Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like.
Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts.
Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here.
In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
Some random guys built a beautiful walled city inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. Before the walled city, almost everyone was homeless, and the few people who had houses were rickety and constantly needed upkeep. (Before YouTube, most people couldn't do video sharing, and tech-savvy people could but it was more complicated)
Five years later, the random guys realized they had spent themselves into oblivion building the city. Thankfully, the Emperor, G, came along and offered to bail them out provided he could run the city. G didn't want to charge people money to live in the city, but did need to make money somehow, so he began allowing people to run home businesses and made profit off business taxes.
Years after that, lots of people were running home businesses. Some of them were running legally and ethically odious home businesses. Two things happened: First, all the customers from outside the city said they really didn't want to keep buying from Emperor G's city unless he took action to shut down the shady businesses. Second, Emperor G didn't like that he was being associated with those businesses. So he suggested that in the near future, zoning laws would change to prohibit running home businesses in some categories. In the metaphor, this is Google and advertisers beginning to demonetize certain for-profit YouTube channels without banning anyone.
Some business and some residents owners expressed concern about the new zoning laws (especially those affected!), but most of them, and certainly most visitors, didn't because they had the effect of weeding out some undesirable elements and beautifying the city.
Then, like three years after that, a bunch of white supremacists (and some people who aren't white supremacists, but who frequently say things that are debatably white supremacist, and also, some people who aren't even those people, but pal around with them a lot and really do their best to appeal to white supremacist audiences) colonized a big wing of the town. Some of them were running businesses and so they ran into zoning law problems as before, but most were just living there. Emperor G started an HOA to exclude those people, since many others in the city were tired of the general nuisance. I think the metaphor here should be clear.
Like most HOAs, it wasn't especially fair (and it caught up some of the neighbors of the people listed above) and so even if you agree with the decisions in principle you probably still have a lot to complain about.
Now, as even more years go by, Emperor G is starting to make really silly calls through the HOA, like banning certain colours of paint on houses. People are really starting to get irritated with this. Some of the people kicked out in the previous wave or zoned out of business in the first wave are seeing "told you so", but most residents of the town don't see the connection because it's possible to support HOAs or zoning laws while disagreeing with specific stuff that they ban. That's this thread and what's being discussed here. In fact, most people do support the HOA and the zoning laws!
Some people talk about leaving the city for the wilderness, or just missing the wilderness. Today, about the same number of people have wilderness skills as had them before, and the good news is there's more avenues than ever before to learn wilderness skills and get supplies out there. So you absolutely could leave the wilderness. However, most people still prefer the city despite its flaws, because in the same way that it takes less effort to prepare food than it does to grow it from scratch, the city allows people to focus on the things that matter to them rather than reinventing all of civilization from scratch. Besides, all the white supremacists that got kicked out of the city are still out there screaming, and sometimes you just want to go through your day without being screamed at.
Authoritarian Censors always have a boogeyman to point to that justifies their censorship
Your white supremacists boogeyman is just a over blown justification for massive dictatorial censorship of the internet in general and you tube more specifically
I have no respect for anyone that wants to hide behind this narrative in support of the wide and sweeping censorship of millions of hours of contents
//as a side not, HOA's and Zoning laws are also Authoritarian, as a libertarian and supporter of individual freedom I do not support censorship, nor HOA's nor Zoning laws
I know my post was a little long for HN, but I think you need to follow the through line. Let me re-iterate:
Policy decisions and how people respond to them unfold in chronological order, and so the chronology is important. I was responding to a metaphor that imagined Google as an Emperor of YouTube, subjecting its subjects to a series of terrible decisions. It was framed as a "first they came for..." style argument for why we should believe today's decision tells us something about previous decisions. In the original metaphor, no hacking videos is like the emperor taking away another colour, after having previously taken away other colours.
I rewrote the metaphor as a chronology of what I think were some of the major inflection points for YouTube, and why a) this is different than previous cases; b) but the previous cases do lead us to this; c) I can support the goal of restricting some content on YouTube and not support this; d) I disagree with it and believe it to be stupid and arbitrary, but also I don't think the end point here is "Abandon YouTube and reclaim the free web!" for a few reasons.
Like most odious behavior, there is a scale. It doesn't have to be super odious for it to be banned anyway, just look at your local HOA board and how petty they can be.
Flippant comments like these are not only frustrating, they are misleading. I know you realize now that you were wrong, but your short, dismissive comment following a substantive paragraph makes it seem much less substantive without having read it. Which would be great, if you weren't wrong.
It'd be real nice if we could make an expeditionary force and start setting up more cities outside, to continue the analogy. At the moment, most groups wanting to leave the city contain too many undesirables, but eventually there'll be enough critical mass. What does that look like? At first - an ecosystem of services, packaged together, rather than piecemeal. Firefox, duckduckgo, an open calendar. I don't think it means linux per say, but maybe a privacy-focused android distro and an overlay for windows. The OS doesn't matter as much anymore.
The solution to alternative communities having too many 'undesirables' is pretty simple; you focus on a specific niche/field that YouTube or whatever doesn't do well, then build up from there.
That's how Twitch took off. Started off being gaming focused, became a bit more open to other content later on. Same with Discord compared to say, Reddit or Twitter or Slack or what not.
The reason most alternatives attract the wrong audience/don't reach critical mass is because their marketing is always focused on the freedom of speech/privacy/whatever angle. That's attractive to a certain audience (those who are being censored more often on existing platforms), but not to the general public.
So you aim your new privacy/decentralised/free speech focused platform at gamers or sports fans or software engineers or what not, and then slowly open it up to the general public/all topics. Like how Facebook started out being aimed specifically at college students.
I disagree. Everything described above applies to the Microsoft Windows monopoly. The monopoly was shaken by the web, then by mobile in general, but lots of traditional businesses are still locked into the Windows stack. Non technical businesses in particular are locked into MS Office.
Given that the world basically shrugged and let MS keep their stranglehold over the enterprise market, I don't expect Google to be treated any differently.
I work in a non-technical business that depends critically on MS Office, but it's not a very pernicious form of lock-in. Honestly, we could probably get by with LibreOffice or Google Docs, and with VMs or terminal servers as a backup, we could ditch Windows as our main desktop OS.
But retraining non-technical users is disruptive and expensive, not to mention retraining helpdesk staff who were hired from a massive pool of Windows experts. The ongoing support costs could massively exceed Microsoft's licensing costs, and switching would produce no benefit for us. So we're 'locked in,' but it's not really Microsoft's fault.
Things were different before their monopoly was disrupted by the web and mobile. OS pluralism is normal now, and people are more inclined to blame vendors, rather than those who opt out of the vendor's ecosystem, for compatibility problems.
What an exuberantly generous take on the relationship that exists between your company and Microsoft.
'depends critically' vs 'we could probably get by [with alternative]' - which?
> So we're 'locked in', but it's not really Microsoft's fault.
It's conceivable that some of the wealthiest people on the planet have accidentally arrived at a situation whereby myriad users are 'locked in' to a situation whereby their on-going wealth is assured.
Most enterprises depend critically on being able to view and edit Word and Excel documents. If there was some urgent need to get rid of Microsoft, they could get by with non-Microsoft applications that support the same file formats. It's easier and cheaper to stick with Microsoft because of the huge ecosystem Microsoft built. That's no accident, it was good business, aided by some questionable business practices which were noticed by antitrust regulators at the time. But it doesn't give Microsoft unlimited power – if they hike licensing fees, the available alternatives will start to look more appealing, despite the (currently) higher cost of finding staff to support them.
They’re locked in because they do license agreements for office, not because they can’t use anything else on windows. Plenty of companies use g-suite on windows.
I was also talking more about home and personal use in general, rather than businesses.
If solutions were independent of the environment, the fix would be easy: simply develop better software than Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft owns the stack so it's hard to compete with them on their turf. You can develop for Mac or Linux and sell to a tiny market. Or you can develop for Windows and hope Microsoft decides not to enter your market.
> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
I mean... no?
I think it's useful to have a separate concept for actual censorship (government-mandated), and just "someone built a really great way to connect to a bunch of users, that didn't exist 20 years ago, but now isn't letting you use it". I'm not saying it's not problematic (or that it is), just that it's different in a meaningful way and therefore bad to conflate.
As for how much of a monopoly YouTube really is - it's clearly a huge aggregator that's gotten almost all "user watching video" engagement. Except other niches have been discussed here (e.g. porn), and they seem to be doing fine. So I don't think it's inevitable that YouTube is the only service that can exist.
This works in a non monopolized system. If you live in a large city with many different stores, and you get banned for one of them for wearing a blue shirt, that doesn't matter too much.
If you live in a remote city with one wallmart and no other stores, and wallmart bans you, that's a problem.
Yes, there are alternatives, but 97% of the market is definitely a monopoly.
The difference between your example and the YouTube case is in how accessible are the alternatives. If the only store close to you bans you, then it can be somewhere between a major inconvenience and practically impossible to go to an alternative.
On the other hand, replacing YouTube as a hosting platform isn't too hard (I think? I don't actually have much experience with this but there are alternatives).
Of course the big issue isn't YouTube the host, it's YouTube the marketing platform - but even here there are alternatives. Host on vimeo, but use other social media more. More Facebook posts. Get an audience via podcasts. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying that I'm not at all convinced that YouTube really is a monopoly in the sense where we want to do something about it.
It's very easy to host a video elsewhere than YouTube.
It's very easy to view a video elsewhere than YouTube.
It's difficult to convince other people to view a video elsewhere than YouTube. You'd have to be on YouTube to begin with to reach them. Sure, there are Facebook and Twitter. But if you want to get off those as well (and I do)… good luck.
Youtube is not a chat app, where you have 10 alternatives (whatsapp, viber, wechat, fb, telegram, signal,...), but it's the site where most users search for videos, and if eg. wallmart had such a monopoly as youtube does, if they decide not to sell your products, you're basically fuked.
This is a good point. I've been hearing "deplatforming" as the word for what's happening and that seems more accurate than censoring. In part because if we call this censoring and then later the government actually does strictly ban this content - what do we call that?
I mean, corporations have the worst track record. A great number of governments managed to stay non-evil for centuries, even the ones that dipped their toes in censorship.
Honestly if it were my government (the Dutch one, which is okay, but also definitely not perfect) versus any random corporation, even one that has so far only displayed good and well-intentioned behaviour, benevolent even. Remember Google in the early 2000s? Yeah.
To turn from something so good, such a positive outlook on the future, idealism, etc, in less than two decades into the this global market dominating, employee mistreating, faceless, evil .. Moloch thing.
This can of course also happen to governments, but if you look at history, it's the exception. Whereas with capitalism and corporations, it seems to be the fucking rule. You just have to wait which ones grow big enough to just go completely predator on humankind.
Government-mandated or capitalism-mandated? What's the meaningful difference?
Well, maybe, historically, many governments have proven time and time again a meaningful capability to not simply turn Evil for many decades, centuries even. For corporations it seems utterly inevitable; they either grow and become evil, or they don't grow and die. Which happens over the span of one or two decades at the most.
Clearly, we should prefer government censorship, if anything. ...
For the most part, if I don't "do what YouTube/Google wants", then I'll just not use their products. If they want to "censor" me by not allowing me to post certain content, then I can put that content elsewhere.
On the other hand, if my government decides to censor me, they can force me to be quiet, either by monetary threats or physical threats. This is obviously much more of a deterrence.
> For corporations it seems utterly inevitable; they either grow and become evil, or they don't grow and die. Which happens over the span of one or two decades at the most.
Not really? Most corporations are not "evil", even if you choose to personify the corporation, which I think is a mistake.
While Google created that walled city, they also destroyed every other city into a pile of rubble after tapping into endless resources from a completely unrelated industry. YouTube had an unfair advantage over just about any other company trying to build something similar.
Google is famous for making things free until they are not, than your screwed. I like when they arbitrarily change rules about SEO, AMP's and such. Don't want to play by the new rules? No problem, you and your company will be thrown onto the scrap heap.
The more this metaphor is fleshed out the more it sounds like it's referring to civilization in general and how ancient cities/city-states actually operated (to some level of similarity).
Build a city, invite people in, tax them and rule them, and destroy or absorb every rival you can get away with. Have technology or resources your competitor doesn't have? Sucks to be them.
I guess I'm not that surprised that even though we can collectively build better systems for ourselves after time and lots of understanding where the alternatives lead us, our nature shows itself in various other areas.
Yeah, that's exactly how it was. Then we pushed for the rule of law, a set of fundamental rights, democracy, and a social safety net and while this stuff still happens it's a lot better than it was.
Time will tell if we're able to keep it up. Certainly there are new threats and opportunities.
Many of the of the same pundits supporting censorship on Google search and Youtube used to be extremely critical of Walmart's business practices. This isn't about principles.
As far as I know, no. You can request the desktop site and that should stop you from getting AMP pages as search results, but it doesn't always work either.
Apparently it's "for our own good" not to have the option to turn it off.
Ah, but we do know how to navigate the wilderness. You see, we built this city. We built it on ARP and IP. And we can build it again - next time with better foundations.
The gatekeepers underestimate how long tastemakers are willing to go without them to discourage long-term bad behaviour.
My only regret is that I did not contribute to building DuckDuckGo.
The problem isn't you and me, the problem is "the most".
In my time, we all hung out on IRC (well, some still do, but mostly for technical stuff). But IRC was like ARP and IP, you needed to set some parameters, enter a server address (that you had to look up in a paper magazone or had to ask a friend for it), you had to join a channel, that you had to find first (listing all channels was useless on larger ircnets), and then you could chat. ...and you had to be online to receive messages, which was a problem back then with dialup connections.
Then came "social networks" (myspace, facebook,...), where all you needed to know was "myspace.com", and they offered objectively "more" than irc (chat messages were recorded even if you were offline, photos, profile pages,...), and people started using those. So if you wanted to chat with friends, you had to make an account there. And most people slowly migrated to myspace, and then facebook, and so on.
Anyone can build a website, set up video streaming, buy virtual machines for video hosting, etc. But if "all of your friends" (97%(?) of video watchers) open up youtube, and search for videos there, and your video is not there, it's the same if you were alone on an empty irc channel with two other users on the irc server.
You can use other search engines, but the only one Mr. G tells you about is their own, and it consistently features YouTube above other sites.
If this kind of behavior from a market leader isn't a textbook anti-trust concern I don't know what is. It's remarkably similar to Microsoft featuring and promoting its own browser at the expense of others. The level of bundling and integration that they were attempting between IE and Windows, and which ultimately got the DoJ to act, has been going on in Android with Search and Chrome from day one.
Look up "search engine" on google and you find link to alternatives to google, and not google (of course you need to know what a search engine is and that it exists)
It was also possible to use Windows to download alternatives to Internet Explorer.
Microsoft got into hot water not because Windows blocked alternatives, but because it gave preference to Microsoft's own browser. Which is something that is normally perfectly legal and fine, but under US antitrust law it stops being fine once you're the market leader.
the Analogy to me is the Google run YouTube, Andriod and Search.
Google, it is believed and supported by much anecdotal evidence and some leaked documents, that google manipulates search to remove the "undesirable" competition like Minds, Gab, Bitchute, and others. Twitter, Facebook, and other Authoritarian Censorship supporting Silicon Valley companies are unaffected
Then there is Android where google blocks apps from anyone unless the adopt a censorship policy mirroring that of Google
Greed. Humanity has always been driven by greed, but the hope was that it would recognize and overcome this sin and get to the next level. This hasn't happened. I have a weird feeling that humanity (or rather this civilization that started about 10k years b.c.) has just missed the critical point when it needed to take off. The greed was too heavy and we've started losing altitude. In practice, losing altitude manifests as the raising temperatures: the only way to solve this problem is to overcome greed.
A lesson that's impossible to follow when all the land is already owned, unless everyone gets the ability to create a full fledged ISP in their basement.
> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
Reminds me of the retort to libertarian/anti-big-government goals: "Lots of things become a government"
You forgot the part about how Emperor G would come and burn your house to the ground if you tried to build outside the city because building houses was his idea.
But wait, they didn't invent building houses. But Arbiter W lives in the walled city and the Emperor gives him gifts. Arbiter W considers Emperor G to be the person who owns the idea of building houses, and Aribter W is the one that sent the arsons out to your place, so you are now shit out of luck with a burning house.
I'm sorry, this just flew over my head. What is this analogy about? Is Google DoS'ing third party websites? Deranking them? Suing for patent infringement? Who's W?
YouTube's policy appears to ban videos that "promise users they will see something but instead directs them off site in order to view." As far as I can tell, mentioning that you have a Twitch channel should be fine, but creating a video called "my sick game livestreaming" whose content is a guy telling you to go somewhere else to watch your sick livestreaming might be seen as this type of spam. Honestly, that sounds pretty reasonable to me. Maybe I'm missing a story somewhere about them doing something worse?
> creating a video called "my sick game livestreaming" whose content is a guy telling you to go somewhere else to watch your sick livestreaming might be seen as this type of spam.
this happens a lot with many twitch streamers who also do youtube. I don't think it's banned under youtube.
They mention the Twitch or Floatplane streams or streaming all the time. Either last week or the week before that they had an issue with the Youtube and Floatplane streams, but Twitch was doing fine.
Would you link to those rules? Curious what the exact text is.
If I recall right, they have said that there were not that many users who came from youtube so it doesn't matter much, and that wan show itself isn't really a money maker in the first place but rather a place where they can vent and just talk a bit about random stuff. They later changed their setup so the same stream goes to youtube, twitch and floatplane at the same time but they don't know if that is within the youtube rules.
