Its Youtube, not a public space and not something government controlled. They are free to say what is and isn't on their system. What if you made a system and someone took that from you and they demanded that ISIS be given equal rights to people with your political leanings?
Don't tolerate intolerance. Thats not tolerance is spineless.
But I think Youtube is a public space, one of the most important ones there is right now. The fact that it is owned by a large corporation rather than a government is immaterial.
I also think the power Google of today wields over my life is probably comparable to the power the government of 1789 wielded over its citizens.
Is it really wise to so readily accept arbitrary behavior from Google just because they're a private company? At a certain point, companies become big and powerful enough that I think it's reasonable to hold them to similar standards as governments.
You thinking YouTube is a public space doesn't make it so, even if you put is in italics.
YouTube is a company. It has employees, a business model, and a TOS. It decides what is acceptable content. You are free to patronize another video site if you don't like it.
In the 90s, if you argued your local mall was a public space because a lot of people spent time there and that's where the conversation was happening, you would be just as wrong.
In a certain sense, a mall is a public space, though. Meaning, you can't exclude people simply because they belong to a protected class. A privately-owned mall is very different from a privately-owned home or club in that regard.
Are you disputing whether they should be allowed according to our current laws, or whether they actually exist? There are plenty of women-only or men-only or black-only or Jewish-only or Chinese-only or ... etc. private clubs/organizations. For example Augusta National Golf Club only recently admitted women, and solely due to public pressure / protest; not due to any legal requirement as far as I know.
Whether they should. I'm absolutely sure there exist organizations that break the law exist (sidestepping the issue of whether or not this does break the law).
Actually, some US states (including California, Massachusetts and Colorado) have concluded that malls are equivalent to public "Main Street" space and must be open venues for public speech. This notion is disputed elsewhere. See https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/12/22/protests-first-amen...
Your argument doesn't hold up as long as there are compeditors. When you start needing government or regulator approval and it comes qith strings attached, things change.
There should be some kind of line drawn when a service is something people are essentially forced to rely on or is so ubiquitous. "Common carrier" phone companies aren't allowed to selectively censor your use of them, and it seems reasonable that something the likes of Facebook should maybe have to be held to a similar standard when it's so ubiquitous and a major part of modern communication. There are also precedents such as malls not being allowed to limit speech on the premises in California, along with some other states having similar enforcement of certain rights on some kinds of private property.
The real effects of leaving ISIS recruiting videos on youtube is people dying. They actually do succeed in recruiting people and those people do bad things. Shouldn't this be stopped?
That is really a trollish comparison. The US military is under the under the control of a democratically elected government. Even considering that there have been abuses, There is a categorical ethical difference.
The ISIS videos are often calls to violence, showing beheadings and encouraging beheadings. Consider which group intentionally targets civilians, which groups condone vs punish rape, which groups answers to people vs outdated books.
Either way its not my choice, its Google's choice. Oh and the law has some say, calls incite to violence are not protected under even the first amendment. Google has to remove at least some of these because they are illegally asking for violence and people. This law has just been selectively enforced because that is how strong the First Amendment is. It is so strong it protects even more speech in more places than was intended.
I don't consider this trollish at all, I'm legitimately asking. Just because you don't like that your argument can be flipped around doesn't change anything.
> Consider which group intentionally targets civilians, which groups condone vs punish rape, which groups answers to people vs outdated books.
I do consider that and I can't defend America in this case. We have historically targeted civilians, condoned rape, and definitely answer to a book that I strongly consider outdated.
This is the problem that I have with censorship: It usually ends up being OK if the "good guys" do it, but we can't let "them" do the same thing, or people might listen to them!
The argument cannot be flipped and that is why I called it trollish. There is no hypocrisy.
The US military does not post beheading videos, or any of the rebuttals I pposted easlier. There are periods were we did bad things, but those are the exception, and we take active effort to fix. the US military has ethics panels and a court system. Can you show me the ISIS court system?
Today the level of scandal is places like gitmo or drone strikes. We have an army of lawyers overseeing both. Waterboarding as inhumane as it is not the condoned rape of 14 year girl every day for 6 months because she was born into the wrong ethnicity.
One side has done wrong things. The other wants to do wrong things. The ethical line is clear.
EDIT- Also thank you for finally bringing up the real issue, the slippery slope.
My rebuttal to that is that what was posted was generally not legal as it was. Speech that incites violences is not protetected in the United States. The government is allowed to silence people doing things like calling for "Death to all Infidels". This isn't censorship this is enforcing laws we have already had for centuries.
I'm sorry, but I can't disagree with you more. Your decision to make this an "us vs them" issue seems to be clouding your judgment on who should be able to speak their mind, and who shouldn't. There is a huge amount of hypocrisy here, and if you can't see it, then I'm not sure I can help you.
I wouldn't oppose videos promoting many other militaries, including at the extreme end of the "them" spectrum the Russian military. Because they would follow Youtube rules and US laws. The Russians for whatever their other flaws understand bilateral communication and have the ability to treat people like people. This is something specifically ISIS (and some other extremist groups) cannot do.
