People are trying various escape hatches in the responses but it obviously is.
First, censorship can be carried out by non-state actors. Second, they treat these videos differently to intentionally limit their reach and appeal.
First, censorship can be carried out by non-state actors. Second, they treat these videos differently to intentionally limit their reach and appeal.
"Start your own website" is a brush-off when faced with corporate cenosrhip. People have tried it. Daily Stormer had several domains pulled, Gab had payment processors and Google Play ban them.
There is a very real problem with corporate harassment for views their management finds worthy of targeting and people are dismissing it because they like the targeting. For now anyway.
I don't see this as a "problem," per se. There are no guarantees in life that you will have unfettered access to services like this, particularly if you use them in a manner the providers deem against their terms.
"Freedom of expression" is just that, the freedom to voice your opinion. It's not the "Right of attention".
Furthermore, like any freedom there are limitations when your freedom starts endangering the freedom of others. We don't allow hate speech and death threats, so where does anti-vax fit in?
“I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore. I don’t believe that we should optimize for neutrality..” -@jack
Glad to hear it. And, because you just changed your view on neutrality, I just changed mine on anti-trust, eminent domain and tech platforms.
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/109545757231478784...
It's true. These platforms don't owe users a freedom to voice their opinions.
But since they're making editorial decisions, we, as a society, don't owe them protection from libel laws for example. And we should definitely look into monopolistic practices of VISA and Mastercard because it's much more serious than some microblogging site.
Youtube doesn't accept porn for example, which is why people that want to share entirely legal videos of consenting adults having sex created their own platforms to do it. You never hear complaints from them about being censored. Because they were not.
When did it became acceptable to go into someone's house, start shouting about some crazy religion, then act surprised crying censorship and oppression when they finally ask you to leave?
We either need government regulations for these companies or they should be split up. This problem goes further than freedom of expression.
"You can't smoke in my house" "call all the papers I'm being censored!"
If you want to have a real discussion about it you have to concede that there are degrees to everything. Which is why some form of, according to your definition, censorship are illegal and some are not. What youtube is doing here is entirely supported by the constitution. There is not even a gray area, or a maybe or a second interpretation, nothing.
Youtube is entirely within their rights, as is every one else, to decided what they want to host, share and promote on their platform, spending their own resources mind you as hosting and transferring videos costs a lot of money, and specially they have the right to decide with whom to enter into a financial contract, which is what they are doing here. I will argue forcing them to agree to pay or promote someone they are not legally required to is censorship.
Otherwise, if you can't or won't realize there are degrees of what you call "censorship" and not all is the same then there is no point in having the discussion.