Speaking as a lurker, this seems basically like what people have been asking for for awhile now including here. I remember seeing numerous top comment chains over the last four years (and of course before that but not here) that all boiled down to very eloquent defenses of censoring fringe thinkers.<p>Who knows, maybe in theory land there's no reason we can't have it both ways. But it seems to me that in the real world precisely the opposite is true. We can't demand increasingly invasive and opaque mechanisms to prevent the spread of misinformation (once upon a time many examples of which would have just been called "gossip" or the "rumor mill") and then act surpised when radicals for our own important causes get swept up in the net. At some point we either have to admit that what we really want to build is a like-minded dictorship or we have to start discussing (in a sober manner devoid of the histrionics and gamesmanship that have come to envelope contemporary dialogues) what an intellient compromise in objectives might look like.
Talk about the military industry, crime financial complex, pretexts to war or history of US foreign policy - anything with actual weight that isn't just "culture wars" - and see yourself get delisted from Google, smeared in the media, then get harassed by various agencies until you either flee the country or end up like Hastings or car bombed like Daphne.<p>There is only freedom of speech until you actually go against those in power.
The YouTube shadow ban is bad enough, but to me the even scarier part comes further down the thread:<p>> A few months ago I uploaded a video about police brutality. It showed explicit acts of violence by the police, and it was understandably age-gated. The video was appropriate only for older audiences, but did not break any of YouTube's terms and conditions.<p>> That video earned me a visit from the DHS, who asked me about "Anti-American sentiment" in my videos. That was the first time I realized, wow, I guess people really are monitoring what we say and are willing to try to intimidate us, even if what we say is objectively true.<p>The video in question is, I suspect, this one: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEVoX-RwMJw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEVoX-RwMJw</a><p>To me it's beyond disturbing that this kind of stuff still happens, it's the kind of thing that you'd think went away in the 50's or so.
It would be helpful for people who have previously come out against cancel culture and deplatforming to defend the principle for someone who is not a member of their political tribe. Independent of the content of the video and who it happened to offend, the deceptive practice of shadow banning is reprehensible.<p>Tar-pitting spammers is one thing, deceiving creators, especially ones who are politically engaged as to the impact of their work discredits the legitimacy of the platforms, and the agencies. Are the government agencies "persons," deserving protection in this case?<p>A major part of the problem is the language platforms use in their alerts, which is patronizing, gaslighting, and from what I have read in posts like these, basically enraging (which is what their business does best, so no surprises there).<p>If platforms would use language that made it clear they owned their role as referees it would go a lot more smoothly, and mitigate the effects of this "for your own good," deception bit. Of course I see it as the effect of platform employees who culturally reject the idea of binding principles in favour of exercising arbitrary power, but if that's not going to change, they can't reasonably complain about explosive reactions to their "dynamic choices" either.
I have no views on the video, I didn’t watch it, but tech companies censoring and pushing back against free speech troubles me.<p>Individuals and companies have the right to do what they want with their own property, and I don’t have any great ideas on how to solve this dilemma. One solution would be to have many platforms but we live in a winner take all world and platforms like YT get more powerful because of network effects.
Just watched the video, read the thread. Here are some thoughts.<p>First of all, the video uploader is promoting a competitor to YouTube. This is not disclaimed clearly.<p>The video goes over criticism to the CIA, which are fair enough. But it takes some things as axioms, for example, that only the US are interfering/meddling in the world. He presents it as "the US is the bad guy and the world would be fair without the CIA." Which also is a form of propaganda.<p>It's a bit näive to not see this as anti-government propaganda. The crude reality is: true democracies never existed, and influence between countries is as old as society.<p>About the "censorship" itself: Youtube's goals is not the same as the authors, why would they promote something that is not what they want to be? They have a huge infant audience, they want to be advertiser-friendly. This is not something hidden or unknown.<p>They did not delete the video, but they shouldn't promote it. No fault in my eyes.<p>And at the same time, the buzz around saying "my video is being suppressed" get more views and is even a badge to prove the content "hits where it hurts". Just like rock bands in the 80s/90s would go after being censored or considered 18+ just to sell more.
