I'm sure that Google has been waiting for a youtube media panic to pull the trigger on this for a while. They'd prefer to be an on-demand cable channel, and would love to remove any material controversial to anyone, but didn't want censorship to be the story (especially with antitrust stuff going around.)
Google isn't in the video business because it wants people to be able to share videos with each other. Google is in the video business to sell ads. Censoring the illiberal is the way to get to get liberals to support censorship. Announcing manual control over the suggestions is a way to justify steering viewers away from any content, starving it of revenue, and getting it off the platform.
Google isn't in the video business because it wants people to be able to share videos with each other. Google is in the video business to sell ads. Censoring the illiberal is the way to get to get liberals to support censorship. Announcing manual control over the suggestions is a way to justify steering viewers away from any content, starving it of revenue, and getting it off the platform.