The prize of reducing the scenario where a tiny minority of people can legally cause the deaths of thousands of people if their fantasies are fed by the media they seek.
We have laws for murder. And for constitutional protection of speech.
It's even more ludicrous that the alleged crime is statistics. Meanwhile, Imperial College statistical models were proven wrong almost immediately by Oxford University, but they are still allowed to speak after triggering hasty decisions that affected millions of lives.
We are leaving unaccountable the people who literally yelled "Fire!!" to billions of people, but it's suddenly imperative to suppress speech that informs collective decisions that are complex, regional and contextual? What does Google have against learning?
It would take little effort to prepend a correction to the original video and/or publish a revised version. This is Hacker News: surprise, someone is wrong on the internet! They get corrected. It's better than being wrong offline and never being corrected.
Some people will now work to minimize damage to society by private platforms.
Google can apply arbitrary rules, but they can't claim that their decisions represent "society". There was no consultative process where society elected Google or society was asked for their opinion on censoring this particular video. In fact, "society" has immediately republished the video elsewhere.
In fact, the Streisand effect will guarantee more attention to the video (e.g. this thread). Google destroyed a huge number of comments debating the merits of the video. Previously, such destruction would have been done by book burning.
Now the debate is scattered and it is harder to address any confused people, instead of going to the number one web property for video. Way to miss the point of both speech and censorship, Google.
You’re likening the deletion of a video on a private free video hosting site to state-sponsored book burning?
The Streisand effect is a blip in popularity here. The point is to not validate dangerous fantasies of people who are unwilling or incapable of behaving in a safe and logical manner. Google succeeded in this endeavor, despite what people paying close attention to things might argue about in side channels.
When a large private organization or a few of them control virtually all public discourse (the digital public square), their choices are in effect as dangerous and impactful as the government taking the same action.
