Anybody just throwing around the term “authoritative sources” – and leaving it at that, should no longer be able to pass the scrutiny as a proper (media) source by any critically thinking person.
It’s too late in this game now to just keep getting bamboozled and disparaged as passive “consumers” of deliberately misleading “reporting” like this – using seemingly big words like “authoritative” – that in reality mean nothing.
Unfortunately, this is a hope that Big Tech and its clearly sympathetic if not in some way (at least ideologically) affiliated web content like this won’t be accommodating any time soon.
The piece goes hard against “conspiracy theorists” while propping up the attack by mentioning “authoritative sources” as a legitimate counterpoint, time and again.
To use some terminology they understand – that’s highly problematic.
If not – tell us how and what exactly makes the sources you promote “authoritative.” Or shut up about “authoritative” forever. Respect your audience. Tell us how you define those sources, and prove that your method has any intrinsic value.
But we do learn two important things from this MIT Technology Review piece: first, that YouTube, believe it or not, is still “not doing enough” to censor content, at least in the eyes of its ideological media handlers. And the giant platform is being let known this very publicly, through articles like this.
And second, the kind of pressure promoted here works. It doesn’t go for good old censorship that simply deletes content – the smarter way is to stunt it through demonetization.
And here’s how it goes: several YouTube channels are first singled out as fit for censorship – among them in this case that of financial YouTuber Patrick Bet-David, who recently interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Needless to say, none of these were toeing YouTube’s ideological lines of the day, on issues like vaccination or coronavirus.
“We asked YouTube for comment on all three videos on Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday morning, one of the three (an interview with Dr Judy Mikovits) had been deleted for violating YouTube’s medical misinformation policies. Before it was deleted, the video had more than 1 million views,” writes MIT Technology Review – the media mouthpiece of that university that was once among Jeffrey Epstein’s favorite donation targets.
The point of the lengthy article – once it’s stripped of its plentiful BS – is that even a peak aggressive, censorship-minded YouTube acting against anything not strictly within the bounds of its arbitrary (“authoritative-sourced”) policy – is still, somehow, “not doing enough.”
And again, this isn’t about whether you support the ideas of Mikovits et al or not – it’s about whether a select group of people should be allowed to decide who speaks.
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