YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization” | Hacker News Reader

YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

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372 pointspimpampum275 comments

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.

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.

I think an open system is emergent, not something that can be planned around intelligent compromises. I have an intuition that planning government systems is about satisfying the shepherds that there are fences against the chaos and convincing the sociopaths there are rules to exploit.

Otherwise, it'll just turn into DnD 3.5e where every action has a rule in a book somewhere, it'll be blasphemy if you handwave it before looking it up, and yet somehow that one guy always has their character just so to skirt that same rule.

It s as if we rediscover liberalism in full circles

My pet theory is that there will always be a constant loop much like the prey-predator relationship. We start by going in one direction i.e. liberalism, then we realize that some pieces of authoritarianism might be good for a problem we currently have, so we water it down a bit.

Fast forward 50-70 years, we realize that the balance has swung too much to one side so we try to do a sharp turn. That action causes an overcompensation which is when revolution and violence happen. Finally we end up back at some sort of liberalism and the circle begins anew.

I see it as a result of generation gap. We don't know the value of something until we lose it. Right now the public doesn't value freedom of speech as much as it used to so we are right on track to have it more limited.

We're on a loop alright, but it's caused by the interplay of the more numerous working/underclasses and elites struggling to stay on top.

Currently we are at the bit of the loop where the underclasses are thrashing out and the elites are trying to channel that rage somehow.

I don't think it's a given that revolution and violence reset the cycle to liberalism. There would appear to be plenty of examples where the chaos just ushers in a greater degree of authoritarianism and how much liberalism that follows a power change is just caused by the period of new power consolidating its control?

Even if it's a matter of picking the right start and stop times to a cycle, every iteration would be heterogeneous enough that calling it a cycle is probably missing some important behaviors.

Absolutely, to be clear I don't have the arrogance to think that I can explain the complexity of western society in a single HN comment. I am just a software engineer.

Fortunately -in many civilized countries- we have institutionalized and ritualized the act of having a revolution every 4 years.

As with many such rituals, -and as long as everyone sticks to the prescribed acts- this reduces the bloodshed immeasurably. With a little luck, the only victims are dead trees and broken pencils.

I think the OP's author makes a pretty good point: the censorship itself doesn't bother him; it's the opaqueness that's a problem. If they just said "this is censored because the CIA requires it", he'd be fine (his own words from the OP)

I can understand the call for censorship, but I don't see any particular value in the opaqueness.

Any censorship is going to be pretty opaque. The author accuses Youtube of lying to him, but I don't think it was a lie; most likely, whoever runs the TeamYoutube account simply looked it up in the support documentation, which really does say what they told him (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/58097?hl=en).

At first I suspected peoples world view was build on compound falsehoods. I couldn't help but pay attention to this concept. I had to rub my eyes a few times wondering if I was not simply seeing what I was hoping to find. At later age I was seeing the unquestioned bullshit all around me. Then came a stage where I repeatedly noticed my own subscriptions to nonsense and the erroneous mindset that one would logically build on top - repeatedly, again and again! I had to learn to carefully avoid telling people how things really work which worked wonderfully with repeatedly discovering that my revised world view was almost as wrong as the previous iteration. That said, I learn a lot from people still naive enough to speak their unconventional mind. Their topics of interest are not half as interesting as the route to their world view.

I don't want to give an example since those usually get confused for the subject but I'll share 2 things that made me laugh at the time: 1) I use to think people are logical beings. I believed the first half of my life that we act based on logic and reason. Then one day I noticed this is simply something I like to believe to be true. That I can think this without a shred of evidence is evidence in it self of the opposite. 2) We build, create and design to make things as easy and convenient as possible for ourselves and for other people. Comfort is taken on faith as a valid goal so obvious that it needs not be questioned. In the process we distance ourselves from the core mechanics of our existence and we fail to challenge our mind as well as our body. If we can build the apparatus we are happy to forget how to tie our shoes. We no longer need to know what we can eat in the forest, when to plant crops, how to make all of those nice wooden things, how to forge metals, how to have a productive conversation (which requires disagreement) we think we benefit from calling that taxi but what we really needed was the 3 km walk in the sun or snow, fresh air and to see those birds fly over that old tree. Even the shoes are a solution to their own problem.

:-)

Logic unfortunately tends to fail in the real world. Even seemingly concrete ideas like life and death get tricky when dealing with frozen sperm and viruses. Edge cases abound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) People really want stuff like Bayesian statistics to work. But it’s also fails for similar reasons as it depends on accurately updating a model.

The world is filled with models that are simple enough to use and accurate enough to be useful, sadly that doesn’t make them correct.

Censorship seems so simple on the surface, but like everything else the implementation rarely matches the theory. I would argue for disclaimers as a much better option, even if they also fail.

I suppose the question is who should get to engineer the population? Traditionally governments did this job. This gets pretty draconian in some cases but until it does I don't need any committee of unelected faceless corporate directors dictating how I should think? Or do I?

Perhaps it isn't the right question. Say you have a bunch of people as raw resources. What should you make from those? I kinda like my people as-is but this seems a moving target.

Children are taught to not question what they're told, because it's much easier on parents and teachers when children don't question what they're told. Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation.

To me, the solution is obviously better education. When people believe the Earth is round only because that's what they were told, it's not that hard for a clever talker to convince them the Earth could be flat. When people know the Earth is round because they actually understand the physics behind it, there's no way you're ever going to convince them the Earth is flat.

Instead of admitting our education system has failed, people's ignorance is being used as an excuse to tighten control over the media even further.

I agree 100%. The lack of critical thinking skills in this country is a national security threat. We need a national initiative improve the baseline education and critical thinking skills of the next generation.

The powers that be, haven't got the memo yet that it doesn't benefit them anymore to have a populous which is easily manipulated. In the past, old media acted as parameter control, though concentrated ownership. Sure they had vested interests, but they were generally alined with American values; capitalism, stable democracy, international leadership by America, etc. But now each of the 340 million brains in this country can be accessed directly by foreign adversaries. Parameter control can not work anymore, unless we shut down the internet. We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.

Some will argue that we should shutdown the internet or censor it. But is that the world we want to live in? That would stifle economic growth and i do not believe it is compatible with the ideals of liberal democracies.

It’s been tried. It’s how we got “new math“

To be clear i did say a "national initiative" not a "national curriculum".

What is the old line, people get the government they deserve, they elect people that they like and/or agree with? Even here on HN most people only upvote comments they like or otherwise agree with. Its the same everywhere. Massive massive echo chambers on the left and right with propaganda being retweeted and shared to millions.

>We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.

Why? Why must we treat adults as children that we have been entrusted with, and that it is our responsibility to give them 'mental medicine'? What makes our thinking superior to others' that we need to lord over them in this way?

>Some will argue that we should shutdown the internet or censor it. But is that the world we want to live in? That would stifle economic growth and i do not believe it is compatible with the ideals of liberal democracies.

I believe that these ideals are bottom-up. We form governments that align with the ideals of the people, not the other way around. If the people out of choice or ignorance no longer care about the ideals of liberal democracy, who are we to force them onto others?

>>We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.

>Why? Why must we treat adults as children

I am suggesting the opposite. Rather than treat adults as children and censoring what they can and can not see. I am suggesting we give them the skills to critically analyze input they receive.

> that we have been entrusted with, and that it is our responsibility to give them 'mental medicine'? What makes our thinking superior to others' that we need to lord over them in this way?

Why provide any education at all then? As a society it is our responsibility to skill the next generation with the skills they need to operate in our society. I believe critical thinking skills is one of these required skills.

> I believe that these ideals are bottom-up. We form governments that align with the ideals of the people, not the other way around

I agree with this. But to get the best form of government we need educated and intelligent citizens.

> If the people out of choice or ignorance no longer care about the ideals of liberal democracy, who are we to force them onto others?

We really are fucked then aren't we. I kind of like living in a liberal democracy. If we throw our current system out due to ignorance I am very confident what comes next will not be superior. I'm not willing to accept that as path we take.

>Why provide any education at all then? As a society it is our responsibility to skill the next generation with the skills they need to operate in our society. I believe critical thinking skills is one of these required skills.

There are several views on education. It used to be that you went to school/college to be educated, but lately it seems like the schools are just places where you get trained so that you can get a job. Would parents send their kids to school if primary goal was education, and getting a job was just incidental?

Personally, I don't think critical thinking skills can be taught in a school via a curriculum en-masse. It requires a personal approach tailored to each individual's needs based on their upbringing and cultural context.

>We really are fucked then aren't we. I kind of like living in a liberal democracy. If we throw our current system out due to ignorance I am very confident what comes next will not be superior. I'm not willing to accept that as path we take.

Yes, we might very well be fucked in the near-term. But I'm not saying we throw everything out, I'm saying we have to trust people more than systems. How many people are willing to earnestly engage with the other side? We have to do our part to foster safe-zones where people can express any and all ideas without fear of being ridiculed or shamed. We're all responsible in some way for the decline in public trust in several pillars of democracy - especially the news media. To make it personal, several of my family members are Trump voters, and I do not think they're racist or evil. I understand them, and they hold varying beliefs with varying degrees of certitude but they feel trapped where they cannot even express an opinion without being shouted down and ridiculed.

I think we're mostly on the same page.

> Personally, I don't think critical thinking skills can be taught in a school via a curriculum en-masse. It requires a personal approach tailored to each individual's needs based on their upbringing and cultural context.

