This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Youtube needs to be punished for their hypocrisy.
Average Joe gets a community guidelines strike for "promoting violence" because he said "Dead" instead of "Unalived", but Penis Prager can advocate for beating your gay kids till they turn straight and YouTube just throws it into everyone's playlists without so much as a "Boys will be boys"
I think the root of the problem is the Republican party. If you look at the language the shooter used in his manifesto, it's very very similar. There are things social media platforms can do to mitigate extremism, but people like this will continue to feel emboldened by the GOP.
Everytown Law is about to get a lesson on how Section 230 works.
Pretty sure SCOTUS has a case they’re hearing currently that may very well change the scope of section 230 so I’d maybe reserve your quips until after that shakes out lol
The two big cases this year were already decided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter,_Inc._v._Taamneh and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzalez_v._Google_LLC
Although both dodged the S230 claims, both made it clear that Twitter and Google, respectively, had no liability.
Is there another case I missed?
This is so so stupid. We should also sue the ISPs then, they enabled the use of YouTube and Reddit. And the phone provider for enabling communications. This is such a dangerous slippery slope to put any blame on the platforms.
I think the thing isn't just providing access to the content, but using algorithms to promote how likely it is for deranged people to view more and more content that fuel their motives for hateful acts instead of trying to reduce how often that content is seen, all because they make more money if they watch more content, wether it is harmful or not.
This.
I don't know about Reddit, but YouTube 100% drives engagement by feeding users increasingly flammable and hateful content.
Yeah, the difference is in whether or not the company is choosing what to put in front of a viewer's eyes.
For the most part an ISP just shows people what they request. If someone gets bomb making directions from YouTube it would be insane to sue AT&T because AT&T delivered the appropriate packets when someone went to YouTube.
On the other end of the spectrum is something like Fox News. They hire every host, give them timeslots, have the opportunity to vet guests, accept advertising money to run against their content, and so on.
Section 512 of the DMCA treats "online service providers" like YouTube and Reddit as if they're just ISPs, merely hosting content that is generated by users. OTOH, YouTube and Reddit use ML systems to decide what the users are shown. In the case of YouTube, the push to suggest content to users is pretty strong. You could argue they're much closer to the Fox News side of things than to the ISP side these days. There's no human making the decisions on what content should be shown, but does that matter?
If you were head of a psychiatric ward and had an employee you knew was telling patients "Boy, I sure wish someone would kill as many black people as they could", you would absolutely share responsibility when on of them did exactly that.
If you were deliberately pairing that employee with patients who had shown violent behaviour on the basis of "they both seem to like violence", you would absolutely share responsibility for that violence.
This isn't a matter of "there's just so much content, however can we check it all?".
Reddit has hosted multiple extremist and dangerous communities, claiming "we're just the platform!" while handing over the very predictable post histories of mass shooters week after week.
YouTube has built an algorithm and monetisation system that is deliberately designed to lure people down rabbit holes then done nothing to stop it luring people towards domestic terrorism.
It's a lawsuit against companies worth billions. They're not being executed. There are grounds to accuse them of knowingly profiting from the grooming of terrorists and if they want to prove that's not the case, they can do it in court.
Do ISPs actively encourage you to watch extremist content? Do they push that content toward people who are at risk of radicalization to get extra money?
They should be suing the Conservative Party. That’s the enabler of gun violence.
If youtube is still pushing racist and alt right content on to people, then they can get fucked. Why should we let some recommender system controlled by a private corporation have this much influence American culture and politics??
I sub to primarily leftist content and their YouTube shorts algorithm insists on recommending the most vile far right content on the planet. It is to the point that I'm convinced YouTube is intentionally trying to shift people far right
I primarily watch woodworking or baking content on Youtube. I feel like the far right content is super prevalent with Shorts. I'll watch something like a quick tool review, and the next video will be someone asking folks on the street if it's ok to be white. What color you are isn't your decision, but what you do every day is, and being some dumbass white kid accosting black tourists in Times Square for shitty reaction content is just gross.
It doesn't matter how often I say I dislike the content, block channels or whatever, Youtube has just decided it's going to check in from time to time and see if I want to let loose my inner Boomer and rage with Rogan.
It could be that pushing videos on the other side of the political spectrum gets interactions in the form of people sharing/commenting on it. Even if you disagree, going "Why does YouTube recommend this, this is awful" is still a share.
The algorithm prioritises interactions above all else, and fewer things get people interacting more than being wrong, or them disagreeing vehemently.
If you look at anything even remotely related to "men's interests" YouTube will begin showing you alt right fascist bull shit.
