Many channels are seeing their revenues plummet as big companies pull their ads out of fear they will be shown in more controversial videos ... Strictly speakin

Many channels are seeing their revenues plummet as big companies pull their ads out of fear they will be shown in more controversial videos ... Strictly speaking it isn't censorship when Youtube removes a channel for being politically too extreme. Ugh. It's not remotely censorship to stop funding something. You don't have any obligation to pay me to jabber in front of a camera, and neither does anyone else. Putting the distinct ideas of "refusing to pay for X" and "censorship of X" in such proximity is either the result of confusion or a deliberate attempt at emotional Roveian conflation. The linked Guardian article makes no mention of YouTube removing either videos or channels. If that's not happening, then whatever is happening isn't even similar to censorship. Just because the Guardian author throws the term around so casually doesn't make it true. ...we should ask ourselves how comfortable we are with large corporations essentially setting the terms of acceptable political discourse by pressuring media platforms into banning unpopular opinions. Back in the 1970s, when video in America was dominated by three huge networks, an argument like this would have made a glimmer of sense: if advertisers pulled out of a program en masse, the network management would cancel the show in search of something more profitable, and the attitudes or opinions the program espoused might not be represented on television at all anymore. But the internet isn't like that. YouTube isn't like that. You can keep making your show, your blog, your own personal website, etc., regardless of what the advertisers do. There is no panel of bean counters controlling access to limited, valuable airwaves, because the "airwaves" are unbounded in breadth and unmoored from time. One might argue that this is the principal, signature difference between broadcast television and internet video. Even if YouTube was deleting videos outright, they're hardly the only way to share videos online. They simply aren't capable of "banning unpopular opinions" in any effective general way. It's a little tough to take "righteous" "Wiseman's" internet-censorship-based startup ideas seriously when 1) he doesn't seem to understand what censorship is 2) he doesn't seem to understand important differences between the internet and older media systems.