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.