AD1184
Celestial
Overnight, Google-owned YouTube has deleted the channel of the fairly mainstream (and Murdoch-owned) radio broadcaster TalkRadio from its platform. The channel had around 250,000 subscribers, and it is a British Office of Communications-regulated broadcaster. To my knowledge, it has not faced any official censure for being in breach of Ofcom regulations or guidelines.
TalkRadio: YouTube kicks channel off its platform
The channel mostly hosted a livestream of its radio broadcasts, with an in-studio video feed of the presenters hosting each programme, and also uploaded recordings of past programmes and highlights, like interviews with specific people.
It has tended to hold a sceptical editorial view of state-implemented lockdowns in response to the Covid pandemic, although not all presenters share that view, and it is speculated that it is for this reason that YouTube decided to remove the channel.
I think this is a step too far. I suspected that once they started banning those like InfoWars a few years ago, whom I do not agree with on anything, there would be an ever-narrower selection of acceptable opinions on Big Tech platforms, conforming to culturally leftist, or 'woke', views shared by the people who run such companies.
Defenders of this policy will say that they own the platform, therefore they get to decide what views are expressible on it. However, YouTube has created something of a monopoly for itself, and there is something rather dishonest about its current practice of political censorship. It built up a platform that held the promise of democratizing television, allowing any content producer to find their audience, free of the limitations and costs of traditional broadcasts. One major driving force of this was its permissiveness about what sort of views were expressible. Now, once it has captured its audience, who are habituated to watching YouTube videos, it is selectively removing channels which do not conform to YouTube's own politics. I would have said fair enough if it had had this policy from the outset, but it is thanks largely to the previous absence of such a policy that it has achieved its monopoly of hosting user-generated content.
TalkRadio: YouTube kicks channel off its platform
The channel mostly hosted a livestream of its radio broadcasts, with an in-studio video feed of the presenters hosting each programme, and also uploaded recordings of past programmes and highlights, like interviews with specific people.
It has tended to hold a sceptical editorial view of state-implemented lockdowns in response to the Covid pandemic, although not all presenters share that view, and it is speculated that it is for this reason that YouTube decided to remove the channel.
I think this is a step too far. I suspected that once they started banning those like InfoWars a few years ago, whom I do not agree with on anything, there would be an ever-narrower selection of acceptable opinions on Big Tech platforms, conforming to culturally leftist, or 'woke', views shared by the people who run such companies.
Defenders of this policy will say that they own the platform, therefore they get to decide what views are expressible on it. However, YouTube has created something of a monopoly for itself, and there is something rather dishonest about its current practice of political censorship. It built up a platform that held the promise of democratizing television, allowing any content producer to find their audience, free of the limitations and costs of traditional broadcasts. One major driving force of this was its permissiveness about what sort of views were expressible. Now, once it has captured its audience, who are habituated to watching YouTube videos, it is selectively removing channels which do not conform to YouTube's own politics. I would have said fair enough if it had had this policy from the outset, but it is thanks largely to the previous absence of such a policy that it has achieved its monopoly of hosting user-generated content.
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