For now, note the conscious blowing-off, on YouTube's part, of all the re-uploads. Will they also get got? If not, why not?
I-- I can't believe they've done this.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170812/01102937985/once-...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...
Sometimes we want it big enough to fight against state-level censorship; sometimes we want it small enough to obey anti-trust or privacy law.
Do they actually delete the videos? For all we know, the video is still stored on Google's servers indefinitely, there is just a flag set which blocks public access to it. If a government or UN agency asks for a copy of the video, is Google able and willing to provide it? Knowingly destroying evidence of a crime is (often) a crime; denying public access to evidence of a crime is not a crime, especially if you are still happy to provide it to the proper authorities on request.
Regarding "Destroying or covering up evidence of war crimes is, itself, a war crime", I don't believe that is actually true. Under the Rome Statute of the ICC, war crimes are crimes against article 8; destroying evidence of a war crime is not a war crime, because it is not an article 8 crime, it is a crime against article 70 ("Offences against the administration of justice"). Other international treaties against war crimes (such as the Geneva Conventions), and national laws against war crimes (such as the US War Crimes Act codified at 18 USC 2441), likewise do not consider destroying evidence of a war crime to be a war crime, instead it is a non-war crime against the administration of justice.
But you are making an assumption that the average worker (probably from India) making $1 an hour, can tell the difference between newsworthy war crimes, and a snuff film.
I don't think anyone is going to get that right 100% of the time. So no, I don't really see it as a problem.
Also, lol at Youtube getting filled with war crime videos. Youtube has plenty of space.
They are not your friend. Nor anybody's friend.
>Their mission is to make money, not to archive the internet.
So how did deleting this make YouTube money?
I assume they remove "violent" videos to appease advertisers. In this case, they did not consider the value of the video being removed, instead prioritizing the safety of the content with respect to the advertisers.
In the large, YouTube's terms of service are structured around retaining an audience (both in terms of individual and institutional choice... Without a TOS that at least nominally says what constitutes offensive content, businesses and schools block access to YouTube and that decreases viewership which decreases revenue potential). They are also structured around being a hospitable place for advertising, and advertising (in particular brand advertising) gets real gun-shy on spending dollars on content that might be significantly off the bead from "wholesome."
Whether or not this video in particular violates the TOS is debatable (though having never heard of this before this link on Hacker News, my naive read on it is that it's simple violent aggression and a display of unadulterated physical violence, which generally doesn't pass the TOS for graphic violence... "Content featuring anything listed above where the viewer is not given enough context to understand that the footage is dramatized or fictional").
Clearly they are relying upon an immature AI dragnet to classify and kill categories of objectionable material. Thankfully they have an appeals process, but it seems to me that automated takedowns are blatantly wrong. Instead they ought to use that data to generate a queue for humans to review and flag, where more popular videos have more reviewers requiring consensus. No matter, it’s clear we’ve allowed a commercial platform to outgrow its structural integrity, and no algorithm can do a thing but delay its collapse under its own weight.