The original analogy was that you're not allowed to build a house elsewhere. You seem to be analogously talking about selling said house within the perimeter of the original city.
Doesn't Twitch have similar rules regarding not advertising other streaming sites? I mean, its reasonable trying not to give free advertisement for your competitors.
And if you built a really nice house and people saw leaving the city to join your new house community. The G would just buy your house and move everyone in the walled city.
But they are not instructionals on how to commit crimes. They are instructionals on how to bypass security systems, and that may or may not be a crime depending on your relationship with the entity controlling the security system.
The same argument could be used to ban any videos showing weapons being used (target practice or demonstration dummies) or any martial arts. Because who knows whether viewers will use that knowledge against live targets. That would include a ban of all military combat and training videos.
Importantly: understanding how to bypass security systems is an implicit dependency of understanding how to defend oneself against your own security systems being bypassed by others. Instead of allowing ordinary people to educate themselves on how they might go about defending themselves against cybercrime, YouTube has effectively decided that "nah, it'd be better for the common folk to be entirely helpless to cybercriminals".
Videos that involve weaponry are already either banned outright or heavily hidden and demonetized on YouTube. There was a channel (not sure if it still exists) that was about making different kinds of slingshots. SLINGSHOTS. And YouTube came for them a few years ago. The content was popular and the audience loved it. Google, however, did not. They declared it in violation of their community guidelines and swiftly stripped away the creators livelihood.
It's important to realize that we're not just talking about "oh some entertainment is no longer available" here but, in most cases, someone or groups of people just went from being able to feed their families to not.
As far as I can tell, a slippery slope is nothing more than a projection based on current and past data. I think it’s foolish to cast out such projection for the mere reason that they are projections. Rather, we ought to debate the quality of the data and model feeding the projection.
A reply to you makes the unsubstantiated claim that YouTube is a profit-seeking company. They ignore the fact that, no, YouTube has not operated as a profit-seeking company. The reason YouTube is, and will remain, the pre-eminent video platform is because it was run at a profound loss for over a decade, losing hundreds of millions of dollars at a clip, for no reason other than to totally suppress competition. Framing them as some kind of capitalist company is genuinely false.
If you wish to build a competitor to YouTube, your first task is to secure a billion dollars or so to build a competitive infrastructure with investors who are prepared to lose money on its operation for no less than a decade and quite possibly forever (or until Google goes bankrupt).
> The reason YouTube is, and will remain, the pre-eminent video platform is because it was run at a profound loss for over a decade, losing hundreds of millions of dollars at a clip, for no reason other than to totally suppress competition.
No one actually knows whether YT is technically profitable as a sole entity. So the premise of your argument and the argument you're referring to is basically flawed unless you have insider information.
Your local auto parts store prices oil lower than a mechanic can get it for, just to bring people in the door to sell them other items.
This is a well known tactic; these items are called "loss leaders". The fact that in this environment other people have successfully made video sharing websites (without a billion dollars, no less) means that the environment is competitive, even with the loss leader tactic.
On TOP of that, "Sharing videos" is not something that is required for civil society. It's an ancillary waste of time, but in no way owed to the public sphere.
They are a for profit company and can do what ever they want. regardless if their membership is free or not.
There are other choices out there. They may not be the best. People can build their own youtube if they want to.
At least in the USofA you can build something similar with your own rules.
youtube can be taken down, but people appear to be too lazy or unaware of what youtube is doing slowly. Taking away certain liberties that used to be available in YouTube.
Its more about the arbitrary practices which affect people’s livelihood while youtube retains all the profits from content it eventually disagrees with
This anticompetitive behavior can be curbed using the people’s government in ways that have nothing to do with free speech
It's like how free speech is both a reference to the first amendment and a concept in and of itself, meaning that you can support free speech in private spaces, without supporting it as a requirement under law. There's always confusion over the difference between what should be allowed under law and how things should be ideally.
Except that slopes are actually slippery sometimes. Look at the recent, and quite rapid, normalization of physical violence in American political argumentation.
Are politicians literally shooting each other again, like Aaron Burr & Hamilton? In all seriousness, if anything is new in our political discourse, it is sensitivity to violent language.
Emperor G will use his massive power to influence the elections of the Gods, only allows those sympathetic to the Emperor's goals a voice to talk to the people in the city
One effective way to protest this would be to report videos by high-profile companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google itself.
Take a few minutes to look for a video about Azure or AWS or GCP, or a video of a presentation at a conference around such things, and report it as Inappropriate content citing the relevant terms of service.
Be very careful only to report content that conforms to the above description — the point here is to show YouTube where they're wrong by forcing them into direct confrontation with their own vested interests.
Bonus irony points will be conceded to correctly flagging a Google Project Zero video, or a YouTube security team video, as in violation of the terms of service as stated.
Again, please do not do this indiscriminately. Use your judgement on how to create the maximum exposure of stupidity through honest and careful judgement of what obviously should be permitted and yet does not comply with the rules as stated today.
EDIT: Per commenters below — if you behave improperly and report a ton of videos inappropriately, you very well could get your account banned. If you're worried about this, report one video only. Be selective, use your single vote, and then move on.
> Bonus irony points will be conceded to correctly flagging a Google Project Zero video, or a YouTube security team video, as in violation of the terms of service as stated.
Without reading the ToS too carefully, I'm all but certain academic and industry-leading security work is deliberately carved out. Clearly this rule is designed to disallow liability concerns like a viral "how to see someone else's snapchats!" video, etc...
In the case of the linked tweet, it seems to have also hit a legitimate-seeming-if-not-industry-leading security source as a false positive. And that's bad, and a reason to oppose this policy in general.
But treating this as an "Ah hah! Hypocrisy!" kind of thing is missing the point and not going to help anyone. You know what they're trying to do.
Sadly, this is the moment where the terms of service that do permit such work would have been precisely what we need to counter the direction of the entire post. I hope you or someone are able to discover it and cite it here. (I couldn’t manage to find the terms from my device, but that’s likely more my device’s fault than any. I’ll try again later if I remember, but it might be too late for today’s comment.)
On this page (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964?hl=en) of the Community Guidelines they say you may not post “Instructional hacking and phishing [content]: Showing users how to bypass secure computer systems or steal user credentials and personal data.”
Interpret that how you will. It seems broad enough to include academic/security work.
I'm always curious what people think my username means. I thought of it when I was only starting to learn English at around age 10, and my young brain thought it would be amazing to combine "game" and "biting" (as in, eating games, since I loved playing them). I only discovered the word gambit much later.
At least in real life you get a chance to face your opponent, even if it's a goliath and david mismatched weight-class scenario. An angry mob may be outgunned by the police, but at least they can still throw bricks. What can realistically be done online to hurt Google? Does there exist a digital brick heavy enough for google to even notice you throwing it?
For a number of years now you have to give a phone number to make an account. Doesn't need to be a one-to-one mapping, but it still connects the accounts.
It can be evaded by using multiple phone numbers, but if you're working that hard to not be violated by Google then chances are you aren't using Google in the first place.
> For a number of years now you have to give a phone number to make an account. Doesn't need to be a one-to-one mapping, but it still connects the accounts.
Even if the number is required (a sibling comment challenges that), it only connects your accounts if you only have one phone number, or all the phone numbers you have and use for Google accounts are publicly (or privately but through Google) tied to your identity. Otherwise it does not, to Google, connect the accounts.
I thought they keep track of "associated accounts" via IP address, browser cookies, fingerprinting and so on. There have been plenty of instances where innocent Google Acounts have been terminated due to a different account holder's activity on the same machine.
It depends, if you are signing up on a mobile device (say creating an account as part of an Android device setup) it is absolutely required in my direct experience with no way to bypass it.
However if you create a new account via a desktop browser, it's not been required.
for your first account, it is not required. once they think you are opening more than one, or they think you may be a bit, a working non-voip humber is required.
This will be ineffective. Google whitelists many channels by large organizations and they are sheltered from any such reports. If 200k reports came in on the next Microsoft video posted, someone at YouTube might notice, but the video would never be taken down. You should read (as should everyone else) Eric Schmidt's book 'A New Digital Age'. In it he lies out his view. Basically (and obviously this is my perspective, this is the meaning not the language he uses to sell it), because Google is rich, they are Better. The teeming masses of the unwashed must be yolked by their betters. Left to their own devices, the public would destroy themselves and it is the responsibility of Google and other gigacorps to create culture in order to preserve civilization.
> because Google is rich, they are Better. The teeming masses of the unwashed must be yolked by their betters. Left to their own devices, the public would destroy themselves and it is the responsibility of Google and other gigacorps to create culture in order to preserve civilization
(probably an unpopular opinion, but...) sounds like neoliberalism
Really? It is almost the textbook definition of Conservatism. Not like 'Republicans are conservative', but the political science sort of Conservatism that ruled the world for centuries, the ideology that supports monarchies, dictatorships, theocracies, etc. The belief that the rights of the state (or church or similar) are primary, that some people are 'special' in a way that destines them to lead while the majority are destined to follow because they are constitutionally incapable of anything else. A refutation of that was the meaning of "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence which was the first official codification of Liberalism. Liberalism then conquered the world, but I imagine there's nothing absolute in place that would prevent it from re-emerging.
well, neoliberalism is a weird thing because it means different things to different people, but wikipedia puts it thusly[1]:
> economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society
basically how “gigacorps” rule society and public needs to be lead by private institution because they can’t rule themselves fits very much (in my opinion) with neoliberal thinking... and in more modern times neoliberal thinking very much has an anti-democratic and more capital-centered (or you could say elitist) orientation...
[edit] just to be clear, what i mean to say is that neoliberalism shouldn’t be confused with classical liberalism even if they have similar origins, with neoliberalism being more closer to the conservative ideal economically (not socially per se)
I can say from experience this does not work at scale. YouTube has allowed large public accounts to be in blatant violation of the terms of service. They are selectively enforced.
This reminds me of the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia. They protested against the Communist regime by reporting to the it its own violations of its laws and agreements. It was a brilliant way of unveiling the lies of their government. Somehow, this approach is very similar.
You can make it a PR issue. Go through reporting and if the videos clearly violate TOS and aren't taken down, point out the double standard to the activist press.
Except the activist press only cares about their side. If you're censoring anything they don't like or critical of them, they will shower you with praise.
They will actually cheer at Google to ban more. Just wait until a US President, British PM, or other leader they like is in power - they'll beg Google to merge with the government.
In practice it’s playing the outrage lottery: you can’t complain not winning if you don’t buy into it, but you only have one in a million chance to have your issue blow up to any proportion, and then some more astronomically low chance it leads to anything.
I am still thinking about the Vox presenter Carlos Maza who painstakingly documented and published how youtube didn’t enforce its hate speech rules, gathered 20 000 retweets, got an official youtube account reply to assure they’ll look into it. And nothing (well, some more harrasment and hate speech)
It seems to be very polarizing yes. Then Steven Crowder's channel has 4 000 000 subscribers, so someone asking youtube to punish the channel is garanteed to have "strong opinions" facing him.
asdf21 is implying that your strategy probably won't be effective because YouTube may only enforce this policy selectively (i.e. not on their own parent's content or other powerful entities).
can you clarify which options to click on? I dont see a label that best fits this complaint. there are options like terrorism/child abuse/offensive content, etc.
There's a lot of bad content on the Internet, and a lot of people wanted to ban it. And the free speech absolutists said, that's a slippery slope. Once you start restricting speech beyond whatever is illegal, there will be no end to the demands to ban certain content.
And a lot of us said, slippery slopes are silly arguments. All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence. We can evaluate these things individually on their own terms.
I don't think this changes the idea that the slippery slope is a silly argument.
Aren't we evaluating these things on their own terms now? It's definitely possible to have a YouTube that is harsh on calls to violence but allows cyber-security instructionals.
We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.
edit:
I should not have used "we" above, since only Alphabet controls the platform.
To clarify, I don't think this is the natural end of a "slippery slope" from removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube.
This was not an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that takes down violent content and leaves educational material up.
If it makes them money and no one in power objects, it stays up (see harassment of Carlos Maza). If it jeopardizes those in power or YouTube's bottom line, it comes down.
A slippery slope is only a fallacy if you can't demonstrate a downward slide. Once you can demonstrate that slide, the issue needs to be taken more seriously. I believe that over the last two years, we have seen a dramatic increase in censorship from the most powerful companies in the world. I'm not even sure that our governments have the will or power to stop them at this point.
A big problem with critics of "slippery slope absolutists" is that often when someone says "Youtube just banned porn, you don't care now but one day they'll come for something you love" the response is "dude that's such a slippery slope, that won't happen." In other words: we just classified the end-state as a correct slippery slope, and now we're thinking that the end-state will never happen because that one argument was wrong.
A correct slippery slope identification is when someone says "A happened, thus Z will happen." That's a stretch. But "A happened, then B, C, D, E, F, and G... Z is looking more likely", its no longer a slippery slope. Its a valid concern. The slope is slippery and we're falling down it. The first case can still be right, even if we only had one data point at the time. Its incorrect to assert it is absolutely right, but its also incorrect to dismiss it just because there's only one data point.
Slippery Slopes are, absolutely, among the weakest logical fallacies to be proven wrong by internet armchair warriors with the Fallacies wikipedia page open in another tab. We can make the easy jump all the way to Goodwin's Law and assert that it is a known historical fact that people in 1930s Germany felt the same thing as these armchair warriors when the Socialists were drug away. And then the trade unionists. And then the Gypsies. And the Jewish population. And tens of millions of good people were killed. Slippery Slopes are absolutely a real thing. Having a fallacy named after them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Thank you. Listing to people intone about how dumb slippery slopes are makes one wonder if they think the world is 100% stochastic without a trend in sight.
Every other HN discussion I've seen about YouTube banning content lately has been full of people insisting that because Google moderates their content at all, they are morally obliged to use their powers to police the politics of the nation. That's not so much a slippery slope as it is a slippery cliff face. Probably the only reason this one is different is because they're going after something HN regulars care about.
It is possible to have a Youtube like this. Its also possible to have a Youtube that allows porn, or a Youtube that exclusively hosts videos from large media companies because its too risky to allow random people to upload any of these things.
All of these are possibilities. Some of them are more likely than others. But you want to know the least likely possibility? The one with chances so unrealistically impossible that it practically will not happen? Its the possibility that Moderation will land on the point in the Gray Area that you believe is Fair.
Why is that? Its because everyone's point is different, and its insanely difficult to even define that point during day-to-day enforcement. So, Youtube, serving millions of users, having thousands of humans and millions of lines of code running enforcement, will continually become more conservative. Someone is outraged? Ban it. An advertiser is outraged? Oh damn, make a policy. Making a policy is easy. Reverting is is very difficult. At its very foundations this is why the world gets more and more conservative over time.
This is why freedom of speech is such an important thing. The first, best option is to find a gray area that is perfect for everyone... which is impossible. The second best option is to allow anything. Anything is better than nothing, and its also probably better than the conservative, whitewashed world that we're headed toward.
But, then again; they can run their platform however they want. And most people think they should ban violence... and self-harm... and suicide... and directions for making explosives... and hacking? Well, maybe there is somewhere they should stop. No one ever said it was easy. Or that allowing everything is the right move for them. But, the reality is, if they keep changing the rules, then the rules will eventually slide toward gross conservatism. That's the future of the platform. And next decade, a new platform will replace them, and the same thing will happen to them. Freedom of speech isn't necessary in private platforms like this; generally speaking, given enough time, the markets will take care of it.
That's why I'm fine with the government staying out of it(free speech) and letting the rest of us squabble over and it figure it out ourselves. Users will pressure Youtube, Youtube will pressure users, platforms will come and go, and the pendulum will continue to swing.
Instead of "doomsdaying" over Youtube policy I need to change the strings on the world's smallest violent. It got quite the workout playing for Daily Stormer and Alex Jones..
> I don't think this changes the idea that the slippery slope is a silly argument.
Why? "slippery slope" holds when each change makes it easier to enact further change in the same direction, and that seems to be the case here. "censor CP" + "censor porn" is an easier sell than the original "censor CP" step was, thanks to infrastructure already being in place. Adding copyright on top of that was easier still. And then violent content, and then aid to terrorism, and then politics we don't like, and gun repair videos, and ammo reloading, and...
Now we're at "hacking instructions", which is a hell of a way down that slope.
> We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.
Perhaps we're running down the slope and not sliding, but that doesn't increase the chance we're about to turn around.
> We took a step too low and need to climb back up
This is not going to happen; we will keep sliding. We are not the ones doing the stepping, because we do not control the platform. What we can do is persuade people to use distributed and/or federated alternatives.
I was trying to say that this is not the natural end of a "slippery slope" of removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube.
I don't think this was an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that left educational material up. It was a choice by a powerful corporation acting in the interest of other powerful forces. If they had a real competitor they might be under pressure to leave useful videos like this up.
YouTube is definitely in the wrong, distributed alternatives are a good way of providing access to this important information.
> All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence
I agree that it's reasonable to ban "calls to violence", but the "overt racism " part is extremely subjective. Why is racism worse than hacking? I, based on my own principles, think racism is 'worse' than hacking, but most people's principles are completely different from mine, and I think a considerable part of the population thinks that hacking is morally "worse" than racism, even if they don't realize that they think that.
Different people might have different views about whether "racism is worse than hacking," but that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and concede that everyone is entitled to their own views. Explicitly racist policy still exists, and racism became socially unacceptable in the first world only very recently (in historical terms). But the fight against racist policy has partially succeeded in changing the world, and racism no longer falls within the Overton window.
