How We Could Wind Up Banned From Discussing An October Surprise On Social Media This Election
Google-owned YouTube's policy of censoring any information that could affect the election if obtained via "hack" would likely be taken up by other platforms too.
medium.com/@caityjohnston…
Google-owned YouTube's policy of censoring any information that could affect the election if obtained via "hack" would likely be taken up by other platforms too.
medium.com/@caityjohnston…
In what it calls an effort to make itself “a more reliable source for election-related news and information,” YouTube has announced that it will be removing “content that contains hacked information, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes, 
If there is authentic information out there about either of the candidates who are up for the most powerful elected position on the planet, the world is entitled to know about it, regardless of how that information was acquired.
Immensely powerful people should not be permitted to have secrets from the public anyway. The amount of power one has should be directly inverse to the amount of secrecy they are permitted to have. If you’re anywhere near the presidency of the USA, that's zero secrecy.
If a hacker is able to get ahold of accurate information about Donald Trump or Joe Biden, that information is ours. We’re entitled to it. Anyone who tries to obstruct our access to that information is stealing from us.
It’s absolutely ridiculous that we have a society where people are permitted to both rule over us and keep secrets from us as it is without government-aligned tech plutocrats silencing our attempts to learn what those secrets might be.
Moreover, no Youtube moderator will be in any position to definitively say whether most information that comes out is hacked.
So this in and of itself is an outrage. But the way things are playing out it could wind up being a lot worse if damning information about a candidate surfaces prior to the November election.
We already know from experience that social media giants tend to follow in each other’s footsteps whenever there’s a significant step in the direction of censorship, like their coordinated cross-platform removals of alternative media outlets, accounts from US-targeted nations,
So there’s already reason to be concerned that Youtube’s new attack on press freedoms will spread to social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook. Add in the fact that these platforms are openly coordinating with each other and with the US government
The New York Times published an article on Wednesday titled “Google, Facebook and Others Form Tech Coalition to Secure U.S. Election”, later changed to “Google, Facebook and Others Broaden Group to Secure U.S. Election”.
So if information emerges about a candidate in a way that can be credibly spun as a “hack” like the 2016 WikiLeaks drops were, it’s entirely likely that we will see some interference in people’s ability to communicate about it on not just one but multiple social media platforms.
How much communication interference we’d be subjected to is unknown at this time, but it certainly looks like there are measures in place to at least implement some under certain circumstances.
Imagine if documents or video footage were posted online somewhere and we’d get blocked from sharing its URLS on Facebook or suspended for posting screenshots of it on Twitter. The way censorship practices are already unfolding, it’s a possibility that looks not at all remote.
Anyway, something to be on alert for.
