
YouTube bans 14 year old for violating hate speech guidelines - anigbrowl
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/456215-youtube-bans-14-year-old-for-violating-hate-speech-guidelines
======
mmastrac
> Soph threatened to murder YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki earlier this year,
> which resulted in the site temporarily suspending and demonetizing her
> account, according to BuzzFeed.

Why is this controversial in any way? She was lucky to get back on.

~~~
throwawaywego
Not a credible threat, according to police. Also, only after she was targeted
by the media (a common pattern for Youtube to take action).

> “Susan, I’ve known your address since last summer. I’ve got a Luger and a
> mitochondrial disease. I don’t care if I live. Why should I care if you live
> or your children? I just called an Uber. You’ve got about seven minutes to
> draft up a will. … I’m coming for you, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

~~~
happytoexplain
The credibility of the threat to murder is quite relevant for legal reasons,
but I don't understand how there are people who are upset that she was banned
from YouTube for this.

~~~
leereeves
It's a reasonable standard but I'd like to see it applied more fairly.

Were any of these celebrities [1] deplatformed for threatening Republicans?

Does anyone on the left consider that their hateful rhetoric might be
inspiring their own followers to violence when that happens?

1: [https://www.thewrap.com/hollywood-stars-donald-trump-
violent...](https://www.thewrap.com/hollywood-stars-donald-trump-violent-
death-kathy-griffin-snoop-dogg/)

~~~
notafraudster
I clicked your link expecting threats comparable to the above. What I mostly
got were off-color jokes. Like, an example here is Rosie O'Donnell (who is
absolutely an idiot when it comes to political commentary) tweeting a link to
a flash game where you can push Trump off a cliff. What is the scenario where
this is at all connected to reality? I could certainly see it being seen as
threatening and I wouldn't shed a tear if she was banned from it, but do you
think that's comparable to the kind of threat being discussed in this thread?

Another example at this link is the NYC Public Theatre's presentation of
Julius Caesar, which typically is a modern adaptation of Caesar where Caesar
is depicted as whoever is currently in charge; and they did a production where
Caesar is dressed like Trump. It's been a while since I've read Caesar, but
the premise of Julius Caesar is that the conspirators who overthrow the man
they believe to be a tyrant are themselves tyrannical. Caesar is not depicted
well, but he's not the bad guy and the play isn't glorifying or calling for
violence against Caesar, it's depicting the tragic spiral of consequences as a
result of the coup against him. It's not even commentary about Trump, it's a
running thing they do with whoever the contemporary leader is. They have
previously done productions with an Obama-Caesar. I think they may have also
had a Clinton-Caesar.

Another linked example involves a music video where a robot that looks like
Trump explodes. Do you think this is threatening violence against Trump?

I just mention this because I'm trying to understand what possessed you to
link to this to draw an equivalence. The only example given that seems at all
comparable is the Big Sean lyric, and even then, I'm not sure I accept the
premise that we should take a lyric from a song to be directly equivalent to
an apparently straight-faced declaration of intent.

Do you think you could elaborate a bit on how you believe the linked examples
are equivalent to his without saying "the left"? Like, specifically, which of
the linked examples do you think is most directly comparable to this, and
specifically, which of the threats would you ban if you controlled YouTube and
those threats were made on YouTube?

~~~
leereeves
I have pretty strong views on free speech. I wouldn't ban any of these, and I
wouldn't have banned this 14 year old either.

But while I can see reason in the argument for banning her, I think such a
position also calls for banning depictions of people holding up severed heads
of their opponents (as in two of the cases in the link) or "joking" about
smothering them with a pillow or beating them with a Louisville slugger (as in
two other cases).

You seem to have chosen the most "fictional" of the examples (video games,
theatre) and ignored the very explicit depictions of violence and "jokes" that
are nothing more than descriptions of violent acts.

~~~
notafraudster
Your intervention in the thread wasn't to argue that this girl shouldn't be
deplatformed, it was to list apparently horrible instances of celebrities on
the left threatening Republicans and getting away with it. I am surprised that
your intended point was to say that those things all should be allowed, and so
should this girl. It is deeply strange to me that you thought your original
post would have conveyed this.

Were you personally convinced by the strength of the article you linked that
there is an epidemic of threatened violence against Republicans?

