Google CEO Confirms You Don’t Even Need To Violate Policies To Be Censored

It has become increasingly apparent that the major Silicon Valley tech companies hold a liberal bias against conservatives, and though those firms routinely deny it, the mask of unbiased nonpartisanship has continued to slip as these firms receive pushback for their one-sided ideological activities.

The latest tech firm to let the mask slip is Google, as its CEO recently admitted in an interview with Axios that content creators on YouTube — which is owned and operated by Google — can be censored by the platform even if they haven’t actually violated any of YouTube’s policies or terms of service.

The interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai took place prior to the most recent YouTube scandal, but remarks from Pichai about the need to address and even censor “borderline content” on the platform has now been viewed as alluding to actions YouTube took in the days after the interview.

The latest scandal involved conservative comedian Steven Crowder, who’d been targeted by a leftist activist and writer for Vox named Carlos Maza. Maza accused Crowder of using homophobic and racist insults against him.

An initial review of Crowder’s content by YouTube found that no violations of policy had occurred. However, following a great outcry from the left, YouTube proceeded to censor and demonetize Crowder’s channel anyways, as his content was deemed to have displayed “a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community.” 

Getting back to Pichai’s commentary in the “Axios on HBO” interview, the CEO said that YouTube and Google were working hard to remove “harmful content” from its platforms, though he admitted it was a work in progress that still needed adjustments.

He noted that much like how Google ranks search results based on content quality, “(W)e are bringing that same notion and approach to YouTube so that we can rank higher quality stuff better and really prevent borderline content.”

Pichai proceeded to define borderline content as, “Content which doesn’t exactly violate policies, which needs to be removed, but which can still cause harm.” 

The CEO suggested that the efforts to prevent such content from appearing on the platforms was not just a “hard computer science problem,” but also a “hard societal problem because we need better frameworks around what is hate speech, what’s not, and how do we as a company make those decisions at scale, and get it right without making mistakes.”

So there you have it, the CEO of what is arguably the largest and most influential tech firm in the world stated openly that content creators on YouTube don’t even have to violate the vague policies and terms of service to be punished by way of censorship, demonetization or even removal from the platform.

Instead, such individuals can find themselves in trouble merely by posting “borderline content” that doesn’t violate anything but is nevertheless deemed by the powers that be at Google to be “harmful” in some way, shape or form to the broader social community at large.

We pretty much already know how that arbitrary measure will work, as the liberal morality police at Google and YouTube have already revealed their inordinate ideological bias in favor of liberals and against conservatives.

In other words, people who post conservative content on YouTube could find that they’ve been deemed “harmful” to the liberal social media utopia the Google overlords are attempting to create, while “borderline” or even blatantly harmful content that unquestionably violates policies and terms of service will continue to be overlooked and ignored. 

If Google was to establish clear guidelines policing allowable content and speech on the platform and otherwise maintain a hands-off approach to those who didn’t violate those specific policies, there likely wouldn’t be any problems whatsoever, regardless of the inherent bias of those who run Google and YouTube.

However, the arbitrary crackdown on content and speech that the left finds disagreeable has only become worse and will likely only cause additional problems going forward, and that is simply unacceptable to roughly half of the country.