YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
I&#x27;m starting to think that comment sections on news sites are a really bad idea.  At first I thought NPR and the like were cowards for removing theirs.<p>It&#x27;s bad enough that NYT can be pretty biased on its own, but the comment sections are always full of low-tier thinking that just push whatever narrative is currently in the Overton window.<p>What I find distressing is how people remark that a telecom and advertising giant acting as a de facto government over the public square isn&#x27;t a violation of free speech principles because they&#x27;re a &quot;private business&quot;, as if that&#x27;s an original thought that&#x27;s profound.  Funny how people say &quot;it&#x27;s a private business&quot; when it suits their own political interests.<p>We wouldn&#x27;t blindly allow company-owned cities or states to pass laws, especially vague or undefined ones, that potentially violate our rights, so why do we allow &quot;states&quot; in <i>cyberspace</i> to be run in such a way?<p>Ban people promoting violence?  Sure, why not.  I&#x27;m as against hate and violence as the next person.  But not only is censoring &quot;hate speech&quot; becoming a slippery slope at the company level, it&#x27;s bad for the public in general because it sets a greater precedent for what the big corporations that run our everyday lives can tell us what we can or cannot do, and with <i>no forgiveness</i>.  I don&#x27;t find it hard to imagine a world where individuals can be <i>instantly</i> and <i>permanently</i> banned from doing everyday things, just like they are on YouTube, because they said or did something off the platform.