I highlighted examples that I believed were being alleged to be threats. You
did not clarify that you linked an article you thought was filled with
nonsense examples but you wanted to talk about Kathy Griffith.

Kathy Griffith seems like a stupid idiot. She did get "deplatformed" after the
Trump thing, which appeared in a magazine. Most of her work since then has
been talking about how she can't get booked anymore. She lost a bunch of work.
This is all fairly well documented. You must know this, since you were aware
enough of the wave of leftist celebrity violence incitement to have the link
to the article on hand. Why did you pivot to saying I should engage more
thoroughly with her case but leave out the details?

But if we really want to unpack it, you've conceptually slipped from
"threatening violence in a literal and direct way", which the 14 year old
shithead definitely did, to "depicting violence" or "doing something everyone
knows is a joke but that is arguably violent." Kathy Griffith's thing is a
stupid tasteless stunt by a comedienne whose entire career is being stupid and
tasteless. But I don't see even the slightest comparison between that and
this.

You also call attention to the "smother with a pillow" Larry Wilmore line. The
"joke", such as it is -- Wilmore's show was terrible and so I am not surprised
the joke was terrible too -- is that some far-right figures believed in a
conspiracy that Antonin Scalia was smothered with a pillow. Antonin Scalia was
not smothered with a pillow. It is difficult to argue that a joke about
conspiracy theorists should be construed to otherwise be a dead serious
threat.

Should I take this to mean that you believe Antonin Scalia was smothered with
a pillow? This might be off topic, but I think it's relevant as to your
ability to adjudicate whether there is an epidemic of leftist incitement to
violence against Republicans, which was your original argument, apparently in
support of your position that no one should be banned for making direct and
personalized death threats on social media.

~~~
leereeves
That's a lot of tangents and my time is limited right now, so let's focus on
Kathy Griffin.

Yes, I heard she was deplatformed by some media outlets, but not by YouTube.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/officialkathygriffin](https://www.youtube.com/user/officialkathygriffin)

So if YouTube now has a policy of deplatforming violence, I'd like to see it
enforced fairly.

That doesn't mean I necessarily approve of that policy, but that's not my
decision and I can see that it's a reasonable policy, _if_ enforced fairly.

That will have to be all for now, I have other things to do, but if you'd like
to continue I'll try to respond later.

~~~
notafraudster
Okay, so first let it be noted that you linked a list of 15 bad examples and
when I called them out you called me cherrypicking, then when I stopped
cherrypicking your immediate response was "I don't have enough time to engage
with all the examples". Jeez louise, you literally just asked for me to "open
up tangents". I was satisfied summarizing your list as ridiculous garbage that
made no sense. The reason we're still talking about it is because you wanted
to. Okay, let's only talk about Kathy Griffith for some reason.

The reason YouTube did not ban Kathy Griffith under rules for threatening
violence is because: 1) The purported threatened violence was not threatened
on YouTube, it was for a magazine. 2) The purported threatened violence was
not a threat of violence, it was a depiction of violence. Those are not the
same thing, but I'm totally fine with banning for the latter. You're the one
that isn't fine with the thing you're arguing for. 3) The threat occurred at a
time before YouTube put these rules in place. Updating your rules isn't being
a hypocrite because you didn't time travel after doing so. It's also literally
what the left has been asking for for years.

But separate from that, your position was that the left didn't deplatform her,
and unsurprisingly, it did. CNN, Home Of The Left Biased Anti Trump Fake News,
fired her immediately. So great, it is agreed that celebrities face
significant reputational consequence for doing things that aren't threatening
violence but are adjacent and might be perceived as uncouth.

Again, I need to stress that the person in the OP directly threatened
violence. She didn't say "I hope the people who own YouTube get shot". She
didn't say "If I was alone in a room with YouTube lady, I'd punch her in the
face". She didn't do a music video of robot YouTube getting exploded. She did
a direct and personal threat to murder a specific named individual. And you
thought the really important aspect of this story was talking about Kathy
Griffith.

