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/163/ Three Articles + Censorship ft. Douglas Lain

🕑 Added 2020-12-01 08:01:02 +0000 UTC

Comments

Malcolm Perry

I think there might be a much simpler answer to why the video was removed. Alex and Doug are right that making an algorithm to detect content + tone and cross-reference it with WHO would be near-impossible right now, but detecting pieces of media that are on a pre-existing banned list would be much easier, like, er, Alex Jones saying COVID is a hoax. This already happens with music, which lets you see the songs played at the bottom of the video, for example. This seems a lot like copyright fair use, where you could show a clip of Jones in order to critique his views, but it would certainly require human intervention to understand that's what you are doing, rather than just reposting banned content to get around filters.

Matthew Black

First of all: I don’t think the problem is so much that the conspiracy theories have gotten worse as that the skeptical position has become incredibly hollowed out. There was always something suspect about the debunker’s obsession with pure facts but it’s become really transparent with this notion that algorithms can police the validity of arguments and the construction of this anti-Trump conspiracy theory that is Russiagate. With reference to free speech, it seems like a trickier issue? Wasn’t Chomsky’s point in Manufacturing Consent that these big well-edited juggernauts of respectable journalism like the NYT were, in fact, practicing censored journalism? It seems like the growth of social media on platforms like Reddit lead to the presence of a lot of highly illiberal and repugnant opinions that were previously repressed—I don’t dispute that a lot of those attitudes were in fact odious, but I’m also suspicious of this idea that we can go back to a better age. On both these points I find myself constantly coming back to Baudrillard.