YouTube approves ad by Belarusian gov with journalist from hijackd Ryanair plane
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I do agree that people get overly outraged when it's likely an honest mistake by a minimum wage worker.
Close up of his forehead: https://archive.is/bYKJt/0961300a066abefe7e7cea32db259ef162c...
They chose profits over people, that makes them evil and makes people who work for them, knowingly making it worse in order to collect a higher paycheck, also evil.
But the subj IMO is just an exception which probably sneaked through in the disguise of social ad or something.
Who are you going to pay for that? Your neighbor Joey, he will go and perform an intelligence operation in a foreign country? Or maybe some professional CIA-as-a-service corporation?
It's appealing to try to help this person, though. Maybe other people feel the same.
There's also the question of logistics. It would be hard to transport weapons across country borders. The most likely way to do it might be to start the op in a neighboring country. But if you want to drive, you'll probably be stopped at a checkpoint. Walking isn't very appealing. I suppose you could parachute in, Fortnite-style, but that's pushing the boundaries of believability. Plus that Mig they sent to intercept the civilian plane might have a few things to say about that.
That poor guy. I wish there was something to do for him.
Actually I'm pretty sure there are PCMs who could handle it.
Crowdfunding mercenaries to go against nation states would be very cyberpunk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn#Flight_from_Japan
Money (ie, power) creates and solves such problems; it just doesn't do that under the sun.
(It is of course illegal to crowdfund coup attempts and jailbreaks in foreign countries, although whether a prosecution takes place is entirely political)
Call me irresponsible, but I am weirdly optimistic about the potential for our floundering to have unexpected upsides
The Russians are the world's undisputed masters of this, so it's time we paramilitarize back.
Also, time to fuck Russia, hard. Putin's parkinsons won't come soon enough, and what comes after might even be worse. We should offer a visa for every Russian woman under 18. Starve the country of mothers, and their birthrate is already abysmal.
1 - https://polymarket.com/market/will-joe-biden-be-president-of...
It'll also blow right up in our face in terms of the desired effect. In many cases, I figure doing that would actually boost support for the regime. Many dictators are ruling right now on nationalist sentiment -- "I may be a thug but I am strong and I keep our nation safe from the Americans [or whoever]". Bumping them off will not exactly dispel that myth. If they survive, or if power transfers stably to their second-hand-man or woman, they can now portray themselves and their nation as besieged by hostile foreign powers which will stoop as low as assassination to manipulate the nation's destiny for their ulterior objectives. (The best propaganda, after all, is the truth.)
Anybody can assassinate just anybody. Even heads of G7 can only afford security barely enough to defend against lone attacker with a battalion sized force constantly following them.
It's just they don't want to because they are afraid.
Assassinations aren't quite that, but perhaps the world would be better if that, rather than warfare was how countries that couldn't resolve their differences escalated. Leaders would have a more personal stake in resolving conflict diplomatically, and fewer people would die when they failed.
I should note this is only half-serious before somebody writes up a reply about a scenario where more extreme leaders take their place and there's a worse war as a result, or some such.
It also sends a very strong message to Putin that the US may not want to send
What a heck is that "power vacuum?" I never managed to comprehend the mechanics of Western thought process arriving to that philosophical concept.
> It also sends a very strong message to Putin that the US may not want to send
You want to send this message. You want Putin to be intimidated, and scared, and not laughing at you in the face.
Very massive intimidation. Gaddafi's intimate encounter with a bayonet type of one.
It will be also a message of unity, for the world to see that the West can still Desert Storm any Hitler wannabe like was in time when the West was big, and menacing, and not the other way around.
It's called a "vacuum" by analogy with physics, because unscrupulous folks will rush in to fill it. This kind of chaos is not something you actually want, since it lets the worst guys around win easily. You want to give Mr. Dictator the best opportunity to establish well-founded transition/succession mechanisms (including respect for fundamental rights, which is even more important than democratic voting norms!) and then step down willingly and orderly, with a golden parachute to sweeten the deal.
