YouTube permanently bans Right Wing Watch
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
Source:
YouTube Reinstates Right Wing Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27668935
That's the point being made here: they are being banned not for copyright reasons (e.g. their act of re-uploading clips) but for the content in those clips. That is, YouTube is banning them for posting (exclusively right wing) extremist content, which they are posting specifically to expose. People who don't watch the handful of national right wing news outlets or the hundreds of local stations likely won't otherwise know what half of the country is being fed daily.
You are absolutely correct, his video did not have any added audio commentary or basically anything and he won his case, his video was just sections copied directly from the source creating a compilation of the original video.
In this case as I understand it, the content being uploaded is extremist content (in their eyes) explicitly being uploaded to highlight its extremism (in their eyes), the difference between the two situations being that Sargon’s video didn’t contain extremist content that YouTube wouldn’t want on their platform.
RWW is posting content they essentially want to be removed. They got what they wanted, the content was removed. In a sense they succeeded in what they set out to do.
I wish their channel be reinstated, but this situation looks to be slightly different from Benjamin’s unless more details come out.
It seems like YouTube messed up and is treating them harshly, but for all we know this type of content is now no longer allowed on the platform due to policy change.
No it's not? Where'd you get that intention from? It's literally to catalogue and store the content
If you post misinformation telling people that it's illegal to charge for healthcare and that you can just throw out any medical bills you receive without recourse, or that drug laws are unconstitutional so you can't actually go to jail for them, or that private prisons don't count so you are allowed to break out of them, well yeah you might get banned!
Close to 2/3rds of the American public supports universal healthcare and ending the drug war. Therefore they can't by definition be extreme left positions.
"63% of U.S. adults say the government has the responsibility to provide health care coverage for all"
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
'65% of voters support ending the “War on Drugs.”'
https://drugpolicy.org/press-release/2021/06/50th-anniversar...
If you can't figure out where the leftist extremism is, you aren't looking hard enough, or you are being willfully ignorant.
"That's a dishonest framing, given you're neglecting this murderous position, that race essentialism position, and--"
"Sunshine. And. Rainbows. :)"
That seems more like a libertarian position to me.
> Communism ... is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is ... a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of ... money.
This is clearly whataboutism though.
(EDIT: For the record I am all for a "left wing watch" that only reposts influencial left-wing's voices that the posters believes violates terms of service on the website they post on. I just don't understand why "right wing watch" should be expected to do so, or why it's a double standard if they don't.)
That is not like the take down algorithm is being triggered by something you just posted, that sounds just like someone deciding to look in your garbage bins to find anything to be used against you. It stinks a lot, and I don't mean the garbage.
" ... the deletion of the site’s channel erases a deep, years-long archive of video clips—effectively eliminating a resource for understanding and exposing right-wing extremism."
Well, that one is 100% their fault. Never, ever, ever, rely on any other service for keeping data other than your own backups. Especially when the party involved in keeping your data is also the same one who can wipe it from existence if anyone with deep enough pockets or connections says so.
> While Right Wing Watch had essentially moved away from regularly posting its videos to YouTube over the past year, as Mantyla noted, the deletion of the site’s channel erases a deep, years-long archive of video clips—effectively eliminating a resource for understanding and exposing right-wing extremism.
Nothing in here says "we lost our only copies of the videos", just that the resource is now gone from the Internet, and that users currently can't get at it.
This is a trick I’ve seen right wingers employing over and over.
Edit: burn, karma, burn!
My guess is that since RWW has a pretty active doxxing operation running outside of YouTube, they've decided to take action on that basis.
Only a guess, though.
The onus is always on the reader to engage in critical thinking. You should be able to read "misinformation" and easily discern it as such. You should also be able to read "information" and easily discern as "misinformation" as well as the ability to read "misinformation" and discern it to be factually consistent and potentially correct.
Do not trust others where your own brain is needed to figure shit out.
I'm afraid this is equivalent to saying "You should be able to be offered high-sugar food, and avoid it to an appropriate degree." This may be true in the moral sense, but practically speaking most people will fail this test.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting the answer is censorship, but just pointing out that large numbers of people cannot meaningfully deal with misinformation.
I agree that censorship is bad, and that also we have entered an era where private organizations own platforms where potentially they should not be allowed editorial license because of scale.
I couldn't argue that someone is educated (regardless of degree) or wise without a practiced mind geared toward (critical) thinking.
Give me concrete, well-researched, well-evidenced claims about the easy identification of misinformation, because it's so easy.
