Long before he became a libertarian, John Stossel was a consumer reporter on the ABC News. His specialty was reporting on seedy companies. That’s what won him a lot of Emmies.
Now John has returned to his roots, reporting on a seedy company or, more correctly, a company that occasionally engages in seedy behavior, named Google. The difference this time: he doesn’t advocate regulating the firm to change its bad behavior. Instead, he reports on its bad behavior and calls it creepy. And guess what? It has already worked. John had a YouTube video showing that socialism is violent. Google, which owns YouTube, judged that it was a bad idea to show young people that socialism is violent and so Google restricted it to adults. After John reported on it, Google relented.
One caveat: John refers to what Google did as censorship. It’s not censorship. It may be creepy, as John claims, but its actions are not censorship.
READER COMMENTS
Joseph
Dec 10 2018 at 12:12am
Why isn’t that censorship? The common sense definition of the term is the suppression of speech by public or private institution because the institution such speech is considered harmful. Are you redefining the term to omit private institutions? If so why?
Matthias Goergens
Dec 10 2018 at 5:10am
That definition might be an Americanism.
Regardless of definition, you can argue that that a private company being picky about what content they host is different from a government forbidding content, especially when they forbid other people to host it instead of just excluding it from government owned venues.
Kathleen J Wikstrom
Dec 10 2018 at 11:18am
Google doesn’t have the authority to suppress John Stossel’s video; they can only keep it off YouTube (their private property). He could still release it on other platforms. Speech is not “suppressed” when someone doesn’t provide you a platform for it. It is suppressed if you’re threatened with jail/violence for speaking your message.
KevinDC
Dec 11 2018 at 12:41pm
Joseph,
Not wishing to speak for David, but I think the reason to not refer to what Google did as censorship is found in the word “suppression” you supplied in your common sense definition. Suppression is a positive action – it’s something you have to actively do. You aren’t suppressing someone by simply failing to support them. Declining to provide someone with a platform, or providing them with a more limited platform than they would like, is not suppressing them. Simple example – I’m a terrible singer and I have no stage presence. (I have many karaoke nights to use as data points to support this hypothesis.) If I was to try to create an album and I found myself turned away by every radio station and every music label and every streaming service, and I complained that my music was being censored and suppressed, you shouldn’t take my complaint seriously. You’re entitle to say (or sing) anything you want, but you’re not entitled to be provided with a platform at someone else’s expense.
TMC
Dec 10 2018 at 5:07pm
I’d agree that this is censorship, but legal censorship. Google has the right to censor as they are a private company and own the platform. People often conflate censorship and illegal censorship.
dennis e miller
Dec 11 2018 at 9:05am
Not sure why Google can decide what content to allow, yet a cake baker cannot. I think all should be free to decide what they want their private business to be.
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