The West has gotten this stuff horribly wrong as of late, even as recently as the latest wars in the Middle East, but that's no reason to do even worse.
Here’s an example from the end of Habsburg Spain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Spanish_Successio...
This guy rose to power after Tsar Nicolas II and his family were machine-gunned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin Then, Stalin rose to power from the chaos after Lenin’s death, and then when Stalin died, Malankov was ‘in charge’ until Khrushchev took power from him, and so on.
There are counter examples of course, Nicolae Ceausescu being executed in Romania, for instance.
Well, Lenin (with peers like Trotsky and to some extent Stalin) was the architect of the Russian revolution that got rid of the Tsars. Rather than being a lucky opportunist he was dedicated to that project for a long period, motivated significantly by the execution of his brother. I don't think it's a great example of a power vacuum so much as the payoff for a singular focus on a specific goal.
On the other hand, Lenin's debilitation and death following being shot in an assassination attempt and then suffering a series of strokes did create a power vacuum, and Stalin had cleverly positioned himself to fully exploit it and push aside his rival Trotsky - arguably a more capable military and political leader, but one so dedicated to his cause that he failed to defend his own position.
After the Tsar was forced to abdicate as a result of the spontaneous, popular and bottom-up February 1917 Revolution, his government was replaced by a provisional government led by Kerensky which tried to incorporate all political classes and factions in Russian society. However, the provisional government was both weak and unstable – vulnerable to a coup by monarchists in the army while being effectively dependent on the co-operation of the Soviets (workers’ councils / citizen assemblies) of the more industrialised cities, particularly St. Petersburg. Just as important, they had been unable to extricate Russia from the disastrous and unpopular war with Germany (Eastern front of the First World War) and had been unable to resolve much of the material conditions (food shortages) that precipitated the February Revolution.
The Bolshevik party had been organising as a revolutionary party (previously a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) since the turn of the century. Unlike orthodox Marxists, they weren’t content to wait for the capitalist class to become powerful enough to institute modern, industrialised capitalism in Russian society and they believed it was their role to revolutionise Russian society, by-passing the capitalist stage of development.
By 1917, the Bolsheviks had become a well-disciplined and effective political force. They successfully worked towards gaining the support of the majority of the working class in St. Petersburg and Moscow (but not the peasants). After they gained control of the Soviets, they were strong enough to carry out their own coup d’état (known as the October Revolution) and become both the “de facto” and “de jure” ruling party.
The Tsar and his family were executed (horribly, by both bayonet and gunshot) only after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power in order to prevent monarchist/counter-revolutionary forces (known as the “Whites”) from rescuing them.
One of the things I found so bizarre as a liberal... I was against the Iraq war on the basis that it would create a power vacuum, which it did. When six years later, liberals lined up to applaud the Arab Spring, I was against American support for it for the same reason. Both of those things were sold to the American public as a form of liberation from dictatorship. In the former, we would supply democracy after overthrowing Hussein. In the latter, we would expect countries with no history of democracy and almost no independent civic institutions to do it for themselves. The goal is great, but it never seems to be reached. People here haven't mentioned the Iranian revolution which was the most vivid example in modern history of a sudden vacuum in a dictator's absence, with the presence of a drifting democracy movement, being filled by a bloodthirsty lunatic.
tl;dr Better the devil you know, in most cases.
But at least Europe got much needed civil reform in the process, I guess?
A more effective solution is to sponsor a resistance movement (whether militant or peaceful) and this has been done so often that it's been systematized in both military and civil terms by various imperial powers, but with (imho) increasingly mediocre outcomes and increasing risk of blowback.
It's a bit like being a spy: get caught and you're disavowed.
Now, what I for one would love to see is an extraction of Julian Assange. He's a far more important journalist, who's been held in captivity far longer, and whose mental and physical deterioration as a result of the abuse he's endured has been far greater. He's the Griffith of the journalistic world.