The process of understanding is a continuum that we strive towards.
There is an entire replication crisis in scientific literature debunking "well-researched, well-evidenced claims".
The only way out is to think.
I would expect YouTube only to report honestly (as a news source) for things align with it's commonly held beliefs.
YouTube endorses everything it does not censor.
edit: And you should not put blind trust in any "news" organization either. Every observation deserves your full cognition to figure out what is plausible, consistent, implausible, inconsistent, let alone "true" or "false".
And yeah, sure, everything should be judged on it's merits, however there's simply not enough time in the day to independently verify all facts. It's much easier and generally reliable to start with the mainstream news sources like NPR, who we can generally assume to be trustworthy.
Centralized : Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
> BitChute is a video hosting service known for accommodating far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists, and for hosting hate speech.
So it sounds like that's the type of hosting provider they might want.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-reinstates-ch...
This Wikipedia article excerpt seems like editorial, not information. It might be 100% accurate but the spin is so blatant that I don’t trust Wikipedia on this.
Similarly, I wouldn’t trust a Wikipedia article about Adolf Hitler if it began “Hitler was one of the most evil men of the 20th century”. Although I believe that statement to be true, there’s too much editorial bias.
I want an encyclopedia to tell me unbiased facts and let ME make the moral conclusions.
“Conspiracy theories” and “right wing” are labels of opinion, not fact, these days. They don’t inform, they label.
Parler, for example, had a bit of a hair-trigger on left-wing accounts trolling on the site, as well as being stricter than Twitter itself on porn/swearing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-... https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/pa...
A little bit of garbage here and there is easy to deal with, and that's what critical thinking is for. But given enough garbage, your normal functions (and that of the network you're a part of) will be impaired.
You are what you eat, and your brain is what it reads. Feed it enough garbage, and no amount of critical thinking will save you.
If your goal is to have a "stable" system that converges towards truth, stability, consensus, and generally progresses over time, you need to have some sort of mechanism to regulate garbage.
When people suggest "critical thinking" as a solution to high-volume and high-visibility disinformation, my guess is they think the problem I'm trying to solve is: "There's so much disinformation, and I just don't know what to think!" when actually the problem is "There's so much disinformation, and my fellow countrymen are acting on it in ways that cause measurable harm to me and to society at large."
It's a complex topic. I'm not suggesting that there's an easy answer and I'm not here to sing the praises of censorship, but I find it frustrating to see "think critically" proposed as if it's the simple, obvious solution over and over again.
I think that's quite insightful.
Would it be heliocentric models of the solar system? What about hand washing as a way to prevent disease? Perhaps a bit more recently the sars-cov-2 lab leak theory?
It's not for me to decide which politician has the best or most honest character (though I'll give you my opinion if asked). But if you do a math exam wrong, you're going to score garbage grades. There are some things in life which for all practical purposes are clear cut.
I'll take your examples.
1. Heliocentric model: Garbage.
2. Hand washing: Not garbage.
3. SARS-CoV-2 lab leak theory: Not garbage.
Obviously the distinction between garbage and not-garbage is not just about the topic, it's about the actual information. For example, it's important to talk about the heliocentric model because it gives us perspective on the current state of human knowledge and it humbles us in the face of uncertainty é what we don't (yet) know. There's great pedagogical or even archival value in this. We could write a book about this, but I hope one example makes the point.
If you ask me, and I'm a biochemist, about the third, I will say that I believe it to be less likely than natural occurrence, and I'd worry about how productive the question was. But it doesn't mean it's pollution. I can have an opinion about something, even a strong one, and still defend your right to express contrary or different ideas. I know this skill seems to be in short supply these years, but it's not that difficult really.
Every problem has a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong.
Humans are prone to fall for self-reinforcing belief loops like conspiracy theories. They subvert the mechanism of critical thinking a bit like a prion will misfold proteins and cause all sort of issues.
It seems that the deluge of content available today guarantees that whatever view you're even mildly sympathetic toward will get reinforced, and then you are immediately placed on a slope toward the extremes (in terms of other recommended content).
One of the few antidotes I've seen to this has been the emergence of long-form podcasting where conversations are still allowed to meander, dwell on minor points, or become boring. It seems harder for people to shill for multiple uninterrupted hours at a time.
And yet if you rely on this as a source of information you can't pick very many topics to be informed about given the constraint of time.
Once bitten, twice shy
Fool me once, shame on you ...
Why wouldn't the accumulation of experiences logically lead to people being savvier about claims over time?
