Sorry, but I can't watch your youtube video until it has been thoroughly vetted to the same standard as commits to the linux kernel or peer review in science. As a matter of fact, I'd have to say your video is bad for society.
Surely you see how this is a self-defeating argument? Of course higher-stakes projects where inclusion of incorrect or malicious inputs in the end result could have significant impact on a lot of people will have more stringent checking than social media. Is your ideal world really one where all forums of human communication are peer reviewed?
What YouTube video? I haven't read that comment yet; still awaiting results from the Online Content Vetting Foundation. Yours flew through the process though. Congrats!
In all seriousness though, I do agree somewhat with the GP. Inherent vetting can be good. But it's also a tool used against us for manipulation. An example of this would be app stores. Heavily vetted, but you are force fed the apps they want you to see, and they have every right to deny you access to apps they find undesirable.
We need systems of reputation and trust to emerge, as they always have, and we need the freedom to choose them. Tools like Twitter allow largely unvetted content, sure, but they also allow users to curate their own circle of trust. This comes with risks of course, but I trust it more than some omniscient entity handing me content like mana from heaven.
That’s because they are vetted by ONE organization, that privately owns the store. It is actually an example of private capitalist ownership, again.
In science, no one “owns” physics. No one “owns” articles on wikipedia. The ideal is to have multiple reviews represented and all of their major legitimate concerns should be addressed before publishing something to the public. Think of concentric circles where the inner circle isn’t just Apple or Google but a good mix of experts with different views.
The hard part is resolving disputes between experts, or determining if a criticism is legitimate. This is what “edit wars” are like on wikipedia. Perhaps in this case, both points of view should be included side by side.
In a capitalist market system, though, explaining nuances of WHY Trump’s or Biden’s administration did something, or including the entire context of a gaffe video, would make it uninteresting to their audience. Imagine if Fox News would fairly report the results of studies about single payer healthcare around the world - their audence would bounce. They face intense market pressures to cater to their audience, this is WHY they report as they do and WHY they tell their straight news anchors to “rein it in”.
The one exception may be Tucker Carlson over there, who is able to somehow maintain a show while going against the entire military-industrial complex and establishment, unlike Sean Hannity. It is a rare phenomenon to see someone with such a highly promoted time slot have such a contrarian position. But if it sells to an audience, I guess it works. CNN totally jumped the shark when they discovered they can cover the malaysian airline flight for months 24/7 and their ratings went up. They went from being a straight news network to pandering for ratings too. None of the open source platforms or wikipedia would sell out like that.
In the video, I bring this up to Noam towards the end. He actually disagrees, that audience is a form of capital. He says it is influence, but not capital. Even though one can do the same operations with it as with any capital, including exchanging it for other forms of capital etc.
You are just USED to celebrity culture, and following what Jonny Depp or Will Smith does can even overshadow a war in Ukraine or humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Four Libyan ambassadors matter more than millions of Libyans.
On Wikipedia or in NGinX there are no celebrities, except maybe the founders. And it is far far more useful and popular than their closed-source capitalist alternatives: Britannica/Encarta and Internet Information Server. They power more machines and serve more people in more ways.
And you bet that there are a lot of operating system maintainers that put software like nginx and php through their paces before giving their members access.
If you don’t like a centralized organization vetting things, then have various distros, like Linux. The point is that the author shouldn’t also be the one vetting each new version and what changed. Security researchers should be.
Your argument for “free speech absolutism” would fail in science and any endeavor that actually matters to people. For humor, entertainment and idle discussion, maybe we can have celebrities.
But yes — my video would normally not matter if not for Noam Chomsky’s amassed reputation and audience. The content in my video would be far better published as part of a collaborative discussion rather than an off-the-cuff one. But a chat between two non-celebrities would be fine for society… people could watch it for entertainment, or whatever. It wouldn’t move markets or convince people of crazy theories about 9/11 or QANON pedophiles.
There is a limit to how much power should be concentrated in one place.
Surely you see how this is a self-defeating argument? Of course higher-stakes projects where inclusion of incorrect or malicious inputs in the end result could have significant impact on a lot of people will have more stringent checking than social media. Is your ideal world really one where all forums of human communication are peer reviewed?