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A recent ruling by the FCC has ended a plan by the state of California’s Public Utilities Commission to tax text messages, while YouTube announced that it has removed 58 million videos from its site that were posting hateful or inappropriate content, a move that has many critics crying censorship.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) announced that the ruling last week by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which reclassified text messages as an “information services,” will now prevent the state from levying taxes on people sending text messages.
If the FCC had ruled the other way, and designated text messages as “telecommunications,” then it would have allowed California’s PUC to levy taxes, since text messages would then fall under the same classification now assigned to telephone calls.
But in light of the FCC ruling, the Commissioner of the CPUC, Carla Peterman, has withdrawn the tax proposal. Peterman said the “Federal CommunicationsAct… limits state authority over information services.”
In an effort to quell the posting of hateful videos and inappropriate content, the video sharing network owned by Google announced that it removed some 58 million videos from its site that the company had deemed in violation of its community standards.
The company says most of the videos that fell under the category of inappropriate had to do with spam or adult content. YouTube also used algorithms to flag hateful and conspiratorial videos for review by their teams for potential removal.
“We’ve always used a mix of human reviewers and technology to address violative content on our platform, and in 2017 we started applying more advanced machine-learning technology to flag content for review by our teams,” a company spokeswoman told ABC News. “This combination of smart detection technology and highly-trained human reviewers has enabled us to consistently enforce our policies with increasing speed.”
Critics, however, have called the move a form of censorship, and have pointed to the uneven approach toward conservative or right-leaning viewpoints.
One example they point to is when YouTube and a number of other social media networks banned Alex Jones, despite the fact that many of Jones’ reports have revealed a lot of actual truth about questionable activities by members of the government and other people in high places.
Critics feel this move by YouTube is yet another step toward further silencing or marginalizing conservative voices.
