Google Gag Reflex

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: Maybe it's an honor when big-tech companies gag you. Maybe you're doing something right.

Google-owned YouTube has yanked a Mises Institute talk by Tom Woods ("The COVID Cult") from the Institute's YouTube channel for challenging orthodox views of the pandemic. Google is also threatening the Mises Institute with further sanctions if the Institute's YouTube channel sponsors further prohibited discourse.

In response, Mises Institute President Jeff Deist observes that Google and other big-tech firms have become de facto extensions of the state, "governmentalities . . . committed to ideological service. . . ."

To fight back, he says, we must "build our own platforms." YouTube alternatives include Bitchute and Odysee, which still host the forbidden talk.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that there's a big difference "between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right."

Not every word of this passage is incontestable, but Mill had a point. If Google is so sure it is so right about COVID-19 policy and Woods so wrong, why try to kill an "opportunity for contesting" Google's view?

Maybe Google's "assurance of being right" is not so rational.

This is Common Sense. I'm Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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