YouTube restricts access to conservative radio host's videos | Hacker News Reader

YouTube restricts access to conservative radio host's videos

wsj.com

69 pointsThorondor35 comments

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone envolved with social media. This type of thing has been going on for the last couple of years. The most recent high profile event was when Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos for bigoted comments which his followers posted. [1] But it is often the case that this type of thing occurs because of a flagging algorithm.

However, I would still defend Youtube's right as a company to act as it chooses. If people dislike Youtube's behaviour they can leave the platform, and if enough so choose Youtube will feel the free market forces acting just like any other company would.

This does highlight an overal issue I've noticed recently, namely, a growing tendency for people to not be capable of rational discussion. And if someone presents a differing viewpoint, many people and companies alike respond in an outraged and overblown PC manner.

To see something along these lines that is actually going on in Canada right now check out Jordan B Petersons videos on youtube. [2] I really could not believe what's happening to this very intelligent man is real until I saw it for myself.

Anyway, I wish people could just calm down with the emotional outbursts and have rational debate to come to conclusions about specific issues or even agreements to disagree.

1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanen...

2. https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos/videos

That would be a nice and believable if Google wasn't a major investor in Clinton and Schmidt wasn't balls deep in the Clinton machine

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundati...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-05-19/clinto...

http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working...

http://freebeacon.com/politics/podesta-linked-googles-execut...

There is a reason Google came out with YouTube heroes just a little bit ago. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7124236?hl=en They changed their monetization terms so youtubers are easier to censor https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/97527?hl=en I see many more leftist ads on YouTube than right. Even though Google should know I'm not leftist by now, they keep advertising it to me. I watched many trolling videos and an ad about Evan Bayh come up 30/40 videos - the other 10 being Toyota ads. If Google is going to censor conservative videos, they should at least let me opt out of the leftist ads. Or any political ads.

How is this censorship? As I understand it they just remove ads from videos that their advertisers don't want to be associated with, they don't remove the video, if anything it makes the video better because now it doesn't have ads.

And the creators doen't get paid and are heavily disincentivised from posting anything that might be worth watching. Not removing the video outright doesn't mean everything is fine... Disclaimer: I literally hate anyone who is a conservative/ far right. Yet i stand by their right to take part in the discussion, because muffling them makes everything worse

Free speech doesn't mean you are entitled to have your speech subsidized by other private actors.

Just look at the downvotes assaulting your post's parent and grandparent

> If Google is going to censor conservative videos, they should at least let me opt out of the leftist ads. Or any political ads.

You can opt out of ads, entirely, which seems to meet your needs. Of course, it's not free, but opting out of advertising, either entirely or any subset, has a cost to Google, so that makes sense.

If they are going to discourage providing content I may enjoy, they should also provide a free means of opting out of ads I hate watching. The platform wouldn't have grown to the size it has if it always had these advertising rules. Why can't they make a deal with certain advertisers for the content that is now offensive or whatever they label it as. There are certainly advertiserers that wouldn't mind being advertised on those sorts of videos. When your company grows in size (especially when accelerated by government deals) you have a duty to not censor what you might have when you were small. I would understand if they had always had their current terms, but by now, they shouldn't be changing terms. Opting out of political ads shouldn't have a cost to Google because they could replace the ad with something else. But Google seems to really want to show the world "don't be evil" was always meant to be ironic. They announced the other day they would start attaching your name to advertising preferences - something they said they'd never do. How can we trust Google won't continue to change things that shouldn't be? From a business sense, it makes sense to take part in government corruption, but the fact that it is a good thing to a company should be alarming. I could always use an adblocker, but I prefer to support creators to spiting Google.

"However, I would still defend Youtube's right as a company to act as it chooses."

There are businesses in the US that have gotten slapped with fines for not baking a cake for a gay wedding (and were forced to subsequently shut down). Any other type of cake could have been purchased.

There is a clear bias with US law and the type of censoring we are seeing. This is part of the 'rigged' system that many people are talking about.

It's dangerous to allow businesses to do as they please, because unless you are independently wealthy, you will be ruled by at least one company in your life. It gives them too much control and power over our daily lives.

"If people dislike Youtube's behaviour they can leave the platform, and if enough so choose Youtube will feel the free market forces acting just like any other company would."

Youtube pretty much has a monopoly on video content. Yes, you could go elsewhere, but you will have almost no fan base.

"To see something along these lines that is actually going on in Canada right now check out Jordan B Petersons videos on youtube. [2] I really could not believe what's happening to this very intelligent man is real until I saw it for myself."

This isn't really surprising. Canada really doesn't have the freedom of speech.

Multiple comedians have been ordered to pay fines there for merely telling a joke that offended someone.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mike-ward-verdict-1.3...

"Anyway, I wish people could just calm down with the emotional outbursts and have rational debate to come to conclusions about specific issues or even agreements to disagree."

I wish more people were as rational as you. I feel like the safe space culture we see on college campuses today only hurts our youth and prevents them from being able to maturely process dissenting opinions.

>I feel like the safe space culture we see on college campuses today only hurts our youth and prevents them from being able to maturely process dissenting opinions.

When I was in college, safe spaces were places that students went for non-judgemental discussion of issues that affected them. That included guiding them through the mature processing of dissenting opinions.

> ... Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos for bigoted comments which his followers posted.

This is an incredibly weird way of characterizing what happened.

