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Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

I think people here are fundamentally misunderstanding what happened here. There is a nonprofit, the "Freedom Forum Institute" that awarded this award. Only the award ceremony was sponsored by YouTube. It's common practice for nonprofits to use awards like this as an opportunity to ask for donations, and for the company associated with that person to offer to sponsor the awards ceremony.

I don't see anything to indicate that this award was created by YouTube or that YouTube decided to award this to her.

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Even if you completely ignore whatever sponsorship YouTube has with the organization, the sheer idea of awarding YouTube a prize related to freedom of expression/freedom of speech is what's laughable.

I suspect some people think the only possible reason YouTube could win this award is because of the sponsorship of the award ceremony. Because how else would you explain it?

The name "Freedom Forum Institute" itself sounds suspiciously doublespeak-ish, and makes me think it's actually a pro-censorship organisation.

https://www.freedomforum.org/about/council-of-advisors/

CNN, Fox News, Charles Koch Institute, Comcast, a bunch of VC firms, and Susan Wojcicki's _own mother_.

A vulgar display of power.

Wow that is insane. They don't give a single f.

It seems that companies do not care about hiding their rotten values anymore. Law enforcement does not punish them and consumers keep buying, why care?

In the case this goes viral, they will post a copy from some previous non-apology, take a hit for a couple of weeks and do it all over again.

Disgusting that these types of organizations are allowed tax exempt status.

Does the Freedom Forum Institute do societally beneficial things or are they just a prestige laundering service?

An award that the recipient pays for isn't a meritorious award.

Even more when the charitable foundation pays their CEO lavishly [0]. Pay to play seems to be quite in line of this institute's DNA.

[0] http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/as-freedom-forum-pos...

Oh. I don't care that there is some thirdparty. Its negligable, the only important actors in the event are: - Susan the CEO of Youtube - Youtube team - Google/Alphabet team - People/Users

People share the optics of the event. The fact this institute got into this mess is kinda sad, but their impactfulness here is really 0. Despite all that it seems like shade scheme to nominate some rich ceo and beg for money to make some fakish award. But like I said nobody cares about them... there are worse scams to fight against.

You're right, it's really just an average non-profit money-waste, dedicated to congratulating mainstream news figures for defining what mainstream news is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Neuharth#Freedom_Forum

Giving the award to Susan, who fought valiantly to narrow the Overton window on YouTube to align better with that of mainstream news, makes perfect sense.

Actually, most fundamentally understand what's happened. We've all seen these things before; the embarrassing identifying characteristics of unchecked power.

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