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by adatavizguy 2246 days ago
I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding what content is and is not allowed to be hosted on their private servers using their private services. This is very different from government officials that you vote for censoring free speech.

Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers.

4 comments

> I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding...

YouTube is part of a gigantic, public company with more power than many world governments. In a very real sense, Alphabet is more powerful than a hypothetical Standard Oil that also owned one of the most popular two newspapers in every single city in the US.

Their ability to shape markets, public opinion and even elections in 100+ countries is unprecedented and very easy to use with plausible deniability. Facebook is a similar sort of entity. In aggregate, the two control more personal communications than the postal service.

The notion that only a government can be a threat to free speech is outdated and naive.

Almost seems like the problem is monopoly capitalism, doesn't it?
>I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you.

Your snarky condescending tone is not helpful.

Just because a person reaches a different conclusion than you doesn't mean that they lack information like this.

I think it's dangerous to society to give corporations that have as much power as YouTube a pass simply because they are not government entities.

> Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to

...criticize them on HackerNews.

Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers

You mean the Facebook that just banned WhatsApp message forwarding, despite their service supposedly being end-to-end encrypted? It didn't take long for that little sham to collapse did it? Sure, go self publish and watch as the self appointed guardians of the galaxy do everything in their power to stop you speaking.

We're not debating Google here. Not really. We're debating the whole ethos of Silicon Valley liberals which has become, "we're smarter than you and will ensure you think what we want you to think". Except they're not smarter. Having worked there for years I can confidently say that whilst there might have been some merit to that argument a long time ago within the scope of computer science, but years of endless hiring has now made them distinctly average groups of people with no edge over the rest of the world. Yet they continue to believe merely being a part of a particular organisation allows them to instantaneously decide the correctness of any argument.