My video banned by YouTube (N-word alert)

A strange coincidence of timing: Today I recorded an episode of Open College on why even dangerous ideas should not be banned, on the ground that free societies need to understand them so as to combat them.

Also today, my documentary on Nietzsche and the Nazis was suppressed at YouTube (at Craig Lennon Danielson’s site).

Apparently it’s been caught up inadvertently in YouTube’s “hate speech” crackdown. The crackdown is intended (mistakenly, in my view) to make us safe from false and destructive ideas, but is unintentionally also blocking historical true and constructive material. MIT Technology Review reports on the problem. I hope the YouTube/Google algorithm engineers are working overtime.

The book version of Nietzsche and the Nazis, based on the documentary that was originally carried by Netflix, is in part a discussion of the political, economic, and cultural program of the National Socialists, and in part an intellectual history of the philosophers and intellectuals who prepared the groundwork for the rise of Nazism, taking up especially the charged question of whether Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is implicated.

2 thoughts on “My video banned by YouTube (N-word alert)”

  1. ”free societies need to understand them so as to combat them”

    philosophy and stupidity: the latter is as common, as the former is rare. Even more stupid of Youtoob is how they can’t even make a fair assessment of a distinguished thinker such as a philosopher.

    To assume that someone like you gave a hate speech, is just so stupid and pathetic. If anything, it made me subscribe to your channel; I didn’t know you had one, although I should have imagined so. Thanks.

  2. What a stupid and inept world. Luckily, there’s philosophers who make it a bit more tolerable.

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