Almost everyone agrees that there should be some room for objectionable and offensive content, but 'the worst' content must be censored and criminalised. There is very little consensus on where to draw the line. Banning hacking videos (if that's an accurate description of what occurs in practice) crosses the line for me, but at the same time, hackers don't need YouTube to share videos.
Behaviour that is racist or illegal in one place is very often acceptable in another. YouTube as a global website has to remain fair.
For example, Cape Town puts on a minstrel festival every year[1]. Should YouTube ban videos of it? It is surely intensely racist and offensive from an American perspective, yet it is also a culturally significant event in Cape Town and it seems unreasonable to apply American/Anglo definitions of racism to South Africans thousands of miles away who see the world from a different perspective.
I don't think YouTube could exist without banning certain kinds of content. But at the same time, I wish they do so lightly. Because homogeneity of thought is far more dangerous to a society than any video.
It is almost as if the founding fathers gave a lot of thought and consideration to the first amendment. Maybe we shouldn't willy nilly stomp all over it.
Of course they have a point. It just takes getting burned a few times before people learn why “you do you even when I don’t like you” is an important philosophy.
We become accustomed to restrictions when they’re not against us. The MPAA is a censorship cartel. But most people couldn’t be bothered to give a shit and those that do are happy for it. Who cares if movies forcefeed sexual negativity as long as it means little Timmy will never see tits?
Eh, I think there is a difference, and it should be obvious, which is why it should be discernible. There is something to learn from hacking videos. The people tend to put them up "in good faith", a critical component of my argument.
Hate speech, calls for racial violence and other overtly harmful speech with no redeeming value, lesson, or skillset are discernible from videos about skills that could be used for good or bad.
A video about how to shoot accurately under pressure isn't bad. A video about how to take cover and kill as many people as you can in a church when the revolution begins is harmful.
Showing unpatched vulns that have been reported in IoT devices, or teaching about discovering web vulnerabilities, is good. Publishing a specific zero-day with no warning to the vendor in a way that would compromise many peoples' PII or banking data should be banned.
I’m in that boat. I thought the slippery slope argument was just fear mongering. How embarrassing. Last I heard anti GMO content is to be banned. Bizarre.
At this point I don’t know why “slippery slope” is called a logical fallacy when so much experience has proved otherwise.
Would you then agree that any communist leaning YouTube channel is by definition a "call to violence", since communist movements have resulted in deaths of 110 million people in 20th century? And therefore the channel must be shut down.
Rejecting that 'definition' does not imply the truth of any slippery slope argument. I think it's easy to distinguish between communist leaning YouTube channels, and communist leaning YouTube channels that contain explicit calls to violence. A 'slippery slope' argument assumes the opposite: that once we accept that some content is prohibited, we cannot avoid the conclusion that all content is prohibitable by an arbitrary censor.
Youtube is banning racist videos with no explicit calls to violence. Communism has killed more people than racism. Maybe the truth does not matter though, people are just doing what they can to not get sued...
these seem fairly unrelated, honestly. They could have just as easily left the bad content in and still moved on removing videos on circumventing device/computer security. The bad content removal isn't a precedent that allowed for the removal of videos that affect their (and their peers') bottom line: they had that capacity from the onset.
As terrible as it may be (I haven't seen what is being removed to say), it is their site and their rules. So it then falls upon the users to decide if another site that will provide security bypassing videos is worth it to go to.
Right. Most "free speech absolutists" are only absolutists when it comes to viewpoint neutrality, not when it comes to issues like incitement, false advertising, or defamation.
And frankly, a lot of people who loudly proclaim their love of free speech aren't even close to being absolutists in that sense; they'll talk up the marketplace of ideas and the importance of rational discourse as long as they're under threat, then suddenly lose interest in the issue when restrictions are applied to the outgroup.
Except YouTube hasn't even banned overt racism and calls to violence. You can still find plenty of it on the platform. Once a channel is large enough, there's effectively nothing you can do short of copyright infringement to get banned.
'Slippery slope' is an illogical way to argue things. There are better arguments against censorship, most notably: There is no cogent argument in favor of censorship. It's that simple. People don't like simple truth, but really, that's their problem. The fact of the matter is, there is exactly 1 person who can control the impact of any expression - the audience. No one else can do it. When the audience wishes to abdicate their responsibility to determine their response, and wish to pawn it off on the creator or anyone else, they have abandoned civilization.
Does this mean that all the reverse engineering videos, con talks, prof of exploit demos, CTF walkthroughs', and fuzzing tutorials will be removed? What about videos showing me how to use tools like Twistlock? Will they be exempt, but videos about burp be banned?
What constitutes a "secure" computer system?
Side note, I guess its time to fire up youtube-dl. Are there any channels that need to be archived? I normally just watch what comes up in a search, not anyone in particular.
Exploiting a buffer overflow in sprintf was a lab assignment in my computer architecture course, iirc I had to watch a few youtube videos to really understand what I needed to do (my TA wasn't particularly helpful).
Not to go all slippery slope, but are BosnianBill and the Lock Picking Lawyer next?
I'm not going to be able to take a look for a few days, but I'd be grateful if someone made sure that most of the Defcon talks were archived or mirrored somewhere.
Please use tubeup [1] to backup at risk videos to the Internet Archive. It uses youtube-dl on the backend for retrieving content, subtitles, etc, and will properly set metadata for the item in the archive. The content will be darked if there’s an issue serving it, and the IA staff and storage system will throttle you if necessary (which will bubble up as s3 timeouts).
DEFCON, CCC, and other infosec groups need to move to peertube ASAP.
Someone suggested federating with the PeerTube network to the people maintaining the backend for https://media.ccc.de , but there doesn't seem to have been a decision on that yet.
I think ippsec recently set up a mirror for himself where you can download all of his videos, but his videos on youtube are tremendous help on my way to OSCP. He does walkthroughs of boxes hosted on hackthebox shortly after they retire.
It's a shame to see this type of content at risk of being blacklisted.
I've been trying to argue for awhile that if the major public venues become privately moderated that it would have a chilling effect on free speech. I continually get the rhetoric that free speech only applies to the government (it doesn't; the First Amendment only applies to the government but the ideal of free speech is a universal human right) and that censorship is something only the government can do (also not true for the same reason).
This is not a new concept. In 1859, John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that the tyranny of the majority and the de facto censorship that they can create is just as if not far more dangerous to actual liberty than government control.
If we have laws for common carriers, and laws like network neutrality, then there must also be laws protecting the right of the people to participate in public discourse even when the venue is privately held. It is vital to the existence of a free state!
Better perhaps, but what's your proposed path to implementing that? Is it achievable, and what eggs get broken in the course of cooking that omelette?
One huge roadblock I can see is that you would need to address the question of what would replace privately held platforms? If the suggested replacement is something the government operates, you now have to address how that conflicts with the overall neoliberal philosophy of government that we've been operating under for the past couple of decades that precludes the notion of such a thing being operated in that manner. So now we're looking at quite a lot of smashed eggs.
Whereas the former suggestion is something that has, at first glance, a reasonably straightforward path to implementation via legislation, and related precedent to boot. It's easier to make a targeted override of a behavior that is an inherent part of the system under which it emerged, than it is to overhaul the entire system to correct that particular behavior.
> If the suggested replacement is something the government operates
No. That is the exact opposite of helpful. What you need is something that nobody/everybody operates, in the style of email. A protocol (like SMTP), not a platform (like Facebook).
A government could usefully fund the development of such a thing though.
I like your idea since it would mean more self-hosting and decentralisation, but I'm afraid it's the much more complicated way of doing things, and if it could ever happen, I'm not sure it can anymore given that we already have these platforms and especially the USA government would never shut them down, citing economic and national security (everyone's data now has to pass through the USA) reasons.
"More complicated" isn't really the issue. It's the same amount of complicated as email and people use that. And people use it by mostly using gmail and other big providers -- but that's not really a problem as long as setting up your own and still communicating with everybody who uses gmail continues to be an option. It means Google can kick you off of gmail but they can't kick you off of email.
> especially the USA government would never shut them down, citing economic and national security (everyone's data now has to pass through the USA) reasons.
On the other hand, it means every other government has every incentive to make the alternate succeed so that doesn't happen. How about the EU take that fine money they've been sucking out of Google and use it to fund a solid free competing social media protocol implementation.
That's an extremely difficult problem given the speed at which social media changes and the slowness of legal changes. Look at the explosion of Discord. Also, social media isn't a commodity service. What happens if YouTube is broken up? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter?
It seems safer to also require that any platform that offers free, open access to social media style content not show any bias towards that content unless it is otherwise illegal. If you want to pretend to be a public venue, you've got to have the responsibility of keeping a public venue.
> What happens if YouTube is broken up? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter?
If you're going to break them up, you don't do it along those lines. You don't need to have six separate Facebook clones so that five of them can fail or flail around until they get bought back up by the others. Look at what happened with the AT&T breakup.
The lines you break them up on are the preexisting ones. Facebook can't continue to own Instagram and in general major social media companies can't buy competitors. Split YouTube off from Google so that YouTube competitors have equal access to Google's ad network and Google searches don't have any reason to suspiciously favor YouTube videos. That sort of thing.
> It seems safer to also require that any platform that offers free, open access to social media style content not show any bias towards that content unless it is otherwise illegal.
That is hopeless. To give an obvious example, a lot of spam isn't strictly illegal. You do want platforms to filter out content that all of their users want filtered out.
The problem is when they filter out content that some of their users actually want to see, merely because some other users don't want anybody to see it. But there is no principled test for that because the spammers and trolls will insist that they want to see spam and trolling while the censors insist that anything they don't like is spam and trolling that nobody wants to see.
It's inherently subjective. On top of that, you have the "anything not prohibited is now mandatory" problem where you have something which is questionably legal and if you allow it and then a court says it's illegal you're screwed but if you remove it and then a court says it's legal you're also screwed.
The only real solution is to fracture the power to banish into a million separate pieces so that everybody has a little but nobody has too much.
I'm so torn on this issue. I dislike the idea of the government interfering with private business very much, and I can see how easily it can get scary.
That said, it really is insane how influential and widely used a well made application/website can get (youtube/discord/etc). I really cannot think of something that YouTube could do that would make people leave the platform. The amount of users and content on there just totally cements their position.
In this specific situation I think tech-savvy people can find where these videos will be located. In other situations, it's pretty strange/scary. I wish people were more open to alternative platforms. Sometimes I talk about DuckDuckGo and get the weirdest stares
> I'm so torn on this issue. I dislike the idea of the government interfering with private business very much, and I can see how easily it can get scary.
When corporations were first created, they used to have to show how what they were doing was for the benefit of the community. The protections against risk afforded to companies was once granted only in exchange for the ability of a company to add real value to the people and the state. This made sense because very few people would primarily profit, so it made sense to get a guarantee or promise that the company would invest into the community. Companies had a responsibility to ensure that happened.
None of that is true anymore, but that's not because it's immoral to require companies to invest in and have a responsibility for improving and supporting the community. Those corporations only exist by the leave of the state, and in a western republic, that means the leave of the people.
Food companies are responsible for producing healthy food.
Automobile companies are responsible for producing safe vehicles.
Social media services should be responsible for creating environments and discussions that benefit the people.
> Food companies are responsible for producing healthy food. Automobile companies are responsible for producing safe vehicles. Social media services should be responsible for creating environments and discussions that benefit the people.
Are you proposing regulation/legislation for social media services?
Economies of scale and network effects mean that government (or comparable entity) will have to go out of their way to foster competition way beyond what the market will bear. How can we make this happen?
to participate in public discourse even when the venue is privately held
So if I come to your house, to your birthday party, and I start teaching people (or just talking) about torture, scams, rape techniques, differences of classes/races/whatever, etc. or simply teaching kids how to hack an ATM, will you be OK with it? Would you ask me to leave?
Edit: saying all of that possibly while arguing that "it's just educational" even when it may or may not be the real reason.
There are thousands of hours of excellent cybersecurity content hosted on YouTube. The possibility of losing this wealth of information and history is shocking to me.
Time to start the archive effort. And to finally appreciate what so many other communities have gone through when they've found themselves on the wrong side of one of the internet behemoths. I feel naive.
Shocking indeed. Imagine if this thinking was applied to other classes of content. Banning game emulator videos. Banning piracy videos. Banning unauthorized iphone repair videos.
- Many convention talks are really good and are too many to list
- OWASP
- zseano
- hackerone
- Bugcrowd (Jason Haddix's stuff is a pretty important pillar)
- OWASP
- DarkOperator
- Absolute AppSec
- KacperSzureEN
- PwnFunction
- LiveOverflow
There are a ton more, these are just ones I've been watching in the past 6 months or so.
The "solution" is choosing your priorities and being willing to make sacrifices, which, in my experience, many people are not willing to do.
"I don't want to be on a censorious megacorporate platform." Great! You can do this, you'll just have to be on the #2 platform rather than the #1 platform, and there won't be as many "free" tools & services. "What?? How can you suggest I abandon the #1 platform? I need all those free tools and services + the exposure of the #1 platform!" :shrug: OK, in that case "free tools and services" & "exposure" are higher priorities to you than user respect, privacy, free expression etc., and you're making the right choice to stay on youtube.
It feels a lot like people want to have their cake and eat it too.
Our (as users) only negotiating leverage with a provider like google is willingness to leave their platforms. If you're are not willing to do that, all this hand-wringing and complaining is just wasted breath as google has ~0 incentive to take your complaints seriously.
I think the truth here is that saying "Just use another platform" isn't taking into account reality.
Let's say for a moment that Google isn't evil (hypothetical, I know) and that you want a Facebook alternative. Google themselves tried to make one - and failed spectacularly.
If Google can't make a Facebook alternative, what chance does anyone else have? In what way does a #2 platform ever even approach Facebook while FB can just purchase them or otherwise stop them before a critical mass of users switch?
I'm very free market, but this is a clear monopoly and social media sites seemingly requires new rules that didn't exist for telecoms.
Youtube updating its policy to ban videos they have already monetized from, while the creators get nothing. Youtube is a monopoly. Creators need to get off YT, and onto something else if it exists.
Herein lies the problem.. Most creators/uploaders know on some level that YT is a toxic monopoly and would be happy to jump ship. Granted some more than others, but I've never observed any sense of loyalty towards the platform - it's just where everyone goes to share and watch videos.
However, switching to vimeo/DTube/flixxo/etc means less views and smaller paychecks. Why would content creators in the same amount of effort for less recognition & money? Nothing will change until alternative services solve the problem of monetization & audience size.
Thus a chicken-vs-egg situation where viewers don't want to switch because their favorite uploaders are on YT, uploaders don't want to switch because all their viewers are on YT, and competitors can't convince investors to bankroll them without higher user counts. Meanwhile, the Big G/YT monolith keeps chugging along with thousands of employees and billions of dollars behind it, becoming more deeply entrenched every year. What's the solution?
What stops creators from uploading to both? Sure, they miss out on some revenue when people watch their video on Vimeo rather than YouTube. But once they are getting a significant portion of their views on another platform, that would likely mean the alternative platform is popular enough to offer reasonable compensation to creators and they can eventually stop sharing content on YouTube.
Less views means worse discovery. Basically, if they start to push their viewers to another platform, they'll be recommended less on YouTube. Like it or not, 99.999% of their potential viewers are only on YouTube, which means growth will stagnate. Worse than that, their videos will be shown less even to current subscribers so they'll lose income.
There really isn't a good solution that I can think of...
I'm glad you brought this up. This was the exact question I had a few years ago, when I began developing my idea for a solution.
What I considered to be the best approach is to break apart the idea of hosting content and sharing content with your audience in the same place. If you can share in one place and host in another, then switching content hosts ceases to be a problem; You can transfer your content to a different host while preserving the space in which you share, losing no audience or traction in the process.
I'm currently in the process of launching this platform, called MyNexus. If you'd like to learn more, or know anyone searching for a solution to these problems, my email is yaniv@mynexus.io.
That's where the business model comes in. To focus on being a positive tool for content creators, I decided to charge them a monthly fee to have their page on the platform. And I maintain absolutely no other means of revenue. The entirely of the business depends on creators finding it a useful, reliable, and trustworthy tool that is worth their money.
I know that doesn't strictly forbid banning certain content, but without the pressure of having to satisfy advertisers, etc., I don't expect to need to ban content. The only exception that comes to mind would be restricting certain content in order to comply with laws.
Please do follow up with any questions or concerns you have. My goal is to be transparent and to build trust, so I'm happy to address them.
Your edit doesn't go far enough. He encouraged hate against the parents of the children killed at the Sandyhook mass shooting. Yes, Jones has a right to be a crackpot, but it ends when it infringes on the rights of the people Jones' audience harassing.
You may be applying an uneven standard by wanting to ban the speech that turns your stomach, but not the speech that turns the Corporate Overlord's stomachs. You could argue that hacking videos encourage computer crime - the counterargument would be that there are plenty of reasons to talk about something other than to actually encourage people to do it. In fact, Alex Jones' defense in one court case he was in was that he was a satirist.
At the very least, these decisions should be made in court, where the judges are elected and the proceedings are public. Of course that can't happen because the courts have already decided in favor of the speech-miscreants. What Alex Jones was doing is absolutely permitted in our society; and I think there's some wisdom in the reasoning behind why that is.
