I am reminded of a quote I just ran into from the Canadian Supreme Court on free speech in R v. Zundel. Setting aside any legal questions, I found it interesting for its emphasis on the potential expressive value to disinformation.

> The first difficulty results from the premise that deliberate lies can never have value. Exaggeration -- even clear falsification -- may arguably serve useful social purposes linked to the values underlying freedom of expression. A person fighting cruelty against animals may knowingly cite false statistics in pursuit of his or her beliefs and with the purpose of communicating a more fundamental message, e.g., `cruelty to animals is increasing and must be stopped'. A doctor, in order to persuade people to be inoculated against a burgeoning epidemic, may exaggerate the number or geographical location of persons potentially infected with the virus. An artist, for artistic purposes, may make a statement that a particular society considers both an assertion of fact and a manifestly deliberate lie; consider the case of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, viewed by many Muslim societies as perpetrating deliberate lies against the Prophet.

The speed at which we have embraced censorship with the attendant rationalizations has been amazing.

Who is doing the censoring here? It's YouTube. They have a right to remove content from their platform as they see fit, in accordance with their TOS. There is no right to post YouTube videos in the constitution.

Your not being oppressed. Get over it.

I refer you back to my original comment. I quoted the Canadian Supreme Court in part to separate the legal question from the deeper one. As a non-American, the legal question is honestly pretty boring. The deeper issue of what constitutes a healthy society with free debate and expression, however, is interesting to me.

Because free speech is a societal and cultural value, as much as a legal one. A commune of religious weirdos with no laws at all could be highly tolerant or intolerant of dissent. It could embrace or reject free speech, just socially based on whether they ostracize the dissenters. Similarly, a nation of publishers where every publisher refuses to publish anything controversial, dissident or offensive may have no First Amendment issues, but it's not one that takes the principles and values of free speech very seriously.

There is no question here other than the legal one. End of story. These people have their free speech. If that artist wanted to, they could host their own website and serve that video all day long.

It seems like you are confusing real life with some fantasy world you live in. Welcome to late stage capitalism. It's not fair.

As I said, rationalizations. What is also amazing is that people think that repeating the obvious in vaguely sassy fashion is somehow an argument. In any case, Youtube's "rights" as you call them would be more palatable if they did not enjoy section 230 immunity. Furthermore, I'm sure there is a legal case to be made regarding the Government employing private actors in a manner that violates the first amendment.

So you want to limit free speech then? Who gets to have free speech in your opinion?

It is sad I have to repeat myself so you can understand that private companies can do as they please.

I have said no such thing, quite the opposite. If you have truly missed that then, an further discussion with you is doomed.

Nah you got me, that was a trap

Half the songs out there contain disinformation. Is YouTube going to get rid of them all?

Medical disinformation? Because the typical music industry schtick of lying about how much money you have or how often you get laid probably isn't quite as bad as that one.

Listen to Eminem from the early 00s.

And what’s so bad about medical misinformation vs say talking about murdering people? This is a rabbit hole and the left is gleefully throwing us down it.

> And what’s so bad about medical misinformation vs say talking about murdering people?

Predominantly that I'm not aware of a huge number of people who listened to Stan and then committed a murder suicide, but I'm aware of a staggering number of people who watched some absolute moron's YouTube video about COVID-19 and then decided to ingest horse dewormer.

I'm not sure how much of this difference is because music is performative (a song about murders is not typically trying to convince its listeners to commit murders), or how much of it is just because the demographic watching conspiratorial YouTube videos are way more gullible than people listening to Eminem songs, but it's pretty clear that medical disinformation is causing a huge amount of harm, and it's not at all clear that this is the case for songs with aggressive lyrics.

Yeah not even close. This has real repercussions, especially to the people that need herd immunity to reenter society, like the immune comprised.

So now everybody has to change speech for a very very small minority?

Yes, if you lean politically hard left in the USA. This has already become a political talking point for transgender people, and all censorship is good censorship under those claims.

No, if you're simply liberal or conservative in the USA. They generally think that speech should be uncensored until it's directly causing legitimate violence (e.g., yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or threatening death).

Speech? No, that's free. We're talking about hurting people by not getting vaccinated.

YouTube is a private company. Them censoring someone is not an infringement on free speech.

You’re hiding behind legality. The spirit of free speech is most definitely damaged.

Lots of songs tell me cannabis is harmless even if you smoke it all day every day.

Do you infect other innocent people with your cannabis addiction by breathing on them?

Do you give people COVID by listening to a song?

Yes, all the ones that contain statements about the pandemic being manufactured.

This is a precipitous road due to conflation. Are we talking about the pandemic as a social phenomenon, or as a spread of a virus?

It's evident that there's been political gain on the matter, which is a "manufactured" social phenomenon, but it's obvious that there's a physically propagating coronavirus that mutates and spreads via airborne transmission.

Unfortunately, I've seen people vacillate back-and-forth on the two depending on what they're trying to assert.