Upbringing and cultural context are certainly heavy influences. But it is totally possible to teach / develop critical thinking skills in students. Instead of focusing on memorizing facts & information, we should focus on the techniques used to break down problems, seek evidence, extract alternate readings & motivations, etc. Easy. The problem is this stuff isn't taught in school, and if it is, it's only brushed over as a particular topic and not part of everything. This stuff needs to be embedded in the core operating system of our citizens.

Putting the fate of liberal democracies aside. I believe the economic activity lost from the under development and under capitalization on the potential of our populous is significant.

I'll let you have the last word. Have a nice day :)

> Children are taught to not question what they're told, because it's much easier on parents and teachers when children don't question what they're told. Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation.

I'm gonna guess you don't have children. Children like easy-to-follow directions. They don't understand nuance at all. It's not because it's "easier on parents and teachers", it's because it's what works.

You add nuance later in middle and high school.

> You add nuance later in middle and high school.

If you take children to be under 18 then the statement seems valid because I don't think there's a lot of nuance going on in most middle or high schools.

Young children absolutely need easy-to-follow directions because they can't follow complicated directions.

I'm not arguing against easy-to-follow directions, so I don't quite see your point. I'm against parents and schools encouraging unquestioning obedience to their directions.

> Children like easy-to-follow directions. They don't understand nuance at all.

I don't have kids myself, but I do remember how it is to be a child, having been one myself a while ago :D

I can assure you kids understand nuance quite well if they're explained things properly, patiently, in a friendly manner.

When I'm 4, I could win the debate with adults. That bothered me for several years to think why an adult looks like child. As an adult now, I know the reason their mind never grow up. Not children could not understand complicated thing, it is that adult could not explain them well.

THIS. My father believed children should never be given a short answer, or told "because I said so". If we wanted something we would have to give a rational argument why. If we asked a question and he wasn't sure of the answer, he would say he didn't know and we would go to the encyclopedia together to read the full answer.

Every night from the time I was 6 we had to read 50 pages in a book he assigned and discuss it. This was after he came home from 10 hour days at work.

Most parents are (1) too lazy to properly explain things to their children, (2) unwilling to say when they don't know the answer, (3) lack the critical thinking skills themselves to evaluate statements, (4) lack the basic research skills needed to validate or invalidate a proposition.

That is the problem in America.

When I was about 8 years old we were riding in the car with a couple my parents were friends with and their children who were similar in age to us. The son asked the father why the sky was blue. The father turned around and said, "well, it reflects the ocean". I said, "no, you're wrong, it's the color the atmosphere refracts light" (or something like that). The father and son both stared at me in shock because I would tell an adult they were wrong. My father just laughed.

I don't think I was necessarily smarter than other children by nature. I was just brought up with the idea that it is everyone's personal responsibility to read, to learn, to say when you don't know the answer, to find reliable sources. And above all, never to memorize answers without fully understanding them.

Which is why I love writing code ;)

I think 'the meta' about parenting is more about entrusting your children to behave appropriately when unsupervised rather than insuring arbitrary directions are followed by making them in the form of an easy "lie-to-children".

Churches lose membership and therefore money when schools teach critical thinking effectively. Given the power of the church over the last thousand years, it is unsurprising that progress in education has been so stymied.

>when children don't question what they're told.

That doesn't mean they accept everything as fact. They may simply not choose to question because of fear of punishment, or for any other number of reasons.

>Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation.

That is a giant leap of logic.. or faith. Case in point :- I went to a religious school (though, it was more of a hippie religious school), and many of my classmates became atheists later in life. :)

I think there a large room for even further nuance about how humans develop and all the factors that shape our thinking. Simply forcing a 'critical thinking' class into the curriculum won't give them any benefit any more than attending an entrepreneurship class will make you an entrepreneur.

> When people believe the Earth is round only because that's what they were told, it's not that hard for a clever talker to convince them the Earth could be flat. When people know the Earth is round because they actually understand the physics behind it, there's no way you're ever going to convince them the Earth is flat.

The problem with understanding things from their fundamentals is that it doesn't scale. The world is too complex.

Are vaccines safe? Maybe I'll just should read through the Institute of Medicine's definitive, 900 page "Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality."

Can these robust explanations be simplified for lay people? Yes, but faced with competing, simplified explanations, can lay people dependably evaluate which is correct? Can they do it better than a domain expert?

I have some understanding of how vaccines work, from school and popular science literature. But if tomorrow leaders in the field of medicine broadly announced that all of our understanding of vaccines up until now had been mistaken and that there was now some new explanation, well I would accept that new explanation. Whatever education I have had on the topic, it is obviously not going to be better than the education of experts in the medical field.

Epistemic humility and a consequent reliance on domain experts is an essential part of being informed in our wonderfully complex world. This also means it is possible to be mislead by experts who are in the wrong, but I don't really see how this can be entirely avoided.

So you have to get good at evaluating experts. Strategies include: comparing multiple sources, checking on the background of the alleged experts, picking out a few interesting but verifiable statements from their argument and fact-checking those, finding an opposing argument and seeing which argument seems to make more sense or be better supported.

Having attended school through tenth grade... There were maybe a couple of assignments over the years in which we were told to choose a topic, do research on it while following some of the above (explicitly stated) strategies, and write it all up.

The rest of the time, though, it was a lot more like "this stuff is fact" and you're not really encouraged to doubt it or look closely into the evidence chain. Evidence or proof might be presented (textbooks often mention it), or might not. I wouldn't say that the whole "skeptically evaluating your chosen experts" thing was considered a core skill or habit to cultivate (probably a few teachers considered it such, but their curricula didn't really emphasize it).

"Fringe thinkers" is a very complementary and misleading way of describing the kinds of things HN users are typically OK with websites banning.

So enumerating historical events became being a fringe thinker?

Radicals are now people that speak truth in plain language.

This is a romantic characterization that's rooted in only believing people who are "on your side", which is what is destroying society.

This is a simplistic and reductionist understanding of what is destroying society.

I think that people are increasingly getting stuck in their own filter bubbles. This leads to people drifting apart over time and into extremes. This is because there is no cohesive force getting them to think together anymore.

One proposed solution is to simply filter the more 'extreme' standpoints out of the dialogue. Hence censorship.

But I don't think that filtering and moderation are going to help much if people still stay isolated in their bubbles. All you're doing is superficially fighting symptoms; but the root cause remains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

People are stuck in bubbles created by companies. If recommendation algorithms were developed to recommend videos that tell contrary perspective or didn't recommend similar videos and fill My Feeds with similar videos, no individual would have being in the bubble in first place in best scenario or at worst in some private forum like he/she used to in early days of internet. Instead people have started allowing companies to create bubbles and censor them too and now they are rationalising the power they gave to corporates.

Maybe you can link some of the numerous top comments you've run across that are very eloquent defenses of censoring fringe thinkers.

More fundamentally, what is the point of participating in a social platform that only allows one set of information? Why would you want to read the same thing from many sources? Seems like it’s easier to just read one source and be done with it.

I posit that the lack of censorship is the reason that social media exists. Similarly, the printing press. Why on earth would anybody want to read the Bible, or any other book, by themselves? All truth is taught in Church. To think otherwise is blasphemy.

On topic:

Ah, the Paradox of Tolerance and the Age-Old Quandry of "Is unconditionally punching a Nazi consistent with liberalism?"

The fact is, you can't try to stabilize or bring stability to the system by cutting off or ignoring the "fringes". The entire system is always seeking an equilibrium, and the increased relevance of the fringes indicates the direction the Overton window is shifting in. Cutting things off on one side just guarantees an unsympathetic schism forming on the other, where the people just barely this side of the schism point are left wondering whether the folks on the other side may have had a point. Rinse repeat. Authoritarianism in all forms tends to capture the public imagination in times of crisis. The issue right now is magnitude, and if you keep pushing the censorship button now, there's going to be a loss of quite a few reasonable people previously amenable to putting their differences aside.

For those without ShowDead on, there is a user, AnHonestComment, who has apparently run afoul of some moderation policies, and tends to get his posts nuked from orbit (likely by the user base) as a response, I figured that it was worth pointing out the irony of his attempted statement "This is what HN wants," sans the combative tone with regards to the moderation team.

If you take a spin through his comment history, it's not terribly unreasonable aside from a serious chip on his shoulder with regards to the moderation team.

AnHonestComment, if you're still reading this, you aren't necessarily shadowbanned or anything like that, you're just inviting downvote bombing with the constant references to the moderation by the community.

You seem a decent sort, and I know as well the harrowing plight of the conscientious objector. There is a place here for it, even if it might be well advised to build up some karma first. It shouldn't be that way arguably, but it is, and it's what we've all got to work with.

More importantly, thinking that Youtube can be an efficient arbiter of truth is delusional.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat is pretty famous...

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.

There is only freedom of speech until you actually go against those in power.

Voltaire said something like "to know who your masters are, look at who you can't criticize".

And the popular reply to that is "orphans with leukemia"

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/comedian-mike-ward-seeks-permiss...

That meets the "can't criticize" criteria, but not the "are your masters" criteria, unless there's some sort of secret cabal of disabled boys ruling over us.

right, which means that Voltaire's quip, although clever as everything he said, did not happen to actually cover all the possibilities of censorship in every possible society.

In his time, certainly, the people you couldn't criticize were the rulers, in our time there is a wider range of people you can't criticize.

The statement makes much more sense for today's world if the "who" in the question "Who you can't criticize" is specific instead of broadly targeting a demographic. You won't get hunted down for saying "rich people are bad and should die", but if you start spewing facts with names and pointing fingers ("CIA is a terrorist organization, and this is why"), or e.g. in Greece you say "Marinakis is a drug dealer" publicly, you should start worrying for yourself.

