YouTube takes down independent court livestreams
twitter.com
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Yet, this thread quickly devolved into a discussion about the grand conspiracy to censor instead of the repeated failure of automated tools and the ease at which they're abused.
However, if the "conspiracy" is in fact a bunch of automated tools created by a bunch of humans who all have similar biases in the same ideological direction (biases which happen to be ascendant on elite college campuses and/or in the Bay Area), then this is a fairly reasonable belief.
When an incident like this happens, the outcry is great enough that the humans, who are themselves still human and capable of compassion, can reinstate accounts and override the automated system. But how many "failures" such as this occur where the affected parties simply have no recourse because they don't have the privilege of 60k simultaneous streamers watching?
if streamer.is_black() or streamer.is_woman():
streamer.suspend()
Thus, the problem to raise isn't that parties with no recourse might be silenced. That's absolutely an issue, but clearly the mere argument hasn't gotten YouTube to sufficiently change their ways. That's because that conspiracy doesn't exist. The argument to make is that it degrades YouTube's content as a whole. There are a number of other Internet video hosting platforms, most recently TikTok, and it behooves YouTube to spend more time adjusting their algorithms simply because content creators are going to create a little something with the hope to go viral, then get their content taken down, and then move to another platform, rather than say anything about it to more than a couple of real life friends. TikTok's ascendancy (and Vine before it) proves that YouTube's dominance is not assured. The right winds of change could result in YouTube to be displaced, and YouTube's "algorithm" being incorrect too frequently with takedowns is sure to play a role.
The conspiracy theorists just don't know about bad automated decisions made in the other direction because it's suppressed in their echo chamber.
If people react to a glitch that way, I'd argue that the damage had been done before the glitch.
True, a few years ago I had clearly cut them slack and today I feel like a jackass for being so naive about it back then.
It is not irreparable I think, and I don't think of Google as a comic supervillain, on fact in some ways they are way better than everyone else.
I do not however cut them any slack anymore like I used to.
A lot of "normies" think there's someone actively at a computer, doing all this stuff.
i wonder whether Google/etc have already done A/B testing on how frequently and how visibly they need to have "repeated failure of automated tools" for the populace to get used to that idea instead of censorship.
It is absolutely not free of cost. Google wouldn't be able to sustain if they were not receiving anything in return.
In this exchange, however, you don't know the value you're contributing; there is no clear value exchange: "I'll give you $x.xx for use of such-n-such." Instead you're expected to believe that what they provide you is fair for the value you provide them.
The ridiculousness of it, though. The rekieta law stream (which is fantastic, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7YXd2M5E-8) has anywhere from 4-12 active lawyers giving commentary and context to everything that is happening.
This is exactly the type of thing we dreamed about when we were first creating the internet.
However: often times these smaller independent journalists and commenters go against the reality that media companies want you to believe you live in. Thus: they get censored. Rekieta lost almost 40,000 people who were getting live commentary from a diverse (idealogically) set of lawyers, and now must to places where these companies can assert more narrative control.
It's sad.
Still broken for "kyle rittenhouse" however.
Well there is; you don't put takedowns in the hands of an algorithm. Ideally you put them in the hands of a court of law.
Why?
Therein lies the problem.
Or, without having to put on a tinfoil hat, it's been trained to remove content that discusses shooting and killing people?
Or even more benignly, a lot of people reported the stream because users also have a vested interest in abusing censorship systems for political purposes, and it's not always easy to separate that kind of collective bad actorship from legitimate reports.
You don't have to attack the legitimacy of someone's position like this. Sure, it is possible that the reasons for it are what you're saying, but this personal dismissive attack is unwarranted, and frankly at this point tired and ineffective.
Or do they just have a dark sense of humor or something?
>So most people aren't feeling much sympathy for the fact that he died.
The GP said they were laughing and celebrating it, that's quite different from 'aren't feeling much sympathy for someone dying'.
And robust self-defense laws for when someone poses an immediate threat and there's not enough time to go to law enforcement to help.
>The GP said they were laughing and celebrating it, that's quite different from 'aren't feeling much sympathy for someone dying'.
It's called "understatement." To be clear, the death of such a person, especially if it is while they are in the process of trying to assault and/or kill someone (which the evidence clearly shows) is in fact something to be celebrated. The world is a better place for his absence from it.
