To the general audience: the rhetoric of the parent comment is designed to blur the lines and invite accusations of "censorship" where none apply.
If this is regarding section 230, around which this dichotomy always seems to surface, then are you aware that the word "platform" does not appear in the text of said section?
As a voter, I'd expect to be able to use the platform/publisher spectrum to determine how much censorship a service should have. If a service has censorship capabilities different from what a large enough part of the population thinks they should have then the law should be changed to rectify this.
My questions to you (and anyone else):
Where does YouTube lie on this idealized platform/publisher perspective? How much censorship ability should they have? To what degree does your expectations of their censorship ability differ from their actual censorship ability according to the law?
The law explicitly allows YouTube (or Twitter, or HackerNews, for that matter) to do exactly that.
You are operating under at least one misconception. Perhaps this[0] can help.
[0]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
tl;dr: being a "platform" is neither a Get Out of Lawsuits Free card nor a requirement for content to be unmoderated.
As a voter/citizen it would be great if we had reasonable expectations about our what these services are and how we should set our own expectations for censorship. The platform/publisher spectrum is an easy jumping off point for a casual discussion.
Where is "Youtube" on this spectrum? What stops Youtube from marking all content associated with a particular religion/political party/national origin "otherwise objectionable"?
Many questions. I can state that as a citizen I view Youtube as a platform that should take a minimal approach to censorship. I view the attempts to control what the "plebians/proles" believe as excessively paternalistic and likely to be unhelpful. If the censorship causes these people to visit more radical sources of information then who is to blame when they get further radicalized? At least Youtube has washed their hands of the situation.
Market forces? Advertiser pressure? Bad hair day?
They are under no obligation to host anything they choose not to host.
And that's a good thing too. If Google can be forced to host content they don't wish to host, then so can you, and so can I and so can HackerNews or Bernadette's Knitting website.
> otherwise objectionable
along with
> whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
gives them fairly broad leeway to pull down whatever they want.
You may disagree with the law, but it doesn't mean I have to agree with a bullshit dichotomy that hasn't been the state of reality for the last 25 years. Instead you have to convince me that state of reality is a bad one to be in.
Part of the muddying is that it is very difficult for people to see information if it is not on one of these major publishers or platforms. Information that is legal to present, but no one will ever see, may as well not exist.
The answer to that question is "Yes."
A platform is a particular kind of publisher, and a publisher is a particular kind of platform. 'Publisher' and 'Platform' are two overlapping circles on a Venn diagram.
I mean, absent further context, the answer is "obviously, yes."
A company censoring information on their platform seems deeply different, no?
Not necessarily; I think that is the crux of the discussion.
From a legal point of view it is deeply different. From a practical point of view it's not so clear. If a video isn't on Youtube, for many it's the same as not existing at all. For example, my Roku can show YouTube videos, but cannot access arbitrary urls.
In general, platforms are not supposed to discriminate, while Publishers do. This particular case makes that distinction far less obvious. I'd like to see some alternative, such as markings, instead of a simple include or not.
Before YouTube, media was controlled by television channels, private companies who decided what they wanted to show.
Before TV, media was controlled by radio broadcasters, private companies who decided what they wanted to air.
And before that was print media, private companies who decide what is published.
So that ship has sailed. In fact it has been the norm for 99% of history. You can argue over whether we want to go back but you can't say this is some slippery slope to a dangerous future; that danger has arrived, and if anything it seems to be fuelled by the hyperdemocratisation of media.
I think a better approach, instead of broad censorship, would be simply inserting warning statement(s), at least in front of the material. They already stick in ads, so the tech is there. That way, the material is still available, but with warnings. We "show but warn" with many other materials (sexually explicit, violence, etc.) - I think that would be the much better way to handle such materials.