Is there an established "kittens to terrorist" pipeline? Did I miss a news story earlier this week? It seems very brash to assume that activity you simply don't approve of is instantaneously harmful.
I'm also suspicious of any study that uses YouGov, and in particular, derives it's data from a volunteer panel.
This smacks of looking for a conclusion and then building a study to find it.
A marketplace of ideas only works if every single idea every person has is actively chosen based on analysis of alternatives.
Given that applies to about 0% of beliefs for most people, I'd say the idea has some flaws.
If you immediately reject that, you're not very open to external ideas, are you?
If you don't immediately reject it, you see how a market can be subverted to serve purposes that it was never intended to or constructed to resist.
Either way, the idea of a marketplace of ideas is paradoxical in the extremes. And once you acknowledge the idea needs to be softened to avoid self-contradiction, you end up back at the question of what constitutes abuse. That's the exact same question people are wrestling with now. And because it's inherently an expression of a power struggle, you need to be aware of whose power you're supporting.
I recommend siding against authoritarians and fascists, but that's just my idea.
> A marketplace of ideas only works if every single idea every person has is actively chosen based on analysis of alternatives.
What is required is exposure to alternatives. It's not a perfect nor an instantaneous process, but it absolutely works. I've changed my position many times based on rational argumentation. If they are never exposed to the alternatives, the majority of people will just continue believing in what they already believe, of which the bulk comes from upbringing.
What is required is people arguing in good faith and telling the truth. Systematic omnipresent bad-faith argument appealing to strong emotions and flat-out lying about basic facts can easily overwhelm people’s reasoning, empathy, and capacity for independent fact checking.
The problem is, when somebody is disagreeing with you it's extremely tempting to declare them "in bad faith" or "flat out lying." For example the "Lab Leak Theory" was banned as disinformation and people mentioning it were roundly mocked and disparaged (I was somewhat guilty of mocking those people also because it seemed too conspiratorial to me and many of the "usual" conspiracy nuts were all too eager to jump on Lab Leak). But then we found out that it was actually more plausible than it seemed. However the accounts of people honestly trying to make the case had long been banned already, and there was nowhere to go to get their reputations back.
So I fully agree that "Systematic omnipresent bad-faith argument appealing to strong emotions and flat-out lying" is poison to the mind, but I think it's also reached for way too quickly and can and has been abused to silence opinions we don't like.
The “lab leak theory” was propounded by a bunch of people who did flat out lie, and made all sorts of bad faith claims (including e.g. Fox News commentators, predictable anti-China trolls, and fringe conspiracy nutters [not mutually exclusive categories]). They well deserved to be mocked and disparaged, and without them the conversation would have been dramatically healthier and more productive.
There were also serious people asking legitimate questions, but those got much less media-circus attention and their commentary was much less self assured, full of caveats and explicit attention to the speculative/hypothetical nature of the claims involved. Those were part of a more scholarly/careful conversation (still ongoing) and were answered carefully and respectfully.
One of the biggest problems for anyone asking careful serious questions is the likelihood that they’d be mischaracterized and amplified by the crazies and then interpreted by the general public according to that mischaracterization and roped into some broader political fight.
> found out that it was actually more plausible than it seemed
It was always plausible, as scientists have maintained from the start. It still today (if you listen to conversations among experts and look into the details) seems unlikely, and the “natural origin” theory has somewhat more convincing evidentiary support. But the Chinese government’s reflexive secrecy has made it impossible for independent analysts to gather the information needed to prove or disprove the theory.
If by win, you mean paid SEO of propaganda with brigading by fake accounts.
But wait, you used the word free?
How is paid propaganda free?
The way astroturf is grass?
Are corporations canceling me by not sufficiently promoting my political agenda on their ad supported site, because my content makes people not want to buy anything associated with it?
Who decides the architectonic layout of that marketplace and could it not have some sort of influence on the success or failure of said idea?
Or lets ask differently: how could there ever be a neutral layout to said market place, which is without influence of the powers at play in any given situation?
First off, ideas are not a marketplace. Every useful idea has some call to action as part of it. That call to action may be a call to raise or lower taxes, a call to install bike lanes, a call to write more books about race car driving. These actions are frequently incompatible, and so they must be communally chosen. This is in contrast to a free market, where each individual can choose between available options.
