This looks like it's going to be an increasingly big problem for the platform giants, as it pertains to their increasingly aggressive speech restrictions. As they ramp those restrictions up, I'd expect the need for security to increase accordingly.
A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. They'll feel isolated and it'll very likely feel like a personal attack by the tech company. The platforms today are so large, it surely can seem like being cut off from society in general, like a human right is being revoked.
The people the platforms are looking to restrict based on expressed views or behavior, I suspect, are going to tend to have higher than normal rates of mental illness (emphasis that I think it's likely to be a higher rate, not universal).
I don't want to debate the state of her mental wellness as we can only speculate at this time, but I don't think a healthy person would feel that a tech giant is specifically targeting them, even if they think it might be unfair and arbitrary.
She didn't think she was being specifically targeted. In one of her rants she specifically stated that she knew of many other content creators having their videos censored, age restricted, and demonetized.
Her methods are nuts, obviously, but her beef with Youtube is entirely justified.
The end result, unfortunately, isn't going to be Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc... realizing the error of their ways - it's going to be them over-reacting to protect themselves.
I expect Silicon Valley campuses will get locked down. I expect any content that even slightly might maybe insinuate violence will get taken down.
tldr; The problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
I don’t agree that will happen, but it may be good if it does.
It’s about time many of these companies start to realize their decisions have very real consequences on people’s lives (in who makes money/a living and who doesn’t, harassment levels) and their seemingly capricious decisions and rule changes are very problematic.
They’re not the small semi-isolated bubbles they used to be, they’re powerful entities that have large effects on the online economy.
Obviously they shouldn’t be subject to physical attacks/assaults/etc. But YouTube is not what it was in 2007 anymore.
Yeah, they should probably have censored way earlier to prevent that. They now have to go through with getting rid of the radicals they raised. Or re-open the floodgates, accept even more radicalization and thus even more painful consequences later down the line. Just like most problems, ignoring them rarely makes them go away and you instead loose you most pleasant remaining ways out.
> "...but her beef with Youtube is entirely justified."
I am curious as to how we concluded that? Until now, we have only heard her side of the story, and not that of YouTube. May be she was violating ToS? There could be thousands of well-justified reasons for YouTube to terminate her account.
Without hearing the other side of the story, how do we know that her beef was entirely justified?
And, of course, there is the usual argument that YouTube is a platform owned by a private entity. Nobody has a justifiable right to put their video on YouTube and earn revenue from it.
Of course. I emphasized that I believe it's likely to be a higher than normal rate of mental illness, specifically to preempt the obvious responses I'd get, people will emotionally jump to a conclusion that I'm saying everyone falls into that category.
I personally know a few extreme conspiracy theory prone people, that drift into some pretty terrible areas intellectually (from lizard people to anti-semitism). In one case, the person has gotten progressively worse as the years have gone by, they seem crazy at this point. Their views are now being aggressively silenced/blocked by Facebook. I believe mental illness is a not uncommon context with a lot of people that end up like this person and end up getting silenced by the platforms.
The implication being that private companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) now fill the role that common carriers did a few decades ago, and that, curiously, they enjoy many of the privileges usually allotted to common carriers (eg. can't be prosecuted for content passing through their networks) without the responsibilities.
Isn’t that fact quickly changing with laws like SESTA? I feel like tech companies have been at forever war against not being afforded common carrier protections in a way phone companies were not, and I wonder if that regulatory uncertainty has led to self-policing & hedging
There are a bunch of these in society that are interesting and very deserving of more public discussion, including that one (broadly communication access).
Given the importance to work and life of having access to the wireless networks today, owned by AT&T, Verizon etc., should they be allowed to blanket deny you access to them as a customer (assuming you can pay)? Especially given the wireless carriers are essentially a group monopoly (spectrum limitations).
Or how we take away voting rights for felons, until a certain amount of time after they've been released, or in some states permanently (unless altered by a court order or governor's action). Something like 1 in 40 American adults can't vote right now because of that. It revokes the ability to participate in a critical democratic function.
I'd expect an increasingly large societal debate about the context of the platforms and what their rights are when it comes to restricting access. Whether they increasingly get treated as public utilities and if the FCC sets down guidelines/rules for them to comply with on access restriction. That overall conversation probably accelerates the longer they're part of a big part of society. I'm not sure how far that debate will get in the US in regards to actions/regulations, I expect it'll get pretty far in some nations though.
"In the national elections in 2012, the various state felony disenfranchisement laws together blocked an estimated 5.85 million felons from voting, up from 1.2 million in 1976. This comprised 2.5% of the potential voters in general." (emphasis mine)
If your speech causes enough problems? Yes. Remember Kevin Mitnick was banned from using computers at all, and I think was banned from the phone system for a while too?
