So Mark @ Mashable wrote about YouTube updating their community guidelines against Hate speech.
He points out the obvious - people on the internet are retarded and this change means they are censoring us all, and we are fucked because all censorship is evil, and they have won because they can’t say their evil words online.
Freedom of speech is absolute.
If we can’t beat them without silencing their message, we obviously
aren’t being convincing enough to those they are converting. Fight them
with our own free speech and expression.
Overall - it’s a good read. YouTube doing a political nod (gee, just like Google did for China, and then did with Law Enforcement Agencies).
My only real issue with the article is the wrap-up:
We Need to be Smart About This
As Uncle Ben used to say, with great power comes great responsibility… If we want to keep it safe from the grubby paws of governmental intervention, companies like Google must implement and enforce standards
of policing the community. Otherwise, the government will do that for
us, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we do not want that.
Google isn’t the little shop down the street. They’re a huge-ass corporation. If MSN was doing this people would be calling for Bill Gates head. If Steve Jobs did it, people would make shiny new logos promoting how innovative and forward thinking he’s being.
Instead, YouTube (which was purchased by Google) is taking it into their own hands. This shows the error of their “Do No Evil” slogan - nothing is really black and white. They can do something that a lot of people can consider evil - collecting user data, censoring hate speech, censoring anti-hate speech.
I do not welcome our new Internet Overlords.
Benjamin Franklin once said,
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
We continue to do so, and turn a blind eye to it. We say it’s for the best. It’s better this way. Think of the children. To me, this just shows how freaking worthless our rights are becoming. Services talk about how they’re for everything, but what’s going to happen in the future? For a citizen to express their discontentment, they’ll have to make a video, encrypt it, send it to a friend over seas to upload it to a “video sharing site” hosted on a derilect oil tanker in international waters that’s under siege by the U.S. Government for posting a video of someone saying “The Bill of Rights is an illusion.”
So what - how did I get all of this off a little YouTube censorship? Because Google was supposed to be that Little Big company. They’re supposed to be those guys that got big being good, making Microsoft look foolish for ever putting DRM on your computer. Instead they’re slowly transforming into “will this be good for the company?” type double-speak they can throw around in marketing and PR to make themselves look good.
How long until Google starts telling you what to write on your blog? “You said not nice things about Google, so we’re giving you a PR of 1, unless you delete those articles. By the way, we bought the rights to your domain, so when it expires, it’s ours unless you comply.”
Those who have the power, make the rules. Those that get the information can make their power. I know, I know, a bit paranoidal-freakish, but hey, political season stupidity always riles me up.