Google Rejects Australian Censorship Proposal 197
Xiroth writes "Google has rejected overtures from the Australian government to censor YouTube clips that had been given an RC rating by Australian classification authority, the OFLC. According to a Google spokesperson: 'YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography, and we enforce these, but we can't give any assurances that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification content from YouTube.
The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information. RC includes the grey realms of material instructing in any crime from [painting] graffiti to politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia, and exposing these topics to public debate is vital for democracy.'"
Can an Australian brother... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is getting interesting! (Score:5, Interesting)
Also worrying is the fact that YouTube considers itself infrastructure for "free speech". What if they decide to broaden their definitions of "hate speech" and "pornography"?
The Internet is supposed to be free. It is supposed to allow equal access to data by equal parties. The existence of megacorporations in this space undermines the original spirit of the Internet, and provides just another way to turn the once-egalitarian Internet into just another tilted media outlet like Fox News.
This brings about a good discussion point: I remember the days of usenet, when IRC was the main form of IM, when gopher provided beautiful cruft-free content and I pine. No really, I still use pine. How could we, as citizens of the global Internet connected society, go about moving back towards an egalitarian Internet? I recognize that technology has moved forwards, however, I am left wondering how would we move the *values* back to what they were? Was it the massive influx of average people that did this to the Internet community? Or was it the megacorps who eventually found ways to monetize Internet users?
Re:Google still not evil (Score:3, Interesting)
Eternal September (Score:5, Interesting)
You're looking at it through rose tinted glasses. There have been walled gardens such as AOL practically right from the "start". The value of the internet grew with popularity, and popularity brought in the noobs, who dived head first into the most convenient bucket provided by megacorps.
This is the status quo.
This is what happens when average people interact with megacorps on a mass scale, so nobody is to blame per se.
Whilst some very clever people were involved with the building blocks of the internet, the values and ideology, like everything in this world is completely up for negotiation.
Google deserves a little praise (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Eternal September (Score:3, Interesting)
A slight tangent here, but the number of obscure and/or interesting films available on bit torrent really dropped after bit torrent became main stream. Sure, you can find movies like Avatar a week before their release date, but good quality rips of independent films and just strange stuff in general sort of disappeared by 2007 or so as it got lost in the noise on trackers like supernova and the pirate bay. I'm sure there's private tracker with a community around it nowadays if I looked hard enough, but to download an obscure 60's camp scifi movie I had to wait nine days while enough people finally seeded the damn thing (doesn't help that the only torrent available was for the 1.1gb version).
Re:This is getting interesting! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is completely right. Just because a particular vehicle for speech doesn't allow *all* speech doesn't imply that it's not a vehicle for public debate about certain topics. The newspaper doesn't print porn, does that mean that newspapers are not involved in an active democracy? Or that any attempt to censor a newspaper doesn't effect free speech because the newspaper doesn't allow a totally unvetted expression of ideas?
Thinking about free speech in this all-or-nothing way is not productive, and it tends to alienate people from supporting free speech because they feel like they have to support porn.
Re:What is hate speech? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google's policy defines it as anything inciting or advocating violence, or making insulting stereotypes or generalizations about any group. Anyways, YouTube only has this policy due to constant harassment by Lieberman demanding they censors Muslim videos. But yeah, you can't use THEIR OWN PERSONAL SITE to spew various retarded stereotypes about Mexicans (Look out Mencia!), it's the end of the world. Free speech means the government can't interfere (Like in Australia) it doesn't mean Google has a legal obligation to carry your hate speech. Oh yeah, in the announcement where Google added this to their policy, they said "We don't expect you to treat everybody like nuns, the elderly, or brain surgeons." Amazingly, some catholic nutbars started posting about down with Google the great satan, for picking on nuns like that, saying Google's announcement itself was hatespeech! The nerve, implying nuns should be treated with respect, how dare they!
And what the fuck are you talking about, guilty? Google doesn't make laws, you're not guilty of any crime. They delete your video because they find it tasteless. Did you scream with such rage when Kramer got shitcanned for screaming racial slurs over and over and over and over? Clubs stopped hiring him so basically he was found guilty of hate speech and banned, just like youtube does! OH NO SLIPPERY SLOPE. You can say how you hate black people and gays all you want. You can't force Google to say it for you.
If you're referring to countries like Canada that actually DO have hate speech laws, it's a lot more rigidly defined than Google (Except Manitoba, but even their own courts throw all those cases out as unconstitutional, and make (unheeded) demands that the provincial government fix them). As in, to be hate speech, your speech has to be speech that will cause violence or hatred of the group you are targetting. And judges have interpreted that quite narrowly. As in, if you say "GOD HATES FAGS, BURN IN HELL HOMOS" that has time and again been affirmed as not hate-speech, as nobody hearing that would start hating gays if they didn't already, and nobody would read it and go beat up a gay person if they weren't going to already. It's also been held as allowed because the hate speech law has exemptions for anything that is true, or said in good faith. A preacher believes what he says, and so it's protected speech. If he actually calls for violence though, that's a different beast, and it doesn't matter if he believes beating gays to death is God's will or not.
As for the Australian law, the Australians have passed a law banning porn that features cartoons (because you can't tell how old a cartoon is so basically its all child porn), female ejaculation (because it's obscene) and women with small breasts (As underage teens also have smaller breasts, and so seeing women with less than a D cup may cause people to turn into pedophiles). There is currently no word on if they eventually plan to ban having actual consensual sex with adults with small breasts, or if you will be OK as long as you don't film it.
Re:What is hate speech? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's possibly worth noting that Google takes a pretty expansive view of a historical/educational exception to their "hate speech" restriction as well, in contrast to some countries. For example, there are plenty of Nazi propaganda videos up on YouTube.