Who wouldn't love hearing that a crack Russian special forces unit dropped into London, hit the Belmarsh hard, incapacitated the prison guards, and sprang Assange? Then vanished from London under cover of night, nursed Assange back to health in Russia, and Assange eventually returns to journalism after a decade of suppression, assuming his mind can be pieced back together, while living as a free refugee, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the former USSR?
I think we're all owed a happy ending at this point. It's been an ugly decade.
Geopolitics is much more a game of Go than Call of Duty.
So, what gives? Is it supposed to demonstrate the regime's ability to break you? Do these dictatorships just suck at PR as much as they suck at other aspects of governing?
Disclaimer: I live in Russia and what is told about Russia here on HN slowly kills me with its striking primitivism.
I think a lot of "Russian influence campaign" suspicions held by people are just because they cannot fathom the other side being genuine. Helped by the fact that Russia does, in fact, run the occasional influence campaign in the US.
It is clear that they have been attempting to influence elections. In the US but also in other places, like Austria. It seems unlikely they stick to elections.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-pfizer-covid-disinformation-s...
I can believe it! I do judo with a Russian and it's interesting the difference between how others talk about Russia and knowing even a single actual Russian. I should be clearer that I'm describing the Russian government, not actual Russians, my apologies.
As to the point - the only explanation offered that really makes sense to me is that it's an extension of the arguments that a number of governments are having around the various vaccines. The Russian government is in conflict with e.g. Brazil around the Sputnik vaccine. The Chinese government has been suggesting it will only allow travel to China from people who have been vaccinated with a Chinese-developed vaccine, not any others. And, of course, there is the ongoing argument over the patent status of a number of the European and US vaccines.
No problem, I don't take this personally :) Sometimes I just can't help diving into political argument despite outcome in most cases is disappoining and HN is not inteded for such discussions in the first place.
As for vaccines, in most cases it is pretty clear why something happens and motives are obvious. Spreading lies about competitors vaccine is definitely a dirty play but at least understandable tactic. Using toursts as a trade war weapon puzzles me a bit but still can probably be useful to improve negitiation position or whatever. But antivaccination propaganda has just rung a bell - it doesn't pass qui bono test. Antivaccination groups in any country are a minority (AFAIK) and it is hard to use them to "divide and conquer". IMO this kind of campaign most likely has been initiated by some antivaccination activists.
1984 did it first.
>incompatible with the idea of democracy
So is Belarusian regime.
>suck at PR
Do concentration camp administration suck at PR? Beating random prisoners to death for no reason is quite efficient way of keeping people under control.
But if Lukashenka gets torn to bloody pieces by the crowd - then yes, he did suck at PR indeed.
It's the same reason Israel claims that every building they level in Gaza is a military target.
It's the same reason cops in the US cite noncompliance as a justification for violence.
It's the same reason Republicans allege voter fraud when they make laws to suppress millions of votes.
Authoritarians will never, ever, ever admit "we're dictators" or "this is about power". They will always have an excuse for it.
Want to cite that counterclaim? Which innocent building was razed?
how about that one? Which person that doesn't deserve it has ever been the victim of police violence? Can you prove it?
Have never heard about what happened during the Civil Rights movement?
Try a web search for police violence. You will see hours upon hours of unprovoked violence by the US police.
Your comment is quite frankly incredibly ignorant.
It is extremely hard to believe that at least by accident that Israel has not bombed civilian target, harder still to believe that all the "Intel" they have is so accurate that they know exactly always which civilian buildings Hamas operates out of during the middle of a war.
Extraordinary claims that not a single civilian target was bombed needs extraordinary proof .
I don't think that Israel is claiming that, although some people might make such a stupid claim.
>It is extremely hard to believe that at least by accident that Israel has not bombed civilian target, harder still to believe that all the "Intel" they have is so accurate that they know exactly always which civilian buildings Hamas operates out of during the middle of a war.
