If it's anything like network TV when YouTube was a rising star the people left that have been deemed acceptable will only be the ones that old people want to watch. The kids I suspect will move on like they always have to places with freer expression.
This isn’t just censorship by a monopolist megacorp that operates a common carrier utility and the new digital town square. It’s also election interference and campaigning. Democracy isn’t just what happens at the poll booth. It’s everything that happens earlier in the process. Shutting down one set of political voices and allowing others should be treated as illegal electioneering and a violation of campaign financing laws. After all I don’t see any such censorship being applied to BLM or antifa affiliated channels. They were allowed to use all the Silicon Valley platforms to coordinate and evangelize political violence throughout 2020 and continue to exist there today.
This implies a dichotomy I don't see. Does an educated society not control information?
Unshaped signal is just noise. I think every society controls information in some way; "How much and how is it controlled" is the real question.
YouTube isn't obligated to share the Oath Keeper content; they're perfectly free to host it themselves. We are also perfectly free to decide YouTube's info-shaping is not to our liking and watch something else. It's freedom all around, including the freedom to not propagate a signal.
In many ways, this is like saying... we have the right to block Internet access. If you don't like it, you can build your own ISP. In many ways, the barriers being setup by providers is too high. What happens when someone gets blocked from GCP, AWS, Azure, etc, Scaleway, etc. Then they go to host it on their ISP and they get blocked. Let's say that it isn't right-wing content they are blocking, but left-wing once the right gets back into power and they say that the content is linked to socialism or communism. Then the left while whine, and say... but muh free speech, but they had no problem doing it. If the content blatantly violates some law, let's say for example... child porn, snuff films, etc. Then yes, they have a legal obligation. But right now, they are just removing whatever pleases the vocal sensitive group that is offended that someone says something that they don't like. Who cares if people says the earth is flat, that vaccines have 5G chips, or that Bill Gates is a reptillian. The best course of action for any of these challenges is educating society and society can make consciousnesses choices for themselves.
If one can't find anyone to store and forward one's content, then yes... One's content will be hard to find online. It's a big world, and that practically isn't happening much. YouTube has competitors that host content YouTube drops, be it for copyright violations or for "significant evidence presented in a court of law against a creator for a very egregious crime."
> Let's say that it isn't right-wing content they are blocking, but left-wing
Anecdotally, I've gotten suspended from Facebook way more often for espousing Communist thought and asking if Americans are fit for running a Democracy. Which is fine ... Their service, their rules. They're not obligated to host me and I'm not obligated to use them.
I mostly agree with what you're saying here, however I don't think the tech environment is structured in a way through the government to allow this behavior right now. If ISPs were treated as a utility making it very difficult for someone to get blocked, and same for cloud providers.. and YouTube, Facebook, etc had to donate a percentage of resources to comparable open source solutions the were easy to self-host, then I'd agree with you. But they do exactly the opposite. We have monopolies attacking and trying to prevent free speech alternatives.
I think this would only cement those whom can't break out of their own confirmation bias as they spiral into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I remember Jordan Peterson once saying: "A good man is not a harmless man but a man who is dangerous and has it under control."
