Devil's Advocate: YouTube and Twitter reporting is not #Censorship# at least not from a strictly libertarian perspective

lafielle · 2013-09-06T13:45:13+00:00

When I buy gasoline, I can choose from different companies, because they essentially offer the same interchangeable service (gasoline). So if I dislike, say, the environmental policies of one of those companies, I can go to a different one. My car won't notice.

While in theory there are non-YouTube video services, in practice these services are so excessively dwarfed by YouTube that the comparison goes blank, because while I can upload my video, I will not have a tenth of a percent of the visitors I would on YouTube. Likewise as a visitor to an alternative website, I would not have a tenth of a percent of the content available to me that I would on YouTube.

A large part of the value of YouTube is the fact that it has so many visitors and videos, which makes it have an effective monopoly on online video services.

Now I am not advocating splitting YouTube up into several smaller companies, nor am I suggesting YouTube should be ran by the government as a public infrastructure. However because of their effective monopoly, YouTube has more responsibility in regards to freedom of speech and the law than a not so large company would have. This is more than just my moral opinion. Its encoded in law and Google (and other monopoly holding companies) have already received hundreds of millions of euro's in fines for failing to carry that responsibility.

I do believe people and companies have the right to operate as they wish, but as a monopolist they have special responsibilities above and beyond those of regular companies. If they don't like that responsibility, YouTube is free to stop offering its services in the EU.

lafielle · 2013-09-06T14:17:14+00:00

Yeah... that's not what censorship means.

You seem to be confusing two separate, but related, notions. The first is whether or not it's a first amendment issue -- and on that, you're right: because the government isn't involved, it isn't a first amendment issue.

The second is whether or not it's censorship. And on that, you are obviously wrong. There's simply no way to argue otherwise. Any attempt to prevent others from speaking, writing or otherwise expressing themselves is censorship, because that's the definition of censorship. It is censorship when a website does this. It's censorship when a corporation does this. It's censorship when an individual does this. It only becomes a first amendment issue if the government does it (regardless of what level of government, due to the first amendment being incorporated against the states).

femdelusion · 2013-09-06T14:10:41+00:00

In reality, corporate censorship has been around for a long time. Plenty of newspapers avoid printing stories that will embarrass their advertisers, and there's self-evidently a 'business-friendly' editorial line in all of the so-called 'free' press. I think it's thus a tad inaccurate to pretend that the ways in which feminists seek to silence their enemies are anything new. They're merely using the same system that at one time existed to silence feminism. It makes contemporary feminists hypocrites and traitors to the historical roots of the movement, but not much more than that.

There's something broader in play here, and it's the peculiar self-image feminists have of fighting 'oppression' from within mainstream media and occupying positions of power. Here's what I think basically happened: feminists were quite right to question the ways in which man was taken as the default position, but they didn't follow through on the logic behind it - which is that gender wasn't an issue before feminism made it one. The gendered aspects of policies simply weren't considered. Sometimes this hurt men; sometimes it hurt women. But no one said "Hang on, maybe we should conscript a few million women to die for the country to even out the numbers?" It simply wasn't a topic on the horizon any more than space travel or bacterial infection was a topic on the horizon of the average hunter-gatherer. Thus, it was feminism that created gender as a topic, and it was thus inevitable that it would be feminists that control and police the boundaries of that topic. Having invented the topic, they enjoyed automatic hegemony over the discourse, and understandably (if unforgivably) are fighting tooth and nail to maintain that hegemony in the face of continued and growing resistance.

I don't think feminists have quite worked out yet how successful they've actually been. They think they're being 'radical', when they're actually repeating the same extraordinarily tired rhetoric that was around in the 70s, and merely cutting and pasting it onto issues as they come up. Feminism is the establishment. You have the POTUS repeating the 77c meme. You have Hilary Clinton saying women are the real victims of war. You have huge amounts of money getting shifted into international development projects run by feminists, gleefully interfering in cultures they don't understand to the profound detriment of men in those cultures. You have the UN parroting feminist propaganda about 'violence against women' (which is obviously categorically different from 'violence' simpliciter!). You have gender quotas being put in place by the EU. How much more establishment can feminism get before feminists work out that they're no longer fighting the man but that they are the man?

DavidByron · 2013-09-06T17:58:38+00:00

at least not from a strictly libertarian perspective

And there's the problem; libertarians are idiots who believe corporations can do no wrong, and that the exact same evil behaviour from a government is just fine if done by a corporation.

rightsbot · 2013-09-06T13:04:19+00:00

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Cardplay3r · 2013-09-06T17:54:09+00:00

Censorship is not a concept limited to government-run spaces, nor is it illegal in and of itself.

Free speech rights only make sense when they go against majority's thinking, as it's often the only type of speech that needs protection.

Also, you will be hard pressed on finding any subject that's not "content deemed objectionable by a sizeable minority of their patrons". I suppose baby and cat pictures fits the description, but that's about it.

Stephen_Morgan · 2013-09-06T14:12:49+00:00

To a libertarian setting someone on fire because you don't like what they say isn't censorship, unless you're the government. Libertarianism is nonsense, therefore the OP is irrelevant.

Title	Devil's Advocate: YouTube and Twitter reporting is not #Censorship# at least not from a strictly libertarian perspective
Author	GenderEqualityKing
Upvotes	2
Comments	11
Date	September 6, 2013 1:02 PM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1lummp/devils_advocate_youtube_and_twitter_reporting_is/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/devils-advocate-youtube-and-twitter-reporting-is.1164558 https://theredarchive.com/post/1164558

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