This is absolutely the correct approach to take. If there is content that you value, you need to personally archive a copy, because it may be gone for hundreds of reasons next time you try to access it.
And you won't even know which video is gone unless you've taken a copy of your playlist (my favourites playlist is about 25% holes after 10 years.)
It's despicable, sure, but not at all surprising.
It is natural to try to see patterns in the moderation, but I think the largest pattern is that there is little pattern. They instead have an job that is impossible to do at the scale they do it at the budget they do it at. They therefore make a lot of mistakes. They hate to admit these mistakes so they are constantly trying to defend the indefensible rather than admit that there is no way to have a uniform moderation policy that works on the hundreds of hours of video that are uploaded every minute.
Yes, and it drives me bonkers because everyone who makes these kinds of complains tend to like the narrative that YouTube is 100% hellbend on just being bad because Google Is Bad (tm)
In this case, they're putting profit over ethics leading to negative effects, so this one doesn't. Furthermore, Hanlon's razor is a false dichotomy: In this case the result is unethical yet neither malicious nor stupid.
This is the money shot right here. They can’t admit the impossibility because if they did they further open the door to the private platform versus town square debate (which doesn’t seem to have certain consequences either way… yet)
I'd be curious to know what the strikes were for, since they never discuss them. But non-political channels get burned by unfair strikes all the time, including on very old videos.
Another possibility is the use of targeted reporting by fans of those featured in videos.
Do they really though? Is there evidence that there are *any* effective strategies for reducing viewership of mind-rotting extremist content at scale?
It is my understanding that what the right wing is going through in 2021 is kinda what Muslims have gone through in 2016, with lots of outrage because some visible targets have been taken down, the malicious actors attempting to fan the outrage and get the entire community to protect the actual evil content, the feeling of being singled out for termination, etc.
How much overlap do you think there is between those who watch conspiracy videos and those who watch the videos that debunk them? I'd guess it's really small, probably <5% and possibly <1%—depending on how much Youtube's algorithm recommends the latter to the former. Actually, if they wanted to maximize view counts, they could tweak the algorithm and keep both videos, thus both keeping the gullible audience and driving outrage views from the skeptical audience.
If RWW is posting content that otherwise would be barred from YouTube (e.g. hate speech, etc) -- effectively rehosting -- it makes sense that it would get strikes. e.g. If you started a "LiveLeak Watch" and reposted gruesome videos under the notion that it's a critique, that would get a ban too.
You need to have principles on your side and back those principles even when "bad" people enjoy those principles.
You will not go far if instead of principles you back people because they agree with you on a particular topic.
The CDC is a political organization controlled by the executive branch that happens to be staffed partly with people who call themselves scientists[0]. The unwavering faith that people put into political organizations is its own tragic issue.
[0] - In the same way that many programmers are terrible at being programmers, many scientists are terrible at being scientists.
However there are a third group that knowingly misrepresent and fabricate evidence to promote conspiracy theories. Screw those guys. They hide under the cover of legitimate opinion, but no platform should be expected to tolerate being used to propagate that sort of crap.
If a socialist candidate is assassinated in South America and someone on YouTube says “this was the American imperialist regimes doing” without evidence, I wouldn’t assume they are right, but I’d see it as an opinion based on historical evidence that I’d hate to see censored.
This applies even if someone claims it was aliens!
The differences are in the type of claim being made and in whether the reasons given are real or made up and in whether the reasons actually support the claim and in the systemic harm caused by being wrong. All of those differences matter.
There’s no place for silencing opinions, and those are opinions that all have different levels of evidence. That you tend to weigh certain evidence differently is your own stance, not objective fact.
To try again, let’s say someone is a “body language expert”. I don’t really believe that to a large degree, but fine. They post a YouTube clip showing the Chinese gov denying the lab leak and say “oh man I can tell based on X, Y, and Z their body language is a total giveaway that this was intentional!”
Again, I don’t believe it. But it doesn’t matter. Whether they think it’s aliens because they saw some cloud trails or tea leaves or whatever, it’s all a matter of degree.
The lab leak was shut down under the same premises. “Our” evidence is strong, and “their” evidence is conspiracy theory. Except it wasn’t. So I don’t trust anyone, you included, to be the decider of valid evidence. I’ll sort through it myself.
You are conflating "opinion" with "unsupported statement of fact", "assumption", and "guess". Assumption and conclusion are not synonyms, but your statement here treats them as though they are.
