YouTube and Reddit roll out new restrictions including channel and sub bans

I understand your points and agree that it is our right currently as an American to own a gun. I'm not afraid of guns and grew up around them, although I do not own any today. The problem I have is equating guns to cars or any other weapon. Just owning a gun means you are more likely to be injured or killed in a gun related incident[1].

Guns are an immediate force multiplier that can cause a lot of injury with little planning. Guns make it easy for someone who has a brief thought of suicide, anger, or stupidity to act on that thought with irreversible consequences. While in high school, one friend committed suicide with their family's gun. Another person I know was shot because their friend was playing around with a gun.

I think only when both sides can agree that a) guns will likely never be banned and b) yes, guns are dangerous and require more regulation that we currently have, will we get anywhere. Until then people will just talk past each other.

[1] This is based on older studies at this point because the NRA has made it impossible to get funding to study gun violence.

A rooted android device is still counted in their stats on phones running android. An iPhone is showing that you switched to their competition.

Most firearm violence is committed using handguns and most illegal guns are obtained through straw purchases. The best thing we could do would be to implement universal background checks (i.e. require background checks for private sales) but in a privacy-conscious and convenient way that will maintain support from the pro-gun side. Some kind of app or mobile website that allows the background check to be conducted for free on a smartphone, perhaps using token-based authentication to avoid the need to share personal information.

People who sell guns want a way to perform background checks on the people they sell to, but there's no way to do it because only licensed dealers can access NICS. As long as the private background check system has the same privacy invariants as the existing paper system for dealers (primarily that it is not possible to look up which guns someone owns, only to take a serial number and see who owns it) there won't be significant opposition.

First of all, ED seems overly focused on USA/West/China, it doesn't list several arson (I assume that's what Fire Emblem means) and stabbing events (Hack'n'Slash) I personally know of.

Next, I'm assuming that by "mass shootings" you mean the FPS, Single Player category on there (since the only other FPS aka shootings category is Co-op Mode which seems to be almost exclusively terrorism and gangs, not "common people").

Here is the raw data: https://pastebin.com/rfHy5KUu

Here is the aggregate by country: https://pastebin.com/NPi3kELY

USA has 'only' 4.3% of global population but 17 out of 50 top ED loner shootings and one third of deaths and almost half of injuries.

If that's not a phenomenon then I guess nothing is.

> The crux of what I'm getting at is, do you think that you should have the right to moderate the content on your own platform that you built?

As I've said elsewhere on this thread, corporations don't have rights, people do. A more clear way to say this might be: corporations only have rights inasmuch as the people who make up the corporation have rights.

Even though you're not asking this rhetorically, the way you're asking this question is an appeal to me as a person, and obviously I don't want to be forced to host the content of people I disagree with.

But giant corporations are different from individuals. Either we should prevent corporations from being too big to fail, or we should ensure that their failures don't damage society. If a corporation owns a communication platform the size of YouTube, they lose the right to choose what content they host, because doing so infringes their users' rights to free speech, and their users can't just go elsewhere because there are no other equivalent platforms.

Just because a corporation doesn't have a right to an ideology doesn't mean we should not let any corporations have ideologies: we can let corporations have ideologies as long as we make sure it isn't harmful to the rights of individuals. The purpose of laws, as I see it, is to protect the weak from the powerful. If I started Dave's Liberal Hosting Service with just a server and a dream, and only hosted Democratic websites, that's fine, because such a service doesn't become the platform of the internet that everyone is forced to use--it's likely a conservative equivalent would arise even before I built a significant business. Part of the problem is that services like Reddit and YouTube have performed a bait-and-switch--they built themselves into major platforms on a free-speech ideology, and then when they were too big to fail, they turned into ideological platforms. Similarly in the realm of CDNs, groups like Amazon, CloudFlare, Akamai, or Google absolutely don't get to have ideologies. Anyone who wants to work on the internet has to work with these CDNs, so if they don't allow free speech, there isn't free speech on the internet.

> Note Cloudflare had this exact issue: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Likewise, I'm also not saying free speech is the only right that needs protection. With the CloudFlare case, the "Freedom of Speech if the Daily Stormer was inciting violence, that's a higher priority than free speech. But note how this isn't about CloudFlare's rights at all--it's about protecting the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the people the Daily Stormer was attacking.

Random aside: I do wish that they hadn't been so nationalistic about it though. (He said: "I, personally, believe in strong Freedom of Speech protections, but I also acknowledge that it is a very American idea that is not shared globally").