Very bad precedent, very Un-American.
Edit: As an arrogant American, I forgot to consider that this might be a global Youtube policy.
At least with state censorship, there’s a formal hierarchy of authority. There’s the law, and some semblance of duty to the public.
With corporate censorship, it’s ethereal, anarchic, and less accountable. The rules are opaque, the deciders are unknown, and the only duty is maximizing shareholder profit.
As a serf, I’d be happier knowing who to blame.
Edit: Anyway, I’ll add to your point. As a company, Google has no issue censoring it’s product in China as opposed to other countries. It sounds almost trite to bring up, but Google censors the Tiananmen Square massacre for the CCP.
With this in mind, what sincere values does Google hold on censorship?
So ya, you’re right, corporate accountability on censorship is basically non existent (and you can trace it back to the fact that they probably don’t have values to even hold accountable).
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 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.
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.
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?
There are indeed two summers on this planet every year.
Also, when people write date examples with the day and month both being values <= 12... that is especially annoying
So in no way "state".
It's less "state" than if Walt Disney World had rules about family appropriate clothing (since the Florida granted them municipal control)
Youtube thinks I don’t need to know anything about this video.
Replace WHO with CDC, what’s the difference? Now you officially have the US censoring Youtube. The pattern is not good.
Youtube is the de facto video platform that the masses use, so much so that Youtube finds it necessary to enact something like this.
To bring it back to your point - If we don’t like YouTube’s policies, we can’t just simply ignore Youtube and move on from it. How it controls things is a big deal, especially if it is similar to how non-free governments censor stuff. We have to be vigilant of this, it ain’t some niche video site.