Ben Shapiro on YouTube: ‘if you approach an unspecified line, you’ll be downgraded or banned’

This week was a disastrous one for those of us who care about free speech, viewpoint diversity, and fighting censorship. To find out why, tune in to the latest episode of Censored in the City, in which Ben Shapiro and I dig into the nefarious ongoings at YouTube.

‘They’ve created this incredibly vague standard, if you approach an unspecified line, then, presumably, you will be downgraded or banned,’ Ben tells me.

‘And not only that, in their new standards they say they are going to upgrade what they call “authoritative sources”. Well who the hell are “authoritative sources”? I assume that would be exactly who you think it is: BuzzFeed, Vox, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, all the places that conservatives love to hate that are basically propaganda outlets for leftist thought.’

YouTube, like Facebook and Twitter, is a tech company that has in many ways replaced both the public square and the marketplace of ideas. Decisions made by the powers that be at these companies affects the lives, views, and access to information of millions and millions of people every single day.

Rather than handle this responsibility, well, responsibly, the tech giants have chosen time and again to censor certain voices and magnify and elevate others. This abuse of basic standards of fairness and neutrality has already claimed the platforms of many ‘controversial’ content creators. Some of these creators are in fact ‘controversial’, at least in my view, but others are nothing more than typical conservatives. In targeting them, YouTube has shown itself not to be neutral or evenhanded, but biased and opinionated. We here at Censored in the City could live with that, if they would only honestly identify themselves as such.

Will the censorship and deplatforming trend end, and if so, how? Will it be through conservatives forming their own versions of each of these social media platforms, to escape the censorship and deplatforming that seems to await them? Find out in this week’s episode.

https://audioboom.com/posts/7282644-ben-shapiro-on-social-media-censorship

Also discussed: the extent to which YouTube invents new ‘standards’ at a shockingly rapid pace in order to satisfy an online mob that wants to silence even more voices than YouTube itself.

Censored in the City is a new Spectator USA podcast hosted by Daniella Greenbaum Davis taking listeners through a round up of news, politics, and culture in New York City, Washington DC, and abroad, focusing on stories that have significance beyond the 24/7 news cycle.