[fennecfoxen]

> This is all the result of confusing 1st amendment rights with the right to access the audience that gathers at a particular URL.

No one is confused. The article mentions neither the First Amendment nor the Constitution. It only calls the matter "un-American." This phrase is clearly a value statement, not some neutral and dispassionate assessment.

The line you draw to separate the government from the private sector is quite useful in other contexts, but does not affect the matter before us today. After all, in a democracy (which the Constitution aspires to be) the ideal of free speech itself must proceed from shared cultural values; if those values change enough, we might also expect the First Amendment to be repealed anyway.

Of course YouTube of course is not required to represent these purportedly-American values; just as surely, it may be criticized as "un-American" by those promulgating such values. A much more interesting argument would assess the extent to which the values in question are, in fact, American, whether YouTube's choices are more representative (surely there's a case for this) or simply more desirable (I note many here agree with them) -- and whether American (or "American") values can coexist with these YouTube values.