I'm not sure joking about drowning someone meets the usual definition of criticism.

You don't go in court nor in jail for that. So you can indeed criticize them even if it probably will cost you socially.

I think you could make a good case that orphans with leukaemia are a stereotypical example of a utility monster, where the moral halo around them leads our society to waste tons of resources that would go much further doing something unglamorous like, say, free mass vitamin D supplementation. Would this rise to the level of criticism? Because I wouldn't be particularly worried about making that statement and signing it with my real name. Sure, the Society for Saving Orphans with Leukaemia and the ten people who read their tweets may be very upset at me, but I doubt that my employment or social situation would be seriously threatened, I'd find my phone calls mysteriously redirected, be rejected at the US border or barred from flights altogether.

I think any public figure would be eviscerated for such a suggestion. It would certainly cost you tech jobs if it were known to the hiring committee. Perhaps the ‘masters’ statement would apply to the people profiting from public funding of such causes.

And in a totally different response, the vitamin D comment reminded me of the ad council messages of the 80s and 90s, which would tell people things that were unambiguously good for them, like “go play outside”, in a mitigation effort for their negative effects. The Mormon church also ran a lot of these type of ads. This was intended to be the opposite form of social good, one with high leverage through a small positive effect on everybody. This sort of thing seems unrecognizable today in the corporate media.

That quote seems to be coming from nazist and convict Kevin Alfred Strom, not Voltaire. According to Wikipedia, the full quote is "To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?" and Strom first published "All America Must Know the Terror that is Upon Us" in 1993.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/27/cory-...

I'm pretty sure Voltaire didn't say it in English, meaning the full quote above it like the one that parent comment said was like something Voltaire said - a translation of something that Voltaire actually said.

In that case I think the two translations convey the meaning about equally well, and I don't think that because one translation comes from a bad person makes it any worse a translation of what Voltaire intended.

> I'm pretty sure Voltaire didn't say it in English, meaning the full quote above it like the one that parent comment said was like something Voltaire said - a translation of something that Voltaire actually said.

Dr Paul Gibbard, of the University of Western Australia, one of the world’s leading experts in Voltaire who worked as a researcher at the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford, disagrees with you and says that Voltaire never said anything like that, in English or what I presume could also be French. Source for that: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/27/cory-...

And I never meant to say that the quote is good/bad/wrong/correct, simply that it was mis-attributed to Voltaire, when in reality doesn't seem to come from him.

ah ok, sorry I misunderstood your comment as saying that the quote was wrong and that voltaire had actually said the quote you gave.

That quote is often attributed to Voltaire, but, sadly, it actually belongs to Kevin Alfred Strom, a white nationalist.[0]

Doesn't make the quote less true though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Alfred_Strom#%22True_Rul...

Yeah, the dying orphans with leukemia are holding all the reigns.

Well whether or not you think the quote is true, the only point I was trying to make is that the truth of the quote doesn't depend on who said it.

>Talk about the military industry, crime financial complex, pretexts to war or history of US foreign policy [...] and see yourself get delisted from Google, smeared in the media, then get harassed by various agencies

uhh, what? You frequently see posts critical of all of those on reddit and hn, and to my knowledge the things you've listed didn't happen to them.

I don't know what to think here. If you get harassed by US agencies, you might stop posting on the internet, so we wouldn't see anything from them. Simply impossible for us to guess what happens to strangers on the internet, after they post US critical thinking publicly.

That might be true, but these posts have been on reddit/hn for years. You'd think that if there was some sort of effort to harass people making these posts that we'd stop seeing them and/or hear more people speaking out about government harassment.

You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" (soon to be "Chinese agents" as our geopolitical focus shifts)? Or harassing them by having their websites deranked and hidden on Google, like what happened to WSWS (among many other "dissident" sites)? Or simply disappearing them on Facebook and Twitter with unexplained and unappealable shadowbans and account suspensions? Do you think the widespread establishment push for censorship because of "disinformation" is coming out of the deep concern for people who are being misled? Its about tightening the screws of narrative control, which used to be near absolute when 99%+ of Americans got all of their information from the 3 major networks and was lost with the uncontrolled spread of information on the internet and social networks. The powers-that-be want that narrative control back and they will stop at nothing to get it.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html

>You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" ?

Strange, I'm not seeing any of that for the topics mentioned:

"military industry": https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/e0b1ui/dwight_d_eis...

"crime financial complex": https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3r93j0/til_t...

"pretexts to war": https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1aiszn/new_eviden...

These have all received high amount of upvotes, and I'm not seeing any evidence of smearing/harassment happening in the comment threads.

>Or harassing them by having their websites deranked and hidden on Google, like what happened to WSWS (among many other "dissident" sites)?

The problem here is that you're lumping fringe/extremist anti-establishment content with mainstream anti-establishment content, and assuming that if the fringe/extremist content is being taken down, it's because it's anti-establishment rather than being fringe/extremist. I've shown counter-examples of anti-establishment content being left up (there's plenty more if you search around), so the original claim of

>Talk about [anti-establishment] 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.

is demonstrably false.

>>You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" ?

>Strange, I'm not seeing any of that for the topics mentioned

You've been living in a cave for the last several years if you haven't watched everyone who questioned the narrative about the intelligence agencies and US global military empire smeared as Russian assets, from sitting Congresswomen to Pulitzer Prize winning journalists.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/c...

>The problem here is that you're lumping fringe/extremist anti-establishment content with mainstream anti-establishment content,

Who decides what is fringe, you? The CIA? Apparently Youtube though that the video in question was "fringe". Who sets the standard for what information people are allowed to see and hear? For decades it has been the CIA.

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/28/archives/cia-ties-to-jour...

>>Talk about [anti-establishment] 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.

>is demonstrably false.

A false and predictable assertion from someone who forms their opinions based on an echo chamber of children on reddit. Some of us don't want the rest of the media and the discourse to turn into the same.

>You've been living in a cave for the last several years if you haven't watched everyone who questioned the narrative about the intelligence agencies and US global military empire smeared as Russian assets, from sitting Congresswomen

Is being a congresswomen supposed to be some sort of credential? All it means is you won a popularity contest. Keep in mind there are a few representatives that believe in qanon, so the bar is very low.

>Who decides what is fringe, you? The CIA? Apparently Youtube though that the video in question was "fringe". Who sets the standard for what information people are allowed to see and hear? For decades it has been the CIA.

Why is that question relevant? The initial claim was that espousing anti-establishment views will get you censored and/or receive retaliation, but my examples clearly show that's not the case.

At best, being anti-establishment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for retribution.

>A false and predictable assertion from someone who forms their opinions based on an echo chamber of children on reddit. Some of us don't want the rest of the media and the discourse to turn into the same.

I don't get it, do the threads I've linked not anti- "military industry", "crime financial complex", or "pretexts to war"? Reddit might be biased, but I fail to see how this matters in the context of this arguments.

If a congresswoman was provably a Russian asset, I would think that would be grounds for her immediate, urgent dismissal. The set of congresswomen would then only include women for whom there is no known compelling evidence of the accusation. And I believe they're talking about Tulsi Gabbard, who holds additional relevant credentials.

Also, there are two representatives who believe in Q. One won by coincidence, and the other has publically expressed that they don't believe in Q, having never said they do. They aren't really indicative of congress as a whole.

The ones that delve into the really juicy parts have it harder: Julian Assange fights extradition after being holed up in an embassy for years, Edward Snowden had to claim asylum in Russia, Reality Winner got locked up, Chelsea Manning got jailed for a year for refusing to testify against Assange, ABC and a journalist got raided by police in Australia, Indymedia Linksunten got dissolved as a "criminal enterprise" by the German state, Daphne Caruana Galizia got carbombed for going against the highest elites of Maltese society...

But just about all of those people listed are alleged to have committed actual crimes. They may have done so for noble reasons, and a large group of people may not agree that they should be crimes, but they are currently still crimes.

You can't just kill dissidents (if they are known), you have to discredit them first, otherwise you create mortars

I think you mean “martyrs” - but the typo is fitting and illustrative.

What you see is those few that actually make it through, what you don't see are the numerous voices that never manage to break trough the noise because they are actively being suppressed.

Take for example the case of Facebook censoring posts with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc aka "Napalm Girl".

Facebook used to censor those with the excuse of "depiction of child nudity", nobody knows how many Facebook posts were deleted over this, as it only came to light after the editor of the largest Norwegian newspaper did use his access and position at the newspaper to draw attention to the issue [0].

It's easy to hand-wave something like that away as "moderation error", but it's really not. American social media companies also censored and deleted photos depicting US torture in Iraqi prisons, like Abu Ghraib. The reasoning? It's apparently "terrorist propaganda/extremist content" [1].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031

[1] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-th...

I really recommend tracking down the actual documentary, even to this 20+ years web user that whole thing was like a punch to the guts, quite a warning call about the state of the web and the kind of influence and power that particularly social media companies are wielding these day.

The YouTube shadow ban is bad enough, but to me the even scarier part comes further down the thread:

> 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.

> 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.

The video in question is, I suspect, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEVoX-RwMJw

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.

Are you a naturalized American citizen?

:)) no. Why do you ask?

Sorry, meant to ask that question about the author making the claim about DHS.

I was quoting part of the main Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/_SecondThought/status/133274617257067725...

Yep, my mistake. The twitter user appears american.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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

Granted. Principle defended and censorship of other political tribes condemned.

So does that mean we now get an apology from the other lot if the tables have indeed turned?

This is pretty snarky.