The prosecution has beyond ridiculous arguments time and again over the last 2 weeks. The lawyers all started out really civil, and some of the violations (especially the 5th amendment one that even got the Judge angry) began to make then exasperated.
Combine that with the general silence of the defense, and by now they are all pretty angry at how much of a mess this is.
A lot of ridiculous arguments were brought up by the jury about Rosenbaum, to the point that internal jokes have started emerging surrounding the death of Rosenbaum. Most serve to ridicule the prosecution, rather than Rosenbaum himself.
Lastly, They you are in profession where every time you're in court, some has died. You develop a cruel sense of humor to cope. Very common for victims of abuse or military to have similar coping mechanisms. It seems bizarre from a civilian's POV, but that's just our privilege.
It'd be interesting to have a poll of the people defending YouTube back when they started taking a political stance and see if they think that a line has been crossed somewhere between there and here, or if this is still the sort of behaviour they expect from YouTube.
It seems that YouTube has taken a firm stance against being a knowledge repository a la Wikipedia or Google Search.
Although I do want to protest politics by Tweet. There is nothing here to really discuss; we don't know why, or even if, YouTube is suppressing commentary of the Rittenhouse trial or what Rekieta thinks about it. Tweets are too shallow.
In reality, there has never been much tolerance for free speech. This has been the norm for all of human history. It has also been the norm that people with non-controversial thoughts have believed they had freedom of speech. It’s only once you finally happen to have a thought that isn’t tolerable by those in power that you realize there was never any freedom from the beginning. Is that sad? It’s an increase in awareness. The world is not a happy place.
Freedom of speech is not the same as the freedom to spout anything without repercussion. Nor do we have to tolerate the intolerant (reference: Karl Popper, free speech and the paradox of tolerance).
I'd like to believe we have more freedom of speech nowadays than 100 years ago when society was more hierarchical. However... every fart you make gets recorded and if zoomed in on, it gets reprimanded to the point where a cardinal Richelieu would be able to get the subject hanging.
With regards of multi-culture and tolerance: certain behaviour is not accepted, and if ghat does not get assimilated the main culture become more racist to the subculture. Subcultures are free to maintain a part of their identity, its how certsin customs got into other society after war etc.
Popper said we should tolerate the intolerant as far as possible. His statement mostly related to when the intolerant starts to get physical or other real actions, not people just talking, he wouldn't agree with this modern interpretation of his words: "don't let intolerant people speak, shut them up!". He was very much in favor of conversations, so a platform where tolerant and intolerant people can meet and discuss is exactly what he would have wanted.
It’s interesting that you’re regurgitating this fairly standard talking point in response to my comment even though it refutes a point my comment never made. It’s as if you grepped the term “freedom of speech” in my comment and that mechanically triggered this cookie cutter response. As long as you’re not thinking critically about the content you are reading, you’ll never have an original thought that actually may be intolerable to those in power.
That isn't even a senseless wish when people of all ages use the internet, but that is a parenting issue and not solvable by censorship.
Yeah, remember this one? "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." How far we have come...
Such horrible people maintain a doublespeak even in their own mind.
We’ve lost. We’ve lost.
I also find myself disagreeing with my father's politics often. I do compartmentalize it into a judgment of his political views, not my view on him as a person.
It’s sad, I’m sad, he’s sad, but he keeps doing it, and doesn’t want to discuss it.
To answer your question, I have often changed my mind in my life. Precisely because I’ve always engaged with opponents, had animated debates, and sometimes encompassed their point of view. I don’t understand how one can stay stuck on a demonstrably false information, and be so mean about it that you wouldn’t want it undemonstrated. But I feel like 10-20% of the Gen Z generation has the same problem dealing with their parents consuming fake news.
Again, they're either naive or that's what they want and should be honest about it.
This is one reason why I think P2P tech like peertube will not only be around longer but even thrive.
I can't tell you how many times they mocked one of the prosecutors for their weight. I actually do think this is a clear case of self-defense, but if you have to make fun of someone for their weight then you prob don't have a very good point.
For an example from this specific case, compare the actual unedited testimony of Gaige Grosskreutz, who admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse did not fire until Gaige's Glock 17 was pointed directly at Kyle's head, to the coverage of his testimony by CNN, et. al.
