Some channels post videos which stay up for years without any strikes or problems and then out of the blue the whole channel gets taken down under a vague "you violated our T&Cs" notice without Youtube bothering to highlight which of the T&Cs. They sometimes take down huge channels without first contacting the channel owners to warn them in advance and give them the opportunity to do something about it.

Rather than take down the channel why can't Youtube just remove the videos?

It's not a civilised way to conduct business.

It's true, and the way they try to hide this fact is by pretending that the censorship and policy switch-up is done in the name of "anti-racism."

YouTube & co could not have been more lucky that an entire segment of the culture came up with the perfect catch-all term to enable them to walk back their horrible business blunders.

I don't think they were lucky at all. There's always a "ism" assholes can hide behind to justify their actions, whether it's Racism, Terrorism, Communism, Nazism... etc. As well as the timeless "Think of the Children" shtick.

It's becoming painstakingly difficult to be actively against all of the overwhelming misinformation leveled one's way, because anti-racism's tenants are so easily generalized.

For example (given enough capital), is there genuinely an opportunity to build a YouTube-like platform that simply doesn't have the policies YouTube has (e.g. shares revenue more fairly, has a more-sane copyright law enforcement, explains their moderation actions)?

The idea here is that while it's true, in theory, that YouTube could make those policy changes and your YouTube alternative would then be pointless, the reality is they never will, even if it begins to cost them.

I really wish I could talk to someone more about this, or if there was targeted reading, but I haven't really found much, because I think most folks dismiss this as a viable strategy.

To me this seems like a good middle ground between having your own website and relying on a monopolistic service. Downside still is that your identity is fixed to an instance, but there are discussions on how to change that.

TIDAL tried this as a Spotify competitor and have basically failed.

Or can you throw money at it until you have those? TIDAL seems to be trying the "throw money at it until it's winning" strategy...

And since you cannot without great effort educate people who are incapable or intentionally unwilling to learn, the easiest solution is to sacrifice some of your users to placate the idiots.

Maybe this is not Google's excuse, but it certainly applies to many other internet companies (craigslist for example).

Edit: typing on phone is miserable :(

Advertisers pay the bills, not governments. And the golden rule[0] applies.

[0] "He who has the gold makes the rules."

How so? I wouldn't have gotten into phreaking in the 80's without Phrack.

However, I think you would be correct if you amended your statement to read, "It's a mistaken position to believe sharing "how to" information solely mints cybercriminals."