No more so than the original comment's presumption that "people who have previously come out against cancel culture and deplatforming" only care about the issue as some kind of tribal marker. I don't want to defend tit-for-tat snark, but it's super frustrating to see people making snide remarks about this issue even as it starts to affect their own beliefs.

Not snide at all. They're only principles if we defend them when it's hardest to do so.

I'm (the "snarky" comment) a man of the left who has been appalled by the use of free speech suppression tactics over the last few years by my supposed political fellow travellers to intimidate those on the right, and like many others have persistently and continuously challenged them in defence of those I sometimes disagree fundamentally with.

So yes, they are principles deeply held and I'm not about to take any implications (intended or not) from your original comment they are not.

FWIW

I'm happy to defend the principle and oppose what happened, but I think you're confused about the mechanism here. The anti-cancel-culture tribe isn't a natural or pre-existing political grouping; it's just the growing set of people whose positions have become cancellable. Within a few years, I expect that stances against shadowbanning and maybe even proposals to abolish the CIA will get you categorized as part of the anti-cancel-culture tribe.

> "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."

Very well, as a liberal, I duly condemn this deplatforming. All people who claim to believe in the tenets of Enlightenment liberalism should.

All right. To establish the tribal difference: I see "Second Thought is creating Leftist Educational Videos", one of which is called "You're Probably Already a Socialist", and some comments on his Twitter seem to establish him as either a socialist or at least very sympathetic to socialism; as a libertarian who currently sees the left as more dangerous and authoritarian than the right, this makes me say "Oh dear, oh no."

And now: Assuming he is correct about what's happening, I say that Youtube is cowardly and they suck for suppressing his video, and for being cagey about it; and the DHS giving him a physical visit seems like clearly an intimidation tactic and one of the early stages of authoritarian evil.

I have no views on the video, I didn’t watch it, but tech companies censoring and pushing back against free speech troubles me.

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.

Let me try being the devil's advocate here. With so many content being uploaded, it's better to err and not promote any video that could be an allusion to terrorism, sexual content, and so on. If humans were moderating youtube it would be worse and the amount of people needed would be impractical.

At the same time, the author gets much more views saying his video was censored than if he was just one more video made on the platform. Just like singers would look for the +18 black mark on their LPs back in the 80s/90s.

> "If humans were moderating youtube it would be worse"

That's quite an assumption that human moderation is worse than an algorithm.

> "and the amount of people needed would be impractical."

What is up-voting and down-voting and reporting? It's not like there's a lack of human eyeballs on the issue already. If no one watched, then no impact.

But why is that? Shouldn't the only bar to putting some videos up on the internet be bandwith? We can solve that with IPFS.

The content hosting with youtube is nice, but the bigger problem solved by YT is search. So a video up on a server somewhere might as well be dark unless something can link to it and someone looking for it or something similar can be pointed to it. That search feature itself can't be centralized or else we have the same censoring problem.

It would be nice if a type of searching system could be bundled with IPFS, though I don't know what that would look like. The sooner we have a system where no one can close the gates, the better.

Well at least for the near future it would probably work like how people have to find torrents: different sites index meta data in their own data bases.

Maybe with something like opentracker there could be an endpoint like /search that translates search phrases into a sparse column vector and looks up cosine similarity against that instances low dimensional space representation of the tf-idf against torrent hashes, those low dimensional space representation files can also be distributed in torrent file and as well as way to constantly update/compute new low dimensional space representation files as hashes are added.

For example it would probably look something like what I do in [0] but as a compiled module linked into and accessed from [1] as well constant update/rebuild of ldsr files like [2] linked and kicked off from flags passed in [3] as new hashes come in.

[0]: https://github.com/cinquemb/hackedteam-email-index-mining/bl...

[1]: https://erdgeist.org/gitweb/opentracker/tree/ot_http.c

[2]: https://github.com/cinquemb/hackedteam-email-index-mining/bl...

[3]: https://erdgeist.org/gitweb/opentracker/tree/opentracker.c

If you look at the current fracturing of conservative media...with Trump supporters fleeing to OANN and Newsmax...what you'll get is that an audience would only watch things that reinforces their beliefs for the dopamine hit, and people will do anything to monetize it, including telling extreme lies over and over (and standing by claiming it's just their opinion that covid is fake, protected by by free speech, while hospitals bed are getting overloaded)

But they own the platform? You are free to set up your own server and host the content. What is much much scarier is the government telling you that you can't put up such content. Until that happens I'm not very worried.

Just watched the video, read the thread. Here are some thoughts.

First of all, the video uploader is promoting a competitor to YouTube. This is not disclaimed clearly.

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.

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.

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.

They did not delete the video, but they shouldn't promote it. No fault in my eyes.

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.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great video with lots of research in the most known CIA meddling like Cuba, Latin America, Iran, and so on.

But it's literally nothing new to anyone with any political knowledge that countries meddle in each other business all the time.

The difference is that it is exposed in a way to make it sensationalist.

The buildup to the Iraq war (WMD) was sensationalist. Propaganda propagated by powerful corporations on the American people to instigate a fake excuse for war. If it's sensationalist to speak truth regards power of the US propaganda machine, them yes, there is no other way. One cannot downplay the fact that the machine is all-powerful.

The internet was supposed to be the antidote to old propaganda, but corporations have taken over the mainstream internet, and wield even more power over our lives. Again, we should not downplay this fact.

> But it's literally nothing new to anyone with any political knowledge

It's therefore even more surprising and alarming that generally available information still gets shadow banned.

the video uploader is promoting his own competitor to youtube, a streaming service. that is mentioned in the end of the video, and it should really be mentioned in the thread title.

There are dozens of YouTubers on that platform who regularly advertise it in their videos on YouTube. Doubt that has anything to do with this.

It doesn't, but it also means the author has a bias against YouTube to promote the other platform.

There are many videos promoting competitors to YouTube that don't get shadow banned, nor visits from Homeland Security. For example The Legal Eagle channel always promotes a competitor to YouTube, as paid advertising in each video.

You're mixing the arguments.

I did not say he is getting Homeland Security visits because of a previous video, he got it because he is criticizing the country he lives in, and that country does not and never had opening to do that.

And I did not mean that his video is being unlisted because of Nebula, the reason is because of the kind of content.

My point about Nebula/YouTube is that his critics of YouTube are biased, since he gains something if people move to Nebula (in the long and the short run).

Legal Eagle fan here \o

Yeah, I did not mean that it's being shadowbanned because of it, but his criticism (to YouTube) are biased by definition.

> It takes some things as axioms, for example, that only the US are interfering/meddling in the world

Where does it claim that? I'm not saying you are lying. I didn't watch it properly so I may have missed it.

> It's a bit näive to not see this as anti-government propaganda.

I don't know what that means. Are you saying that something in the video is untrue or just that it contains facts that make the US government look bad? Would you describe a similar video criticizing an enemy of the US government (whether another government, terrorist organisation, or something else) in the same way?

> Youtube's goals is not the same as the authors

I think the problem here is if YouTube's goal is to help the government who (according to the author) is Google's customer. YouTube is under no obligation to do anything to help spread the author's video, but they should definitely be criticised for working with an organisation committing horrible abuses and acts of violence.

>Where does it claim that? I'm not saying you are lying. I didn't watch it properly so I may have missed it.

All the conflicts are shown as one-sided. Like the Iran one, where he mentions US/CIA interference, but doesn't mention all other players that also wanted to interfere there, because Iran and oil were essential to the global scenario of Cold War (and eventually a not cold war).

>I don't know what that means. Are you saying that something in the video is untrue or just that it contains facts that make the US government look bad? Would you describe a similar video criticizing an enemy of the US government (whether another government, terrorist organisation, or something else) in the same way?

I'm saying the video does indeed make an extra effort to make the US government / CIA look bad indeed. The thing is, looks like there is an editorial choice to make that point, and the video went after it. No wonder it can/will raise eyebrows in the US government / CIA. Which is a completely sepparate problem from youtube/online censoring.

>I think the problem here is if YouTube's goal is to help the government who (according to the author) is Google's customer. YouTube is under no obligation to do anything to help spread the author's video, but they should definitely be criticised for working with an organisation committing horrible abuses and acts of violence.

Indeed. That's exactly what I mean. YouTube is in close ties with the government, and also led by advertisers, they explicitly want to make it more friendly to the most viewers possible. And that kind of documentary is not aligned with that goal, thus will not be promoted.

But it is important to notice the difference between promoting it and hiding it actively. I can't find the video while searching for the exact title.

Wow, your post is beyond sinister!

1) He did not imply the world would be "good" if the CIA didn't exist. That's a ridiculous take and is smearing a very well researched channel.

2) Youtube didn't just stop promoting this piece. They are hiding it. You can't find it even if you search for it.

3) He's not just trying to "create a buzz", department of homeland security paid him a visit now his videos are disappearing - if you think that's not worrisome, well damn!

4) Implying that if you create an axiom that has not been "state approved" then you deserve to get delisted?

Insanely dystopian because you more or less don't seem to care and justify state intervention in private well researched but pretty bland political historical takes.

His views are not that radical. Almost standard in many European countries and that result in some state agency coming to his door and threatening him? Like what??

Replying point by point:

(1) He does imply that in the script yes, in several ways. Pay close attention to moments like "like a good democracy should never have interference".

(2) The bit about YouTube hiding is good point taken, I didn't notice that, I thought it was just not showing up in recommended videos.

(3) He is also trying to create a buzz, the homeland security visit is not related to that video. My point is not that it is not worrisome, but that this is nothing new. The US is like this since the beginning. Have you ever seen what happens to journalists that crack open the NSA and CIA?

