Either way, totally agree that it's a tragic situation.
The only sympathy I have for Google is that trying to separate the good vs. "evil" (as in "Don't be evil.") content is a monumental task that machine learning will probably never be capable of performing. So they're left with the choice of spending an inordinate amount on human review and detailed research or just make wildly over-broad removals.
I'd rather they leave up more rather than less, but they tried this approach and it almost lost them every major advertiser. So continuing down that road would potentially lead to the whole platform losing viability. Maybe some would like that outcome but these historical videos would be just as lost.
Maybe we'll see the pendulum swing back in an effort to reach a more reasonable middle ground.
If youtube can't handle the load, then they shouldn't claim that they can. At the absolute lest, they need a usable appeals process. If they can't do that, then they need to own up to it, and stop allowing anyone to upload anything.
YouTube is a company that is beholden to advertisers. YouTube wants/pays for videos that they can put ads in front of. If your content is not the type of content YouTube can wrap in ads, and you need longevity for your videos, YouTube is not the platform for you. YouTube never claimed to be an everlasting video storage space for all your video needs, so I'm not sure why you're expecting that of them.
Video has become politicised because it is a popular medium for political topics and one which can be rapidly produced and consumed. Advertisers are perhaps influencing Google's decisions on this, but they are equally political. The debacle with the diversity memo is one example of biases inside of the company. There have been many more examples over the last years, one such example is censorship across the board of conservative commentators.
It goes on in Facebook, Twitter and so on. So we have to wait for competitors to turn up, how many years will that take? Is that a responsible route considering the foothold these companies have?
ALSO: I don't know about you, but this so-called "censoring" of conservative commentators doesn't seem to have worked. I see more young people skewing right/centre than I did 10 years ago. You can call it censorship if you want (because sure, that's probably the best term), but implying that a company selectively hosting content is the same thing as limiting the free exercise of speech is absurd.
Probably for this reason: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
That's an impossibility because evil depends on perspective.
This is why we have free speech rights in america. If we determined others to limit our free speech by their perception of evil, then atheist speech and lgbt speech would be banned. Pornography would be banned along with "offensive" music. Hell books like huckleberry finn would be banned.
This is why we cherish free speech rights in america ( or we used to ) and why we have the saying "You have the right to be offended".
At some point it will be as easy to create fake videos as to create fake text. It is unrealistic to expect people who aren't information literate about text will be literate about video, but I hope that there's a way for journalists to move away from YouTube by then.
I was googling for baking videos the other day, when all of the sudden most of the hits I got was auto generated videos uploaded on youtube. They just had some panning stock photos in the background with text scrolling on top and super generic music, must be really simple to generate.
There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them from various accounts, all conveniently linked to each other making more of them appear as relevant in the rightmost column.
Documentation is pointless if it can't be distributed and used to effect change.
This comment by jacobr suggests there is a risk of lost footage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998452
You're saying like every human rights organization have some magical means of preservation other than uploading to YouTube.
If it's so important, these orgs should maybe build their own platform that is purely about video longevity.
Expecting a private company to host content they don't want to host is silly.
At the least, we probably need “upload video to archive.org” mobile apps to make this as useful to journalists in the field as YouTube currently is.
If the Archive grows as a journalistic distribution channel, it might then face YouTube's issues of copyrights, piracy, and other criminal use. However, the Archive could apply goals that are more compatible with journalism than YouTube can. Maybe sufficient philanthropic support could make this possible.
Tools exist already to upload to S3 from practically every device, especially Android.
Curation would be much harder, but there is a lot of money in philanthropy and I could see some deep pockets contributing to that.
YouTube is fine as a means of promoting and gaining awareness - world should know about these things, but it's not rational to expect a corporation (aka people within it) to act in any other interest other then it's own.
Seems like this could be an interesting infrastructure non-profit for YC to fund.