YouTube’s rules are used to silence human rights activists
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
>"We welcome responsible [sic] efforts to document important human rights cases around the world. We also have policies that do not allow channels to publish Personally Identifiable Information in order to prevent harassment."
Because the disappearance would be more visible to foreigners, and therefore more embarrassing to China. It's bad PR.
IIRC, some Soviet dissidents were merely harassed for an extended period time and/or offered the option of exile, because they were so well known in the West.
At least with Xinjiang, they deny all the negative stories and have invested quite a bit of effort to push unbelievable "positive" propaganda about it. Disappearing someone who's known outside of China undermines that propaganda effort. That doesn't mean they won't do it, but clearly identifying yourself like these people did makes such actions more costly, which can tip the scales (e.g. it might save you from a bullet and land you in prison instead).
If you stay anonymous, no one may know unless the pile of bodies gets too big to deny.
Given that these people are giving their testimony to Atajurt (and not the Chinese government), these are people trying to share their story so the rest of the world knows how bad things are. As the article says, this knowledge is either shared directly (the videos themselves are shared), or indirectly ("the information in the videos is then used by other organizations..., which documents [sic] where detentions are occurring, which communities are most affected, and who has disappeared."). YouTube is therefore preventing one of the most oppressed groups in the world from explaining how they are oppressed.
That sounds pretty bad to me.
The Google policy on PII linked from YouTube's response quoted in the article is intentionally a bit broad and vague and considers "full name" PII, but lots of people say their full name on YouTube videos. Showing ID cards isn't mentioned in the policy - those could violate the rules about addresses, but the ID documentation being shown certainly isn't accurate anymore: the people in the videos escaped the camps and I presume aren't in China anymore.
Maybe it's the documenting of the relatives still in the camps YouTube objects to. If this is a violation, would a news clip about a missing child that includes the child's name and photo also be a violation? Seems like it should be. If YouTube takes that down, are they trying to help the missing child?
The difference is that a missing child is unlikely to be punished for appearing on YouTube. The same can't be said for a detained political prisoner.
1) YouTube isn't doing anything wrong. They obviously support in principle the rights of humans.
2) They are consistently applying their policies. This could reasonably be used to dox people (eg, holding up ID of your enemies so maybe they get rounded up eventually).
3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules, so there isn't much they can practically do.
You might (quite reasonably!) want YouTube to be active in promoting some combination of human rights and/or free speech. But YouTube has made their in-practice policy quite clear. They are also going to defer to what the local authorities believe is acceptable.
Isn't YouTube banned in China? What "local government rules" are you thinking of, specifically?
That wouldn't be a radical departure from policy for YouTube. This is well trod ground.
Come on. "not wanting misinformation on their platform" != kowtowing to authoritarian regimes outside of their jurisdiction.
The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.
They make their own call on what misinformation is (or who to trust to identify it), which is how they actually do it.
> The obvious way to do it is to ask the local government what is misinformation. Google isn't an expert on the truth of everything, for all that their search index being impressive.
That's not the obvious way, that's a stupid way for reasons that should be obvious for anyone with any knowledge of history or current events. Keep in mind this is political information, not technical information.
Google has tons of offices in China, and RnD sweatshops
YouTube is a company. The default for a company is indifference to every topic. And that's fine. YouTube doesn't "obviously support in principle" anything.
The people there will support things, but companies are not just the mathematical average of the people there. It's specifically about how those people choose to act when they're acting in the name of the company. Nothing about YouTube makes me think it's interested in using the platform supporting the rights of humans.
If there was some clickable and advertiser friendly content produced by people promoting human rights, I'm sure YouTube would be happy to host that. But they're happy to host almost all flavors of advertiser friendly content. I'm sure they would take credit for hosting that video as if YouTube itself was doing something that moved the needle on human rights. When all they're really doing is not prohibiting the content on their default-allow platform.
It's been known for years that YouTube removes evidence of warcrimes because those videos are too graphic.
>2) They are consistently applying their policies.
When videos about a topic they "obviously support in principle" runs up against the general purpose policies, what would "support" look like other than creating a special case in their policies?