It didn't prevent the abuse, even though it exposed it.
"Dubbed the "most dangerous hacker in the world," Mitnick was put in solitary confinement and prevented from using a phone after law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone, he said."
https://www.cnet.com/news/social-engineering-101-mitnick-and...
As far as I know, her videos were demonetized, not rejected. There's a huge difference between being silenced and being refused ad placement on your videos.
Getting paid to express your opinion is not a human right.
Tru, but if it is your primary income, I can see how people get mad. Mind you, not, lets go shoot some people mad, but still. Being fired by a demonetization algorithm is kinda shitty.
Loads of people rely on YT for there income and recent changes to the content algoritms are demonetizing all kinds of video's without any warning or clear indication that it happened (or why ftm) and no real recourse to fix things. It already was a bit of a crap shoot, but now it is quite easy to loose months of income without being acknowledged as a person. I mean, even if you reach the 'you-get-human-support' level of views, you still only get to mail with bots...
> There's a huge difference between being silenced and being refused ad placement on your videos.
If there's a huge difference between the impact that being silenced has on someone compared to having their primary source of income abruptly taken away, I would expect the latter to be worse for most people.
I don't believe it's a human right. I believe it hurts to be demonetized. I believe it is enraging to the creators to be demonetized for making content that doesn't have good optics from YouTube's own self-serving point of view.
Some of them were also made age-restricted even though, according to her, they did not include graphic content. From a glance I took at her videos, she did seem quite a bit off. Whoever is saying she is a far-leftist is plain wrong. She never talks about politics, just animal rights and little bit about culture). Most likely she could've been diagnosed with a mental condition if she ever bothered to get herself checked out. Unfortunately criticizing such people now-a-days usually backfires on the person criticizing.
You are talking about people with mental illness. I think the platforms produce mental illness. If you influence and produce a certain kind of behaviour through appropriate reward mechanisms and then after a few years of conditioning reduce/remove the reward what do you think happens? Mental illness.
YouTube has conditioned a generation of people to chant "subscribe like and share" like a robots. The day the "subscribe like and share" model stops being viable the robots will break down.
For those who care about doing something here is a starting point - humanetech.com
People doing things that you consider irrational is not automatically "mental illness." To conflate the two is both to absolve criminals and terrorists of moral responsibility and to stigmatize the mentally ill, most of whom are not homicidal.
Unless you have specific evidence of a particular mental illness, this kind of statement is irresponsible.
A position doesn't become "relativism" just because you don't want to hear it. It's not relativism to point out that people have responsibility for their actions, nor to point out that mental illnesses do not generally make people homicidal.
Regardless of what is ultimately found out about the case, people were claiming mental illness before they had information to support that, as they do in nearly all of these cases.
Mental illness is described in terms of deviance from "normal" behavior and conformance to generally accepted morals. I think this is trivially proven from a lay read of the DSM.
A shooting spree in reaction to an website's policy change is both immoral and irrational. No conceivable context would make that chain of actions acceptable.
How could one look at this action and assume mental illness does not exist?
It's not relativism to point out that people have responsibility for their actions, nor to point out that mental illnesses do not generally make people homicidal.
Saying mental illness exists based on their behavior is not even close to the same thing as saying that they did not have culpability for their actions, and it's both unfair and disingenuous to imply I did.
>Mental illness is described in terms of deviance from "normal" behavior and conformance to generally accepted morals. I think this is trivially proven from a lay read of the DSM.
Deviation from normal behavior and generally accepted morals is absolutely not a definition of mental illness. A bank robber isn't mentally ill by virtue of robbing a bank. I don't believe you've ever read the DSM in any of its editions.
>No conceivable context would make that chain of actions acceptable.
No one said they were acceptable.
>How could one look at this action and assume mental illness does not exist?
People do horrible, outrageous things without diagnosable mental illnesses all the time.
>Saying mental illness exists based on their behavior is not even close to the same thing as saying that they did not have culpability for their actions, and it's both unfair and disingenuous to imply I did.
The assumption that any horrible, irrational crime must be due to mental illness--obviously this diminishes culpability. Have you never heard of pleading insanity? If someone is genuinely out of their mind, they cannot be held responsible for their actions in the same way a normal person would be held responsible.
Diminishes and eliminates are two different words for a reason. The other thing I think you're missing here is that there's a certain level of rationality implied with someone who robs a bank. Ignoring morals, sure, but rationality nonetheless.