There's nothing less popular than relativism in the midst of a moral outrage, but you have to bear in mind that some of your favorite things were probably at one time (and could easily become again) moral outrages. Alex Jones could just as easily have been caught "encouraging homosexuality in our children," "fomenting hate against church officials," "advocating against job creation," or anything else that the ruling party was against. You'd just have to change the names, places, and times.
He wanted the parents to research it for themselves, which usually means "Google around until you see some more conspiracy websites with the same story thereby becoming even more convinced." It's not entirely clear to me that he advocated for anything bad, although I will admit I don't watch his show. I do know that some of what people are repeating is not exactly true.
The US is one of the few countries that believes in a radical, unlimited right to free speech. Most other countries, it is not tolerated, and this has not lead to a slippery slope.
Claiming that the families of shooting victims are actually "crisis actors" would not be tolerated under British forms of slander/libel law; Nazi apologism/fetishism or rallying is not tolerated under German laws. These societies aren't just fine, they are actually the better for it.
If you feel that Germany or the UK are dystopias where ideological dissent is brutally suppressed, well, that's just your opinion, man.
If there was a horrible fact right under the surface, discussion of which was being successfully suppressed by German/UK speech laws, you would not hear about it.
Yeah, like when that German youtuber called out the total mishandling of several important issues by a major political party, and was slandered by some newspapers and stalked by journalists hanging out on his street. Said video is a fully sourced, well researched thing that calls out the insanity around the environment and other things. For example, the fussing about with coal, to save the measly 20k jobs that are in that sector, while just recently 80k jobs were lost due to cuts for spending on renewables. Or Ramstein airbase being used for US drones, and how that just gets shrugged off. Not even a shred of "tinfoil" (the slur that made blind obedience hip), all just very, very appalling facts.
He also got a lot of support, it's not like all media and all politicians attacked him. But those attacks also happened, including a person who dreamed herself future chancellor (at least as far as young people are concerned, she can completely forget that now) musing about whether it should even be "allowed", to just point out the list of hardcore failings before an election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX3Mz8pdFCs
Yes, we are better for Neonazis not being allowed to run around with swastikas, and I agree that many Americans don't quite get that, but there's plenty of dystopian-in-spe bullshit to be found, and that's not even getting started on the UK. At any rate, the laws that forbid displaying swastikas to glorify Nazism etc. weren't just decided nilly-willy, because "obviously" that had to be done. They took that decision seriously and discussed it in-depth, so exactly the opposite for these rationalizations for censorship by self-styled SV shepherds.
I’ve thought seriously about it; the biggest thing holding me back being the lack of a job waiting for me there. Perhaps I could pick my German back up.
Why do you think that’s relevant? In your mind, you can’t comment on something unless you’re personally involved in it? It is plainly evident that Europeans enjoy a high degree of freedom and a broad and open discourse despite the lack of an unlimited freedom of speech - and in fact often a broader discourse than occurs in the US.
Slippery slopes are not in fact an automatic thing, outside external pressure. We can in fact just ban the libel and stop there. Even the US already does that, to some degree. We can just ban Naziism, tolerating it is not a self-evident moral necessity, but rather one that we as a society have decided to value. Other societies do not.
To be just as crass and dismissive as you were to me - your unlimited right to say anything you want has already been breached even in the US. I assume you are moving to Somalia to pursue your maximal freedom in a Libertarian paradise?
> In your mind, you can’t comment on something unless you’re personally involved in it?
Well, as a German, it's just another instance of Americans who don't know 5% of what is going on here, using simplifications so gross they might as well be completely fabricated memes, to sidestep actually making a solid argument. I'm fine with it, I'm not going to fight that particular windmill. But it's really astonishing how a few scraps here and there tend to make Americans experts on Germany in their mind, as a general observation. It's flattering, like being pestered by someone you aren't interested in is still flattering.
> one that we as a society have decided to value
Individuals decide things, "we as a society" is BS, it doesn't exist, though it rings familiar. Nazis "as a society" decided Jews and others don't "have value". You need to be more precise than that.
> Well, as a German, it's just another instance of Americans who don't know 5% of what is going on here
Go on then, what exactly "is happening in Germany"?
I suppose this is where you reference the "immigrant hordes" and so on, and the need to "keep Germany for Germans"?
I am broadly familiar with German domestic politics. After all, they are EU politics, which are world politics. Germany is easily within the top 10 most influential countries on the world stage.
> Individuals decide things, "we as a society" is BS, it doesn't exist, though it rings familiar. Nazis "as a society" decided Jews and others don't "have value". You need to be more precise than that.
Oh, "we as individuals need to decide" on whether or not libel or aggression "have value" as constitutionally protected speech? Based on your argument upthread, I suppose you think it should be put up to a vote then?
Again: we can constitutionally decide that people shouldn't vote on whether "jews have value" but also constitutionally decide that Naziism has no value. Even America has decided, in principle, that certain kinds of speech are not protected.
You present a false dilemma here. Why do you think that is not a consistent argument?
> Germany is easily within the top 10 most influential countries on the world stage.
But that doesn't mean, say, banning swastikas was a decision that came easy or without deep deliberation and discussion. It also doesn't mean we're not riddled with people seeking to control language in all sorts of ways, or that just censoring stuff we "don't consider valuable" is automatically a good idea.
> Oh, "we as individuals need to decide" on whether or not libel or aggression "have value" as constitutionally protected speech?
No, I simply said the way you phrased it, it's an euphemism at best. Individuals make decisions. If you want to be able to say "we as a society" as a shorthand, meaning the people you agree with, minus the people you think you can simply declare unpersons, then you need to be actually able to point to a process where said society had that serious discussion.
> Based on your argument upthread, I suppose you think it should be put up to a vote then?
Why are you shifting the burden to me? You talk about "we as society", so what do you think how would that go? Just doing it? I mentioned it wasn't done nilly-willy in Germany for the swastika etc., you could look into that for a start.
> Even America has decided, in principle, that certain kinds of speech are not protected.
You initially said this:
> The US is one of the few countries that believes in a radical, unlimited right to free speech. Most other countries, it is not tolerated, and this has not lead to a slippery slope.
How you just shift from Alex Jones to Nazis is also noted, but not accepted. To just say "certain kinds of speech" is not good enough, and if you start like that, you can just expand nilly willy. I even already said Germany is better for having banned Nazis -- but the way it's going in America, where people who act like Nazis, want to see people lose their jobs at a drop of a hat for example, I wouldn't buy "let's ban certain kinds of speech" combined with the double think of "oh, it's just a private platform, we're not banning anything". If you want to talk Nazis and don't even see how that shit has red flags plastered all over it, I just don't know how to help sorry.
If you want to make something illegal, lobby to make it illegal. It's not as if in Germany you can do the things you cited in real life, just not on the internet. That's the elephant on the couch in all this. It's just technocrats using somewhat agreeable examples to get their foot in the door to circumvent all that pesky supreme court stuff, and that's closer to the Nazis than Alex Jones will ever be, as foul as he is.
So what do you want? Do you want video hosting to be open to all, regardless of how distasteful, or do you want someone else deciding which videos are acceptable and which are not?
He didn't say: Mr and Mrs So and So need to be attacked.
But he repeatedly painted a picture of a staged event where the participants were doing it to in order to take away your fundamental rights! They are lying to you! They want to take your freedom! I'm not willing to let that happen! People, America as we know it is about to die, and we can't let that happen! (weeps crocodile tears)
Then when it became known that many of the parents were being followed and harassed, Jones tacitly approved it by not telling the harassers to stop.
He was accusing the parents of aiding a conspiracy to stage a fake shooting. I can imagine being a parent who has just lost a child, only to be told that I was lying, and that my child either never existed or was still alive. It's a real ideological litmus test - exactly how turned can your stomach get before you call for an exception to free speech?
So he wasn't directing anybody to commit a crime? It's a deplorable scenario, but free exchange of ideas and beliefs still requires protection. The consequences of losing it are in the long-term far greater than personal grief.
He flat out lied about the Sandy Hook massacre and slandered victims of murder. He absolutely encouraged people to "take action on their own by looking into it". You can't claim satire on flat out repeated lies. Lies are not protected speech. This wasn't about the free exchange of ideas, this isn't a disagreement on policy, it was about propogating lies to people in order to make money.
Lets be clear with terms here; I wouldn't call for an exception to "free speech" even for Alex Jones. He has every right to say whatever he wants short of outright threats, etc.
But I certainly don't think anyone should be forced or required to give him a platform for which to broadcast his speech.
> But I certainly don't think anyone should be forced or required to give him a platform
This is where I think most people on both sides of the debate miss the point. Section 203 of the communications decency act provides protection from liability for platforms that host content provided by others. This is a very important law that I think most people see the value in. However it has a Good Samaritan clause which allows them to arbitrarily moderate content without losing that protection. Should these large platforms be able to exert absolute editorial control over the content they host? I think yes, they most certainly should be allowed to. But they should not be entitled to the liability protections afforded to common carriers if they choose to do so.
So basically you're suggesting that a forum about knitting couldn't restrict their content to just knitting topics without losing their copyright infringement protection?
I see the point you're trying to make but it's completely wrong. Platform like this one would be impossible without Section 203; I don't see why it's necessary to tie that together with other requirements. It's certainly not a logical follow on.
> I see the point you're trying to make but it's completely wrong.
If it is, then it’s not for the reason you provided. If I made Knitter News, and somebody posted a thread about gardening, then nobody would comment on it or up vote it. If I went into a knitting thread, and started posted gardening comments, then they would be downvoted.
It’s also not just copyright infringement protection, it protects against a broad range of liability.
The reason common carrier protections exist, is because the service providers do not control the content they disseminate, or the goods they transport, etc... Providing common carrier protections to platforms that exert editorial control over the content they publish is granting common carrier protections to service providers that are not common carriers.
Logically, this is precisely equivalent to providing common carrier protections to an ISP, but completely removing all regulations that mandate any form of net neutrality.
The law was specifically created to protect free expression online, and in the mid 90s, that’s exactly what it did. However since then, most online expression as become concentrated into a small handful of platforms, who all leverage their position (often in concert) to restrict expression to only that which they deem acceptable.
Regardless of what you think about their judgements of what is acceptable, the law is not consistent with other common carrier regulations, and it is absolutely not doing what it was originally designed to do.
> If I made Knitter News, and somebody posted a thread about gardening, then nobody would comment on it or up vote it.
What if you posted about gardening every 5 minutes, every day, from morning till night and every thread about knitting is drowned out completely. I've run a forum, this happens all the time.
> If I went into a knitting thread, and started posted gardening comments, then they would be downvoted.
OH! So now it's not enough to provide a forum, it also needs to have upvoting and downvoting?! How much other software must I develop? And censorship is ok as long as democratic? How much effort must I put into the software to ensure this?
> Providing common carrier protections to platforms that exert editorial control over the content they publish is granting common carrier protections to service providers that are not common carriers.
That's exactly the point. If they were common carriers, they wouldn't need that protection under the DMCA. I don't see how having moderation control means that they should be liable for content of their users. They are not editing the content, they are just allowing or disallowing. If you run a platform, you should under the same concepts of free speech be able to control that platform. In fact, that's really what a platform is -- it's not just a blob of disk space somewhere. Youtube is fundamentally different from Pornhub. How is that distinction possible in your mind?
> The law was specifically created to protect free expression online, and in the mid 90s, that’s exactly what it did.
Free expression online in any form would be impossible without it, even now.
> However since then, most online expression as become concentrated into a small handful of platforms, who all leverage their position (often in concert) to restrict expression to only that which they deem acceptable.
And yet there is literally nothing stopping you from posting a video to your own website that you pay for and distributing it to as many people as you want.
To say that the moment I put a blog online with comments that suddenly I have to host, with my own money, any comment that gets posted there is ludicrous. On the face it's completely illogical and completely against the very idea of free expression.
The most interesting thing here is really that there is no commercial transaction going on here. Common carriers charge for their services. YouTube doesn't charge you to host your video under the condition that they can remove anything they want. That's the terms. So now you're suggesting that they have to host everything for free? What if that isn't even economically possible?
According to your analogy, YouTube is no different from a news paper. All they do is collect content and publish it. The content can be user generated, it can written by people who don’t work for the news paper, it can be written by journalists from other papers. All they’re doing is decided what is and is not published, right? When I read it for free on their website, there is also no transaction taking place.
So if I start a news paper, and begin to publish completely false and libellous information about people, I should be entitled to a common carrier immunity? All I did was decide what was published.
> Free expression online in any form would be impossible without it, even now.
Free expression would be protected by removing the Good Samaritan clause, it’s not a necessary element of the law.
> To say that the moment I put a blog online with comments that suddenly I have to host, with my own money, any comment that gets posted there is ludicrous.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. If you wanted to moderate them you could create a moderation queue. But otherwise what you are trying to do is act as a publisher, but you simply don’t want the liability associated with it.
> And yet there is literally nothing stopping you from posting a video to your own website
There’s nothing stopping me from making my own ISP and running it however I like. Yet we still cherish regulated net neutrality principles as being an essential element of a free internet.
You haven’t really made an effort to refute my underlying claims here, which are:
Section 203 protections are not consistent with any other form of common carrier protections.
The law is currently having the opposite of its intended effect at the time of legislation. It has simply allowed a very small number of companies to exert editorial control over most of the worlds internet traffic, without having to accept any of the liability that should have come attached to that.
> According to your analogy, YouTube is no different from a news paper. All they do is collect content and publish it.
The alternative is that all websites do, in fact, become exactly like newspapers. Every bit of content would have to be submitted behind the scenes to editors who, in turn, would decide exactly what to publish, ensure nothing is libelous or copyrighted elsewhere, and edit the content appropriately.
Obviously, the Internet already existed as a place where content was posted immediately, openly, and moderated. So in order to continue to enjoy doing exactly what we were already doing here, then such an exception has to be made. That's it. It's not rocket science. It's not about free speech or freedom of expression. It's just about making the Internet possible.
> The law is currently having the opposite of its intended effect at the time of legislation. It has simply allowed a very small number of companies to exert editorial control over most of the worlds internet traffic, without having to accept any of the liability that should have come attached to that.
The point of the law is to not require editorial control. Some editorial control is always necessary. It would be impossible to run any website on the Internet without some editorial control just as it would be almost as impossible to run anything other than a newspaper on the Internet if editorial control was mandatory.
The fact that we are here having this conversion is proof that the law is having the exact intended effect it was supposed to have. You are the one trying to give it far more meaning and scope. And the more you expand the scope the more it goes into ridiculous territory that you have no good answer for.
You’re still just describing the status quo, without acknowledging any of the issues I’ve articulated.
This whole argument seems to run up against some of the values that HN would appear to hold most dearly.
HN discussions around net neutrality would suggest that this community thinks it’s one of the most important tools for protecting a free internet. However this argument is arbitrarily applied only to specific companies. I could go and create my own website, with my own ad network, and have my own YouTube. I could also go and create my own ISP that discriminates against content in a way that satisfies me. This argument is somehow absurd when it comes to packets, but completely rock solid when it comes to the content they transmit?
This community also derides walled gardens when it comes to publishing software, but walled gardens are somehow perfectly acceptable when it comes to speech?
It seems indisputable to me that section 203 grants common carrier protections to organisations that are not common carriers. The outcome is that freedom of expression is restricted. This should be seen as a problem, regardless of whether you personally agree with how those restrictions are applied.
The problem I have with your argument is that your proposed solution is worse. And just because one holds a value most dearly doesn't mean that I'm willing to trample on the freedom of others to get it.
Take your example: the community derides walled gardens. I personally dislike walled gardens and I move away from iPhones mainly because of that. There are plenty of ways that I feel that they're bad. But at the very same time, I believe that Apple is entirely within their rights to have a walled garden. The freedom to create software you want to create should be held dear by anyone on HN. Why should that be different for Apple.
I support the right of free expression; that government cannot restrict free expression and you can't be imprisoned or harassed for your speech. But at the same time I support freedom from speech as well. Just because you have freedom of speech does mean that I'm required to hear it. My freedom of expression also means I don't have support your expression. That's my right.
I also support net neutrality and common carrier requirements for phone companies and monopoly shipping companies, etc. But I also acknowledge that there is difference between being a communications carrier and a publisher. In fact, to be a publisher you need to have a carrier so they're already not the same thing.
Requiring publishers to maintain the speech of others without restriction is an impossibility. Is YouTube really going to be required to host every piece of video published to it forever? Is Hacker News? How would any of this work. They are fundamentally different and what you are proposing just doesn't work. But even more so, if I'm the owner of the website you'd be restricting my right to free expression with this scheme. I think that is equally as important.
Is there really a problem here? Maybe. Is forcing everyone to host everything the solution? God no. As long as we are free to choose what services we can connect to then we have the freedom to choose something other than buying an iPhone, going on Facebook, using YouTube, turning on Fox News, or reading the New York Times. We don't have to host our content, for free, on YouTube so they can monetize it. Having our freedom and eating our free cake too isn't going to work.
Except this isn’t an accurate representation of what the alternative actually is, and it avoids acknowledging what the problems actually are.
> Is YouTube really going to be required to host every piece of video published to it forever?
This is a pretty blatant reductio ad absurdum. If YouTube want to clear out some of their content, they don’t have to exert editorial control to do so. Deleting every video that is more than 5 years old isn’t exerting editorial control. Deleting every video that isn’t earning $x/month arguably isn’t either. Deleting videos based on their content is.
If they decide what videos they want to host based on their content, they’re not a common carrier. They’re a publisher that is deciding what content they want to publish. Expecting them to take responsibility for that isn’t trampling their freedom.