(4) And it does not imply that, but implies that YouTube is not a platform for free speech, as it has never been. No novelty here. Surprisingly if it was the TV times this wouldn't even go live, no it is going live. The system is changing little by little, but doesn't mean it is 100% free speech. Never was.

There use to be a reasonable channel by a retired CIA employee. His many videos simply showed pictures of a country along with the declassified text about the mission. The channel one day just vanished. The "why?" is left up to our imagination. All I know is that making the channel took a good bit of effort and the content was historically significant.

Its not dystopian only because somebody has a difference of opinion. That is perhaps the opposite of dystopian.

I didn't see any claim in the video that the CIA is the only organization of such sort. It might make you feel this way because it's entirely focused on the CIA.

It didn't claim neither that the world would be fair without the CIA.

It's definitely one-sided and is just a quick overview of the CIA (but you wouldn't expect more from a short video on such a big subject), but I fail to see how it is propaganda.

My point is not that it clears all other organizations, but doesn't even mention one other. Which is an editorial choice.

edit: not only that, but also implies that the CIA actions are one-sided, as in other players were not trying to mess and do the same to harm the US in the same actions (let's say, Iran).

> but doesn't even mention one other. Which is an editorial choice.

That's some weird hot take on a 20 min video titled "The CIA is a Terrorist Organization". He's obligated to mention Moussad, KGB/FSB et al, because "both sides"?

Also last I checked, "we only did shady shit cause they did shady shit" isn't much os a defense anyway.

>First of all, the video uploader is promoting a competitor to YouTube. This is not disclaimed clearly.

If you're referring to the nebula ad at the end, he and other youtubers have been advertising it for months, if not years now. No other video with a nebula ad has been shadow banned like this.

Also, trying to paint this as "Youtube isn't promoting it" is disingenuous. Youtube is hiding it from people who've explicitly asked to be notified about his videos.

Not my point, my point is that because he has other sponsors that heads-on compete with Youtube, his views about YouTube are not unbiased. He gains something when he promotes Nebula, in hopes to gain even more than what he makes on YouTube.

Now about the promoting, it is my bad, I thought that YouTube wasn't showing it in frontpage, not that it was literally removed from search. I tried searching for the video and it indeed doesn't show in the results. That's a negative point for YouTube.

I saw the video as well.

> First of all, the video uploader is promoting a competitor to YouTube. This is not disclaimed clearly.

You are starting of by literally the last thing on the video which is the promotion of the uploader's income stream, a standard practice for full-time youtubers... to prove what?

> 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.

There is no such claim in the video. Very dishonest of you to missinform people about it.

Apart from that, I agree with your overall conclusion. Youtube is not a public interest organization, they are a private company making money from ads, it is their right to do as they will on their platform. The sooner people realize that, the better. Beyond that, there is an argument here for having transparent practices. There is nothing preventing youtube from saying the truth about what they do.

>The sooner people realize that, the better. Beyond that, there is an argument here for having transparent practices. There is nothing preventing youtube from saying the truth about what they do.

Indeed.

About the criticism, it really sounds like that to me in the video. It implies in the way it is written, and I don't wanna go over details of the script, but pay attention to moments when he mentions "like a good democracy" and so on.

The current status of world dominance/power is an evolution of previous iterations (be it good or bad). But we never had a democratic system the CIA is breaking. The video is presented in a way that if you don't know all of that you will assume the CIA is making the world bad. It is just one more player amongst many, and just a continuation of something that is going on since the Romans.

> The current status of world dominance/power is an evolution of previous iterations (be it good or bad). But we never had a democratic system the CIA is breaking.

True

> The video is presented in a way that if you don't know all of that you will assume the CIA is making the world bad.

Maybe true, but this is an unintended consequence. In no point does the uploader make such a claim or presents evidence to make you think of that. It's only by absence of mentions one can derrive to this false conclusion (that cia is the only such player)

Final thought, although I get your criticism of the uploader, let's say "forgeting" other players as CIA, I would argue they are the biggest and most impactful contemporary agency. Thus, although not the only one, sure the one to be most concerned about. Thus his lack of mentioning other players isn't that of a con to me. My argument is based on what we publicly know of these agencies.

It’s not just absence of mentions of actions by other clandestine actors, it’s absence of even acknowledging what kind of world does cia operate in - everybody all the time is engaged in secret operations to advance their agenda. Everybody does that in multiple parallel projects, operated in different capacities with people of varying competency.

Any “storytelling” about single agency or project or a person is incomplete almost to the point of being misleading/disinformational. The legacy of ashes is one such example.

Does it mean one shouldn’t be (allowed) telling those stories? Certainly not. But without actively and profusely apologizing and warning that the story is definitely incomplete and almost certainly incorrect without proper context, which often is unknowable - the value to the consumer is negative.

The producer knowingly or not is acting as a propaganda actor for one or many competing agencies.

Asking out of curiosiry. Do you have an contemporary actors in mind that operate on the same level as CIA? Because it seems to me like there is much concern about other "conpetitors", but I do not know of any. Not to be missinterpreted, I don't say there aren't spy agencies from other countries trying to do similar things, I'm saying I am not aware of any that operate on a similar scale and range as CIA. Interested in learning about those

KGB did not go anywhere since USSR’s collapse. They literally operate a mafia superpower with nuclear capacity right now in form of Russia. They are also more sophisticated in terms of people operations since they’ve been at it for quite a bit longer and they were never restrained by even a facade of moral responsibility USA places upon itself by pretending to be democratic and leader of the free world.

Whatever China’s counterpart to CIA is can’t be small either be it in scale or sophistication.

Don’t underestimate those by comparing purely financial side of things, agencies that operate on ideology tend to have way more motivated and focused humans which more than makes up any financial shortcomings. The whole industry operates on the idea of asymmetric response and making the US waste so much resources is part of the goal.

Again, I appreciate the existence of others. Do we have any knowledge of them doing what CIA has? Have they organized dozens of coups on the other side of the globe or something?

you only have knowledge about CIA because they willingly declassify information after some time. KGB doesn't. people that talk suddenly get polonium in their tea or novichok on their door handles, and that's how they operate on UK's soil in freaking London, people in other places just disappear without a trace and investigation.

as for what have they organized.. well, let's check the last couple year: USA presidency - check, UK exit from EU - check, Catalania almost leaving Spain, Marine le Pen almost becoming president of France, huge rise of AfD popularity in Germany, hacking of various high profile corporations, olympic games and governments. destabilization of global alliances and international relations is what they do for decades.

> you only have knowledge about CIA because they willingly declassify information after some time.

Willingly declassify information? Ok this is hard troll teritory, I refuse to dig deeper.

The entire legacy of ashes book is compiled from such declassified documents.

> literally the last thing on the video

The video starts, "This video brought to you by Nebula, the streaming platform for content providers like you and me."

Apologies, my mind completely erased that for some reason. Although this detail is false the validity of my point still stands. The creator's sponsor doesn't have anything to do with the action youtube has taken nor with the content of the video.There is nothing to be prooved by pointing that out.

> 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".

The videos on that channel regularly have hundreds of thousands of views with many videos even having millions of them a long time before it had this "badge" to "get more views" [0].

So while it could be an attempt to utilize the Streisand effect for marketing, I consider that rather unlikely because the channel really doesn't need it and I can't think of a way the creator could force YouTube to reliably delist the video to make it a viable PR tactic.

[0] https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCJm2TgUqtK1_NLBrjNQ...

> They have a huge infant audience,

And that's so wrong in so many ways.

> that only the US are interfering/meddling in the world

They didn't claim that. You inferred it.

>Youtube's goals is not the same as the authors, why would they promote something that is not what they want to be?

Because YT doesn't come out and say "We don't want controversial content on our platform. We don't want to question the ruling order of the country from which we operate". If they did, it would be a bit more honest. I don't see why you seem to be defending their quasi-suppressive behavior.

This is the delisted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI

I draw a line between promotion and discoverability.

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.

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?

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:

https://youtu.be/5qEuKCS-czU

> Yesterday morning I released a video titled "The CIA is a Terrorist Organization." Unsurprisingly, it was instantly demonetized. Fine. I'm used to that.

Everything after, "Fine. I'm used to that," is irrelevant.

This thread is apparently content using services built with a spirit functionally equivalent to, "Let's see if we can do the opposite of all four of the freedoms of the GPL."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The content hosting is feasible. The problem is search. If all the videos ever produced where captured in an IPFS hash somewhere...how do you find them?

The problem is how to make the search itself uncensorable, unlike bittorrent ttackers

Take a look at PeerTube. It's federated and they have a global search.

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?

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.

Probably a lot of flagging. That’ll derank it quickly.

That said, use the /active page if you really want to see what’s spicy. This is top of the page there. I visit active before the front page almost every time. :)

I'd never heard of /active before, thanks!

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:

It’s “anti-American” to say that the people ostensibly enforcing our laws should not commit violence against us.

Absolutely ridiculous - do Americans even know why the country was even founded anymore?

Do you? Not to over simplify things, but freedom, liberty, and equal treatment were pretty much empty words and applied only to white American men (see: treatment of Native Americans, the Mexican-American war, slaves, and women).

Federalists were very clear in their commentary and design of the Constitution that they were in favor of broad federal powers and feared populism and direct democracy. The Bill of Rights was not in the original drafts of the Constitution and likely would not have existed had it not been for the Anti-Federalists.

Not to mention gems such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, Three-Fifths Compromise, Manifest Destiny, etc.

Many of the tensions and fears that existed back then, are some of the same ones we are dealing with now.

Edit: Original comment suggested Patrick Henry was against the Bill of Rights - which was inaccurate and a big error on my part. Apologies for the misleading quote!

