[ianstallings]

Agreed. Being of the Libertarian mindset, I was at first completely okay with it under the argument of personal liberty and personal property. It's a private company and they can do what they want.

But the closer I looked at it the more I realized that it truly is a public space. And then when powerful political figures started influencing what was okay to censor on it I realized they are trying to do an end-run around the actual law via technicality. No need for the government to censor anything when they can just get the technocrats to do it for them. And everyone seems okay with it, so long as it's not them.

[xnxn]

Having a lot of people in a space doesn't make it a "public space". These terms are well defined, and we should stick to them when discussing, or we'll all talk past each other.

YouTube is not even a "privately owned public space" because it isn't legally required to be open to the public.

If you believe video hosting is critical public infrastructure, nationalize it.

[kd0amg]

Past thought about free speech seems to be based on the assumption that people can communicate without having some third party approve the sender/receiver/message. Now we mostly use a communication medium that involves a lot of third parties. How many private companies carried this comment to your screen? The bakery whose WiFi I'm using now, their ISP, some unknown backbone carrier, YCombinator, your ISP. Maybe a CDN provider and some others I can't think of.

We already have an answer about a government-operated communication medium: the government (including those acting on its behalf) must uphold our rights. That implies an obligation to keep storing/hosting/delivering things we say. It costs money, but society is more or less ok with the idea of a government having a legal obligation to spend resources on something. But what do we do with a private entity which spends a lot of money to operate and maintain a communication medium?