YouTube to block all anti-vaccine content and ban prominent anti-vax activists

This would be a good time to remember that the formal definition of “censorship” has traditionally been when the government prohibits or otherwise punishes speech.

The reason this matters is that, in theory, the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to enforce its rules.

Of course serious political and cultural questions arise when particularly powerful private actors prohibit various kinds of speech on their own platforms, but those remain qualitatively different questions than the questions surrounding the use of government violence, actual or potential, to censor speech.

It’s a good thing that YouTube is using its market power to “censor” this kind of speech, because this kind of speech is wreaking enormous amounts of destruction in our society, and YouTube cannot remain neutral on the question of whether it ought to use its market power to allow this to happen.