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It’s quite simple: YouTube allows drug glamorization culture and music videos to be watched by young people. For vulnerable young people, there is a straight line from idolizing a rapper to doing the drugs of said rapper. See: Lil Peep (1 billion+ views, mostly teenagers). Some of these rappers are a walking advertisement for drug use. When you’re then at a party listening to their music and there’s drugs available, you are more likely to participate in taking drugs.
— are not engaged in a sophisticated emotional manipulation campaign to get adolescents to find drugs cool.
I think this is all too far. Notably, crime-glorifying rap was around well before YouTube was able to become a star-maker. I don't think YouTube not being around would have made that much difference for rapping about fent charting on radio or whatever.
But I don’t think that absolves them of their crime, because as per my OP, I think all of the players involved are complicit and not only YouTube. If our culture wanted they could make this music require an 18+ identification card for consumption, but there’s too much money to be made and they don’t care about the consequences of their actions.
I mean, we kinda tried, though it perhaps wasn't overly strict and the high-contrast label they slapped onto those albums arguably only made them more desirable. Our culture is not set up for this.
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I don’t see how allowing a certain type of content is comparable to making that content, let alone making the stuff which the content is about.
That’s the same reasoning which leads to colleges banning public speakers.
Colleges are environments specifically designed for intellectual inquiry among adults. And even then, a speaker whose entire shtick is “drugs are good and fun” should probably be prevented from speaking without serious warnings and counter arguments. YouTube is an environment for young peoples’ entertainment, which is very much unlike a college. The content is algorithmically fed to young people, and YouTube profits off of it. As a parent doesn’t escape jail by saying they only allowed their children to drink alcohol, a content server should not escape guilt and shame by saying they only allowed impressionable young people to watch music videos glamorizing opiate use.
Notably, YouTube bans holocaust denialism, which is a less bad thing than the promotion of opiates.
Guilt and shame isn’t equivalent to jail time. Algorithmic service isn’t the same as actually providing drugs. Which, at least in freedom land, isn’t actually illegal, not from a parent to his or her child. Not that youtube provides a parental or even collegiate level of authority over viewers!
Frankly, the analogy is completely incoherent.
We could imagine a scenario where a parent serves their child a reasonable amount of alcohol in their presence. But clearly, in this context, “a parent allowing their child to drink alcohol” isn’t referring to that. This is a discussion on illicit drug use, so a reasonable reader would interpret that in its intended meaning, as an illicit act. But I can be more detailed, if that’s important:
There we go.
But what do they have in common? They are considered the just responses to an infraction. Our society deemed it an infraction to allow children to drink alcohol illegally, and parents aren’t excused by claiming they merely permitted it and merely had the alcohol out in the open for easy access. Now, at least among many people, showing young people a glamorous depiction of drug use by their idol is considered shameful. The YouTube CEO is not excused from shame by merely permitting it and merely having it in the open for easy access.
So the analogy is comparing the relevant commonality of the two cases. Analogies are by their nature simplifications to save time. But your analogy re: college didn’t work because the expectations of freedom of speech on a college campus are distinct from the expectations on an app used by young people and children, from which the CEO derives profit per view.
Is it the same as providing a desirable lifestyle of drug use? Why or why not?
How would you react if someone went up to a teen and showed them really cool depictions of drugs? That would be pretty shameful, right? YouTube does this knowingly using middle men.
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Does YouTube allow the “promotion of opiates”? From their website:
I think videos explicitly encouraging illegal opiate use are probably banned on YouTube given they likely involve the use of hard drugs.
Yes. From their website: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mRTV-j87wOo
You can hear more of his lyricism in works such as Overdose, Benz Truck, and Giving Girls Cocaine. All on YouTube. He is not the only rapper who glamorizes opiates.
Not if they encourage the drug through catchy lyrics and interesting music videos designed to be memorable to adolescents.
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