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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Agree or disagree, YouTube should not be removing testimony before the United States Congress.

Was this video just raw testimony without being wrapped in opinion? Was it located on an official US Congress channel? If so then I do agree. If not then I don’t necessarily agree, and it’s not necessarily so cut and dry. This opinion piece doesn’t give any hard information in that regard.

they should only remove illegal content. that's it.

act as a common carrier.

/r/jailbait wasn't illegal content. Would you want Reddit to restore it? I don't.

Downvotes without explanation?

So no business should be allowed to refuse whom they can do business with? (other than illegal deals)

i'm just saying that's what platforms that are the defacto town square should do. act as a neutral platform, not a publisher. the town square should not be governed by a few publishing giants.

Youtube should remove whatever they want because they're a private company and it's not like they're the sole archiver of these videos. I've attached the committee hearing in question below [0].

What removing the video does do is make me not want to use YouTube for any serious kind of deep dive research, which frankly is not what I use it for anyways. I'm not really sure what the goal of YouTube is supposed to be actually, not really sure what the goal of most of FAANG is supposed to be, other than print maximal amounts of money. I think people might be a little less angry at them if they actually some stated mission to evaluate against.

[0] - https://www.c-span.org/video/?507035-1/medical-response-covi...

> ...YouTube should not be removing...

> Youtube can remove...

You're arguing against a strawman. "can" and "should" are different things.

I replaced "can" with "should", and the rest of my post didn't change at all. It doesn't change the point at all. It's a meaningless semantic objection.

I am not convinced whatsoever that YouTube "should" be mandated to carry congressional testimony, presidential communication, or anything else they don't want to carry. Removing it is not deplatforming it because as stated, Congress already has a platform. It's easily accessible. It's free.

> Social networking websites have become such an important source of information that even sex offenders should not be barred from social media, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday.[0]

> social networking sites have become a major part of "the marketplace of ideas," in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's words. "Increasingly, this is the way people get ... all information," Justice Elena Kagan said. "This is the way people structure their civic community life."

> During oral argument, only Justice Samuel Alito mounted much of a defense of the law, suggesting that it could be limited to core social networking sites rather than The New York Times or Betty Crocker. "There are still alternative channels," he said. But David Goldberg of Stanford Law School's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, who represented Packingham, said Twitter hosts about 500 million tweets a day, and Snapchat hosts 10 billion videos — statistics that are not replicable elsewhere.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/06/19/supr...

SCOTUS can see clearly that having a platform is insufficient if that platform has <1% of the reach of the platforms that everyone else uses.

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