YouTube can restrict PragerU because it is a private forum, appeals court rules

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/first-amendment-doesnt-apply-on-youtube-judges-reject-prageru-lawsuit/

by Bender • 6 years ago

123 203 6 years ago

gregd3• 6 years ago

Since the First Amendment acts as a constraint on Government, yeah, it makes sense that YouTube is under no obligation to protect your freedom of speech. This isn't a hard concept.

wpietri5• 6 years ago

Well, it's not a hard concept if you believe in rule of law and have read a few Wikipedia pages. But a surprisingly large number of people seem to start from the position, "My actions should never have consequences I don't like," and then backfill from there.

crankylinuxuser2• 6 years ago

Well, there is a different way of looking at it.

As real flesh and bones individuals, the first amendment protections should apply.

For companies (aka: fictitious entities), are granted corporate charters by the government. They are extensions of the government allowing a bubble of state/federal government of what we call a company.

Freedom of speech makes sense when its my body - but who's body does the speech come out of with a corporation?

In that light, companies should have a requirement to uphold the bill of rights. They are created legal entities, not at all like a person.

------------------------

The glaring problem with not applying 1FA to a company means the mega-companies that wish to deplatform you leads you to no recourse. Do you have a right to use a monopolistic service?

The issue with that course of actions is that the rules to the megacorps (FAANG) also apply to the small companies with 1 or more. More regulation does tend to kill tiny companies.

AdamJacobMuller2• 6 years ago

See Marsh V Alabama.

I hope Prager appeals, this could easily reach the SC and potentially be an even more influential case than Marsh.

cvwright4• 6 years ago

This is a fascinating example, particularly in comparison to the "wedding cake" cases from a couple of years ago.

The question of trading off between the customer's speech and the service provider's freedom seems to be nearly the same in both cases.

But the people following along at home have almost all traded sides! Those who were for the customer before are now cheering for the provider. Those who supported the old provider are now supporting the new customer. And they're using many of the same arguments to do it.

People are weird.

prostheticvamp• 6 years ago

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that, in a way the bill of rights never had reason to consider.

The freedom of speech prohibits government control of speech in government (read: public) spaces, in order to conserve public right of criticism of the government.

These massive platforms, as a matter of business, attempt to replace and own “the public square.” Google/YouTube, directly or indirectly, controls an enormous fraction of the public conversation. Their interests, as corporations constantly lobbying for favorable regulatory treatment, tend to align along the “appease the government as long as it doesn’t hurt our revenue” axis.

You can with some validity argue that an entity that monopolizes control of the public square is obligated to protect the rights intrinsic in that square, all the more so when their interests align with the government’s.

You can, with some validity, argue that a company doesn’t have to have a monopoly on the public square to be forced to recognize those rights, but as a continuous function, as they subsume more of the public square they should undergo increasing burden for conserving the functions of that square.

It used to be “the public square” was a distinct geographic entity. We are now faced with the fact that it was, maybe, a set of functions attached to that geographic entity, and it’s those functions that must be protected.

themagician6• 6 years ago

These platforms don’t replace the public square. The internet is the “public square” and you can buy your own domain and do whatever you want.

These platforms are the giant retail shops that line the square in a capitalist world. They come and go. You don’t have to go into them and they can kick you out whenever they want.

yk2• 6 years ago

While I am quite sympathetic to the argument, PragerU would need to disagree (if we assume they actually believe their videos are true). So they are American conservatives in the sense that they argue that free markets have the right outcomes, and more importantly they are originalists, that is they argue that one should interpret the US constitution as intended when written, not in a sense, what the principle would tell one when we imagine the US constitution was written today.