That seems sadly quite possible and hard to verify either way. Also my guess would be that most of the intel was gathered prior to the war.
Is it not likely any quasi military organization would move things around once war actually starts ?
That's a misunderstanding, if you act like a buffoon the police are required to treat you as one. There not dictators, just blue collar workers doing there jobs.
There's hours of video online of American police screaming "stop resisting arrest!", while beating civilians senseless.
It's quite clearly a tactic employed by a lot of them to create plausible deniability of their appalling behavior.
Selection bias, you see the videos that outrage you the most well you don't see the day to day reality. Police don't beat calm sensible people, they beat the kind of people who are out there resisting arrest.
They don't suck at PR, they are doing exact what they want and it is extremely effective. You simply are coming into it with the wrong frame, one based on viewing it in the detached and abstract hypothetical, vs the embodied view of someone who is in that society and has everything to lose.
Everyone ultimately knows the Big Lie is false. The PR is showing that the truth does not matter vs the power of the regime.
One of the most chilling examples of this is the footage from when Saddam took absolute power. He paraded out a "confessor" that showed signs of torture in front of the legislature. The confessor started reading a list of names of sitting members of the legislature. As he continued, the entire congress became panic'd. Many of them began screaming hyperbolic pledges of loyalty to Saddam, prostrating in the aisles, etc.
Once the list of names was done, roughly half the legislature was named. Saddam took everyone outside, distributed firearms, and made the half that was not named execute the half that was. He did that to make the survivors complicit in his new dictatorship. The message was: if I go down, you go with me now.
That's what this sort of stuff is about. Not some armchair platonic musing about whether it's hypocritical vs the ideals of democracy.
I wished I was joking.
FTFY
But it seems like it could be true, too. I'm just wondering how to verify.
Even Amazon has live chat any time I need it. Google has no real competitor, so doesn't have to provide customer service at all. It's more fuel for the "break up big tech" meetings that I hope come soon.
---------------
...but I recognize that having live-chat support for "how do I do $this in Google Exce...Sheets?" or even "why aren't my MX records for Gmail not working?" is not the same thing as having someone to speak to regarding systemic (but not inherent!) problems with Google's business.
Yep. The only reason I pay for G Suite is so I can complain to a human when something in Google is properly fucking up. They hate me but they always talk to me.
Even the few paid support channels they do have are fragile. Support is an afterthought, Google supports GSuite to both attract and retain customers now the product is stable… if they decide your business is not wanted then your S.O.L.
I took this as questioning the how to verify that the tweet is reporting authentically on the video being played in an ad. I admit that I hadn’t considered this. That said, such seems in line with news coverage that I’ve seen so far.
Hat tip for reminding me to think critically regardless of whether somethings sounds plausible.
Not sure what to think. No one seems to know. I was hoping for something like “it’s true because the video itself came from the ad,” or... something.
Also relatedly, I made a complaint via feedback-form about Amazon Prime issues a couple years ago on a Friday. An Amazon support agent called me on a Sunday* to help me work through my issues. It was the middle of Summer and I was out adventuring, so I didn't have time to get into the issues, but it sure surprised me.
*Here in Austria almost everything is closed on Sunday, except public transport, care homes/hospitals and restaurants/bars, so it was doubly-shocking to receive a phone call.
I'm curious which countries the Belarusan gov is trying to influence. (If I had to guess, I'd say they limited their ad spend to the US.)
Iewould have thought they would spend it advertising to those in Belarus.IIts propaganda for domestic consumption.
(Why would you pay someone in order to stop behavior you find unethical?)
Like block ads if you want man, whatever, but to take a moral high road lol...
He didn't claim that his action was ethical.
He said that YouTube's was unethical.
You completely misunderstood.
Ethics is the basis of parent's argument. If what you are saying is true, that parent would yield their action is unethical, then the comment completely spelled out would be:
"Do not take YT's prescribed course (YT premium) because they are unethical. Instead, take my suggested route, even though it is also unethical"
Additionally, OP presented their option with * which means it's a correction or superior form, and not just an alternative. If they had said 'or alternatively use ublock' then maybe it would have been okay.