>3) They are probably going to be forced to do stuff like this anyway in compliance with local government rules
What government is telling YouTube to make videos about human rights abuses unavailable worldwide? And why would a company that "obviously support in principle the rights of humans" choose to do business within that government's jurisdiction?
yeah, I get that I'm being really critical and holding youtube to a high standard. But it's also totally fine if YouTube chooses not to meet that standard. Most companies barley have the manpower and expertise to execute on a signal focus. YouTube doesn't have to try to move the needle on human rights issues. All I really mean is that we shouldn't default to giving them even a single ounce of unearned goodwill on their human rights record.
Not sure if they are still doing it. But for a fairly long time YouTube censor the word CCP and some other negative words related to CCP.
Not surpassing consider some of those moderators are pro CCP.
Peter Thiel talked about this in happening in Facebook moderation. But I gather most on HN somehow loathe him so it might not matter much what he has to say.
I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure.
Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No?
It just seems very strange, the situation that platforms that have become truly global can silence people without any enforceable appeal system, using a weird mix of western moral and eastern business incentives in deciding to do so.
They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech.
We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.
But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now.
Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.
Dont the top 2% that actually own these corporation control them?
Reddit also cracked down on Syrian civil war media around this time. The videos were often gruesome propaganda and evidence of war crimes at the same time.
The reason people called on social media to remove this material instead of making it a job for law enforcement is that First Amendment protections are very broad. Praising ISIS or sharing "inspirational" videos of them killing government soldiers is not a crime if it doesn't also call for imminent lawless action. But few Americans of any political affiliation want such material to spread freely online, so it has been suppressed by other means on major platforms.
I'm not endorsing or condemning how these platforms behave. I'm just pointing out that they have long suppressed material that the First Amendment protects. The timeline of moderation well predates the Trump presidency.
I don't mean to be snarky, but to try to draw a line. There are goods and rights that are intrinsically important (say food, water, social life, freedom from crime) and some that are important for the maintaining of a society (contracts are a good example here).
One of these "to maintain a society" freedoms is due process. Another, free speech. Both are important for their own sake, but also to check and control power.
You can say, and it is reasonable to say, that not suffering the ill effects of crime is more important than having good due process. But, given that due process is an important check on those in power, whenever they say "we need to reduce due process to get better law enforcement", you should be wary.
To sum up: some seemingly rational trades between values are dangerous, especially since they reduce our ability to influence society/to undo those trades.
Sunlight is ALWAYS the best disinfectant. Free speech is the first amendment in the US Constitution because those that wrote it had first hand experience what life is like without it.
Transparency allows us to see what's going on inside companies, and make sure that they're not making decisions that are to the detriment of our society as a whole.
Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born.
In my opinion, the best way to give credence to these kinds of beliefs is to drive them underground. Now you have people whispering from the bushes about the topic to people they think might be swayed to join them and no one is around to counter what they are saying. The best way to keep people from believing these kinds of things is to let their proponents speak, and then call them on it. Joe Gullible will at least be able to see both sides.
Similarly, the best way to unlearn bigotry is to converse with people you are bigoted towards about a range of topics. Eventually you learn that they are just people, like everyone else. The same thing could happen with politics if we stopped being shoved into bubbles (or willingly building them up).
Unfortunately, advertisers don't want to place ads where contentious discussions occur and big companies don't want to lose advertising revenue, so here we are.
There is also the potential problem of censoring people who actually do hold a valid evidence-based opinion on a topic, it's just not one that's politically en vogue currently. Not to mention all the topics where it isn't clear what the truth is, despite a plethora of evidence for and against, and the person in charge holds a strong opinion on it.
What I'm saying, I guess, is "citation needed". Show me your evidence that people don't change their opinions based on evidence and maybe I'll change my opinion on this topic :)
Of course, those currently a part of the Christian, American far right would be pleading for more regulation on free speech.
For chat you have XMPP, for feeds you have RSS and webpub (mastodon.) There's ical for sharing events of course.
It seems to me that a distributed (and more secure) version needs to have something in it that would cause a network effect. The idea of Facebook seems sound, it's just hard to get everyone to agree on one and when they do it's hard to break them free.
My firm belief is that that is impossible.
