The powers that be at YouTube don’t like truth. From John Hinderaker at Powerline:
I related here the fact that YouTube deleted the livestream of our program today with Heather Mac Donald, in which she demolished the anti-police myths propagated by the Marxist Black Lives Matter and other leftist elements. It was too much for YouTube to take, apparently.
I appealed YouTube’s deletion of the video, and it didn’t take long for cooler heads to prevail. A little while ago, we got this email from YouTube:
That is good. Eight minutes after that email, however, YouTube sent us a second email, saying that our video has been age-restricted:
I have no idea what there could be in Heather’s presentation that is more unsuitable for consumption by teenagers than most of YouTube’s content. Maybe we will contest this at some point, but for now we may as well celebrate victory.
What remains unexplained, of course, is why our video was banned in the first place. YouTube told us the American Experiment/Mac Donald video was “flagged for review.” As I noted here, “flagged” is a weasel word. Was Heather’s presentation “flagged” by a computer algorithm? If so, based on what? Was it “flagged” by a YouTube employee? If so, why, and based on what internal YouTube guidelines? Was it “flagged” by a goofball leftist? If so, on what basis, and why did YouTube immediately respond to such “flagging” by deleting the video?
Go here to read the rest. The contemporary Left tends to be pretty lousy at argument, which is why they use any means at their disposal to silence all dissenting opinions. The Left is busily attempting to convince Americans, by their actions, that another civil war is not the worst alternative.
Twitter, FB and Twitter should be boycotted. Conservative demonstrators and all right thinking people need to march on Corporations who advertise on these social network sites and call them out for helping to deny free speech.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube should either be broken up as the monopolies they are under the antitrust laws, or be regulated as public utilities.
I have been about as close to a First Amendment and free speech absolutist as one can possibly be for the vast majority of my 5 decades on this earth, so that is not a government step I consider lightly. I strongly believe that private actors ordinarily should be able to not only express their own views, but to restrict views that run counter to their mission. But, in the age of the Internet and social media, things have changed. This is the dominant form of communication in our time, and the actions of a very few powerful tech giants effectively have final say over which voices will be heard and which will be completely shut out of the public square.
That is unacceptable.
Jay:
When you annex so much public space that no one else has any, the claim “I can do what I like with my own property” has to be modified.
Each of the Big Tech entities is a corporate person, and corporate persons have rights, too.
The First Amendment’s guarantees protect you against the government, not against the actions of private persons acting in a free market system.
If you don’t like monopolistic oligarchs marginalizing you, start your own tech giant.
/sarcasm off
Youtube really has been upping its usage of age restrictions as a means to censor. It gives them the excuse of “we’re not actually removing the video.” But it does make it impossible for people not logged into an account to watch the video (without workarounds). So they not only discourage viewing, they also get a record of people who watched wrongthink videos.
I’m thinking the best thing to do would be to vacate their intellectual property claims so people could do just that.
Anyways, it’s interesting to me that Theodore Roosevelt’s stock with conservatives has (or ought to have) gone up with conservatives grappling with how to deal with the the tech oligarchs.