The mainstream media lies, constantly and blatantly, not by minor omissions or bad research, but by gross, egregious violations of truth that can only be explained by extreme malice and contempt for their viewers.
I've more or less read that fact on NYT though.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/kyle-rittenhouse-gaige...
> “So when you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?” Corey Chirafisi, a defense lawyer, asked.
> “Correct,” Mr. Grosskreutz answered.
> “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun — now your hands down, pointed at him — that he fired, right?” Mr. Chirafisi said.
> “Correct,” he said.
“Gaige Grosskreutz says he feared for his life before Kyle Rittenhouse shot him during Kenosha unrest”
“Gaige Grosskreutz says he feared for his life, pointed gun at Kyle Rittenhouse before getting shot”
Keep that in mind while we're talking about omitting information to manipulate the narrative.
It’s a clever example of what Mark Rosewater calls lenticular design. The low information crowd gets their emotional fix from the headlines and early text and quits there while the Times’ more thoughtful readers get the full picture. Given the paper’s financial success in the Internet age I think we can say they’ve found a good business model.
Just keep people divided? Get more viewers who are "outraged"?
Dystopic
It is insanely hard to present only facts and be truthful and impartial. It is quite easy to pick a narrative and stick to it, damn the facts.
MSM is funded by advertisers and big corporations. They’ll do what their money masters want them to - vilifying unions is a good example.
This seems the likely result, but I’m not quite convinced it’s their motivation.
It seems just as likely to me that they’re reporting based on analysis from people who are ideologically motivated, consciously or not.
Cooper: On Good Morning America today you said that you were absolutely not pointing your gun at Rittenhouse. Can you clarify there?
Grosskreutz: Yes, absolutely. Um. First and foremost, [the cross examination] was a very tense situation. Something that I've never been in before. Just like never being shot before. I think it's important to note though, specifically during cross that, if there's skilled attorney, they're able to present questions to help support their narrative. That's their job. And with one of the exhibits that Attorney Sharrad(?) had introduced, there's a photo of me with my gun pointed towards the defendant. Either just after or right during he had shot me in my right arm. I think it's important to note though that the physiology of my wound would be inconsistent with someone being shot with their arm in.. we'll say the traditional way that you would point your gun at somebody or something. The only way that I could have sustained the injury that I have is if I had been shot with my arms up.
Cooper (looking perplexed): So... so you're say--did you ever point your gun at him?
[someone speaks to Grosskreutz off camera, he looks at them, turns back] Grosskreutz: I think that in the still photos it certainly looks like it. But never intentionally. You have to understand that, following that gunshot, I was--I had no use of my arm. I wasn't able to move anything. I--and--in my right arm, or in my right arm.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/11/12/gaige-grosskreutz-i...
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/#pa...
I would say this is what it's like.
At least, here in America we decided that justice should be public and cameras freely admitted into courtrooms. It's sad to see that YouTube is trying to work against these ideals of transparency, openness and universal access.
It is not, however, a universal freedom. In many foreign countries (even in Canada) it's simply impossible to get a simple video and audio feed outside of the courtroom.
Only people with the means of queuing up and spending the whole day in court can get the privilege of seeing and hearing justice with their very own eyes and ears. The rest have to rely on what these people will decide to write in either the state backed medias or billionaire owned news outlets.
Anyways this is a classic ruling class tactic: keep the plebs entertained with something else. While they're busy endlessly discussing the Rittenhouse case with ever more inane partisan takes, they're not discussing the impending economic crisis, the unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality, pressing climate crisis...
> "It wasn't until you pointed your gun at him, advanced at him with your gun ... that he fired," Chirafisi said. "Right," Grosskreutz responded.
I always find it funny how 99% of the time when people claim "the mainstream media is too biased to cover this", if you look at the corresponding article it is 100% covered.
If you watch the videos of the event in sequence you realise that this is one of the most blatant and well documented cases of self-defence in history, yet people who have only consumed media coverage of the shooting have been surprised by the difficulty that the prosecution have had proving it was murder. Clearly there is something broken in the transmission of information there.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/290695292964306948/90...
Now here's what Grosskreutz said on the stand:
Corey Chirafisi: Now, you’d agree your firearm is pointed at Mr. Rittenhouse. Correct?
Gaige Grosskreutz: Yes.
