Youtube says I'm racist, too: the banning of Molyneux, AIU, etc.

let's start with the solution and then
talk about the problem people say they're against censorship in fact what they're against is unfairness and thus unfair censorship here on YouTube if nobody is allowed to show nudity if nobody is allowed to show nipples it's a very simple rule across the board it can be consistent transparent and fair and we all know there are other websites that do allow you and do encourage you to show female nudity to show nipples so on and so forth the problem is not censorship as such the problem is unfairness inconsistency and lack of transparency there's a YouTube channel based in New York City now has a huge number of viewers called sneak oh he had nude images of a conventionally attractive blonde female on his channel and they were edited in from a movie he was talking about so this wasn't like nudity that happened accidentally or spontaneously during a live stream okay this was intentionally placed in nudity and this wasn't nudity in the context of a medical lecture about how to perform surgery properly there have been exceptions like that in the past legitimate medical use exceptions for nudity or something know his channel was not punished in any way I didn't check today but just a couple of weeks ago when I saw that I was really shocked by it hasn't the particular video hasn't been taken down his channel hasn't been demonetised deleted or punished okay my channel has been punished repeatedly even just within the last two months not even for nudity but for discussions or imagery that draws attention to a female body part even if there's no nudity involved okay so to give an example just a couple days ago a couple weeks ago I mentioned Kim Kardashian in passing and I had the cover of a magazine pop-up as an image here on screen and she's wearing a bikini she's covering the bikini area more it's not it's not showing you anything you haven't seen before it's probably not showing you any part of Kim Kardashian in particular you haven't seen we just popped up in passing in the back and that channel sorry that video was punished for trying attention to female body parts even if there was no nudity so you have this tremendous sense of unfairness in inconsistency and you sit there and wonder why is it that this other youtuber sneaked Oh has intentionally erotic nudity again of a conventionally good-looking actress clip from a movie it's a movie he's discussing he can get away with that right I can't get away with any question getting with I don't see anything wrong whatsoever I can't get away with discussions of my sex life with no illustrations I can't get away with showing the cover of a magazine for like four seconds in passing when it's appropriate to the conversation it's reminding you of who or what it is I'm talking about okay this is the problem with YouTube I mean you'd think nudity is something so simple that if you have a censorship policy against nudity you don't have to define what it means but you do and if you have a policy against racism you have to define what racism means we're having this discussion today because somewhat buried under the avalanche of recent news is the fact that YouTube deleted a huge number of massively popular youtubers who were indeed in my opinion racist I would not dispute for a moment that stefan molyneux was racist I would even say he was a self-aware intentional racist he was cognitively racist and again we have this one word racism that covers many different things I think someone who is intentionally deploying racist arguments in pursuit of a political objective is very different from say someone who loses his temper while playing a video game and shouts something racist at the screen that's not good I don't encourage it make excuses for that there was another case a million years ago of a guy and his girlfriend broke up with him and got together with a black guy and he lost his temper and since the bad things about black people or that particular black person that's you know it's bad it's readable it's wrong but that's not the same thing as people consciously and intentionally deploying racist arguments for political purpose as stefan molyneux did for years but still problem is not censorship the problem is transparency consistency and fairness stefan molyneux channel was deleted but not faith Goldie faith Goldie is a racist and she is a racist political leader you can see still now on YouTube conversation she's had in which she is engaging in explicitly white supremacist discourse explicitly anti-semitic conspiracy theory discourse of faith Goldie has also stood for election then we take a step back and we have to ask the question is it in the public interest to allow someone like stefan molyneux to articulate his message precisely so that other people can debate it can refute it so that that discourse and that debate can happen and let me just ask if not on YouTube then where I wish YouTube had competition but this is quite different from say debating nudity on Instagram the Instagram doesn't allow people to show their nipples or various parts their body there's a lot of stuff that's about 85% nude on Instagram but they don't allow 100% nudity try Google there were plenty of websites with photographs of naked women naked man no the wall is no poorer because Instagram doesn't allow this kind of nudity although I utterly despise stefan molyneux as an individual you have to recognize there have been some brilliant criticisms