Civil society to YouTube: stop helping Russia suppress free speech

Google wants YouTube to be a place for cat videos and shitty listicals, where people escape from their lives to laugh and be influenced by advertisers. If your content is even remotely confronting, advertisers don&#x27;t want it, and Google doesn&#x27;t want it.<p>We really have nobody to blame but ourselves for this. Sure, video hosting is expensive, and most people can&#x27;t be bothered to visit more than their default 6 or 7 apps, but we&#x27;ve had a decade of people shouting that from the wings and nobody has managed to fix it yet.

Didn&#x27;t YouTube (and many others) make it clear that they&#x27;re plenty willing to work with government officials to censor free speech that the officials don&#x27;t like?<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, YouTube is well within its rights to decide what content they do and don&#x27;t want to host and distribute. Its clear that these companies are, in fact, for profit businesses though.<p>They aren&#x27;t going to stand behind free speech and wouldn&#x27;t even touch the idea of &quot;absolute free speech&quot; which is itself a confusing and misunderstood argument that we can somehow have free speech with limitations.<p>At best, YouTube will inconsistently protect free speech in some areas and censor it in others. The only real answer is for users to go elsewhere, ideally to something they themselves control, if they want to avoid most risks of censorship.

Every corporation has to deal with the laws of the country they are operating in.<p>Most European countries have significant restrictions on what is &quot;free speech&quot;, Google will censor those as well to follow local laws.

Youtube isn&#x27;t your friend. It&#x27;s not going to act in its own interests and those interest will rarely align with yours.<p>This includes willing cooperation with any government they want to do business with, including Russia. This is one reason why I think China banning Youtube is a policy mistake (for them): they could exert more control over Youtube if they allowed it in mainland China.<p>I feel like every story like this is like Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football. Just how many times do we need to do a surprised Pikachu face?<p>Youtube, Meta and Twitter all suppress content related to a certain current Middle East conflict [1] and they do so largely to keep the US State Department happy.<p>My point here is that this &quot;free speech&quot; and &quot;censorship&quot; tends to get used very selectively by people in a way that oddly coincides with their world view on certain topics. If you&#x27;re against Youtube censoring anti-Russian content as per this post (as I am) you should also be against suppression of Middle Eastern news and content too yet I so often find a complete double standard here.<p>Oh and literally nobody is a free speech absolutist (including me, except arguably for Noam Chomsky) yet many pretend to me but again, this tends to be self-serving in a way aligned with their own views on things.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hrw.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;metas-broken-promises&#x2F;systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hrw.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;metas-broken-promises&#x2F;...</a>

People want YouTube to censor Russians in EU but not censor Russians in Russia...

Google will do whatever makes them profit. They&#x27;ve made it pretty clear that nothing controversial in any way is allowed on youtube. Best find some place else to distribute information.

If you are an international company, you play by their rules. If you are dealing with a totalitarian dictator, then expect you&#x27;re going to have some unsavory rules to contend with and have a PR team ready for any blow back. This is some groups unhappy with mean person in charge being mean.<p>Civil society would be better if people were not taking advantage of free speech and posting whatever non-sense that gets passed as legit causing chaos and turmoil within the masses.

I&#x27;m from Russia and I watch pro Ukraine videos on YouTube without any problems. Yes, it may have blocked some videos, but if it didn&#x27;t, it could get blocked in Russia completely, and then what? Me and all the other people who wants to see content from other countries won&#x27;t be able to do that, which will only make things worse.

Bros, they “suppress free speech” in the US too. Try protesting that maybe?

If anything, YouTube search in Russian context is extremely West-biased. It&#x27;s impossible to find any original source of Putin saying anything, for example. Yesterday he was talking about Zelensky not being legitimate. The search results are literally: Radio Liberty, some Azerbajani channel, Ukrainian channel called FREEДОМ - obvious pro-western vibes, DW, Ukrainian UNIAN, BBC etc. It&#x27;s one thing if they were blocking these and only showing goverment propaganda, but it&#x27;s actually the other way around.

Anti-Russian channels scattered on Earth anywhere except of Russia are complaining about that right now.

Yeah we need a CivilTube, that will work very well.

Show me one instance when Google changed anything significant like this (say something that risks it getting blocked in a coutnry with &gt; 100 mil. people) after a simple public appeal.