Well duh.
What exactly are you suggesting legal and regulatory wise?
If pressure negates free speech, then by that definition no one has it. I apparently don’t have it in my own household because I’m under pressure to be nice to my wife.
I was talking to my daughter about Astronauts landing on the moon the other day, so I thought I would look up a video on YouTube to show her. Nearly every result was either a (conspiracy) video questioning whether we actually did land, or a video attempting to prove that we had. Needless to say, she didn’t get to see what I wanted her to.
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When I had a plague of flat earth videos on my YouTube home page, I took over an hour to remove almost all those channels from my YouTube experience.
- It felt good.
- Voting down individual videos is pointless.
- It leaves room on my home page for the stuff I do want to see.
- Hopefully it’s some kind of meta-stat thumbs-down against those channels.
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A well-regulated utility! I may have been too hasty in saying ‘private companies’, as establishing internet common-carriers is the best way to deal with the problem.
The tldr isn’t very appetizing – ISPs made to host the internet’s nastiest content – but it’s what should happen, as these are the companies renting the poles and the airwaves from the public.
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Even if ISP’s are common carriers that won’t stop a host like youtube showing you the door. You could get your own server though.
Verizon is absolutely a private company, traded on the NYSE. Their relationship with regulators has a long, complicated, sordid history, and it should be central to understanding net neutrality.
If Verizon could prevent you from calling City Hall… would they? Or would they maintain their neutrality because it’s the right thing to do?
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You could probably make the reasonable argument that simply surfacing something in a search result isn’t “actively promoting” it, but when The Algorithm is driven in part to show you what’s popular because you’re more likely to watch it (and thus stick around longer, garnering more ad impressions), bad actors and small groups of conspiracy nuts can game it into pushing their mind-rot onto a larger population.
That said, YouTube can be remarkably hands-on when they want to be (see ContentID improperly flagging silent clips as illegal re-postings of 4:33), so when conspiracy videos flood people’s search results, or when policy-violating transphobic ads start showing up in people’s pre-rolls, it speaks to what YouTube, Google, and Alphabet actually care about moderating and curating, and what they don’t.
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Nearly nothing, as I don’t think itwould be desirable to try and it wouldn’t work anyway.
That said, data protection and data access rights, speedy access to what companies retain about you and a mechanism to force them to ditch what they shouldn’t. I wonder what it would take to remove their incentive to treat the entire thing as a securitized mass of fungible content and trackable interactions.
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That’s the unappetizing part of ISPs as common carriers. For it to mean anything, they would have to provide services such as video hosting and streaming.
I feel like you missed the joke. maybe?
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My father-in-law is a conspiracy nut. He disbelieves everything in the news uniformly. In his world, everything that happens anywhere isn’t what it seems and is done for reasons you can’t fully grasp.
I’m sure he believes Paddock was a patsy, just like he believes the jets that struck the Twin Towers were loaded with frozen corpses and flown by remote control. In his world, there are only false flag attacks.
My point being that some of the people who believe this was a false flag attack are far right, and some are just nuts in a very broad sense.
Also, I wish the phrase “false flag” didn’t exist.
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And only similar in this case, not identical. I see distinct differences in jawline, mouth, eyes and eyebrows between all three.
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Holy shit, if you’re misogynist enough all brunettes look the same!
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yeah NRA is definitely not into things like equality in nullity.
Only if the sinking of a ship carrying blacks, whites, et al, qualifies as progress.
Remember when we used to have FUN conspiracy theories about aliens and pyramids and shit?
sigh
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I’ll bet there were some people in the crowd that night in Vegas who believe Newtown or Aurora or the Boston Marathon were hoaxes, and now they find they themselves on the receiving end of that shit, being called “paid actors” and such. Maybe not, but there’s something satisfying about that idea anyway.
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