It's not an issue if you happen to agree this time.
Next time you might not. And then it's too late, you've made your bed.
Next time you might not. And then it's too late, you've made your bed.
Imagine a public town square. Would you want any company acting as the gatekeeper, deciding what speech is allowed or not in that setting?
YouTube, Twitter and a few others are effectively the new town square. I don't think we want to end up in a position where a few corporations are dictating acceptable speech and open debate.
> what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square.
The power to ban someone from social media is the power to cut them off from society. That's too much power for any private corporation to hold.
There's no daylight between "we can't restrict shitty speech because one day we might restrict non-shitty speech" and "we can't have laws against bad things because one day we might have laws against non-bad things". It's an obviously stupid argument and it's not any less stupid because the operating verb is speech.
Let's see if this goes any further. If it doesn't, there's no problem.
You are absolutely right. Right now, it isn't an issue, because Alex Jones is a legitimately awful, possibly insane human being who contributes nothing to actual political discourse, and directs hatred at parents of murdered children for his schtick. It's Youtube, not the federal government.
And while I do believe "The Internet" is the public square, I don't think Youtube is /quite/ that protected yet, and I don't think Alex Jones deserves that protection.
Other people may get shut down like AJ did, and I may not like it, and I'll argue against it.
https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/
tldr - AJ can set up a server at home or on AWS. He may have to do compressed audio only.