Firstly, my sympathies with the people at Youtube HQ. I have many, many friends in the bay area and so this kind of thing hits close to home.
Secondly, I struggle when thinking about if we should give airtime to a shooter's grievances, or reasons. Or even mention who they are. I tend to be on the side of: don't give them any air time. And certainly, don't acquiesce to this type of behavior because it is almost by definition "terrorism" (using violence to cause change in policies).
On the other hand, I have been hearing a lot about YouTube demonitization, censorship, etc. Should this shooting be a part of the discussion about censorship? Should YouTube and the tech community let it affect the discourse around censorship?
>On the other hand, I have been hearing a lot about YouTube demonitization, censorship, etc. Should this shooting be a part of the discussion about censorship? Should YouTube and the tech community let it affect the discourse around censorship?
I think the answer to this is clearly no. I feel like people here feel very strongly about censorship, so maybe they'll disagree. But I think we need to get a bit of perspective here. She attempted to kill people to get what she wanted.
Should people's motives not be inspected simply because they were willing to kill over them? Following that maxim would give us an infantile understanding of human history.
The exact quote by Thomas Jefferson was: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."[0][1]
Though, if the hired guns that enforce and enable their corporate/cultural owners, to silent the voices of societies dissenters and the marginal in various forms, cannot see the roles they play (albeit, indirectly at times, perhaps blinded by their own incentives, maybe this is the lethargy Jefferson talked about), then I will not be surprised to see things to continue to escalate.
Plenty of soft targets abound that corporate and cultural owners rely on for dominating the public for their own ends.
At the same time, they may be propping up a tyrannical system. "Just following orders" is not a solid argument for your morality.
It's clearly a complicated mess. My personal hope is that we eventually learn the lesson that sufficiently influential social networks need to be subject to democratic oversight and a transparent judicial system. That will likely make them more expensive to run, but that's a price we have to pay for three sanity of our society.
> if we should give airtime to a shooter's grievances, or reasons
I think in this case she represents a significant number of YouTubers, and is like an extreme version of discontent that is happening. Imagine a hive of bees growing until they start getting annoying and one of them stings you; by removing one you don't solve anything, you need to do something with the whole hive. So you can remove any traces of her from the Internet so that nobody knows about her motives, but all it does it to let discontent bubble and then erupt in unexpected ways, instead of doing some needed correction.
"...I think in this case she represents a significant number of YouTubers, and is like an extreme version of discontent that is happening..."
Doesn't really matter though. We shouldn't be giving these people the infamy they are looking for. If anything, it's made me think a little less of disgruntled youtubers, and some youtubers have legit gripes.
I don't think it's about being "famous" (some narcissists of course would be like that). I'd treat it as a valid feedback from within a dynamic system that there's a built up pressure somewhere and it's time to do some tweaks for system to continue working, instead of saying everything is wonderful, the feedback was just a deranged singleton instance, or even that we need to double down.
If you look at the whole as a non-personal system, then yes. When you e.g. see your city has suddenly more murders than before, you probably take it as a valid feedback and try to do something about underlying causes.
Murders go up and down all the time. Average resident of that city doesn't really see that as "feedback". In fact, the average person is completely unaffected by that. Probably less than 0.01% of any demographic in the US is murdered in any given year in any given city. Even if the rate went up by an order of magnitude, most would barely notice. (Local TV news not withstanding.)
It hip to talk about the "systematic" nature of Bad Things, but it's very rare for people to actually consider the systems at play. Nobody bothers pushing past inventing a just-so mental state of the actor and looking at the tools they use.
I like your post, you're looking for the bigger picture.
I agree with your sentiment, but I also think we need to make America the kind of place where people don't think a murder-suicide like this is their only remaining option. I'm not too optimistic about that at the moment.
Blowing people up got Ted Kaczynski's anti-technology manifesto printed in the NYTimes. Even if got through to one person I bet he feels like it was worth it.
It's not something to admit in polite company but violence is a great way to start a conversation.
Big companies are morality load balancers. Technically a CEO is morally responsible for what their company does, but this does not truly feel right either. The example scenario goes like this:
The shareholders decide that more money must be made
The CEO decides that more money will be made by obtaining more wood. The hows and whys are kept vague at this stage. Nothing concrete will be put on paper. Upper management decides that resource acquisition will be guided by a study on the various pros and cons of chopping what wood where.
The study confirms that we the best place to get wood is the amazon rain forest. Middle management receives the plans and guidelines from on high. Slowly the moral responsibility is distributed through the ranks. Until, years later, when some pollution case comes to light the question is asked: who to blame? The workers? The results of an objective study? The incentives set by shareholders and a cutthroat market for wood?
"Morally correct" as in according to one's moral principles? Is that, in its turn, something that we all agree on and share?
Terrorists definitely hold moral principles that are different from mine. To a terrorist, blowing people up to bring attention to their point may be the morally correct thing to do.
Hence we have terrifying people like Kaczynski with extremely strong moral convictions that deviate far from what is generally considered normal and socially acceptable, whose ill deeds are consistent and true to their moral principles.
Sure, terrorists disagree, but you're avoiding the fact that most people here - on this site, in this industry, in this country - agree that blowing people up for attention is morally incorrect.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing. That it's possible for someone to believe terrorism is good? I suspect most people already know that, but thankfully most of us disagree.
