https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/816mzt/big_alph...

Perhaps you're saying that, if provided with a list of 5 examples, you would defend why Google chose to censor in those specific cases. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the details of all these cases to be able to pick 5 particularly controversial examples, but I still feel uneasy about the amount of power Google has to silence opinions it disagrees with.

This is one of those times. I don’t agree with their messaging, but Alex Jones should be allowed. Again I completely whole heartily disagree with him, but we can’t be selective in this area.

We’ve kind of validated him to some degree and made him much much bigger than before.

There is a class of people who feel like they aren’t being heard or lied too. Yet we often use tactics to discredit them.

I think this only embolden them. We can even discuss things, without doing the mental laziness of saying. I don’t wanna look at your source, because it’s x.

Within universities, you can’t use one source, why would you think it’s ok now?

You need supporting claims, if you disagree, than support it.. stop being mentally lazy.

YouTube bans thousands of channels a day. It's their right to ban whomever they please and they likely didn't even give the channel owner a reason much less me. For all I know each one of those violated very reasonable terms.

Where did this list even come from? Why are these channels special enough to make it to this list? My guess is the poster agreed with their content, or found news about their banning through various conspiracy-oriented websites.

There's no reason whatsoever to think this list is interesting. There is, however, plenty of reason to think where it was posted is not worth my time.

I think the original point was that Google has a policy of censoring people based on the (perfectly legal) political views that those people have. As you say, Google has the absolute legal right to censor people because of their political views, and presumably you think it is not a problem if they do so.

So I don't think the interesting question is how many of the thousands of channels a day were banned for their unpopular political speech (nor is it interesting to know how special the channels on the r/conspiracy list are), but rather we should ask whether it is good for society if an entity as powerful as Google has this much editorial control over who is exposed to which ideas.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-b...

Perhaps you will say that "instructions on how to assemble firearms" is not an expression of a political view, however I would argue that preventing people from imparting legal factual information to help other people exercise a constitutional right seems like something that, if the government were to do it, would be a breach of their First Amendment rights.

So as not to be seen to be taking a specific view on "gun rights", let me give a different (hypothetical, and non-equivalent) situation to clarify what we mean by "banned for political views alone" here.

Suppose that Google had different politics and decided to ban channels that provided assistance to women seeking an abortion. Perhaps Google would allow channels to advocate, in the abstract, for "abortion rights", but not to give any practical advice on how to exercise them. I think that most people would agree that this would count as unconstitutional "viewpoint discrimination" if the government were to do it, so it is effectively a "ban for political views/expression" if Google do it as a private corporation.

I can't speak for the people that create these channels or want to make these expressions, but I have to assume that at least some of them think that they are making people safer by teaching them how to legally arm themselves. That seems to be a view that Google disagrees with, so they have implemented an editorial policy on YouTube which prevents people from expressing that view in a meaningful way.

Perhaps you think that Google would only be banning people for their political views if the company openly said to them: "We are banning your channel because of a political view you have, even if you never express that view in any of your videos." That seems like an unreasonably high bar to require though. If Google said "You can support any party you want, but we won't allow Democrat political candidates to put their campaign ads on their channel." then that would, at least to me, be a ban on political views.

Fires the memo guy

Complies to DMCA

My favourite is Google officially comparing EU’s right to be forgotten law with russia’s anti gay propaganda law... cannot get lower than that.

Can you explain how "Sandy hook was faked and no children were killed" is a political view? Or how "Anthony Bourdain's suicide was faked for monetary gain" is somehow a political opinion?

I only against censoring freedom of speech and creating ideological echo Chambers.

>Here is just a small handful of YouTube channels censored based on their political views:

(emphasis mine)

I'm asking you to justify calling this censorship based on political views, like you claimed. I didn't say anything about your views.

Clearly state what is allowed and what is not. Do not pick sides and change rules on a case by case basis.

Do what you say you are going to do. That's how businesses used to earn trust. Now integrity in business is a thing of the past.

I'd rather have a bunch of crazy people expressing themselves on the web than being selectively removed due to a couple's persons opinions on what is right especially when it is not written in stone and enforced sitewide on all accounts.

If you want to say Sandy Hooks is fake, go to your own corner, like 127.0.0.1.

Obviously there are some challenges in the 'like this' part, but it seems like it might scale better and be less prone to centralized censorship problems than the current mechanism.

The sad part is that 'yzmtf2008' will exist inside of a vacuum and will miss out on things that appear crazy and may actually be true, but perhaps the upside is that this person may be more productive in other areas of life by defocusing on distractions.

The big problem is that there is no valid counter argument to conspiracy theorist. That means all conventional means of combating them are useless.

I don't agree that keeping conspiracy theorists off a platform is censorship. It's more akin to removing spam.

Jones himself argued (in his divorce hearing) that he doesn't expect anyone to believe him. I think in that case it is hard to argue it is political speech.

(A): This extraordinary claim would require extraordinary evidence.

Their response to why they banned Alex Jones, for instance, was that it wasn't because of the content of his views, but that he violated their cyberbullying guidelines multiple times (he received several strikes in the past).

Maybe I'm being naive, but their motivation doesn't appear to be censorship, but to make YouTube a less toxic place than it already is.

freedom of speech does not keep someone from thinking you (not you specifically, but the general you) are an idiot or a kook, nor does it protect you from the consequences of your words by those other individuals (obviously other laws protect you from intentional physical harm and the like). nothing can compel me to listen to you or make a company broadcast your conspiracy theories (again, the general you).

You are confusing laws (like 1st amendment of the US Constitution) with freedom of speech. Laws exist because freedom of speech is important, not the other way around. The fact that laws only restrict the government from suppressing freedom of speech doesn't mean it is not important in other contexts, just because there's no law enforcing it.

> nothing can compel me to listen

Banning someone from the internet (or any part of Internet that is serviced by a major corporation, which is almost all of it) is not the same as "I do not want to listen", it's "I don't like you so nobody gets to listen to you, at least not without extraordinary effort which 99.999% of people are not capable of". If you just don't want to listen to somebody on youtube, it's enough to not go to that channel. Removing the whole channel goes way beyond that and the only purpose of that to silence, not to "not listen" but to cause others not to listen.

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

There are many allegations in there, but the most salacious one is that Schmidt’s girlfriend was illegally working for Hillary on State dept matters. (I believe they made audio recordings of the phone calls that prove this, but can’t find the shorter write up anywhere).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen

The CEO of Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas) advised both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Snark aside, the asymmetry in their dealings with foreign governments compared to their own is quite illuminating, and the above is by far not the only such incident

They bought a Chinese directory with a "search engine" that just redirects to Baidu, but kept all the juicy search terms to seed the future product.

No, Google has no business in it, but export control does.