YouTube's product chief tells Axios that the Google-owned video site has removed thousands of COVID-19 videos — including some from the Brazilian president's channel — for violating policies related to the spread of medical misinformation.
Spreading medical misinformation is not a good thing to do – Is it stone?
It's far, far better to spread medical misinformation than it is to censor medical misinformation. Or more accurately, censor Youtube's version of misinformation. This is quite draconian to have a corporation dictate what information the world is allowed to see. It's thought control. Or an attempt at it, serving to teach the populous that they can safely become wussies and believe everything they see on the internet.
well it's a private corp, but has lots of CIA etc, gov contracts, so it's not kosher IMO.
Like these websites can boot/ban anyone for no reason, but Google/youtube are different they're basically a gov agency without any of the accountability. And the gov will protect them for that very reason, they can get away with murder, litterally. Sell your private data to Saudi-Israel terrorists, or anyone.
A guy could loose his head over that kinda stuff ;) Where's Kashogi's head, nobody knows.
well it's a private corp, but has lots of CIA etc, gov contracts, so it's not kosher IMO.
The private/public rule was made before the internet came about. Right now youtube is a monopoly, and even private corps have been recognized as subject to break-up when they obtained an overwhelming share of the market, as happened with Standard Oil and whomever it was running the nations telephone service. Corps have learned how to lobby correctly against that -- google, for one, donates money to about every media outlet in existence helping ensure they don't get bad mouthed.
Edit: I'm not sure what the solution is, as the nature of the internet makes normal competition difficult for multiple offering similar services. Usually only one rises to the top. I remember when hifive was competing with facebook, and maybe even predated them.
But one thing that could be done is to declare services like FB and YT to be utilities, granting them complete immunity of any posted content in exchange for a prohibition on any kind of censorship. All must be allowed.
Water and electric companies are also usually private, but regulated in pricing due to the non-competitive nature of their business, and cannot discriminate against customers even for things like bad credit.
