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Comment by ksk | Hacker News Reader

Its interesting that Google is making a 'freedom of expression' argument when they themselves heavily censor YouTube content. Google controls the platform their users use, and the Government controls the 'platform' that both companies and users use. I suppose nobody cares about the users in both cases.

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Anyone whose video is taken down by YouTube is free to host it themselves. On their own servers, they're free to express themselves.

Google, similarly, wants the freedom to express itself on its own servers.

Google is allowed to host or not whatever they want. They can do it wherever they want. They are not a government.

A government somewhere telling Google what they have to do globally? That's scary/stupid.

Actually, they are not allowed to do whatever they want. Nobody is, but okay, believe that if you may.

>A government somewhere telling Google what they have to do globally?

If Google had individual companies in individual countries, with no data (Google's property) being shared, you might have a point. Its a bit more complicated than you make it sound.

> That's scary/stupid

I believe that things seem less scary or stupid if you take the time to understand them.

Google has left the content and is paying the infrastructure cost for the content. No advertisers so they demonetized. That is not the same as censoring.

> That is not the same as censoring.

That is just one case. There are other cases of youtube/google banning peoples accounts. In any case, the person I replied to was equating de-indexing with censoring.

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