re: YouTube: More than 100,000 videos and over 17,000 channels removed

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but google is publicly traded.

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It is still a private company.

The issue lies with whether or not YouTube is a public forum. They certainly claim to be a public forum - this insulates then from any civil or criminal culpability for anything posted on their servers. As long as YouTube has that distinction then they can’t really be sued for anything anyone says or does in the videos.

However, once they start discriminating as to which videos/speech they’ll disallow or which ones they’ll demonetize, they can no longer claim to be a public forum. They have become a publisher, and publishers can be sued and even held criminally accountable for the speech they choose to publish. YouTube does not want this.

Currently Prager U is suing YouTube/Google/Alphabet and is asking the court to make a determination. Either way is really fine, but YouTube will have to pick a side and follow that set of rules (or be forced to do such by the courts).