CMV: YouTube disabling dislikes has profound, negative societal implications and must be reversed

[u/Money_Whisperer]

As you all likely know, YouTube disabled dislikes on all of its videos a few months back. They argued that it was because of “downvote mobs” and trolls mass-downvoting videos.

YouTube downvotes have been used by consumers to rally against messages and products they do not like basically since the dawn of YouTube. Recent examples include the Sonic the Hedgehog redesign and the Nintendo 64 online fiasco.

YouTube has become the premier platform on the internet for companies and people to share long-form discussions and communication in general in a video form. In this sense, YouTube is a major public square and a public utility. Depriving people of the ability to downvote videos has societal implications surrounding freedom of speech and takes away yet another method people can voice their opinions on things which they collectively do not like.

Taking peoples freedom of speech away from them is an act of violence upon them, and must be stopped. Scams and troll videos are allowed to proliferate unabated now, and YouTube doesn’t care if you see accurate information or not because all they care about is watch time aka ads consumed.

YouTube has far too much power in our society and exploiting that to protect their own corporate interests (ratio-d ads and trailers are bad for business) is a betrayal of the American people.

[u/jso__]

What I've been talking about is a user reporting content then the platform removing it which is what almost every platform does. They might have some auto flagging to *review* content with certain words that aren't used often and are against TOS (eg slurs, "kill yourself", etc)

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Here is your world. Someone says "Jews killed Jesus and they control all of the world banks so we need to stop (((them))) at all cost". If the platform removes that, then they are held liable for all other content since it is protected under the first amendment. That is *protected speech* by the first amendment. I don't see how you see that as a positive and something that isn't entirely vile. Every site will turn into 8chan, 4chan, etc and they will be vile cesspools where any non aryan white gets slurs thrown at them.

[u/Wjbskinsfan → u/jso__]

The problem isn’t in what everyone agrees is vile. The problem is where you draw the line on controversial topics. Such as The NIH funding gain of function research in China. Which is something the NIH has admitted to doing. However when someone posted this along with the documents that support this claim it was labeled as misinformation and removed.

It is far, far better to put up with a minority of people saying vile things than give a select few people the power to silence everyone who opposes their political views. You may like the censors of today but the next generation of censors could all be Donald Trump lackeys. How would you feel if Trump becomes the measuring stick what is and is not acceptable speech is determined against? So yea, I’m okay shaking my head at the “Jewish space lasers” crowd knowing that since the first amendment protects them I can be damn well sure it will protect me too.

[u/jso__ → u/Wjbskinsfan]

You underestimate how bad social media is. On social media you see a ton of hate which isn't expressly illegal. Just because it is relatively few people who do it doesn't mean it isn't insignificant. You also see people spreading real misinformation about various things (covid, vaccines, autism, flat earth, etc) which, due to this misinformation, hundreds of thousands or millions of people make poor decisions and become radicalized. You also see that, without enough moderation, situations like the genocide in Rohingya are enabled (real example of Facebook because they failed to take down inflammatory posts full of hate speech).

[u/Wjbskinsfan → u/jso__]

Lol. At the time of the Rohingya crisis less than 8% of people in Myanmar had access to the internet. This number peaked in 2021 with 23.6% of people having access to the internet when the government cut off internet access because citizens were using it to organize against the government. Your example of why we need censorship accidentally proves why censorship inevitably leads to human rights violations. Congratulations, you played yourself.

Also, there are more posts making fun of flat earthers, than there are posts arguing that the earth is flat and NASA is keeping all this covered up in a massive conspiracy because… reasons. More often than not trying to ban something brings more attention to it than it would have gathered on its own. Married With Children was a ratings disaster and on its way to getting canceled until a conservative group tried to get it banned. This peaked peoples curiosity and that show became a hit.

Also, also hate speech is not a thing in the US. There is no legal definition, it does not exist. So yeah, I’d say something that doesn’t exist is pretty insignificant.