I never understood how this "it's an action by a private company, hence... we should ask no questions about it?" thing works.

If there is a good rationale why a government should not install censorship, don't you think there might be similar good reasons why a powerful media company should not install censorship?

If I look at the things people on Reddit are saying about Russia these days I get the uneasy feeling that the average Russian may actually have a more nuanced opinion on world affairs than them. So whatever the Western media are doing, it's working very well.

This is disingenuous, the "state" is still at the center of it.

Consider how Google was happy to censor when it came to doing business in China. Is that just a "private" company making "private" decisions?

It's similar in the US. Consider the 2020 big tech antitrust congressional hearings.

Congress can go after big-tech anytime it wants.

Likewise if big-tech wants to successfully lobby for favorable policies, then they'll want to stay in the governments good graces.

This is the "carrot and the stick" of how our country projects power domestically. Its through soft influence of industry.

We did the same during Covid times. We were never able to federally mandate the vaccine, but we got all our big companies to do so, which is just as good from a policy standpoint.

Google / Youtube would probably piss off a lot of people in washington if they didn't censor these videos.

CIA is basically an "economic interests" vector, right? This really meshes, your statement about using the big corporates as state instruments on the sly. (I guess that's not all that different to Chinese 'state owned' enterprises. They're just more overt. West operates more covert and deceptive. A continuation of a trend, heh :))

What's your thinking about the second-order effects, larger ramifications of this?

Hard to say. Probably further erosion of individualism in the west. Foreign interference will be used as a pretext to railroad policies like digital currency, digital ID, etc. This is of course a slippery slope to the China model of mass surveillance and social credit scores.

How this mixes with the constitution and western values is uncertain. You can still have free speech and human rights in such a system, its just that much more fragile.

That, or foreign interference prevails and our enemies trick us into civil war and we destroy ourselves that way.

Is it pro-Russian? I haven’t watched it.. and now I can’t watch it. I just have to take YouTube’s word for it that I’m not old enough to watch and never will be.

Disregarding this video however, I guess “private company sponsored censorship” is the vogue for capitalist governments

While “state sponsored censorship” is vogue for authoritarian governments

One is outsourced, but the result is much the same. I’m sad that people on HN are constantly cheering one form of censorship when they should recognize the third order effects

In many cases the censorship is at the behest of the state institutions. Of course, there isn't a requirement for it to be disclosed as such.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

A lot of HN dreams of getting to be the censor and given the makeup of the audience here, many will, if they aren't already. What I don't understand is the arrogance in believing the choices of what to censor will always be their choice or inline with what their ideology drives them to censor. Power has a way of shifting quickly and dramatically. Those helping to lace up the boots on someone else's neck often find that same boot on their neck not long after.