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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

I really want to stress that while the internet has enabled just about everyone to act as a citizen journalist, it is not the ubiquity of information that matters, but rather, the access to information. YouTube and Google wield great power when it comes to gatekeeping information. The sinister part is that plenty of people, left and right, will defend Google's ability to do this merely because they are "a private company".

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This is why everyone should read RMS's Right to Read story. Its not just about censoring the output, they want to censor our inputs too! While the RMS parable is less about censorship and more about drm its still relevant. [1]

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who are so bought into the tribalistic dialectic that, in the more recent version, they heard about all the censoring, they saw the people being censored were "those evil others" and said "yeah thats ok with me!", failing to understand the lack of principle would/will come for them next.

The beauty of it all is that I think the oligarchs are overplaying their hand to the point they are going to force a pendulum swing back the other way at some point. The counter-point to that is that with techno-tyranny at some point the oligarchs are going to be able to stop the pendulum swing.

1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

bonus: Hitchens on freedom of speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY&t=0

There is little consistency of belief across the political spectrum. This breeds hypocrisy and mistrust which fuels further mistrust and hypocrisy. It’s just general cultural ugliness all the way down.

>Hitchens on freedom of speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY&t=0

Interesting to watch this with hindsight and see how wrong he was about Religion and why they were censorious.

Could you expound on what you mean? I must have missed it.

He made the point that religious organisations tried to restrict freedom of speech in order to silence activist groups they didn't agree with (which at the time was true), but also suggested a causal relationship between the fact that they held "primitive" beliefs and their willingness to censor.

If you look at how society has evolved over the last 15 years, the opposite has come true. Activists are successfully limiting speech they find offensive through legislation and intimidation, and one of the strongest defenders of "full" freedom of speech has now become the religious far-right.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the notion of "full" freedom of speech (which we don't actually have in Australia; only an implied right to freedom of political communication to the extent that is necessary to keep democracy running), but you can't deny that religion is no longer the enemy of free speech.

Actually I think I could deny it, because the issue is more complex than a boolean. While yes, certain religions have increased in their freedom of speech rhetoric, some of them still have death penalties for things like blasphemy (which in some cases includes cartoon drawings, apparently), and that hasn't really changed.

Isn't this just a market opportunity for other companies?

Google isn't the only company that owns the field of information retrieval. They just came the right place/right time after the .com crash.

Are you going to vote with your money and pay for such a company to exist is the right question I would say.

It is in a perfect market, but Google holds the monopoly and the game is set against competition.

A monopoly for information retrieval? Surely not.

For online ads? Sure you can make that case.

Their business in the end is based on delivering relevant content. If there is a market for the traffic Google refuses to host, then there are probably market opportunities there.

For video-sharing platforms.

1. When you buy an Android phone there's a good chance that YouTube app is preinstalled.

2. If you search the net for "how to do XYZ" or for any song you'll get 99% video results from YouTube.

3. Almost every company/celebrity/influencer/... has a YouTube account and until recently (TikTok, Odysee, BitChute,...) alternative platforms (Vimeo, Dailymotion,...) were mostly a niche market.

And how is it a fair market when the government subsidies give google et al a home field advantage?

government subsidies?

There are a couple problems with the "market opportunity" argument. The first is that no, there isn't a market opportunity due to network and monopolistic forces. The second is that there is a fundamental issue with the system itself, whereby both state and private establishment players eventually force any player with a large piece of the market to do things like censor certain narratives.

While I agree that network effects play a large role in entrenchment, I wouldn't be so surprised if smaller players start swooping up the dissenters and begin slowly chipping away at the giants.

Monopoly power and political access means you can both strangle your competitors in the grave and then use regulatory capture to regulate them out of competitiveness if they survive your initial choking attempt.

Time it right and you can have a set of regulations tailored to your competitors that only minimally impact you and then, when the next party gets its turn at power and all of your competitors are dead, get those regulations removed in the next big wave of corporate deregulation.

It really is a sweet game. Too bad we'll never get to play it.

