267
Indigenous creators are clashing with YouTube’s and Instagram’s sensitive content bans.
(restofworld.org)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
267 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
59288 readers
4045 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. Fuck the censors.
Edit: this pithy response doesn’t reflect my full understanding of the related nuances here, though it does sum up my feelings on this particular example. See below for further discussion.
Again remember that freedom of expression is freedom to not be punished by the government for that expression.
Private companies are not concerned with your freedoms.
Not saying I agree with how things are, just saying how it is. Only way to tell a private company to fuck off is to not use them.
I’m not talking about the US constitution here. I’m saying it is a fundamental human right regardless of the law. What clothing to wear (or not) is part of that freedom.
Private companies should also not restrict fundamental freedoms. I’m aware they’re allowed to currently.
Won’t one party always have restricted freedom of expression in this situation? The private company wants to express themselves freely by curating the content on their social media platform. The individuals wants to express themselves by posting material of themselves with less clothes than the company wants. These both seem to me as entities wanting to express themselves freely. Which freedom are you most willing to limit?
And if you argue that the freedom of an individual should be valued more than the freedom of a private company, should individual people owning websites have their freedom of curation/expression limited?
I think these mega-platforms are way too different from an individual’s website to make that equivalence. The dominant social media companies are, as Elon Musk eloquently put it before shitting all over his own moral principles, more akin to a town square than a back yard. The fact that they are privately owned is a corruption resulting from our authoritarian legal structure—it doesn’t make them morally equivalent to a website I use and produce by myself.
YouTube is a place that tolerates almost any viewpoint or type of content. No one thinks that they actively support or endorse this content. In fact, US law explicitly exempts them from being responsible for it. If that’s the case, why should we grant them the authority to decide what should or shouldn’t be posted there?
Now, there is certainly content, in contrast to non-sexual nudity, that does direct harm, and I support the removal of such content. But either way, I don’t think YouTube deserves the unilateral authority to decide what that looks like. I’d much rather see it managed communally and democratically.