Is YouTube sending people to "re-education camps" now?
If a private platform kicks you out, you can host your stuff elsewhere. If a state censors you, it can use lethal force to silence you. Pretty big difference.
* Send dissenters to perform menial jobs in some remote small city with little impact on the national scale. Technically, the Gulag itself was an application of this strategy, with a particularly harsh destination and a particularly dangerous occupation.
* House arrest. Keep dissenters in their homes, and carefully control whom they get into contact.
The end effect is the same: drastically limit the platform available to dissenters, without outright murdering them.
- demonetizing videos that advertisers don't want to be associated with
- age-restricting highly questionable content
- deleting videos which I, like, worked really hard on, and which I didn't even say anything directly violent
- ARTIFICIALLY DEFLATING FluoridePoison777's subscriber counts
Seriously: your argument is offensive to victims of totalitarian oppression.
There is only the simple observation that there is a spectrum: free speech -> deplatforming [ban from youtube & co] -> deinfrastructuring [ban from paypal / aws & co] -> depersoning [physical exile to periphery] -> lethal force.
I seem to remember a time of nuanced conversations. But perhaps online discourse was always an adversarial contest between two strident extremes. Enjoy.
It also whitewashes the issue at hand: this professor is a notorious crank and has been a notorious crank long before COVID-19. This is not a free-thinker taking a bold stand against a sclerotic public health bureaucracy. This is a con artist spreading dangerous misinformation during the worst public health emergency in 100 years. YouTube removing his content is not just them suppressing views they politically disagree with, it's also individual employees at YouTube viewing this interview as a imminent threat to their family's health and safety. This is a very reasonable view for private individuals and private corporations running private infrastructure to take.
Look: if he starts his own website self-hosting COVID quackery, and the government shuts it down, then that really is Soviet-level and I will take your argument more seriously (though given the vicious threat COVID-19 poses, I am open to the idea that this is an extreme but necessary use of the government's emergency powers). But it is simply ridiculous to say that YouTube can't moderate their own content, especially when 99% of the world's doctor's and public health officials would describe the video as dangerous misinformation.
But your self-pitying shtick about how you're a lone voice of moderation in a sea of adversarial extremes is nice. It's not quite as nice as bringing back 90,000 Americans from the dead but it probably made you feel nice about yourself.