A private party can choose not to spread the content of a third party. That is not censorship. That is one party choosing not to spend their own resources to further the interests of a different party. If the third party has an issue with that, they can spend their own resources creating their own platform to spread their own ideas.
Consider: 1. The Catholic Church's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum 2. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority 3. The Hays code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Standards_and_Practi...
None of them are governmental. All exist to police speech.
In general, merely declining to publish something should probably not be called censorship. It is indeed a fine line between maintaining editorial control and suppressing speech. However, when one publishes just about everything, but excepts certain viewpoints with the explicit goal of suppressing them, the term starts to fit a lot better.
Is any of this against the First amendment? Of course not. But it's still clearly censorship.
The Hays Code was issued by the MPAA as a voluntary set of guidelines governing the then vertically-integrated studios and theaters. Importantly, they were not prohibitions on movie content. Many film productions did not adhere to the Hays Code and many independent theaters similarly ignored it. Indeed, the body established to enforce the code did not even how the power to order studious to cut material... The only instance of the Hays Code having an impact on films was during the short Breen era, which lasted only 6 years, and this only affected films shown in vertically-integrated theaters owned by the studios. Independent theaters continued to ignore the Hays Code, as they always did.
And the Broadcast Standards was a decency code intended to mollify advertisers, i.e., other private parties, who generally did not want to be associated with certain types of content. As with the Hays Code, it was a series of guidelines, not a prohibition, and late-night shows generally flaunted the Broadcast Standards with impunity.
In other words, not censorship...
Just private acts of self-interest to protect their market position.
Pushing people to the fringes just breeds more hatred, outrage, misinformation, and extremists.
Imagine if there was just one phone company and they only let people who they agree with have phones.
The whole rest of the Internet is flush with video content -- it's no monopoly like the phone company used to be.
YouTube is an offshoot of an ad company. A private, for-profit enterprise that uses video content from its users to sell adverts.
Now, if you want to say the Internet is a public utility -- that's getting closer. And if the Internet writ large somehow managed to block certain content, that would be of great concern. That would require government intervention, like you see in China and some other places.
But that is not what it's happening here.
It is not a means of communication like Zoom or the telephone. It's just videos. Lots and lots of videos. It provides entertainment to billions of people, but that doesn't mean YouTube is a utility. It just means its very popular.
This is wrong. I'm ~19 in the UK. My entire demographic gets their news from either Google, YouTube, Facebook and word-of-mouth, younger people even more so.
Also, to note--Google doesn't generate its own news. It sources it to news organizations...Similarly, YouTube News coverage are just segments of news broadcasts by news organizations...
The other thing is the partenalistic stuff, please remove the content so those brain dead morons(not me) dont get influenced.If the ideas are so wacky, you need more light and debate and shame, not censorship and secretism. Maybe I am one of those brain-dead morons, but for me the standard is very clear, if a video/tweet is illegal, remove it and block the account, otherwise, let it be.