Milo's account was permanently suspended after he made a series of racist, sexist comments targeting Leslie Jones (a black actress who had recently starred in Ghostbusters), and directed his followers to make similar comments. This was not a first offense, either; Milo's account had been suspended on multiple previous occasions for similar harassment campaigns.

yes, that link is rather biased, here's one from a little more the other side (http://college.usatoday.com/2016/07/25/the-whole-leslie-jone...), its almost impossible to find anything objective on it, but I followed it at the time and after looking at both sides, it looked most like he called her a hot black guy and fat (http://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12226070/milo-yiannopoulus-twit...), and then his followers as well as Leslie went overboard with racists and ridiculous comments. Her comments have also been extremely racists in the past (http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-le...) so it just highlighted a double standard.

Anyway, he is a troll and Twitter was in its full right even according to their guidelines to ban both of them. They banned him not her. That's the whole explanation for that short sentence which is why I formulated it the way I did because I didn't want to explain it all to people who might not care too much.

> Milo's account was permanently suspended after he made a series of racist, sexist comments targeting Leslie Jones

Show me one.

Indeed, it was she who incited violence.

Edit: downvotes yet this is patently true. She ordered her followers to "get him" in reference to Milo.

Edit 2: I was mistaken about the individual she directed her followers to "get", it was a user by the handle of @whitebecky1776.

Edit3: I stand by my claim of her incitement to violence.

Upvote for correcting yourself. I always respect people who can do this. Too few can and too many should.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/20/milo-yiannopoulos...

I can't find ones in that case (since his account his expended) but I can still find older news articles, like his #WorldPatriarchyDay post which was targeted at someone.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/16/sexbots-w...

> by MILO 16 Sep 2015

> I mean, look, I don’t mean to be rude, but most of the reason I went gay is so I didn’t have to deal with nutty broads. Imagine how much worse they’re going to get when the passive aggressive manipulation tactics stop working because the guy can get himself off with a thinner, hotter robot any time he wants to. They’re going to go mental.

I'm sorry but pretending Milo isn't sexist is like pretending water isn't wet.

Citing the tweets is difficult. The account is suspended, making its tweets unavailable, and most of the news articles which quoted them did so using the Twitter embed API, which went dark along with the original tweets.

Vox has some screenshots in this article, though:

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12226070/milo-yiannopoulus-twit...

A better example would be YouTube restricting access to a shit ton of Christina Hoff Summers' Factual Feminist videos due to "inappropriate content" (since the post refers to censorship on YouTube): https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/786663357910753281

So, the same thing happening to PragerU's videos is not a incident or accident, indeed. It's a trend. A worrying trend.

I doubt anyone at Youtube is explicitly seeking out conservative views to censor. But they have created a system whereby flagging videos you disagree with is rewarded, and an effective way to ensure others don't see them. That won't end well.

YouTube is an advertising supported media outlet ope my seeking to become a megaTV channel. Marginalizing controversial content so that users who haven't affirmatively opted out of filtering don't encounter is not something that is likely to work out badly for them.

A free democracy has a natural way to handle the development of a culture of hate and censorship against a minority. The minority develops its own video sharing sites and its own advertising networks and its own publishing houses. Since we're talking about a free democracy, those new explicitly minority outlets cannot be censored.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Abolitionists, anarchists, communists, pornographers, homosexuals, and others have had to do what conservatives now have to do in the face of a majority culture that chooses to hate and censor them. They'll be fine, maybe even stronger for the experience.

And it has a cool Hacker News perspective. It's certainly good for the startups that will be serving the new market.

You sure? Once they drive all the channels with actual content out who is going to go on youtube?

I literally watch Dota 2 channels, AvE, EEV, other technical channels and most of them had issues recently.

Those channels don't even dabble in controversial content...

Take channels like that away and all you've got left is drama, reactions and contentless shitposting

I believe freedom of speech is sacrosanct, but in the end, if you own the means of delivery, it in the end can be construed as your speech.

So, The one who controls the press, also controls the speech - if you want absolute freedom, you need to build your own press.

I just wish the social media companies didnt keep trying to present themselves and neutral players in this - as if they were just a 'platform'.

This is obviously just some people flagging it, I think a conversation about the algorithm might be interesting but this obviously isn't some purposeful censorship.

Appears to have started with 21 videos and then YT reexamined them and cleared 6 and kept 15 restricted so maybe more than just the algorithm.

That makes more sense. The article doesn't mention that at all and makes it sound just algorithmic

> But more than 15 videos are “restricted” on YouTube, a development PragerU announced this month. This means the clips don’t show up for those who have turned on filtering—say, a parent shielding their children from explicit videos.

They've just been classified as 'restricted'. Only parents of young children use this. This is completely fine.

No it's not fine, I've watched a few of those videos and there is nothing there that should be restricted for young children, there wasn't anything even that controversial just a different political view.

Since restricted videos can be managed as part of the G-Suite (can be either done via account or more commonly network level blocking) organizations such as workplaces and schools can and often do block them this isn't some parental control that is rarely used.

This type of restriction where YouTube is redirected to restrict.youtube.com (https://support.google.com/a/answer/6214622) is actually fairly common in many places, and it can be done transparently so you don't even notice it.

So yeah this is not fine, and this is a big problem.

> This is completely fine.

Completely fine? So if all videos from Side A are normal, and all videos from Side B are "age restricted"...

I don't think "separate but equal" really applies.

Big business and big politics will always have each others' backs. Otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to get this big in the first place.

Follow the money!

I'm not so much disturbed by the "censoring" of Youtube as I am the inability for people to create suitable alternatives. (By "inability" I don't mean lack of skill or frameworks, mind you.)

Algorithm justice is mob justice, plain and simple.

Is it really so simple? What is algorithm justice, really?

A form of justice concerned only with the aggregate, and ignorant to its own ignorance of anything beyond the scope of its immediate vision / data scrappers.

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