Ajedi32• 6 years ago

From a philosophical/moral perspective I agree with you; that seems like a very reasonable position. From the perspective of constitutional law though I don't think its very relevant. The constitution only prohibits the government from making laws restricting the freedom of speech; it doesn't mandate the the government take an active role in preventing freedom of speech from being suppressed by non-government entities. If we want to fix that problem we'll have to do so through other means (whether they be legislative, technical, or social).

flukus• 6 years ago

It gets even more complicated than that with things like the comments section. Does anyone know prager U's moderation policy? I have a feeling it would be quite hypocritical, they've been known to send false copyright infringement notices. Would things like not allowing comments be controlling the public square?

Even the public square analogy doesn't really work because we never had global public squares.

zoonosis2• 6 years ago

And the 14th Amendment was meant to act as a constraint on the general government but that hasn't stopped it from being used to constrain state governments.

lanternslight2• 6 years ago

Thought experiment: what would happen if Alphabet banned homosexual positive speech on all it's platforms?

creaghpatr4• 6 years ago

Seems like a pretty weak argument they made regarding the first amendment. Google censorship being considered a "state action"? Yeah right.

A more interesting test case is Google removing footage of elected officials speaking in a congressional session: https://www.axios.com/rand-paul-whistleblower-name-youtube-v...

jjuel• 6 years ago

I still don't think that would be a First Amendment issue.

klyrs• 6 years ago

A more interesting test case is Google removing footage of elected officials speaking in a congressional session...

Why is that any more interesting? Is google compelled to host and preserve any and all content?

anon73044• 6 years ago

It's Google's platform, they're not the stewards of reality and are free to censor whatever they want.

creaghpatr4• 6 years ago

Freedom to censor being a legal right?

Analemma_• 6 years ago

Seems like a pretty weak argument they made regarding the first amendment.

Because this was a publicity stunt, not an actual attempt to redress anything through the courts.

zoonosis2• 6 years ago

I wonder if government involvement in the creation of Google makes the case any stronger.

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

kgwxd• 6 years ago

Was that not already well established?

Mathnerd314• 6 years ago

A more interesting case would be the federal government pressuring YouTube to remove some videos, similar to the Wiki leaks payment blockade a few years back.

rkapsoro2• 6 years ago

I wonder, why did they use a First Amendment claim rather than something to do with safe harbour considerations (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

My understanding in this area is thin, but from what I understand the big tech media companies often claim limited or no liability for user generated content because of the above legal considerations. If so, and they then go on curate content, that would seem to be allowing them to accept the upside of being a publisher (a curated experience they can sell to customers and other stakeholders) without accepting the downside (liability for copyright infringement, slander and libel, etc.).

I'm not sure why PragerU's legal team didn't push in this area rather than the admittedly dodgy First Amendment claim.

edit: grammar.

UncleMeat9• 6 years ago

This is exactly backwards. 230 does not say "you are safe if you moderate nothing but expose yourself to trouble if you moderate". It says "if you moderate, but not perfectly consistently, you are still protected from garbage on your platform".

rkapsoro2• 6 years ago

Haha well that explains that then. Thanks.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 6 years ago

Because that's not a requirement of the law as written.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180412/23230639618/ted-c...

It would have even less chance of flying in court than the first amendment claim, which at least has some precedent due to lawsuits about protests in malls.

shadowgovt19• 6 years ago

Possibly because PragerU isn't actually good at this sort of thing.

It's not like we should assume they understand law or how to hire lawyers who do. It turns out there's no law against attaching "University" as a title to your organization without any kind of vetting, bona fides, or accreditation.

vumgl• 6 years ago

YouTube is really silly to ban PragerU. Although I disagree with maybe 70% of PragerU's content (I listen to their podcast), I find it very informative of the conservative POV. It also exposes me to ideas that makes me do my own further research. I listen to them regularly; there is much worse content on other places in YouTube.

shadowgovt19• 6 years ago

They haven't banned it; their channel is the first search result on YouTube for the keyword 'PragerU'.

They've flagged it as restricted content so that advertising isn't attached to it, organizations who specifically ask Google "Don't show me restricted content" (such as schools) can't reach it from the networks they control, and auto-recommendation engines are down-sampled on it. Essentially, PragerU is trying to argue that they should have the right to force YouTube to classify their content into the same bucket as "baby shark" videos.

