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by rauchp 2242 days ago
Un-American? There's nothing more "American" than having the right to do whatever you want with your personal property. The free market answer here isn't forcing them to adhere to your tastes, it's to make or promote a competitor that can actually compete with YT.
1 comments

Let’s just stick to the facts then for a second. In this particular case, Youtube has decided I can’t watch a video with dubious facts and make up my own mind whether it’s bullshit or not.

American values are not all about capitalism. We have some ideas on the individual in America.

But, I’m with you on the need for YouTube competitors, but I lack the imagination to see how it can happen. That’s why I’m advocating for the jamming of American values into a what is essentially becoming an institution as opposed to a company that operates against market forces.

> That’s why I’m advocating for the jamming of American values into a what is essentially becoming an institution as opposed to a company that operates against market forces.

Do you also feel this way about historically monopolistic media companies? They also exercise editorial control. NBC, NewsCorp, Sinclair, ClearChannel, AT&T, Disney...

Not every conspiracy theorist gets an oped or interview on any other platform.

I’ll say that old school television had a real scheduling and demographic constraint, they really had to hone in on their programming.

Our modern internet media landscape doesn’t have these constraints, so we really are curating on certain criteria where the overwhelming deciding factor isn’t just ‘do we have enough time for this’ and ‘is this what most of our viewers want’.

Youtube can get content to exactly the right demo, and scheduling is a non factor. So, what is editorial control in this landscape?

Youtube hasn't decided you can't watch, they have decided not to spend resources allowing you to watch it on their platform or to accept sponsorship for the content because they feel that it would cost their brand money or otherwise be against their collective shareholder interests.
> Youtube has decided I can’t watch a video with dubious facts and make up my own mind whether it’s bullshit or not.

That is not factually true since the video is available in other places. What Youtube has done is decided to try to make it harder to view and share the video by removing it from their platform.