Let's recap the thread: You think that no one should be banned for threatening
violence on YouTube. To support this argument, you link a bunch of people,
some of whom were deplatformed, most of whom aren't threatening violence, and
most of whom weren't doing the thing they're accused of on YouTube. You then
insist I'm being uncharitable to the evidence by not taking more seriously the
threats of violence, which again are mostly not threats, and again, you don't
think we should take actual threats of violence seriously.

You should advance the argument you actually believe in, not do a bizarre
strawman devil's advocate where you say "I don't believe in banning people,
but imagine if I did because I was a tyrannical anti-speech leftist, then I
would be a hypocrite, because I wouldn't ban this anti-Trump celebrity, which
makes me a hypocrite, checkmate".

~~~
leereeves
I said it was a reasonable position, not that it was my preference. I'm
capable of admitting that something that isn't my first choice is reasonable.
But it's not reasonable if it's enforced unfairly.

And the policy here at Hacker News is to consider the strongest version of an
argument. You did the opposite, cherry-picking the weakest examples.

> you linked a list of 15 bad examples

No, a list (that I didn't make) with some examples that were stronger than
others, and you tried to ignore the strong ones. Even you admitted that Kathy
Griffin's actions led to deplatforming from some platforms. And you've again
ignored the cartoonist who also depicted Trump's severed head. And you're
dismissing talk about beating someone up because you disagree with them as an
"off-color joke".

You also misrepresented my position.

> your position was that the left didn't deplatform her

This is a discussion about YouTube's policy, it's natural to assume I meant
YouTube, which I did. Again, respond to the strongest version of my argument,
not a different argument that's easier to attack.

~~~
drcongo
As a bystander here, it's almost impossible to work out what your argument
actually is, let alone what the strongest version of it might be. It seems to
be nothing more than whataboutism, like when a primary school child gets told
off and their response is to complain that someone else did something entirely
unrelated and didn't get told off.

~~~
leereeves
Your simile is terrible. I'm not one of the parties, I'm like a third party
who watched two children be treated differently and pointed out the
inconsistency.

And my point is simple: YouTube should have a consistent policy and enforce it
fairly, not ban haphazardly when they feel like it. What you call
"whataboutism" shows that the policy isn't enforced consistently or fairly.

I don't know why that's hard to work out when I said it in the first post.

~~~
drcongo
Because you're talking about _YouTube_ having a consistent policy again, while
providing a load of examples of things that didn't happen on YouTube. You're
all over the place here.

~~~
leereeves
It's on YouTube.

[https://youtu.be/TGnbKgmUzGc?t=7](https://youtu.be/TGnbKgmUzGc?t=7)

------
fortran77
> Soph _threatened to murder_ YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki earlier this year,
> which resulted in the site temporarily suspending and demonetizing her
> account, according to BuzzFeed. [ emphasis mine ]

This goes far beyond hate speech.

They should call Child Protective Services and get her home investigated.

~~~
AmVess
Back in my day, this type of thing would land you in juvenile detention. You
wouldn't be released until you passed a psychiatric evaluation, which was no
simple task.

Perhaps we need to return to the days of removing very clearly troubled people
from circulation until they aren't a danger to others.

~~~
squirrelicus
It's almost like exclusion, not inclusion, is the process by which you create
quality communities.

Of course, redemption should always be on the table. It's worth the risk.

~~~
happytoexplain
>exclusion, not inclusion

Why not both? Why generalize to all scenarios at all times?

~~~
squirrelicus
Because inclusion is trivial. Everyone is welcome.

The process of exclusion is what causes you to define the borders of
acceptability, and allows participants to have a clear understanding of when
they're at risk of being excluded. Then they'll weigh their wants vs the rules
and make a decision about whether they value their ideas over the group
membership. Then what you are left with is people who want to be in the group
more than they want to follow their whims against the group's rules.

------
cousin_it
Video in question
[https://www.bitchute.com/video/FNqiV8kL4cc/](https://www.bitchute.com/video/FNqiV8kL4cc/)

I've never seen a 14 year old talking like that. Possible explanations: 1)
she's a young-looking adult 2) she's a teenager with an adult scriptwriter 3)
she's a deepfake/filter with a teenager's face and voice. I want to believe
it's (3) because that would be the most Black Mirror thing.