People like yourself that constantly bring up the wrongs of the past and constantly remind people that things were less than perfect in the past constantly don't seem to understand that:

* Much like many things society progresses, generally in the western world that progression has tended towards greater liberty (in most respects) of its citizens e.g. Tom Holland (a documentary film maker in the UK) argues the separation of church and state can be traced back to the Bible and it been a steady progression to secularism from there (whether that is valid or not I have no idea).

* You cannot judge people of the past by the standards of today. Someone that would have been seen as progressive back then would be seen as some sort of ultra-traditionalist far-right fridge thinker. You have to judge them by the standards of the time. I am sure in 200-300 years people will see us as backwards, poorly educated and barbaric.

I don't know the history of the events or the characters that led to American indepedence (I am not an American) but what I do find when people feel the need to character assasinate important figures of the past is that they do massively over simplify events and the people involved.

Gp was refuting a claim that the American State was formed on an "anti state oppression" platform. He is not claiming the people were bad, but that their ideals were not what was being claimed of them

To be fair, the person you're responding to only brought up this viewpoint in response to another poster who seems to hold the view that the founding fathers were just as progressive as we are today.

I've already addressed why that is in all likelihood incorrect.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245794

I didn't read it as character assassination. I read it as a reminder that we're should not romanticize and fill in details that were not there.

People interpret history differently, and it is a problem when those interpretations differ too much and lead to fundamentally different expectations.

Let's not generalize "people like yourself", when people like myself hold a much more nuanced view of U.S. history and progress than your post suggests.

Yes, we have made a lot of progress over time and will continue to do so. However, I think you need to read my comment in the context of the original post, which was "do Americans even know why the country was even founded anymore?". I think a perfectly reasonable response to a question like that is to put the founding of the country into perspective.

Not sure how you can compare something to the past, but only look at the positive sides instead of the negative. Or at the very least, not provide just a understanding of an interpretation as you have done, except towards the present.

Bringing up "the wrongs of the past" is entirely appropriate in response to a comment asking about why America was founded.

No. It is largely irrelevant to what the person's point was because they weren't really asking why America was founded. I am sure you will quote it verbatim and say "it says exactly those words" while ignoring the actual intent.

How else am I to interpret this, then?

> Absolutely ridiculous - do Americans even know why the country was even founded anymore?

This statement was made to suggest that America has gotten away from the reasons it was founded. It is entirely reasonable to discuss the historical reasons for the founding of America, which included the desire of white property owners to be guaranteed "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," without interference from their government. Oh, and they kinda didn't want to pay taxes without representation, either.

Yes, I am massively oversimplifying it here. But, I don't want to sit here and write a draft of the book that it would take to actually cover the subject with sufficient detail and nuance.

> How else am I to interpret this, then?

People are simply expressing that a police state is scary and those that work for the police state are working against the interests of their citizens and the ethos of the nation. Whether or not that was the original intention of your founders is irrelevant.

The point is that the “ethos of the nation” is, and has always been, authoritarian hegemony — and the intent of the founders in particular was one of the more totalitarian versions of it.

As an American, I would consider that highly relevant. Since you use the phrasing "your founders," I would suggest you have no standing to say otherwise.

Firstly you don't get to tell me what I can and can't consider and what I happen to think is relevant. As for what is relevant, I was talking about the relevance to this particular discussion nor the wider implications.

It was pretty obvious to me what was meant, but at this point it is pretty obvious people want to make it about something else.

Unless you live in America, yes, I do. Stick to your own house. And, maybe learn to read what people actually write, rather than putting your own spin on it. It was clear to me what was meant as well, and you didn't get it.

> People like yourself

You mean people who are interested in analysis of history? You don't want to consider it. That's fine...oh wait...what about:

> Some argue the separation of church and state can be traced back to the bible

Some people argue people rode Dinosaurs. That's about as compelling, as well. For the most of the cultures that contributed to writing portions of the Bible, religious text was law.

> remind people that things were less than perfect in the past

The point is about intent, which is relevant. "less perfect" or whatever that's supposed to mean to you, is irrelevant. This is history, not a relative comparison of ideals.

> You cannot judge people of the past by the standards of today.

Sure you can. Confusing Moral analysis and Contextual analysis is noise.

> the need to character assasinate

Characters are caricatures (incomplete) if you ignore known qualities. Interestingly enough, while you are objecting strongly to the characterization you could have noted that bladegash might have been wrong about the Patrick Henry quote.

Maybe spend more time researching, instead of emotionally posting.

You are 100% correct on your last comment and thank you for correcting me. Patrick Henry's comments were related to the absence of the Bill of Rights and was an Anti-Federalist. Not sure how I conflated the two, but apologies to anyone that feels misled.

> You mean people who are interested in analysis of history? You don't want to consider it. That's fine...oh wait...what about:

I never said that. I was criticisng how he was analysing it. Today there is a habit of denouncing all the progress someone did in the past because their attitudes and actions at the time weren't up today's standards.

> Some people argue people rode Dinosaurs. That's about as compelling, as well. For the most of the cultures that contributed to writing portions of the Bible, religious text was law.

The point is that a combination of things that culminated in Europe (partly because of Christianity but not wholly) resulted in the secular societies we have in the Western world today. I will remind you just because you don't find it compelling doens't mean that it isn't valid. I think there is little bit of truth to it, but I don't think it tells nearly the whole story.

I know that many people seem to think that Christians are fundamentalist lunatics like Ken Ham, but most aren't.

> The point is about intent, which is relevant. "less perfect" or whatever that's supposed to mean to you, is irrelevant. This is history, not a relative comparison of ideals.

Less perfect means that "It was a step in the right direction". This isn't really difficult to grok.

> Sure you can. Confusing Moral analysis and Contextual analysis is noise.

You really shouldn't. It distorts people's view of history.

> Characters are caricatures (incomplete) if you ignore known qualities. Interestingly enough, while you are objecting strongly to the characterization you could have noted that bladegash might have been wrong about the Patrick Henry quote.

I am not an American, I don't know anything about the people involved and don't claim to. I was simply commenting on the fact that people seem to view history through the standards of today.

> Maybe spend more time researching, instead of emotionally posting.

I did no such thing.

There is no such thing as progress, just shifting societal norms. This cannot be seen as “progress” except retrospectively.

This is true, but you need to consider the context of the debate. The problem with political discussions is that every person (or every side) is actually debating something else.

That said, there are three common contexts to "bringing up the wrongs of the past:"

1 - It's a counter to traditionalist/revivalist/restorationist sentiment and/or mythology. In this case, the myth is that all freedoms come from and are rooted in the infallible founding. Any change is a corruption or a regression and reduces freedom.

The true history is that abolition happened first in the empire. The moral change which made the term "freedom" applicable in any meaningful sense came from outside the empire. The conclusion (should be) exactly what you laid out. Freedom, and a lot of other things we value are really the result of societal progression.

IMO, it's essential to make this argument.

2 - To make analogies to the present.

"In the past, people thought it was OK to X. Today, we don't."

3 - It's a baid faith argument. China suppressing traditional minorities because "the americans did it." This context is just a character assassination attempt and it's bad.

A lot of these "wrongs" are not really as far in the past as you imply there.

For example the political landscape in the US, is still very much dominated by economic elite interest groups. [0]

People are still actively disfranchised from participating in the democratic process, having their right to vote taken from them over a criminal history. After they came out of the literally largest incarceration system of the planet. Locking people up under circumstances that in most of the developed "Western world" are bluntly considered torture [1].

But torture is apparently a-okay as long as it's described in euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation", just like assassinating US citizens is a-okay [2] as long as it allegedly keeps the "homeland safe".

Just like involuntary servitude, aka slavery, is still very much a thing in the US, it the race based variant of that may have been abolished as an "institution" but the practice still very much exists as punishment for crime.

That's just domestic, that whole can of worms only gets nastier foreign policy wise with wars of aggression and the casual and regular disregard for other countries sovereignty.

As such, these are not events from some far-flung past we judge with completely different standards, these are very current and still on-going events being judged with the current standards.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...

Whether wrongs are happening today is irrelevant to my point. People try to reframe history in the poliics of today and it cheapens any discission of the topic as everything is seen through a modern lens.

As for societies domninated by "elite". If you read any Pareto all societies have been dominated by elite interest groups. It is called "Elite Theory". It is nothing unique to America or the Anglosphere.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/elite-theory

> At the bottom of the Wealth curve, he wrote, Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion's share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, 'compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.' Inflammatory stuff – and it burned Pareto's reputation.

Unfortunately it is the basis of fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_po...

> Tom Holland... argues the separation of church and state can be traced back to the Bible and it been a steady progression to secularism from there

This is basically what's known as survivor bias. I think if you look at history you will find that power shifted to and from faith (and the church) in many waves. But true secularism was not, to my knowledge, seriously suggested for the first thousand years or more of Christian history. In a way this view of theological history suggests that there is a "true meaning" of the Bible that people didn't happen to notice for over a millennium - that the principles of modern society was always there in waiting, waiting for us to understand it. What this Tom Holland might refer to are sayings such as the phrase "Render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", which does sound like advocating some form of secularism - to modern ears! But of course these verses had many different interpretations over the years.

Personally, I think a much better explanation is that the interpretation of religious texts always happen in a context. Like any text, I don't think it makes sense to claim that there is an interpretation of any religious text that could be called its true meaning, because meaning always arises as a dialogue between the text and its reader, which happens in a certain context, a certain point in material history. You might be able to say that there is the original intention of the authors, but this is not accessible to us. "Render unto Cesar" can perhaps easily be used as an argument for secularism in a Christian context, but I don't believe the phrase can fully explain its inception.

