Tue 26 Feb 2008
YouChoose year in review
Posted by shelbinator under Geekery, Media, Politics, YouTube and such
YouTube political editor Steve Grove, a.k.a. CitizenTube, compiled a look back at all of the Democrats’ efforts on YouTube over the past year or so. He started off with the oh-so-artistic Mike Gravel (he’s still in the race, right?), and he let me ask the question on every YouTuber’s mind.
Sadly, the chickensuit didn’t make the cut. Damn.
Read more filed under Geekery, Media, Politics, YouTube and such
February 26th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
One of the problems with YouTube is that it gives the illusion of a public forum. For example, when I wrote a comment about how Obama staffers prevented me from entering an Obama rally at Georgia Tech with a peace sign, the editors working for the Obama campaign blocked it from YouTube. Moreover, the YouTube site did not give any indication of the status of my comment. By design, the YouTube site did not explicitly tell me that my comment was rejected or offer me a reason why.
So YouTube is often perceived as a place for public comments, but in the case of the Obama campaign on YouTube, some polite comments were censored because they were critical of Obama in a substantive manner. The site permitted some criticism that could be easily dismissed as invective, but censored polite comments that posed serious questions about how they are censoring the public.
February 26th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Man, Will, I’m not sure where you’re ever going to find a forum you’re happy with! ;-)
YouTube is still a private company run by a big giant behemoth of information dominance, and it allows users to establish a beachhead there and do pretty much whatever they please with their bit of cyberspace within the confines of the law. I wouldn’t want YouTube forcing me into accepting a TOS that requires me to provide a public reason for rejecting every Ron Paul conspiracy nutjob comment that gets posted on my videos. But what Google taketh away, they giveth: they can start their own Blogspot blog and write about how I keep deleting their Ron Paul comments. And then Google Blog Search will keep track of what a free speech killer I am.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
I know I’ve been critical, but I don’t think the standards I’ve proposed are too high. It’s quite reasonable to expect YouTube to provide a software mechanism that reports whether your comment has been rejected, a mechanism that allows you to cite that rejection along with the text that was rejected. These are important design decisions for systems that facilitate our democracy.
Of course, Obama staffers can reject my comment, but the public has a right to know what has been rejected. If Obama staffers do not want to provide a reason… fine, but the system should provide them with that capability, and afford the public with that explanation or their refusal to provide one. If Obama staffers decide to not justify their censorship, fine, but at least that behavior has been documented for future public discourse.
Without those features, political censorship continues in secret and without sufficient evidence to persuade others of the facts.
About free speech: as you know, it’s a very important feature of any democracy. We need to welcome multiple perspectives and make decisions based on reasonable debates. In general, we should not segment public discourse into discursive ghettos, echo chambers where everyone parrots the same views without the prospect of continual justification. Finally, to preserve free speech requires a critical and active voice. There is room for polite argument and debate as long as the parties involved are searching for the truth. And that is why it so important to probe the media institutions that purport to report the truth, or which are used in this manner. We must continue to report the bugs in our media operating system and fix them in accordance with democratic design principles.