Everyone knew this was the state of the law, and highly unlikely to change, but conservative commentator Dennis Prager had many of his followers hoping otherwise. A Ninth Circuit panel has now ruled that YouTube is not a state actor and that its marketing of itself as a forum featuring diverse viewpoints was opinion and not false advertising. [Nancy Scola, Politico; Eugene Volokh; Prager University v. Google; earlier (many channels not identified with conservative ideas saw far higher shares of their content placed in parental-control category than did Prager); Jonathon Hauerschild, American Legislative Exchange Council last January (YouTube not “public forum” for legal purposes)]
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” (many channels not identified with conservative ideas saw far higher shares of their content placed in parental-control category than did Prager)”
Not suggesting that youtube is a state actor or should be regulated, but this is a bit of a straw man argument. That a channel with seriously offensive content has that content placed under parental control is not particularly arguable. That PragerU, who has, as far as I can tell, exactly zero content unsuitable for young people, has their videos placed under parental control for political reasons is far less arguable. That’s like saying “Hustler has more magazines that have to be displayed inside brown covers than Popular Mechanics, and therefore that one edition of PM that was restricted must have been justified”.
Stefan Molyniuex had a video restricted because he talked about the opiod crisis and the fact that white men were far more likely to be addicted than any other segment of society. He drew no conclusions about race, just talked about the facts. I found nothing offensive but down it went.
>has, as far as I can tell, exactly zero content unsuitable for young people
Did you follow the links? The link accompanying the text you cite (“earlier”) includes the following:
“This Mike Masnick thread (language) gives another side to the story. YouTube’s optional ‘restricted mode,’ meant to limit kid viewing, isn’t important or much used (only 1.5% of users enable it). The PragerU shows at issue did have some content about topics like rape, murder, and genocide that might disturb younger children.”
https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1103357334988808192
I don’t think the History Channel, whose offerings were thrown into kid-safe mode at a rate twice as high (24% vs. 12%) as Prager’s, is the sort of material distributed in plain brown wrappers.
For readers who are disinclined to click through to the Masnick thread, here is a snippet that mentions, inter alia, PragerU content related to “mass murders and other atrocities,” “an animated depiction of a nearly naked man lunging at a group of women” in a discussion of campus rape culture, “animations of police officers and black men pointing guns at people,” and so forth. That users might disagree case to case on whether such content is “unsuitable for young people” (and that it might depend on the age of the kids and the setting) goes without saying.
https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1103358726679932928/photo/1
One conclusion might be that because kid-safe mode inevitably requires some contestable judgments, entities like YouTube should give up on trying to provide it, but that’s not what Prager partisans seem to be arguing.