Unless the Irish Times article has been massively edited/corrected (and it doesn’t say it has been), I think that the misinterpretation has been on the part of Techdirt. I mean, given how the flagging system currently works, an article saying that a government agency has been given “superflagger” status which enables them “to flag swaths of content “at scale” instead of only picking out individual videos” doesn’t really imply that the agency has “super-censorship powers.” Especially when the article says that this “allow[s] them to have content instantly reviewed,” as this acknowledges that YouTube still reviews the flagged videos.
And if this was always a part of the article there could be no doubt:
Google confirmed that the Home Office had been given powerful flagging permissions on YouTube but stressed that Google itself still retained the ultimate decision on whether to remove content for breaching its community guidelines.
It’s also a bit ridiculous to think that the government should only ever act against things that are illegal. It’s perfectly legal to be an asshole, but police and the government have always discouraged people from being assholes. The community policing that was once engaged in (and is missed by many) was very heavily engaged in this sort of thing. The government typically uses it’s powers to shape society in ways that it thinks are best. And note that in the IT article Brokenshire was not talking about YouTube specifically, but about the broader government responsibility with respect to online media:
The UK’s security and immigration minister, James Brokenshire, said that the British government has to do more to deal with some material “that may not be illegal, but certainly is unsavoury and may not be the sort of material that people would want to see or receive”.
He said that among the issues being considered by the government was a “code of conduct” for internet service providers and internet companies.
That may be problematic to some, but it’s not quite the same as what Techdirt is saying it is.