The problem is that this situation has allowed a very small group to control most of the speech that takes place on the internet. They decide what content is published, and what content is not, and section 203 allows them to avoid all responsibility for publishing that content.
The Good Samaritan clause grants them with absolute editorial control over the content they host, and the rest of 203 ensures they don’t have to accept any responsibility for their editorial decisions. It is having your cake and eating it too, and the problems it creates are clear as day.
What about spam? What about nudity? What about content designed to be denial of service? What about content that just isn't related to the purpose of the site?
> They’re a publisher that is deciding what content they want to publish. Expecting them to take responsibility for that isn’t trampling their freedom.
I think I've already clearly expressed why this isn't viable.
> The problem is that this situation has allowed a very small group to control most of the speech that takes place on the internet.
Your logic is that this exception has allowed for this but there is no logical connection here. If all publishers need to vet all user submitted content that doesn't preclude the possibility of there becoming a single large video site or large content site. What it does do is make small sites, like Hacker News, practically impossible.
I'm glad you brought up the platform distinction because I've also been thinking about that one.
I could deny Alex Jones a soapbox in my yard, because it has little value and there are plenty of others. If there are only two soap boxes in the world and I coordinate with the owner of the other box to silence somebody, then I have become functionally indistinguishable from the government for the purpose of free speech, thereby taking on the same duty they have to not shut it down.
Not even the government has to provide you with a soap box -- so being functionally indistinguishable from the government makes no difference.
If you cannot find a platform, can't buy one, can't build one because nobody will work with you then tough shit.
We talk about how developers shouldn't work on projects that are morally questionable but here you are suggesting that they must because a platform must be provided. That sounds so much worse to me. How would that even work?
Well, the Soviet Constitution promised every comrade a printing press...
To speak to your market freedom point, imagine a community of racist business owners who all refused to sell to an outsider. If every business owner was equally racist, the outsider would be forced to leave, even if there was no law stating that they couldn't live in the neighborhood. Markets have an answer to this - any defector will make more money. However sometimes everybody stays racist and no defector emerges. The community is acting like a de-facto evil government even though there is no legal system supporting it nor any democracy legitimizing it.
I'm really not sure what to do when that happens. I'm as against forcing business to do business as you are.
As a society , we deem specific groups as protected classes and I don't think it's good to mix concepts about protected classes with just being an asshole.
We make specific laws to protect people from racial or religious discrimination. We don't, however, make the same considerations if you're just an asshole.
Would your argument have the same effect if there was a community of fed up business owners who all refused to sell to a big jerk?
There is an ongoing lawsuit against Jones. The lawsuits contain unproven claims of harassment.
There is no direct inciting, and the indirect inciting claims are half-baked. There is a class action lawsuit office looking for a pay day, so they benefit by keeping Jones in the news.
All people factually saying that Alex Jones incited harassment against the parents, are parroting a non-concluded court case PR campaign ("OJ did it!"), and much like these behemoth companies, are playing judge, jury, and executioner. They most likely haven't seen a clip of Alex Jones inciting, or when they have, it is taken grossly out of context.
Remember, when CNN was targeting Jones for weeks, going through his hours of video, and noting anything they found controversial. "Alex Jones is transphobic, which is against Youtube TOS, but Youtube does nothing". Alex Jones was talking about "public library drag queen reading hour". He said these drag queens looked demonic and that it is not normal to normalize this for little kids. Now, just recently, someone ("a Trump supporter") showed up with a gun to these reading hours. Two possible conclusions: "Alex Jones is a transphobe and incited his followers to violently get rid of them". "Alex Jones practices unpopular, but legal, free speech, and they try to punish him for what any of his million followers might do that is against the law". I am leaning heavily towards the latter and it is a downright shame that the first conclusion is drawn by many, without doing any deeper research.
Imagine what you could do if you knew that many people would go for the first conclusion, regardless of the facts?
Dang, wasn't aware - that's discouraging. However I was not suggesting Vimeo is 'clean' - don't know enough about the ethics/track record of any of those services enough to imply that Vimeo is anything except another option for hosting videos.
>And there is no "who draws the line‽" argument here
That's exactly the argument, not everybody thinks Alex Jones went too far. In fact, I bet a lot of people who listen to Alex Jones would find something you supported to be miles beyond what is ever OK. That's part and parcel of living in a diverse, cosmopolitan society. Sometimes, other people's opinions are miles beyond OK, but that's still okay. ;)
You seem to be willfully ignoring the demonstrable harm he causes. You're promoting a false balance. You're saying "Alex Jones robbed a bank, other people eat their coworkers' lunch, so who are we to judge?"
If demonstrable harm is your standard, please just announce you don't believe in free speech and move along. Everybody advocating for the wrong stance on politics creates demonstrable harm.
Free speech means he can say (edit) legally protegted speech* on his own platform.
No company is obligated to provide that platform for him. When judging a company for what content they decide they don't want to host, spinning "vimeo banned Alex Jones" as negative is ridiculous.
Edited: he can't actually say whatever he wants even on his own platform. There's actually a lawsuit against him right now. Too many internet folk don't actually know what "free speech" means and I should not validate such ignorance.
Actually, free speech is an ethical concept, not a legal concept. The first amendment is a legal concept. Free speech means means enabling the free exchange of ideas. Free speeches as a concept applies to private platforms and organizations too, it just isn't mandated by law.
The courts can draw this line & determine these distinctions, and they are doing just this right now. Jones is currently being sued by some Sandy Hook parents. It turns out we don't need to rely on Youtube of Vimeo to be the ultimate arbiters of this issue, and the system may just be working in this case.
There are alternatives. For years I've been following content creators who upload their content to multiple services because they saw the writing on the wall.
The reported move to pornhub was pretty much just a one-time PR stunt to get some media attention for the issue (it worked.) Full30 seems to be taking a serious shot at it though.
> Creators need to get off YT, and onto something else if it exists.
It does now! I'm currently in the process of launching a content-host agnostic platform for creators.
Basically, MyNexus is a platform to share content with your audience, highlight your preferred avenues for support (eg. Patreon or PayPal), and run promotions (whether your own products or sponsorships).
MyNexus doesn't host any of the content itself. You can still upload your videos to Youtube, Vimeo, Peertube, or any other service. Need to shift to a different platform later? No problem. Simply edit your post and your entire content catalogue is preserved without any inconvenience to your audience.
If you're interested in learning more, email me at yaniv@mynexus.io.
> Creators need to get off YT, and onto something else if it exists.
The most common response to this is that a YouTube alternative can't exist because Google operates it at a loss (unverifiable), so anyone who tries to compete will fail.
The YouTube business model also aligns perfectly with Google's strengths: Advertising, data storage, search, etc. So even if it is profitable, it would still be extremely difficult for anyone else to make money in the same market.
> The YouTube business model also aligns perfectly with Google's strengths:
The things people want an alternative for are central to YouTube’s business model, so an alternative that would have any chance of not duplicating the problems would not be trying to duplicate that business model.
One alternative would be a basic creator-pays model which provides the option for creators to require viewer payment for some or all content with a cut of viewer payment received going to the platfrom as well as all of the creator payment going that way.
Big fan of his channel. It's so fucking stupid how a simple educational channel on mouse traps (and other types of pest traps) can run into a wall of censorship and demonetization.
Vimeo banned video game content for not being arty enough. It was a shame too since they were poised to succeed since stage6 had just shut down and youtube wasn't doing HD video.
Creators can host their own content with their own sponsorship and advertising agreements on their own domain and pay their own bandwidth bill.
YouTube was born in an era of a half dozen different non-standard codecs. Now H.264/MP4 works on everything from TVs to watches.
The reality is that most content on YouTube isn’t even worth the bandwidth it costs to get it to people. Most creators are just looking for a handout for creating mindless nonsense.
> In a subsequent comment, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that Cyber Weapons Lab’s channel was flagged by mistake and the videos have since been reinstated. “With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call,” the spokesperson said. “We have an appeals process in place for users, and when it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”
Most in silicon valley have no issue with Youtube banning political speech they disagree with, but if immediately afterwards they start banning education material dear to the hearts of most in the valley (who started as white/black hat hackers in middle/high school), then you highlight the obvious slippery slope.
Youtube is transitioning from a platform to a curator. That is a huge risk for them if the govt. realizes this.
Lets keep in mind that YouTube has been around for 14 years... In societal terms that's a relatively short amount of time to have a free platform where anyone can post their ideas, no matter how crazy or toxic.
Before that, you could blog.
Before that, you could stand on a street corner and yell, or maybe use a megaphone.
The platforms for broadcasting your message to a large audience were mostly gated, often by large corporations. TV, Newspaper, Radio, etc.
It seems to me that what we are seeing is more like reversion to the mean.
It was great in the early days of the internet, because the communities were small, and often self policing. But once they get large enough it's very easy for the noise to overwhelm the signal. This idea of absolute free speech didn't scale once the population got large enough.
I don't even use Facebook and Twitter anymore because of this. (I also generally opt out of ad supported anything)
I'm really not convinced that providing a cheap / free platform for anyone to amplify their message was actually a net good. Not anymore at least. Like I said, it doesn't scale.
Before, the crazy and toxic could yell on the street corner. Now they have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to shout their conspiracy theories etc.
IMO, we're overdue for scaling some of that back.
There is the right to say and think whatever you want. That does not imply the right to have your message amplified to millions.
I suspect many people were saying the same about the printing press when that was invented. "If anyone can print something quickly, how can will we stop the peasants from printing their own books".
Many would could say same about open source software, people developing their own technology. They are doing their own thing, there is a lot of rubbish code (noise) to good open source code (signal). Maybe a large company like Microsoft or IBM take control of it and be the guardians of the code.
Youtube has everything from make up tutorials, instructions on how to do fix your laptop, cook a meal, there are people making their own reviews of retro computer hardware. Other people are releasing their own music, tutorials on how to code, teachers helping people with their maths homework. Almost all of this would never see the light of day on regular television. Yet somehow you have concentrated on the negative elements.
Claiming it doesn't scale because you don't like some of the content on there is ridiculous and you are just projecting your personal politics on everyone else. If you don't like the content you can just not watch it. I don't like watching network television because it is awful, I like seeing people debate and debunk things like conspiracy theories because it is fun.
I really wish people like yourself would just be honest and just come out to say that you think that certain people shouldn't be allowed to speak because you think you are better than them.
Personally honestly I don't have a problem with people saying what they want to say even if I disagree with it. My problem is that some people suddenly decided that platforms like Youtube are suddenly required to host any and all content when those platforms have always been privately owned and always had various rules which were subject to change.
People have suddenly decided that youtube is somehow quasi public property and seem to feel if they keep repeating that over and over then it will magically come true, it isn't and that's my issue.
This is another argument I hear often. Firstly I don't think many people aren't making that argument at all. People are complaining about Youtube's policies and how they deal with speech on their platform.
Youtube don't appear to apply their policies in an even handed manner. I think most people would be fine if Youtube if their enforcement was strict, IF it was fair.
However enforcement of TOS seems to be arbitrary and seems to be either politically motivated, incoherent or a knee jerk reaction to whatever the current moral panic at the time is. This isn't helped by the fact that any of the appeal mechanisms on the site seem to work on random chance principles.
As for whether Youtube is some sort of public service. Keep in mind it is a monopoly on online user generated video. There is no other site that even comes close.
1) you make some good points.
2) I think you could make them without jumping to conclusions about what I believe, and without assigning intent that isn't there.
But let me try to clarify my point.
I'm not saying that YouTube doesn't scale, or doesn't have a ton of value. Obviously both are true.
I'm saying that laissez faire freedom of speech doesn't scale on platforms like YouTube. There needs to be some set of standards for acceptable behavior.
I think a lot of subreddit's do a good job of this with their moderators and rules. I think HN does a good job with it's down voting, etc. (I suspect my unpopular opinions here will get me some down-votes though....)
But YouTube, Twitter, etc, don't seem have the same community enforcement mechanisms, but something is needed. It's unfortunate that it ends up being a kind of arbitrarily enforced set of rules through an opaque process... But I feel like that's better than just letting anything go.
Also, to be clear. I don't think I do actually agree with the YouTube policy of blocking hacking videos. But I'm trying to make a larger point that I think there does need to be some standard of what is ok or not to be broadcast.
You keep on saying that it doesn't scale without qualifying it. What does this mean? What is acceptable behaviour?
My idea of acceptable behaviour is probably very different to yours (I almost guarantee it).
There is a really good example of this recently. Tim Pool was talking to Jack Dorsey on the Joe Rogan podcast. Near the end of the podcast they were talking about why an individual (can't remember who it was) got banned from Twitter. When Jack's legal counsel (that was what she was really there for) found out via her phone on the show she claimed it was a "threat of violence", I instantly recognised it as a well known internet meme. But because everyone in that room wasn't aware of the meme, it would sound to the outsider as a threat of violence.
So we have a situation where people that don't understand the "lore" (because with some communities there is a lot of in-jokes, history, characters to get your head around) deciding whether something should be on the site because they don't really understand years worth of previous material. How can they possibly make any sort of judgement on whether the material is acceptable?
The answer is they can't.
The only good answer is to just allow anything that is to have some clear and concise rules e.g. no doxing, no harassment and just allow anything that is considered free speech under US law. Sure you will probably get some idiots streaming an animation of a rotating Swastika for 6 hours at a time, but not only will be swamped by other people's worth while content, it is trivial for people to just tell Youtube via clicking the video menu to not show them that channel's content again.
To piggyback your comment and the depth of the analogy: Mein Kampf is still in publication today. Does any otherwise rational person want it stopped and all copies removed from public libraries in the way they seem to expect from Youtube/Facebook et al? Would they want Del Ray Books be held accountable for the content of The Turner Diaries?
However a lot of people seem to forget that the politics of today is only within the Overton window because speech outside of the Overton window at the time was protected and thus the Overton window can "shift".
To extend that; Mein Kampf has extremely relevant historical significants. It's important to understand the mind of your enemy. Not listening to what they have to say does nothing to stop their actions, it only makes you non-privy and less able to identify similar behavior in other individuals.
Neither TV nor radio quite fits the analogy... because these are broadcast 1:many mediums.
And the idea that no one has a right to have their message amplified to millions is sort of insidious and evil.
Because the consumers choose what to watch on YouTube. And the users produce the content. So this more like a virtual community with billions of micro-interactions.
Of course it scales. The internet is a testiment to that. What's different today is only sentimental.
I'm not well versed in anti-trust law, but how does Youtube's popularity (monopoly as you put it) prohibit you from hosting your content on the 100s of other video hosting services available to you? How does Youtube's popularity prevent you from hosting your videos yourself?
You're expecting them to use their own money and their own resources to broadcast messages they don't want to broadcast, for free.
> How does Youtube's popularity prevent you from hosting your videos yourself?
It doesn't. It "prevents" most people from looking for videos anywhere except the youtube search bar.
> You're expecting them to use their own money and their own resources to broadcast messages they don't want to broadcast, for free.
Well, does that prevent them from starting another business, that doesn't seek to grow so big and pervasive that it should be considered common carrier?
>There is the right to say and think whatever you want. That does not imply the right to have your message amplified to millions.
Very easy to say when your message isn't being censored. After all, how could this ever turn around on YOU? Surely you'll always have the correct opinion on things!
I can't wait for all the videos showing you how to repair your own stuff gets outlawed.
Right now it's 'hacking' or possibly circumventing proprietary systems that are trying to get you to purchase a new device or contact them directly rather than fix it yourself if you have the technical know how.
Today it's Software/Hardware and computer systems.
How long until looking up a you-tube video on how to repair your John Deer tractor or iOS device gets banned.
Take it further and how long until all repair/tear down/fix videos get banned from their platform.
Everyone is yelling, just repeal their platform status like it is going to change anything. They've used that status to grow to the size they are now and even if they are forced to go publisher it wouldn't change anything other than them being more brazen at the censorship in my opinion.
I agree, to a point, but I think part of the idea behind the platform -> publisher push is to force YouTube to start making hard choices, where they either become financially untenable trying to stay on top of all the content they're now somewhat legally culpable for, or they ramp up the censorship so quickly and so broadly as to annoy enough of the community to make other platforms viable.
You want YouTube to be one way, but it's the other way.
Protest.
Boycott.
Build alternatives.
This is how you fight corrupt corporations. It makes no sense to force YouTube to host all content for free. YouTube is a video entertainment business, it's not insulin or a house. Again, it's a video entertainment site. It is wholly unimportant in reality.
The only power YouTube has is the power society willingly gives it by visiting the website. Society needs to take responsibility for its own browser history.
Why do you think that? YouTube has lots of content, some of it excellent, but the vast majority of it is of dubious educational quality with tons of trash and misinformation. Much of the educational content that is worthwhile is also superficial compared to other sites on the internet that have quality and accuracy standards for their content. Some examples include khan academy, coursera, and udemy. I'd even include wikipedia before YouTube.
I think you're both right. It's very dilute, but even so it's many orders of magnitude bigger than the counter-examples you give, and even given the dubious content you have to wade through, the absolute volume of high quality info you can find there is unprecedented. Also it's much lower friction to access (well Wikipedia is about the same, but all the others are gated to varying degrees). So I would contend that YT is uniquely significant as a repository of educational material.
That all being said, I agree with your original point - how they moderate/censor that content is and always has been solely YT's prerogative.
I've increasingly become of the opinion that we need actual regulation for any SV app/co that calls itself a platform.
Nearly everyone acknowledges that a platform by definition needs to be either the only co in its industry or part of a duopoly but generally with a 50%+ market share. The gov should acknowledge the benefits of having such platforms but should also recognize the pitfalls and regulate akin to common carrier.
