For the request of the FTC and interested participants,
Outlined in their 'About' page, the platform, YouTube, prides itself by describing its mission as "Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories." However, recent and past events have shown the contrary. The two-faced preferential system has silenced groups while allowing opponents to lambast, accuse, and slander with no accessible means of protest and defense. YouTube has since declined from a community-driven platform to a de facto publishing company silencing opinions as dissent, censoring words as problematic, and flagging common users as extremists. A publishing company should not possess the rights of a platform that is supposed to serve in the interests of the public as a digital forum for discourse, communities, and projects.
Initially YouTube began blanket censorships as they received pressure from prominent household name companies, however it was soon realized that this was simply pretext to undermine the Classical Liberal values of Freedom of Speech, Expression, and Assembly. Only a fringe minority of content on YouTube fits within the parameters of extremist, but they conveniently extended the range of persecution to those with a political leaning right of Socialist. Both Conservative and Liberal factions have been flagged as problematic, and content exposure and access severely hindered the already strained communities that cannot grow due to the pressures of censorship.
YouTube being a monopoly is owned and funded by Google, an entity receiving partnerships and government contracts with the US government. The resources they have from the luxury of falling under the lordship of Google have left competition lagging woefully behind, with only Twitch (owned by Amazon) having at least a minimally visible presence in the Internet. Alternative platforms like Rumble, Odyssey, and Bitchute are functioning with a persecuted community of free thinkers, skeptics, and ideologues but growth is limited due to the rising costs of infrastructure and Google's domineering monopoly over the World Wide Web straining competition. Fox news host, Dan Bongino, was one of the many people victimized by YouTube's draconian policing during the Covid-19 Crisis and their abuse of regulating information since. He has since found a spot in Rumble to continue his journalism, but his reach is severely limited after Google's censorship and blacklisting of him and similar content creators.
The censorship, however, has proven to be notoriously ineffective. As the masses wizened up to the AI censorship, users have resorted to adapting their language and speech to circumvent the algorithm just to express the God-given liberties of free speech. Flagged users cannot say the word 'suicide' under any circumstance, so many would reinterpret the keyword as simply 'unalive' which is enough to fool the AI. As inconvenient as it is, users should not be undergoing several checks and self-censorships on a platform professing that everyone deserves to have a voice.
Frighteningly enough, this censorship has also failed to address the growing problems of the looming botnets that are harassing fringe and flourishing communities. Bots have plagued channels advertising cryptocoin scams, malware, pornographic content (including CSAM). Moreover, bots have also been used to exploit Google's censorship algorithm and silence opponents critical to their own organizations. Politically, Russian troll farms in 2023, when the Russian/Ukraine War began, exploited YouTube's content policing and mass-flagged critics of Russia, and YouTube unwittingly suspended heaves of accounts, many American, that supported Ukraine's resistance, because the AI automatically assumed that an account being mass-flagged should be suspended without contest, only for the user to spend his own time appealing the suspension that can take an afternoon to a week. Mass-flagging still affects users and YouTube is simply ignoring these problems.
It is not enough that they proclaim they will fix this in due time. Google must be broken up for competition to resume and a healthy ecosystem can foster once again in Cyberspace. They are proven perjurers, dismissive and oppressive to users that represent a diverse array of opinions. Such entities should not be allowed to control and govern legacy and branch communities that they only inherited, not created, after buying YouTube on 9 October 2006.
-Anonymous
