I get your point, but given the proximity of Obama, Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party as a whole to Google/Alphabet and subsidiaries, it stands to reason that there's not some wall of separation between Google/YouTube management and the US government. This doesn't seem so hard to believe: we all saw that leaked video after the 2016 US elections where Sergey Brin and several other executives clearly aligned themselves with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
I'm having trouble parsing your reply. Google/Alphabet employees overwhelmingly support left-of-center politicians and causes. Management is aligned with the establishment New Left Democrats and the workers are split between populist New Leftists (e.g. Warren) and the socialists (e.g. Bernie).
Look at who the entity Alphabet itself donates political funds to the majority of the time. Look at which party's policies are more favorable to investor returns.
Examine which side of the political spectrum is overwhelmingly running media businesses through YouTube.
I did a small amount of searching and found the first and third skew strongly to the left. "Which party's policies are more favorable to investor returns" is underspecified, so I'm not sure how we can discuss it.
It might be helpful if you cited sources yourself.
Funny thing is Democratic party and Biden themselves are center-right by most reasonable international definitions. The fact that republicans try to paint Biden and Democratic parties as radical left is laughable to most people with an international view. This also gives insight into the Republican style of pushing out falsities just for the sake of being in power.
The U.S. definition of "left" is different than the international estimation of "left". I don't know why international folks feel the need to correct this. It doesn't seem to bother the folks affected (U.S. citizens and residents).
Note that the reasons for this are complicated, but the U.S. doesn't historically have to deal with monarchy, titles of nobility, vestigial aspects of governance left over from feudalism, a relatively recent postwar recovery period, or government implicated into churches. For instance, there's no American conservative impulse to support the monarchy because there's no American monarchy. The lack of that issue means other things are discussed instead.
This is correct. Also, the influence of nationalism - even under Trump - is much smaller on the American Right than in other countries. The US is both a very large country and a federation, and so a strong national identity doesn't really exist. People on the Right tend to be more nationalistic (they tend to want more immigration restrictions, the "melting pot" model and prefer English as the national language), and those on the Left tend to be more internationalist. But the degree is just much different than other countries.
Monarchism, a formal class system and state establishment of religion tend to be rejected by large swathes of both the American Left and Right.
> Funny thing is Democratic party and Biden themselves are center-right by most reasonable international definitions. The fact that republicans try to paint Biden and Democratic parties as radical left is laughable to most people with an international view.
We just had a summer in which armed gangs of self-identified Leftists roamed the streets of our major cities, set fire to buildings, harassed random passers-by and assaulted (and in a few cases, murdered) anyone they unilaterally labeled a "fascist" (i.e. anyone to the right of Mao). These Democrats you speak of were for three months ignoring the violence; when they occasionally admitted that violence had taken place, they claimed it was all perpetrated by right-wing agitators; when that didn't work (because who actually believes that right-wingers are spray-painting anarchy symbols, "BLM," "ACAB," and other slogans?), their propaganda mouthpieces calling it "mostly peaceful protest."
Do I think Biden is some hard leftist? No. But certainly his party feels extremely constrained in criticizing the hard left, and also feel that they must kowtow down to them.
> This also gives insight into the Republican style of pushing out falsities just for the sake of being in power.
This is a complete non-sequitur. The fact that US definitions of left and right (as mentioned in a sibling comment) differ from international ones "gives insight" into one particular political party lying? What?
Isn't the objective of every political party to obtain power, or at least influence? Don't all political parties "push[] out falsities" in order to obtain or retain power?
The one wrinkle here is that the Republicans (nor anyone on the Right - US definition) absolutely lack real political power, since they have no control over the bureaucracy, the media or the academe. Trump himself figured this out much too late, and wasted years appointing people who had no interest in carrying out his agenda. But in some ways, this is the exception that proves the rule.
But the "government" (well, several senators, the legislative branch of the power) did just politely ask YouTube to start censoring content.
I'd be fine with videos marked with something like "YouTube believes this video is untrue and spreads dangerous disinformation" put before or even over a video. But taking videos down is quite another matter.
God would I love to live in a world where Youtube videos, facebook comments, instagram stories weren't the _actual_ source of most people's news (and by news I mean baseless things people with obvious biases and insidious motives say).
News sources are always biased, even when they try to stay neutral. The trick is to learn to extract useful nuggets of information from a number of biased streams. Having these streams biased differently helps.
This is much like raw data in science: all data have noise and imperfections, but statistics help extract a signal if there is one.
I think anywhere that libel and slander are enforced. Any random person with any random agenda can write on facebook or make youtube videos advancing that agenda.
> News sources are always biased, even when they try to stay neutral. The trick is to learn to extract useful nuggets of information from a number of biased streams. Having these streams biased differently helps.
I'm not talking about bias, I'm talking about obvious made-up QAnon garbage.
> This is much like raw data in science: all data have noise and imperfections, but statistics help extract a signal if there is one.
I would argue that baseless data is not data at all.
My understanding of GP point is that majority of social media companies is negative to Trump and positive to Biden. The difference with Russia is that media is controlled by government, but the original point is that it is healthier when media scrutinises government
As I recall, after his election, Twitter explicitly updated its TOS to basically say that they don't apply to certain public figures, in effect admitting that he does violate the TOS but they are unwilling to do anything about it.
> My understanding of GP point is that majority of social media companies is negative to Trump and positive to Biden
I don't think this is accurate, unless you mean that most employees of big tech vote/contribute Democrat. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that bias exists on the platform.
Your comparison is off.