{"id":41066,"date":"2017-12-01T03:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-12-01T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41066"},"modified":"2017-11-29T19:50:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T00:50:26","slug":"censorship-on-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/12\/01\/censorship-on-the-web\/","title":{"rendered":"Censorship on the web"},"content":{"rendered":"

At City Journal<\/em>, Aaron Renn<\/a> explains why some of the concerns about censorship on the Internet are not so much wrong as misdirected:<\/p>\n

The basic idea of net neutrality makes sense. When I get a phone, the phone company can\u2019t decide whom I can call, or how good the call quality should be depending on who is on the other end of the line. Similarly, when I pay for my cable modem, I should be able to use the bandwidth I paid for to surf any website, not get a better or worse connection depending on whether my cable company cut some side deal to make Netflix perform better than Hulu.<\/p>\n

The problem for net neutrality advocates is that the ISPs aren\u2019t actually doing any of this; they really are providing an open Internet, as promised. The same is not true of the companies pushing net neutrality, however. As Pai suggests, the real threat to an open Internet doesn\u2019t come from your cable company but from Google\/YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others. All these firms have aggressively censored.<\/p>\n

For example, Google recently kicked would-be Twitter competitor Gab out of its app store, not for anything Gab did but for what it refused to do \u2014 censor content. Twitter is famous for censoring, as Pai observes. \u201cI love Twitter, and I use it all the time,\u201d he said. \u201cBut let\u2019s not kid ourselves; when it comes to an open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate.\u201d (Twitter\u2019s censors have not gotten around to removing the abuse, some of it racist, being hurled at Pai, including messages like \u201cDie faggot die\u201d and \u201cHey go fuck yourself you Taliban-looking fuck.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s YouTube unit also censors, setting the channel for Prager University to restricted mode, which limits access; Prager U. is suing Google and YouTube. YouTube has also \u201cdemonetized\u201d videos from independent content creators, making these videos ineligible for advertising, their main source of revenue. Much of the complaining about censorship has come from political conservatives, but they\u2019re not the only victims. The problem is broad-based.<\/p>\n

Yet sometimes Silicon Valley giants have adopted a see-no-evil approach to certain kinds of content. Facebook, for instance, has banned legitimate content but failed to stop Russian bots from going wild during last year\u2019s presidential election, planting voluminous fake news stories. Advertisers recently started fleeing YouTube when reports surfaced that large numbers of child-exploitation videos were showing up on supposedly kid-friendly channels. One account, ToyFreaks, had 8 million subscribers \u2014 making it the 68th most-viewed YouTube channel \u2014 before the company shut it down. It\u2019s not credible that YouTube didn\u2019t know what was happening on a channel with millions of viewers. Other channels and videos featured content from pedophiles. More problems turned up within the last week. A search for \u201cHow do I …\u201d on YouTube returned numerous auto-complete suggestions involving sex with children. Others have found a whole genre of \u201cguess her age\u201d videos, with preview images, printed in giant fonts, saying things like, \u201cShe\u2019s only 9!\u201d The videos may or may not have involved minors \u2014 I didn\u2019t watch them\u2014but at minimum, they trade on pedophilic language to generate views.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At City Journal, Aaron Renn explains why some of the concerns about censorship on the Internet are not so much wrong as misdirected: The basic idea of net neutrality makes sense. When I get a phone, the phone company can\u2019t decide whom I can call, or how good the call quality should be depending on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,10,15,13],"tags":[97,459,391,328,58,310,481],"class_list":["post-41066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-liberty","category-technology","category-usa","tag-advertising","tag-censorship","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-internet","tag-twitter","tag-youtube"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aGm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41067,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41066\/revisions\/41067"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}