First, Google is already heavily curating information on their platform. Don't kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Secondly, Youtube is not a public good. It is a product owned by a company who answers to their shareholders. Google is free (and should remain free) to censor whatever they want on the platform that they own, and users/content creators are free to leave for other platforms. Finally, before folks say that Youtube is a monopoly in video content on the internet, no they aren't. Are they the biggest? Sure. But by no means are they the only platform.

Yes, obviously.

The point is, we have a whole bunch of mores and law that work together to form a free society work that were formed in times when most interpersonal communications didn't go through a few concentrated intermediaries. This new equilibrium a really big concern for free communication and freedom of speech: just letting whatever dangerous stuff circulate at massive scale isn't good, but fully empowering corporate entities being able to squash and marginalize categories of speech isn't great either.

I doubt most of the people (like myself) disagree with anything you say. We can still think it's absolutely ridiculous that they're doing it.

I don't think they should face legal sanctions or anything. I think they should step out of politics. But yeah, they don't have to.

Generally, a company need not be the only one on the market in order to be considered dominant for the purpose of anti-trust laws. Anti-trust laws apply to non-monopolies as well.

> Google is free (and should remain free) to censor whatever they want on the platform that they own

So, since ISPs also own their platform, should they also be free to block content that competes with their services along with content they’re required to block by law?

If only we had a government mechanism for holding service providers to higher standards for neutral delivery of services to citizens regardless of economic incentives.

I see what you did there.

On the other hand, we have sufficiently large number of people believing that Trump actually won this year - enough for it to be a potential political issue. I wouldn't count out someone getting killed over this.

So, the relative merits and dangers of "censorship" should be evaluated against this. The bar for the censorship being "potentially greater risk" is reasonably high.

"Potentially saving lives" is a really dangerous way to choose whether censoring speech is ethical.

Squashing what one might think is dubious criticism of police potentially saves lives, too.

Not too long ago Youtube was removing videos criticizing the CDC for not advocating for masks... Squashing criticism of the CDC during a pandemic seems like an action that could potentially save lives, too.

Maybe I chose a poor example - I didn't mean that "potentially saving lives" is the only important metric.

What I meant was that giving a platform to Trump's deranged claims is harming the fabric of society, eroding trust in each other and in the society itself, sowing discord, and widens the opportunity for an aspiring tyrant to seize the public's interest, declare a bunch of "undesirables" as enemy of the state, and infringe upon individual rights while his supporters cheer him on. (And also kill some lives along the way.)

Just like censorship could potentially lead to a similar kind of outcome.

So, the danger of "censorship", in our current context, should be gauged against the danger of "non-censorship" in the same context.

I just don't believe that having powerful intermediaries squashing views work well for democracy.

It doesn't work so well to stop dangerous ideas, and it has a whole lot of risk of being used against unpopular ones.

Trump's ideas are doing damage to democracy, but attempting to suppress them in this way adds credence to many peoples' belief that there's some dangerous tech/liberal cabal squashing the true majority conservative opinion, too. And even attempts to use these in a bright-line, careful fashion have often squashed the wrong speech and silenced the wrong people; this is before any actual malicious use which is sure to come if the precedent strengthens.

In our rush to get rid of the most repugnant ideas, too, we tend to lose our ability to discuss nuance. To avoid COVID quackery, we can't have an open discussion of the merits of specific policies and interventions. In our rush to squash the dangerous idea of election fraud, we can't have the discussion about how to make our actual election system robust and beyond reproach.

> So, the danger of "censorship", in our current context, should be gauged against the danger of "non-censorship" in the same context.

Yes, which is why I acknowledged those risks in my first comment and said that I believed that these risks are potentially greater.

Think about how much important speech from the past few centuries has seemed dangerous and repugnant at the time it was uttered.

You have the potential of getting only curated information any time you only use one source for that information.

Here we have many social platforms effectively colluding and setting common standards for curation.

Concentrated power is scary. I'd agree it's mostly being used for good here...

I have news for you. Radio, TV, movies, etc have been censored to hell and back since they were invented. The roof hasn't collapsed.

If anything, they're less censored than they used to be.

I'll take the potentially greater risks over the immediate risks in this context.

It is funny how short people memory is when YT was removing videos of people saying you should wear a mask and the YT Censorship gods said "no that is misinformation you can not say that"