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

Bingo.

Companies that pay for ads on youtube don't want their ads shown on certain videos, so this is what happens.

Companies want to sell to as many people as possible, they are not in the business of appealing to right wing edgelords, especially a big international company like Youtube.

 

It's infested with anti-sjw grifters who will go on long rants about a tweet from a rando they disagree with. It's pretty sad.

 

How is it YouTube doesn't consider this hate speech?

"Alex Jones is still a lying *******"
"Abortion Is murder"
"Flat Earth: The DUMBEST People on the Planet?"
"Trump Warns US may have to 'totally destroy North Korea'"
"Iraq war vet: ISIS should be exterminated":
"My niglets" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qodsYoFdGtI
"Get the Wetbacks Outta here!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaZCP7UA__A

Guess YouTube has some extra, extra sensitive topics that everyone MUST agree on: not wetbacks or niglets, but 9/11? Sandy Hook? Why so special?

 

Crowder is an unfunny moron but what is happening to his channel is so bogus.

There's a real danger in having YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc control so much of the public discourse.

 

But if it's through free market mechanisms, can it be a bad thing?

It's the free market, come on!

 

It's just the next step in the inevitable dumbing down of America. First it was eta: the broadsheets, then Hearst and the newspapers, then it was radio, then TV, now this....

What's next?

 

I find this whole situation odd.

Traditional political positions are flipped.

The "free market/private business" side suddenly extremely concerned about censorship because it is hurting the conservative political voices.

The "freedom of speech" brigade suddenly has zero issues with big business controlling the spoken and written word because conservatives are being silenced.

 

The government and big business just continue to meld together.

With robotics and computer improvements, our food sources will be controlled by vertical farming that is computer controlled.

Then the government will pay people to not work, as robotics and computers are cheaper and more efficient.

At that point everyone will be completely at the will of the government for food and necessities and the government and big business will be one.

CHEERS!

 

Funny you mention that...I had a bunch of zucchini and yellow squash from the garden just sitting around, so the Mom added some potatoes and cheese and blended it all up and made soup yesterday.

I told her the Soylent Green was delicious.

 

Media capture. We need to go deeper. Develop the next form of cultural communication systems. Telepathy?

 

Telepathy. Implanted brain chips? Barcodes? Number of the Beast?

 

I teach college and let me tell you: it's a f'ing nightmare. I am the straight white dude that is going out of style, and I am truly afraid of these "liberal" American white girls I teach, that I'm going to lose my job from some offhand comment about the trans issue or whatever.

I teach international students too, and it's much better. I can say whatever I want to kids from Saudi or China . . . not the U.S.A. Americans are the most sensitive p*****s around.

I don't like to teach Americans. And this is different from, say, 2001, when I was teaching at U of H and 9/11 happened. Students were what I considered normal then. American students now are a bunch of argumentative, unpleasant, lonely p*****s whose sense of Americanism is subsumed by their allegiance to red and blue teams of clowns like Trump and Clinton. My blue students and my red students literally have trouble even talking to each other. These idiot students think they have more in common with billionaire Trump or millionaire Clinton than they do with the Mormon kid who was born a month after them and grew up five miles away.

Incidentally, the "conservative" American students seem to be more liberal than the "liberal" students right now: they seem to realize that a lot of people don't like their views, so they are kind of understanding as if they are in a minority. It's the self-righteous "liberals" who are f'ing intolerable, with knowing they are right. (Terrorists think they are right too.)

I used to consider myself a liberal. The word "liberal" has lost its literal meaning in politics.

 

some combination of mesh networks, bitcoin lightening payments, near earth satellites, and open source protocols are going to lead to a system whereby content can be hosted by a distributed network (with members of the network getting paid for their bandwidth/storage) that can't be censored (in the same way BitTorrent can't be stopped)

 

Working with education this has been my experience as well. I'm not boots-on-the-ground so to speak, but I am heavily in their orbit and it is nauseating. This is coming from a card-carrying liberal. The red-hat/blue-hat dichotomy is so tired and broken. One group is proud of its ignorance, the other group is proud of its intolerance.

 

I think the conversation gets muddied by extremes too.

There is harassment, there are youtube channels whose sole purpose is to spread hate, I don't see why Youtube would want to monetize that (even though they still host it, put it under restrictions, etc.) there isn't a single company or workplace that would be proud of supporting some of the views that's floating out there.

Also, that some of these ideas on the right are extreme ideas. I tell you, it gets tiring (as a black man) that some 'Centrists' and conservative voices think that my rights should be up for 'debate' and 'discussion'.

People can talk about how the left constantly complains about free speech or restricting speech...but if people want to play the 'both sides' card then can we acknowledge that one side seems to think the rights of people should be up for debate?

I'm not saying that Crowder should be banned for his videos mocking Maza...I think Maza is in the wrong here on this particular case.

but I am saying that there is a lot of actual hate speech on youtube.

Some of these channels for example openly promote white nationalism which is a fancy term for genocide. I'm not sure why Youtube would want to support that.

 

Are there any updates about the water turning the frogs gay?

 

And my question to you is: why do they allow vids on "niglets" but not Alex Jones. I don't get it.

 

I don't disagree with your positions and I want to make it clear that I do not agree with the vast majority of garbage on youtube or on the internet as a whole.

I suppose it comes down to how you view platforms like youtube. Do you view them as quasi public utilities that should have content protected under free speech? This is a position in the past that liberals would be far more likely to support. I personally still support this position. People should be able to post whatever garbage they want on youtube. As bad as it sounds, my concern is that it is a slippery slope.

 

It's just corporate policy BS. Whatever they can get away with they will get away with. When advertisers tell them "Stop" they do. They allow these videos to be posted but the creators likely are not monetized, if they are, then a simple report from some people may fix what their bots missed.

Carlos Maza was smart enough to save this for Pride month, I don't think that was a coincidence. I don't agree with Maza's take on this. Crowder was joking, was it insulting? It was, but a lot of comedians do what he did. I do understand Maza feeling offended though but I don't think Crowder ever crossed the line, as much as I dislike Crowder... Queer is one of those odd words too...

Youtube allows a lot of garbage though, it's just that most of it is demonetized. Alex Jones, according to them, broke their rules over and over again after they gave him warnings and so kicked him off of the platform. What is interesting is that twitter, facebook, etc all followed suit which really is a big issue because all of these platforms almost work in unison when it comes to banning people.