CC: Okay. And once your firearm is pointed at Mr. Rittenhouse, that’s when he fires his gun. Yes?
GG: No.
CC: Sir, look, I don’t want to – does this look like right now your arm is being shot?
GG: That looks like my bicep being vaporized, yes.
CC: Okay. And it’s being vaporized as you’re pointing your gun directly at him. Yes?
GG: Yes.
CC: Okay. So when you were standing 3-5 feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired. Right?
GG: Correct.
CC: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun — now your hands down — pointed at him that he fired. Right?
GG: Correct.
Now compare that to what Grosskreutz said to ABC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oocNVvTHP5M
ABC: "So here you’re allowed to say whatever you feel like you need to say. So you’re saying you weren’t pointing your gun at him? Is that what you’re saying?”
Grosskreutz: “That’s absolutely what I’m saying, yes.
Problems with this:
* Grosskreutz has a $10M lawsuit against the city over this.
* Grosskreutz' phone was not searched, despite a signed search warrant for the same, due to the DA's personal intervention. Nor was his and only his police interview recorded.
* Grosskreutz has an expired CCL, so was not legally carrying.
* As a side note, the illegal gun charge against Kyle, meanwhile, was dropped. Kyle was not carrying a short-barreled rifle, so Kyle's possession was ruled to be legal under WI's poorly-written laws.
* Grosskreutz lied to the police both about having a gun at all, then later changed his story to dropping it, but was caught on camera in possession of it the entire time.
* The police testified that this is the one and only time they have ever done things that way.
* Grosskreutz testified that he chose to attack because Kyle re-racked his gun. However, this does not happen anywhere in the video of the exchange and no unspent ammo from Kyle's gun was found.
* What was found is an unspent round matching Grosskreutz' glock.
* This implies that Grosskreutz re-racked his gun at some point--something he claims is a threat to kill.
* While that was not seen on camera, this must have happened while he still had two arms.
* Grosskreutz' roommate posted on social media that Grosskreutz regretted not killing Kyle. He later claimed to have been lying when brought to the stand.
In short, ABC put on someone who has changed their story multiple times when confronted with new evidence, who provably lied to the cops that were investigating a murder, and who has $10 million reasons to lie about everything.
This particular exchange has even been fact-checked, so ABC has little excuse for platforming someone they know or should have known to be lying without challenging them:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kyle-rittenhouse-gaige-gro...
One wonders if this coverage will ever show up with a "disputed by fact checkers" label on social media?
The unspent ammo from the glock comes from Lachowski clearing it. Grosskreutz didn't rerack the gun, but he did have one in the chamber ready to shoot, meaning that he meant to take out Rittenhouse when he advanced before having his bicep blown off.
He had DUIs after this event but was let off
There has been some suggestion that his ability to avoid prosecution suggests that he is a likely FBI informant in Antifa.
GG isn't from Kenosha but no one makes any issue about him illegally traveling there to riot with a weapon
It doesn't imply that. It would be nice if, in a thread about the media misreporting the facts of the case and feeding the biases of the folks who are supposed to be benefiting from the coverage, we wouldn't make other assumptions. You might think it's reasonable to make this assumption, but (a) the people leaping to conclusions—many of which turned out to be wrong—and repeating them ad nauseum over the last year also thought their assumptions about Rittenhouse were reasonable, and (b) as it turns out, the source of the ejected round is knowable/known since it was also caught on video (and it wasn't Grosskreutz doing as you said).
[I'm not going to actually delve into the details on that, since as far as I'm concerned this thread is about the meta issues of epistemology in the age of social media echo chambers and the contributions of traditional media to it, and we're best served by staying on that topic and not straying into the details of the case, which provides us a vehicle for the discussion but other than that is really just a tangential third rail.]
You mean Rittenhouse did not fire at Gaige until Gaige's Glock 17 was pointed directly at Kyle's head. Rittenhouse had just opened fire on two unarmed men, killing one of them.
Kind of a major omission to make when you're accusing "the mainstream media" of lying by omission.
edit: this is obviously a complicated case, but arguing whether his later shooting was in self-defense only serves to obfuscates the fact that this is a young man who brought a semi-automatic rifle to a protest, murdered an unarmed man, and then killed another before the shooting in question took place.