It may look crude from todays perspective, but there is zero reason the same concepts couldn't take root today. The big problem is friction. Just logging into to some "free" service that someone else runs for you is all most people want to think about.
I think there is a huge opportunity for a modern revival of concepts like BBS's and FidoNET, but with a modern spin on UI and communications. instead of the master nodelist like FidoNET had use a distributed directory along the lines of DNS. Heck why invent a new protocol - just adopt DNS with a few tweaks.
If somebody else wants to spend their money to host such things, they're free to do it.
Bad stuff happens. Thinking you can filter it out is a fools errand.
In that case someone should build an streaming platform where there is no censorship, let the market decide.
It's funny how the early web thinking encompassed nuclear war but not the presence of authoritarian government in the East and a zealotic secular religion in the West.
There's an implicit circle in this logic. Manually crafting IP packets is unwieldy to the masses, too, but some kind souls came along and made web browsers to make the crafting of IP packets for the purpose of browsing the web easy.
The only thing stopping us from doing the same for better "obscure technologies" is willpower.
I believe the network effects are stronger than the free speech incentive for most people, after all, that is what current leading platforms bet on when deciding about censorship.
This can be in theory only resolved by the state. Advertisers will adjust, marketing is the most adjustable business there is.
It's a big point of dispute if a state should be able to censor someone, of course, but IMO state should not allow censorship within a global privately owned platform.
It's an interesting thought. I rather like the idea as the different political kinks of the big companies are rather obvious. You'd still have the problem of moderation in terms of various types of pornography (country specific), automated cruft/spam and the edge conditions of various degrees of violence in videos. Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine.
Maybe the problem is that a system like youtube or Facebook is monolithic. Placing responsibility in one groups' lap can't be a healthy thing in the long run. That, and people shouldn't get so triggered by what they see on a little screen.
The amount of Usenet servers allowing binary-containing posts is next to zero because of piracy and child porn issues, and the text-only stuff never became mass-market enough to show up on the attention radar of media and wide society.
The problem, I think - and this is pure supposition on my part - is that the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" (i.e. emotional reaction) also kinda accidentally optimises for the shady shit.
You could always find shady shit on Usenet if you wanted it. But you have to go looking for it. Because there wasn't an algorithm feeding you whatever it thought would keep you interested, it wasn't front and centre.
As you say, it never became mass-market enough. Because most people aren't really into the shady shit. Everyone might google for 2 girls 1 receptacle once for kicks, but it's not what most people want to see all day. Without the algorithm, it dies in user sub and most people don't even see it.
Usenet collapsed under the weight of spam and trolls. People tried to keep it going with some bolted on moderation tools but they never worked very well and eventually people moved on to more moderated platforms.
Even if you remove alt.binaries the rest of the Usenet had a massive spam problem that was never fully solved. Once a community grows large enough you can't get around the need for moderation, it takes far too few bad faith actors to increase the noise level beyond the point that the average person can tolerate. It doesn't take long for the quality people to leave in search of a less noisy venue.
Then you watch them twist themselves into pretzels with things like Blizzard's Blitzchung fiasco. Or the NBA's position on political issues around China.
Just the same what happened to 4chan and its more shady copycats: it's going to be immediately overrun by far-right extremism, misogyny, gore, violence and a lot of pedophiles.
> More honest and real world feel?
When I go onto the city plaza and shout a Hitler salute or that women belong in the kitchen, I'm going to be beat up or arrested. On a "censorship" or rather moderation-free platform, there are no mechanisms to enforce social norms and laws.
If we accept the premise that individuals cannot be trusted with information, where does that lead us?
There will always be problems in society. Taking a narrow view of exceptional circumstances, characterizing it as dangerous or "an emergency" ignores the larger picture. Given a chance for rational, open dialog, people equipped to do so can come to conclusions based upon reason. It is the natural course of the dissemination of information.
I remember when the rallying cry of the hacker movement was: "Information wants to be free"
Somewhere along the line we've supplanted that with gatekeeping and walled gardens. Cynics will observe that there is no gatekeeping without walled gardens. Therefore, if there was a motive for censorship and gatekeeping, walled gardens satiated the need.
