This slope isn't nearly as slippery as you're saying. If YouTube began issuing a million times more bans, it might approach the quality of an average newspaper in terms of accuracy. Would we be living in a dystopia at that point? No, we'd be living just like we did in the year 2000, when YouTube wasn't around but newspapers were. Just like a nutjob in 2000, Icke still has print, radio, TV, going outside with a megaphone, and going door to door with pamphlets to promote his message. In fact, he's even luckier, because he still has access to the entire rest of the internet.

Indeed, the fact that we're here discussing Icke's massive popular impact is proof that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000, when he was mostly ignored. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.

I'm not making a slippery-slope argument or freaking out over anything. Just noting the metric you are using will always prefer a more authoritarian response. I.e., did the policy work to silence every example I can find for any conspiracy theory that might survive to gain attention? Defenders of free speech obviously want us to take the bad with the good.

As for the internet, I think of it as technology that brings advances also brings new problems. Sometimes we just have to accept them.

Not that I'm against YouTube censoring their content as a private company, by the way. Just defending a quote here.

> I'm not making a slippery-slope argument

> Perhaps you'd prefer a quote like: the best response to bad speech is an authoritarian censor with unlimited powers to silence and imprison people?

This is literally the slippery slope argument.

And I say it isn't. Speaking of logical arguments, you haven't really brought a lot to the table, by the way.

And you've misused "literally".

There are huge differences between YouTube (a platform for user-generated content) and a newspaper (a publisher). The latter curates and is legally responsible for anything it publishes, the former isn't.

I think YouTube is a lot closer to AT&T than to the New York Times.

Maybe legalistically it is, but my point is that it's like the NYT and radio and print in the sense that these are all routes for one-to-many communication. Restricting one route of one-to-many communication isn't the end of the world. (Meanwhile, AT&T facilitated one-to-one communication. It would indeed be horrifying to censor that -- which is why precisely nobody in this giant comments section is advocating for it, nor is it going to happen.)

Why is censoring one-to-many communication so much less horrifying? One-to-many communication is integral for any social or political action.

Because, as I said a couple comments ago, the degree of one-to-many communication available to people has been continuously skyrocketing for decades, and currently stands at levels far beyond any seen in history. Even the heaviest possible strawman-censorship one could imagine on Youtube would only erase a small part of this rise. That's because the internet has allowed one-to-many communication to massively scale up, while almost by definition one-to-one communication can't.

Totally disagree. Sure the degree of one-to-many communication has greatly increased, but it's been mostly concentrated within the top platforms. Losing access to those would be severely limiting. And no, an email blast isn't a proper alternative to Facebook, any ideas kicked off of major platforms would be at a severe disadvantage.

I feel like we're going in circles here. Even if every single site and app coordinated to kick off David Icke, he would end up, at worst, as silenced as the average American in the year 2000. It just doesn't seem all that bad to me.

No, that's simply not true. The forums of pubic discourse from before do not exist anymore, the collective's attention has moved. If you lose the megaplatforms, you are much worse off than someone in 2000.

What forums are you talking about? Radio, mail, TV, and newspapers still have audiences of hundreds of millions. Internet forums are in decline, but those have always had completely negligible public reach (as in, down by more than 2 orders of magnitude) compared to the others.

The audience of the things you've listed has shrunk dramatically, in terms of percentage at the very least. Just look at where ad dollars have been moving for the past 15 years.