Thread by @ThoughtSlime

I feel like there's a big misunderstanding about the way that big corporations like YouTube censor leftists. It isn't that some YouTube employee is scanning through uploads to find sufficiently leftist messaging and banning people before word gets out.

The shareholders of Alphabet don't view socialists as a threat. They view them as, at worst, a nuisance but far more likely a potential revenue source by creating heated arguments (and therefore, engagement).

They are (perhaps unwisely) confident in their ability to maintain control over their money.

The people who DO view us a threat are the far right. Not even because they're afraid of us winning, but afraid that we might pull from the same pool of alienated people.

The reason it seems like YouTube or twitter or reddit or whatever cracks down on leftists is because the far right organizes mass reporting campaigns that flag leftist media in those platform's algorithms.

The far right breaks their rules far more, they are largely unreported.

It doesn't suit leftists to appeal to the big corporations to attack their opponents for them. It appeals to the right, and that's how they game the system to maintain hegemonic control over these platforms.

Combine this with the fact that there are tons of far right think tanks astro-turfing new media campaigns on all of these platforms. Even when people do get mass reported, or there is a public outcry (like with Crowder, for example) there is a huge in not punishing them.

Now do you think YouTube had to crunch any numbers to determine whether or not to delete @theorypleeb's channel? (#freethepleeb)
Do dozens of million+ subscriber accounts have a vested financial interest in protesting it?

YouTube's only bias in this fight is towards saving themselves workhours and money. They want the tools used to make these decisions to be automatic so that they don't have to pay anyone to enforce their TOS manually.

So their reporting tool gets a thousand reports from some lefto's channel saying that they're calling for violence when they say "punching nazis is good if it keeps people safe from nazis", it bans them.

YouTube is then incentivized to maintain the precedent that it will not listen to appeals, because the more people make appeals and the more they actually check them, the more people they need to pay to actually process those appeals.
See also: the broken copyright system.

This isn't a case of people doing something sinister because of their capitalist ideology.
It's a case of how capitalism naturally makes structures and systems less efficient or useful by putting the needs of the end user in direct contradiction with the needs of the owners.