Can we say that there was not a pre-existing structure for censorship?
The Internet may have temporarily disrupted censorship for some, but it has been a case of solve et coagula. Dissolve and reform. Where before there was a limited conduit of information via mainstream presses and televised talking heads, there is now a curated garden of content. Simulated peer groups share their views. Those that step outside of the prescribed narrative can be removed. Thus the individual need not solely trust their taking head, they can look to their peers and fulfill their desire to conform to social norms.
You ask "What if it [insert-platform] wasn't censored?". As a cynic I must conclude that there would be no point to these platforms without censorship. They either wouldn't be created, or an overriding need to censor them would naturally arise. Censorship is the feature.
Thirdly, media firms are conducting sensorship under false pretences. So there are at least 3 degrees of separation between "you cant arbitrarily sensor invonvenient speech" and "everything turns into 4chan/b"
In both censorship and moderation, there is an authority within some platform with some autonomy (like a country or a social network or house owners meeting etc) which decides which information is acceptable and which is not.
About degrees of separation: I agree, I just did a bit overdramatic illustration of outcomes.
Nope, it'd be a shithole of the worst of the internet; advertisers would stay well away, ISPs would ban it, and it would quickly go away.
Nobody wants "true" freedom. I mean Reddit tried to be a bastion of free speech and had to rein it wayyy back in, first with hate subreddits, then more recently delisting NSFW subreddits, making them much harder to discover - instead of creating filters or adding additional ways to specify why something is not safe for work.
Parler likes to pretend it's a bastion of free speech, but it actively bans any LGBTQ+ content and had to start moderating or be deplatformed by the likes of Apple, Google, and their hosting party.
Reddit was much better in the past.
But you do still need to solve the monetization issue as the site scales. Paying for accounts/to get rid of ads like old SA?
Distributed technologies are the solution to this.
Without this I doubt Reddit would have progressed much from its early programmer audience. It’s not accidental they took a light touch and let communities self moderate in the beginning.
I've had a couple of accounts banned from social media (one on Twitter, one on YouTube). In both cases, I had no idea what policy I had supposedly violated until after I appealed, which is less transparent than a Soviet show trial. In the case of YouTube, the appeal itself got stuck in limbo, and someone at Google briefly locked my main account (rather than the "brand account" sub-account associated with the channel). The thought of having all email since 2004, my family's TV service and my domain names all ripped away from me for arbitrary, capricious and clumsy enforcement of vague policies was like an ice bath.
I've migrated most of my stuff away from Google now, or at least have accounts I don't care about losing.
https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/u-s-senator-alex-padill...
How about a completely law-free society?
Tell me, in what other system of human interaction is a total lack of rules and regulations ever the optimal?
What would be more real about it?
>@YouTube CEO @SusanWojcicki has been at the forefront of fighting hate speech and misinformation online. She’ll be honored at this year’s Free Expression Awards.
https://twitter.com/1stforall/status/1378505352715571206?lan...
It is possible to agree with the right of a private company to control their own platform how they see fit, while disagreeing with the choices they make.
That said, there are cases where platforms have censored content at the behest of government officials. In these cases it is alleged that 1st amendment rights are violated and platforms are acting as agents of the government.
>These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies.
>The document shows that California state officials contacted YouTube directly to remove the video on September 24, 2020, and that YouTube seemed to respond by deleting the video on September 27, 2020
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ca-big-tech-biden-cen...
These instances were uncovered by FOIA requests to the US government. Unfortunately, the CCP does not honor such requests.
Information wants to be free. Privacy is equally important.
This allows each user to tailor their experience as they feel comfortable. Outraged communities can have their moderated bubbles. Those open to alternative viewpoints are free to peruse an unmoderated stream.
I doubt they would take down pictures of the Jan rioters just because PII.
If that’s not the case, I will admit they are being pedantically consistent but socially irresponsible for erasing evidence of systemic and illegal harassment and imprisonment of their own people.
The whole Kharagpur area was a Maoist hotbed, and I believe still is to lesser extend to this day.
A lot of German Marxists were rich idle intellectuals, as were original Russian commies, the kids of spoiled Russian boheme.
