It’s sad that not everyone agrees with all the choices they make?
Doesn’t seem sad to me.
The alternative, where youtube cannot choose what content to host, seems sad to me.
You want to argue he did something illegal, should be in prison, should not be allowed to run? Fine, that's what the court system and respective political parties are for. But please don't tell me it's completely cool that tech CEOs get to decide who can and can't run. You may like the side they fall on this time, but how confident are you that you'll agree in the future? What if leadership changes? What do you think would happen when a politician has a credible shot of winning on a promise to break them up?
None of what you've described would prevent him from running. And in fact, thanks to Streisand Effect, much of it centers him in the public eye.
You can't buy that kind of publicity.
That's probably the moment they could face regulation. Individually, it's their platform to choose what they want to host or not.
As I suspect you know, his point was that it’s sad that YouTube is making politically motivated censorship decisions, just like China would. While we all know that Silicon Valley leans left, I think that those of us who want good things for the world would like to believe that these companies can check their politics at the door when it comes to running platforms that serve people across the political spectrum. Sadly, that’s not the case.
If YouTube identified itself as a partisan platform where speech that is not left leaning is in danger of being curtailed (which is what it is), I wouldn’t have a problem with these actions. But it masquerades as a neutral platform that is open to all, in the same way that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox masquerade as news outlets. That is a threat to democracy, because it creates the impression that only content which aligns with the platform owner’s political ideology is newsworthy or acceptable for viewing, and anything else is fringe.
My desire to give companies rights diminishes with scale.
There is virtually no competition to youtube in the video streaming space (in terms of sheer reach and volume), so choices that youtube make have clear political implications on what voices get heard.
