YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

Youtube is not the Internet, not even the Web. Any nutter is still free to put up a website - or some other new machine behind a IP address and carry on exercising their free speech.

Google has no obligation to let its platform be used by any idiot who wants to, and in hopefully less frequent cases, by experienced psy ops crews waging low level information warfare.

But you have to realize something about how conservatives get their news. They are extremely loyal to a small number of sources and rely heavily on peer-to-peer amplification of right-wing memes. Google has nothing on the Facebook and good-ole-boy networks. They inherently distrust Google and the internet and any "mainstream" media. All Trump has to do is say "The left-wing Google" and it sticks in their heads like a thorn. They trust people they know in real life, and as soon as their friends are repeating they catchphrases, they believe it.

I don't think you realize how dangerous suppression of freedom of speech is.

I do blame them, the same way I blame all social networks. People have always been ready to spread fringe content, but usually that content didn't go too far. What has changed now? Easy: the interest of social networks and platforms in having interactions above all. They have created the algorithms that give relevance to anything that creates activity, no matter what kind of activity (criticism and praise are evaluated the same). They have created the platforms that give a massive reach to anyone, real or not, with a single identity or with a hundred ones. They have created the incentives to favor views above content. They have created the models that will spam you with the "next thing you need to see" no matter what effect that has on you.

Now all of this is just a patch. The next conspiracy theory will come along, and the slightest effort at fighting it will just give it more relevance. The problem here is them. If they want to be serious about this, they should start by removing the mechanisms that are being abused. Of course, that would hurt their income and they don't care that much about the issue of misinformation.