lots of people disapprove. And it might convince future website owners or startup founders to care more about free speech issues. I certainly plan to do so on future websites I create.
But if nothing else it's just a discussion. I don't get the your idea that every discussion needs to have immediate actionable value. Most things on hacker news are not actionable. It's just interesting or fun to discuss.
Lastly I highly doubt YouTube is doing this for money. They need to hire dozens of people to review and moderate this stuff. And they gain nothing from it. They are acting under government and ideological pressure.
>If you felt that strongly about it - not just "i'm going to type a really angry comment about it" strongly but "actually do something about it" strongly then you'd be hosting content yourself.
Or one could exploit the technicals of such platforms and while increasing the costs for such platforms in engaging in such behavior. Like exploiting oauth keys, public wifi networks, shoddy encryption, etc, to upload/modify content on behalf of "acceptable" users/accounts or engage in a number of interactions on such platforms in ways one wants to without the explicit permission that is not protected or enforced by such technical implementations. There's a lot of creativity to be had beyond self hosting.
The companies just want to make a profit, sure, but not every "user" has to care about that just as the companies don't give shit about the users freedoms. Plenty of jurisdictions where IP addrs are assigned in the world that would turn a blind eye to such actors who are acting agaisnt such platforms.
They can do whatever they want but we can comment on whether they're accomplishing what they think they are or if they're creating a culture of closed dialog. When multiple major companies start taking similar policies for manipulating content we can and should call out the trend if for no other reason than to discuss its pros and cons.
No-one's saying you can't discuss it. But where's the discussion?
I just don't see how you one can say "company A has no right to decide what appears on company A's servers" without following up with some watertight legal or moral reason why this should not be the case. Of course they should be able to.
Well, your argument was that trump was a right wing phenomenon caused by "left wing media shaping" but there IS no left wing media in the US as far as I can tell. The right wing/elite serving media like to pretend there is to drag the public/debate further to the right. Movements like trump are people knowing they're getting screwed but having the elite (people like Trump) blame mexicans or muslims (people with no money or power) or whoever rather than the banks, corporations and government itself (who have all the money and power). It doesn't make any difference which story trends on facebook or which youtube video gets pulled. If people wanted to learn about where the power is and how and why people who have generally good intentions are tricked into voting for people like trump then they'd be watching chomsky videos/interviews which are never pulled. By your logic chomsky would do well to get them taken down so that people try and discover what they're missing. But it doesn't work that way.
> there IS no left wing media in the US as far as I can tell.
I think you and I disagree significantly on this foundational fact to the point where there's no use debating downstream arguments.
I see the media fully supporting Clinton while bashing Trump. That's left wing bias in my mind (regardless of my support of either candidate). Once you include online media, the left leaning bias is even more significant. Twitter in particular (I know they're not discussed in the OP) have been very aggressive about stamping out right wing speech.
It's more "establishment media" than "left-wing media", though. The idea that Clinton is left-wing is just amusing, nothing more than an US peculiarity. The only leftish party the US seems to have left is the Green, and the mainstream media certainly doesn't promote them.
> there IS no left wing media in the US as far as I can tell.
That's because left wing media does not, in fact, exist. The only types of media that actually exist are right wing media and media that's not left enough. That's a fuzzy distinction to be sure, but it makes the bias clear enough at least.
Ideally you use a mirror port so that all traffic being routed also gets sent to the SecurityOnion services for automated analysis, reporting, and alerts (depending on how SO is configured).
as andrewstuart2 mentioned, you need it to see all traffic, which doesn't happen if you just connect it to the router. If you have an ethernet connection your internet traffic goes through, you'll want to put a device in there that sends you a copy of all traffic (one simple and cheap option is a Netgear GS105E switch).
"For example, the error rates for image recognition, speech recognition and natural language processing have collapsed to close to human rates, at least on some measurements."
I've always laughed at how poor speech recognition is. I know it's probably a hard problem, and I know that sometimes you can transcribe a whole sentence without error. But how long will it be until it will just work; I'll be able to just speak normally, in English, and have it transcribe without error? Microsoft put up a page recently with a demo and prices, but it was a lot worse than the last one I tried.
Thanks though I don't know why none of the threads in the crash report have any stack traces. Unfortunately this doesn't look actionable. I'll have to ask someone to take another look.
It's a bit like Jazz (and to a lessor extent most other forms of music) from before the 1980's, where they started that horrific over-production which made it sound plasticy and homogenous.
Pretty much any post 1980's Jazz. You can start off comparing Miles Davis's Amandla with anything he was doing in the '60s or '70s (Live Evil, On the Corner, Cellar Door Sessions etc). Herbie Hancock is another one who did stuff both pre and post 1980.
Amandla still has some great tracks, and there's some great post 1980s Jazz out there. But it always sounds like too much attention has been paid to how much reverb there is, how much echo on the drums, and to limit how much the guitar -if present- deviates from permitted parameters. Jazz from the '50s to '70s doesn't have these problems, and a lot of it was extremely well recorded, compared with all the dreadful sounding recordings of most rock from the '60s and '70s.
Are you talking to the person who wrote about helping soldiers, or is that not political, and it's just commenting on helping soldiers which is out of line? Because that seems a little one-sided and naive.
I like the idea of two factor input; enter/select a password on a phone and send it over WiFi to the pc to paste into the field. Does this exist?