This is the delisted video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI</a>
I draw a line between promotion and discoverability.<p>I don't need YouTube to advertise the video, but if I do an exact string search on the title of the video and don't find it, that's suppression.<p>The content of the video is innocuous. It appears to be a factual recounting of CIA ops with some editorializing. It doesn't present new information or a new opinion.
Sorry is there evidence that the DHS were actually involved here as claimed in the author's twitter feed? Or do we take this at face value?<p>edit - and what does a DHS visit look like? Do they knock on your door at 6am or leave a card to call them back? Sorry I've never been in this situation before so I'd be interested in more details on that side of things.
Greenwald and Snowden discuss this issue 3 days ago re valley companies having intelligence contracts and opening themselves up to pressure:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/5qEuKCS-czU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/5qEuKCS-czU</a>
> Yesterday morning I released a video titled "The CIA is a Terrorist Organization." Unsurprisingly, it was instantly demonetized. Fine. I'm used to that.<p>Everything after, "Fine. I'm used to that," is irrelevant.<p>This thread is apparently content using services built with a spirit functionally equivalent to, "Let's see if we can do the <i>opposite</i> of all four of the freedoms of the GPL."<p>And as long as everyone is content with these algorithmic blackboxes controlling discoverability for most of the population, we'll continue discussing heinous second-order effects of these systems. Here and now it happens to be free speech, but there are plenty of others waiting in the wings for as long as we avoid the main problem.
We have long reached the point where, if we want to keep making analogies between social media and analogue media (pun intended), then we need to compare social media to a publication with an editor.<p>Demonetization, age-gating, recommendation engines, bans, shadowbans and their subtler varieties are many-2-many media's equivalent of an editor. Every one impacts the distribution of a video on youtube. Every one of these also impacts what content gets made/posted, because views are like currency.<p>It doesn't matter if it's algorithmic, and it doesn't matter if there are other reasons for (eg) demonetisation to exist. It's still an editor. You need to make the editor happy to succeed on youtube. The single difference between an editor and a censor is scale. If you edit all the magazines, magazines are censored.<p>The innocuous type example for censorship is (as usual) pornography. IDK what the consequences of posting pornography and its juniors (nudity, etc) on youtube, but they're obviously sufficient to make youtube mostly nudity free. It's not because no one wants raunchy videos. The same toolkit can be used (and is) to make any kind of content more or less prevalent on youtube.<p>It's funny that "section 230" is being mentioned by so many under informed politicians and pundits. Changing 230 is unlikely to "fix" the problem, considering that most politicians obviously don't even understand the problem. But section 230 at least captures the main part of the problem. Youtube is not "dumb pipes." Youtube is a content business, and they have a lot of control over content. It's not direct, "delete this segment" control like they have at FOX, but it is editing nonetheless. At youtube, twitter or FB scale, editing is censorship.
I hope YouTube and other platforms for user content will be replaced by something decentralised eventually. I wonder if a decentralised media platform over something like bittorrent or IPFS is or will ever be technologically feasible.
Does anyone else find it strange that this thread is one the third page of hackernews despite being newer, with more upvotes and comments than the majority of posts on the front page?<p>I know the site isn't meant for political discussion, but other stories about tech companies censoring political opinions haven't fallen from the front page as quickly as this one.
The shadow ban isn’t even the scariest part of the thread! The Department of Homeland Security confronted him about a video about police brutality:<p><i>> A few months ago I uploaded a video about police brutality. It showed explicit acts of violence by the police, and it was understandably age-gated. The video was appropriate only for older audiences, but did not break any of YouTube's terms and conditions.</i><p><i>> That video earned me a visit from the DHS, who asked me about "Anti-American sentiment" in my videos. That was the first time I realized, wow, I guess people really are monitoring what we say and are willing to try to intimidate us, even if what we say is objectively true.</i><p>It’s “anti-American” to say that the people ostensibly enforcing our laws should not commit violence against us.