Centralized : Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
People who have disappeared can't exactly be harassed as a result of a YouTube video...
> private company something something
> society, ethical standards something something
> whose standards
summary every single thread on topics like this
Surely for a company which prides itself in having AI which can determine emotions, do natural language analysis etc, this is pathetic.
We are truly living in the future
I had thought they "just knew" what content to prohibit based on where the political winds were blowing, but maybe it was more coordinated.
Centralized censorship platforms are an existential threat to a free society, an accident waiting to happen.
What is the value of these videos since we can't do anything with China anyway?
I wish it were so that everyone knew that "Communism is a tortuous system," but it unfortunately does not seem to be the case anymore. People who were born and never lived in a world with the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall are now voting age, and they don't have an aversion to communism. Even before the Soviet Union fell, a lot of people in the west were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Fortunately we had people like Solzhenitsyn who documented how bad it was. Atajurt and the Uigher witnesses are giving us what may become our generation's equivalent of "In the First Circle."
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpmYGObyCW3xgkpY2cFlacQ
"Peace and Order in China", and sensationalized coverage of violence against Asians in the US.
Clearly propaganda. For all of the demonitization and sometimes outright removal of anti-CCP content, YouTube seems perfectly content to promote CCP propaganda.
Twitter is similar. Under suggested accounts to follow, there are promoted accounts presenting China as an utopian dream.
Say what you will about Big Tech censoring conservatives, or even CCP human rights abuses. Various rationales exist, and we can disagree on those premises. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, these same companies are willing to take advertising dollars to promote CCP propaganda.
Without attributing motive there is an obvious, glaring inconsistency here. If you had to attribute motive, how would you characterize it?
Censorship by these platforms is real, ever present and has been highlighted for many years by many groups only to be meet with "mah private platform".
People like me has been warning that censorship is never the solution, but as usual as long as the people being censored where deemed "wrong thinkers" it is perfectly fine
Everyone knows that 3 SV companies have a politically charged uber-monopoly that they are exploiting to silence the political enemies of the DNC and increasingly enemies of the CCP. Everyone.
I'm not sure what gave you that impression. For clarity's sake I'm opposed to censorship across the board. If information is incorrect or misleading, it should be exposed in the clear light of day.
I was trying to avoid opening up a partisan quagmire.
I'm honestly not sure what anyone expects here. It's like they just want to be outraged and big tech is a convenient target
Discernment.
Google promised to not be “evil”, which is only as reliable a promise to the degree that “evil” is well-defined.
And that's without worrying that your definition might not match anyone else's...
Thats their problem. Alternatively,maybe they don't give a fuck because they have a monopoly and they have nonreason to spend more money
* do nothing and have fake news etc everywhere.
* make it much much harder for users to submit material
Both of those have serious impacts on us. So it's our problem really isn't it?
Before you reply, ask yourself: would I pay a dollar to reply? If the answer is no, you can't really expect YC to spend money on "discernment" for every thread/article/text post can you?
I stick around this forum because I trust dang’s subjective judgement to be broadly wise. Partly because this is because the one time they chastised me I re-read my comment, gave it a second thought, and concluded “yep, thats easily-misinterpreted enough that someone with broader context on the overall health of this forum should remove it.”
That party is not gonna continue for long, we clearly have laws coming down the pipe
This issue has no practical solution.
Right now we can't discern gossip, propaganda, whistleblowing, journalism, etc. Because we can't discern authenticity.
Say whatever you want. Sign your name if you want.
Those choices are important signals for viewers evaluating new information.
But it's not only Google at fault here, it's the voter that allowed government to push such censorship laws upon Google.
The solution seems to be one of:
1. Let said corporations exert such control over public life.
2. Have nation-states nationalize it.
3. Have the UN internationalize it.
4. Have nation-states, perhaps in collaboration, strongly regulate it.
5. Force it (e.g. via regulation) to become distributed, so that no single entity can exert significant control.
Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.
Every time you upload what is arbitrarily controversial, that outcome has to be weighed, and if PeerTube provides a viable alternative, why not use it?
