When you consider the many ways elections can be “rigged,” “fixed” or “stolen,” consider the subtle, often invisible ways search engines like Google prioritize sources of information, advocacy, and political opinion. There is plenty of evidence that this is occurring with increasing vigor (Ethics Alarms itself appears to be a target), and the recent experience of video journalist Matt Orfeala is particularly chilling.
Orfeala made and posted the video above that consists entirely of video clips, arranged to make the quite valid point that Democrats have “denied elections” for decades without being accused of criminal fraud or supporting insurrections, insurrection defined as “attempting to disqualify states’ slate of electors.” Nonetheless, the video was “demonetized” by YouTube, which is owned by Google, on the grounds that it advocated a “dangerous organization.” You know, like Joe…
…says the Republican Party is. Here’s the notice YouTube sent :
Unrestrained conservative fire-breather Ace of Spades’ sharp rhetoric is appropriate here. He writes in part,,
One of YouTube’s favorite tactics is to throttle and demonetize videos by conservatives in the crucial first 48 hours of their posting, in which the video receives 90% of the views it will ever receive, and therefore 90% of the advertising money it will ever earn. Once this crucial period is over, YouTube writes the censored video-maker to say, Whoops, our bad, after a manual review, we’ve determined your video does not violate our policy. Now that we’ve demonetized and throttled it, and thereby insured that almost no one will see it and that you’ll never make a dime off it, our job is done. Next time, make a video supporting the San Francisco Democrat Agenda and maybe we’ll allow people to view it, motherfucker…
Their new favorite tactic is secretly “limiting the visibility” of a video — throttling it, making it hard to share, putting it on the blacklist for automatic recommendations — so that the censored speaker doesn’t realize he’s been censored. He just thinks his video was poorly received and that the public didn’t want it. And therefore: that he should make different videos that the public might want to watch. Videos that support the Democrat-Tech Oligarchist regime, for example….
Bingo. But hey, this doesn’t violate the First Amendment since Google and YouTube are private entities, so there’s nothing wrong with this—say the cynical and Machiavellian partisans whose ideological agenda benefits from this cheat.
Ethics Alarms 
So post it on X instead.
Wouldn’t the vid still have to be hosted on another platform? And TwitteX isn’t really all that search-friendly for content.
And there’s that demonetizing issue…You know: $$$$$
You can monetize TwitteX content, but I don’t exactly know how the process, exposure, and results compare with YouTube. https://create.twitter.com/en/goals/monetization#:~:text=Monetize%20your%20content,creators%20and%20social%20media%20pros.
Still conflicted as to how much private entities should be made to conform to the same Constitutional restrictions as government. Some tech/media have essentially become the new town square (or at least its gatekeepers), and operate as monopolies or oligopolies. There’s no way to really break them up with existing anti-trust actions like with the Ma Bells and Steel industries of old….They’re too fluid and non-fungible. Maybe control of a certain percentage of the market in each sort of platform should be a threshold for having to treat equally all content that isn’t actually illegal.
I don’t think you can make them. It’s ethics, pure and simple.
Crafting a law to address this issue would be problematic.
I explained it in a comment on another post.
Contract law still applies.
If the private enterprise is working as an agent of the government, doesn’t the 1st Amendment apply? Just curious.
MB
Yes. But a clear judicial statement of that is lacking. Or a way to measure it.
It would.
The graphic you posted is technically from last July’s original demonetization, not the current one. I believe you wrote about it near that time.
The current complaint is apparently a human reviewer who said it contained “glorification, recruitment, or graphic portrayal of dangerous organizations,”
Great, now I have to alert the source that mistakenly told me that was from THIS July. Thanks—I fixed it…
So the issue is that he can’t make money off of the video?
So what.
There’s no proof they throttled the video, they just said “we’re not letting you make money off of this”. He has one video on there that makes fun of Biden with 3 million views.
YouTube does this all the time, like if your video uses copyrighted music or you curse a lot. It’s not just because he’s a right winger. All content creators on YouTube have this issue. It’s a known problem.
So what? Here’s what: 1) This chills speech. 2) There was no valid justification for it 3) The human review demonstrates bias and cynical distortions of YouTube’s own regulations. 3) It is obviously based on partisan censorship.
You also need to bone up on the Rationalizations list. “It’s been done before” is not an argument. Moreover, a video ridiculing Biden is obviously opinion. The video only uses video evidence for contrast and comparison. ANY claim that it is harmful is an admission of partisan gate-keeping.