Many young men were following Rittenhouse, yelling things like "Get him" and "Beat him up". I sensed a lot of dangerous emotions in the videos, in the sound of the voices and the movements of the bodies. Some say that those yelling "get him" merely wanted to makes sure than Rittenhouse did not escape legal accountability (for Rittenhouse's shooting minutes earlier of Joseph Rosenbaum). But consider that Rittenhouse was walking down the middle of a wide street towards a line of cops. What need was there to detain Rittenhouse rather than simply to follow him at a distance to make sure he keeps walking toward the police line?
Then someone hit Rittenhouse on the head, Rittenhouse kept walking quickly, but fell down after a few seconds. During questioning in court, he says he fell because he got dizzy because of the blow to his head. While sitting on his ass in the middle of the street, someone ran up to him, hit him on the shoulder with a skateboard and (almost in the same motion if I recall correctly) grabbed Rittenhouse's gun and tried to pull it away from him. This someone was making the kind of dramatic-but-somewhat-clumsy movements of their whole body that people tend to make when they are in the throes of an intense emotion and trying hard to achieve some physical outcome.
Then Rittenhouse shot that someone (Anthony Huber), which very sadly killed him.
Did I leave anything important out?
EDIT. I changed "hit him on the head" (with a skateboard) to "hit him on the shoulder".
This omission game goes both ways. You're leaving pertinent information out to support your narrative also.
Kind of a major omission to make when you're accusing your fellow commentators of lying by omission
The point is to control the dissemination of and characterization of information. Corporate press is already owned and operated by the ultra-wealthy. This is not how they make their money. This is how they mold society to work in the ways they want.
Kids are often brainwashed from a very early age and many thoughts and opinions are just what they have grown to believe based on the media they consumed and those around them watched and believe.
The rules-violating stuff must look very impressive for ad engagement metrics.
Over the last 6 years there have been toooooo many coincidences which go in 1 direction politically instead of equally in both directions.
You only need to flip a coin 5-6 times before you suspect it might be rigged... and after 100's of tosses there is no longer any question.
"Reality has a well known liberal bias"
If heads & tails are left & right and the edge is far right extremism, it's not a "coincidence" that these "coin tosses" go in "1 direction politically instead of equally in both directions" when "1 direction" is left or right and the other "direction" is far right extremism
Yes, but not "American liberal bias". American liberal identity politics is mostly not on the side of reality, and that is like half their platform. It isn't liberal either so the statement isn't technically wrong, but since your statement was made by American liberals I'll assume you think it is.
I do support many of the things American liberals wants to do since I do support a balanced mix of freedom and guard rails, but I still think they are very wrong about around half the things they talk about. So "reality has a well known American liberal bias" only works if you have a biased view of reality.
And to be on topic, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is very much an identity politics topic, and in that topic reality is not on the American liberal side. Lots of people will of course argue otherwise, just like how lots of American republicans will argue that human caused climate change isn't a thing, but reality doesn't seem to agree with those two groups.
YT isn't a public service.
In that, a Holocaust denier has filed a defamation lawsuit against a Jewish professor. Under UK law, she bears the burden of proof.
When they later confront the denier, they point out that he makes many historical mistakes and every single one of them favors the Nazis and/or Hitler. They then compare this to a rigged coin. If he were being honest and doing history wrong, then some of his mistakes should've gone either way, but the fact that his mistakes are substantially in one direction shows evidence of bias.
Denial is a great film, I recommend it.
[0] I could also just switch platforms, but I have similar problems with all the big platforms. Vimeo is a potential paid option, but their streaming plans are a bit out of my budget.
But is it better than 30 years ago or worse? When I hear the suicides committed upon whistleblowers in France 30 years ago, or the Ustica crash, or the Greenpeace boat bombed in NZ, are we committing more today?
One solution: Open, transparent justice and cities enforce laws for rioters instead of letting them throw city burning temper tantrums.
Yes, because right-wingers have never committed violence when they got the outcome they didn't like./s
Fun to work at Google these days? Get to manipulate the crowds big time?
Edit: at least you have now gotten me to watch it. Seriously interesting. Good thing the kid has gotten a good lawyer.
"I wouldn't even know how to manipulate just 1 person... unless I am manipulating thousands of people, its just not worth my time as a engineer at Google."