It's a very silly argument from PragerU's side.

DuskStar2• 6 years ago

And at the same time, Google claiming that prageru is "sensitive content" is kind of ridiculous too.

jessaustin10• 6 years ago

sensitive content

Presumably schools don't want their students ogling T&A during study hall. Does that mean students shouldn't see any politics? These are two entirely different things that should be placed in different categories.

nostromo• 6 years ago

While I agree with the ruling, we could use some new laws governing fairness on the Facebook and Google monopolies.

These two companies have tremendous political power and I don’t think ignoring that and hoping for the best is a great option for an open society.

The other solution could be to break up FB/Instagram/WhatsApp and Google/YouTube to inject some competition back into these markets.

pcj-github• 6 years ago

If YouTube had to survive independently of Google/Alphabet it would look vastly different. Not sure if that is good or bad.

downerending6• 6 years ago

Indeed. Having a corporation as an Orwellian overlord isn't noticeably better than having a government as one.

Traster2• 6 years ago

The problem we have is that whilst lots of people think that there should be new regulation, no one can agree on what it is and in the mean time you have to contend with:

* Both partisans pushing for legislation they can use to beat the other side with

* Monopolistic entities such as facebook that intend to use 'regulation' as a moat - writing legislation that only restricts them from doing things they already don't do

* Incompetent legislators who don't understand the issues - since they were born before colour tv was invented, let alone smart phones and the internet.

And that's before even considering the obvious anti-competitive mergers that have been happening. You talk about breaking up Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp. Why were they allowed to be sold in the first place.

tombert3• 6 years ago

Putting on my tinfoil hat on for a bit, I think PragerU did this lawsuit largely for marketing value, knowing full-well it wouldn't win, since their actual argument was bizarre and had implications that literally no one would get behind.

It puts the right-wing entity "PragerU" into the public consciousness, and they get to wear some badge of "We're the real defenders of free speech!" I'm sure that Dennis Prager and his ilk will go on Fox News and use this to talk about how the evil leftist court systems don't believe in open discourse, and it'll probably end up with more people watching the videos overall.

shadowgovt19• 6 years ago

Agreed. PragerU doesn't appear to understand many things, but I think they understand Streisand Effect.

creaghpatr4• 6 years ago

Not sure why you are downvoted, the theory makes sense.

yters• 6 years ago

Is every commercial content platform free to censor the content however they want? Can Verizon censor the CNN and Fox News that is delivered by cable? Can my cell phone carrier censor whatever conversations I have that they don't like? Can Google skew and eliminate searches they don't agree with?

The former cases seem unlikely, so what is the difference with YouTube?

vorpalhex2• 6 years ago

Can Verizon censor the CNN and Fox News that is delivered by cable?

Yes, and they already set standards for the channels they accept on their cable platform.

Can my cell phone carrier censor whatever conversations I have that they don't like?

No, your phone carrier is a common carrier.

Can Google skew and eliminate searches they don't agree with?

Yes, but they might hit issues with advertising guidelines depending on intent

ryanmarsh• 6 years ago

Would it be feasible (legally) to build a website which hosts user generated content and be considered a common carrier therefore not responsible for what users post? Illegal forms of pornography would have to be the litmus test here.

People get upset when content is censored which they view to be vital to the public interest. In the case of particularly gruesome combat footage or violent crime I don’t see how in some jurisdictions those sites could operate with the content NOT taken down. For instance, you recall how 8chan was taken down over the Christchurch NZ shooters manifesto and video.

ng122• 6 years ago

The question is why YouTube and Twitter shouldn't be treated as common carriers. Is it because they're one-to-many instead of one-to-one?

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

Regarding Google, there's already an abundance of evidence that they can and do.

dependenttypes• 6 years ago

Can Google skew and eliminate searches they don't agree with?

