YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

It is a flawed argument. Censorship may help democracy in the short term, but long term it effectively invites authoritarian rule. A good comparison may be forced ranking system. It can be used temporarily to 'get rid of dead wood', but long term use is asking for only biggest assholes to stick around.

Censorship is not that different. There is no nuance here. Person with power will determine what you can and cannot see. That kind of power does not allow for nuance.

Does no-one else notice that the argument to "allow them all to speak" is completely isomorphic to the Creationist vs argument to "teach the controversy" (1) in their bid to suppress the long settled science of Evolution?

Does anyone think that "teach the controversy" is a good idea and was done in good faith? (hint: no and no)

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy

I would argue that the difference lies mostly with evidence: there is hard evidence of Russian propaganda campaigns via social media, and many lengthy (and non-partisan) investigations and reports backing it up. Not so for claims of election fraud this year, which we can tell by the scores of cases which have been lost or thrown out because the claims have no foundation in reality.

If there is fraud, I want to get to the bottom of it. Which is why I’ve been watching the court cases (plenty which have come before trump appointees), none of which are making progress.

The reality is that the election feels less secure this year because of the efforts by Trump et al to make it seem so. This is not normal and is not at all like the Democratic response in 2016. Hilary Clinton conceded the night of the election. The election is turning out to be significantly less close this year than it was in 2016. Trump’s response to loosing is to make it feel like he lost unfairly, by spouting nonsense and not following the norms of his predecessors. The norm of conceding when the election becomes clear is an important part of the process which helps people trust the results.

Trumps refusal to do so and resulting disinformation campaign is the reason the election isn’t trusted by some people this year. It’s disinformation: lies spread with the intent of misleading people.

In 2016, Democrats didn’t complain that widespread fraud occurred in the election and that it should be overturned. The general feeling was that it sucked to loose and a few figures even said we should at least give trump a chance. There wasn’t a disinformation campaign.

As it became more clear that Russian social media propaganda was fairly influential in polarizing voters in a certain direction, there was a lot of outcry about it. The fact that Trump never did anything about it is partly why it seems like there was collusion.

The reason why it may make sense for YouTube to make this move is just given how things have played out. The campaign has had a chance to prove that there was fraud, and it couldn’t provide any proof. These theories have had their day in the courts. Are we really loosing anything specifically by deplatforming it at this point? It’s had a chance to prove itself.

At this point in time, the disinformation is very hurtful to our society.

All of that said, I’m really not sure we should be ok with YouTube’s deplatforming abilities. It’s a tough situation since large media sites are becoming much more like public places than private. And obviously we have some laws against, e.g., causing unwarranted panic in public places because of the harm it can cause.

But I think this is a totally different situation than what you’re comparing it to.

What underpins the visceral emotions you feel? If you're entitled to rant on the Internet, if you feel some payoff to that, don't you think someone is entitled to "virtue signal?" Isn't "virtual signaling" just, "someone else's passion about something, but that something is just not something I personally feel passionate about?"

You know your viewpoints are correct when you gleefully engage in literal book burning to erase opposing ideas.

Where one political party controls nearly all mass media and chooses what history is, memory holes any opposing ideas, where anyone with an opposing idea is dehumanized and branded as evil, de-platformed, banned, censored, fired, (and eventually, worse).

It's straight out of 1984 and the playbook of every evil regime. And just like every evil regime in the past, it has wide support and the citizens cheer it on and support it and ignore the evil, because they're told it's evil for a good cause. They cheer it on because they've been brainwashed to hate the other half of the population and believe it's OK to do evil to "bad" people. For a party so concerned about stopping the next "Hitler" and how Nazi Germany could have ever happened, they sure love following in the same exact footsteps.