Protests on the social platform have entered a new phase, with users shirking the platform’s NSFW content rules en masse. The development has some media buyers on high alert, experts say.
YouTube also significantly restricts the reach of demonetised content, though. It becomes very unlikely for even people who are subscribed to your channel to see your new uploads.
Still not free speech at all. You're pointing out the difference between being able to speak freely and being provided an audience. There are no nations in history or philosophers in humanity which supposed the existence of a human right to provide an audience to everyone.
But again, YouTube isn't a free speech platform. The public sidewalk is, YouTube isn't. They have no obligation to provide you anything at all.
This is undoubtedly true. YouTube is a private entity and there is no legal obligation for them to treat speech equally. But it is subjectively troubling that YouTube, a virtual monopoly, has little qualms about directly shaping the political discourse on its platform, censoring and limiting the reach of content about LGBT people while Fox News is on the front page.
They are absolutely no where close to a virtual monopoly. Anyone can upload and stream content online, and probably millions of websites allow it now, without exaggeration. What they have is a prefab audience. There are no considerations needed for free speech whatsoever.
If you want to influence their moderation habits, you need to be their customer or better yet, their shareholder. As just another leeching user, your voice means nothing to them and frankly that isn't problematic. 10,000 leeches won't influence them the same as one paying customer. I can guarantee that. And again, if you're just a leech then it really is no wonder why they wouldn't listen as a for-profit business.
There are troubling bits about lots of platforms and media outlets and companies, but that's not an excuse to twist up legal terminologies like monopoly or free speech in order to make weak criticisms. Doing so weakens the framework of law more than it does influence YouTube at all. Because that framework of law is only as valid as we use it. Countless examples of that problem abound - virtually the entirety of the Trump presidency is an example of why misuse of the law in common discussions among people is actually very dangerous. That's been a sticking point for me for a long time, and it's more important as years go by. So I'm gonna call it out, especially when it's happening on "my" team.
If you're gonna make accusations where we actually have legal recourse (like monopolies) then you need to understand them. There is no where close to a real monopoly in YouTube.
JFC... are you this daft or just trolling? I'll map out this entire conversation because you're not able to keep up with your own BS and then I'm done with you.
This started because you made a claim that YouTube demonetizing things = "companies fiddling with speech."
Then, before I ever responded to you, the next comment that you made was "Free speech usually means that you have freedom to express yourself, not that you're speaking for no pay lol."
So it started off sounding like you were equating demonetization with a lack of free speech. I replied, _"To be honest, I'm not sure why YouTube was brought into a conversation about free speech. YouTube is not a free speech platform; thus, demonetization of someone on YouTube's platform has nothing at all to do with free speech."
Then you wanted to move the goalposts, so you said, "This conversation wasn't about free speech, it was about companies fiddling with speech." as you removed the word "free." You have the ability to NOT post on YouTube. YouTube CANNOT "fiddle with speech" if you do not participate in YouTube. Anything you put on there is content that they own. If somehow, some employee of YouTube starts following you around and setting off a bullhorn anytime you start to talk, I'll agree, then they're "fiddling with speech." If some employee of YouTube (Alphabet), starts coming on to Kbin or Lemmy, and removing your comments from here, then I'll agree with you in that scenario too. When an employee of YouTube is removing comments or not promoting comments that they don't like, that's not a speech issue; it's content moderation.
To be honest, I'm not sure why YouTube was brought into a conversation about free speech. YouTube is not a free speech platform; thus, demonetization of someone on YouTube's platform has nothing at all to do with free speech.
Companies fiddling with speech is perfectly legal. No one is obliged to give a soapbox to anyone. Companies curbing speech they don't want to host is not an infringment on speech, legally (in the US, at least).
An anaolgy might be: You offer your front yard for people to put signs in. Someone decides to put a Nazi flag sign in your yard. You are within your rights to remove that sign, even though you made a general offer for anyone to put signs in your yard.
People (again, in the US) very often conflate this kind of situation - a private entity curbing speech that they don't want to be associated with - with the First Amendment of the US Constitution (my emphasis):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Free speech, in the US, is about whether Congress, and as has been interpreted by the courts, the government generally, may abridge the freedom of speech. The government may not.
Even so, free speech is not absolute. It remains against the law for individuals to use speech to incite violence, or to incite an emergency reaction where no emergency exists ("Fire!" in a crowded theater), for two examples. Another example would be communicating classified information to people who are not authorized to have said information.