They have been doing that for a while.

hangphyr• 6 years ago

Youtube has been doing that for a long time now, manually adjusting specific search results, basing it sometimes on geography. I don't know if they are still manually adjusting results in this example, but one example a couple months ago was if someone searched for "Louder with Crowder change my mind" in the US, Crowder's videos were buried several pages in. If you hop onto a VPN and try another country, the expected natural search result came up instead.

One could possibly blame it on poor engineering and bugs, but given Google's talent pool, that seems unlikely.

nexuist• 6 years ago

In every case you described except for your cell carrier, yes, they can. That is not censorship so much as having the right to choose what gets shown on your platform. Verizon can and does offer TV packages that do not include CNN/Fox News. Google can and does unlist and derank websites its algorithms do not like (this is the whole premise of SEO).

YouTube, as a private entity, can choose to do whatever it wants.

danso• 6 years ago

Can Google skew and eliminate searches they don't agree with?

A main motivation behind PageRank was dissatisfaction with the quality and content of other search engines. And Google's SERP algorithm has constantly changed and evolved over the years.

shadowgovt19• 6 years ago

Or rather, First Amendment applies to YouTube, but they have freedom of the press; they are not obligated to be a medium for other people to exercise their freedom of speech.

ng122• 6 years ago

That's the core issue in my mind -- YouTube et al. are publishers when it benefits them and platforms when it doesn't. They can't simultaneously identify as press but then not be responsible for user-uploaded content.

shadowgovt19• 6 years ago

When they're acting as a hosting medium, they're conduit. When they add features atop the content they host to curate and surface it or down-signal it, they're press.

The two functions seem to be acceptable within one organization.

Probably worth noting there's a hefty dose of practicality in the interpretations as they currently stand. Even this forum, without safe harbor protection, could be on the hook for user-provided content if someone linked to child pornography here, yet it seems most users here are in agreement that Hacker News shouldn't lose safe harbor protections because it has moderators and community-driven karma.

wnevets• 6 years ago

am I the only one who finds the irony of a right wing org wanting the government to force a private company to create a safe space for their content funny?

bgschulman31• 6 years ago

As a private company, I don’t believe YouTube should be obligated to be a platform to host people’s free speech. However, they do advertise themselves as a public forum so by restricting viewpoints that they disagree with they really aren’t the public forum they claim to be.

neuland3• 6 years ago

Everyone here is saying 1A doesn't constrain private parties. But that's missing the heart of PragerU's claim.

Section 230 gives internet platforms immunity for what users post. But at the same time, platforms want to moderate their content selecting which views are acceptable and which are not.

These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines.

We have common carrier provisions for other communication mediums with no liability (ex. TV, ISP's). And we have liability for communication mediums with editorial control (ie. Newspapers, Magazines).

Tech companies are running up the center and making huge profits with an unfair legal advantage that no other communication medium gets.

Newspapers have to vet their classifieds and editorials. Facebook/YouTube/etc doesn't. And that is inherently unfair.

So either Congress or the Courts need to fix the law. And it's fair game for the courts, because the law is not being applied correctly to these platforms, given their abuses.

rhcom22• 6 years ago

Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post.

I don't believe that is true. There is nothing in the law that says the platforms can't select or edit what their users post.

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

jaywalk5• 6 years ago

I don' believe your interpretation is correct. I believe the law assumes that platforms are treating all content equally. But they're not.

Even if the content was originally provided by someone else, the platform is making the decision to promote some content and demote other content. In other words, they are making active decisions about what content they'd like to have appear on their supposedly neutral platform.

belltaco7• 6 years ago

This argument has become a meme at this point. EFF debunks it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no...

These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines.

No. If HN removes spam or off topic content or anything else, it does not automatically mean that it's suddenly liable for someone posting libel and getting sued over it. That wasn't the intent of the law from the text, and it was never interpreted that way.

neuland3• 6 years ago

EFF's word is not god. I like them, but you make it sound like it's a settled debate. I'm here to say there's another side and present that viewpoint.