"Its not evil if it encourages people to think correctly about issues"
Now just wait a few days for a wild "whistleblower" to appear claiming Google coulda censored shit _even sooner_.
So it looks like the people at Alphabet/Google are well into suppressing political discourse, in which case I think a break-up of the company once this administration is voted out is totally in the cards.
[1] https://listen.warroom.org/?__cf_chl_rt_tk=gIeuKWPwW6dBmcIkh...
If that is the case, it goes down to the 'narrative'. Was the Kyle a poor kid trying to get away from vicious mob and killing in self-defense, a blood-thirsty vigilante with ties white supremacist movement, or something in between?
A lot of people have already decided. At this point, I am just waiting to see if the jury upholds the right to self-defense. If they don't, riots next year are bound to be much worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/us/kyle-rittenhouse-kenos...
I tried accessing them now, but paywall hit me hard.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people who are so bought into the tribalistic dialectic that, in the more recent version, they heard about all the censoring, they saw the people being censored were "those evil others" and said "yeah thats ok with me!", failing to understand the lack of principle would/will come for them next.
The beauty of it all is that I think the oligarchs are overplaying their hand to the point they are going to force a pendulum swing back the other way at some point. The counter-point to that is that with techno-tyranny at some point the oligarchs are going to be able to stop the pendulum swing.
1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
bonus: Hitchens on freedom of speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY&t=0
Interesting to watch this with hindsight and see how wrong he was about Religion and why they were censorious.
If you look at how society has evolved over the last 15 years, the opposite has come true. Activists are successfully limiting speech they find offensive through legislation and intimidation, and one of the strongest defenders of "full" freedom of speech has now become the religious far-right.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the notion of "full" freedom of speech (which we don't actually have in Australia; only an implied right to freedom of political communication to the extent that is necessary to keep democracy running), but you can't deny that religion is no longer the enemy of free speech.
Google isn't the only company that owns the field of information retrieval. They just came the right place/right time after the .com crash.
Time it right and you can have a set of regulations tailored to your competitors that only minimally impact you and then, when the next party gets its turn at power and all of your competitors are dead, get those regulations removed in the next big wave of corporate deregulation.
It really is a sweet game. Too bad we'll never get to play it.
It's worth noting that I'm loosely parroting the content of a Folding Ideas video[1] that covers the discussion of the creator vs platform relationship overall.
For online ads? Sure you can make that case.
Their business in the end is based on delivering relevant content. If there is a market for the traffic Google refuses to host, then there are probably market opportunities there.
1. When you buy an Android phone there's a good chance that YouTube app is preinstalled.
2. If you search the net for "how to do XYZ" or for any song you'll get 99% video results from YouTube.
3. Almost every company/celebrity/influencer/... has a YouTube account and until recently (TikTok, Odysee, BitChute,...) alternative platforms (Vimeo, Dailymotion,...) were mostly a niche market.
Perhaps but that doesn't preclude criticizing those editorial choices as harmful (false narratives, ideological bubbles, general free-speech principles).
YouTube has only recently started making a profit. If they didn't censor videos they'd be unable to pay for the servers, storage and bandwidth that everyone seem to feel entitled for.
How is this sinister, it seems trivially correct
It course Google and other companies will mess up with their moderation and should be called on it when they do but what exactly is wrong with them moderating in general?
A lot of people will defend google ability to do that because they have a "first amendment right".
Adding air quotes or actual quotes doesn't change that..
People didn't merely defend Google to gatekeep information, they demanded it. A decade ago, Youtube, along with other social media companies, was happy to be pro-free speech. It's not like they have any reason to cut engagement and ad revenue. However, they after two adpocapyses and even the President demanding that they censor more misinformation, they have been pushed into the position of the gatekeeper of the internet. Given that they aren't paid for this position, they will obviously choose most cost effective-route possible, hence why they censor whatever they think will be controversial.
Such ingratiation has also poisoned the well against even considering options like having a strong/big government step in, handing Google over to the people, etc.
As long as greed is good, cash is king, and stock prices are equated with the economy, you're not going to see anyone challenge the status quo of a corporation acting in their own best interest, not mine or yours or ours.
The bar for conspiracy I think needs to be pretty high.