Your re-write should read > "Do not take YT's prescribed course (YT premium) because they are unethical. Instead, take my suggested route"
to accurately reflect my sentiment, although I actually wasn't claiming that YT is unethical, only that user davesque seems to think they were. If I said "How can I stop this man from hitting me?", the response "pay him $5" would be poor, so I was suggesting an alternative.
https://www.quora.com/Do-the-Belarusians-still-speak-Belarus...
Before watching this video of a journalist who was kidnapped and possibly tortured to give you this false statement, here’s an ad about liberty mutual life insurance. Liberty!
To get us another deal
Sometimes it's a bit evil
Sometimes just a bit shady
And don't you ever worry
If we cancel anything it will be Hangsout, Play Music, Timely and Poly
I can't even imagine how a hypothetical well-intentioned judge who wanted to apply that provision correctly would proceed. The judge would basically have to choose between imposing their own personal view on good and evil or declaring the provision nonjusticiable.
Maybe the license could include a mandatory arbitration clause with an arbitrator who shares the author's values, but that still sounds like a terrible idea.
I went in assuming someone's in charge, but honestly, most of the mistakes Google makes are in the category "nobody's in charge." They operate at a scale where everyone tries to use them to do everything. That's everything good and everything bad. They've been both a force for normalizing LGBTQ identity and a force against it, a mass communication tool and a mass oppression tool, a platform to help people and a platform to stalk people. They actively manage, observe, maintain, and regulate only a subset of the space of uses their tools allow.
This is explanation, not excuse. I'm not there anymore because I think it should be their responsibility to take responsibility reflective of their size and impact. I lost faith that the leadership agreed.
In this specific example, my assumption from personal priors is they let this ad in because there's nobody in charge of negative-filtering ads like this until complaints come, and in the absence of policy the default policy is "allow." They have categories to catch ads for illegal substances, various forms of illegal activity, and so on, but "A state-level actor will use our ad platform to paint a false message of the status of a political prisoner" is a new one for them.
Alphabet is still majority-owned by the founders as of 2019. In practice, the board is advisory; 100% of stockholders who's names aren't "Larry Page" and "Sergey Brin" could vote the same on an issue, and the issue will carry in whatever direction Larry and Sergey say it should if both agree.
I fully agree with you, and I don't think that there's any going back: the founders don't care about this, a CEO generally only takes a principled stand on things like this when it's their baby, but Google is not Sundar's baby.
At 11:30-12:20, he taught a course on advertising. At 12:30-13:20, he taught a course on business ethics. Every time a student asked a question, he had to stop and remember which course he was teaching before he answered!
I don't know how much Google is profiting from the Belarusian government, but unless it's a lot, I doubt Google would actively try keeping these ads. If it is a lot of money, that's indeed a data point which supports the theory that they're acting out of greed.
The above of course doesn't excuse Google's mismanagement of the situation, but doing something bad out of incompetence is a different kind of failure (with different remedies necessary) than doing the same out of greed.
I'm saying that most of them — including those who can do something about it — are probably not aware that this ad got through their approval system. If you think this is not the case, you underestimate how inefficiently information travels in large organisations.
As for how much they're profiting off of it? Probably not much from just the Belarusian government, but they don't just have morally awful ads by Belarus, they have morally awful ads coming from probably thousands of advertisers. This one is just exceptionally disgusting. But I doubt an actual human was even involved in the responses about this ad.
That's right! There are plenty of other continents with dictators to give into!
Whether it's malicious or not, Google created this ecosystem where you need to process and serve a bazillion ads to compete with them, if they're unable to properly vet those ads it's on them to scale back to a size where they can properly vet them.
If this was a one-off issue then sure - but Google runs a lot of really slimy advertisements.
It's pretty telling that even small-ish video producers are willing to vet their advertising partners more thoroughly.
