Can you give an example? What's a view that's been eliminated?

Heres an example: Bari Weiss was fired for commissioning an op-ed by a US Senator Tom Cotton calling for the national guard to be called in to break up riots. Note that she did not write the essay, but merely commissioned it. They sometimes have op-eds from varying voices. NY Times apologized and said "This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards"

Pretty extreme view sending in the national guard, right? Except according to a poll around that time, 52% of Americans answered yes to "Do you approve or disapprove of sending in the U.S. military where there are violent protests?" So obviously that op-ed wasn't a fringe belief, but it was enough to end the career of the person responsible to bring it to print, in addition to apologies and a commitment to never do anything like that again.

Being critical of sometimes violent disruptive protests is a view that has been highly suppressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/52-americans-support-deployi...

Are you arguing that Bari Weiss, who was brought in specifically as part of an editorial decision to appeal to alternate viewpoints, is an example of alternate viewpoints being censored?

Yes. She was forced out for doing her job. They don't want alternative view points. That's the point

She resigned, she was not fired.

By all means argue that they made her feel that it was not possible or sensible to try to do the job she wanted to do. But she resigned, and that's not the same thing.

But didn’t the job start as a specific alternative viewpoint subsidy?

Getting to zero after boosting doesn’t seem like censorship.

Also the New York Times is not a monopoly.

"Since March 1, 2021, she has worked as a regular columnist for German daily newspaper Die Welt." (Wikipedia)

Her career is alive and well.

She's a popular Substacker and left the NYT in a wave of journalists starting lucrative Substacks. I'm sure the NYT Slack was quite inhospitable to her (she's a troll, and they're snowflakey), but she wasn't forced out of the NYT; she was lured out. Either way: good riddance. Just because a bunch of irritating snowflakes got what they wanted doesn't, by itself, make an outcome bad.

How is the view simultaneously eliminated and held by the majority of Americans?

What about the very subject of this thread? Not a view worth keeping around?

That's not been eliminated. Quite a few people believe the election was stolen. Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division.

There's no evidence to support the fact that corporate greed in an otherwise competitive market leads to inflation, yet we have plenty of politicians pushing that.

There's no evidence supporting price controls to be an effective way to fight inflation, as was shown to produce awful results in the 70s among many other eras, yet we have politicians pushing for that.

There's no evidence to support that nominal wages rising, but at a rate lower than inflation leads to people being better off, yet we have politicians pushing this.

I think Google should ban any videos promoting these effectively disproven and dangerous economic ideas.

Agree on the economics, but I think it's weak to compare these to the purely forensic question of whether the election was stolen.

Economic opinions are generally not that clear cut, requiring an awful lot of theoretical harness and qualifications to explain. Evidence is similar, you can quibble about a lot of things in economics.

Whether the election was stolen, well, where is a shred of evidence? It's not hard to define what we mean by stolen.

Most things aren't clear cut, and there have been many times in history where widely held beliefs have been proven largely false.

If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said"

There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.

I believe we should mass purge all these videos proposing that the ex president colluded with Russians. We don't want the public to be misinformed.

Consider which regimes throughout history have used silencing political opposition the most, and whether you want to be aligned with them.

I certainly don't.

I would hate for people to fall out of the practice of critically thinking about what they see in the news. Our whole open society depends on people practicing deciding what they think it's right.

I agree.

My preference is to leave all content up, but perhaps provide filters to users so they can choose to look at a bubble if they like. Or have an open standard for video data, on which anybody could build a UI layer.

Just saying, there's a clear double standard here. Saying the election was stolen due to collusion with Russians seems to be along awfully similar lines.

I'm happy to allow companies to do whatever they like, but the data needs to be decoupled from the UI then. Otherwise it's a natural monopoly.

I think history will see it that way, though it may take another decade or two.

>If you'll recall there was a multi year period of mass belief that the president colluded with Russians to steal the election. On the back of very little evidence, other than news heads talking about it and "he said, she said" >There was also a multi year investigation that found nothing, and actually was able to largely disprove documents that helped to kick off the speculation.

This is simply untrue: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/senate-intell...

Even a Republican-backed investigation found many links between Trump campaign advisors and Kremlin officials.

Just because Trump says he was "totally exonerated" for the soundbite doesn't mean anything.

"Ties" are irrelevant. The question was whether the president colluded with Russia. Unless you believe him to be a genius or master of stealth, I can assure you 4 years of all media investigations and official investigations would have uncovered anything compelling were it to exist.

Also, you can tie most government officials to Russia in some capacity. Everybody in politics is well connected.

It was a widely spread conspiracy theory with 0 evidence given a veil of credibility because many talking heads brought it up as if there were something tangible backing it.

Just because many people talked about and bought into it doesn't invalidate that it was a conspiracy theory

Ties are absolutely relevant when the guy is doing stuff like removing Ukraine aid or Russian sanctions from the Republican platform. Look up Paul Manafort.

Nobody is claiming Trump is a genius. The Russian ties are all out there in the open. The only open question was whether they rise to a criminal level. Trump apparently thought they did when he panicked and fired James Comey to halt an investigation. I don’t think the connections were necessarily criminal, just un-American (that of cozying up to corrupt dictators while denigrating allies).

This comment is unrelated to my point. I asked for an example of a viewpoint being eliminated. Instead, I get a wrong answer and a pivot to a request for my views. You're changing the subject yet again to just listing other things politicians have said. That doesn't substantiate the claim that there are viewpoints being eliminated.

It replies directly to your point. You imply that dangerous views shouldn't be kept around.

"Also, it's not a view worth keeping around. There's no evidence to support it and it's just used to justify violence and division."

So I listed some very dangerous economic views that have been proven to fail throughout history, and are widely agreed upon by economists.

So we should silence anybody promoting these views, following your logic. It's for the good of society

We should ban all videos proposing the ex president colluded with Russia too, as it was always a conspiracy theory with no evidence. No matter how much people wanted it to be true. Undermining the legitimacy of a validly elected president should be a silence-able offense. All the better if the party in power or their affiliates are the ones to do the silencing.

Maybe take into consideration which regimes throughout history have used silencing speech the most and whether you want to align with them.

But generally I don't expect holders of these views to acknowledge the hypocrisy of them, or how closely they align to the tactics of authoritarian regimes throughout history.