In an interview on HBO, Google CEO Sundar Pichai admits his company, and especially YouTube, is working hard to censor what they deem as ‘hate speech’:
This is scary. CEO of Google openly says they “as a company” are deciding what’s “hate speech,” what’s too controversial to be on YouTube. They’re not acting as a PLATFORM (allowing open access), they’re acting as a PUBLISHER (making editorial decisions) pic.twitter.com/a7vEZAdnec
— Cliff Sims (@Cliff_Sims) June 11, 2019
In short, what Pichai is explaining here is exactly what they are doing to Steven Crowder.
None of us want harmful content on our platforms. I think last quarter alone we removed nine million videos from the platform. More recently we have introduced – just like today we do this in search. We rank content based on quality. And so we’re bringing that same notion and approach to YouTube so that we can rank higher quality stuff better and really prevent borderline content. Content which doesn’t exactly violate policies which need to be removed but which can still cause harm, and so we are working hard. It’s a hard computer science problem; it’s also a hard societal problem because we need better frameworks on what is safe speech, what’s not, and how do we as a company make those decisions. Let’s scale and get it right without making mistakes.
Crowder didn’t violate their policies and they admitted as much. Yet he was censored anyway from making money on his videos because Google and YouTube have become big brother.
This isn’t about ‘safe speech’ at all. This is a war on speech they disagree with and want to suppress.
It’s one thing to take down videos of a terrorist organization that is killing people, or videos that support those organizations. It’s wholly another thing to suppress videos because of political correctness in some kind of utopian effort to make the world a ‘safe space’ devoid of offenses. Sadly it appears that’s exactly where this world is headed.