Is there any "real free speech" that you think YouTube should be allowed to block?

People advocating for shooting the president?

People describing how to make a nuclear bomb?

People advocating for killing cops?

People sharing people's social security numbers?

People explaining the best suicide methods?

People trying to organize terrorist attacks?

People threatening violence on other people?

Anything?

In the end, the revenue stream dictates the content. The revenue stream is ads. Advertisers don't want to be involved in some Wild West of content, as has been proven several times now. I don't think Youtube would survive as an ad free paid service.

If advertisers don't want to be involved (presumably because they think it would be bad for the brand), YouTube themselves might not want to be involved for the same reasons.

You seem to be implying that YouTube themselves -- shareholders, executives, employees -- has no moral compass, but the advertisers do. And (I guess) the advertisers only do because their potential customers do.

I'd say a more likely case is that morality (or "aversion to Wild West content" or "aversion to unnecessary deaths" or whatever) is something spread fairly evenly among humans, whatever role they have.

Seems rather simplistically cynical to assume that YouTube is the only entity that doesn't actually care about anything but money.

In my opinion, they should be allowing anything they are not required by law to remove.

Which will result in them getting regulated. After being dragged before Congress over and over and being asked "why aren't you doing something about this?"

And by the way, not sure what you mean by "required by law." Does that include when corporate lawyers say "if we leave this up, we are at risk of a judge fining us (or awarding someone suing us) a billion dollars."

The law isn't crystal clear and black and white, until you end up in front of a judge or jury. The legal system in the US isn't all statutory, it is left for courts to decide based on precedent and, when there is none to draw from, higher and higher courts.

It all seems simple until you actually think about these things.

> And by the way, not sure what you mean by "required by law." Does that include when corporate lawyers say "if we leave this up, we are at risk of a judge fining us (or awarding someone suing us) a billion dollars."

I was thinking more along the lines of removing posts when ordered to by the government they are incorporated under or by one in whose country to they do business. And if someone finds child porn or something on their servers, point them at the user that posted it. Which might work if they didn't mess with user's posts unless they absolutely had to.

They are only in this current mess because they voluntarily curate, often aggressively.

> They are only in this current mess because they voluntarily curate, often aggressively.

Does "make videos with lots of upvotes more visible" count as voluntary curation?

Even in the absence of that, hopefully you can see why they'd want to remove content as described in the points I listed above.

I'm not all the comfortable with all curation/moderation/censoring/etc being based on "government orders." That means that government will get more involved in this process, and corrupt governments will have more ability to control the narrative. Not sure you've thought this through.

It also is a very costly process currently for YouTube and facebook (etc). Do you want taxes to pay for that?

So 'real free speech' is about requiring private companies to carry the message of a politically powerful agent of the government?

s/politically powerful agent of the government/person/ , yes.

That is nothing like how free speech generally works in the US. Compelled speech is the exact opposite of free speech.

that's your definition, for me it is allowing anyone to speak their views without putting a "extreme left" sensor and calling it fake.

lol. the idea that masks reduce infection rates is not leftist.

That's exactly what a leftist would say.

view ≠ facts. "extreme left" ≠ untrue.

If YouTube users were moderating YouTube and the reason that a video was flagged was because a non-paid member of the community initiated the action, would that still make YouTube in the wrong? Would the "mod" be to blame?

What if it was a up/down-voting system, and the community just down-voted a video to the point where it was "dead" for normal people? Would YouTube be in the wrong?

It seems strange that there is no expectation of these companies to moderate content that they are hosting, if they perceive it as being bad for their user base.

When I was much younger, I used to get upset when I was banned or squelched from IRC channels for saying things, and I would berate the moderators for being overzealous. In reality, I was just saying things that were perceived as not being conducive to the discussion in these channels, and I was not aware enough to understand that what I was saying was not welcome in that setting.

> They are no arbitrator of truth or facts, leave that to the courts

Not sure this is a good approach either.

Discerning truth and separating fact from fiction isn't a skill that some people have and other's don't. It is a process that requires one to embrace free speech rather than assigning the role of truthsayer to any particular person, group, or institution.

Here is John Stuart Mills rationale for free speech:

..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.

>if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.

Except that doesn't happen. As the saying goes, a lie can travel around the world before the truth laces up its boots. Where is the "clearer perception and livelier impression of truth" being produced by all of the disinformation being spread? Surely, since disinformation is spreading so rapidly and colliding so furiously against truth in the marketplace of ideas, truth should be prevailing everywhere.

No, of course it isn't. Why would it? Both you and John Stuart Mills skipped over the part where embracing free speech actually leads to discernment. It's like people just expect truth to win for reasons.

What's happening is that people don't know what to think, or who to believe, and are being bombarded with far more claims and counterclaims than they have time or ability to thoroughly test. Absent trust in any institution, person or group in which to truest, people are left only with their own uninformed intuition and emotion, which disinformation and propaganda far more effectively feed upon.

And so what do you conclude? You seem to be saying that instead of unfettered speech you prefer that some authority step in and pick and choose what speech is to be allowed?

And who gets to be in that privileged position of determining what discourse is permitted by everyone else?

>And who gets to be in that privileged position of determining what discourse is permitted by everyone else?

Ok. This exact argument has been rehashed on HN a trillion times already, so what's one more?

Whomever owns the platform decides. Freedom of speech doesn't obligate every possible platform has to be forced to publish your speech - that would be coerced speech, which is a violation of the freedoms of the platform owners. Rights don't exist in a vacuum, they have to be balanced against other rights. You have the right to free speech, but you still have to convince people to listen to you.

"unfettered" freedom of speech has never been a right in any society or on any platform. If you want to publish to Youtube, you have to play by Youtube's rules. If the government takes over Youtube, it's a public platform and you have to play by the government's rules. But there will always be rules and limits to what can and cannot be published. You can create your own platform and have everyone play by your rules, if you like.

Youtube can only control what happens on Youtube. Facebook can only control what happens on Facebook. Twitter can only control what happens on Twitter. None of these platforms can moderate or censor content outside of their platforms, and none of them act as arbiters of truth for the entirety of society by doing so on their own platforms.

My conclusion is that platforms being allowed to moderate their own content - even when their decisions are biased or questionable - is preferable to platforms being forced to host content against their will, and definitely preferable to the government taking ownership of social media platforms (as would happen with the repeal of Section 230 protections) and making decisions about what can and cannot be published across the entire network.

We are talking about two different things.

Platforms should be able to have an editorial policy. That doesn't magically make their policy immune from criticism.

YouTube or Facebook presenting their editorial choices as "truth", dissenting opinions as dangerous falsehoods, alternate thoughts as offensive hate speech, and different conclusions as "misinformation" is dangerous to our public discourse.