On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states in the US, with the justification that it is explicitly a place for people to gather and interact, just like the main street of a town in the 19th century.
Which of these cases is Youtube more like? It's already hard to tell, and it's continuing to change. I expect the legal status of online forums to evolve over the next several decades, just like the legal status of brick-and-mortar spaces has evolved over time.
>On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states
Even then, it does not mean that those malls should allow anyone to sell wares. What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race. YouTube banning a channel does not ban individual from watching videos, it prevents them from uploading videos which is akin to setting up stores.
> What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race
No, the "public square" designation specifically allows people to do things like come to the mall and set up political protests and whatnot. It's not about _access_ to the mall; it's about speech protections.
Is uploading videos more akin to setting up a store at the mall, or more akin to standing on a soapbox at the mall and giving a political speech? It probably really depends on the video, on whether the video is being monetized, etc.
In particular, I feel there is an important distinction between demonetization and removal here, from an ethical/moral perspective. I can't speak to the legal perspective; I am not a lawyer.
Not just between demonetization (totally fine with me) and removal (don't really like it). Promotion is also a tricky one, since those algorithms are fully under Google's control and thus responsibility for its results. But do you still participate in this "public square" if only your followers will find your message? But Google will have to decide what videos are shown anyhow...
For a mall comparison, that would be like them only allowing the demonstration to exist in the basement behind the door that says "beware of the leopard".
If a mall did that they likely be accused of discrimination. The demonstrators don't demand to be promoted, but simply be treated as anyone else.
One flaw in the analogy is that physical space is limited and difficult for a person to move around in. The digital space is effectively infinite, and switching is as easy as typing in a new url (compared to the physical challenge of moving to another state/region).
There are all sorts of flaws in the analogies here; that's why they're analogies, not identities.
That said, I'm not quite sure I understand your point. A speaker in physical space can pretty easily take their speech elsewhere; most obviously to the nearest public street corner. So moving away from a private venue typically does not require anything nearly as drastic as "moving to another state/region".
I'd really like to understand your point and how it applies to both the mall and youtube situations, though, and would appreciate you explaining it if you have the time.
The crux is that digital space is infinite -- anyone can create a space for their own speech. In the physical world, people own very little space, and free speech almost always needs to impose on someone else's property. I think because of that, any comparisons between online speech and IRL speech are inherently flawed and not very useful.
I think there's a difference between "you can speak" and "you can speak in such a way that interested people can hear". The former is not very useful in terms of the right people usually think of as "freedom of speech"; the limiting case of it in the physical world is "you can speak, but only in your own home". So what, if anything, makes for an online version of the public square, where one can go to present speech for consideration by others?
Also, I think online speech is more similar to physical-world speech than you make it out to be. You can't speak online without "imposing" on your hosting provider, their ISP, etc. If you self-host, you "impose" on your own ISP (and probably violate their ToS, if you have a residential connection). You "impose" on your domain registrar. These are all private entities, so you have the same sorts of issues as you allude to for the physical world. And these private entities have been known to restrict the speech of people relying on their services, so this is not a hypothetical risk.
Telling a silenced victim that they can easily move to somewhere else in digital space is of little comfort when their complaint is that they are being denied access to a public audience who are habitually congregating in an existing location.
The extent to which someone is entitled to an audience is of course more difficult to judge.
I disagree with your last sentence; I don't think anyone is entitled to an audience, so it's not a very difficult situation to judge. Free speech means you can shout in the wind all day long.
The original poster was referring to the Pruneyard rule, which is not about characteristics of shoppers (public accommodation), but about using the shopping mall's premises specifically to engage in speech directed to other shoppers.
I assure you that if you were to set up a booth in a shopping mall and start screaming slurs and lecturing about how gays and blacks and Jews are undermining the foundations of the superior white civilization, you would very quickly be removed from the mall.
What if you set up a booth in a shopping mall in the spring of 2016 in California or Massachusetts and gave away pro-Trump stickers? I assure you there are plenty of people out there in both states, many of them likely working on YouTube, who view that as equivalent to your hypothetical. I know a number of them personally.
Trust me, I'm not a fan of the sort of rhetoric you describe. But I also don't like slippery slopes with no guardrails. I expect we'll end up with guardrails here in the end, after a few decades and a bunch of court cases, but it's going to take a while.
A literal reading of their new restrictions as quoted in the article would in fact make a bunch of Trump's campaign speeches fall under the restrictions. And while I'd much rather he had not made those speeches or that people had not listened, or both, it's not clear to me that refusing to broadcast them would have been the right call either.
Now very likely Youtube plans to do extremely selective enforcement. I'm not sure that over-broad rules with ensuing very selective enforcement, applied only against the powerless and unpopular, is the right direction to head in, but that's what I see going on here.
I don't have a problem with people pushing bigoted fear mongering narratives for attention being powerless and unpopular.
I think the truth is that big platforms that are conceivably open to anyone eventually become abused, unevenly enforced, and end up being a gamble when it comes to business. YouTube, Google play, Apple's app store and many more are all examples of this.
I think you have the causality backwards. What I said is that in practice only the powerless and unpopular will get silenced, not that silencing will make people powerless and unpopular. That is, in practice this will likely get applied against all sorts of minority viewpoints that fall under the rules, but not applied to sufficiently powerful/popular/near-majority-viewpoint rules violators.
Also, I couldn't care less whether things are a gamble when it comes to business. I do care about public discourse and control thereof.
Which of these cases is Youtube more like? It's already hard to tell, and it's continuing to change. I expect the legal status of online forums to evolve over the next several decades, just like the legal status of brick-and-mortar spaces has evolved over time.