Here is the video in question:<p>The CIA is a Terrorist Organization: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI</a>
There’s a lot of comments here about what’s happening to America.<p>I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that we’ve always been fighting to preserve our rights under the constitution. Freedom and democracy doesn’t just come for free.<p>Take another period in US history... at a time of another pandemic, the Spanish flu, and a World war.<p>The 1918 Sedition Act [1] made illegal the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States.<p>The effects of this law were so successful, that at a time when a pandemic killed 20 million Americans, the newspapers never wrote about the flu. In fact this is why that virus was named the Spanish flu, since during the war Spain was neutral and allowed its press to freely report on it. Not because the virus came from Spain.<p>History of course repeats itself. But the real lesson for us is that we need to always be vigilant. And it’s not a time to despair that things are at their worst, or can’t get better, or everything is downhill.<p>Instead look at how far we’ve come. Look at what we’ve overcome in history.<p>We just need to keep moving the ball forward.<p>1. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918</a>
This happens all the time internationally with organized and state-supported social media mobs . Interestingly, there seems to exist a law in germany that requires services like twitter to tell users when they have been flagged from accounts in germany, and this happened multiple times recently with the conflict in caucasus[1]. I wonder if youtube has something similar<p>1. <a href="https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1328460455380193286" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1328460455380193286</a>
There is a public video with 3.6 million views exactly titled: "Bohemian Grove - Alex Jones"<p>Trying to watch this for the first time I had to find some other website that embed this. If it were any other video finding this shouldn't have took more than 10 seconds.<p>Maybe youtube wants to prevent spread of misinformation but making something inaccessible is whole nother level of evil.
YouTube has been playing these games for a long time, often to mollify the Chinese and Pakistani governments, and various extremist groups:<p><a href="https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/" rel="nofollow">https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/</a>
worst country on this planet. "the world police", who just wants to bring democracy to 3rd world countries by killing hundred thousands innocent civilians... good gob
The Sheriff's deputies came hovering with their helicopter about 20 ft over me in my backyard a few days after they had an issue with me... The whole law enforcement industry in the USA is in need of "re-structuring". They also harassed me because I went to pee in the desert a few miles from the Mexican border (3 different law enforcement agencies came by (well, one was already present)). We don't need to de-fund them (maybe a little bit), but they need better training for sure. Also, I'm white and they were white.
I think it important to entertain the possibility that this person is simply lying. I don't see any evidence that backs up his claim that this was intentional and his claim that he was visited by DHS officials is doubtful to me. There's plenty of videos like his on YouTube already, so I can't really imagine this caused a real government intervention. But maybe I missed something.
It's been known for a while that youtube is not a good platform for anything political. Google has been shadow banning political videos they didn't like since Obama was in office and publicly talking about it.<p>There are other video sites you can go to for this sort of thing.
People who cheer when "right wing" misinformation is censored, should think very carefully about what just happened here.<p>And why, for 200 years, free speech and anti-censorship has been extremely important to Americans. There's a reason the ACLU defended nazis being able to protest. Because eventually censorship will ALWAYS be turned on your side. Whichever side you are on.
OP makes a bunch of tweets alleging mistreatment and foul play with a completely valid response by the host, YouTube, yet he continues to claim baselessly without proof he is wronged. Sounds like a certain president.<p>Present proof or leave the conspiracies to 4chan.
This premise/statement is misinformation in the west, and true information in Iran.<p>YouTube has signed up for determining what is true in the west, and it will definitely upset some people, so shadow banning is the best happy medium.<p>(I personally think most people should start shadow banned and then an algorithm should slowly start opening the sphere of influence/votes to see if information is spreading more widely).