The act of interacting on YouTube used to be an entirely public matter. You could say anything you want as long as it didn’t break any laws and trust it to be thrown into the public. Nowadays you comment on something, and there’s a 75% chance of you being shadowbanned without knowing why, with the video owner being the main filter of what people see, forcing feuds to take place not in comments but in back and forth videos, since this means everyone’s content has become their own little echo chamber, which means a stable argument is impossible, and combined with the fact YouTube is highly indifferent to even most of its most important rules broken, as well as combined with the fact popularity is based entirely on luck now, means anyone can use it as a platform to slander any person or topic completely unchallenged if they’re the one who gets popular while the challenger cannot. And because YouTube once had a reputation for being the best platform for information, most people who grew up with this reputation who have never had to deal with its modern incarnation don’t think to question anything. It’s a literal den of snakes now, you got misinformation trolls coming out its wazoo. What ways have you used to circumvent the issue?
I don’t comment on YouTube, so commenting doesn’t affect me. I have no idea whether it’s a problem or not, but it’s not one that I’ll run into.
I rarely read comments on YouTube.
I don’t have an account on YouTube.
I rarely watch videos of people talking about to each other, as I’ve no interest in the drama side of this (or on Twitter or similar). The very small handful of times where I’ve watched videos with disagreeing takes, it’s been pretty respectful.
Frankly, I don’t think that this is a huge issue. The concept of “nobody can say false things or I will go to the government to have their statement examined by a court and potentially blocked”, whether one agrees with it or not, becomes impractical in the Internet era, YouTube or no; publishing is no longer a local matter. Every individual has easy access to global reach. Laws on acceptable speech don’t generally span jurisdictions (and it’s probably a good thing too; I doubt that most people reading this would be happy about being subject to blasphemy law in some countries, for example). There is no entity with a monopoly over speech acting as an arbiter of truth Internet-wide. There is an absolutely immense amount of incorrect information accessible on the Internet. I think that the expectation is best placed on the consumer of information to take into account that some information out there is wrong, rather than taking it to some country’s courts.