Second, even if ideas are treated as a market, movements can have disproportionate power compared to their "market share". The level of group support required to implement a policy depends on the specific policy. If 5% of people support defecating in the local lake, and 95% of people support the idea of swimming in the lake and using indoor plumbing, the result is not a swimmable lake. In the same way, a violent movement with very low popular support is unlikely to win any elections, but can still make it entirely unsafe for that movement's targets.
Third, personal anecdote time. A few years ago after watching the "Alt-Right Playbook" [0], a YouTube series about recruitment and radicalization tactics used by the alt-right, YouTube recommended that I watch Nazi propaganda. I do not say that in any exaggeration. The video title had the phrase "The Jewish Question", and I was expecting a history on how that phrase had been used in racist fearmongering. It was instead exactly that same racist fearmongering. Even if I were to hold that all speech is permissible without repercussion, there is still a world of difference between allowing Nazi propaganda to exist, and active promotion of propaganda of that same propaganda.
TL;DR: Ideas are not a marketplace, and lack of promotion is not the same as silencing.
Z-Nazi nuns and nurses. More or less, just not fixated on jews. My empathy for Russians declines daily, it seems - they had decades to work things out but seem to have decided that klepocratic autarchy was good enough, or was someone else's problem. Want to be more like North Korea? Do as Russians do.
Megalomaniacs shouldn't be involved in potential nuclear war. The US has proposed structured human-in-the-loop treaties to require that nuclear weapons not be automated, but China and Russia have both refused. A few bad cosmic bit flips and unintended nuclear war is possible. Putin's swan dive into Ukraine should underline the need for change. Humanity is toast if we're going to play stupid nuclear brinksmanship games every couple decades.
What's disturbing is that the poster requested it be on _YouTube_Kids_, they obliged, and due to that any state-sponsored "warning" notation is removed.
Elsa-gate and other nastiness shuttle have been a big wake-up call for YouTube to get their shit together on the kids area of the platform.
Nice, wholesome, patriotic Russian propaganda like that shouldn't be possible to post. Mandatory human review with a checklist and log should be one of many hurdles needed to post content for the kids-only content area. It should be the best guarded, most highly curated segment, but all sorts of inappropriate garbage gets through, and sticks around for weeks or months even after being reported.
>Is there an established "kittens to terrorist" pipeline?
Yes, its what Eli Pariser described as a Filter Bubble, first identified in Google Search results. I wonder if there has been some code sharing going on between Google and Youtube, or if team members have jumped ship?
Some youtube holes can be good but considering the untapped potential of Youtube for DJ mixes as background music for coders, I find the youtube hole incredibly frustrating.
I mean I've only just found this DJ and its pretty decent mix and her previous work is quite good as well, but considering she is Ukrainian, I wonder if this is Youtube's pro Ukrainian political policy in effect?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYC8KkNIkZk
The only link I can see is its from the Boiler Room in Berlin and Berlin is where you can find some decent German underground techno, plus the time of day is a factor, ie trying to slow down someone's Dopamine stimulation at 4am in the morning?
But if you listen to some of the more established DJ's like Boris Brecha, Carl Cox, David Guetta, Adam Beyer or brands like Creamfields, Global Underground, Tomorrowland, Resistance, Transmission, Hooj Tunes, Essential Mix, you'll get stuck in youtube holes left right and centre and the quality tends to get worse the longer you listen. I mean their algorithms dont know how to curate DJ mixes, just like most people cant take people on a journey of aural delights when DJ'ing.
One other thing I have noticed with Youtube is bank holidays in the UK, they tend to promote borderline illegal car activities, things like cruises where people lose it leaving the cruise or speeding videos, more so on August bank holiday and the last May bank holiday. I'm left with the impression Youtube is trying to incite illegal car activities, so maybe the NY Times and the Guardian do have a point!?!
One potential problem with this article is that your LOCATION can also determine which videos are suggested to you. So if you're in New York City, you're not going to see the same suggestions as someone in Arkansas.
How can you trust a media outlet with conflict of interests? This naturally makes me question it's journalists now too.
One might associate NY Times with the city New York, the bastion of a free speech and democractic superpower. But after the facts, how can you not read NY times article without raising questions?
It used to be normal in the news paper industry to have a hard dividing line between the "news" and "advertising" departments for this very reason. There was always a conflict of interest possible when newspapers reported on the companies placing ads with them. I'm not sure how true this is any more.
NYT is like the Democratic party of newspapers. They're vaguely respectable centrists in a slightly Fascist nation.
The scary part is how many of the American population think both of them are terrifying bastions of Communist Woke Terrorism, in striking contrast to objective reality.