Google wants to be the only search engine, fine. everyone benefits when search is consolidated, but it needs to be regulated like a monopoly even if there are 1000 other smaller competitors because it still has a controlling share of the market.
I hate regulation as I'm describing it here, but I cannot see another way out.... if trump doesn't pass something like the S-ATA in the next 2 (- 6?) years the next prez almost def will, we're really hitting that tipping point.
I suspect the issue isn't YouTube per se but society.
While they bear responsibility for their decisions any big entity which becomes the "mainstream" will receive the same pressure. With advertiser backing based on what they /think/ is good for their image regardless of what people other than the many noisy minorities (like every yellow journalist seeking a new moral panic) of all sorts think.
And rather than anyone involved learning they will push hard to be "more like TV" which we have been seeing for years on YouTube with every adpocalyose. If we cannot fix the underlying problem we are doomed to reoccurrence.
edit: I have no idea how thinkspot is going to play out. But if I know one thing about the internet it's that it's really hard to stop people from using it however they please. Attempts to squash mostly just result a shift of where it occurs, not the fact that it occurs.
> I have no idea how thinkspot is going to play out.
I do. The uncensored alternative to a popular platform consistently attracts all the toxic users, making it a place nobody else wants to go. Voat is a relatively recent high-profile example.
Or in the censorship-free scenario, the other potential users who stay away because most people find hate speech distasteful (for example) and don't want to spend time somewhere they're exposed to it frequently.
Unless they themselves are also terrible people, I can't imagine that they don't have some plan to combat this given how obvious of a problem it's been. They mention respect in the header at least...
How do they combat that without being accused, as youtube is here, of censorship? Will they disallow child porn? How about videos advocating violence against specific people? How about obviously libelous videos, like ones claiming, say, Donald Trump is running a child prostitution ring from the basement of a pizza parlor? When they get sued for hosting such content, who is going to pay their legal bills?
I'm very much in favor of this principle as well. The problem is that legality is often disputed and not even the biggest platforms have the capacity to resolve all those disputes without taking down the content as a first (and often only) step.
it be interesting if the "censors" actually just made them categories you can block. So they categorize it as "Deceptive" or "Toxic Masculinity" or "Pro X" and you can choose to filter or not.
Safe harbor laws make it generally legal for a platform to host such content until certain notification provisions are met. There's a specific process for handling child porn in the US, which you can easily find if you want that in your search history.
Advocating violence against specific people is not illegal in the US unless it is likely to produce imminent lawless action. Saying "[racial slur] should be exterminated" doesn't rise to that standard. A live video saying "everybody get your guns and meet me at [location] - we're gonna slaughter those [racial slur]" probably does, but would be subject to safe harbor protections for the platform.
Libel also falls under safe harbor. The platform could eventually be ordered by a court to remove the content, but not until many people have had the opportunity to see it.
What if I decide that the goal of my business is to create a platform that excludes particular perspectives I disagree with? Why should the government force me to host things I don't want to for free?
No problem. I don't see a problem with exclusionary platforms as long as they aren't using their extreme dominance in multiple areas to maintain a monopoly. I guess what I am looking for is a cap on wealth and power.
What I was trying to paint was a slippery slope of cases -- start with something illegal and move towards things which are grey to legal.
The question is every such business would need to face, including youtube, is where to draw the line. Child porn clearly is illegal and very few people would object to such a ban. But legal/not legal isn't always so clear, eg, what statement constitutes libel and is a given person enough of a public figure that less stringent standards apply.
Say I create a video saying "zcid lives at 123 Merry Lane in Westchester, MA. I'm not advocating violence happen to him, I'm just stating a fact." Is that legal? (Note: not only is the address made up, I double checked that no such address actually exists)
If there was a bright line then I don't think there would be as much controversy around the issue as there is. Pretending there is a simple solution (just ban illegal things and allow legal things) doesn't mean the distinction really is clear.
That balance can be shifted if enough normal people get evicted, especially if the normal people tend to end up on some particular service, at least to start with.
Probably the best reason Silicon Valley can understand to start thinking twice about whether they want to deplatform all the non-SV-liberals.
(I initially said "conservatives" there, but given the discussion elsewhere on this page for someone who was deplatformed on Vimeo for reviewing animal traps because they said it was 'cruelty to animals', it's going well beyond that.)
> Probably the best reason Silicon Valley can understand to start thinking twice about whether they want to deplatform all the non-SV-liberals.
I suspect that YouTube's long-term strategy is to morph into a hybrid of Netflix and cable, and YouTubers who broadcast opinions outside the range of acceptable opinions to SV and advertisers are just an impedance to that goal. What they will do is boil the frog by making small changes over a period of time that all appear "reasonable" on their own.
Demonetization was one step in boiling the frog, but hard to argue against because it's in the best interest of advertisers and videos weren't being deleted. Then came changes to the algorithm that promotes videos, and now YouTube believes I "want" to watch more cable news and significantly less of Tim Pool or Joe Rogan. I'm surprised they haven't done more shadow-banning, and maybe that will be one of the following steps.
More incremental changes will be made, probably over several years, until all the interesting voices are gone and no one can point to any one event that made everyone except the left-wing and Rated-G channels leave. And the bulk of users probably won't care since they've been transitioned and conditioned to the resurgence of mainstream blather they'll be selling.
I wasn't aware of that, but it's charming to think of Pornhub deleting videos for being "Insufficiently Pornographic", and then for the uploader to argue that anything can be pornographic to someone. Eventually culminating in a court case based on the "I know it when I don't see it" principle.
I know this is just going to be an opportunity for someone to post the "first they came for the <blank> and I didn't speak out because I wasn't <blank>" copyasta, but..
I wish the only people fighting against censorship by trying to build their own platforms weren't actual white supremacists and bad-faith pseudo-intellectual charlatans. (Note, I"m only placing Peterson in the second category. He's not a white supremacist. He IS however a reductive, regressive male-supremacist, wearing the mask of a classic liberal free speech advocate).
He claims to fight for a free marketplace of ideas, but only because his religious conservative dogma about men, women, gay marriage, and trans people does not hold up to scrutiny, and people have gotten tired of debating him.
Let's be clear:
* Google and YouTube do not owe the internet the right to access to an expensive video hosting content platform. They are a business and they are free to prioritize the content that enables them to make money
* ThinkSpot has two agendas - one to promote "unpopular" free speech ideas in a "safe space" free from criticism, which is hilariously ironic. Two - to make Jordan Peterson money. If you don't think that's part of the goal, you haven't been paying attention to all of his Patreon activity and motivations for the last several years.
These are not the droids we are looking for.
What is the alternative? Honestly, here is a hot take: Kazaa
We need to get back to distributed peer-to-peer file hosting. But this time with more security, encryption, access control, categorization of content that you can choose to host on your node.
I've been saying for a while that we'll get to the point where anyone fighting for Free Speech will get painted as a racist because the censors will claim "free speech is a racist idea" and it appears we're pretty close.
How much of our classic liberty are we willing to lose in the pursuit of tribalism? The retort I hear when I complain about censorship is "haha you conservatives used to love the free market", not realizing not everyone who supports free speech and is anti-corporate is a conservative!
EDIT: These corporations cynically manipulated society's tribalistic nature to impose something that should've had bipartisan opposition. The good news about things like this is it's a great way to develop that bipartisan opposition, many people who've been wearing blinders will say, "hey wait a minute, that's my voice you're shutting down, and I'm not a bad person."
EDIT 2: I'm not here to defend Jordan Peterson or white supremacists. Just saying that moves like this will at least drive more than just two kinds of people away from YouTube, which was "people who love liberty and white supremacists" which of course makes the liberty people miserable.
Free speech has become a meaningless slogan since it's now used as if there was a wide consensus against all property rights. But nobody is against property rights, just property rights of other people, maybe.
I support your right to perform necessary bodily functions, just not on my living room carpet. I wouldn't say that's "tribalistic", more like "territorial".
I think we've had a wide consensus against commercial property "rights" since the Civil Rights Act, and probably long before that, but I'm not a historian. AT&T doesn't get to listen to my calls to decide whether carrying them on their network is good for their brand. The big tech companies shouldn't get to claim they're a platform and then arbitrarily censor whoever they want without any due process.
It's 2019 and everyone talks online, it's time to stop pretending that the public sidewalk is the only place people have a right to protest. Telling someone they have to go use gab.ai (which is blocked on both on both app stores and has had its payment systems pulled) is like telling a sidewalk protestor they have the right to protest as long as it's somewhere in the wilderness where they will not be discovered, alongside the other miscreants who have a beef.
Nobody has ever been against the right of people to protest in invisible places, even China lets you do that. It's like the old saw, that Stalinist Russia had free speech as long as you were praising the party or nobody could hear you.
In the age where people like Ben Shapiro are identified as "alt-right white supremacists" I don't have much confidence in the ability of people to identify racist content. Here's a post where I go into more thinking on the matter that doesn't need to be repeated here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184914
Ben Shapiro was the most popular role model for Alexandre Bissonette, a very clear alt-right white supremacist[1]. Before you dismiss Shapiro's responsibility in stoking these ideals, you should watch this in-depth breakdown of his perspectives and ideals[2]. I know it's a lot to ask to watch an hour long youtube video, but it is thorough to dot all the i's and cross all the t's.
Shapiro even stokes anti-semitic rhetoric by distinguishing between "ethnic jews" (The Woody Allens of the world, but more broadly liberal hollywood elite jews) and "cultural/religious jews" (Morally-clear good-minded folk like himself). The video covers it.
This is how he reconciles his alt-right allies who are anti-semitic and white nationalist, yet use Shapiro as a shield to protect their heinous opinions.
And this is before we get to any of his perspectives on arabs, which another commenter already addressed.
This is probably one of the more sound takes on both ThinkSpot and the right way to address what is happening on these massive platforms. Thanks for this.
A good reminder that NYC decided that viewing adult content on computers at city libraries was protected by freedom of speech and is therefore allowed:
This is definitely relevant for multiple reasons. Pornographic content is legally protected free speech (except on broadcast TV for whishy washy reasons). Yet YouTube does not host pornographic content and is not required to do so. To my knowledge, no large groups of people have demanded that YouTube host pornographic content in the decade or so of its existence under free speech grounds. It's only when YouTube stops hosting stuff they like that they suddenly consider it to be a free speech issue.
And on the other hand, PornHub has offered to host the channels of people who were banned from YouTube. Few chose to move to PornHub because of the implications of this association, even though it is a more free option.
To me it's all nonsense. If you want to host your own stuff unrestricted, start your own site or something like peertube. The more decentralized things are, the freer they are. Alex Jones can still post crazy shit about Sandy Hook families on his own site and deal with his own legal consequences which I will not comment on. But it's pretty obvious why YouTube doesn't want to deal with him. And while it's a bummer for fans of these hacking shows that YouTube won't be hosting their content, perhaps it's an opportunity to work towards decentralization.
My guess is that a tech player with a big ad spend is unhappy about YouTube tutorials teaching users to de-DRM their content or jailbreak their consumer devices.
a) the flagged videos have already been unbanned, with YT saying it was a mistake and b) YT's policy exempts educational videos, which is why it was a mistake, and why e.g LiveOverflow et al should be fine.
Probably something like a how-to guide to hack into a specific site. An analogy might be that a video on how to lockpick a door wouldn't be banned, but a video on how to lockpick your neighbour's door (with his/her address) probably would be.
The whole hullabaloo seems to be semantics about the meaning of educational vs instructional.
BigCo has silos. Water is wet. More breaking news at 11.
Sarcasm aside, I'm betting there's an organizational unit responsible for content policy and they have nearly zero contact with the organization unit that put on the CTF.
Devil's advocate: There's a very thin line between e.g. the Lockpicking Lawyer doing reviews of different padlock brands and e.g. an instructional video about how to break into someone's house. YouTube knows that if someone posts home invasion instructions, and then someone else watches those instructions and commits a crime, the news media will absolutely 100% blame YouTube, and politicians will jump on them to score points with the voters. Since it's essentially impossible to define a simple, objective difference between the Lockpicking Lawyer and instructional videos for actual crimes, YouTube needs to write broad policies that potentially cover both, and then rely on their discretion in individual cases.
Does this suck for everyone involved? Yes. Does YouTube have a choice about this? No.
Since when is censorship for the sake of preventing people from acquiring knowledge that may be used in a later crime even on the table? This is insanity.
I think oconnor663 would agree that it is insane. I believe the argument is that YouTube needs to protect itself because someone could insinuate that they are complicit in a crime simply because someone was trained in the criminal act via YouTube video.
I think the counter-argument is that no policy will protect YouTube from these types of arguments. If some politician wants to demonize YouTube via hyperbolic argument, then they will find a way. These types of disputes rarely use facts.
YouTube should stick to Free Speech and accept that haters are going to hate. To me this just demonstrates that the YouTube leadership has no backbone.
So sad. Some of these channels like e.g. BosnianBill, LockpickingLawyer, HelpfulLockpicker have immense amounts of unique content that are properly even less likely to be backed up somewhere and will most likely be lost for good.
This is not just about lockpicking, Youtube has a trully incomprehensibly vast amount of content locked into their platform. They can hold viewers hostage with it.
My opinion on the morality of the matter is that old abandoned and unclaimed content should be made freely available at least to an open data repository.
In reality, as automated and semi-automated censorship tools improve, less content will be available to you, more content will vanish without a trace, and some content will be restricted based on factors such as location, nationality, ethnicity, political affiliations and browsing history.
Do you blame the bookstore if someone reads about lockpicking and then gets arrested for breaking and entering? Or maybe if they read mein Kampf and become a neonazi? Think about how ridiculous this argument is for a minute.
Don't try to find logic where there is none. Just because people don't blame libraries for teaching someone how to do bad things it doesn't mean the same people won't blame Youtube for doing the same. Our thought process and morality is relative, inconsistent and illogical. The laws, policies and judicial system are a reflection of that.
Blame attaches to the last thing that changed. (https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/05/16/agility.html) And to be fair, I don't think that's completely illogical. It's often the case that the last thing that changed is the easiest thing to change back. And the results of recent changes are generally more predictable than the results of changes from a long time ago.
This is good news. Censorship should've been something with wide bipartisan opposition, but due to the way Google and others cynically (or accidentally) used partisan tricks to make half the populace clamor for their rights to be violated, like they did with Alex Jones and others, they've gotten away with their censorship to grand applause.
Moves like this are a great opportunity to finally develop bipartisan opposition to these corporations. People who've been wearing tribalistic blinders will say, "hey wait a minute, that's my voice you're shutting down, and I'm not a bad person." Even if they don't come to their senses from first principles, at least more of the burden of defending common liberties will now be shared on the shoulders of more people.
Here comes an argument familiar from other domains (drugs, guns, censorship in general) but still valid:
This will serve to drive that content further out of sight and underground, into the realm of people whose hats are statistically more likely to be of a darker shade as it were.
They day Youtube decides to ban the LockpickingLawyer Channel for "showing users how to bypass secure doors" will be the day I uninstall and block Youtube on all my devices.
Google is going to regret this in a few years, when it needs security experts and they are in short supply (or rather shorter; they are already in short supply). Maybe we should be commoditizing security knowledge, which is what a platform such as you tube is capable of. Besides, there's a whole internet full of resources, and this isn't going to stop the script kiddies. The real issue is the nation state hackers from Iran, N. Korea, China, Russia. They are the problem.
Companies I know of and that people I know work with have been the victim of ransomware many times. It is almost always Iran or N. Korea, and companies I know of have even been victimized twice (they took a look while inside and found another vector; the second time, they knew they had insurance and would pay again). Then there's the espionage - if you're bigger or have something China or Russia wants, they'll go after you.
The FBI classifies this as terrorism, and yet does nothing. These are acts of war, and we keep getting stepped on because our government does nothing. Most of us know fully well that our three-letter agencies have exploits capable of disabling just about any thing; it's time they start knocking Iranian, North Korean, Chinese, and Russian infrastructure offline as a retaliatory measure. Each time we trace another attack to one of them, a power plant goes down (or something alike). This is the only solution I can see.
The stigma IT gets from society with regards to security is abundant.
The term hacker for a geek is not the definition the media uses - I often correct people and ask - should Burglars be called Locksmiths? Which is absurd, but then the term hacker has been subverted to mean a computer thief, vandal, burglar or any form of digital crime.
As for showing how to break into a compter - the legal and valid reasons outway the criminal ones and yet this is a blanket ban mentality taking the edge cases and projecting them.
Forget your password - well thanks youtube for banning all valid digital locksmith usage.
So by doing this, it is akin to closing down a road because somebody got caught speeding, or banning anybody learning to drive because somebody got caught speeding. An extreme comparison, but is it?
Bigger issue is such digital rules are automated in action, so less due process, more so with some companies whose support due process depends upon you knowing somebody at the company to `actually` look into the automated oversights.
So what next, p2p and the darkweb have already been demonised by the media. So any attempt to offer an alternative will get negatively associated, and deemed guilty of a crime they did not commit. Which is nice for the establishments in our digital age, as it protects their effective monopoly.
"showing how to bypass secure computer systems" reminds me of the DCMA debate, where "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work." is forbidden.
If it was a "secure" computer system, it shouldn't be breakable by anybody after watching a how to youtube video.
I agree with others here, YT and it's like are de facto monopolies by their size and market share.
PeerTube [1] is a Mastodon [2] offshoot project that might allow users to get off YT, no idea where it's at though.