The Bible, like any religious text, contains the blueprint for an infinity of societies. This idea that any part of modern American society, or Hegel's 19th century Prussian society, for that matter, is the natural consequence of what's in the Bible is very strange when you look, both at everything that came before, and also the fact that a very different progression happened in many parts of the Christian world, like Ethiopia or Coptic villages in Egypt. I don't think the theory of "steady progression" holds much water unless you're extremely selective about your facts and perspective.

> This is basically what's known as survivor bias.

The number of times this comes up on here it is a bit of a meme. So I will counter with the maxim of "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail".

I don't think that's a very good counter, and I don't think it addresses the substance of my post at all. I'd say the term comes up often because it's a very common phenomenon - much like the one about hammers and nails. I'm sure there are many other terms for it - the idea that "history is written by the victors" It's certainly older than the concept of cognitive biaess, and I could as easily have invoked that.

Yes it does. It isn't survivorship bias if the process has been going on centuries. Whenever people bring up "X has worked" you will have someone on this site say "survivorship bias".

It has become such a trope of this site I have heard other people mention it on discord discussions and I haven't brought the subject up.

If you start with a faulty premise we can just stop there (and one that is a complete trope).

I don't think the argument I was addressing can be summed up as "X has worked". It's more like "X has happened, therefore X is an inevitable consequence of Y which preceded it."

Also, tropes are often tropes for a reason. You can't dismiss something just because it comes up often.

> I don't think the argument I was addressing can be summed up as "X has worked". It's more like "X has happened, therefore X is an inevitable consequence of Y which preceded it."

You are splitting hairs now. The point I am making is that frequently on this site observations are discounted immediately as survorship bias. It almost as if it the only one people know.

It simply isn't survorship bias if something been going on for hundreds of years in a particular direction.

> Also, tropes are often tropes for a reason. You can't dismiss something just because it comes up often.

I am dismissing it because it doesn't make sense and it is frequently overused. Thus the hammer and nail analogy.

In any event it pointless continuing this discussion further. So lets just leave it.

> It simply isn't survorship bias if something been going on for hundreds of years in a particular direction.

I'm not saying secularization is survivorship bias, that seems like a category error (if I may be allowed another HN trope).

I'm saying the idea that secularization "can be traced back to the Bible" because it arose in a society inspired by the Bible betrays a view on history that seems akin to what's sometimes called survivorship bias. But I'm not very attached to the word, we can leave it out if you like! The point would stand, however: the Bible is an inspiration to many societies, very few of which have become secular, and the ones that did became secular only did so long after introduction of the Bible. Therefore it does not seem very obvious to posit a link between the two.

> Much like many things society progresses, generally in the western world that progression has tended towards greater liberty (in most respects) of its citizens

There is no natural trend in history towards any cultural viewpoint, much less towards modern progressivism. And honestly, the very notion that there is such a trend is almost inevitably followed by an attack on opponents by casting them as, well, barbaric.

To pick one obvious example, consider the democratic-autocratic scale. In Western history, the first (recorded) height of democracy was in Classical Antiquity, with Rome and the Greek city states being democratic. But by Late Antiquity (around the AD/BC changeover), these democratic states changed into autocratic states, and they remained as such for nearly 2000 years. Even in the past 100-200 years, when Europe has been "generally" democratic, there has been some dramatic see-saws between democracy and autocracy of various flavors.

> I don't know the history of the events or the characters that led to American indepedence (I am not an American) but what I do find when people feel the need to character assasinate important figures of the past is that they do massively over simplify events and the people involved.

Judging from your choice of words here, I suspect that you are equally as guilty of oversimplification as the people you criticize. People are complicated; motivations are complex and interrelated; trying to understand the motivations of people through evidence that is deliberately deceptive is frustrating. But putting people in the past on pedestals and worshiping them is as destructive as vilifying them is.

Again, an example; this time, the role of slavery in colonial and early US. It is definitely a mistake to consider slavery to be the primary motivation for American independence, as the 1619 Project did (for starters, it begs the question as to why the more-intensive slave Caribbean colonies explicitly rejected succession at the same time). But the cognitive dissonance of combining slavery with appeals for universal liberty needs to be noted, even if you're judging from the standards of the time. Contemporary British opponents to American independence castigated the Americans for preaching liberty yet owning slaves. Some states and individuals did emancipate slaves during the revolutionary period, so we can fairly judge their contemporaries (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) for failing to do so.

I would add one additional qualifier to your statement, it was wealthy white men, not merely white men. To the extent we tend to project the past onto the present, it doesn't make sense to see a random white male construction worker as part of this powerful elite who was denying women the right to vote or enslaving anyone. It was a very small number of people who had power, and like all people in power, wrote rules that maintained and/or expanded their power.

That is a great point and I wish I had added that in! It definitely wasn't comparable with that of those in power, and much of the Anti-Federalists' fading into nonexistence was due to that power imbalance. However, I would say white men lower in socioeconomic status still held far greater rights than that of, for example, slaves and women.

The right to be drafted and die yes. The rich could literally bribe their way out of conscription.

I was more so referring to the right to vote, run for office, etc. You are certainly not wrong about the other parts though.

Rich blacks could vote in more states after independence than poor whites. And that remained the case for 50 years. Leading to the hilarious case where the first recognized black slave in the US was owned by a black man.

Regardless, offices again had property and tax qualifications in virtually all states.

A de jure right to vote often did not translate to actual access to the franchise. States often enacted barriers such as poll taxes and literacy tests, exempting anyone whose grandfather was registered to vote (i.e. not Black people, whose grandparents had been enslaved). Such discriminatory practices were not actually outlawed until the Voting Rights Act was passed a full century later.

That's nice, but if someone has a right they can't exercise they are still more privileged than someone who doesn't have that right.

Not to mention that the target of those laws were, now considered white, immigrants rather than the always minority blacks in the north.

This is actually a really interesting point/question, and it's one that doesn't have an easy answer. It's true that, overall, most slaves (in pre-civil-war US) were owned by a small number of plantations. But in some southern states, nearly half the White families owned at least one slave. In those families, obviously the women and children didn't themselves "own" any slaves, but they nevertheless controlled that person's labor. Similarly, wealthy plantation owners frequently rented their slaves to poorer whites. So even a relatively unprivileged class of White people benefited from slave labor directly despite themselves getting a raw deal relative to the land owners.

But ultimately, the south fought a civil war in order to preserve the institution of slavery because it was the fundamental organization of society on top of which the economy was built, and many non-elite white men nevertheless allied themselves with this effort.

As for projecting the past, I don't know. It's certainly plausible that White people today are still reaping the benefits that were established by slavery and racism in a broad, systemic sense. As far as I know, my relatives didn't own slaves, but my relatives did do things like get mortgages that Black people couldn't do. That doesn't seem fair does it? It's a little bit like inheriting stolen property. But if you go back far enough, what isn't stolen property?

You say this Civil War bit as if the proletariat has ever had significant say in whether they are commissioned into wars. Even if they individually supported war and slavery, they had no power to start a war over it. It was the wealthy elite.

...in some southern states, nearly half the White families owned at least one slave.

Which states? This is easier to imagine of e.g. South Carolina than of Tennessee.

In general, exaggerating differences in the interests of different portions of the working class is not to the advantage of the working class. American blacks have suffered more from our racist authoritarian capitalist system than poor whites have, but they have both suffered. Many residents of southern states did not enthusiastically join the war effort; this was why they had to have a "Confederate Home Guard" to brutalize conscripts.

I'm not trying to solve all the problems of the working class (which is not a monolith except when viewed through certain narrow theoretical lenses). I am just clarifying that race-based slavery was fundamental to southern society and economy, and it is ahistorical and misleading to suggest that it only or even primarily benefited a tiny minority of wealthy plantation owners.

The antebellum economy was largely agricultural. A family working ten acres of corn with hand- and mule-power did not in any sense benefit from the fact that other landowners had slaves. It would be more accurate to say that they were in competition with enslaved labor. One might as well ask American factory workers how much they've benefited from cheap overseas factory labor.

Upthread you claimed that such small farmers also used slaves. That may have happened occasionally, but the basic requirements of agriculture in a temperate climate (there is a limited time period during which particular tasks can possibly take place) would have made it rare.

While I agree with a lot of your comments, I was alarmed by your Patrick Henry misquote. He was arguing FOR the Bill of Rights, not against it.

https://wwnorton.com/college/history/america7_brief/content/...

Yeah, that was a huge oversight on my part and thank you for bringing it up! I added an edit to the original comment to correct it/apologize (based on another comment mentioning the same thing).

I think what you’re saying goes to show that the US needs to go beyond the idea that it’s a great country because of its founding myths.

Americans need to define greatness based on what they are and what values they currently promote, as opposed to basing it on hagiographies of about 20 men from the 18th century.

>Edit based on comment below (thank you Supermancho): Patrick Henry's quote above was related to the absence of the Bill of Rights and was an Anti-Federalist.

This is confusing. Had to read 5-10 comments down to understand your edit.

If patrick henry wasn't against bill of rights then remove it from your original statement.

And then place the errata statement / disclaimer at the end.

Sample: I previously claimed that Patrick... Thanks to supermacho for the correction.

Fair point, was trying not to make it seem like I was hiding the original error, but your suggestion does that in a much clearer way. Thank you!

You forgot landed and rich. Which is understandable since the point of history classes in the US is to divide the working class along whatever lines they can, currently race and gender. Previously ethnicity, religion, language, etc

> Do you? Not to over simplify things, but freedom, liberty, and equal treatment were pretty much empty words and applied only to white American men (see: treatment of Native Americans, the Mexican-American war, slaves, and women).