In principle, yes. But Google seems to hold a unique position because of network effects. Countless YouTube clones have been created but none ever seem to gain enough critical mass to become viable competitors. Trying to build a competing platform on the value proposition of being anti-censorship is also fraught with perception issues.

I mean, not just perception issues, but also the fact that you're inherently setting yourself up to build a platform with a core userbase of "People banned from [the more popular version of the platform they're cloning]." You build VidMe and the first people interested in VidMe are people that got kicked off of YouTube, which it turns out are rarely oppressed free speech advocates and much more often trolls and similarly unwanted individuals. If your userbase is entirely toxic, nobody wants to stay there, and your platform never really succeeds because of that.

It's worth noting that I'm loosely parroting the content of a Folding Ideas video[1] that covers the discussion of the creator vs platform relationship overall.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI

> Isn't this just a market opportunity for other companies?

Perhaps but that doesn't preclude criticizing those editorial choices as harmful (false narratives, ideological bubbles, general free-speech principles).

YouTube didn't start removing conspiracy and culture war videos until advertisers started boycotting them back in 2017/2018 for having such content.

YouTube has only recently started making a profit. If they didn't censor videos they'd be unable to pay for the servers, storage and bandwidth that everyone seem to feel entitled for.

Well for better or worse, our freedom of speech only limits government interference. You and I and every other private citizen is free to say, and to not say, anything they like within an extremely broad range. While private companies may have an ethical requirement to avoid censorship, they don't have a legal one. No matter how big their datacenters, no matter how large their audience, you don't have the fundamental right to force them to rebroadcast your message if they do not wish to. You may dislike or even be disgusted by their decisions, but remember that anyone who has the power to limit Google's freedom has the power to limit yours.

> The sinister part is that plenty of people, left and right, will defend Google's ability to do this merely because they are "a private company".

How is this sinister, it seems trivially correct

It course Google and other companies will mess up with their moderation and should be called on it when they do but what exactly is wrong with them moderating in general?

The sinister part is that plenty of people, left and right, will defend Google's ability to do this merely because they are "a private company".

A lot of people will defend google ability to do that because they have a "first amendment right".

Adding air quotes or actual quotes doesn't change that..

> The sinister part is that plenty of people, left and right, will defend Google's ability to do this merely because they are "a private company".

People didn't merely defend Google to gatekeep information, they demanded it. A decade ago, Youtube, along with other social media companies, was happy to be pro-free speech. It's not like they have any reason to cut engagement and ad revenue. However, they after two adpocapyses and even the President demanding that they censor more misinformation, they have been pushed into the position of the gatekeeper of the internet. Given that they aren't paid for this position, they will obviously choose most cost effective-route possible, hence why they censor whatever they think will be controversial.

There was a time when Google was happy to stay out of politics and culture wars. The had few lobbyists and donated little. They were happy building a private surveillance apparatus. But the government, mostly democrats came calling and demanded action against whatever the hysteria de jour was. It was never about policing the internet. It was always about sucking funds out of Google. Then brainwashed graduates took positions at Google and here we are. The perfect mechanism for propaganda and thought control

You know, you could just... not use youtube. It actually isn't that hard.

If most people do watch YouTube, and YouTube censors stuff, then me not watching YouTube doesn't magically get that information to the other people

You can make the exact same criticism of OAN, Fox News, or MSNBC. At the end of the day, non-public venues are private.

I think every home/car repair that I did in the last year I learned by watching a youtube video. I would argue that not using youtube is actually very very difficult in 2021

When we're ingrained to all but deify corporatism, capitalism and laissez faire, it's only natural that the people will think that a private company must be allowed to do what it wants.

Such ingratiation has also poisoned the well against even considering options like having a strong/big government step in, handing Google over to the people, etc.

As long as greed is good, cash is king, and stock prices are equated with the economy, you're not going to see anyone challenge the status quo of a corporation acting in their own best interest, not mine or yours or ours.

In my very layman view, one loses the "private" status when they become a monopoly. And anyone that knows enough law to be dangerous can point out plenty of technical reasons why Google isn't a monopoly. But everyone knows a monopoly when they see one. And everyone knows when a company has the vertical and horizontal scale to crush competitors before they get out of the gate.

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