See my other reply to you below.
Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.
And half of America that politically was skeptical of anti-trust has the power to rethink that as well. (And they will, and Google will find out if the juice is worth the squeeze on that.)
Because of COVID-19 and the huge increase of mail in ballots, there is good reason to believe that fraud was higher than other years. Biden's margin of victory in key swing states is smaller than Trump's in 2016. These are not unreasonable things to discuss and I find unfathomable that this policy would be something Google would apply to say, Iran, or any other country where there was speech skeptical of government.
Acting as if speech discussing this on their platform is beyond the pale is ludicrous. It shows a sheltered, fragile group of people who think their views are more common than they are.
Another strong indication that there wasn't fraud? The ludicrous affidavits accompanying the highest-profile lawsuits against states.
What states were swung by a small margin "administered by Republicans" (political parties don't administer elections).
Most of the arguments revolve around mainly 4 metro areas: Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia (with a little Pittsburgh thrown in). These 4 metro areas alone could decide the election via electoral math. It is cliche that these areas have had voter fraud. It's been going on for a century. People have been convicted for these crimes in these areas regularly. For people to act like _this election_, that kind of talk is unreasonable, well, I have some not nice words to say to those people.
Given the extraordinary circumstances, and the narrow margins of victories, people bringing up these facts is reasonable. Youtube allows holocaust denial, and I'm supposed to believe that people claiming inner city fraud (only when it's claimed in the U.S. btw) is "a threat to democracy".
Please.
The reason for this is simple: voter fraud is a stupid crime. It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.
This has been a conservative trope for decades. If there was any substance to it, you should have no trouble coming up with concrete examples within the last 20 years of material voter fraud being detected in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. You can't, because there isn't any.
What the affidavits attached to these ludicrous but high-profile lawsuits instead provide is suppositions, like "suspicious" swings from certain levels of Clinton support to different levels of Biden support (it's almost like they're... different people!), or worse, batshit conspiracy theories, like the guy named "Spyder" who ran a SpiderFoot scan on Dominion Voting Systems and got dunked on by the author of SpiderFoot for not understanding the results. Or the woman who testified in Michigan, with the President's personal lawyer sitting next to her, who believes the Obamas funded the secret Wuhan lab where Coronavirus was created.
Liberals have their own problems and blind spots. But conservatives own this, and the travesty of the administration's handling of its predictable loss in the 2020 general election, completely and absolutely.
But the voter fraud being alleged now isn't one or two ballots. It's ballot harvesting here, and lost SD cards there, voting machines not properly recognizing votes, and poll watchers not being allowed near tables. In any of these cases thousands of votes could have been altered, added, or removed.
We need to take this seriously, investigate, show that the fraud (which is inevitable at some level) didn't change the election (hopefully), and tighten up the rules for next time.
Stuff that should be bipartisan. 1) Voting machines suck, even when they only count. 2) Recounts can't be on the same machines as the first count. 3) Counts must stop unless poll watchers are able to watch. 4) Poll watchers should have to make a positive assertion that they could see, and did watch, or the votes should get recounted. 5) All disputed votes, either the ID or the vote marking, should be kept separate and recounts should involve reexamining the entire vote.
> During his guilty plea hearing, Demuro admitted that while serving as an elected municipal Judge of Elections, he accepted bribes in the form of money and other things of value in exchange for adding ballots to increase the vote totals for certain candidates on the voting machines in his jurisdiction and for certifying tallies of all the ballots, including the fraudulent ballots. [1]
This was 6 months ago. That's election fraud. Investigations don't start with proof, they start with claims. These areas have in large part said that even trying to discover evidence is moot, and that no investigation has standing.
Worse, YouTube is saying that even claims for investigation are invalid. Or that claims of voter fraud past a deadline are somehow off limits, when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...
Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election. The democrats have been saying that it is bad to solicit aid from a foreign power to help you win an election through social media campaigns and hacking email accounts. That's wildly different than "actually I got the most votes in relevant states and really should be president".