Perfect example of this is "X." X is some highly mainstream, controversial thing happening right now. "X" has a lot of videos. YouTube starts removing videos of "X". People start to say YouTube is censoring. Maybe they are. However it's more likely that the increased traffic to "X" and the fact that it's controversial results in more people (in aggregate) using built in tools such as commenting, flagging , etc. to highlight the video. Some criterion might be met and high activity videos that are "controversial" might be removed or throttled.
From the outside it looks like a conspiracy. I'd love for someone to post conclusive evidence of YouTube engaged in some conspiracy around these livestreams.
On top of that, there have been clear examples of censorship. For example, when Google specifically targeted Christian websites in a blacklist on Google Now [1], or when they were noted for scrubbing autocomplete results that were critical of Hillary Clinton around the 2016 election [2] when it was also revealed that then-Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt had been a major supporter of Clinton for years [3]. These things seldom get questioned, and even then rarely get answers. It's hardly surprising to see why many people don't trust these companies and jump to conspiracy theories when these things happen.
[1] https://www.christiantoday.com/article/google-is-blacklistin...
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3636048/Google-accu...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-emails-google-eric...
What I'm saying is that there's no conclusive proof there's some sort of grand conspiracy at work here.
[1] First link says certain types of conservative media is blacklisted. However it's not like there isn't thousands of conservative videos on YouTube.
[2] Your second link isn't really relevant or surprising, unless there's proof that Schmidt somehow took actions to promote Clinton beyond the (imo) very clear media bias towards her.
[3] I'm not saying you should trust these companies - you shouldn't. I'm just saying that there's no proof of a conspiracy and most of these issues are probably just technical underlying. Still shouldn't trust them, though.
Could you define what you mean by "grand conspiracy"? And what conclusive proof of it would look like?
In the end this will boil down to speculation until/if YouTube makes a statement, but at least it can be informed speculation.
I'm already trying to gauge likes vs watch count as a sloppy proxy for video quality but it's just not the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRCSX-u01eM
The video is titled: "Boeing C-17 Globemaster Jet Crash All Hell breaks loose". It has 2,302,640 views and I took a screenshot of the like/dislike metrics before the change took place. 1.6K Upvoted, 21K Downvoted.
The spoiler is that the plane taking off never actually crashes. It just looks like it will because of the camera angle. The uploader wrote "I made this video to start a conversation and it has certainly started a conversation ..." but has disabled comments. The video is a complete and total lie and the ratio reflected that. Without comments, you have nothing else to warn you about the video. From now on, you will have to rely on the fact that a video viewed two million times only has one and a half thousand likes as a proxy.
Granted, I know some videos are prone to have bad-looking ratios because they are discussing contentious topics. I give those a wide berth and don't immediately dismiss them because they have a 60-40 like dislike ratio.
This whole dislike thing fundamentally breaks YT for me. Completely. I will not waste time watching videos if they’re not worth watching.
There is a reason why IMDB is a thing. If they remove ratings, it becomes useless. Ratings are the foundational aspect of IMDB.
Google needs a lesson or two and I hope the community responds in the strongest form of protest.
Are the ratings why people go to IMDB? I use IMDB as a database on the internet for movies and TV cast/crew credits. I almost never look at the ratings for the things I look up.
HN only shows max(upvotes-downvotes, -4) to the original commenter. Censorship?
As such, yeah HN does only show up/downvote ratios like you are claiming. However, the scale is completely different between here and YT, which is a primary source of information for many people nowadays.
Edit - To further elaborate, with the same example, imagine that not only is the dislike ratio masking the actual dissent, but other companies and platforms are collaborating on a truth, and discussion to the contrary cannot be discussed on their platform. This is what is literally happening, you have to be blind to not see it at this point. Government published videos are having their ratios hidden, anything that is counter to the decided narrative is being automatically flagged by AIs on FB/Twitter to throw "warnings" up. This is the nature of the current web right now and you really should acknowledge the tightening of the grip that these companies are doing over the years.
Clearly, that got ridiculous. But, what I'm curious about is if there's an underlying principal in your mind here. Because what you appear to be suggesting is a regulation compelling not only disclosure of internal statistics, but specifically how fine-grain those internal statistics are allowed to be? And, for example, what about twitter? They don't have a dislike button -- do you think they should be compelled to implement one? Since your focus seems to be on where people are getting their news, do you think that news sites (above a certain popularity?) should be compelled to implement dislikes on their own content, or only user-submitted comments?