of him on YouTube it's a brilliant reputations of him I have seen some freely Nvidia breaking down piece by piece and discussing precisely the ways in which he is racist in the ways in which he's manipulating his audience into accepting his particular doctrine of so-called race realism okay now is is that worth something and further if that can't happen here on YouTube then where is it going to happen right so I think it's important to focus on the solution more than the problem here I have said in the past that what we need is not one YouTube but two three four many competitors to YouTube so I'm not going to repeat that argument again it's tremendously important that we have other companies with other standards of censorship that will allow an encourage even if it's just the level of gore that you see on a news report on CNN or the BBC we can't even engage in discussion of the war and Afghanistan is in here we can't show news footage anymore we can't have the the level of sexual discussion that's on HBO you know we can neither have fox news nor refuting fox news here on youtube the standards of censorship have become so narrow that to say they have a chilling effect on freedom speeches and understand so yes one one part of the solution is going to be the pluralization of the video platform itself I've discussed that in the past but you know another solution that is really much less work for the corporation hosting these videos or hosting whatever content it is on your platform anyone another solution is just to eliminate anonymity okay now stefan molyneux is not anonymous uses his real name and his real face faith Goldie is not anonymous uses a real name and her real face I think it's very important to observe that by far the worst hate speech the worst harassment the worst abuse the worst encouragement of violence and so on and the most worthless Internet content to debate or respond to her to try to engage you with is always the anonymous content so as bad as stefan molyneux may be I don't think it's worthless for people to criticize his videos to engage in a critique and discussion and even try to engage his fans and reconsidering and realizing what's wrong I think that's meaningful and for anyone who has the patience or sense of moral duty to do so you know over the last 10 years that's been a meaningful chunk of what what went on here on in YouTube politics right so I mean you this is a problem you can't only have one half of that political discourse like as bad as the racism of Stefan ball and you maybe keep in mind we wouldn't have the anti-racist discourse I can't stefan molyneux if we didn't have that there for us to criticize and respond to so there's some value even if the value is only in that in that contrast there were in that debate that arises out of his kind of however so what I've just said about stefan molyneux and the critique of cephalonia i would not say that about the garbage race-baiting content yet racist but I'm saying race-baiting in the sense of inciting conflict the kind of garbage content you see on 4chan on reddit even on Facebook and especially see it all the time in discord the type of you know just of hatred of pointless self-defeating race-baiting conflict that you see in Anonymous forums I think that's something very different from what we had going on here on YouTube on the last 10 years 15 years whatever it's being so there was an alternative for YouTube as a company and I think there's an alternative for many companies who are investing in the internet now one of the alternatives is instead of trying to employ an ever-expanding team of sensors to evaluate and calibrate their standards ever more precisely as to what is and isn't racist or what what isn't isn't racist enough to get banned or punished like you know these dotted lines that nobody can make sense of as to why one person is bandit and not another an alternative is just to eliminate anonymity itself to say hey if you want to participate in these discussions you have to have skin in the game you have to be willing to put your own face your own name and your own professional reputation on the line if you're gonna state these racist views if you're gonna engage in these debates and you know maybe I'm a reckless optimist but I think that when people do that there is the real potential for change there's the real potential that they can become educated that they can change their own view of the world that they could learn from the experience of voicing and sharing their views hearing back reconsidering and then moving on and that's what we're losing on YouTube right now you may think that racism is something as easily defined and as easily punished as nudity on this platform YouTube is at a great deal of trouble defining nudity and punishing people for posting nudity already as mentioned right you may have seen examples in the news you may know examples from your own life of someone who's accused of being racist let's specify a white person is accused of being racist against black people and then in response to these allegations the white person reveals or draws attention to the fact that they're actually married to a black person and raising black kids whether those their own kind of half black kids or they have adopted kids or foster kids and like they reveal that and they just put up a photograph of themselves with their black family at a black church on Sunday and they say look they actually live in the black community and this these aren't you at all