> You're conflating free speech (government) with a business's decision to monitor their platform (private).
No, he specifically did not conflate those two things. Read his comment again. He said that he understands that Google can censor whatever they like, but doesn't understand why they choose to do so. I'd have to agree, I'm inclined to not trust YouTube as much anymore, even if I believe the content they are censoring is completely crazy in this case.
The argument that people conflate state censorship and private censorship has become overused to the point being disingenuous. There are some people who truly don't understand the difference between state and private censorship. But the more intellectually serious argument involves thinking about why we forbid the government from regulating speech. The first reason is that the government is ill-equipped to regulate speech; it's hard for the government to determine which speech is socially beneficial. The second is that it is often better in general to challenge incorrect ideas through rebuttal and education rather than censorship. This harkens back to Mill's argument for free speech. Importantly, the second idea doesn't just argue against government censorship, but private censorship as well.
As soon as someone argues that YouTube is wrong to take this action, people start parroting the argument that free speech only applies to government action. But that completely ignores the idea that censorship is just fundamentally the wrong way to combat wrong ideas or ideas you disagree with. And to make matters worse, many commenters also ignore the idea that you are allowed to disagree with a company's actions even if you don't think the government should compel them to act differently.
And another problem I see is we're trending toward there being two different groups of social media sites in the U.S., conservative social media and liberal social media sites, and I don't think that portends well to the future of American political discourse.
Whether all these ideas are rightly classified as "free speech" issues is a matter of terminology. Perhaps "open discourse" is a more accurate term. I just read an interesting article[1] that discusses this debate and argues it does not involve a fundamental threat to free expression, but nonetheless that it is important.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/22/21325942/f...