Just like the US military the Russians are imperfect but after WWII they didn't promote rape as a benefit of joining their armed services. ISIS today presents the option of raping infidels as a virtue and a reason for potential rapists to join. Russia doesn't promote attacks on unarmed civilians, ISIS does.
This is only us vs them issue I have is difficulty endorsing people who embrace rape, attacks on non-combatants and other embracing of war crimes. No other group that is a world power does this that I am aware of. No group is perfect, but most groups at least make an attempt to punish people who participate in war crimes like this. ISIS promotes these war crimes.
> The US military is under the under the control of a democratically elected government
Democracy is not an blank check that allows anything. Even some of the worst leaders in History were actually elected through regular, due process. And there is no principle that shows that Democracies don't engage in Mass-Murder of civilians (erm, Dresden? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? And many others)...
Allende is another one, actually elected by a small minority of people because of the voting process. Before the coup by Pinochet, he used Pinochet (then a general) to brutally repress the political opposition in his country.
Clear Whataboutism, If we do nothing but look back we cannot go forward. We understand those were mistakes and we learned from them and we are better now. ISIS is not our ethical equal, they endorse attacks on civilians, not as a means to an end, but as the goal itself. If the infidel is a civilian then it doesn't matter.
We did commit all three of those atrocities you mentioned. We are imperfect. We also did the best we could the time. We have also improved since then and attempt to actively prevent nuclear proliferation. We have developed bombed that can destroy a single building making arms and leave the hospital across the street untouched. Consider the 1991 gulf war. It had the lowest rate of civilian casualties of any war up until then. We have never set out with the goal of killing enemy civilians out of some direct malice, sometimes we did it because we saw an existential and no other choice.
We blew up cities because we thought it was the best way to destroy factories making arms and we mistakenly thought it would scare the enemy into defeat. Our leaders didn't understand the psychology of our enemy. We have never demanded "death of all infidels" or beheaded our enemies and used that in promotional material. ISIS is the ethical equal of a military of any modern world power.
Although I agree with the whole YouTube deciding what they want on their platform narrative, the argument loses some steam when talking about edge cases. There are a lot of conflicts where the distinction between quelling extremist content and removing anti-establishment rhetoric is a thin one. Once YouTube starts content censorship of any kind, they might quickly find themselves having to pick sides in somewhat grey areas. Making such value judgements and making them consistently becomes a challenge.
Yes, I agree with you that it's within their rights to do so.
The public square has effectively become platforms like YouTube. If I cannot participate in these discussions, my ideology, and perhaps my welfare, will suffer. Giving public speeches in my town is increasingly meaningless, because this is not where discussions take place in the digital age.
But Google is a private company and there are no laws (rightfully) to force them to display your opinions if they don't want to do so. Free speech laws just apply to the government not silencing you, not private companies.
> The public square has effectively become platforms like YouTube.
Then people have willfully given up their rights. Google and the companies they bought and developers they pay made their software services. People own this stuff it is property and the property owners get the say as long as they follow the laws.
One could even argue they have to remove this stuff because much of it is "calls to violence" which are illegal and not protected by the first amendment.
This might sound snide and dismissive, but that is not what I am going for, so I am sorry. You are free to make any service you like and host it. It has literally never been easier. Look at 4chan. The first versions cost nearly nothing to setup and maintain and that is about as free as speech gets. You can have whatever rules you like on your property. You apparently haven't gone through the effort of making a giant video or communication service so you have to play by the rules of the people who own the ones that exist. If you think you shouldn't have to make one to (to enforce your rules) then petition to make one, but that is really asking for trouble in my opinion.
With your word game you are siding with bunch of religious extremist who are literally raping and pillaging, is that what you meant? They literally killing and raping people.
How is hindering their recruiting not good? Many of the videos are already illegal even in the USA with first amendment protections. Inciting violence is not legal, and most of these videos do that on some level. And Google/Alphabet don't what that rubbish on their private property, why would they?
I see how it could be a slippery slope, but that is not what anyone here is arguing. Instead people here are literally arguing that Google should host recruitment videos for a group that literally beheads people and uses that to market to people who are probably in need of mental health services instead of recruitment to zealotry.
>> With your word game you are siding with bunch of religious extremist who are literally raping and pillaging, is that what you meant? They literally killing and raping people.
Wait, are you talking about the Christian extremists who caused the unrest in Syria and Libya? What about the Christian extremists who started the war in Iraq? Or maybe you're talking about the Hindu extremists in India who committed genocide?
>> I see how it could be a slippery slope, but that is not what anyone here is arguing.
You're right, most of what you seem to be arguing accepts that we've already completely slid down that slope and are now just figuring out where to aim the bullets
We can stop with what's already illegal. It is not legal to incite violence. Videos demanding that the infidels be killed are not legal. Neither are videos calling for the death of people for any other reason.
Consider: during Prohibition here in the U.S., alcohol was illegal. Were a similar situation develop, should discussion of alcohol distilling be illegal? What about where to find a speakeasy? What about simply discussing how wrong a ban on alcohol is?
Don't tolerate intolerance. Thats not tolerance is spineless.