3 ms·

Youtube doesn't need to support free speech. They're a private company, not the govenrment.

• brain_dev 8y ago
  So surely you take no issue with Google developing a search engine that does not support free speech then, either?
  • nrb 8y ago
    The following are not equal: 1) Google has decided that it does not want this content on their platform. 2) The totalitarian government has decided that nobody can access this content on any platform.
    • darpa_escapee 8y ago
      Let's be clear here, it's not that they don't want content on their platform: it's that content blatantly violates their rules. Encouraging the harassment of families of school shooting victims is pretty heinous, and not something I'd want affiliated with my brand. I also wouldn't want my brand to become a platform for someone who perpetuates conspiracy theories that cause true believes to pick up weapons and become terrorists, simply because that's how he makes a buck. After all, both Google and Twitter have spent close to a decade silencing religious extremists on their platforms. Where were the free speech advocates when fundamentalist Muslims were silenced on Twitter and couldn't use the platform to spread their message?
      • nrb 8y ago
        Yeah, I equated the two concepts: they created rules to specify what they do and don't want on their platform. Sorry if it came across as them deciding arbitrarily on the fly.
  • yacn 8y ago
    False equivalency as has been said and I don't use google anyways...
• pmoriarty 8y ago
  People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue. It's not a first amendment issue because the first amendment only forbids the government from censoring speech, and private companies are not the government. However, it's still a free speech issue, and it's still a censorship issue. Just not a first amendment issue. Private companies can still censor and can stifle/forbid free speech.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue. No, people disagree on the meaning, scope, nature, and purpose of “free speech”, despite agreeing that “free speech” is a good thing. It's true that the First Amendment (especially when combined with incorporation under the 14th) directly embodies a reasonably close approximation of one of the viewpoints of what free speech is all about, while simultaneously looking like a narrow special case of one of the other viewpoints. But the nature of the disagreement here is not confusion between a principle and a legal embodiment of that principle, but a fundamental clash of beliefs about the nature of the named principle.
  • passiveincomelg 8y ago
    This is the risk people take when they are too lazy to host their content themselves.