It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host?
It’s sad that not everyone agrees with all the choices they make?
Doesn’t seem sad to me.
The alternative, where youtube cannot choose what content to host, seems sad to me.
It’s sad that not everyone agrees with all the choices they make?
Doesn’t seem sad to me.
The alternative, where youtube cannot choose what content to host, seems sad to me.
You want to argue he did something illegal, should be in prison, should not be allowed to run? Fine, that's what the court system and respective political parties are for. But please don't tell me it's completely cool that tech CEOs get to decide who can and can't run. You may like the side they fall on this time, but how confident are you that you'll agree in the future? What if leadership changes? What do you think would happen when a politician has a credible shot of winning on a promise to break them up?
None of what you've described would prevent him from running. And in fact, thanks to Streisand Effect, much of it centers him in the public eye.
You can't buy that kind of publicity.
That's probably the moment they could face regulation. Individually, it's their platform to choose what they want to host or not.
The former guy got banned on all the services all at once. Even tiktok which he was not on. Hell, even grindr banned him.
There may not be direct coordination (maybe there is), but there's a signal and no one likes to make waves
They all took a different direction about the "pee tape":
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/opinion/comey-book-steele...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/magazine/nothing-proves-y...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
For more: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+trump+pee...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
The complaint seems to be that the corruption he was probably involved in is slightly different than the corruption Trump was talking about. Which again, standard political fare but the crackdown on the story seems suspicious. If it had been Trump there is no way such a story would have been quietened down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden#Investor_and_lobb...
> In the grand scheme of things is looks like a pretty routine case of potential corruption, but that being associated with the president's son like a big deal
If you're making the claim that simply being on a board of directors or part of a venture firm because of who you know or are related to is ipso facto corruption, unfortunately we're unlikely to ever rid ourselves of that short of random work assignments in some kind of scifi YA novel.
And, frankly, the reason these left-leaning outlets were suppressing the story was because to a lot of people the situation does meet the standard of ipso facto corruption. It seems clear that the people who were interacting with Hunter thought they were buying influence in the US political apparatus, probably the executive given his father's position; otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense. To a lot of people that basically is corruption. Although I doubt it is unusual in the US Congress if we poked around a little.
EDIT, was Russia-US war. My bad.
It came out in December that his taxes were being investigated and it was widely reported. Easy to see from the wikipedia article where there are multiple citations from major news outlets.
> It is materially interesting what business connections the US president has with (famous for being corrupt I might add) Ukraine.
What is interesting? You're playing connect the dots and taking possible tax issues from business in China and connecting it to made up stories about Burisma and saying "now prove me wrong". Again, the impetus is on the person making the argument to make an actual concrete claim. The Senate republicans already have you covered on the Ukraine part, of course (nothing).
> otherwise the decisions don't make a lot of sense
Henry Kissinger got a bunch of people to heavily invest in Theranos. You're going to need more substance than "why do rich white people keep failing upwards?" for a story here.
Which lends some rather solid credence to all the people back around the election who were saying this looks like fairly obvious corruption. I mean, the facts haven't really changed much, the only change is that the political establishment is OK with it being reported on in December. Anyone reading the initial story could have told you there was going to be an investigation.
Whether they'll find anything is an open question since the person who controls the executive is currently president - but it looks as shady as anything in US politics. There is little question that the big tech giants were making a political move when they took the story down on its first arrival, it would have swung votes and they didn't want that.
Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
> Not finding overwhelming evidence of money laundering can't be the story unless the original - silenced - accusations of corruption were also a story.
Not finding evidence can't be the story because the original story (which is what had no evidence), er, was a story? Again, an accusation can't pull itself up by its bootstraps. There has to be a there, there.
Now you may not care. I certainly don't think it is the biggest issue, this sort of corruption is pretty small biscuits compared to the damage that US politicians of Biden's tenure typically manage to do. However, the fact that there was a vigorous campaign of censorship leading up to the election is extremely weird. Which is the polite phrase for "this was a partisan lie by omission because big tech is showing their cards and those cards are Democrat".
As I suspect you know, his point was that it’s sad that YouTube is making politically motivated censorship decisions, just like China would. While we all know that Silicon Valley leans left, I think that those of us who want good things for the world would like to believe that these companies can check their politics at the door when it comes to running platforms that serve people across the political spectrum. Sadly, that’s not the case.
If YouTube identified itself as a partisan platform where speech that is not left leaning is in danger of being curtailed (which is what it is), I wouldn’t have a problem with these actions. But it masquerades as a neutral platform that is open to all, in the same way that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox masquerade as news outlets. That is a threat to democracy, because it creates the impression that only content which aligns with the platform owner’s political ideology is newsworthy or acceptable for viewing, and anything else is fringe.
My desire to give companies rights diminishes with scale.
You have no shield against private oligopolies.
There needs to be an actual free market where people have a realistic set of alternatives.
Pointing out public versus private is IMO misidentifying the problem.
For starters, Google doesn't get to raise a private army or arrest The Hill for misuse of their services.
With enough size and political influence they could do it, it just hasn't been in fashion.
There is virtually no competition to youtube in the video streaming space (in terms of sheer reach and volume), so choices that youtube make have clear political implications on what voices get heard.