"One project, Peertube, does exactly this. A federated, decentralized video sharing platform using the same back end as Mastodon, but around the sharing of video clips."[3]
Meanwhile, YouTube is flooded with pseudo-humoristic content from "artists" such as Paul Logan. Hopefully we will be able to transfer knowledge with short Instagram stories and accelerated video posts. Until it get censored and a new unregulated plateform appears
Surely someone by now has created a distributed video streaming system coupled with search? Maybe based on bittorrent or something? It seems like an obvious solution to this issue. It wouldn't be fast, and videos might not be as "permanent" (depending on number of "seeders").
The problem seems to be centralization of content and distribution; this seems to be the problem ultimately with many services and "platforms" on the internet. Decentralize it all, make it so that your browser is also a "server" or something of that nature, let the users become "peers".
Yes - I am aware of the various projects out there working on this, but all of them seem to be doing their own thing, with no standards or interoperability - maybe that's a good thing? It is fragmentary - but again, maybe that's better for the ecosystem as a whole?
The only downside is ultimately the ISP level; they already have TOS terms that they can arbitrarily enforce to prevent using "servers"; they currently don't because of so many things out there that need to operate like this, but they technically could, blocking all kinds of stuff, including a distributed "web" (or whatever you want to call it).
So many of these problems can be traced back to when all you had was a form of dialup modem system, and we were conditioned to think that we weren't "peers" on the internet, because the speeds were so slow. We were conditioned to think that our ISP was the endpoint, and we were just paying them to get some of their stuff - and in turn, we turned them into the "gatekeepers". Today, we have always-on connections that would rival or surpass what were actual peerage speeds back then - yet we still have the same broken model that (technically) prevents us from being free to set up our own servers and anything else we want (unless we pay a lot more money for so-called "business class" service - which some providers won't allow you to purchase if the end point is at a "residential address").
This all needs to change - but we might be way, way too late.
Offensive security Youtube videos doesn't help the world to make computer systems more secure. The offensive security subculture deals more about fame, fun and profit. Therefore I'm a little happy on the reaction of some offensive/black hat security people, although I agree that the policy is to ambiguous to be fair. The obvious intention of the policy is obviously the removal script-kiddy like videos which are showing either "how to hack Facebook" bullshit videos or videos which are concretely showing how to harm one concrete business. The boundaries between immature script-kiddy videos and offensive/blackhat security videos are not very clear.
Just thinking out loud here: it seems like Youtube has been restricting or pulling videos for a variety of reasons. Alternatives are great, but could still succumb to the same outcome. Personal hosting is an option, but not a solution for everyone. Maybe this could lead to a fun weekend project. Imagine something like MediaGoblin paired with git-annex. I really haven't given it any more thought than what I've just written, but could be a fun project!
If true that sounds silly. If the videos aren't breaking the law or found offensive by your advertisers, why would you (as a business) want to stop that kind of content?
I'm super concerned about this. I head up hacker education at HackerOne and the biggest part of that is Hacker101, which hosts all its videos on YouTube. I have the master files and could host them elsewhere, of course, but there's huge value in discoverability, which YouTube completely owns compared to any other platform. Definitely something that I'm going to have to keep an eye on, and be ready to adapt to if they end up enforcing this.
Not entirely unexpected now that YouTube has grown up and can't be seen hanging out with certain folks by the other grownups in the room. Another example of this trend of getting popular on the backs of the same nerd/geek/hacker/counter-culture/ people who are then deemed unfit to be part of the community, one they become the minority (and hence wont affect your bottom line).
Sending messages using One-time Pads are perfectly secure when used properly, which is pretty simple - don't reuse the keys and the message has to be shorter than the key you are using.
And is there an app or service in existence currently using OTPs "properly", as you say?
OTPs are extremely onerous, if not impossible to implement properly in real life in a way that scales. Hence why nobody uses them (instead people use RSA/ECC/AES/etc).
They should just ban all interesting content already so creators finally move to better platforms some of which are probably yet to be created. Watching YouTube these days without adblocker is just painful, not to mention the broken copyright claim system which has to be the way it is partly because YouTube is just too big.
Now, the editing has progressed from (legitimately) weeding out violent and often clearly illegal material (e.g., child porn), to material that some people find objectionable, in this case corporate sponsors.
They are now unquestionably editing the content on their site. Soon (as mentioned by others), it is likely to be 'how to repair' videos and the like that end up on the proverbial cutting room floor.
It is far past the time for YouTube, FaceBook, etc. to be stripped of their now demonstrably farcical "platform" status and recognized as publishers of content, and reqauired to operate with that set of rights & responsibilities.
It won't solve all problems, partly because this has gone on for far too long, but at least they'll need to take on some responsibility for their decisions. It is obvious why they've worked so mightily for so long to avoid exactly this responsibility.
I guess we'll have to go back to BBS' and reading 2600 again.
Really though, this is ridiculously bad. A video on how to install Lineageos? Ubuntu on a Chromebook? DD-WRT? All Ostensibly banned. Hell, is showing how to use a VPN to get around geographic restrictions banned now too? Using TOR to escape the great firewall?
Below the original comment in a reply is YouTube's full list. One of the items bans videos about "hard drugs" which it defines as any drug that causes a physical addiction. Is there an incoming wave of coffee- and tea-related takedowns? Because I'm pretty sure that headache you get when you don't drink caffeine for a day is not your brain longing for the rich aroma of freshly-ground beans. It's a physical addiction to ... a drug!
They should just make the rules say "We don't know what our standards are. If someone flags your video and whoever happens to be reviewing things doesn't like you, you're gone. Buh bye." At least people couldn't complain, as every takedown would comply with their written policy.
What about the premium series they produced, Mindfield? A good number of the episodes are about Michael Stevens (Vsauce) taking hallucinogens and describing the experience.
On second thought, I guess most of those aren't addictive. It still seems like a really odd line to draw.
I guess it depends on what Sergey or Susan are smoking these days... Odd throwing parties at 'plex when Prop 64 was approved, posing with joints, then banning drug videos...
Some Hacker communities already have their own video platforms - I only know of CCC so far but I bet there are others: https://media.ccc.de/
This knowledge will become even more isolated and harder to find for beginners.
But these communities have so much content already, together with banned 'security bypass'-videos it could be combined (or cross-referenced somehow) to an impressive collection.
Aggregators and links to similar platforms play an important role whith 'illicit' content. Porn is not allowed on YouTube as well, it is hosted on different platforms and yet people still manage to find it somehow.
Once you buy into the premise that mere words cause "harm", there's no limit to what you'll censor. It's important to take a hard line against speech restrictions in general: once you start, you can't stop.
The policy also says "Instructional theft: Showing users how to steal money or tangible goods." [0] I could see LockPickingLawyer falling under this category.
So more random bullshit YouTube censorship, but what are people going to do?
Hosting videos in 2019 is easy. Getting your content discovered is the hard bit.
We need a decentralised and/or federated alternative for video-content publishing. The sooner, the better.
YouTube has been taken over by big business and lawyers, and it seems they are gradually trying to “dumb” it down and take away any risky (read: useful/interesting) content to the point it might as well be cable tv.
We could use a viable, alternate and free platform this very instant.
> Getting your content discovered is the hard bit.
> We need a decentralised and/or federated alternative for video-content publishing.
I don't see how that second phrase follows from the first. Your comment has a strong point about the need to break Google down, but not on making it easier to host videos.
Does anyone know what the ligality of uploading MIT's OCW lecture videos here would be? Personally that's what got me into watching youtube in the first place.
Also: does that really need javascript? (I'm guessing you're doing something with IPFS?) is there any way to brows it with some command line tool if it does?
A government is an organization that governs. Any organization that polices it's customers/users beyond what the law requires them to is acting as a government. YouTube crossed that line a long time ago. Like home owners associations, YouTube is a government and should be forced by courts to recognize constitutional protections of civil liberties.
A lot of people (especially here) would like to see more competition from non-Google platforms like Vimeo or others (currently they're so obscure, I can't even name any others), so not making too big a fuss about this and not getting it reverted might be a good thing because it forces people to go somewhere else with kids or IT security videos.
So apparently the video was about how to light fireworks using WiFi, could it then be the case that it might fall under a 'dangerous handling of explosives' guideline instead of the 'showing users how to bypass secure computer systems'. The Google support pages says there are other guidelines not listed there.
Not anymore a conspiracy theory. This is the actual big brother modeling our futures, a group of people powerful enough, with their own interests and their own agenda with access to most peoples minds/lives, and who already publicly explained how they plan to influence on global geopolitics and society building.
I find it disturbing this level of censorship. At first, it was pedophiles, murders and violent criminal acts, then terrorism and copyright... even without the need of a lawsuit or proper request from a court it is hard to argue against this sort of censorship. But now they started banning and censoring everything they find immoral and the definition of morals is subjective and not even philosophers could argue that there is any common moral, not even among the most uniform society. Good luck to everyone, sooner than later they will change their definition of morality and we all gonna pay with our freedom. I think it is a better win for everyone to defend individual rights over the supposed benefit of collectives as history proved because no one is authorized or qualified enough to decide our collective destiny. But many are the ones who feel entitled to do it.
This genre of distributed, lower resource usage social platform is rather enjoyable (for me). Hopefully Rustodon, Florence, PixelFed & Lemmy also continue developing, as this can be a compelling alternative to the FAANGs ecosystem.
It's sooner. If you dig it's not hard to find videos of highly-placed employees of these companies talking about how they plan on manipulating future elections. It goes far beyond anything that Russia has even been accused of doing in the past three years, but it's the "right people" saying it, so it's not a scandal.
I don't put much faith in videos made by known con artists who until yesterday were up for felony charges. Not sure why some set of the internet clings to them either.
Thank you. If Project Veritas is indeed what OP was referencing, then the claim can be easily dismissed without viewing the "source" footage, given Veritas' and O'Keefe's extensive history of selective editing, fraudulent claims, dubious methods and borderline entrapment[1].
Edit: If you're going to downvote me, note that I have no problem discussing why we should lend credence to claims from an individual with a long history of fraudulent claims. I am genuinely interested in hearing why we should trust anything PV produces going forward.
Years ago, Bill Kristol accused the lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay detainees of being anti-American for doing so. Up until that point, Bill Kristol has been a pundit I read semi-regularly as a reasonable voice I disagreed with. From that point on, I have never read anything else he had to say. Ever. If an article mentions him, I stop reading. If I accidentally end up on a column of his, I immediately hit the back button. If I happen to be watching TV (very rare) and he appears, I change the channel. By trampling over a foundational precept of justice to get his rhetorical points du jour, he forever forfeited his right to my time.
You may say that is extreme. I say: anything worth saying has dozens of people saying it already. If I want diverse points of view, the internet has them in abundance. So I lose nothing and, in a small way, I can try to make things better.
The point is: Project Veritas is comically partisan. Literally nothing has been too underhanded for them: taking things out of context, outright lying about what they found, splicing video to make it look like people said things they didn’t, you name it and they’ve done it.
So no, they don’t get to be listened to. Ever. No one who worked there gets listened to. Ever. Someone else will speak whatever truths they speak, and meanwhile we need not listen to their lies.
They posted the full unedited video. It doesn't reveal anything deceptive about the editing of the first edited-for-time video.
EDIT: Going to the substance - you really think Google employees don't want to prevent Trump's re-election? Because every possible indicator (campaign donations, personal speech, company policy) says that they do. The Veritas video is part of a massive pattern of evidence pointing to the same conclusion.
They've got a dog in the fight, and there is no mechanism to stop them abusing their non-accountable, opaque, non-democratic power over the modern mediums of communication.
Another question - If this isn't enough evidence to convince you, what would be? What's the standard or proof? Would you apply that same standard to accusations that, say, Trump wants America to be just white people? Or are you just using an isolated demand for rigor [0]?
This isn’t about Google. I reject Project Veritas as a source of evidence. I take no public position on Google, not least because I work there and don’t speak for them.
This isn’t a demand for rigor, isolated or otherwise, because I genuinely didn’t know what this was about before your comment. The history of the thread went:
- Some vague statement
- Someone expressing confusion
- Someone else supposing it was a Project Veritas story and discarding it.
- Parent to my comment asking how its parent thought the evidence was flawed.
My comment was that in some cases, including this one, the source should be dismissed out of hand. No reading, no weighing evidence, nothing. In SSC terms, this source defects while wearing a T-shirt that says “I cooperate”. You don’t entertain such sources unless you want to poison your discourse and your ability to trust evidence.
None of this has anything to do with whether PV’s accusation this time around is true.
Dismiss PV's analysis if you want. I do the same to some sources.
But it's nonsense to discard a primary source, like that video, because it went through a particular person's hands.
If hypothetically, ThinkProgress (who I do not trust) gets a hidden camera video of Trump talking about his dream of mass-expelling nonwhites from America, I wouldn't just pretend it didn't exist because ThinkProgress is the one who took it. Primary sources are primary sources.
I do not have the technical know-how to evaluate their claim that the video is unedited, nor have they earned the right to my time to validate it if I did. If the video is egregious enough, people with less mistrust than me will do the legwork, validate it, and will push it up the trust chain until I get it from a source I trust, which will say “this was originally leaked to PV, but we have done extensive checking and believe it is genuine.”
At which point, well, I still won’t be able to comment on it, but at least I’ll stop saying “dismiss this source out of hand.” :-)
>If the video is egregious enough, people with less mistrust than me will do the legwork, validate it, and will push it up the trust chain until I get it from a source I trust
The issue is that this can't happen because the sources you trust have decided that achieving their political goals (currently - getting rid of Trump) are more important than telling the truth. That's what this entire expose is about, in fact.
Obviously the sources you trust will not pass along information indicating that they are themselves untrustworthy.
When you offload your mental faculties to others, you become their pawn.
People have a duty to at least try to use their brain as an independent judging citizen. Help me, I can't stop these megacorps on my own...
That's a really dangerous attitude to take. Are you really not curious what your own company is up to? Does it matter where the leak came from?
How about this. Go to google.com and type the following:
"women can"
vs.
"men can"
The bias is clear as day and you don't need Project Veritas to tell you.
There were also numerous documents leaked showing extreme left wing bias. You'll probably have seen them as an employee so it's pretty disingenuous to not address the root point (that Goolge is biased) and instead attack the messenger (Project Veritas in this case).
Please source these leaked documents you're referencing. If you read through my posts, I've pointed out multiple times in this thread that the docs Project Veritas leaked pertaining to their latest Google video show no attempt at being biased, nor do they single-out right-wing/Conservative/etc. viewpoints.
That second one has some great examples. They're literally talking about editing the search results for Treyvon Martin and George Zimmerman for instance.
I can’t address the root point in public. You’ll have to take my word for it that I didn’t know what the point was at all when I wrote about sources (though of course, being sentient, I had an idea of the kind of point it would be).
My attitude would be dangerous if Project Veritas were the only entity talking about the dangers of Google. But I find, opening a news tab, that everyone is deeply aware of Google’s reach and power and how it could be problematic. So ignoring known liars doesn’t mean I’m missing vital information. As I said: someone honest is probably making those points, and I certainly listen to such people, from both sides of the aisle, and some of whom I even agree with on some points!
Sadly the mainstream coverage of this issue is woefully lacking. Yes, everyone knows that Google is powerful and that's dangerous but you rarely see very explicit evidence of this and how they are biased. As much as it pains you, you probably should take the 5 minutes required to watch the actual footage. At least then you'll understand why Project Veritas isn't an important part of this story and why people are strongly disagreeing with your position. Jen Gennai's words definitely speak for themselves (as do the leaked documents).
>Another question - If this isn't enough evidence to convince you, what would be? What's the standard or proof?
Where's your evidence and standard of proof? Please read the full dumped documents provided by PV[1] and show me where the anti-Trump/Conservative/right-wing bias is. Beyond a video with an edited interview (I honestly can't find the "full unedited video" on their site or Twitter), all PV has is some shadowy "anonymous" source whose entire credibility is called into question by PV's lengthy history of fraudulent claims. PV and you have no proof, so please don't ask us for ours - Hitchens's Razor[2] should apply here.
Nobody said he used deepfakes. I'm sure that the interviews with Googlers whose faces/voices were on camera were legitimate, and selectively edited just like every single one of his videos. Contrary to other media outlets whose track records of honesty can lend credence to their anonymous sources, O'Keefe's extensive track record of dishonesty and deception casts a long shadow of doubt on his shadowy, voice-modified interviewee that provides additional context to the unbiased documents PV leaked.
>Or are you saying that autocomplete results for "men can " in Google search are totally natural and not at all political engineering done by Google?
Machine learning-based search suggestions are probably going to be a little weird for a while. That's literally all that is.
I went through the okeef wiki and ya it certainly seems like there is a great deal of dishonesty in his "reporting" style.
But the dismissive "that's literally all that it is." Makes me wonder who is it you are trying to convince.
I don't trust project veritas or its motives, at all.
There will be possibly be a time in the future when we can reasonably prove our identities and all things we have done with those identities. In this future, Reputation will be at least as valuable as any other form of measure of worth, because it will also be a world filled with bullshit. In that world, we will want to be very selective with our attention, and who gets that attention.
In the past, project veritas has gone out of their way to misrepresent those they are "interviewing," has lied and made hilarious, absurd, claims to "gotcha" people. They engage in rhetorical dishonesty and fallacy.
They aren't worth anyone's time. I won't waste my valuable attention and time "disproving" every heaping pile of dung that Veritas shits out. They already lost my trust ages ago.
