YouTube had the discretion to take down content that harmed users, judge said.
TLDR:
Person was posting medically dangerous advice on youtube.
Youtube closed their channel.
They were upset that they could not download their misinformation and sued for recovery and damages.
Judge: Youtube is not a backup and data storage service and has no obligation to hold copies of your material.
I mean… does Youtube have any obligation to host any content?
I believe it’s pretty clear that they can (and they do) take down any videos they don’t wanna host, regardless of the reason.regardless of the reason.
That’s the crux of it, and the answer is no. They still need to obey civil rights laws. They couldn’t, for instance, ban women from uploading, or Asians, or any other protected group.
Antivaxxers, however, are not one of them.
Sure but that’s a different topic. We are talking about the content they host, it’s the content what they can take down for any reason. Of course they can’t ban an individual based on one of the conditions that are protected by human rights, but they can ban them based on what kind of content that person posts. He wasn’t banned because of being an antivaxer (even if that isn’t protected), but because of the antivax content he posted. Even an antivaxer can post content in Youtube, as long as it’s content Youtube is ok with (eg. not antivax). I’m sure there’s a lot of people with controversial ideas that happen to post content within the limits of what Youtube tolerates.
Youtube often takes down content that shows too much of women boobs, but they are ok with showing men boobs, for example.
You can’t refuse selling a calendar to a woman (for the reason of her being a woman), but you can refuse to sell calendars that have pictures of women on them if you decided that’s not what you wanna sell (and you don’t even need to justify it). For example.
That could still bleed into analysis of the type of content. If YouTube consistent took down all videos about Islam, for instance, there would be a legitimate case to be made that that would be illegal discrimination on the basis of religion, even if it wasn’t a blanket ban on uploads from Muslims individually.
That doesn’t apply here, of course, but my point is that YouTube can be considered to be legally obligated to host some content that they might not otherwise want to. While they could probably get away with prohibiting all religious content, they’d be in a messier position if they only blocked a specific one. Civil rights law gets messy fast.
In general terms, I believe each website can limit the scope of the content they host in any way they choose. The same way as how /m/asia can limit itself to Asian content and delete content related to other countries/ethnicities, or how an Islamic streaming service can decide that it will only allow content that respects the Islam, and remove any Christian content (and in the same way, a website might declare itself Christian and remove Islamic content).
Though in the particular case of Youtube I’m not saying that’s a bad point, but only because of how big of a platform Youtube is. So in a way they could be considered a monopoly, and in that case there might be a reason to think that they should not target any demografic in their content. But I’m not a lawyer and I’m not sure if that’s enough of a legal basis to demand that. I would expect it’s not, though. Specially if we are talking US law which is under which this lawsuit was filled.
Surprising no one.
Just another reason to use Rumble instead.
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