Seriously. I spend a little too much time watching a short that is clearly designed to get me worked up about stereotypical communication difficulties between men & women from a "women, am I rite?" perspective, suddenly I'm getting Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. I spend a little too much time watching a video about certain Ukrainian war equipment or a Slo Mo Guys video involving guns (wood stock hunting guns, I felt like it was the early 80s all over again before everyone decided they needed assault weapons), suddenly I'm getting served tacticool idiots with kitted-out murder machines. Or I watch a Bart Erhman video (secular New Testament scholar with a large lay audience) and suddenly I get served muslim da'wah/apologetics videos and Catholic catechism ads.
They should sue Facebook too. Facebook is rife with Nazis. And they're fine with it.
Considering the Facebook algorithm will introduce you to neo-nazis, that would actually make sense.
Good. Civil court is where they're most vulnerable, this is called tort law.
In criminal cases, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers. In a civil lawsuit, the defendant is only innocent until a judge, or jury, depending thinks they're 51% likely to be guilty, what they call the preponderance of evidence.
In other words, "probably" is good enough when you sue someone. It is not good enough if the state is trying to throw you in prison. This makes it more efficient to process the 99% of civil court cases, which are usually just dumb shit, like which of these two arguing neighbors needs to pay for having a tree on their property line cut down or something. It also results in our civil system being a very effective weapon though, as a lot of wealthier and more powerful people know pretty well.
edit for italics
edit2: If anyone doubts me you can just google "tort" and read all about our American system on wikipedia, or any number of other places.
edit3: juries in civil too.
Feels good to be reading this somewhere other than reddit
I mean lookingbat the details for the basis of the suit. They think they can sue someone for teaching a criminal how to do something. They think they can sue the makers of body armor for selling a guy who was not a criminal at the time of purchase, an unregulated commercial product. They think they can sue YouTube for providing motive for whatever he did.
In the law world theres a word for this. Its called a shakedown. This is grieving family's who are vindictive. They dont care who pays, but somebody has to pay in their eyes. Sadly on the merits this case will die in court pretty fast and nobody is gonna see a dollar unless alphabet and spez's lawyers decide they are feeling charitable. Which they won't because settling would cause implications of guilt in the public eye.
You have klan members in Congress, supreme court, churches and every police department, but sure, YT and Reddit are the problem.
Will be dismissed on section 230 grounds.
Their content promotion algorithms are not protected by section 230. Those algorithms are the real problem, pushing more and more radical content onto vulnerable minds. (The alt-right YouTube pipeline is pretty well documented. Reddit, I think, less so. But they still promote "similar content")
They blamed books for copy cat killers, movies and video games for shootings now they want to blame websites...
now they are trying to sue people because of hindsight? this isn't Minority Report. this is 'lets throw allot of torts and other legal bs on the wall and pray something sticks'
Making legal precedent so that they AVOID showing the offending content instead of PROMOTING the offending content is probably the goal
About 30-40 times a day, Youtube shorts shows me videos actively advocating violence, and I know for sure that Google has enough money and resources currently to prevent these videos being shown, considering it AUTOMATICALLY SUBTITLES THEM
I had to manually report a 100k views short showing someone killing a snail with an air gun. It got removed almost instantly.
Sure, it's a snail, and sure, it's an air gun, but exactly this type of videos are breeding grounds for sickos. And no YouTube, the 1mil sub Minecraft channel that said "kill a creep" is not really violent, neither is some who says "fuck" in the first 30 seconds.
Gosh I hate the platform.
I feel like our problem isn't that social media companies are not liable but that they are too big, like imagine this happening on mastodon. Generally I feel like mastodon would not allow this unless the instance was specificlly facist like the KF instance
🤔 so if gun violence is a problem... and they've already banned violence... what if one would ban the other thing - oh wait no it's definitely the goofy gamer machinimas 🤭 stop giggling y'all, this is serious. you don't wanna turn into criminals
Reddit enables more than just racist, it's a nasty cesspool the like of 4chan, riddled with bots, the CEO himself is a POS.
It's a fucked up website but if you think it's remotely as bad as 4chan then I've assumed you've never been to /pol/. Reddit doesn't allow the n word.
It's weird that this is a link to the exact same 25 day old post on the same community.
Much as I dislike Reddit, I dont think they are to blame here
Reddit worked very hard to protect all anti-nazi imagery and stop people from posting anti-nazi sentiment. I'd like for someone to acknowledge that they silence anyone who posts anti-nazi shit and who speaks about killing Nazis.
Many are here because of that.
