> Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections.
Indeed.
I was told by all the right people that Russia hacked the 2016 election for 4 years.
To this day, Stacy Abrams acts like she's governor of Georgia and claims the election was stolen.
All of that content will not be taken down.
But yes, given the fact that 1) "safe harbor" means nothing historically, 2) there have been electoral contests in the U.S. decided within days of inauguration, and 3) there is active litigation being pursued, this chilling of speech can't be seen as anything other that Google pushing their hands on the scale here.
There is evidence[1, 2, 3] of Russian interference in the 2016 election. There is evidence[4, 5, 6, 7] of interference by Republicans in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. That content will not be taken down because it is true.
There is no evidence[8] of fraud in the 2020 election. Trump's own lawyers have admitted[9, 10, 11] that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
There couldn't possibly be other dissenting views on that. It's _true_ my friends.
Vox is clearly an impartial observer. The Senate hearings which led to impeachment hearings on Trump (because he investigated Hunter Biden, who has been under FBI investigation for over a year now... a materially true fact) could not _possibly_ have been politically motivated.
Shutting down speech does not lead to "facts" or "truth", it leads to uncertainty. YouTube is basically the Catholic church, claiming they know the facts, they know the truth, and Galileo is spouting nonsense.
If you're so confident, then let those people speak and use arguments (even your ludicrous wall of links) against them. That's rational and dare I say it, scientific.
> You have not actually provided evidence to the contrary
YouTube is arguing that I shouldn't be able to provide evidence to the contrary, which is the point.
I'm not arguing with the list of bullet points. I'm arguing with the very silly implication that there is an obvious "truth" that some MegaCorp should be able to hand down and enforce on this.
You are free to host your video evidence on your own website, following your own internal moderation rules for what is deemed credible or not. No one is taking this right from you.
Correct. But it's tantamount to saying "you can't speak in this public square, how about you pretend your front yard is a public square and speak there."
Eventually, people are going to say the hell with that and that Google's "private" management of 90% of inbound searches and content is, in fact, public.
After that, maybe we can start calling it Gov-gle or something once it's nationalized.
There are no public squares on the internet. Every DNS resolution leads to privately owned 'land'. You can be escorted off the property for nearly any reason.
Maybe Youtube gave the misconception that they were a public square when they weren't moderating as heavily.
Great citations. I think the general point is that there are more specific examples of election irregularities than there are specific examples of Russia interfering.
Indeed.
I was told by all the right people that Russia hacked the 2016 election for 4 years.
To this day, Stacy Abrams acts like she's governor of Georgia and claims the election was stolen.
All of that content will not be taken down.
But yes, given the fact that 1) "safe harbor" means nothing historically, 2) there have been electoral contests in the U.S. decided within days of inauguration, and 3) there is active litigation being pursued, this chilling of speech can't be seen as anything other that Google pushing their hands on the scale here.