Since they analyzed the platform as a whole and decided there are more harm than good in dislikes, and they are applying globally (allowing for a transition period), it is just how they decided the feature set to behave. You can't call it censorship if it applies to 100% of people and content without exception.
And newspapers own the copyright on everything they print, even falsehoods.
What's important is the reason why they are doing it, not whether they have the right, because we all agree that they have the right to do it, but we are not all happy.
Without such systems it's trivial to just 'clickfraud' relevancy systems out of whack. Of course Google has has a long record of playing cat/mouse games with this type of behavior due to the entire SEO industry who would manipulate rankings and other signals.
Part of the problem is that people have been told that there is such a thing as a free lunch. Yet YouTube censorship is a great example of where that leads us.
This kind of logic is how we ended up here in the first place.
"Web3" is nothing like email. Email creates value as a communication medium. NFTs transfer wealth from one gullible gambler to another presumably more informed one.
A simple analysis could be something like looking at how the trade velocity of some NFTs dropped to 0. All the people holding tokens as volume evaporates are the losers. It's literally what happened in 2008 with real estate, except it's happening faster, more frequently and at smaller scales. That's the real logic that got us here. We've just democratized the process of getting scammed.
An NFT is just a unique piece of data attached to an ethereum account. An NFT doesn’t even have a value. You can create as many as you want and for whatever purpose.
To elaborate, It is noteworthy because YouTube is essentially the de-facto monopoly video host on the Internet. From there, we have basically two main paths of discussion:
1) We should do nothing 2) We should force change on that monopoly to either: 2a) break it up 2b) control its actions 2c) nurture competition
I think that 2c is the topic with most interesting discussion because the core issue is deeply connected with the general difficulty involved in existing online outside of "walled gardens". What does "nurturing" a potential competitor to YouTube actually involve? It could potentially be oblique changes that result in easier self-hosting or easier inter-system integration for basic communication like contacts/messages/email.
There's no point in sounding like legal experts or arguing over semantics for the sake of defending the position you have already taken before spending the time watching the full version of both sides arguments.
Like any other site, accounts with less "trust" are probably going to be flagged by automatic mechanisms. I've been on a few teams with various companies that have done things like fraud detection and it almost always works this way. sometimes there is of course, legitimate false positives.
Never forget it.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-gets-fre...
That situation is the obama-gives-obama-a-medal meme.
As result any attempts to stand against Russia sponsored propaganda and lies are prosecuted by Youtube.
There are brave Ukrainian man and women who with their own time and resources are trying to stand against huge Russian propaganda machine. The task itself is almost impossible and in addition to that Youtube acts against them.
Recently Youtube have managed to close Ukrainian channel with 125k subscribers. No warnings, no nothing. The channel was criticizing Russia sponsored propaganda and lies.
I wish someone who can speak with this Susan Wojcicki would deliver her warmest "hi" from Ukraine and a big thanks for supporting Russian war against Ukraine.
Not only democratic Ukraine faces aggression from Russia it also faces injustices on Youtube. This is absolutely unacceptable situation.
Recovered channel with video describing situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_02243_Ck&t=354s
They use facts,official documents, OSCE public reports, public Videos and pure logic to convince Russians that their country indeed have started unprovoked War against Ukraine and covers it with lies pretending it never did. The deadly War that took already more then 15000 lives.
They use all possible methods to convince Russians but usually Russians are in complete denial. Ukrainians are recording those conversations and put on Youtube for everyone to observe. I was also shocked to find out how many Russians are actually support this war and cruelty toward innocent neighbor.
One example of such channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6sS9akmYgA
Preview Picture for Video says:
Russian:
- Where Russian army?
Blogger showing document:
- HERE!
Please someone who can, deliver that message to Susan Wojcicki. Not only she could change that malicious practice she SHOULD change it. There are no excuses. For each such 'shit happening' there is a person responsible for it. She is absolutely responsible for not protecting the truth here.
I wrote this essay here which you should read next:
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
They violated Youtube's ToS with their conspiracy theories and got kicked out, it seems.
[1] https://www.psiram.com/de/index.php/Stiftung_Corona-Ausschus...
great sign of progress. Just mere 400 years ago they would have been tortured and burned at stake as heretics. Though who knows, the way things been moving lately ...