[jonbronson]

The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan. Nor are they the only political figures to reference the widely acknowledged facts that there was no spread widespread voter fraud. Prominent Republican politicians in positions of oversight have agreed with this outcome.

[hartator]

> The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan.

Politics requesting censorship is always partisan.

[_RPL5_]

I am curious how something like this would have been handled 50, 100, 200 years ago.

Let's say you have a newspaper spreading misinformation that is hurting an important social institution. What do you do? Close it down? Sue the editor for defamation, then close it down? There must have been precedent.

[Pils]

Censorship measures often have bipartisan support.

[thomastjeffery]

Politics in a two-party system is always divided by party lines, but that does not make it necessarily partisan.

You can say that it's the Democrats who want censorship, but the other side of the coin is that Republicans want to freely spread a false narrative.

[adamsea]

> Politics requesting censorship is always partisan.

Extremely general statements are always applicable.

[meragrin]

If YouTube does as good a job as Facebook, then I have zero faith it won't just become partisan censorship. I have seen "False Information" labels on Facebook posts which were linked to "fact checking articles" which confirmed the post as true rather than false.

[cjohnson318]

Can you share examples?

[cable2600]

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

YouTube had security camera videos posted by members that showed taking mail in ballots from under the table rather than the counting bins. Stuff like that was called false or inaccurate. I cannot say if this mail in vote did the same across the USA, but it shows that the voting process is flawed that and the Dominion software flipping votes from Trump to Biden by mistake.

[stickyricky]

Its possible to censor incorrect information. Recognizing false information is not equivalent to calling for it to be suppressed.

[briandear]

Who determines “correct?”

[495636483]

This. The world will end, if we treat every fucking word like an "opinion", which deserves to be heard.

"Covid19 is a lie!1!!" isn't an opinion. It's ignorant non-sense at best, likely malicious, indirect interest-driven misinformation. It absolutely does not deserve the same, attention, platform and range as scientific, or reasonably political debate.

Naive unconditional free speech, "attention communism", if you want lol, is an ignorant and anti-democratic idea. The only reason that hasn't hurt us like this before, was the cost of spreading information effectively, pre-www.

[AmericanChopper]

The facts of this case are quite clearly in dispute, so to make a judgement about which of those facts are accurate and which aren’t is rather clearly taking a partisan political position.

This whole fact obsession has gotten completely out of hand. Presiding over disputed matters of fact is pretty much the core purpose of our entire court system. You can’t just call something a fact and be done with it. What you’ve actually described is a collection of opinions, and then declared them settled facts by referencing some of the people that hold them.

I know people get terribly riled up by politics, but they’re just losing sight of any form of reasonableness. Having an unaccountable central authority decide what’s true and what’s not is literally one of the most canonical forms of dystopia that exists.

[monsieurbanana]

I thought many (most?) US courts had already ruled against widespread voting fraud, and that so far there was no evidence presented.

How is it still "quite clearly in dispute"?

> Having an unaccountable central authority decide what’s true and what’s not

This part of your comment is highly ironic.

[dbbk]

The people disputing the facts are doing it in bad faith because they want to steal the election. There is not a genuine argument to be made for widespread voter fraud.

[downandout]

The facts aligning in the Senator's favor does not make the request partisan.

Of course it's partisan. Had Trump won, and Biden voters were publishing content like this with the same lack of evidence, do you believe that Democratic senators would still be urging YouTube to take it down in the interest of fairness to Trump? I think you know the answer to that.

The scary part of this is that elected officials, who were presumably elected by people that thought they were going to protect the freedoms granted to them by the Constitution, and who must take an oath upon taking office to "support and defend the Constitution," sat down and wrote a letter that gleefully trampled all over one of our most fundamental constitutional rights. Since they were successful in this endeavor, it will happen again, on other, more expansive, partisan issues. Down the slippery slope we go.

The simple fact of the matter is that people are entitled to their opinions, and in the United States, they have a constitutional right to express those opinions in the same way and on the same platforms as those that disagree with them. The only problem is that now we have politicians who believe that those rights should only be extended to those who are on their side. Both sides of the political aisle are acting this way, and it does not bode well for our future as a country.

[tzs]

> The simple fact of the matter is that people are entitled to their opinions, and in the United States, they have a constitutional right to express those opinions in the same way and on the same platforms as those that disagree with them.

You've never had a constitutional right to a particular platform for your opinions. E.g., if a magazine or newspaper published an opinion that disagreed with yours, you do not have a constitutional right to have your opinion published in that same magazine or newspaper.

[thomastjeffery]

> Of course it's partisan. Had Trump won, and Biden voters were publishing content like this with the same lack of evidence, do you believe that Democratic senators would still be urging YouTube to take it down in the interest of fairness to Trump? I think you know the answer to that.

The answer that it feels like I would have is, "No"; but it only feels that way because I can't even imagine them doing that in the first place. In order to even enter your thought experiment, I must put Biden and the Democrats in the shoes of Trump and the Republicans, and imagine that they have done something I don't believe they would do; and that is where the entire thing falls apart.

> The simple fact of the matter is that people are entitled to their opinions, and in the United States, they have a constitutional right to express those opinions in the same way and on the same platforms as those that disagree with them.

False. Everyone has the right to express whatever they want, but they don't have the right to do so using someone else's platform. For example, I have the right to express my criticisms of The Bible, but I don't have the right to walk into a church, walk up to the pulpit, and start a TED talk about the lack of evidence for Noah and the great flood, Moses and Hebrew slaves in Egypt, New Testament authorship, etc.

What keeps getting called "censorship" here is really "moderation". The reason it's such a big deal is that YouTube is a huge monolithic platform, so moderation on that platform is inherently a big deal.

If we want to remove the power YouTube has over public discourse, we need to create real competitors. The same goes for Facebook, Twitter, et al.

[jakelazaroff]

> Had Trump won, and Biden voters were publishing content like this with the same lack of evidence, do you believe that Democratic senators would still be urging YouTube to take it down in the interest of fairness to Trump? I think you know the answer to that.

The premise here is that both sides are just as likely to push misinformation on behalf of their team. The Democrats aren't perfect, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that they would engage in the exact same tactics and rhetoric as the GOP if the shoe were on the other foot.

I'll flip the question around. Had Trump won, would the Democratic party be publishing content like this with the same lack of evidence? I think you know the answer to that.

[p1necone]

Wow, I've seen plenty of whataboutism before, but I've never seen hypothetical whataboutism until this comment...

[lukas099]

>Why even bother?

Because many people have been fooled by misinformation on large social websites, and it gives them a bad name, which is not in the companies' best interest. I don't really see this as a nanny state action, either. YouTube is not part of the state. From a libertarian point of view, shouldn't they have the right to censor what they want on their own platform? Yes, politicians are urging YouTube to take down the videos, but the key word there is "urging". They have no way to force them to take them down.

[mrzimmerman]

I’ll agree there was no pee pee tape (or at least zero evidence ever presented for it), but your point is just false equivalence.

[Covzire]

"Disinfo for thee, but not for me..."

[swirepe]

>And there was no pee-pee tape

You haven't seen it?