That's immaterial. YouTube's censorship restrictions have nothing to do with a formal concession, merely claims of fraud impacting the election. And identical claims of election tampering resulting in a "fraudulent electioin" have been ongoing by Democrats on MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. for 4 years.
So we're now in a boat where Google/YouTube is essentially arguing they're qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the U.S.
It has nothing to do with policy consistency, and everything to do with who the people are who work there.
And people have to right to find this despicable. Although Google may not actually have that power (I don't know how much Youtube is considered a monopoly)
Your argument also accepts that the courts judged these cases to have no merit, while implicitly denying that such judging was necessary.
How should a Google staffer differentiate between case number 9 (dismissed) and case number 10 (still on the docket)? And what hope can they have of coming to a better understanding of the details and merits of a case than the exact body (a court) which is set up to do precisely this?
The whole legal system is premised on every case being judged on its own merits, and rightly so.
If Google was a courtroom, you might have a point --- the courts are in many circumstances obligated to hear and dispassionately resolve batshit frivolous cases. Google is not.
I also have absolutely zero trust in Random Googlers being capable of determining truth and falsity in the general case (which is where this is heading), or in managing this power in such a way that is a net benefit to society. If they didn't have monopolies on information consumption I would be a little less concerned.
A different example: Google could have stopped people seeing "false" information about COVID earlier this year. Twitter and other platforms labelled this "misinformation", and Google could have censored it from YouTube, searches, etc. The tech companies anointed the WHO as the arbiter of truth, yet the WHO was wrong for quite a while about several important things. I would prefer to live in a world where individuals are allowed to see all the contested facts and arguments, and decide for themselves.
One last example: Ignaz Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and many others.
I suppose the real solution is to break up the information monopolies, then let them do all the censoring they want.
There is also a difference in kind between porn and this sort of speech. Different laws apply, different social norms apply, different technical options (and trade-offs) apply, and so on. I have also heard that there are many other porn hosting websites, and Google does not enjoy any sort of monopoly.
Perhaps we're talking past each other here but to put my general point a different way, and it's only relevant because Google is effectively a monopoly: If you were told you could be born into a world with a free internet, or a curated internet, but you had no influence over who would do the curation, which world would you choose?
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, next to Google itself. I would say it's not beyond the realms of possibility for YouTube to eventually eclipse Google.
1. How would the average person find that website? A search engine perhaps?
2. How many search engines does the average person use? One, perhaps? Which one?
2. Probably the median person uses several -- google, facebook, and the like.
At this point, any case being filed now over the results of the election is doomed to fail either by the doctrine of laches (you should have filed it sooner) or inability to grant relief, and that's even without considering any other possible failings it may have (including merit!).
While the courts will operate under the assumption that a case is meritorious until proven otherwise, there is no reason for the court of public opinion to operate under the same assumption, especially when there is clear precedent and established case history demonstrating why the case must be dismissed that the filing makes no attempt to address.
By your standard, Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and the rest.
example of crazy plot? hereya go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
They provided the forum, they need to moderate it
How do you know the more non batshit accounts haven't already been taken down?
The Mike Kelly case in PA, arguing that the law allowing mail-in ballots was illegal, was ruled by a judge as completely legally valid, but was thrown out of the state supreme court because "they waited too long to complain".
So, no, not objectively batshit. If the GOP had filed that case in January, Trump would have won PA...assuming the same supreme court didn't throw out their case for some other arbitrary reason like "filing too soon."
The Democrats outplayed Republicans. Democrats passed an un-Constitutional law that helped them stuff ballot boxes with ballots that were almost certainly harvested or bought. If we're to believe the election results and voter turnout in, say, mostly black Philadelphia, Joe Biden is a more popular politician than even Barack Obama. Only an idiot would believe that. But still, it serves Republicans right for underestimating the extent to which Democrats would cheat.
Most of the lawsuits are so ridiculously bad, it makes me wonder if it's just part of keeping up the act in order to keep his followers riled up and throwing cash at him. Inciting such intense hatred with so very many lies all for personal money and power - it's devisive, dangerous, and absolutely terrifying that this is happening in the USA, a country that spent decades forcing democracy on other countries.