This is nonsense. The US was a left-wing experiment. It was a repudiation of the way things were done in Europe. The fact that it didn't solve every single inequity in one blow is not an interesting observation.

It's fair game to criticize the US, but to misunderstand its history to this extent is just sad. The US was radically egalitarian at its founding and served as the example for the rest of the world for at least a century and a half.

John Adams: "I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."

It's understandable that you have been misled in this way; enforcing this particular myth seems to be the primary purpose of USA public schools. I recommend historian Gerald Horne. He has identified Somerset v Stewart as an important event in inspiring American slaveholders and their sometime lawyer John Adams to start the Revolutionary War. That is, they fought a war in large part so that they wouldn't have to give up the practice of slavery.

Horne is a clumsy propagandist and you've been thoroughly propagandized.

In this kind of history, all nuance (like Adams' views on slavery) is lost and all historical events are made to fit a predetermined narrative. In addition to being wrong, it's incredibly boring stuff.

A clumsy propagandist for whom? A secret cabal of evildoers who plot the day that USA will do less racist shit?

Just because you view all history as the result of a "secret cabal of evildoers" (in this case, plotting to preserve slavery) doesn't mean I have to.

As you let slip here, Horne's writings aren't about history: they're a form public of agitation so that "the USA will do less racist shit". Which would be fine if he was a social critic or a politician. But he's been passing himself off as a historian.

Words have meanings. "Propaganda" isn't just funny stories; it is done for particular interests. You claim he's a propagandist, so you should identify which interests those are. Failing that, you could retract your vicious slur...

I identified his interest. Are you getting all the way through my posts?

> Horne's writings aren't about history: they're a form public of agitation so that "the USA will do less racist shit".

And this is a reason we should disregard history? Please take a long look at your priorities, Ted.

Humans will do whatever makes them feel good. The rest doesn’t matter.

Practically speaking the US was founded because a political elite minority, concentrated in certain geographic regions, pushed war on a mostly indifferent population.

it could be argued it was because people didn't like to pay taxes.

Specifically, American colonists wanted representation in the the British Parliament and because they didn't have that they considered taxes a denial of their rights as Englishmen.

This happens all the time, example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgqeJi_Z6aM

I’m upvoting your comment. I hope I don’t get a visit from the secret police.

> That video earned me a visit from the DHS

I wasn’t there, so I’ve no idea if that really happened, but the statement definitely makes his videos more exciting and click worthy :eye-roll:

Well I have encountered this article a while ago - "How CIA made Google":

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

From this perspective, youtube blocking CIA criticizing video seems like something completely normal.

It's not normal, even if there is such a connection. If there is such, it's way more powerful if it's kept in secret. In which instance does the CIA benefit more? If people believe that GAFAM are a front of the CIA and thus enemies avoid GAFAM products? Or if enemies of the CIA use GAFAM products, believing that data collection is only done to improve ads?

The DHS was established in the panic following 9/11. If they're knocking on doors trying to intimidate dissidents, it seems clear that it has outlived its usefulness (if it ever had any) and should be dismantled.

You'd think that would be something small-government republicans progressive democrats could agree on...

You would think. But both sides also feel like they have to look strong on security, or the other side is going to beat them up in the next election.

I mean, it's not really that surprising, the DHS is an organization that openly calls for Americans to snitch on each other, it's even a registered trademark: "If You See Something, Say Something®" [0]

Also not only reserved to the DHS. There have also been examples of people being under surveillance by the FBI, and ultimately going to jail, over Facebook posts [1]

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-...

> It’s “anti-American” to say that the people ostensibly enforcing our laws should not commit violence against us.

No. Everybody knows that, everybody agrees with that, and you can say it. But it's "anti-American" to point out that the people ostensibly enforcing our laws do commit unreasonably unnecessary violence against us.

Here is the video in question:

The CIA is a Terrorist Organization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI

There’s a lot of comments here about what’s happening to America.

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.

Take another period in US history... at a time of another pandemic, the Spanish flu, and a World war.

The 1918 Sedition Act [1] made illegal the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States.

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.

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.

Instead look at how far we’ve come. Look at what we’ve overcome in history.

We just need to keep moving the ball forward.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918

Google Trends also shows spike in Second Thought being searched from Virginia at 100 on their relative scale.

" Plain spam, even your pricing section has different amounts. "

I'm sorry but you have a toxic mind.

We pay for access to the best data on public, venture-backed, and private companies available, as well as utilize independent analyst research, to identify profitable markets.

If you don'y want to give your email. No problem just read an example here before say any no sense:

https://saasideas.net/f/Free_Saas_Idea.pdf

For prices. I made a free plan where readers can get 1 SaaS idea every Friday.

If you want more you can pay for 6 Months subscription. If you feel the price not right! Give feedback otherwise don't be a toxic person.

Thanks

Lol, first off you replied to a wrong thread. Secondly, get a proof reader for both your website & whoever manages this HN account. And lastly if you re-read what I wrote, I mention that the prices within a given plan are different than what the header of that plan suggests.

$48 -> the button says 'Get Access for $58' LOL

You removed the third pricing plan. Simply put you're just spam marketing a paid newsletter.

PS: Your post did get flagged by mods for spamming.

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

1. https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1328460455380193286

Searching the video title on DuckDuckGo gives the Youtube video as the top search result. Put that into your crack pipe and smoke it.

Search that in Youtube and in Google and you'll see it's nowhere, only the reactions to it being shadowbanned.

What exactly happens when Youtube shadowbans a video? The creator believes it's accessible, but no one else can access it?

From the Twitter thread, I understand the video becomes secretly unlisted - not reachable in any way other than having a direct URL to it.

You can find it by going to his youtube channel, but it doesn't show up in searches or in subscriptions if you're subscribed to him.

Eventually something you agree with or think is reasonable will be censored by a corporation. censorship is always a problem

Without forming a specific argument, this popular expression is meaningless by its very nature. Yes, of course people won't like when a system they live in punishes them. That's not avoidable.

There is a public video with 3.6 million views exactly titled: "Bohemian Grove - Alex Jones"

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.

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:

https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/

Shadow-banning is particularly awful. It's a deceptive business practice.

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

somewhat related: youtube selectively deploys objectively malicious psyops on American citizens. bleep you, Google.

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.

You can easily search for the exact title, order by all the right things and is not there, you can see a reaction but not the actual video. https://ibb.co/j8rbkks

Videos don't always appear in search results immediately. He could have also just unlisted the video. I've uploaded hundreds of videos and many don't really show up in the results if they are similar to many other videos.

If you just search "CIA terrorist organization" you get plenty of other video that are similar to the one described, so it's doubtful this one was censored for content.

I don’t recall an option on YouTube to delist a video from search but still have it be accessible from a channel. It’s either publicly searchable (public) or it’s only viewable with a link (unlisted) or completely private (private). The ones viewable with a link will not appear anywhere but this video does appear on the channel. So clearly there is a fourth option youtube has behind the scenes.

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.

There are other video sites you can go to for this sort of thing.

imagine thinking counter-subversion is not justified

People who cheer when "right wing" misinformation is censored, should think very carefully about what just happened here.

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.

The availability and ease of distribution of "fringe" content is a 100 times higher today than it ever was in those 200 years you're glorifying.

You're phrasing this as though censorship of leftism were a hypothetical, when in fact it's been happening for over a century. Read about the Red Scare (both the well-known one in the 1950s and the lesser-known one after World War I) [1] and COINTELPRO [2] for a start.

There's even an example in the thread: the DHS confronted the person about "anti-American sentiment" for posting a video about police brutality. Continuing a proud tradition of censorship and propaganda — of the people, by the people, for the people.

You'll forgive me for questioning whether Americans really care about free speech and anti-censorship.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

You'd do better with examples that aren't from the 1950s.

And #2 was run by Deep Throat (Mike Felt) himself.

Cointelpro ran into the 70's. Also you should read some Chomsky. Lots of examples of thought control.

A mixed-race or same-sex couple on TV? A quarterback mentioning racism?

The first has only become commonly accepted in the last decade or so. The latter is even more recent.

Well, there’s the example from the Twitter thread. But the point is that anti-leftist censorship and propaganda have been happening for a loooooong time.

>You'll forgive me for questioning whether Americans really care about free speech and anti-censorship.

I'd venture to say nobody complaining on this thread will do anything about it other than complain on this thread. No calls to representatives, no nothing.

Complaining doesn't get you anywhere. Awareness by itself is useless.

One check-and-balance that people seem to have forgotten about recently is "what happens when your political opposition wields the power you want to create?"

Which is fascinating because for the last four years they haven’t been in power and at the same time that they’ve been calling for more central control they’ve been bemoaning how terrible the current executive is, and how bad it is that he’s doing all these things and someone has to stop him. Without a single hint of irony that they want to hand the office more power and control.

You're being pretty presumptuous. I support the majority of cases of banning misinformation that become controversial on HN, and agree that they're often "right wing", but I don't feel my ideology or politics attacked here at all. Not everything is a black and white data point in a culture war.

I hope HN doesn’t become the next place conspiracy theories are peddled.

What is the conspiracy theory you see being peddled here? The theory that the video was shadow banned as a result of its content, or the theories presented in the video itself?

That the difficulty of finding the video in YouTube search was a deliberate change made at the request of the CIA.

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.

Present proof or leave the conspiracies to 4chan.

This premise/statement is misinformation in the west, and true information in Iran.

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.

(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).

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