So the result is still accessible through the search, but you would want it "suggested"?
You claim you want to see Alex Jones because you want to be challenged in your opinions, but is that possible that SUGGESTING Alex Jones is actually causing harm to many people? It might not cause you harm, but if we suggest it to people that might not have looked for it otherwise, we are sending people down the line of starting to harass parents of victims. It seems clear to me why it's not suggested. Perhaps for you it doesn't matter, it' just to "challenge" your views. Obviously, your kid wasn't shot in a school and you don't have people calling you every hour of the day to tell you you're a criminal that just made it up and have random people going to your house and fire at your house.
Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence.
Again.. those videos are still there in the search results, just the suggested terms are not there.
I'm not the parent poster, and this is just a reaction to the specific wording of "causing violence", not an attack on your beliefs or anything.
In my opinion, showing a suggestion in a drop-down box in a YT search field with "Alex Jones" in it does not equate to "causing violence". I get your point about some people (such as parents of Sandy Hook victims) being caused harm just by seeing his name, but equating that to "causing violence" just waters down the term. I lost a parent to leukemia years ago and seeing references to the disease causes me slight bits of "harm". I wouldn't even call it that, though maybe I would have directly after they died. It's not "violence" though, because that presupposes a type of deliberate one-on-one physical harm that even the most well-engineered drop-down menu can be expected to achieve. It's also not something I would expect the developers at YouTube to be working hard to shield me from.
In my opinion, personal freedom needs a much higher bar before it can be restricted than seeing personal names in drop-down menus in search boxes. I get that this sentiment is going the way of the dinosaurs these days, but I at least still believe in it.
>Now those episodes have been controversial, and I only bring them up because it's the example that came to my head (before someone misses the whole point and starts looking at the finger)
As you can see in my initial post.. or maybe you don't, I avoid talking about things like this on HN because most people here are smart enough to look between the lines but some only pretend to look at the finger to win an argument, well..
I was talking about censorship, and I don't "want" or "not want" Alex Jones to be suggested, and I won't pretend to tell a private company how to do their business, so I just stopped using Youtube and most other social media.
>Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence.
Of course if you call for violence on others, but if I say that people of party X are liars, then my fans start attacking them on the street, am I causing harm or are my fans the ones who cause the harm? If it's my fault then most politicians call each other liars and criminals every other week...
Also about the children thing I'm not up to date with it, but I know he said Sandy Hook was fake and something happened (I'm not American), but the guy says lots of crazy stuff and always has, it's still not a reason to censor anyone.
I doubt you'll understand how small steps like this can lead to somethings that in hindsight we see as catastrophic, but a system (like soviet russia or nazi germany) is built step by step, today we censor you, tomorrow we deepfake the president's face and post it on twitter, very soon we throw you in a concentration camp.
>but is that possible that SUGGESTING Alex Jones is actually causing harm to many people?
There are videos of kids challenging each other to balance on the rooftop of a skyscraper, videos of Islamic priests calling for the death of unbelievers, ads for fast-food with a shit ton of sugar and fat, videos on how to make high powered infrared lasers that can blind someone without even being visible to the naked eye, videos of home made guns, etc... and they all get suggested in the search bar once you type in a few words.
Other thoughts:
Also an important thing to note is that the Alex Jones lies (that he maybe believed since he's not 100% in there) on Sandy Hook resulted in zero deaths. Mainstream media and CIA misinformation on weapons of mass destruction resulted in 1 million+ innocent Iraqis dying in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" yet no one has ever tried to ban them from anything, are those Iraqi kids just not that important? Are they less than us because they're not white?
Alex Jones and Johnny Depp gets publicly televised trials but none for Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, all the "terrorist suspects" in Guantanamo, Julian Assange, and so on and so forth
I never would have thought that in the 21th century in the first world I'd be arguing FOR freedom of speech while being talked down to as the bad guy.
You claim you want to see Alex Jones because you want to be challenged in your opinions, but is that possible that SUGGESTING Alex Jones is actually causing harm to many people? It might not cause you harm, but if we suggest it to people that might not have looked for it otherwise, we are sending people down the line of starting to harass parents of victims. It seems clear to me why it's not suggested. Perhaps for you it doesn't matter, it' just to "challenge" your views. Obviously, your kid wasn't shot in a school and you don't have people calling you every hour of the day to tell you you're a criminal that just made it up and have random people going to your house and fire at your house.
Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence.
Again.. those videos are still there in the search results, just the suggested terms are not there.