YouTube was a free speech platform only as long as it took to establish dominance. Now it's just another corporate megaphone with an inconvenient independent creator problem they are slowly solving by making it an intolerable place to have dissenting opinions.
Can't question the election, can't question coronavirus. Big Google decides what is acceptable and keeps the rules and process vague, inscrutable, and opaque so they can selectively enforce them.
WH disabling comments on its videos is not against free speech. It's not about allowing you to shout about your issues wherever you want with everyone having to see it. Disabling comments on official communication is a good move whether it's gov or private company announcements.
They won't have to deal with some top upvoted comment with: incorrect summary, incorrect restatement of something, abuse at the account or others, etc. For official announcement there's thousands of places to discuss them on the internet and literally no upside to allowing that in the same visible space as the announcement itself.
(see for example https://youtu.be/lzTUQLbzYJA and try to find any comment which provides any valuable information and isn't just heckling, totally off topic, or just abusive - I found just 1 out of ~140 - why would anyone want that on an official announcement?)
That's absolutely what it's about. There's nothing to debate about that.
It's the same reason Trump wanted to be able to block people on Twitter. For the same reason he wasn't allowed to do that, the White House shouldn't be allowed to disable YouTube commenting. But hey, it's not like there's a double standard in favor of the Democrats and Biden.
Different case. From the Twitter ruling: "... utilizing Twitter's 'blocking' function to limit certain users' access to his social media account, which is otherwise open to the public at large, because he disagrees with their speech".
That is completely different from not enabling comments on an announcement video where they're not enabled to anyone, but also not restricting anyone from seeing the content.
I’m curious if Twitter would’ve allowed him to blanket disable comments. Not blocking specific individuals, but just not having any comments at all.
They have an option for that (technically, “only people you @mention,” but as long as you never @mention anyone, it won’t let them reply), but I don’t remember hearing anything one way or the other about him trying to do that.
If you want a free speech platform you should advocate for a government funded competitor. You might think that the NSA would instantly prune comments but you'd be failing to see the 800 lbs gorilla which is the US GAO and FOIA requests that'd hamstring anything the intelligence branches tried to do (outside of, y'know, legitimate threats).
That's an interesting idea. I'm working on an alternative discussion site and have wondered why the Gov doesn't do more to foster competition rather than hold pointless hearings with the same 3 people over and over again.
Can't question the election, can't question coronavirus. Big Google decides what is acceptable and keeps the rules and process vague, inscrutable, and opaque so they can selectively enforce them.