As you many imagine, I agree with Sen. Cruz's line of question from the article you linked. And I don't think EFF's solution is viable. They suggest that Facebook should make their policies more transparent and give users more control over what they see.

But this misses the entire point. Facebook/YouTube/etc are in a monopoly position. They've proven that they are nakedly partisan, and they have no intention of acting in good faith.

Platforms should not be allowed to discriminate on any viewpoint or legal content. They can still provide tools for advertisers to choose what content their ads appear next to. And they can still provide tools for users to choose what they see.

But discriminating on some viewpoints and not others is anathema to a public forum. And you can read Section 230 that way.

Natsu2• 6 years ago

I get that, but what happens when the big ISPs decide to moderate content? They're private businesses too...

Isn't that what started the movement for Net Neutrality in the first place? They were going to start charging us to provide YouTube, etc.

I agree that this is a bad legal argument, but I do think there's an underlying issue, even if it's not an issue with YouTube itself.

Granted, the best way to deal with that might be to attach some sort of neutrality provisions to the various contracts they have to agree to in order to lay fiber, get spectrum, etc. rather than deciding what websites can and can't do.

jessaustin10• 6 years ago

As a supporter of EFF, I wish they had found space in that piece to talk about the monopoly in online video that Alphabet enjoys. If Youtube had to stand on its own feet as a profitable service, different editorial choices would be made. So fortunate, for them, that we've allowed them the massive subsidy of Alphabet's massive online advertising business...

magicalist2• 6 years ago

Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post

as has been pointed out in other comments[1], this isn't true, and is also irrelevant to PagerU's first amendment argument, which definitely was the heart of their claim.

[1] e.g. root at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434592

mech12346• 6 years ago

I wasn't aware that this claim was central to the suit, thanks for that. Many people here are not focusing on that claim. EDIT: Per other replies, it seems like that claim has a large amount of direct evidence against it.

I think it is interesting that in some long-term sense there is pressure for the government's regulatory reach to move farther up the network layer stack.

~50+ years ago it was clear that telephone lines were a natural monopoly and required regulation. Over time this transferred to ISP's, over time this may transfer to "platform websites", which currently to me seems like a pretty dang vague category.

It would be very strange for an Elizabeth-Warren-esque tech regulatory crackdown to occur without guaranteeing certain freedoms of speech for users.

gregd3• 6 years ago

You're also wrong in that these are not inherently conflicting things. A platform can moderate their content AS WELL AS have immunity from what their users post.

RestlessMind• 6 years ago

I will repeat a comment I made on another article: treat certain surfaces of social media companies, mainly the user specific pages (Donald Trump's twitter page, PewDiePie's YT channel etc) as a platform; treat other surfaces which are generated based on algorithms and not directly by individual users (FB feed, YT watch feed, reddit homepage etc) as a publisher. That way, social media companies won't be responsible for what their users upload. But they will be responsible for what they present to their users to optimize clicks / engagement / revenue etc.

xoa• 6 years ago

How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate when it's so trivial to just pull up a search engine or Wikipedia or the like and type "Section 230" and see the law itself (as well as subsequent court rulings and ample discussion)? This post is nearly completely wrong. First, here is what Section 230 actually says:

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Note there are no requirements for "neutrality", or for perfection or any other such thing. "Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post" is completely incorrect. A service that carries anything neutrally short of a lawful order is covered under Common Carrier status, which is a different thing. Before 230, Internet services faced two choices: to be perfectly neutral and engage in no moderation and thus not be responsible under common carrier, or else to engage in moderation, fail to be 100% perfect at it, and after inevitably having something bad posted get sued for it and end up being ruled the "publisher or speaker". This would destroy all real time user content posting, and potentially user content posting in general.

