Google already does this, I don't see the issue with it hypothetically happening on YouTube. If you search for a well-known person, place or thing, you'll be presented with information aggregated from trustworthy sources. Can they be wrong? Sure, and it happens. It's not sinister.

It sounds like you're envisioning someone manually tagging things. That would be odd and suboptimal. Instead, just tag helpful Wikipedia pages about the broad scientific consensus of things on relevant videos.

Putting a link under the videos isn’t likely to achieve that, but that’s a separate issue.

The only problem I have with Google doing this, is that I trust corporations and government about the same — i.e. that both will lie and dissemble as much as they are allowed to get away with for their own or their leader’s benefit, without regard for my interests.

Sounds great, I'm all for it.

Sure the truth can be complicated, but I fail to see how implementing software that auto-links to a relevant article on Wikipedia causes Google to be the arbiter of truth.

Even if Google thinks climate change isn't man-made and links to sources backing that up?

There aren't sources backing up that climate change isn't real. That's a hill I'll happily die on. There are plenty of alternative sources which make that claim, but Google does not aggregate facts from them for presentation to its users. Because they don't have evidence.

Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, this isn't a revolutionary idea. Google does it on its search engine and the sky hasn't fallen. I remain unconvinced it would fail if they pushed it out to YouTube.

Note the solution I posed is something which Google already does on its search engine without calamity. Therefore I don't see a reason why it would fail for YouTube. In contrast the example you're giving seems pretty hard to just link to an authoritative source.

Put another way, I'm not advocating for Google to arbitrate the truth on a case by case basis. I'm advocating for Google to identify ahead of time which sources are well-researched and trustworthy, then outsource its fact-linking system to those sources.

If Google were to supply facts on a case by case basis that would be suspect. But that's not how the company operates, so I'm deeply skeptical they would become some kind of arbiter of truth.

There are many things that are debatable, but flat earth? That falls under verifiable facts, and we shouldn't equivocate about those.

Ex: „If banks stop allowing strangers to withdraw money from my account, how will I ever get my money“

And, no, questions of fact aren’t different. The earth is round, not flat. One tree does not a forest make, but a thousand does. Even if we can’t agree on the specific cutoff (is 15 trees a forest? 50? 500?), that does not prevent us from accurately describing the extremes.

This idea that because nobody has a monopoly on the truth then we can't make decision is utterly futile and silly; I have no idea where it originates, except perhaps in the darkest places where reason has utterly collapsed.

There is no reason behind the idea that because we can't totally differentiate between good and bad where the line is blurry then we can't do anything at all. I'd also question whether free speech is intrinsically valuable, more than other actions are. I have seen no convincing reason to think so.

We can approve of good actions (like putting a Wikipedia link about earth science under a flat earther's video) and disapprove of bad ones (like putting flat earth propaganda underneath a scientific video). I see no issue here.

Here we see the vacuity of the harm principle: one can claim anything is (or isn't) harmful in order to attach their favorite idea to it. As an example, some people may be said to be harmed simply by the knowledge that someone is watching pornography in their house. You'd likely say that doesn't "count" as harm - well then what does? As it turns out, controlling speech under your schema is simply a matter of defining what counts as harm and what doesn't. Yet philosophers such as Joel Feinberg and Catherine MacKinnon have pointed out, very few people (if any) would like to live in a society in which only harmful speech (or acts, since there is no meaningful distinction between speech and acts other than invoking body-mind dualism) is not permitted.

Then we get to ideas: who's to say that threats or child porn can't carry ideas in them? In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too? Some would say the idea that "it's not so bad to have sex with children" is encoded in every instance of child pornography. What if I made my threat into an art piece?

> In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too?

Ideas are by definition abstract and so they should be communicable through some other medium.

Obviously I'm not defending child pornography here, but I think there's a logical flaw in your reasoning.

The fact that ideas can be communicated through other media is irrelevant, since it would mean that we can censor whatever ideas we like in any major category (e.g ideas conveyed in photography and film) but thereby only farcically allow them otherwise (e.g the expression of the idea is only allowed through physical speech).

But censoring one particular medium is not censoring the idea. So your attempt at finding a contradiction doesn't hold water.

>What differentiates the free speech content of child pornography from other pornography, or even art which required harm in its creation?

Consent.

>since it would mean that we can censor whatever ideas we like in any major category

This doesn't follow from my argument that censoring one particular medium is OK. Child porn is a genuine special case (direct harm in its production, lack of consent in dissemination) that doesn't transfer to other mediums that don't have the same problems.

>This doesn't follow from my argument that censoring one particular medium is OK.

It does, since by your own admission, censoring a particular medium does not entail censoring the idea.

>Child porn is a genuine special case (direct harm in its production, lack of consent in dissemination)

So this is what I was getting at - you say it's fine to censor a particular way of conveying an idea due to other harms being associated with that particular way of conveying. In child pornography it's the violation of consent in its production and violation of privacy in its reproduction. Extending this argument from child pornography to regular pornography, some would say there are significant harms involved there too (e.g it conveys the idea that women ought to be subservient to men), and then to hate speech.

The core idea is that speech is not absolute, just like actions aren't absolute. You're free to swing your fist so long as it doesn't hurt anyone, and you're free to say things so long as they don't hurt anyone (or require anyone to be hurt, of course). This means that with a sufficiently convincing empirical dataset, we can outlaw regular pornography and hate speech.

And letting google choose which responses to choose to a search request is essentially also asking them to decide what's true (how many people even go to the second page of results, much less later ones?)

I agree with your sentiment (and am not a gmail user -- yuck!!) but I do sometimes use their search engine...and know that when I use ddg I'm ceding the same authority to them.

My mail and other services run on hardware of mine in a colo. I've had a rack of personal machines in a colo since the mid 90s; before then I simply plugged my machines in at work.

You: sue them out of existence.

We both know what you just typed is bullshit, for good reason.

> You: sue them out of existence.

Well, no, so I wouldn't say that, but, OTOH, saying that might be problematic from an employment noon-discrimination standpoint. And there are other things Google might say that would be problematic from a standpoint of either consumer or securities fraud. Or libel. But none of that is germane to the point under discussion.