That's always been the case and it still doesn't matter. It would matter if this was an isolated thing that happened every once in a while, but the outcome has been the same, which makes it not matter when it's been going on for so long.
Hate to break it to you, but that is how most evil in the world works-- through callous indifference and incompetence, not through some cartoon villain.
But why are you not quitting. I am sure you can find another job within a week. Curious what you choose to stay.
Although I'm sure these aren't the reasons YouTube approved the ad(s).
YT must deal with probably hundreds of new ads a day. They stand to gain nearly nothing from running this particular ad, and stand to lose quite a lot, even from a pure corporate-self-interest perspective. Which is more likely: that YT said "screw human rights abuses, gimme the cash" in full knowledge of what was going on, or that some contractor who had already reviewed a dozen that day and maybe hasn't even seen the news articles clicked a button without proper due diligence, and YT hadn't factored "what if a developed nation's government openly advertises human rights abuses" into its oversight processes?
This is the kind of reactionary attitude that causes YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing. Later, even more people will complain that their favorite YouTuber is being demonetized. Everyone has their own brilliant ideas of perfect moderation, but at the end of the day, they would never be willing to accept that responsibility themselves and the blowback that comes with it. See the grandstanding that occured during the section 230 Congressional hearings as a perfect example.
Why can't YouTube simply just make a mistake and correct for it? When governments failed to protect a plane from being forcibly escorted, I don't see why people expect a private business to fix all the world's geopolitical issues.
So youtube can do this but if they did it, the very same people who claim to want this would lose their collective minds. They don't realize they're baddies too on some level, and want only their own kind of baddies to have free reign in the media.
Great point about the governments too! Youtube can't fix what trillions in collective worldwide military spending can't fix. If dictators are this brazen and getting away wit this, as well as the American dictator wanna-be getting away with 1/6, sorry but FAANG can't help you. We're too fargone for tech solutions at this point. Fix your governments first.
It matters that they are falling short and only correct their mistakes when massive social pressure is applied because most issues can't generate the social pressure needed to get Google to notice. That means most of their errors won't actually get fixed.
Google makes insane amounts of profits, but they don't have the resources to moderate content well?
Yeah but this video is of a political prisoner who was tortured and the account is a government account.
The youtubers getting improperly demonetized are often minorities with content that could be offensive to some group of people (eg. gay youtubers talking about their life... is offensive to extremely religious people).
There is a big moderation quality gap between "official government posts torture prisoners" and "random gay 21yo in LA describes college life". I DO expect youtube to be able to get this balance at least right, all of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
After some thinking it seems a lack of authority on what 'Truly' constitutes a logical fallacy during a conversation, but claiming the other is using a fallacy is a fallacy in it's own right. May I suggest Fallaception?
Lots of people using 'what about' are doing so to try to make reasonable comparisons between two cases. Lots of people do it to avoid blame or confuse the argument. You have to actually read to figure out which it is.
For instance, the event with Evo Morales' plane being forced down in Switzerland, while not exactly the same, clearly set a bad precedent and we're paying the price now. I don't have any problem with saying that what Belarus just did and what happened then with Evo Morales' plane were both wrong. (At the same time I support European countries sanctioning Belarus even if they were the same countries that just a few years ago denied their airspace to Morale's plane for political reasons.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
On the other hand, if Ukraine did this just to harass a journalist saying things they didn't like (once again if we take the RT article at face value), then that's a questionable action that deserves to be criticized.
One key thing would be to stop bullshit like this.
No they didn't.
You are comparing apples to oranges.
We are seeing a dicator state broadcast their use of torture on a dissident via Google ads.
I'm appalled that you would trivialize this like it's a "business as usual" scenario.
[0] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident...
I thought "forcing down" implies that the enforcer decides when and where you land. For all we know, Morales' plane could have turned around and flown back to Russia, I suppose? I don't know what his options were. But that Ryanair plane, as far as I understand, didn't have any options.