Random shooting sprees tend to lack that rationality - as this one does. There's no chain of cause and effect that goes from "youtube demonetized my videos" to "I'm going to shoot random people at youtube with no understanding of their responsibility, and later myself".
This I just wrong from the start. If there’s a single overarching definition of mental illness, it’s “clinical significance” and not deviation from the norm. Of course it’s not that simple either, but it is a common thread throughout all of them.
This only moves the definition down one level. If clinical significance (in general, not just in psychology) isn't based on deviation from a norm, what is it based on?
The degree to which something interferes in someone’s life, their ability to function, etc. If you’re suicidally depressed, or psychotic, it’s a clear distinction for obvious reasons. It’s not about comparing to some standard, you can believe strange things, be unhappy, and so on, but if it starts to make you unable to live your life, it might be a problem.
Maybe with some AI we could target unhealthy people and flatter their egos. Like fake accounts subscribing commenting and agreeing with the troubled soul.
If you have a profile on Instagram and try to build a following through hashtags, this may as well already be true. You tend to get random international followers (at least temporarily) who post fairly inane comments trying to seem engaging.
Fake AIs could probably come up with better content!
It certainly doesn't help that Google's customer support is so terrible. There have been several articles posted here about well known people having to use their high level Google connections or "go viral" just to make Google pay any attention.
Combine mental illness with that feeling of helplessness, and it's not going to end well.
This was nearly 20 years ago at the same building the news station was in. Maybe a news station was a platform giant in 1999. I guess it was a very restrictive platform. They talked and you listened.
> A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced.
A mentally unwell person is equally likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by a platform that harbors content which, in fact or merely their perception, endorses, advocates, or directly does any of targeting, oppressing, threatening, or harming them or any group they identify with.
Heck, even a mentally well person might reasonably feel that way, though they may be less likely to respond to it violently.
I'm struggling to understand the difference between a mentally unwell person and a mentally unwell corporation or government.
I don't think YouTube is mentally unwell, but there have certainly been examples in the past of corporations acting in ways that resulted in the deaths of individuals - either through negligence (justified economically) or through rare but not nonexistent direct corporate violence.
Contemporary examples of murderous governments are trivially easy to find.
Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill, but not murderous groups of individuals once they're beyond a certain level of political and/or economic influence?
> Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill, but not murderous groups of individuals
Other way round, surely? Recieving a diagnosis of mental illness is one of the few things that will save a murderer from punishment.
There is a tendency for news and the public to reclassify certain kinds of crime as "mentally ill" when they can't, or don't want to understand, the motivations. Often it's a form of terrorism and radicalisation.
> I'm struggling to understand the difference between a mentally unwell person and a mentally unwell corporation or government.
Corporations and governments are collections whose concrete eleemtns are individuals. If corporations or governments act out of mental illness, it is the mental illness of one or more of the individuals comprising the collection.
The aggregate might be subject to dysfunction distinct from but in some way analogous to individual mental illness, but that isn't mental illness, just a loosely analogous state.
> Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill
We generally don't, though mental illness is an explanation for some personal violence.
WRT corporate mental illness, I'm not convinced it's widespread mental illness rather than simply the way humans are combined with poor/unethical/apathetic/etc leadership. The vast majority of us just go along with whatever an "authority" tells us is right. The Milgram Experiment [1] illustrated this well.
>Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill, but not murderous groups of individuals once they're beyond a certain level of political and/or economic influence?
Because "might makes right" is an implicit virtue for many of the most powerful of people.
He could have gone with "extreme animal rights activist"[1] too, depending on how you want to spin it. Mentally unwell best sums up her beliefs + actions.
> Interesting that we’re going for “mentally unwell” rather than “gun owner” this time.
We're?
Your response comes off as quite rude and dismissive. When in the past did I go for "gun owner" instead of "mentally unwell" or similar, such that your statement makes any sense?
Your assumption/s about me and what I believe, have no place on HN, in my opinion. If you want to know what I think about something, you should ask. There's a polite, collegial way to add to the conversation in doing so.
Right, that's my point: I'm not the collective narrative, I'm an individual person, with a mix of beliefs and thoughts on any given subject. You apparently assumed I was projecting something (a narrative?), based on some past experiences you've had.
If your guess is incorrect about what I believe and why I'm saying what I am, what then? That's why you ask.
A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. They'll feel isolated and it'll very likely feel like a personal attack by the tech company. The platforms today are so large, it surely can seem like being cut off from society in general, like a human right is being revoked.
The people the platforms are looking to restrict based on expressed views or behavior, I suspect, are going to tend to have higher than normal rates of mental illness (emphasis that I think it's likely to be a higher rate, not universal).