There remains a real conflict about free speech, and it's the elmination of the commons. When the Constitution was written and ratified, the First Amendment protection of speech was more effective, because the way you would get your speech to a large number of people was via distribution of pamphlets and just speaking aloud in public spaces, where passers-by were walking. The landscape is very different today, where "public" messaging happens on the conduits provided by private companies - who, as we've learned, are not legally obliged to carry that speech. In fact, those private companies operating "open forums" can be held responsible for failing to moderate speech which runs afoul of legal limitations on speech.
The internet is definitely a huge change around speech, but the degradation of public spaces brought on by shopping malls - which are private property - had the same kind of effect. The fact that we tend to spend more time in our private homes, travel in the bubbles of our private vehicles, and do our personal business entirely on private property effectively reduces the public space available to exercise our own free speech effectively, or be exposed to others' speech similarly.
That’s where tech companies start to get a justification to fiddle with speech.
Which implies that companies need a "justification," which further implies that companies "fiddling with speech" needs to be "justified," as though "unjustified fiddling with speech by companies" is, or should be, disallowed.
Later, you said:
Free speech usually means that you have freedom to express yourself, ...
That might be colloquially accurate, but it's misleading in the context of private companies acting as platforms for speech, in the US (I know I have beat that drum plenty, but it's necessary).
Infringement of freedoms is met with legal consequences. Since private entities are not oblligated to be a platform for any speech, whether that's a forum on the internet or other people's signs in your front yard, there are no legal consequences when those private entities curb the speech in the space they provide for speech. The discussions around this situation generally carry a subtext of "something should be done about this," and because of the conflation of colloquial vs legal "free speech," it's easy for that "something" to feel like "companies shouldn't be able to do that," with legal consequences.
Who is talking about it being illegal?
People rightly recognize that there is a problem with the diminishing ability for people to express themselves, and conversations about that usually misidentify the problem as being with the operators of private spaces where so much speech is today exercised. Any solution which grants and protects individual rights is necessarily a legal solution. So, while maybe nobody is saying the words "It should be illegal for companies to curb speech on the platforms they operate," the discussion is about a legal remedy.
I was trying to describe that the problem is more likely the degradation of the public commons. The relative absence of public spaces in which speech can be effectively transmitted drives people's speech to private spaces, and those private spaces come with much greater limitations on speech. While I don't have a specific solution to offer for that problem, I have to think it must include creating or reinvigorating public commons.
demonitization means taking money away... that doesn't have anything to do with speech. Posting on YouTube is not "speech" in the traditional sense. Posting on YouTube is content creation.
"Speech" in terms of the context in which you've been trying to use it means that you're free in an open forum. Speech would be going out on to the sidewalk and saying things to people. Speech would be your ability to make a platform like YouTube for others to make videos and say whatever they want.
Just as you do not have the right to demand air-time on ABC news to rant about whatever you want; you do not get the right to demand space on YouTube to rant about whatever you want either. When you post on YouTube (or Lemmy / Kbin / reddit) those things you say are not "speech." The posts you make are content for someone else's platform.
I really don't know where you got that from. And I'm not freaking demanding anything. Just pointing out things that corporates be doing. Can't we fucking have conversation about how corporations can use their power to influence and direct conversation to be more "ad friendly" without people butting in with "aCtUally it'S wElL witHin thEiR righTS". I know that. I think most people do. Doesn't mean we can't talk about it or shit on the company.
You are free to understand me any which way you want but "speech" exists also on non-public or self-owned platforms. That's just dumb to argue otherwise. I'm right here, "speeching" away, on someone else's platform.
it means your government cannot limit your right to speak, write, and share ideas and opinions. you can say whatever you want but be ready for consequences for saying stupid, racist, bigoted stuff from the rest of your fellow countrymen.
What advertisers want is not necessarily what your political beliefs are. It’s so happens that at the moment that you align, but they have not always aligned, and it is unlikely that in the future they will remain aligned forever.
When I was a kid, advertisers were a conservative force. When gay people were even shown on TV a lot of advertisers would pull out to appease the religious right, exerting pressure upon television producers to keep stuff like that out of their television shows.
Show runners back then often put pressure to keep LGBT themes out of TV shows. Do you think they felt like they had freedom to speak despite the pressure to stay quiet?