The point of 230 was precisely to allow imperfect and biased moderation and content enforcement by real time (or close) private platforms without assuming legal responsibility for what users published. Quite arguably more than any other law in existence it's what made the modern Internet possible.

shadowgovt19• 6 years ago

How the heck do such wild, ludicrously wrong misunderstandings propagate

Hypothesis: in the modern era, perhaps thanks to strong belief in freedom of speech and support for said belief baked into our mass bidirectional communications tools on the internet, false beliefs can easily outstrip true facts on publicly-accessible fora because false beliefs greatly outnumber true facts.

tzs3• 6 years ago

We have common carrier provisions for other communication mediums with no liability (ex. TV, ISP's). And we have liability for communication mediums with editorial control (ie. Newspapers, Magazines).

...and we have bookstores, which can choose to not carry books on certain subjects, but are not generally liable for the content of the books they do carry.

Online forums seem to me to be more like bookstores than either common carriers or newspapers.

jaywalk5• 6 years ago

I'm not aware of any bookstore that allows anyone off the street to come in and put their own books up for sale in their store.

weare138• 6 years ago

These are inherently conflicting things. Section 230 gives special protection on the assumption that platforms aren't involved in selecting what users post. But then with the other hand, platforms are selecting what users post via their content guidelines.

They're not contradictory, they're unrelated.

jknoepfler2• 6 years ago

There are a lot of comments here suggesting that this case is cut-and-dried obvious. YouTube is a private entity, QED.

This case is more nuanced than that, and part of an ongoing, evolving understanding of the purview of the First Amendment in the United States.

(NOTE: IANAL, much less a constitutional law scholar, I'm just digging into some news over coffee as an interested citizen)

Poking around the case materials a little bit:

PragerU lawyers reference a decision (here: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1332974.html) in which a corporate entity tried to remove street preachers from grounds (the Rose Garden) partially leased from a public entity (the City of Portland). The court found in favor of the preachers, holding that the corporation effectively was a state actor over which the court had jurisdiction.

If you read the reasoning in that case, you'll find reference to other cases in which the courts tried (unsuccessfully) to hammer down what counts as a state actor. From a very cursory reading there's substantial jurisprudential churn around the notion of "state actor" - there are commonly accepted "tests" (which are sort of like thought experiments in philosophy), a substantial amount of common sense, and a large margin of error involved in determining whether or not a private entity is behaving in a way that might run afoul of restrictions placed on public actors.

It's clear that there are cases where publicly owned resources are leased to private entities, and that "speech" happens over these resources (broadcast frequencies, ISP rights, publicly-owned domains, etc.). There certainly are private actors in this space that do fall under the purview of the First Ammendment.

Again, I don't think YouTube is such an entity - and the courts agree - but this is a space where limits are evolving and being tested all the time.

edit:

I enjoy the court's somewhat punchy decision:

  Both sides say that the sky will fall if we do not adopt 
  their position. PragerU prophesizes living under the tyranny 
  of big-tech, possessing the power to censor any speech it 
  does not like. YouTube and several amicus curiae, on the 
  other hand, foretell the undoing of the Internet if online 
  speech is regulated. While these arguments have interesting 
  and important roles to play in policy discussions concerning 
  the future of the Internet, they do not figure into our 
  straightforward application of the First Amendment. Because 
  the state action doctrine precludes constitutional scrutiny 
  of YouTube's content moderation pursuant to its Terms of 
  Service and Community Guidelines, we affirm the district 
  court's dismissal of PragerU's First Amendment claim.

jknoepfler2• 6 years ago

why on earth was this downvoted? did I incorrectly report something? I'm actually confused. was the observation that the case represents a sample of a complicated and interesting legal landscape in the United States of America incorrect, insulting, or what?

Bendingo2• 6 years ago

I have no idea why you were downvoted.

The whole concept of down/up votes is broken - I am a grown-up and quite capable of critical thinking and can form my own opinion of other people's view.

Furthermore, in this current era of group-think and censorship, comments (like yours) that are downvoted are usually the the most interesting.

On the plus side, the greying-out of such comments just makes it easier to find them among a sea of conformance.

