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Comment by quuquuquu | Hacker News Reader

Help me understand-

Alexa O'Brien has a Youtube account with many hours of video.

She also has a google account, drive, etc.

Some of her videos contained material that Google (being Google), didn't like.

Despite the fact that it was all very important journalism, Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned.

I would say that 5 years ago I would have been shocked and outraged, but lately I just absolutely am not surprised by Google anymore.

I hope Alexa kept local copies but I'm imagining maybe she didn't. At the very least she is losing all of the views and PR associated with her channel.

If you do have local copies, please try to publish elsewhere!

Google is on a crusade to demonitize any video it doesn't like, so it can keep dwindling ad money flowing to only the people it chooses.

Good luck, how can we help??

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This happens. It's not good that it happens but we must expect it to happen.

What power to we have?

Change our perspective.

These online services which area now beginning to dip their toes into censorship / advertiser-hedged editorializing, are not to be seen as reliable ubiquitous platforms existing for the convenience of all. As much as they perhaps want to be seen as such, their actions belie this.

They are closed niches with particular stances, and their loyalty is never to us, despite marketing.

And we can treat them as such, we will be okay.

Backup your things. Use multiple providers. Use multiple accounts, a burner account for content against their editorial stance, and a longer lived account for other things. Run your own services. If you despise this state of affairs so greatly, form your own business services, and ape to take some of their market.

Tl;dr they are not our friends. Stop expecting them to not betray us, expect betrayal, and keep them at an appropriate distance.

Don't complain. Just start doing it if you want to protect yourself against it. I think github and npm can be included in this.

I am a big fan of run your own services. But when I do the maths, the cost is uneconomical for the average user. And the complexity already too high even for my own taste. Like configuring a mail server is hard.

Well, it's a trade-off between comfort and privacy. You should self-host what you are capable of and deem of higest importance / privacy.

To upgrade from gmail, you don't even to jump directly to self-hosting. There are pay-to-use email-providers, who treat you like the customer, not the product. Similar services exist for video, etc.

Perhaps an alternative to running your own services is using paid services where you are the company's source of income. And diversify the services you use among different providers (i.e. don't use Google-everything.)

That's not the question. The question is : is your content sensitive/important/unique/are-you-paranoid-enough that it's worth the price/time/learn ? There are alternatives afaik, that one cba to use them is not the problem. Companies do money out of our own laziness, they're not entitled to anything. I have a hard time understanding what all this fuss is about.

This is one part of why I dont think people should use the new Drive File Stream over the backup and sync (Google Drive legacy app) client.

Actually, speaking of that,the new backup and sync automatically uploads photos and backs up USB drives -> what if some of the automatic content it uploads violates their TOS (e.g. an investigative journalists photos from a war zone)

> Google arbitrarily decided it was #extremism, therefore #banned

It is extremism. What makes a difference is the people's intention of uploading it. But it is not clearly to me, whether it makes a difference or not, if that video's targeting audience see this video and use it as an inspiration to commit terrorism.

> Google is on a crusade to demonitize any video it doesn't like

I am going to be a devil's advocate, make money out of a platform is not freedom of speech, or freedom of expression. That is why I cringed every time when some Youtuber acts like cry baby that certain video is demonetize crying no freedom of speech while that video is not blocked and had a million views.

when you cannot control the message through politics and laws you get ask your friends in important industries to step in for you. if not that then you have the very rich and powerful deciding what they think is good for society and abusing their position to make it so.

it all depends on how much freedom you can stand, me, I want everyone to have freedom to express their views regardless how abhorrent I find them (not saying anything about the person in the article) and no politician or large business should have the ability to stop it. if anything we have a safer society because people have an outlet and also the more dangerous self identify.

Do you think Google should have the authority to decide who is a journalist and who isn't? What criteria should they apply to determine that? Other than just reading the description alongside a video and just uncritically believing what the poster wrote, how should they determine the reasons and motivation for posting a video?

What this argument comes down to is "How dare Google pull this video posted by a nice white woman who clearly should be allowed to post it, can't they see she isn't one of those nasty brown people who clearly shouldn't?"

Hmm, interesting. Personally I think everyone should be allowed to post it, regardless of proclaimed profession.

However, what I think Google is attempting to do here, is prevent "ISIS beheads infidels, join now, link in description".

Obviously they are failing miserably at that, and there might even be something sinister going on.

But, that is how I would distinguish between journalist and devout terrorist.

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