And now we're seeing an unintended consequence of that.
I get the free speech argument and I am 110% behind that argume at least when it comes to not banning people for saying whatever they want on what is indisputably by now a public platform.
However the monetization is another issue, if we side with free speech then the ads that run are the free speech of the advertisers they have the final say in where and how those ads run.
The problem is that for the most part there aren't that many advertiser anymore especially on the big platforms. The only times I ever get ads is when I use YouTube on my iPhone and i try to avoid using the app because of them (I didn't log into YT with my account just because I can't adblock the YT ads).
And what ads you get? the same 10-20 big brands all over, big soda, big car, big sports channel, big bank, big store chain that's it.
Regardless where you lean left or right large companies that run on essentially the most inoffensive vanilla consensus possible will rather avoid you and YT demonitizes plenty of far left (and simply weird) channels also.
But as some one who is pro-free speech as it gets as in I stoutly believe that there should be no legal limitation on speech at all including what people call "hate speech" (there will be hate regardless and no laws will ever save us from that) I can't find a single argument that to limit agency of YouTube and advertisers in any way that would improve the freedom of speech rather than diminish it.
Now banning people because they like to shoot guns, pro trump, believe in aliens, anti-vaxxers, socialists, communists, maoists or w/e is something that I strongly believe that platforms like YouTube should not practice.
YouTube was essentially built by weird and disturbing crap that people uploaded over the years (heck for the longest time YouTube and at the time Stage6 if anyone remembers DIVX's competitor was essentially Netflix for the masses, and you can still find plenty of pirated content on YT today to watch) until it became the monster it is, after squashing all competition they simply can't just say sorry folks you have to play by our rules now despite the fact that we got where we are by essentially violating all of them.
The problem with social media is that they don't have people telling the public that their ideas are crap, so everyone thinks they're important.
Editors don't scale.