I didn't downvote your comment but having governments own the media would increase censorship instead of decrease it. We're not just talking about China CCP censorship but also democratic nations such as UK. See examples of BBC censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
>3. Have the UN internationalize it.
This idea is underspecified because it does not explain implementation of how the video website is funded. This is key because censorship happens by proxy via money. If the implementation is to get governments to collectively chip in to fund a global video website, you will get more censorship -- not less. Politicians like to exercise government's power to censor.
That's not a big list, more people are censored on youtube daily than BBC did in it's lifetime. This does not support your point.
"Politicians like to exercise government's power to censor."
And CEO's don't? Abusing political office for sensorship is a crime, abusing CEO position is ordinary business. Who is going to hold them accountable ?
Are you free to show the world your company's dirty business? In contrast, I can submit a freedom of information request and get access to lots of information from mutiple government departments.
What instance can you think of where governments have been held accountable for their censorship? There aren't a lot of high profile cases there.
> Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.
Based on what evidence? Where have alternatives been tried? Why aren't those alternatives in general use if they are so good? Is this a comparison of messy reality with unattainable theory?
Trading a thing we can choose not to use for a thing must use and that is integrated with military force. is always a bad trade. However bad Google is, government control of the media is worse.
The only exception I make to that rule is foreign ownership of media, which is probably worse than government control. But both are pretty bad.
Did you live under a rock for the past hundred years? We have actual regulation of newspapers, radio and television. They dont need to be owned by the government, but we have media regulators thay set standards, and where you can complain
Social media is still a far better platform for getting out an unpopular message than newspapers, radio and television. The past hundred years of those media have been marked by minority groups (political, but also in the common sense of the word) really struggling to get a voice.
Pro option 2: There will be an official mechanism for people to influence how such a platform is managed.
Con for option 2: Governments are typically not very answerable to people, and definitely exploit the possibility of manipulating mass media or media platforms. Also, they have a natural symbiosis with large business interests, so it's possible they'll just be ok with the way things stand.
As for option 3 - it's true that this is underspecified, and I'm not even sure there's a relevant precedent for anything like that. I mean, even something like ISO is independent of the UN. Although that suggests the possibility of a group of nation-states setting something like that up voluntarily, not necessarily going through the UN. Also, you'd need nation-states to want this bad enough, and I'm not at all sure enough of them do.
Literally any other site where one can upload videos would be better.
But putting that aside from a person using YT often from incognito mode and similar:
- there is a overlap between "content farm trash" and "entertainment visdeos" what you might seem as "content trash" other might see as "short simple entertainment".
- there is a lot of educational content on YT, sadly it is often not featured that much on a "incognito" front page
- there is a lot of entertainment content with a bit of educational content on it.
- there is even more purely entertainment content on it
- there is questionable kids content on it (but YT explicitly split out YT Kids because it (at least officially) doesn't want kids on the normal YT (kids != teens/young adults)
- there is questionable "content farm trash" it also tries most to "play to algorithm" so it might seem that there is a lot of it when you visit YT in incognito mode/without personalized YT preferences. But it's not what keeps the platform alive.
- there is a lot of TV content on it (at least in some countries) (e.g. a recordings of TV news programs uploaded by the TV channels which produced it).
- there is quite a bit of serious content, discussions, etc. on it sadly mostly demonetized.
- there is a bit of more then just a bit of very very wrong and misleading content on it.
Or in other words YT is a platform for all content, from extremely serious discussions over good entertainment, grate educational material to pointless 5 minute craft videos and ending with conspiracy theories.
You can make that case, but it's hard to beat youtube. It's not just a matter of the amount of content, but also support on settop boxes/devices, quality of playback,etc.
Having said that, I'm starting to go to the effort of building an offline library. To me, the youtube death of a thousand cuts is happening because of their increasingly heinous ads (like google search) and strengthening copyright enforcement (since their position is now in place).
In a place the creator is in full control and isn't funded by advertisers which will pull their funding for anything they dislike.
That's pretty much the nature of publishing content - if you're not independent there's always the tension of your funding source dictating the content.
The whole point of a video hosting service is to act as an easy directory for finding videos you like. The fact that the same service happens to host the videos in this case is inconsequential.
Continual seeding to millions of peers is not.