>In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.

I don't completely blame Google, but all one needs to do is read the comments here to know what's actually happening. This pedophile issue - a real issue - is being paired with the "racist" issue in order to give partisan, political-ideological groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center a quasi-official regulatory status to censor comments on mainstream social media websites.

This isn't new, it's just now they found a way to push it openly. When the recent government shutdown ended, the first piece of legislation the US Congress considered, and passed, was to denounce criticism of the government of Israel as "anti-semitism." This legislation was pushed by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL isn't just some objective watchdog, it's an agent of a foreign government with deep ties to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington DC - and an unregistered agent of a foreign government.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is, essentially, an off-shore hedge fund, started by a direct-mail scam artist who reinvented themselves as an "anti-hate watchdog" that is given undue credibility by virtually the entire corporate media in the USA. It's a major pressure group aligned with the Democratic party, and it is as "racist" as any of their critics.

Border controls - one of Hillary Clinton's campaign issues when she ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic party primaries - is now considered "racist hate speech" by partisans of the SPLC. This particular faction is now leveraging "pedophilia" in order to censor non-left-wing sentiments on social media.

It's ironic, because the left, not the right, has spent nearly the last 50 years promoting pedophilia. Just recently, Salon.com, a far left website, infamously gave a platform to a so-called "virtuous pedophile."

Of course this website, Hacker News, barely allows non-far-left opinions outside of some "libertarian capitalist" sentiments. But what is kind of shocking is how anti-free-speech so many on this site are. I'm old enough to remember the idealistic - although rather fatuous in hindsight - early days of the "internet culture" which promoted John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" [0] and John Gilmore's sentiment that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." [1]

The cowardly weaseling expressed in previous comments here, that this has nothing to do with political pressure or partisan politics, but is merely hard-headed business concern, is absurd on its face. Donald Trump, and "racist" sentiments, are quite popular in America, Europe, and in all countries among all human populations on earth. It's just that the partisan denizens of YCombinator - a far left San Francisco investment company aligned with the far left of the Democratic party and specific Democratic party politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, perhaps the most powerful legislator in the USA (and an extreme racist) - always posture that expressing their political power is really just "hard headed business sense" when it clearly is not.

[0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore