Terminated
susiebright.substack.com
susiebright.substack.com
"The thing is, this banning/terminating/deleting troll crap has been going on since I first got my modem in 1986. I’ve been on every popular web platform, every one — and I’ve been “un-platformed” each time, because of specious complaints. The emerging media companies court early adopters, and then they can’t get rid of us fast enough."
She participated in the famous WELL, back in the 1980s. It is interesting how long this particular struggle, over moderation policies, has been going on.
She makes a good point that each of these companies has followed a similar pattern of first courting the kinds of radical experimenters who blaze new trails, and then later kicking them off platforms because they are not respectable:
"This has been going on for decades now. It isn’t just Google, it’s all the majors: Apple, Amazon, FB, Twitter, Microsoft, AOL, on and on. I could name a dozen others who’ve disappeared in the social media mist. It’s cruel that each of them censor the very people who created their original incubators. Did you know that On Our Backs was the first magazine, of any kind, to publish with an early Apple computer and Adobe Pagemaker 1.0? Yes, we were. I was on The WELL in the 80s. Our idealism and commitment was ferocious!"
IMO/IME this is not exactly how it happens. What really happens is that as these platforms grow, they attract the attention of religious zealot groups who conduct absolutely massive campaigns to take down any content that they personally see as inappropriate. They have their own private blogs and mailing lists, with people given names/emails to contact to lodge complaints about "highly offensive" content that they have never even viewed, they were just instructed to file complaints against it.
A big part of the issue is that much of this content really only appeals to a small group of people, and many times those people do not even realize these attacks are happening in the background. The content platforms then decide it is easier to just ban this content so that they do not get overwhelmed with the religious zealot protests.
I wish we could charge those kinds of groups with the impediment of free speech (at least in the US) and fine them out of existence.
The biggest threat is that only a handful of companies operate most of the Internet now and they want it to have all the diversity and culture of a suburban shopping mall.
Also, it has never been easier to form geographically dispersed but aligned cultural groups.
I don't know which Internet operators you are talking about, but mine does not give a crap about the culture of the content I consume--only the ability to sell me ads about it.
I think companies embrace moral relativism and attempt to stay within the Overton Window (or at most dabble near the edges). It's a survival necessity because their own profitability will suffer if they are found to facilitate content that is outside of that window. The Overton Window does drift, which explains how content can suddenly become objectionable in a matter of months.
These content filters block large swaths of the internet. Urban Dictionary is the one that trips me up every time I change networks.
LGBTQIA+ related content has typically gotten caught up in this as well.
You’re lucky if your Internet operator does not care. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of places where censorship is rampant, under the guise of just “think of the children.”
Zealot is the key word. People who are enthusiastically intolerant.
That would be an actual violation of free speech, penalizing a legal, private, first amendment-protected activity. Remember, the first amendment only prevents the government from constraining the speech of citizens. Telling an organization, especially a religious organization, what they can and cannot advocate for would be an egregious violation of first amendment protections.
Those groups are, and would be, free to voice their concerns and beliefs on their own platforms, in their own buildings, etc. I am not saying they should not have an equal right to free speech, just that their should be a cost or penalty for trying to impose your beliefs on all of society via those kinds of organized actions.
At least in the US, "organized actions" would be protected under "right of the people peaceably to assemble" part of the First Amendment. Unless those organized actions presented a "clear and present danger"[1], it's difficult for me to see how a government could restrain organizing.
1 Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940)
This has been going on at least since publishers existed (ie. centuries ago).
Publishers have always held the reigns of power, and decided who had a voice and who didn't.
That's where self-publishing comes in, but of course self-publishing and independent platforms/publishers won't have the reach of huge organizations.
At least for now we still have a choice where to turn our attention, even if it's only a minority who'll make the effort to do so and stay informed from outside of mainstream media.
Not that it was always perfect or anything, but this is a key difference. You can get content out there without going through Facebook/Google, but it's much harder. It's like the postal service doing the censorship.
The challenges faced by Facebook and Google are also substantial, although most of these revolve around user-generated content, a bit different from publisher-generated content. Maybe it shouldn't treat them as identical.
See 18 U.S. Code § 1461
The campaigns don't even need to be very big. The baseline of organic complaints against the average show/video/site is vanishingly small, so even a group of a few thousand people all hitting the same target at once looks like a tidal wave of backlash by comparison.
Do we have data on this? How do you know this? How does this effect interact with the usual claim of YouTube self-policing to be able to sell ads?
Compared to modern forums, it's a bit hard to read because the subject lines don't change. Topics can last for many years and keep getting rolled over when they're full.
> Needless to say, the OOB lecturers were fully clothed and rather obsessed with our historical narrative. Anyone not interested in feminist politics would have probably fallen asleep.
The lecturers perhaps, but the streamed lecture contains full-screen examples from pornographic magazines that obviously should be flagged for verification by any porn detecting algorithm.
Youtube does state that explicit materials are allowed for educational content, but if their copyright machines can't even distinguish white noise from copyrighted music then I have very little hope that context like "educational discussion" will ever be recognised automatically.
As a society, we may need a platform where educational/government institutions can upload content (with content warnings, if necessary) because Youtube is a terrible fit for content like this. Youtube's scope is too large to be managed by humans who can understand context and their advertiser seeking behaviour provides an incentive to "punish" videos containing even allowed nudity in their self-learning algorithms. Requiring every institution to set up their own video hosting infrastructure is unnecessary and even wasteful of public funds.
[0] As in it will leave a bad impression on a lot of people, not that they'll lose the next election.
Vimeo seems like a much better fit for eduction to be honest. They're probably more expensive, though.
What they really want is to upload the Internet Archive, but the UI really sucks.
To the credit of YT, they host plenty of nude videos that aren't, somehow, "porn" (search for "Brazilian wax" for instance...)
So much so that one begins to wonder if the problem with Cornell and such may stem more from the political message than the imagery itself.
But how hard can it be to mark Cornell University as an account important enough that every action needs a human review, or two?
The love for tech companies on Wall Street stems from their ability to scale up revenues much more rapidly than their costs. Human review is costly, and at YouTube's scale, every reasonable request for more human attention opens the floodgates for tons of other, equally reasonable requests. Thus, any broad policy change that increases demand for human review can eat into profit margins and stock prices big time, and will therefore be resisted with great ferocity and vigilance.
IIUC you're suggesting people -- academic lecturers, no less, not professional streamers -- splice out sections of their lecture, replace them with a content warning, provide a contextual link to the "risky" content, and then hope that people will follow it, jump right back to the original lecture, and then come back? (And that somehow that link won't trigger the same YouTube content flag, b/c obviously they're going to at least broadly categorize outbound links to combat spam.)
This (meaning HN) community regularly nerds out over SEO, landing page optimization, and zero-friction payment flows. Why should we expect educators to be successful delivering complex content in an approachable way if we're also going to require them to carefully slice their content into "acceptable" and "NSFW" segments and deliver them separately, even when the original lecture was linear?
Probably not but what rando has the password to that account could be crazy wide ranging, that's the real key. Professional sports teams still have run ins with "oh some rando intern was posting sorry".
Still worth a try. Maybe have it so the filter "flags" questionable video, the account is special so it doesn't remove the video and it gets checked "quickly" with some identifier that this is an educational account.
Granted exceptions are always complicated. What happens when someone else gets their content shut down and a concerned educational account starts reposing it ;) (and that's just the first complication I can think of)
I wish that regulation was the answer, but back in the day, government censorship was the problem. Which also fell disproportionately on small and weak organizations. In the 80s and 90s, in Canada, there were Supreme Court cases about small LGBT-identified bookstores routinely having their orders seized by Customs on obscenity grounds.
EDIT: I don’t know what I believe any more. We know that censorship falls heavily on on unpopular speech from marginalized people, no matter whether it’s government or private industry. On the other hand, without censorship or regulation, it seems to be true that content providers and adtech will turn about 10-15% of the population insane with far-right conspiracy theories.
But the tension between free speech, censorship, information, and misinformation is as old as communication itself, and there's more to be learned on the subjects from history than from the YouTube Terms of Service.
I have some of these people in my family tree. Adtech, content providers, censorship, etc are all irrelevant. Those 10-15% are going to find their nutjob content no matter where it lives. The content doesn't make them crazy, they make themselves crazy by filtering their memetic exposure to stuff that confirms their biases. Kicking it off of youtube does not prevent them from finding it, it just confirms their suspicion that there's a conspiracy trying to stop them from hearing "the truth".
I understand Cornell using YouTube as a mirror for the content - especially considering the content is probably more "discoverable" there. However, I find it ridiculous that a large, well-funded institution with such a large catalog of public video content can't stand up their own host. Relying on YouTube to host their content is just negligent.
They might pay for uncensored video hosting and exposure an "edu only" site, but they wouldn't want the expense of hosting their own. The value add would be a content nexus for academic and "open university" lectures that could possibly be monetized by a per view/per topic fee from the users.
All these institutions already host their own websites.
These institutions are big enough to host their own videos - we don't need a new platform, they just need to spin up a server and to pay for their own bandwidth.
If you trust Google to provide your video hosting at a pricetag of £0 this is what you get... You are on their platform, with their rules, where their algorithm is judge, jury and executioner.
Sounds like a Govt's.
Bureaucracy isn’t a compelling excuse - that’s just an easy way to dismiss anything.
Universities have absolutely managed more complex IT change than hosting a few videos on their website.
But we are going to complain that a universities videos got taken down because of YouTube bureaucracy but universities can’t host their own videos because of their own internal bureaucracy then I have very little pity!
They likely already have datacenters and high bandwidth internet connections (multiple).
Oh and they also have staff already on the payroll, and likely capable students that could lend a hand as a part time job or something.
Not to mention, the role of big corporations could be reduced to cdn only, for example (tink of google cdn, cloudfront or cloudflare).
It just take willingness to actually address the problem.
Fwiw, universities have long paid for their own white label YouTube clones from various companies; at a bare minimum Canvas has been around forever. It just wasn't free (as in beer or otherwise).
> PeerTube aspires to be a decentralized and free/libre alternative to video broadcasting services.
> [...]
> Anyone with a modicum of technical skills can host a PeerTube server, aka an instance. Each instance hosts its users and their videos. In this way, every instance is created, moderated and maintained independently by various administrators.
[1]: https://odysee.com/
[2]: https://lbry.com/
That’s why companies emerge - people don’t want to acquire specialized skills. And that’s why as a technology manager I choose to buy over building more often than not.
Or in other words, assuming I have a ten minute video I want to make available, how do I go about it rather than "throw on YouTube, add to page"?
I’ve never used it, but they make it sound like just a few clicks.
At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, we created our own video hosting site, https://mediahub.unl.edu/ (https://github.com/unl/UNL_MediaHub) to self-host videos for when avoiding government or k-12 firewalls is desirable as well as integrating with rev.com for captioning.
It's really unfortunate that higher education hasn't banded together more often to develop projects of mutual interest.
It would: * allow archiving, or display with sunset on certain lectures * be available to university libraries, lecturers and student projects. * have less stringent content rules because educational * allow each institution could dictate what their rules were * allow institutions to determine who got what type of access
I would do it, but I am kinda soft on the video transcoding skills. Maybe UNL could work on expanding the service, with a fee, to other universities.
Hosting videos is a non-trivial thing. Let's say you upload a video in 4K. Not everyone can watch in 4K, so it needs to be converted into other resolutions. That's transcoding. Then those other files need to be packaged so a player can intelligently upscale automatically depending on throttling — that requires a bunch of frontend and backend code to work correctly.
Instead of building it themselves, Cornell could pay $$$ for a white-labelled third-party service, but they would be on the hook for a large recurring cost, and they won't get the benefit of YouTube's excellent discovery.
We saw this phenomenon at Vimeo, which offers all the transcoding and throttling etc. Back in the day camera reviews were overwhelmingly hosted on Vimeo (mainly because it had a reputation for higher-quality video).
We assumed that paying users would prefer their videos be watched in isolation from others' accounts — this seems obvious, but it means that the average user watches fewer videos per session, which decreases the overall view count.
Over time YouTube mostly caught up on the video quality front, and camera reviewers were drawn to YouTube where there was a much greater chance of their video racking up a high view count than on Vimeo, simply because users watched more videos on YouTube.
Stated cynically, YouTube doesn't respect users' attention spans as much, so it gets more viewers' time than other platforms. That means more people want to put their videos there for people to watch.
Discovery is the issue here.
Just use handbrake to post three versions at three different resolutions and be done with it, or we all agree to move to some format that can easily support streaming with multiple bitrates.
Main value of Youtube is not their video hosting technology; it's the userbase.
It's problematic to only let government or entrenched institutions deliver uncensored content. Powerful groups have a habit of shaping what is "educational" to fit their goals.
Some of the museums in Vienna started posting to onlyfans to avoid running into the rules around nudity on other platforms https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/onlyfans-vienna-museum...
I don't think they weren't restored. It's possible that the videos are unlisted or uploaded on some other account.
[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20211010100521/https://www.youtub...
But why the obsession with recognizing it automatically?
I've long wondered why we never developed a digital system for asserting copyright rights. Like, you register a piece of IP with Google and Google should give you a key. You can then use that key to sign certificates that grant certain people legal use of your content on Google. When I go upload a video, I upload all of the relevant keys that indicate that I've included certain copyright material in my video but I've cleared it up with rights holders ahead of time. Video game companies, for example, could one click hand out keys for free to make sure game streamers could legally stream their games.
Similarly, Google could outsource their enforcement of "for educational discussion" to individual organizations. Cornell could agree that staff uploading content that is in keeping with Google's TOS is an official part of Cornell disciplinary proceedings. In return, Cornell has to place a bond at Google that would be forfeited if they ever broke their agreement. Insurance companies could insure such bonds by evaluating whether Cornell has the right processes in place that would prevent TOS violating content from ever appearing on Cornell's YT channel. In return, Google agrees to turn off all ML content moderation on Cornell's account.
This could easily scale down to smaller channels. If I'm a video essayist channel, I could agree to take a mandatory training course and put down a $X00 bond to have my channel be free from all ML copyright checking up to my first X0,000 followers/X00,000,000 views. If a human judges me to have violated the TOS, the $X00 is there to pay for that human's time. No spam channel would find it worthwhile to go through verification and they would still be subjected to the normal ML checking but people who depend on YT for professional reasons could be more certain of avoiding automated false positives & negatives.
A: "500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide." https://www.oberlo.com/blog/youtube-statistics A bit of arithmetic gives 30000 days of video uploaded to YouTube per day. Manually reviewing all that content would require an army of people.
Why not add a complex system of DRM keys? Because the current system works, there is no de facto standard of copyright ownership (though certificates would work pretty easily, even X509 certs have an authority, an expiration date, and a revocation system) and there's no interest in setting something like that up.
Currently, copyright holders have all the power and Google doesn't really care about rights of the people who upload stuff. Why invest money into change? What competitor does it better?
We do: It's called Their Own Websites.
Not that what YouTube did was right, but I sure wouldn't rely on them to be the sole holder and provider of my content.
... she declared, uncensored, from her self-hosted journal.
A multinational Fortune-500 megacorp declined to host Cornell's content for free because they have standards the content violates. Cornell has more than enough cash in the ol' war chest to spin up their own video hosting. This is almost a non-story because it's either telling us something we already know about how corporations treat potentially-embarrassing-to-them content or how society treats the content Susie Bright creates.
ETA: In addition, YouTube does not appear to have decided not to host the content after all (it was likely found initially objectionable because they can code a recognizer for "objectionable" more accurately than a recognizer for "educational value"). This doesn't change the fact that YouTube is within their rights to choose not to associate with Cornell as a business arrangement, but it perhaps matters that here, they didn't even make that choice.
Removing the content costs less than responding to the complaints, unless those associated with the affected content have sufficient clout to swing the cost equation the other way.
How do we govern the internet? For all our bluster about loving democracy, the internet is essentially a feudal system. A few large entities have stepped up to build needed infrastructure. In exchange, they own everything. You don't rent your facebook page, your gmail address or your iCloud account. Renters have rights. If AI enforcers run by the the big tech companies don't like you, they'll just banish you from their land forever. (And delete all your stuff in the process). You have no rights and no representation. Just like in medieval times, this is seen as totally normal.
Facebook and Google pay for all of this by tracking us everywhere we go and selling our data to advertisers. Its like if every road outside your house was owned by a company, and when you walk out the front door cameras track your every move so they can show you personalized ads. Apple pays for it all by massively taxing every transaction in their store, banning competition and making it so everything you buy inside their ecosystem won't work anywhere else.
I never know quite what to say when people defend the right of companies to shamelessly claim sovereignty over their billions of users. I mean, its not exactly the same as totalitarianism because you can move to a different tech platform if you want. Well sort of - have to leave your data, communities, apps and devices behind when you leave.
And anyway, benevolent dictators work great in small companies and communities. My problem with Facebook is that it has nearly 3 billion monthly active users. Thats not a team. Thats bigger than any country. Its an empire. It even has a king!
If I don't like how my city is run, I can vote in my local elections. Where is the ballet box for our tech platforms?
It took humanity thousands of years to figure out that democratic systems work better than feudal systems. I really hope we can make that leap faster this time. Our civilization might depend on it.
Everything about access to the network has grown as a peer-and-guest arrangement between private owners or government entities (starting from the original systems where most people connected via academia or the government and being fired from your government position or exited from your university cut your access to your email account and other online resources). In this modern era, very few are peers and most are guests, and yes, the ownership situation reflects that. Adjusting that ownership situation by fiat or force is a fraught enterprise. Let's imagine someone tries to nationalize Internet infrastructure that is currently privately-owned and establish a democratic structure for managing it. What government do we trust to do that? Part of the allure of the Internet was how hard it was for governments to control it; do we willingly hand them that power?
All of that having been said, I agree with you that tension is there between the origins of the Internet and the modern desire for self-actualization and personal data rights in the use of the Internet. I'm somewhat excited about projects like Mastodon that seem to be trying to decrease the complexity of becoming a peer. I can imagine someone starting a democratically-run service provider, perhaps off the credit union model, to provide more direct ownership to their userbase. Of course, it would have to compete in the corporate world alongside other companies, and there is, perhaps, a reason that the corporate world so closely resembles medieval fiefdoms almost uniformly. You noted "It took humanity thousands of years to figure out that democratic systems work better than feudal systems;" I'd offer the counterpoint that the feudal system describes most corporate structures pretty correctly. But maybe that's just accident of history and there's no particular reason that board-owned or single-owned companies dominate the landscape relative to co-ops.
It'd be a fun experiment to watch someone try to provide a better alternative as a service provider (in the connection, social networking, data hosting, or cloud infra spaces).
Really interesting point, and I hope it works for them.
They did?
Seems to still be available for me: https://www.youtube.com/c/cornelllibrary
I couldn't find any news about this "termination" with a cursory google search either.
I even still see the lecture mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM0RL8ppDmE
Presumably it was some kind of automated response which was quickly overturned by a human?
> As one Google rep emailed me in the 1990s, “If you were a 10-figure net worth institution, we woudn’t bother. But you aren’t.”
Google is rather heavily incentivized to try and automate as much as possible (and deal with the political blow-back when they stumble) instead of playing the cat-and-mouse game.
(As a fun thought experiment: ask yourself "If I were to design the algorithm that wouldn't have kicked Cornell off but would still auto-enforce the TOS, how would I do it?" And then ask yourself "If I were a malicious actor and the algorithm I designed were the one implemented, what kind of content could I create that the algorithm would fail to take down?").
I tried a cursory google search of 'cornell library youtube down' and the first result is a tweet from the 18th where someone's taken a screenshot of the content being down.
"This page isn't available" YouTube - search it and you'll see thousands. The other thing that can happen is if the channel is marked as private.
It's age-restricted though, so you have to give up some identifying data to Google to be able to view it.
https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restrictio...
> This extension uses some API tricks to access age-restricted videos from YouTube anonymously.
The less/non-anonymous method of using cookies from a logged-in browser still works on all videos.(?)
[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/pull/575#issuecomment-88883...
Unfortunately, YouTube is a de facto monopoly in its space which is backed by its daddy's search monopoly, so it will be very hard for alternatives (be it competing services or p2p solutions) to become viable even if the degradation will become obvious to everyone.
The most realistic hope regarding YouTube which I have is that combination of factors will allow/force the US establishment to force split of tech giants similarly to how it was done to AT&T. Without it YouTube will continue to enjoy its dominant position with minimal oversight and accelerating abuse of its power on information consumed by populace.
[1] https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/act-man-quantum-tv-drama-ex...
[2] https://twitter.com/TheActMan_YT/status/1518660188617641984
If anything, YouTube's response to that threat is positively reserved; they've taken nearly none of ActMan's content down.
Have we entered an era where satire is dead? No one wants to spend time actually gauging intent so everything is read as literally as possible.
Or Facebook/Instagram/Meta, or Twitter, or Dropbox, or ...
Not even Iron Mountain is immune from malicious or negligent handling of critical records.
Also never depend on any one thing; GCP, AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc.
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/internet-privac...
Oh, because it's free and cool, comes with free distribution too.
Google didn't just target her or the university, like she said the AIs are amoral and the company doesn't really care because they only care about profit (or maybe they couldn't care less because of the yottabyte of content published everyday?)
Just being too dramatic while she could actually learn the rules and use YouTube as a platform to promote her content, i.e.cutting down full length lectures into smaller bitsize fun info video and direct viewers to their own hosting platform, etc.
And ironically, she's directing people to her paid subscription. We all need a sustainable way to create content and host it. She deserves to be paid for her content but don't play the victim card.
And Google and other platform is not all innocent, they need to be transparent about content moderation, like if you remove someone's content, please let everyone know why (on the page instead of just channel not found) and how the decision was made (bot or manual reviewed).
For one, Google didn't own YouTube in the 90s. In fact, YouTube didn't exist. So that reference to a "Google rep in the 90s" is clearly wrong. But let's assume they meant "the 2010s", which would be the most reasonable time for such an interaction.
Beyond that there doesn't seem to be much evidence that the Cornell account was de-platformed, or if it was, it was not for very long and clearly a quickly rectified error.
The author has some legitimate complaints, but they seem to be surrounded by exaggerations or just lies.
Uh-huh. In 1999, Google was a pre-revenue startup with probably 50 employees and a tiny number of early users. In the unlikely case that they'd somehow specifically targeted the author for "un-platforming", how likely is it that the author would have even noticed, let alone gotten a reply talking about requiring a "10-figure net worth" to be listened to from a company that itself had only raised low 8-figures of VC.
It is unacceptable that accounts are locked or deleted by huge tech cos with no recourse. Sometimes there actually is a political agenda, more often it is just some random, unfortunate AI screw up.
This example sounds a lot more like the latter but the author (a professional victim) is trying very hard to convince us it is the former.
The lesson here is not about AI, it's about how correctly managing your videos is a lot easier than whining on substack about how oppressed you are.
It's hard to imagine that this person even got twenty emails from bewildered colleagues, when the view stats on Youtube indicate that this channel gets about 5 views per day.
> As one Google rep emailed me in the 1990s
In the 90s Google was a small and unknown startup that wasn't in the business of censoring anything. I doubt author would have any reason to exchange emails with them.
That being said, there exists no innate right for content to be hosted on Youtube (or anywhere else for that matter).
Perhaps the two align, I do not know. Until more is know, I reserve judgement.
When this comic was first printed it was partially a response to big platforms like Reddit having massive waves of bannings. It has always been about systems that are advertiser friendly, even if Munroe is too dense to realize that.
Automated content flagging by AI on a platform like YouTube is completely different.
The reality is that speech is ALWAYS a slippery slope, and those who believe it isn't are always surprised when they become the next target.
In the case of youtube we are talking about a platform. While it could relate, up to which level do we consider that it is a private platform? What about writing something on your own website that is hosted on a vps and you end up terminated by the hosting provider ? What if you end up terminated by your ISP and your mobile vendor ?
Do we have to draw the line and if so where ?
When the government gets involved.
Till then, build your own internet backbone or get back in line.
Fwiw, I don't agree with this but net neutrality died a while ago. Both the left and right political movements have had ample opportunity to fix this problem but they've made their bed. Now they get to lie in it.
> Both the left and right political movements have had ample opportunity to fix this problem but they've made their bed. Now they get to lie in it.
This is frankly nonsense. Net Neutrality is dead because organizations like Google aren't bothered by having more control on the net as well. For every "blackout" site when NN was a big pet issue, there are 10 people who were in favor of NN then that could not even explain what NN was.
Google doesn't push on the NN angle anymore because they make more money on a closed net, and pushing out anyone critical of mass media/advertisers.
NN is dead because the big institutional players are against it. It's as simple as that.
A private platform without uptight censorious people banning anything they deem offensive from the right or the left.
That doesn't seem inconsistent to me.
The AI, despite recent rumors to the contrary, is not a self-aware entity. It is the creation of humans, and it reflects the biases and values of the humans that created it. It's simply that the people listening have created a tool to automate listening and reacting.
give up?
We have not found a way to duplicate the human required to build, sustain, and maintain a community of humans in our digital spaces.
> Google’s little company deleted all the files, after they saw the April university lectures by myself, Gayle Rubin, and other On Our Backs artists. We don’t know if there was a complaint, or it was just their usual harrow of ever-changing terms and conditions.
It's literally wrong, lol. You can go on YouTube and find these lectures yourself. If people on here are susceptible to such blatant misinformation then maybe there's no hope. YouTube can and does actually delete videos - if this is what happened they'd be gone (even if the account were restored). The fact you can see the videos in question means the author is wrong.
Furthermore, where's the proof that it was ever taken down to begin with? Archive.org is a thing. People just believe anything they're told huh.