Sincere thanks to all downvoters.

gfodor• 6 years ago

mark my words: this will get to the supreme court, and youtube will lose. sites like youtube, facebook, twitter ultimately need to be recognized as some kind of semi-public forum. once they are, the rules change.

mech12346• 6 years ago

The world is a better world when reasonable opinions are well-considered on all sides.

Prager U's videos are not hate speech. They are reasonable opinions voiced in a calm manner.

It is sad that YouTube chooses to de-promote Prager's content. But it is not illegal.

FireBeyond4• 6 years ago

Do you consider it "sad" that Fox doesn't have 50% left leaning contributors, too?

If not, why not?

mech12346• 6 years ago

Yes, it is sad that Fox doesn't have enough left-leaning commentators.

Media producers have realized that consumers self-select into viewing distribution channels that appeal to their existing beliefs. It creates a feedback loop where media market segmentation by political affiliation drives people further apart.

PragerU is a conservative entity that tried to penetrate a liberal bastion; I like it for that. I also like it when liberal entities try to penetrate conservative bastions.

From my subjective survey of the media landscape, it seems that the left-leaning bastions currently dominate. To the extent that they push reasonable conservatives off of their channels, they encourage conservatives to bifurcate: either join them, or retreat to far-right positions.

downerending6• 6 years ago

It would be extremely sad, if they dominated their market to the degree that YouTube does.

UncleMeat9• 6 years ago

They are reasonable opinions voiced in a calm manner.

Many of their videos are wildly against academic consensus and also inflammatory. A classic is the claim that colonialism was actually great for colonized nations.

You can absolutely voice inflammatory and bogus intellectual material in a "calm manner". That doesn't change that it is both wrong and inflammatory.

mech12346• 6 years ago

If you are referring to to the video "If you Live in Freedom, Thank the British Empire", it is factual regarding its objective claims but heavily spun in its subjective claims and in which material it chooses to cover and omit. It would be wrong to call it wrong- no history professor would claim that the historical events it discussed did not happen. Disagreement would only occur regarding how beneficial they were and whether important details were omitted.

In the context of that particular video, the degree to which the value judgements disagree with academic consensus is mostly reflective of the ideological leanings of current history departments in comparison to PragerU. And to address the main thesis of the video- Western democratic freedom is almost certainly more widespread nowadays than it would have been without the presence of the British Empire (also assuming that France or similar colonial competitors didn't swoop in to fill the power vacuum).

The way that the video seems tone-deaf is that it isn't sufficiently critical of Britain's moral failings. However, its central thesis is not incorrect.

downerending6• 6 years ago

Part of the point of the academy is to have people argue wildly different positions. Certainly debating the merits of colonialism would fall in there.

If debates like this don't happen, you end up with a populace that has no idea why certain things that were tried in the past went horribly wrong, even if they seemed innocuous.

Personally I'd far rather be exposed to outrageous claims and work it out for myself.

lanternslight2• 6 years ago

And blindly following academic consensus is good?

neuland3• 6 years ago

We should be free to be "wrong".

All advancement of knowledge stops when the prevailing truth of the elite is unquestionable.

Traster2• 6 years ago

The world is a better world when reasonable opinions are well-considered on all sides.

Absolutely, that's categorically not what PragerU does. But if it did, that would be relevant.

They are reasonable opinions voiced in a calm manner.

Actually no, quite a lot of them are entirely unreasonable opinions voiced in a calm manner. Go and search for PragerU's presentation of evolution for example - their criticism amounts to "Scientists are unsure whether the speed of light is 3x108 or 3.015x108 so clearly there's no speed of light". And "Well maybe micro-evolution but 'many' scientists doubt macro evolution".

It's not reasonable, it's deliberate mis-representation of the scientific material to serve a religious agenda.

mech12346• 6 years ago

I agree that the video "Evolution: Bacteria to Beethoven" is misleading and serves a religious agenda.

