No, that's just not believable. YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public'

No, that's just not believable. YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public's own good. They've gone to the best schools, lived cosseted lives in safe, sparkly clean neighborhoods, and never had to shower after work instead of before work. They're totally out of touch with what regular people think, yet believe they know better than regular people and have not only a right, but a duty to guide the public conversation in what they see as the right direction. YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents. If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced. There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.