"Murder is wrong" is an opinion, because it's a compressed substitute for an expansive syllogistic trail that starts from some initial premises that are purely personal and subjective about the value and nature of life and being and leads to the conclusion. You reach a moral ruling starting from an instinctive feeling. Expressing that feeling itself is not an opinion, but concluding a moral position from that feeling is. "I like the taste of this cheese" is a factual observation about the self that is not an opinion, because while it observes something personal it itself is not subjectively based on an initial position. You either like the taste of this cheese or you don't. Statements about the cause of things that happen in the world are either true or false, not opinions. There's a reason for the old saw that opinions can't be wrong. Subjectivity is the critical element that makes them opinions in the first place. People tend to lose or forget that distinction or insert subjectivity where none exists, but that's an error which disrupts effective communication and muddies thought.
If we have to have some private unelected board at YouTube deciding where opinion ends and fact begins, that’s dystopia. People state opinions as facts all the time. “It was the United States gov” is an opinion it’s just a colloquial American thing to say it in that style. Their real belief may be that it’s actually only 90% probable, and their threshold for wording it as certain is lower than yours.
Only a fool listens to a strongly stated opinion, even when it’s worded as though it’s a fact, and isn’t skeptical. If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over. I don’t want that.
I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe, and it seems people who don’t get real worried that their “better” opinions will drown out. I don’t think so. And I’ve seen the people with the right opinions be wrong too often lately to ever trust them.
I think I have bad news for you about the world, then.
> If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over.
What is your plan for a society like the one we currently live in that appears to be mostly greatest fools?
> I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe
According to polling, in the US the average joe claims that God directly created humans in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years and that evolution is, to put a common phrase in their mouths, "fake news". https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...
Feel whatever you want about the benefit of religion, that belief is based on something entirely extraneous to evidence.
Exactly. As I had edited in my last comment before I saw your reply, you have a huge lack of faith in the intelligence of others (that, or a big ego).
Believing in religion got humans a lot further due to in-group cooperation. Their exact beliefs may look wrong, but the way it makes them act is more right than atheism or anything else.
In your world talking about any religion would be banned, and what a sad world that’d be.
Column A, Column B.
> In your world talking about any religion would be banned, and what a sad world that’d be.
I promise I wouldn't ban talking about religion.
> Their exact beliefs may look wrong, but the way it makes them act is more right than atheism or anything else.
Secular humanists would strongly disagree.
How come the folks who keep bringing this up don't also mention that the original "censored" claims were that the virus was both engineered and intentionally leaked?
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir...
Literally claims it's a manmade weapon released intentionally in the first paragraph.
Edit: it seems pretty obvious that article was banned because it's an unsubstantiated witch-hunt. It even gives the guy's number and urges the reader to harass him. Fwiw "they were just asking questions!" is not a valid argument.
Do you know what the word "accidentally" means?
Edit: ah you're the troll I unfortunately encountered yesterday. Won't be engaging further, have a good evening!
Yes. Do you know what a disjunction is?
Don’t get me wrong, it absolutely sucks to feel “silenced” and I’m sure it sucks even more to feel silenced when you are indeed correct or at least aren’t as dead wrong as others claimed. But isn’t the crux of the free speech “marketplace of ideas” that the “good” ideas will find listeners and gain traction anyway? Even when “everyone” initially disagrees or thinks you’re crazy.
Because that’s free speech, too. You have a right to say things even if they sound kind of crazy and I have a right to say “hey, that sounds crazy!”
Also if you scroll down about 40% of the way here: https://m.facebook.com/help/230764881494641/ you will see that claiming that the vaccine has negative effects is still a bannable offense.
Have they always been problematic? I would love to hear some historical conspiracy theories and their deleterious effects.
Also Ancient Rome and demonizing political opponents (some the depravity ascribed to some of the emperors were exaggerations).
Here is a concrete example from NBC[0]: their fact-checkers say Trump's statement about Clinton "acid-washing" her email server was a lie, because her team actually just "used an app called BleachBit".
Do you see the point I am making?
If anything they could probably point out and say "hey, we are balanced!" in the same way reddit could by banning chapotraphouse after thedonald, but people who are on that site still know which way the wind blows.
The only thing they have in common is that they are all anti-establishment at core. It seems to me that the Left, who used to be anti-establishment, has now become what it once fought.
With some warning, I wonder if Aechive Team would have helped back it up to IA
We need an alternative that can generate even 1/4 the audience of YouTube. There are many cloud providers, many car brands, many food stores, many email providers, but just one YouTube.
