This is what people don't get about these policies; they think that it's a debate between people who believe Trump's lie and people who don't believe Trump's lie. And sure, there are people in full force coming out here to argue that the election was stolen, but it's not just about whether or not those people get to speak. Inevitably, these policies always end up clamping down on people who talk
about misinformation, because at the scale of Youtube, moderation can't really figure out context.
This happens all over the place; policies around abuse end up getting applied to people that report that they are being abused, policies around misinformation get applied to people who report that misinformation is happening. It's kind of big news that Trump is still pushing this narrative in 2022. It actually is entirely legitimate to report that he's still saying this, he's likely to be the Republican candidate in 2024, people should know that he hasn't stopped making this claim.
There's a debate about disinformation censorship that's all about whether or not censorship is the right way to stop people from telling these lies, but even before we get to that debate, regardless of whether or not someone believes that censorship actually helps prevent the spread of misinformation -- the reality is that platforms like Youtube/Twitter are too big to effectively apply many of these rules, and often they end up affecting the opposite of their intended targets.
We have these high-level conversations about whether or not censorship on broad platforms that are nevertheless private is appropriate, and there's some value in having those conversations. But how often do we step back and ask, "are the platforms even capable of pulling off the censorship that they claim in the first place? Is Youtube even capable of censoring election misinformation without also censoring a bunch of other stuff that they didn't intend to?"
A conversation about censorship on tech platforms that doesn't take into account how clumsy these filters are in practice isn't really an accurate reflection of the reality. We have debates about whether or not private censorship on a broad scale is a good idea, but it's not even clear that any of these tech platforms are capable of doing censorship in a targeted way for any context-dependent topic.
It reminds me of how we used to have a bunch of conversations about the morality of self-driving cars making moral choices during accidents, but you zoom out and realize that even those debates are just incredibly optimistic, and in reality the cars just crash into guardrails because their sensors aren't good enough. We should not go into these conversations assuming that accurately targeted censorship of the kind that Youtube proposes even is possible at the global scale Youtube wants to operate on, we have a lot of data showing that large platforms aren't really capable of moderating with the same degree of precision as smaller platforms.