It might be easy to say “that was then and this is now, advertisers are on our side!”, That would be unwise. History is not a straight line forward, and sometimes cultures that appear to be moving forward end up taking steps back. There are a number of periods of History where something more like what we would consider to be good today regressed into something that was quite different that we would consider to be less good. The Islamic golden age between the 8th and 14th centuries was characterized by advances in various Fields including mathematics astronomy medicine philosophy and architecture, and we feel the impact of those times to this day in our words for things like algebra and alchemy (and thus chemistry). That golden age was followed by an era of deep religious conservatism that in many ways continues to this day because instead of investigating the world to find out what God has done through his works, and they decided that the book itself was the word of God in that God being an unknowable thing would go out and change the world at its whim, and so rather than trying to understand God through the world you must try to understand God through the Quran. The Korean Goryeo period had a number of Rights and freedoms for women that were something we might considered quite good for the time viewed through today’s lens, but the following Joseon dynasty followed confucianism, which is an extremely conservative set of values and that changed the role of women from one where they could hold positions of authority in a number of different institutions to one where they were often kept from social interactions all together and kept in the inner quarters of their homes and told that they should obey their fathers, sons, and parents. The Weimar Republic of Germany was by the standards of the era quite progressive when viewed through a modern lens, and the next chapter of Germany’s story were the national socialists under Adolf Hitler.
For all you know, advertisers could decide tomorrow that based on some of the recent events that have harmed advertising clients that they don’t want to monetize LGBT content. If that were to happen, would you really consider that to not be about freedom of speech?
I tend to believe that you would not, and I would not. Because freedom is about more than government. The only freedom of speech that applies directly to the government is that provided by constitutional protections such as the first amendment, but anyone can restrict anyone else’s freedom of speech. All it takes is a bit of leverage.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that if somebody thinks that freedom of speech is only the government, and that advertisers sticking their fingers into the content of media only ever serves to help the current political agenda, then those people are wrong. Freedom of speech can be curtailed in many ways and the example that I used was personally using physical Force to threaten someone, which is indeed a violation of their freedom to speak even if it isn’t done by the government, and while today advertise your agendas May perfectly align with another person’s politics, we know that culture changes over time so we can’t assume that their agendas are going to stay the same tomorrow as they are today. Just as the Joseon dynasty ended up taking up Confucianism which had a completely different role for women, a future advertiser could decide that they we’re concerned about offending Muslims and Christians by depictions of LGBT lifestyles in their programming. There is no guarantee that that will happen, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t. Therefore, you cannot act as if advertisers sticking their fingers into programming is just the political ideology that you believe being played out, because the fact that the advertisers agree with you today is basically a historical aberration.
I think a lot of people who are younger don’t realize how much the culture has changed from 30 years ago. Back then, the culture was much more driven by the religious right and the moral majority. For someone who was born after the year 2000, they’ve never seen anything but most of society agreeing with the current political orthodoxy because it’s relatively new. But remember that Bill Clinton did not support gay marriage, and I believe he signed into law a law protecting marriage as between a man and a woman. Barack Obama did not support gay marriage in his first term, and it wasn’t until after the court decision that made it legal that he changed his standpoint.
But I think that a lot of these have been and still are widely held cultural views today, but it just goes to show you how quickly stuff changes. That’s why people who are going around acting as if advertiser interference is a good thing because it happens to align with their values today don’t realize that they’re playing with a dangerous tool, much like the murasama sword it must taste blood before it is put back in the scabbard.
Demonetisation in Youtube is not just about payment, it is also about the "reach" of your video -- demonetised videos get pushed to the bottom by "the algorithm".
but thats the buety of other things. We all have to be ready to leave stuff if its bs. I was barely on facebook, only keep linkedin for job search purposes, and did reddit till it just got to crappy. Might leave this but because its independent I could leave my home for another federated region. I can block what I want which frees up less boosted content and if need be I will go to yet another type of platform.
I remember recently they changed some of their NSFW language rules, people had the shits and 6 weeks later they changed them again. This one guy who makes summaries of r/amitheasshole changed how he says it to 'am I the butt hole'
It's silly crap like that which is the most annoying, trying to censor the most mundane swear words.
