Before we move any further, let's get this out of the way:

Yes, a private entity has the right, under free market rules, to decide what to publish and what not to publish on its platform. It is not required to make this point clear to me, I am aware. That is not the point here.

Now to the actual topic.

I've been a follower of YouTuber barbara4u2c for quite a while now. She's originally from Slovenia, so she's recently been focusing on the mass immigration currently happening in Europe.

It's a touchy subject which few manage to touch with any sort of elegance or class, but I've found Barbara's videos on the topic to be of good quality. She makes it well known that she's not a fan of the immigration movement, but she never stoops to downright racism or any other type of low brow content.

She simply calls it as she sees it while providing the reasons and data that have lead her to her conclusions. Something that should be applauded, no matter which side of the fence you're in.

I often don't really bother with YouTubers since I tend to find so many of them to be disingenuous and not worth the time, but Barbara's videos I've been checking out.

Yesterday, she published the above videos where she talks about Italy in specific as it pertains to the mass immigration movement.

It was mostly statistics, backstory, and data.

I watched it, liked it, considered it informative and innocent. God knows the mass media isn't covering this shit in any way that could be considered thorough.

I feel information like this has value, like I said. At its core, it has nothing to do with how you feel about immigration. It even has nothing to do with whether or not all the information provided was accurate. I'm not saying it wasn't, I'm making a point to state that different types of viewpoints should be out there for people to watch, judge, and decide for themselves.

The video gained a lot of traction in a short time span, and this morning it had been flagged by the YouTube community, and made invisible.

Basically, you need to go to her profile to see the video, it won't be seen on YouTube otherwise. Commenting, liking, sharing, related videos - everything is disabled.

At first, I just figured someone got offended, flagged it, and as soon as the YouTube team reviews the video, they'll realize there was not an ounce of "hate speech" involved, and they'll reactive the video. But apparently not. Apparently, they feel that Barbara simply expressing her views is hate speech and not allowed on the platform.

This works as a set up for quite the unfortunate and a rather scary precedent, in my eyes.

So, where does this leave us?

YouTube has had its role as an alternative news source for viewpoints and ideas that don't gain notable mainstream traction. Unfortunately, however, YouTube is now becoming merely another mainstream outlet and will be treated as such. You should be concerned for this development.

These may not be the ideas you hold, but they very well could be. I repeat what I said at the top of this post: this is not about free speech, per se, but it is about the culture of silencing. The culture of "dangerous ideas" where you're being safeguarded from ideas that are deemed too dangerous for you, by other people.

It's not the government restricting this, this is our culture restricting the spreading of ideas.

And this me saying this as a libertarian anarchist: culture can be more dangerous than the government.

When the government does stuff like this, you notice. You can keep track. But when it's the culture just shaping itself into something, it can be extremely sneaky about it and do it behind your back when you're not looking.

You can't change culture by voting or changing laws - though voting doesn't help anyway, but that's a separate topic, one I've discussed to death in the past and I choose not to bore you with yet another mundane rant, unless you're looking for a cure for insomnia, in which case you contact me via the chat - culture consists of individual people. And if those people choose to ignore these types of things and shut up, it ultimately doesn't matter who is or isn't in charge.

Don't you want a culture where you can still decide for yourself? Instead of handing that right to a select few sitting in their ivory towers who see fit to make up your mind for you.

If you do, then I suggest you stop sitting around with your thumb up your ass and start paying attention to what's happening around you.

It'd be slightly different if Barbara was in the video calling everybody a nigger, but she isn't. There's nothing incriminating about the video. Even if we, for argument's sake, assume that the information was false. That should not be considered hate speech and you shouldn't allow this shit to be considered hate speech.

The pesky thing about words - as I've said in the past - is that they all have definitions. The only way words mean anything is if we hold on to their definitions. A chair is a chair, not a table. If the word "chair" can mean both a chair as well as a table, communication becomes meaningless.

And words have been reshaped in the past few years something fierce. In turn, this has made a huge chunk of communication about these topics completely meaningless. The current meaning of words like racist, sexist, hate speech, et cetera is anyone's guess at this point.

Consider this: if expressing your opinion is now hate speech, what exactly can be safe from hate speech branding? It may not be your viewpoints today, but God only knows it might be it tomorrow. Even if you agree with the current status quo, the status quo can change, while the culture of silencing will remain, and it might be your ideas that are silenced next.

I'm aware that that sounds overly dramatic and doom'n'gloomy, but this is honestly getting past ridiculous at this point.

I know 1984 is the popular thing to reference in regards to censorship and whatnot, but I've always contended that the much less popular work by Neil Postman called Amusing Ourselves to Death hits home harder than Orwell managed to.

In his book, Postman concludes that an Orwellian 1984-esque society will not be the story of our enslavement, but instead, we will happily enslave ourselves via entertainment and media outlets. The noise to signal ratio of society will get so catastrophic that all valuable signals will be buried beneath the noise, making it impossible to find those signals anymore.

To say it in English to those more normal than me: signal means things like truth, virtue, value, and noise is shitty reality TV. How elitist of me. But fuck you, I'm entitled to it. Contend that if you will.

If we let media entities like YouTube dictate what does and doesn't deserve to get published, all we're ever going to get is shitty reality TV. The pathetic thing about all this is that the Orwellian dictatorship will never even be needed: we'll simply stop caring about the truth ourselves. The government doesn't even have to do anything. Boy, do libertarians look kinda silly then, huh?

The more people stay quiet, the further up their own asses platforms like YouTube will continue to shove their heads.

I think people should be insulted by a culture like this. Normal, functioning, sane adult human beings should be insulted that they're being treated like kindergarteners who the nannies keep themselves from cursing in front of. Just so that little Timmy doesn't learn that life is terrible until he's 14 and has sex for the first time and it sucks. I've been there, but that's another post.

I damn sure am insulted.

But back to YouTube and content publishing stuff.

A lot of people have built their audiences on YouTube, so moving to a different platform is undoubtedly going to be a difficult task - that is, if one is even willing to do it. I can understand this; a content creator is as valuable as his or her followers, and there's no guarantee that the audience follows him or her to a new platform.

Let's get back to the basics of this platform right here.

What's the point of this seemingly neverending tangent I'm on?

What initially drew me to Steemit wasn't the monetary rewards. I never felt it was about that. Steemit's unique gimmick in being a platform built on top of a censorship-free blockchain was the fact that was introduced to me this place - and a demand for something like what we have here is growing by the day.

It pains me to see so much focus here being put on the money - which is nice, don't get me wrong - when something so much bigger could be accomplished here if it was the main focus for just once.

We need a platform that treats people like adults. We're not children. We don't need to be protected from ideas - bad ideas need to be protected from us.

Here's a follow up video she made:

Notice that she doesn't whine about demonetization, she never has.

If you care about the issue, do share the video above and show your support for Barbara.