I’m not so sure. I can’t help but think a good proportion of Google/YouTube employees truly believe they are saving lives and fighting “misinformation” with this move. To me, citing lost ad revenue is a convenient scapegoat for what these partisan folks wanted to do the whole time.

Google is a multinational corporation, not a club. Those employees wouldn't get their way if it threatened their company's revenue stream.

Google is also a Bay Area company and happens to have a sizable number of vocal/activist employees with lofty world-saving goals. I also can’t help but think that having so much revenue and de-facto monopolies means they are comfortable with alienating “the other side”. I think they know people aren’t going to switch en-masse to a YouTube competitor because of this.

Agreed. As one example, take Amazon banning Parler from AWS. That clearly isn't a positive move for revenue (at least ignoring any potential shady behind-the-scenes kickbacks they could have gotten for doing so), but they did it because it aligned with many of their employees' ideology (among other reasons).

(As an aside Parler was idiotic for not running on their own hardware given they were billing themselves as the censorship resistant twitter, but that's neither here nor there)

> Google is also a Bay Area company and happens to have a sizable number of vocal/activist employees with lofty world-saving goals.

Which ends up being mostly used for PR, and causes occasional drama when some employees' view conflict with tech sphere's most vocal views. Notice the swift and harsh reactions of Google and other tech companies in those cases: that's what happens when their revenue is threatened.

> I also can’t help but think that having so much revenue and de-facto monopolies means they are comfortable with alienating “the other side”.

It doesn't really matter what "the other side" thinks. All "sides" are using YouTube and buying Android phones anyway, because they have very few other options. And all "sides" are equally good targets for advertising.

Google isn't worried about people migrating off YouTube because of these actions. They're worried about regulators, who are looking at content moderation practices and considering meddling in that space - which would be very threatening to YouTube's revenue.

Any organization can be staffed by people with ulterior motives and turned against its official purpose.

Maybe because when they hear "advertising" they think car commercial or magazine ad and associate that with your comment. Those can be very good things. Mechanizing disinformation to pool people into cults and sell them to the highest bidder is not advertisement...it is what we call "big tech" until we can figure out another word.

Truth it is. Whatever their motto of the day, companies have no morals or principles, they are driven purely by their business goals and would change their policies in a blink of an eye when they feel it would help their business.

Huh? The opposite seems to me to be true: YouTube can make "easy money" selling ads on viral anti-vax videos, but choose not to.

The big tech companies are facing intervention by the state at this point. Being broken up or regulated or, depending on country, just outright banned, could really clamp down on profits.

Their advertisers wouldn't much like that. Pharma being one of their larger advertisers, allowing videos about cheap out of patent drugs that may prevent someone from taking a vaccine is in direct opposition to this model.

This risks advertisers who do not want their brands associated with this content leaving the platform entirely. YouTube is not only trying to sell ads, they’re trying to remain “respectable” so the advertising whales keep spending.

You ever heard of the YouTube channel "dick or dildo"? YouTube doesn't remove content that is not respectable, gross, unsettling, no the criteria always seems to be certain opinions and lines of discussion. Advertisers have advertised on YouTube just fine with all the crazy wacko content on it before. " targeted advertising" is wonderful in the sense that advertisers get to decide what sorts of content their ads appear on, so they never have to worry about being associated with something they don't want to be.

This line of reasoning doesn't make sense under even the lightest scrutiny, it doesn't go along with what we actually see YouTube doing.

Au contraire, it does make sense. There have been a number of adpocolypse events that kicked off when advertisers became worried about certain content

Media platforms have always been gatekeepers. Freedom of speech is great, freedom of mass speech is decidedly not. This is super controversial on HN but I think the Internet without some form of restrictions on mass speech is a net negative for human society. Otherwise you’re just daring bad actors to take advantage of the situation.

Companies doing this is arguably preferred to governments doing it, but only just barely.

> ...freedom of mass speech is decidedly not.

That's one assertion. I don't buy it. If users have the tools to decide what information they're exposed to I think that solves the problem just fine.

Preach, my man. I've been saying that for years too. There's a fear that banning advertising would be a stain on free speech and that may be true but legislation is the only way outside of this cold war.

We're getting to the point where companies could pay parents to name their children after products. Oh wait, too late[0], we're already there.

[0]https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-11-17-bethesdas-skyr...

If advertising is responsible for actually getting them to get off their asses to take down antivax misinformation and potentially save lives, that's making advertising sound really good right now. Though that might be crediting advertising a little too much, maybe some employees in charge don't want to take part in spreading misinformation.