Google was unique as a major dot com with an absolutist position on free speech. Where Twitter eagerly censored the right and favored the left, Facebook favored the left, Google stood by free speech.
When Obama came looking for a Benghazi scapegoat and seized on the Innocence of Muslims video, not only did YouTube refuse to take it down, but Google fought an extended court battle over it. It was an impressive feat that is coming undone.
Google News and then Google began baking in partisan "fact checks" into search results. Then the search algorithms were retooled to promote Islamist views over those of counterterrorism critics, as Robert Spencer has discussed. Search for Jihad and you'll find Islamist results while Jihad Watch has been buried.
Now Google will have a cage for "inflammatory videos". As a subset of measures being taken to flag pro-terrorist videos, there will be a crackdown on non-violent but inflammatory videos.
Third, we will be taking a tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies — for example, videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content. In future these will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetised, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements. That means these videos will have less engagement and be harder to find. We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.
The question is who decides what is inflammatory or offensive. And what are the metrics?
Google is a private company. It has the right to decide who uses its service. But
1. Google is vocally fighting for Net Neutrality. There's a good deal of hypocrisy in demanding that cable companies shouldn't be able to rein in YouTube's bandwidth as part of their own corporate policies, while playing the capitalism card when it suits it.
2. Google is a monopoly. There's no way around it. It controls much of the internet. Its dominance in search is particularly troubling. As it begins biasing its results, the worry stops being abstract and becomes a real threat to freedom of speech. When a corporate monopoly can silence political dissent, we're in troubling territory.
And this needs to be addressed.