The video accepts natural selection, and references real research data, which is nice, but it asks too much of science. The implicit claim is "until all biological mechanisms underlying evolution are fully explained, you should remain skeptical of the theory of evolution."

An obvious likely audience interpretation of the video could be, "this calm, smart, and reasonable-sounding man is telling me that it is fine to be skeptical of evolution. I'll keep on believing in creationism."

However, this amount of misdirection is reasonable, is fairly typical among political organizations, and does not reflect an incendiary or particularly damaging viewpoint. If the corpus of PragerU videos can pass this bar, then there is no reason to de-rank them in YouTube.

brightball3• 6 years ago

It’s interesting that the article lists PragerU as a conservative outlet. The stuff I’ve seen of theirs in the past gave me the opposite impression.

blaser-waffle2• 6 years ago

Citation needed -- link me to something that isn't conservative.

brightball3• 6 years ago

I’d have to find it. They put out one on the causes of the civil war that went viral years ago that was so misleading it was embarrassing.

( Civil War history is a hobby of mine because it’s really interesting )

eesmith• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU points out "PragerU was founded in 2009 by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager and radio producer and screenwriter Allen Estrin,[7] in order to present conservative views and to offset what Prager regards as the undermining of college education by the left." ... "Vanity Fair said PragerU "packages right-wing social concepts into slick videos" and that PragerU was "one of the most effective conversion tools for young conservatives."[30]"

Their home page includes "Join PragerFORCE, our student ambassador program — the fastest-growing conservative digital army, fighting the war of ideas online and on campus." Their press releases include "PragerU’s Day in Court: Ninth Circuit Court to Hear PragerU’s Appeal August 27 as Censorship of Conservative Free Speech Continues".

So I think both general society and PragerU regard PragerU as "conservative."

throwGuardian2• 6 years ago

Does anyone else find it ironic that Google (rightly) led the net neutrality fight against ISPs/carriers, with one of the complaints being potential censorship from these entities.

And then they turn around and censor conservative content disproportionately, with no self awareness on perceptions of bias that it creates.

It doesn't matter if section 203 requires neutrality, a giant megacorp with a monopoly on internet video needs to stay neutral. We cannot have a "rules for thee, not for me" attitude from Google. If they won't stay neutral, they need to be regulated.

Section 203 needs to be scrapped, and something that guarantees 1A, while shielding platforms from culpability, needs to emerge.

tzs3• 6 years ago

Does anyone else find it ironic that Google (rightly) led the net neutrality fight against ISPs/carriers, with one of the complaints being potential censorship from these entities.

No, because to use a transportation analogy ISPs are like buses or light rail, while websites are like the stores and offices and gathering places that you take the buses or light rail too.

There would be nothing ironic about believing that a city's bus or light rail systems should be required to accept all passengers who have the fare and are not an actual danger to other passengers, while simultaneously believing that a private store or office that one might reach by bus does not have to accept everyone.

throwGuardian2• 6 years ago

Why does Google feel the need to censor any conservative content? The right to censor doesn't have to culminate in actual censorship without cause.

Double speak is on full display here: self certified ethical, moral, freedom loving, anti authoritarians are the first to indulge in thought policing.

Moreover, this kind of censorship plays out on the daily across tech, while the companies involved lie about not being biased, with a straight face. It's all too Orwellian

teh_klev• 6 years ago

Leonard French (an actual lawyer) who runs the Lawful Masses YouTube channel has quite a good analysis of the failed appeal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddz5u8Yygys

ghgdynb1• 6 years ago

What a deceptive headline

downerending6• 6 years ago

The court could not have ruled otherwise. Still, a society where a dominant corporation has this much power to squelch voices it doesn't like is not what we ought to hope for.

godelzilla• 6 years ago

Wow a fake university that promotes pseudo-science doesn't understand the first amendment? Shocker.

YouTube can restrict PragerU because it is a private forum, appeals court rules

Related Stories