> If you're going to murder your parents over a conspiracy theory is there any reason to assume you wouldn't murder them for a dozen other reasons?

I'd wager that some will and some won't, and that if you were morbid enough you could probably measure such a thing statistically.

> How justified is censoring a platform for millions of users because of one mentally ill user?

Not only the mentally ill occasionally have absolutely terrible ideas, buy into something stupid, or get occasionally conned. Adding information to videos is also not censorship - at least insofar as I'd define the term, or generally seen it defined, unless perhaps if you're going so far as to try to bury a needle in a haystack - so I'm not sure the question is relevant here unless you're worried about some slippery slope or something.

I'd hesitate to impose censorship, but adding information to pierce the walls of echo chambers - and to let e.g. "the marketplace of ideas" actually work - seems like a great idea to me. Not that any implementation of such a thing won't have it's flaws, mind you.

> Is there any evidence that being exposed to certain ideas "pushes someone over the edge" any more than what they can come up with in their own head or without technological assistance? I've read some stuff about school shootings that suggests media coverage encourages "copycat" attacks.

I feel like you've answered your own question here, but I may be missing something. Isn't what a copycat being exposed to when they read the news about one of these incidents, also ideas? Terrible, terrible ideas? Or are you perhaps asking if any of that stuff you've read rises to the level of evidence instead of clickbait hearsay? I've likely read little more than you have - references to studies that suggest the evidence is there. I don't recall reading about any studies refuting that idea or showing no correlation.

I agree with you that what youtube is doing now is not censorship by any standard definition and I don't think it's a bad thing. You might be able to argue that it's a form of "positive censorship" in the sense that a wiki on a video would be a scarlet letter but even that seems like very weak censorship.

I included the example of copycat attacks to show good faith that I'm not ignoring examples I know of that counter my own argument. What I'm trying to understand is the role of radicalization and conspiracy in violent acts. We know there are large communities of radical conspiracy theorists and yet physical violence or violent harassment is only a small subset of that community. How safely can we presume that "radical media" is the main cause of the latter violent groups? It's definitely an appealing narrative to imagine these people groom and reinforce their own beliefs until they "boil over" into violence but is that really how it works? We act as though people can be almost brainwashed into doing terrible things just by mere exposure. I'm arguing that at the very least it's more complicated than that and we should inject a little bit of nuance into the rhetoric of what conspiracy theories mean for society.

In the one anecdote in this thread, the perpetrator in question was Milo's intern. Someone receiving direct 1st-hand gaslighting from Milo himself doesn't really need Youtube to learn about Milo's conspiracy theories.

There is certainly a lot of research about the radicalization process, generally aimed (unsurprisingly) at terrorism rather than isolated murderers. I don’t have a signal succinct citation to point you to, but I am relatively confident that there is good evidence to support the claim that an individual being increasingly surrounded by media espousing a radical or fringe belief is correlated with that individual becoming increasingly radical.

That doesn’t answer your question about justifying censorship, but I think that’s not the best question to ask, since media recommendation algorithms that penalize certain radical subjects is hardly what I would call “censorship.”

>I am relatively confident that there is good evidence to support the claim that an individual being increasingly surrounded by media espousing a radical or fringe belief is correlated with that individual becoming increasingly radical.

I get where you're coming from but I have some issues with that perspective. Would you agree that a conspiracy theorist who uses physical violence and/or threats of physical violence is strong indicator of a dangerously radicalized person? Then how can we explain the large number of people exposed to radical media but only a small handful performing radical violence? Are conspiracies and radical beliefs always some kind of treadmill where you take a nibble and then inevitably go deeper and deeper until you become so delusional that you feel the need to take violent action? To me that feels too much like a just-so narrative.

Also, I think we should be concerned about what some people consider "radicalization." Everyone is against radical violence and media that contributes to that end. But what about media that makes someone a Trump voter? Rhetorically some argue that they are just as dangerous as any shooter because they create a social environment that precipitates violence, even though the causation isn't direct.

It's difficult to talk about these things without coming up with false dichotomies or bad generalizations. Really what I'm trying to get at is a "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" understanding. It's easy to get rid of the baby when it's not your baby or the baby is casually stereotyped in an appealing way.

> Then how can we explain the large number of people exposed to radical media but only a small handful performing radical violence?

Surely there's some various in the predisposition of individuals to become radicalized, but I don't suspect that means that people who do become radicalized would inevitably have become radicalized regardless of their exposure to certain ideas. The fact that terrorist groups put a lot of effort into radicalizing people indicates that they are under the impression that their efforts are meaningful. Even if the predisposition for an individual to become radicalized is already determined and unchangeable, there is an incentive for various radical groups to radicalize those people under their banner rather than some other banner.

> Everyone is against radical violence and media that contributes to that end. But what about media that makes someone a Trump voter? Rhetorically some argue that they are just as dangerous as any shooter because they create a social environment that precipitates violence, even though the causation isn't direct.

I agree that there's a continuum here, and that it's extremely subjective. I think most people agree that explicitly inciting violence is not (and should not be) protected speech/communication. But what about communication about groups dedicated to violence that don't explicitly mention violence? Then what about groups espousing philosophies which are strongly correlated with advocating violence, like blatant racism? Then what about groups that espouse philosophies described to just barely not quite be blatant racism, like "white nationalists" who explicitly advocate for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" of certain people from certain regions, but claim to not be racist and not support violence? Do we throw up our hands and say "well, they said the word 'peaceful,' therefore they're not technically advocating violence, therefore it's protected speech"?