>Youtube is a private company. They can make whatever additional moderation decisions beyond the law they want. Which are in no way based on what you want but are entirely based on what advertisers want. This control effectively answers every question you raised.

This is effectively the same thing. Advertisers care because the users have different moral judgments on different types of content which impacts their opinion of the companies that advertise on that content. If users were happy seeing Ford ads on porn, Ford would likely be fine advertising on Pornhub.

>In any case, Youtube is the size where it can grapple with all these questions you just posed, but anyone else hoping to challenge their monopoly or otherwise host a small collection of videos, perhaps for a specific purpose or community, now effectively cannot.

I'm not sure where this logic leads. Are you suggesting that a company needs to reach a certain size before they can be expected to moderate their content?

>Who exactly started _this_ debate? Was there some recent outcry from the citizens that their lives have become unlivable due to the lax content restrictions on social media? Really?

Isn't this question answered by your first paragraph? Users and advertisers started this debate. There was definitely public pressure for Google to take down Covid discussions that mainstream sources believed were misleading. Was there consensus? Maybe not, but there was definitely a public debate about it.