It's mostly a semantic argument. I'm arguing against using "correct" in a context where correctness evidently depends on morality, which is individual enough that this kind of person exists and thrives. That nullifies the whole basis of the argument that "There are correct ways to start a discourse around censorship." I'm not sure that it was meant as an argument. Maybe it's just a cheap way to score points among "most people here", because it's rather pointless as an argument regardless of its validity.
Also, I assume that by this country you mean the U.S., where killing people at least partly to draw attention (for the purpose of general deterrence) is practiced by the justice system. I bet you'll find a lot more people in this crowd that agree with this on the basis of their morals. I know people who believe one thing but will at least briefly change their mind learning of some particularly heinous crime or some particularly tragic wrongful conviction. Correct/incorrect isn't really a scale, so which would pick for something a little more polarized like this?
I disagree with the premise of your post. There are not "correct" ways to "start a discourse" about censorship, because there are no ways to start a discourse about censorship.
There are a bunch of people doing the media dance around a topic, all within the confines of the status quo. The disagreements are loud, but the questions at stake are fixed. In appearing to debate conclusions, everyone is tricked into accepting the form of the argument.
The outcome of censorship arguments will be exactly the same as the outcome of privacy arguments: whatever benefits the system. Eich was run out of town on a rail after the status quo moved beyond thing he gave minor support to, while Zuckerberg is only experiencing a momentary PR blip until they can get everyone back on track of unironically defending his contract of adhesion as if it's not on-the-face abusive to end users.
The unfortunate truth is that this woman got more exposure for her message by taking the action she did then would have been possible by any other means.
That has some rather frightening implications for society.
I want to know what happens in the public sphere. I don't want some bureaucrat deciding what is and is not "too dangerous to public safety" to allow to to be broadcasted because some copycat MIGHT get inspired. To quote Charlton Heston's response in "Touch of Evil" when the corrupt cop played by Orson Wells complains how effective policing isn't easy, "your job isn't supposed to be easy. The only job where policing is easy is in a police state."
We have "censorship" in Europe and we don't have people murdering others because of it.
The problem isn't censorship. The problem is that the US is far more violent than other developed nations, and there is easy access to deadly weapons for anyone who wants one.
>We have "censorship" in Europe and we don't have people murdering others because of it.
Europe has a long history of mass murder intertwined with censorship. This history was the basis for the US Bill of Rights, notably the first and second amendments.
YouTube (and other social media services) usually take down the accounts of headline-making killers. You're asking if they should make an exception in this case?
In parallel, there has been a conversation going on about demonitization, censorship, etc (see the removal of the gun videos recently). My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation? I feel like we should restrain ourselves from letting violent acts like this impact those conversations, even if the violent acts were done "in the name of" fighting against censorship
> My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation?
Did you expect that the shooting would have a meaningful impact in the debate? Certainly, people will mention her name in the next few months, because of the infamy of her acts. But no, I don't think Google is going to openly say that an attempted mass murder of their employees was an incentive or disincentive. For likely the same reason why governments don't typically negotiate with ransomers and terrorists.
> Did you expect that the shooting would have a meaningful impact in the debate?
Not upstream comment author, but I can see how it could. People make a living off YouTube. YouTube purposefully hides the metrics by which they judge videos and choose to promote them to or hide them from different audiences, and which cause a video to become demonetized, which means no revenue can be obtained from it. They have valid reasons for wanting to do this (which isn't to say those reasons should win out in the end, it's an active debate AFAIK), but on the other hand they heavily encourage content creators to make it their full time job and embrace YouTube.
The stress of having your livelihood drastically affected due to an algorithm change in some opaque way that nobody will explain may contribute heavily to stress individuals feel. That doesn't in any way excuse the actions of this person, but if it contributed, is this not a valid, if extreme, data point about the impact in people when they feel powerless and in the dark about their livelihood?
Thousands of people got massive "wealth shocks" from YouTube's massive wave of perceived-as-arbitrary (or at least unexplained) and unanticipated "demonitization" wave. YouTube has no worthy competitor so these people had nowhere else to go and could only try to trade even more labor for far less income. It's no surprise that this has led to quite a few suicides:
https://www.daytondailynews.com/business/midlife-wealth-shoc...
No the shooting shouldn't be about the discussion on "censorship". The discussion should be about the tendency to resort to extreme levels of violence to settle disputes and settle perceived wrongs.
As far as the attention question, I'm in the same boat. The more I've read about school shooters and the like the more apparent it is how much of an inspiration their predecessors (starting with Harris and Klebold) are. There is this obsession with "Why'd they do it" which leads to a level of attention that appears to be desirable.
Secondly, I struggle when thinking about if we should give airtime to a shooter's grievances, or reasons. Or even mention who they are. I tend to be on the side of: don't give them any air time. And certainly, don't acquiesce to this type of behavior because it is almost by definition "terrorism" (using violence to cause change in policies).
On the other hand, I have been hearing a lot about YouTube demonitization, censorship, etc. Should this shooting be a part of the discussion about censorship? Should YouTube and the tech community let it affect the discourse around censorship?
I don't know.