every so often there are controversies at that in the news and of course you may also have the experience in life it's quite possible to meet white people who are married to black people who are nevertheless racist it may be an interesting aspect of the context to abate someones views they may nevertheless up racist views while having black married into a black family or while being part community so life's full of those kinds of unexpected contradictions all right my first wife is French my daughter is French and growing up in France I have had YouTube D monetize and soft sensor my videos for being racist against French people and when you read the details of precisely what YouTube said it's not just that they're racist against the French YouTube claims it's not just that they're biased against the French the claim is that my video was hate speech against a minority group meaning the French that the video constituted hate speech against the French and what was I criticizing France for what was that criticizing French culture for in that video I was criticizing them for their lack of interest in washing their hands their poor standards of hygiene in restaurants in grocery stores in bakeries and even in hospitals I talked about a lot of the bad experiences I had with French people refusing to wash their hands lacking any concept of culturally the germ theory of disease of transmitting illness by handling food with unclean hands and then eating it okay now there are a couple levels to this here game what if YouTube is right what if I really do have some kind of bias against the French what if I'm pretty Syst against the French what if that video even is hate speech is what if YouTube is right isn't there still some value in me being able to come on camera and share with an audience my negative experience of what it was like living in France you know whether that's reasonable or unreasonable couldn't that be of some value to the audience couldn't that be of some value to me if people get in touch with me and carry on the discourse and carry on the debate and end up educating me or deprogramming me or change my perspective where I gained some kind of new perspective on France or the bracele something positive could could come into that way and then again also just like stefan molyneux what if it's significant partly because of the reputation of it but what if my bias against the French is also important and meaningful because it generates this kind of counter discourse YouTube's fundamental problem is as I've already said a lack of competition a lack of any viable alternative YouTube's recent decision to delete so many major influential racist channels was covered in Forbes magazine this is real news this has real consequences we live in an era when I hope this doesn't last forever I hope this is a brief moment in the history of the world were the most important platform for publishing the most important speaker's corner the Agora of our political discourse the Penix of our political discourse of all the important debates at our time this this is where Donald Trump comes to make his political statements this is where Bernie Sanders comes to make his political statements across the whole political spectrum YouTube is the crucial theater where contrasting political views come to be heard and the corporation that owns YouTube has decided to narrow and narrow to tighten and tighten the rules on censorship and the problem is again not that censorship itself is bad or evil or wrong but that when we accept censorship when we accept it it has to be on the basis of consistency transparency and fairness the lack of those three things the lack of consistency the lack of transparency the lack of fairness in how YouTube's Census your policies are applied make it unacceptable for all of us I have within just the last 1 month I have repeatedly been punished for videos containing so-called hate speech including as I mentioned he's alleged hate speech against the French my channel is in danger of being deleted for so-called racism right now because I dared to engage in a productive and healthy critique of the leadership of black lives matter doing such outrageous things as looking up the authors serve heard me looking up the founders of the movement reading the books and book chapters they'd written discussing their writing discussing their political leadership discussing what's going on in the movement and what I think is a really healthy and productive way not only do I feel strongly that my videos about black lives matter not only do I feel my videos are not racist I think there's a really insidious form of racism in the lack of critique directed towards black lives matter and its leaders I think there's profoundly unsettling racism the fact that nobody else read the books the articles and the chapters these people published nobody else looked into the intellectual underpinning to this movement and question who are these people what are the objectives with every but I think one of the greatest problems with black lives matter is what is called the soft bigotry of low expectations there's been so little critical interests in evaluating who the leaders are with the position but we have a lesson right here right now unfolding that YouTube will not allow me to engage in that critique will not allow me to engage in that political discourse if this is not a chilling effect on freedom of speech on the most important most constitutionally protected form of political free speech what is