In my opinion the important thing to remember is that Youtube could easily do something about this. It seems like there's a trend in a lot tech-centric companie

In my opinion the important thing to remember is that Youtube could easily do something about this. It seems like there's a trend in a lot tech-centric companies to save money automating away actual content review as well as customer interaction. But humans are entirely capable of reviewing content and giving detailed explanations for why something has been judged a certain way, especially if you have them work alongside an automated system that simplifies the process for them. I realize that minimizing human labor is a big part of how these sorts of business models achieve their profitability, but problems like this aren't going to go away as long as that's the norm. And I don't just mean poor explanations for policy decisions either. The core issue is bigger than that imo. The information age has privatized a lot of the modern 'public' social/cultural spaces. For nations that value both the freedom of speech and the preservation of historically/culturally significant speech this is problematic. It reduces the public's ability to express itself but also their ability to look back on old expressions and learn about the history or cultural paradigms behind them. This isn't really supposed to be a rant at Google in specific. They're just the topic at hand so they're the easy punching bag. In general, customer service aside, I think they do good work and more importantly they exercised the necessary foresight and resources to develop their products into what they are today. I'm by no means implying we should socialize social media... no pun intended. But I do think there needs to be more discourse about how these trends will affect the future of speech and historical censorship. Right now it's just a modern problem in its infancy, but decades from now people who want to see visceral content depicting firsthand experiences from events like those happening in Syria, or the Arab Spring, are going to be getting censored history. What if China started pressuring foreign companies, via benevolent coercion such as financial incentives, to implement systems that made finding information about Tienanmen Square more difficult? The privatized nature of these platforms makes this sort of attack easier as well. And I don't have a good solution, but that's why I think there needs to be more dialogue about the future of online media in general and what direction we want to steer it in.