If you don't mind my asking, how old are you? And did you grow up in the United States?

If you grew up in the US and are (significantly) older than Facebook and Youtube, you were raised in a society that had significantly greater suppression of free speech than is being discussed here. Nobody handed crazy people a megaphone and a world-wide platform to spread their nuttiness. They had to stand out in front of the post office or mall entrance (where they would be shooed away by security quickly) to enlighten the world about the evils of fluoride.

But that's probably just Bill Gates' chip talking.

I am 46 and I was born and living all my life in Soviet Union and now Russia. So you don't tell me what a significant free speech suppression feels like)

YouTube is not a megafone. TV and newspapers is. YouTube is just a medium. People still have to find those videos, click links, share them and so on. Unless, of course, YouTube algos are putting them on the front page because they are generating more ads profit.

And you could not stop information from flowing around in 1980-s (@see "Samizdat") and hundredfold cannot do it today. If you think then closing Parler solved the problem of internal division in USA - no, it just made it worse.

If you've experienced significant free speech suppression, then shouldn't you be better able to tell the difference instead of playing Slippery Slope?

That is true but I am not as disillusioned that giving everyone a megaphone was positively conductive to spread more interesting art, discussions and general content. I would not want to go back to Youtube TV.

I think people that only see the dangers of misinformation that must be contained are the modern versions of priests to be honest.

Very tricky, embedding an assumption - that a particular example conforming to long recognized free-speech exceptions is the same as general suppression of free speech - in your question. Have you stopped beating your wife? Maybe, if you're acting in good faith and really are prepared to consider an answer other than the one you've ordained, you could try phrasing the question in a less prejudicial way.

Another simple question: if actions were ineffective like you describe, why would people take them? There isn't some cosmic homeostasis keeping the world the way you percieve it. If you get rid of anti-vax videos, fewer people are going to be exposed to that, and fewer people will be resultantly anti-vax.

I didn't describe anything as ineffective. On the contrary: those who vaccinated are now very effectively avoiding being seriously sick or even dead. What was ineffective is an information campaign about vaccines, their direct and side short and long term effects. At least in US, I believe.

A private site like YouTube choosing to censor content on its own servers is not suppressing freedom of speech.

In fact, it is YouTube exercising freedom of speech by wielding editorial control over their own website.

I mean... Yeah... Long ago some people got together and said large government organizations should not censor speech. They thought this idea was good enough that it shouldn't just be law, they should Amend the US Constitution to protect people from a particular large organization's overwhelming power to suppress dissent.

But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.

YouTube doesn’t have military, power to tax, or power to imprison, so it still seems quite different.

Freedom of speech can go beyond just what's in the federal constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

It's not necessarily that simple, although it probably is under current state laws.

Of course it is suppressing freedom of speech.

So... Youtube is now a publisher, not a platform?

Youtube should be held civil and criminal liable for ALL content on its highly edited and curated platform.

> because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".

Note that that is incorrect, and ironically demonstrates a unjustifiably high degree of trust in authorities. Rather, if someone supports censoring something, it means that they believe that it[0]'s true. But that doesn't mean they're right - their revealed internal beliefs are no more infalliable than their externally claimed ones.

0: Technically, they believe that something in the general class of claims they're attempting to censor (eg some anti-vaxx claim, but not necessarily any of the specific ones that have actually been made) is true.

> do you beleive[sic] that suppressing freedom of speech

wildly wrong take on what the first amendment means....

This seems incredibly naive. The present proliferation of anti-vaccine sentiment is almost entirely the result of propaganda pushed by a tiny number of people being amplified by social media. You can argue about whether or not it's right to suppress information on principle, but I don't see how you can argue it's ineffective. It's ineffective at combating actual truth when things like the Supreme Soviet just lie about meeting their five year plan goals and imprison anyone who presents real data, but scientific journals and newspapers introducing some editorial curation in what they were willing to amplify worked perfectly fine at actually suppressing fringe pseudoscience and false conspiracy theories for centuries.

I get it. Some conspiracies turn out to be true. Watergate happened. The Panama Papers happened. COINTELPRO happened. The FBI probably really did assassinate Fred Hampton. Galileo was right. But for every Galileo, there are a few thousand cranks thinking they disproved special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine and refusing to grant them a platform has worked fine forever until social media came along and gave everyone an audience.

There was a huge lie about Russian election interference that was heavily pushed by media companies.

I am vaccinated but it is still a medical experiment. One that should be carefully monitored. Maybe we are guilty of enabling strains like delta. Perhaps not. As I said, it warrants close monitoring.

The heart of any anti-* sentiment is DOUBT. And in case of covid vaccines part of that doubt is totally legit. Yes, in a history of mankind there was never a medical substance so rushed to the market. And yes, our current covid vaccines are far from perfect. All you can do to counter these facts are bring another facts. And not shutting down intelligent reasonable people discussing all those facts.

We don't remember people who got other theories than Galileo. We don't even remember those who judged him. Because in the end all is remains is proven unshakable science.