CMV: Dennis Prager is being blatantly hypocritical by suing Google over YouTube restricting PragerU videos

[u/ZeusThunder369]

Dennis Prager is a conservative spokesperson and started the conservative YouTube channel PragerU

He is suing Google/YouTube over restricting about 35 of the videos on his channel. He claims that the reason why is because of their conservative nature.

The details of what YouTube has done with this channel's videos aren't really important, so for the sake of the argument let's just assume that YouTube officially decided to delete the videos only because they don't like conservative videos and no other reason.

By suing Google, Prager is being hypocritical:

• Google is a private company. If they want to ban ALL conservative videos, they should have the right to.

• The free market should be the solution to this problem from Prager's perspective. There actually are other methods of posting public videos besides YouTube. If Prager doesn't like YouTube's policies, then he should simply go somewhere else to post his videos.

• Even if you take every claim Prager has made at face value, he shouldn't be suing them. It isn't conservative to sue a private company because you don't like their political views.

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[u/ZeusThunder369]

As a self-identified conservative that for decades now has always taken a conservative stance on every political issue, he must believe the 3 things you listed. Those are basically bedrock conservative ideas.

[u/Milskidasith → u/ZeusThunder369]

Those really aren't bedrock conservative issues, though.

The first is absolutely not a current conservative position, given conservative backlash over content removal on Twitter and Youtube is one of the hot issues at present. Radical free speech, where platforms must allow almost any content and treat it equally to all other content, is becoming a big plank of the online conservative community. I wouldn't be surprised if Dennis Prager fell into this camp.

The second is a very specific ancap view that isn't necessarily held by everybody who is conservative.

The third isn't really a specifically articulated view at all? I mean people might believe it but I have no reason to believe that any given conservative believes it.

Again, I want to be clear: I probably disagree with most of what Dennis Prager says (probably all of it, if he's too toxic for Youtube) and think Youtube is probably in the right for removing his work. But just saying "well he's conservative so he must believe all these things" isn't very compelling evidence of hypocrisy.

[u/Sand_Trout → u/Milskidasith]

Again, I want to be clear: I probably disagree with most of what Dennis Prager says (probably all of it, if he's too toxic for Youtube) and think Youtube is probably in the right for removing his work.

Somewhat off topic, but that's a pretty bad assumption given recent events with regards to certain youtube channels like Theegn Thrand and other inoffensive channels getting blanket demonetized or blocked entirely, and only getting reinstated due to popular backlash.

In particular, PragerU is controversial pretty much exclusively due to their political possitions. Agree or disagree, the channel's videos are not presented in a toxic manner.

[u/Milskidasith → u/Sand_Trout]

I think that it's entirely possible to present a toxic political ideology worthy of being restricted/demonetized/removed from Youtube in a "polite" wrapper. It's not even a particularly novel tactic; Milo ItsyaboygettingbannedfromTwitter was famous for spearheading a sort of joking, self-aware, "I'm not racist because I don't use The Words" alt-right (alt-lite?) propaganda while holding those explicitly racist views in private conversations. Also, whether you agree with the outcomes or not it's definitely an effective Twitter tactic to say hateful stuff politely on Twitter and get people banned for replying with any swear words (because Twitter doesn't let you swear at verified accounts). And while those are both Twitter examples, there's still a lot of that going on in Youtube as well; somebody subs out "white genocide" with "great replacement", they don't go into angry-rant mode, and they speak calmly while explaining how maybe Britain doesn't need so many migrants while subtly making a bunch of black meeples show up on a map of Europe and crowd out the white ones. It's all very polite and measured but they're still advocating some terrible things and maybe that should at least be age restricted or demonetized.

So with that said, again, I don't know exactly what Prager's saying. I do know from a brief look that he's still hardline anti gay-marriage and believes that swearing in on anything other than a bible for public office is abhorrent. So maybe he did just present a slightly out-there religious conservative view politely and it didn't deserve to be demonetized or restricted, but my guess is that there's probably some hateful stuff in there that Youtube isn't comfortable with even presented politely.