Ultimately, his freedom and originality haven't been impinged; if he wants to say whatever he wants, he can make and host his own videos.
His freedom of speech doesn't override Disney's freedom of association or YouTube's freedom of the press; they're under no obligation to publish or promote anyone's content, and the counterweight to that is that people who don't like their policies can boycott them.
But you're unlikely to find a successful boycott organized around the notion that there should be no ramifications for paying strangers to hold up signs that say "Death To All Jews."
This is all correct -- but it underlines the awkward moral spot that Google (my employer) is in.
Our incentive is to pay lip service to freedom of speech while taking the path of least resistance and censor to keep angry 3rd parties happy. You might think this shuts down only speech beyond the pale. But we are still rewarding those who act most offended, and our wisest course is to kowtow more and more.
That stuff is no danger to a society when the soap boxes are distributed about land. But YouTube is a single platform in the position where it can one of the most effective censors of film on earth.
It is more more powerful in this field than any government, -- except those which can force our hand. Yet Google has the rights, and indeed duties of a private company. And that is a long-term danger to society and to the company.
If we stopped saying things that might "offend" someone somewhere there would be silence. What's interesting is, the more we try to silence certain voices, the louder their message gets. Does demonization (?) work? Does it back fire ? Take IS for instance. The stronger and more extreme the resistance (?) the stronger it gets.
I'm certainly not defending hate, etc. Just wondering - out loud - if the old countermeasure rules still apply.
There are things that are pretty unlikely to offend, things that are very likely to offend a lot of people, and things that are very likely to offend a few people (this kind of humor is often called "punching down" when the few are a low-power group and "punching up" when it's a high-power group).
Nobody is calling for zero offense; that's a slippery-slope argument that doesn't really apply to the situation. And nobody has silenced PewDiePie; he's completely free to continue to publish his content on YouTube (with proper community flagging, within the guidelines of the YouTube community, and even if he were no longer free to do so, he wouldn't be "silenced;" he'd just have to move his content to .mp4s hosted out of his own pocket).
What has happened is YouTube and Disney have both exercised their option to no longer pay the guy for being offensive, which they are perfectly within their rights to do.
In terms of the more general "Just wondering aloud" question: The old Streisand Effect is still in play, but the Internet is now a mature enough platform that it has "these sites" and "those sites." You can find all manner of things completely unacceptable to YouTube's community standards linked off of 4chan. Keeping them off of YouTube does probably make them a little harder for most web users to find (since YouTube's search, indexing, and relational systems are so convenient). That's likely working as intended.
Agreed. They are free to hire and fire whoever they want. But that's not my point. The question is this: Does marginalizing and demonizing - in the internet era - make fringe ideas weaker or stronger? Or is "there's no such thing as bad press" finally not true?
His freedom of speech doesn't override Disney's freedom of association or YouTube's freedom of the press; they're under no obligation to publish or promote anyone's content, and the counterweight to that is that people who don't like their policies can boycott them.
But you're unlikely to find a successful boycott organized around the notion that there should be no ramifications for paying strangers to hold up signs that say "Death To All Jews."