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Comment by syndacks | Hacker News Reader

For as smart as many of the people on this site are, I'm shocked how many don't understand the fundamental principal that YouTube is a private company and can do whatever they please with speech. This isn't the government, this isn't first amendment.

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You're mischaracterizing the outrage. Virtually everyone is making a normative argument against this censorship, not a technical one. Google is perfectly within their rights to host what they want, everyone can agree with that. Whether they should engage in censorship (beyond what is required by law) is what everyone is debating.

This thread starts out with the assumption that this was the result of a partisan request for censorship.

That is concerning, surely, but there's a big difference between a handful of government partisans asking a private corporation to censor content -- versus the Government forcing a private corporation to censor content. The former is not a violation of the first amendment.

I disagree. There are many here (including you) that conflate the idea of 1st Amendment "freedom of speech" and the general idea of censorship. You even use the word "censorship" to provoke a knee-jerk reaction as if censorship is automatically evil and we ought to have some inherent right to not be censored. We do have such a right, from the 1st Amendment, and it doesn't apply to YouTube.

Companies censor, as they often should. They should censor against violence, exploitation, DDOS attacks, and much more. They should censor to protect their viewers and their brands. If you want to spew hate speech, exploit some vulnerable people, build a devoted following of uneducated people then do it on your own dime.

And you are conflating the principle of freedom of speech with the implementation (the 1st Amendment). Many believe that people do indeed have an inherent, natural right to not be censored, while also acknowledging that 1A is only partial protection and that companies are free to choose what content they host.

Yes, companies are free to censor content as they should. It's not only a shrewd business decision but it is also good for anyone watching the platform. Censorship is even done to comply with the law, as is the case with child pornography. Censorship is not the inherently bad thing you make it out to be. By saying the word "censorship" as if it's synonymous with "bad" you are piggybacking off the idea that our legal rights are being violated, as if someone is experiencing a tremendous loss because they can't post their specific brand of hate speech on a popular website. The reality is that our rights are not violated and such content has proven to be directly harmful to other people and harmful to YouTube as a brand.

You'd think we were in China considering how many people here think that our internet overlords know better about what we should and shouldn't see. Censorship in China is mostly through private platforms as well. And regardless of that, mostly people there buy the story that a particular bit of censored information is a threat to the nation and worthy of censorship.

Why is censorship suddenly a required response to every supposed existential threat to our nation now? In fact, this trend of censorship is an existential threat to the nation.

He made no claims about any entity knowing better than any other entity.

Also, if you think a “private” company in China is even remotely the same as a private company in America you’re in for a surprise.

I'm in for no such surprise. I worked at (and also ran) some of these companies in China and the business charters, org charts, and operations were not much different from US companies. And private companies on both sides of the Pacific can be tools of the government.

Google is an arm of the State Department [1] and Facebook and other SV companies have ties to the CIA [2].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-inves...

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