[gibba999]

They didn't pick Ron Paul to test this on, and it's not a bold move. YouTube has been in the censorship game for a long, long time.

A lot of content creators -- of documentaries -- created Nebula because they were sick and tired of getting censored.

https://nebula.app/videos?category=history

These aren't wackos. These are mostly serious scholars, tired of a serious problem with Google. I'm giving this as an example; this has been a problem for a lot of people for a long time.

[xupybd]

For sure this is not the first instance of censorship but I'm not aware of any famous American politicians getting censored before, are there any?

[hagbard_c]

I seem to remember your former president getting banned? His shtick may have been that he entered politics as an outsider but once he was in he surely was a politician, and a famous one at that.

[xupybd]

I'm not American but think it's significant because they're American companies.

I thought that was Twitter not YouTube. I could be wrong.

[hagbard_c]

As far as I know he was banned more or less across the board - Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, Shopify, Reddit and possibly others [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/11/trump-b...

[xupybd]

The more you know. That does make this less significant.

[hagbard_c]

It certainly does not, it makes it all the more clear that it is foolhardy to rely on these centralised corporate entities to carry your message for you unless that message happens to coincide with the current desired narrative - and even in that case it would be wise to not rely on them given that the narrative can and will change.

Every grain of sand leaking from their hands adds to the viability of a decentralised 'net so the more they censor, the more they'll lose. I say let them lose everything, let Youtube become a wasteland of cat videos interspersed with government broadcasts and kitschy music videos, let it become the online equivalent of a shopping mall past its heyday where elevator music echoes through empty galleries, let interesting material migrate to alternative distribution channels. All that is needed for that is a reliable CDN, a problem which might be solvable using p2p distribution like Peertube and LBRY do. Once this is established there will be another fight, this time led by copyright holders who insist on blocking these channels so the system needs to be robust against such attempts.

Will there be fewer 'Youtube millionaires'? Sure, that was a short-lived fad which is unlikely to survive in a decentralised 'net. Is this something to mourn over? Not in my opinion.

[AnEro]

Comparing messy AI that will demonetize/remove historic retellings of traumatic events, wars, and hate crimes to 'censoring' Ron Paul is ridiculous.

Most of them moved to because of demonetization... Where swearing can demonetize a video as well as mentioning rape or murder in contexts explicitly. Yes that is horrible to punish literal historians talking about these events that really happened that we should be educated on but, how do you separate those from actually hateful content so charmin/coke/corporation still will pay you to run ads?

Letting people think the vaccine is dangerous without scientific proof when they could die without it, isn't government regulation friendly.

edit: to day I learned there's a down vote feature lol. Didn't know acknowledging a private company has interests beyond letting people saying w/e when want when it can negatively impact their bottom line would be so controversial. Also banning him for being conservative is very different from banning spreading vaccine misinformation. Then grouping that with removing historians incomes due to messy AI implementation to save YouTube's ad friendliness to keep their bottom line is just a victim complex.

[gibba999]

If it's just AI, you separate them with actual human oversight.

From what I understand, they moved less because of demonetization, and more because of the chilling effect it had on free speech. They needed to be super-careful in script writing to make sure they didn't anger the YouTube algorithm.

I'll also mention another darker side of this: Google is almost entirely liberal inside. If a liberal channel is wrongly banned, an army of Googlers quickly rushes to fix it. If a conservative channel is wrongly banned, there's internal snickering. AIs are not neutral, and Google's reflects the biases of the people who keep tweaking it.

[AnEro]

> chilling effect it had on free speech

I think comparing this to free speech is just a losing argument cause legally free speech is for criticizing the government non-violently.

They are private companies that have a monopoly, making a new platform focused on enabling creator's means of revenue is the ideal approach.

>If a liberal channel is wrongly banned, an army of Googlers quickly rushes to fix it. If a conservative channel is wrongly banned, there's internal snickering.

Conservatives unironically have a victim complex for this because lefties have the same issue because they are saying the centerist thing. Democrats or what conservatives call 'liberal' right now are mostly a centerist party, trying to be palatable to the largest audience. The same social media companies want to keep the largest ad consumer base as well as advertiser pool.

> another darker side of this

I honestly think it is a societal shift of the vanilla of politics, I'm sorry conservatism is no longer vanilla and is actually the rocky road of politics and isn't as friendly.

Edit: I challenge anyone offended by this point of view, to look into conservatives that have been 'cancelled'/'silenced' viewership and numbers before and after. It usually helps them get more of a following across the board, they inflate this issue beyond how bad it is to get more attention for a possible loss in revenue.

[gibba999]

I don't care about "legally." I care about whether we live in a society where we have diverse opinions, and people feel free to express themselves. If we have a system where:

- Market forces drive companies to support one point of view in media, and censor everything else;

- Market forces drive everyone to work under draconian NDAs; and

- Market forces drive companies not to hire people who engage in WrongThink

We've got a broken system where no one has free speech, no matter what the laws say.

And no, you can't successfully start a competing company, because market forces mean that companies which optimize to market forces win.

I don't care about conservatives, liberals, or victim complexes. I care about having reason discourse, civic debate, and free speech. If a social, political, and economic system doesn't allow that, we've got a broken system. As a footnote, every conservative I've spoken to thinks I'm a leftwing nutjob, and every liberal, a rightwing nutjob. If you disagree with either party line on anything (even not in the opposing direction), that's how you're viewed. The polarization and stereotyping is crazy.

[AnEro]

I agree market forces are largely an issue, just know that when you're saying 'WrongThink' and 'Market forces drive companies to support one point of view in media, and censor everything else;'. Just as a heads up cause I would rather have these conversations than not, just like you said others wouldn't.

It just sounds like the 'reason, discourse and civic debate crowd are more aligning groups known for hate speech or using dog whistles to encourage that type of person to watch their content. For instance a Ben Shapiro, who sounds smart and looks like he wants reasons and facts but really his perfectly crafted throw away statements just take 30 minutes of googling to disprove. Rather than actually providing real fats and logic, it's just the common sense he can placate to and arguments reinforcing a religious agenda. It makes sense why he doesn't notice this as well, because to be cold and analytical it reduces blood flow to the sections of your brain that contribute to emotional thinking which is normally ideal. However, it also turns off your ability to sense when it's seeping into your thoughts regardless. So focusing purely rationality alone, can also dampen your effective rationality because it is harder to tell when you let emotions play a factor in your think