Alphabet, the company that owns Google and YouTube, has quietly become one of the most powerful gatekeepers of permitted speech on the planet, along with Facebook and – within China – the Chinese government. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. Everyone agrees there are some things that have no place online, although different cultures and different countries have varying and often entirely incompatible rules about permissible speech. But an entirely uncensored internet would be a disaster for society, as everyone now acknowledges. Governments want their rules enforced, and the advertising businesses that have become the giants of social media are the players who can enforce them. If Google, Facebook, and Twitter all decide to ban a person their public profile will be extinguished and they will, in effect, disappear. Such a person may still exist on the internet, but only on the margins.
There is a halfway house between complete extinction and freedom: YouTube can choose, as a private company, not to show any advertisements against a particular channel, and even to keep for itself the donations some people make to see their comments prominently featured below a video. These sanctions were last week imposed on Carl Benjamin, the Ukip candidate for MEP, who has repeatedly discussed raping the Labour MP Jess Phillips; it is right that he should not be able to profit from such disgusting misogyny.
Continue reading...from Advertising | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2LDCwlp
via IFTTT
Comments
Post a Comment