But it's silly crap like that that matters to advertisers. NSFW actually is the word "fuck", "asshole", etc. You might be able to say that at work, not everyone can without repercussion.
And that's not a stretch at all, it's why network television won't let you say either of those words either. Not next to their Ford and Samsung advertisements.
The entire premise of NSFW is silly to me. Like no one has an obligation to make sure YOU are safely browsing at work. Get back to work.
If you don't at least have reliable NSFW flags then many parents (and more importantly schools) won't let their kids watch, which is a large part of ad revenue.
"Warnings about explicit content work" is a new take to me. The history of such direct warnings tells us otherwise. At one point there were bands dropping F-bombs on albums just to get that sticker. Because it increased their sales and visibility.
The Streisand Effect is real, in big ways and also in these small ones. I'm not saying don't try, but I'm telling you it won't ever work the way you think it will.
What's interesting is that the MPAA Rating system itself was a compromise from the industry with the government to avoid the government stepping in to control content. That's where it started. Seems eerily similar no? It's not coincidence. But that's just another example of the point I'm making too: originally they rated porn movies "X" and agreed these wouldn't be in the industry- controlled theaters. Porn movie producers took it as a badge and began labeling their movies "XXX" and leaned into it so hard, the MPAA had to change the distinction to something more innocuous, "NC-17." But the cats out of the bag, even today every 11 year old kid knows what XXX means. The warning became a siren call.
Warnings are just the Streisand Effect, so don't expect much of them.
The NSFW flag is a really good idea in my opinion. It's a compromise. It's like saying "we're still going to have content that might not go over well with all audiences, or all settings; but you just have to mark it as such so that someone ELSE that happens to see the screen doesn't have a shit fit." I feel like it protects me, as the viewer. If I want to look at a picture of a party of lemons, then I know that what I'm about to click might cause me to get a bunch of shit from my conservative co-worker. Maybe I'll wait for her to leave the room, and then I'll click the link about the party of lemons.
It’s really frustrating that I can’t tell if the party of lemons is an analogy I don’t get, the name of a political party, or if conservatives think lemons are a liberal ploy to replace oranges and limes so George Soros can take over America or some shit.
The entire premise of NSFW is silly to me. Like no one has an obligation to make sure YOU are safely browsing at work. Get back to work.
I think you’re taking the W in NSFW too literally. It’s a user-moderated content filtering system. Be it at work, school, on a bus, in the streets, many people wish to be considerate of others and don’t want to publicly flaunt questionable material.
It may be to protect others from having to view it or to protect themselves from repercussion viewing explicit content in professional environments.
There’s also a difference between some text with ‘bad words’ and having hardcore porn or beheadings (NSFL) or whatever. Is there a grey area? Of course, different people will consider different things appropriate, especially in different settings and different cultures, but giving users the ability to flag content they post as ‘potentially questionable’ (synonymous to NSFW from my perspective) is just a means to respect other users.
Brand safety as an idea isn't dangerous, and there's an entire sub-industry in the adTech space devoted to it. The bottom line is most companies don't want their ads showing up on sites or in close proximity to certain types of content (illegal, political, hate speech, etc.). Services from these companies are used to make sure when doing ads on the open web, your DSP doesn't inadvertently put your ads in places like that. One example: https://integralads.com/solutions/brand-safety-suitability/
Is there any planned date for a mass delete? I would guess it would be more meaningful if many of us deleted on the same day.
Personally, I logged out of my account for the blackout and haven't been back -- I plan to delete my 3 accounts tomorrow before the 3rd party apps shut down.
One month in, just deleted my 10 year old reddit account. Shame it had to come to that, I really loved the place up until a few years ago when they started getting worse with every update. Guess we're getting another chance of doing it right on the fediverse.
“My number one concern right now as an advertiser would be that Reddit seems to be losing rapport with and control over their users. Reddit needs to talk to their community members now and work to regain their trust and support or risk losing brand advertisers long term.”
We’ll see. The article also notes that no company has pulled their ads from Reddit yet and even says that compared to some other sites, Reddit isn’t doing so bad (I’m assuming they’re implying Twitter’s refusal to remove hate speech).
The original owner of 4chan left after leaked celebrity nudes were posted on the site. The owner faced gigantic lawsuits over it and ultimately decided owning the site was too much legal hassle.
So maybe posting nudes of Jennifer Lawrence to Reddit’s front page would do them in too?
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