Given YouTube's record of banning right-wing content, non-partisan content that doesn't adhere to some official narrative (Bret Weinstein's Ivermectin videos, Covid-19 lab leak theories, mRNA vaccine heart inflammation), incredibly inconsistent copyright infringement enforcement, and random demonetization, this claim seems to be a bit of a stretch.
If anything, YT appears to be biased the other way.
I miss Soph.
This is a classic example of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They wanted YouTube to cancel these people, so logically, YouTube has to cancel compilations of these people. It doesn't matter that RWW is criticizing them. Otherwise, people can just post the videos while pretending to criticize them.
>Notably, many of the right-wing outlets and personalities that Right Wing Watch chronicles are not currently suspended or banned from posting content to YouTube
The article frames this as a contradiction when there isn't one. RWW didn't get cancelled for chronicling commentators who didn't get cancelled. They were cancelled for chronicling the cancel-worthy content.
This exposes what everyone already knows. YouTube (Google... err... Alphabet) doesn't really have a problem with the conspiracy theories and right wing propaganda. They just don't want the drama. Nutjobs watch for hours and apparently click on advertisements.
Those who spread and consume conspiracy theories have one thing in abundance a lot of people don't: time. They can flag whatever they don't like as offensive or as violating DMCA or whatever third thing. Not just once, not just twice, but all day.
And showing a video of someone taking a shit on a sidewalk to show how people are making videos of shitting on the sidewalk is still showing someone taking a shit on the sidewalk. It falls in that realm of "Well, technically, it's against the rules to show people shitting on the sidewalk."
So even if they are showing the content to then explain why that content is wrong or bad, they're still technically showing the content.
I'd wager that Right Wing Watch gets far more flags and reports than the content creators they show so they can debunk them. And if you're only dealing with reports and flags in a "squeaky wheel gets the grease" kind of way, it'll be a long while before you get to the source, because the fanbase of the source will be overwhelming you with reports and flags on channels with critical content showing the offending content as a demonstration of why it is offensive.
Anyway the analogy isn't a good match. Shitting on the sidewalk is obscenity, there's no reason to reproduce it without censoring it when discussing it. That's not true of quoting conspiracy theories and propaganda when criticizing it. Context matters greatly.
Publicly traded corporations are incompatible custodians of platforms that offer reasonable freedom of expression unless bound to do so by law.
– debate!
(edit: That's a a pretty clumsy and cumbersome sentence but I've gotten my point across I hope.)
corporations which rely on advertising for revenue are (beyond a certain size) incompatible custodians of platforms that offer reasonable freedom of expression unless bound to do so by law.
– debate!
(edit: That's a a pretty clumsy and cumbersome sentence but I've gotten my point across I hope.)
And why do you call them custodians? If I own a theater, I get to decide what plays and concerts are presented. Am I a custodian as well?
If you don't like it because the politics are wrong, fine, explain that. If you don't like it because the politics are extreme, you haven't yet described why I shouldn't like it.
Extremist movements tend to be composed from people that do not listen, do not want to understand the other side and are interested only in furthering their own views. Further, frequently more moderate people (as in being more open to discussion or not accepting extreme measures being used) are being ejected from extremist movements to preserve their extremist nature. This process of polarization is a contest on who can be even more extreme and makes further resolution of the difference in views even more difficult.
I object to the idea of extremism.
Resolution of any problem requires that people cooperate and extremism thrives on prolonging the problem rather than seeking resolution.
(edit: hint, maybe you meant to use word "radical" rather than "extremist". Radical is an extremist sans extreme methods)
> After being accused of extremism, Martin Luther King Jr. criticized the mainstream usage of the term in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love…Was not Amos an extremist for justice…Was not Martin Luther an extremist…So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?"
I think you can see how 'extremism' has been used as pejorative in order to dismiss radicalism.
As the Wikipedia entry points out: "When in conflict, the activities of members of low power groups tend to be viewed as more extreme than similar activities committed by members of groups advocating the status quo."
Viewed through that lens, if the status quo isn't meritocratic, then doesn't your definition imply extremists actually do have "the right to use extreme measures to be heard and/or prove [their] point"?
Quoting Letter From A Birmingham Jail:
"If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action."
Out of curiosity, which ideas are you enthusiastic about killing for?
What kind of question is that? If you actually think it over there are a fuck ton of ideas you'd be willing to kill over.
I feel that this definition is closer to how "extremist" is reasonably used, it's probably pointless to argue, since most people seem to use the word as just another generic pejorative. Oh well.
Besides, the US is known for having a very small Overton Window compared to the rest of developed countries.