Maybe it’s an honor when big-tech companies gag you. Maybe you’re doing something right.
Google-owned YouTube has yanked a Mises Institute talk by Tom Woods (“The COVID Cult”) from the Institute’s YouTube channel for challenging orthodox views of the pandemic. Google is also threatening the Mises Institute with further sanctions if the Institute’s YouTube channel sponsors further prohibited discourse.
In response, Mises Institute President Jeff Deist observes that Google and other big-tech firms have become de facto extensions of the state, “governmentalities . . . committed to ideological service. . . .”
To fight back, he says, we must “build our own platforms.” YouTube alternatives include Bitchute and Odysee, which still host the forbidden talk.
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that there’s a big difference “between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”
Not every word of this passage is incontestable, but Mill had a point. If Google is so sure it is so right about COVID-19 policy and Woods so wrong, why try to kill an “opportunity for contesting” Google’s view?
Maybe Google’s “assurance of being right” is not so rational.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Google Gag Reflex”
I would agree that anyone should be able to say anything he/she wants to say but I also believe we must hold the person speaking responsible, at least in part, for the actions of others in response to what is said. To do otherwise permits shouting FIRE in a theater when there is no fire. I believe we fail to hold people sufficiently accountable for their actions. Since we cannot to bring ourselves to hold anyone accountable for almost anything, removing the “soapbox” seems the only workable alternative.
How do you propose to “hold the person speaking responsible”?
Either people can speak their mind or they can’t, and will be shut out as google is doing.
If google (I refuse to capitalize it) is going to restrict differences of opinion, then the are not an open site, but in effect a publisher, which removes them from the protection of section 230.
Deist doesn’t “observe” that Google et al. have become “de facto extensions of the state.”
Rather, he “asserts” that Google et al. have become “de facto extensions of the state.”
There’s a difference.