~~~
api_or_ipa
I agree. It's VERY hard to believe a 14 year old wrote and produced that
content. It's too complex and engages in content that a child would have no
real interest in talking about.

~~~
jvagner
I want to agree with this, but the delivery is also not-14-ish. I have a 15yo
child. This is in uncanny-valley in both the "what 14 yo would write this?"
and "what 14 yo would want to delivery this?" quadrants.

That said, it also feels like copy-pasta from the conservative radio voices of
the last 20 years (Rush Limbaugh, etc).

------
threeseed
Be curious to understand US government's role here.

When a 14 year old "threatened to murder YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki" surely it
crossed the line into being a child welfare problem.

~~~
youeseh
I'm sure it can be solved by a more local level CPS department.

------
izzydata
Is it relevant who someone is if they break rules? Being 14 shouldn't exempt
someone from the consequences of "violating hate speech guidelines".

------
iron0013
Am I supposed to be outraged by this ban? It sounds like it was well deserved.

------
aaron695
Here's the video

[https://www.bitchute.com/video/FNqiV8kL4cc/](https://www.bitchute.com/video/FNqiV8kL4cc/)

It's very well written. Would have to be a teams work, or she's very gifted,
possibly both and has enough cynicism to be seen as a parady.

But if I was Russia I'd be her patreon, the cynicism is funny, but it bleeds
heavily into reality. It's propaganda of some sort, or part of its machinery.

(And it's clearly written to get her booted from YouTube, mission
accomplished)

------
leftyted
A pole shift has occurred in the US. In the past, transgressive comedy almost
exclusively came out of the left (I'm thinking Lenny Bruce, Hunter S.
Thompson, John Waters, etc). The right, by comparison, was straight-laced.

These days, more and more, transgressive voices are coming from the right.
Soph is pretty extreme but I do see the humor in her videos. You're not
obligated to laugh, but if you don't see the humor, take a step back and
consider that conservatives rarely saw the humor in Bruce, Thompson, or
Waters.

~~~
happytoexplain
Even assuming for academic reasons that the situation is identical in every
way, except with left-right political nouns swapped - why is the inverse
version bad, requiring that people "take a step back"?

~~~
leftyted
"Identical in every way" is strong wording that I didn't use.

> why is the inverse version bad, requiring that people "take a step back"?

What I'm saying is that if you don't see the humor, you're missing something.

You don't have to think it's funny. You can think it's "going too far" or "in
poor taste". But there is a strange brand of transgressive humor there.

~~~
CyanBird
>What I'm saying is that if you don't see the humor, you're missing something.

There's quite literally no humor on this, the Youtube headquarters have in the
past already been targeted by mentally unstable people in a shooting.

~~~
leftyted
> There's quite literally no humor on this

I'm sure more than one person said this about Lenny Bruce, probably during his
obscenity trial.

------
avip
I, for one, am interested in what the little girl has to say

~~~
traderjane
She talks about how homosexuals are dangerous because of pedophilia, and that
having an aversion towards homosexuals isn't the same thing homophobia; you
can think something is immoral without fearing it.

~~~
dragonwriter
“Homophobia” is a term adopted for _bigotry against_ homosexuals, not fear of
homosexuals (“-phobia” in general does not mean exclusively fear, though
that's the most common single-word interpretation.) Homophobia and transphobia
denote the same attitude toward gay and trans people, respectively, that
misogyny denotes toward women, despite the fact that th prefix “mis-” and the
suffix “-phobia” aren't exactly equivalent in range of meaning.

But, yeah, that's been an argument by homophobes to argue that their
homophobia isn't homophobia for decades, and even if it wasn't ignorant of the
_general_ use of tg suffix, it would still only be an argument that the word
“homophobia” was a _sui generis_ idiom rather than an obvious combination of
it's etymological components (which it arguably is anyway, since “homo-” is
short for “homosexual” rather than being a normal use of the prefix), rather
than an actual argument against what they exhibit actually being what is
denoted by the term.

------
gfosco
Followed by Patreon banning her the following day. It's getting pretty crazy
how little one has to do to get deplatformed, if you've attracted an audience.

~~~
spamizbad
Can't believe you're not allowed to threaten to murder people these days.
Everyone's so sensitive!

~~~
berbec
Liberal snowflakes getting the Deep State to censor Good People™ under orders
from their military-industrial complex overlords.