Thanks for chiming in here. I just read through the original PV post[1] and also skimmed through some of the documents in PV's "Doc Dump"[2] related to the article. The documents they dumped don't have a political bias to them - they're literally about trying to get factual/fair news displayed to people as best as possible.
Beyond that, I'm not even going to bother with videos. Like you said, O'Keefe has a very selective/gotcha method of editing his videos, and his claims and methods have long been both suspect and invalidated. Were I to have found anything worthwhile in the documents they dumped or the quotes in the article on their site, I might have given the video a view, but there's nothing "suspect" against Google in the dumped documents to begin with.
So I actually watched the video. Jen Gennai said that if Google is broken up the pieces won't be as effective at thwarting the next "Trump Situation". The frauds a Veritas interpret this as preventing the free and fair election of their favored candidate. Mrs. Gennai said she used imprecise words in a bar conversation when she didn't know she was being recorded. She likely meant that are making an attempt to reduce the spread of fake news, information silo-ing in their news aggregation and still keep user engagement up. Automating the identification of truth is certainly hard, and maybe harder without the resources of a unified Google.
The idea that a single group of people should be 'auditing the identification of truth' with no transparency, no diversity of viewpoint, and no accountability is frighteningly Orwellian.
We are headlong sprinting towards a dark future of corporate control over human expression and democracy itself. And you're helping the megacorps consolidate power because the already convinced you that the people criticizing them are icky.
Truth arbitration does indeed have dark potential and I'll be critical of it without transparency of the process. The people in the video criticizing Google convinced me they are icky because I listened to what they say.
I don't care much about his history. But the video is pretty damning. Unless it's "deceptively edited" in the sense of cutting up her speech and merging it together to form completely different sentences (which seems unlikely, as the video is smooth) or she was just kidding (sure, Trump is "just kidding" all the time!) or deepfakes (possible, but so far noone alleges that)...
Probably referring most recently to the Project Veritas video where a Google exec talked about how they're going to work on "preventing the next Trump situation" and how if Google is broken up, the smaller companies won't have the resources to do that.
Lots of other such leaks and material also pointing to political manipulation by Google in this. There were some Congressional hearings about it recently.
The video was banned by both YouTube and Vimeo on some flimsy pretext. This by itself reinforces the image of a cabal of megacorporations consolidating control over public mindshare and, by extension, the government itself. Of course the mainstream media (CNN, NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, etc) also totally buried the story.
They post the entire unedited footage soon after the initial reveal, for years now. That's much better than CNN, MSNBC, Fox, late night shows, etc. Should the findings of muckrakers be discarded because the practice of muckraking is dishonorable?
And how many times (ACORN, NPR, etc.) have the full versions of those videos shown something different than what the edited versions portrayed?
It's been six days since the "initial reveal"[1] of the video and documents (which, if you read them, are incredibly unbiased). Care to share a link to the entire unedited footage of these new interviews?
Here is a rebuttal to the claim of persistent misleading editing, and also an expose of how outlets such as the Washington Post deliberately engaged in purposefully misleading edits in their coverage of the incidents you name: https://youtu.be/_6SPN03SxM8
I could definitely get behind your point if the subject were the government. It's not, though I understand the sentiment is the same.
At the end of the day YouTube is a private company. Yea, a very big one with huge reach, but private nonetheless. Taking a subjective moral position is something companies have been doing for a long time. If you disagree with them, don't give them your $ (don't use youtube).
Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, even though the sidewalk was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
> "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it."
I don’t see where one would have to move with their family. The case is about a private entity having a “space” with a reach to the public. I find it is a pretty appropriate comparison (in this case the company has a monopoly on the only boardwalk in the whole world, “moving” would mean convincing not only your family but millions (billions?) of people at the same time).
The digital town square is where the people are at. Moving to other streaming sites is more like having your expression relegated to some dusty back road.
If YouTube wants to be editor over the content they host, then they ought to be subject to the same liabilities as a publisher. If they want to be considered a platform then should be forced to remain neutral. The conflation of these mutually exclusive roles serves money at the expense of everyone else.
I agree, I feel like they should host pretty much anything. But they are absolutely responsible for what they promote, since their algorithms select what to recommend. This makes it impossible to remain "neutral". And they are also responsible for effects their algorithms have on society. At the very least will less people want to work for a company who caused the next civil war by spreading divisive content.
Freedom of Speech is not the Obligation to be Heard, nor is it the Freedom to Exploit Private Businesses to Promote Your Opinion.
The case cited was one where a piece of land was being used, passively, by individuals requiring no unique support or upkeep by owner in order for the plaintiffs to enjoy those freedoms. To make it relevant to YouTube, the court would have had to rule that the private business was required to provide shade, iced tea in sweet and unsweet varieties, as well as free megaphones.
Property is no less a social construct than law is. That decision draws a spectrum between individual property and public property that is modulated by use; if you allow public use of your property, it will be regulated by the public, proportional to the degree at which you open the property to public use.
Without doing this, the government only has the authority to guarantee your rights on government property, which would effectively be no different from granting complete sovereignty to private entities.
The US is weird in that a lot of commonly expected services aren't supplied by the government, if there was a wewillhostyourvideos.gov site out there then I'd definitely agree with you - I still _mostly_ agree with you since youtube now has semi-legitimate competition from vimeo - vimeo fails hard as a browsing platform but is fine as a place to host your video.
This sort of censorship by a private company is only acceptable if there is a legitimate other path to post videos (still within the realm of ethically decided censorship) - if the government has a presence in a market we demand that the government be the most lax player when it comes to issues of freedom of speech, but I think we're fine as long as there exist places in which to practice our free speech.
Is there any government in the world providing a wewillhostyourvideos.gov? More to the point, video is not the only form of speech, web pages exist, podcasts exist, I am not sure why freedom of speech now equals video and why people insist that the ability to post video to a privately owned platform is now a right just because that platform happens to be popular.
I am unaware of any governments that provide wewillhostyourvideos.gov, as to the question of mediums... it's a delicate balance. It is very logical that the government doesn't need to support everyone's ability to paint their opinions on a forty foot canvas with premium oil paints, but I think video based (and even more specifically that vlog/video essay form that has emerged recently) is a way that people feel naturally suites their self expression, if it isn't heinously expensive to support them expressing in that manner then I think we (as a society) benefit a lot from supporting their expression in that form.
I think with the power and influence these private companies wield and the huge effects they can have on society, the distinction between the standards we hold gov vs private to is arbitrary and only remain for historical reasons. It doesn't have to be that way just because it always was.
YouTube is a video sharing website, the only power it has is the power we willingly give it by voluntarily visiting their website. Society needs to have personal responsibility for it's own viewing habits.
When they have more influence and impact on citizens than governments, perhaps we should revisit our definition of what "public" means. They can close businesses, make disappear the reach of specific competitors and do all sorts of things that governments cannot do because they agreed with their respective societies to limit their own power after thousands of years of history.
Right now the only part in which are they private is that they were founded by private capital.
It is utterly absurd to suggest that YouTube has more influence and impact than the government. The government has the power to imprison and murder you with impunity, their level of impact and influence completely dwarfs every video sharing site on the internet combined.
> At the end of the day YouTube is a private company
I can’t argue that it isn’t, and I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with somebody saying “you have to host whatever is uploaded”… on the other hand, AT&T and Comcast are “private companies” that host the backbone of the internet and could at any time start refusing to route traffic for, say, a YouTube competitor. Some banks are already refusing to do business with vendors that also sell guns… there is a point where censorship become discriminatory.
Expect, YouTube is a monopoly in monetizing video content. It's like asking an app developer to not publish with [Apple, Google] if they disagree with their policies. Sure, they can choose to not publish, but with that choice goes away the ability to monetize their app in the real world
Big tech has gotten even more powerful and necessary at a practical level, with none of the guarantees of fair treatment the government is bound by. This needs to change, pronto.
Facebook is just as restrictive as Google. Vimeo doesn't compare to YouTube in any way. To follow the analogy of the parent comment, Vimeo is like only being able to publish on the Amazon app store.
If we accept this ownership of the digital space by corporations, our future is looking very bleak.
I'm more concerned that if a migration happened to Vimeo, you'd end up in the same spot. Speech doesn't presume an easy to reach audience. I'm fine with YouTube and its ilk not surfacing things organically if they don't want to or even de-monetizing- but I do object to total de-platforming based on non-illegal content. People have to have /somewhere/ to go.
Oh come on, YouTube isn't banning content "showing users how to bypass secure computer systems or steal user credentials and personal data" because it somehow offends their moral sensibilities.
They're doing it because they know that if there was a major hack and whoever did it learned from YouTube videos, there would be widespread outrage.
The headlines would be "YouTube teaches hackers how to steal your private data", and there would be calls for more regulation on what YouTube can and cannot do, which is something that they probably want to avoid at all costs.
So we end up with rules like these. You and I might disagree with them, but they come about because it's what we (collectively as a society) have demanded.
I don't think anyone is stopping you from putting your hacking video on your own website and letting users download it. That would be censorship. This is merely an aggregator/community that doesn't want to pay to distribute your content. So pay someone else!
Try to make viral anything you want without the cooperation of silicon valley big tech club. Unfortunately, I lack the data but I am sure these companies are covering the biggest part of the mass distribution channels and current personal telecommunications, especially since whatsapp surpassed phone calls and texts.
In the other hand, they built a social image and I wouldn't wonder that the ones out of the most' platform will become the new parias and they will be less trusted and less accessible, harder to find etc.
That is until your web host decides to play by the same game, or is scared into doing so by activist mobs.
Even if you do host your own videos, good luck getting anywhere near the same amount of traffic that you'd get by hosting it on a site like YouTube.
I suppose the next answer would be to host on one's own servers. Well, great. Up until the ISP, domain registrar, or payment processor decides it doesn't like what you're saying and won't even take your money to do so.
I suppose you're alluding to issues like Cloudflare dumping literal Nazis off their service. The same issue still applies with all of those entities. Political party is not a protected class and nobody is guaranteed any internet service until internet service is deemed a human right. Until that time, Nazis are free to preach and prattle on physical town squares instead of virtual ones.
No, I've never heard of that, and just a suggestion, but you should think twice before assuming what someone might be implying, especially if it can any way be insinuated as a defense of "literal Nazis". (versus, what, figurative nazis?)
My point is that it logically follows that people being banned from YouTube is fundamentally the same thing as being banned from another layer of the communication stack, whether it be the web host, the ISP, the telecom, the payment processor, etc.
Hell, why even stop at the technology stack? Maybe apartment complexes shouldn't rent to people with unpopular views. Perhaps grocery stores should refuse to sell food to those who say bad things about the LGBTQ+ community. /s
> Political party is not a protected class and nobody is guaranteed any internet service until internet service is deemed a human right.
Do you see the problem with this? When the internet is the virtual town square and the way to mass communicate, having no protections for free speech by either individuals or groups is a recipe for tyranny. Maybe this doesn't feel concerning to those whose views are currently the popular ones, but with the centralization of the internet and our increasing dependence on it for everything, that's a fascistic situation waiting to develop.
Just as we allow private businesses to have their own rules and practices, while simultaneously forbidding privately-owned cities from violating the US Constitution, there should come a point where the "private business" excuse is no longer valid once a small group of corporations have a stranglehold over the way that everyone communicates.
Hacking is a very broad term with positive meanings in most cases, at least spoken from one programmer to another. It seems too broad to say, hacking videos are not allowed. Hacking together a Node SPA? Is that hacking? No, but it will result in the video immediately being flagged as not eligible for monetization etc. Google's morals and ethics should not be pushed on the entire world's only video platform (realistically speaking). The world needed competitors years ago.
I am not sure why we're having a debate about what "hacking" is when the original article is entitled 'YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”'. Making a Node SPA is not bypassing secure computer systems. You are getting mad at Google for something they have neither said nor done.
The point of my original post was to say, no matter what YouTube's guidelines are, they're not censorship any more than NBC not wanting to broadcast some random TV show you just produced. There are other means to get your message out there. Not having access to easy ones doesn't mean you're being oppressed. It just means you have to work harder.
The regulation is getting more and more expensive to be compliant with and soon only the wealthy will be able to afford hosting their own uncensored videos. Governments then will take care of that too.
Agreed. Being of the Libertarian mindset, I was at first completely okay with it under the argument of personal liberty and personal property. It's a private company and they can do what they want.
But the closer I looked at it the more I realized that it truly is a public space. And then when powerful political figures started influencing what was okay to censor on it I realized they are trying to do an end-run around the actual law via technicality. No need for the government to censor anything when they can just get the technocrats to do it for them. And everyone seems okay with it, so long as it's not them.
Having a lot of people in a space doesn't make it a "public space". These terms are well defined, and we should stick to them when discussing, or we'll all talk past each other.
YouTube is not even a "privately owned public space" because it isn't legally required to be open to the public.
If you believe video hosting is critical public infrastructure, nationalize it.
Past thought about free speech seems to be based on the assumption that people can communicate without having some third party approve the sender/receiver/message. Now we mostly use a communication medium that involves a lot of third parties. How many private companies carried this comment to your screen? The bakery whose WiFi I'm using now, their ISP, some unknown backbone carrier, YCombinator, your ISP. Maybe a CDN provider and some others I can't think of.
We already have an answer about a government-operated communication medium: the government (including those acting on its behalf) must uphold our rights. That implies an obligation to keep storing/hosting/delivering things we say. It costs money, but society is more or less ok with the idea of a government having a legal obligation to spend resources on something. But what do we do with a private entity which spends a lot of money to operate and maintain a communication medium?
Or maybe instead of this being a conspiracy of brigades, more people are waking up the dangers of too much control in the hands of a few powerful people?
Thank you for this cold slap in the face. I needed it.
I am of course very happy to see more people waking up to the dangers of too much control in the hands of powerful people. I'll edit my other post to remove the accusation, it poisons the well. I've been whinging on about this for years and it's definitely worn on my ability to be civil about it when we're at the "I told you so" stage of censorship.
As a YouTuber with 125k subscribers, it's stuff like this that makes me look forward to quitting one day (it does pay bills). YouTube won't be able to keep creators like me around at this rate. You can add this to a very long list of bad decisions by YouTube. It's almost second nature for them at this point. They need at least one competitor and there are none.
Is YouTube stopping you from buying a camcorder, recording a bit, buying a server, and putting it on the internet? No, they aren't. They're stopping you from doing it on their servers.
It's their product, so they get to choose who can use it and how. You not entitled to tell them what to do with their product. On their platform, they can censor whatever they want.
You don't even pay them any money, and here you are pretending that you have some right to tell them what to do, that this is about your freedom, not theirs.
If this were like, a water, power, telephone, or other utility, you might have some expectation of ability to express free speech on their platform. But YouTube is not an inalienable right.
>Not anymore a conspiracy theory. This is the actual big brother modeling our futures,
No. This is a company that gets 99% of its income from selling ad space doing what they need to do to keep advertisers, their customers, happy.
It is not a conspiracy, Big Brother isn't trying to censor you, YouTube is trying to keep their customers happy to keep money flowing in.
I'm tired of people complaining YouTube demonetizing, or removing, videos is some sort of state-sponsored censorship. We had this exact same thing happen to many firearm channels in the past couple of years and it had nothing to do with guns being evil and everything to do with some of the channels were doing outright dangerous things and that advertisers did not want to be associated with home-made ammunition (taofledermaus exists solely to shoot home made ammunition, stuff like lego heads/nails/pennies/wax/anything you can think of), bumpstocks (JerryRigEverything showed one when it was in the news, DemolitionRanch showed how to bumpfire without a bumpstock), what happens if I put the wrong caliber ammunition in a firearm (Demolition Ranch, also I believe King of Everything did this as well he also was in the news for at least two of his videos and had legal action taken against him for making explosives around the same time) and video series like:
"what happens if I shoot OBJECT with a 50 cal" DemolitionRanch 50-cal Fridays
"what happens if I microwave ammunition/loaded firearms/full magazines" DemolitionRanch
Etc.
People screamed this was some Orwellian, big brother, gotta oppress people, conspiracy and it was nothing more than YouTube doing CYA and attempting to keep their customers (the advertisers) happy.
As a creator or viewer you are NOT a customer of YouTube, you are the product.
When they have more influence on citizens than governments, perhaps we should revisit our definition of what public means.
In the other hands, there has been already ideology ban and promotion of their own, and recently in a leaked video, they affirmed how they will stop promoting certain political views and promote the ones they find correct for the 2020 elections.
Laugh now at the leolingua described by George Orwell, what is freedom and what is public?
I don't think they believe it either. It's just easier to treat people as criminals by default. Why go through the effort of engineering things properly when you can have 10+ cops break down your door and shoot your dog?
> Isn't that how most home door locks work, though?
Not at all. Short of building a fortress, you won't stop someone determined to get inside, but you can make it sufficiently difficult that they're more likely to be noticed, or more likely to seek out an easier alternative.
> it's pretty helpful to have legal deterrents to amoral actions...
Nobody is suggesting otherwise; rather, the issue is that legislating against something doesn't stop it from happening, and therefore you do still need to secure against it as part of your threat model.
Furthermore, laws tend to paint with a very broad brush; changing a number in a URL isn't "hacking", for instance. Laws should work with technical measures. Climbing a fence makes it much more obvious that you're trespassing.
Wait, "Not at all"? Yes, it very much is, what you just said is literally the explanation I would give if someone asked me to explain why a front door lock is a legislative protection, not an actual security feature...
Legislation meaning you don't need to defend against it is actually quite real in meat space (and quite effective), so pretending like it's universally a bad idea is incongruous with your own facts.
Most people do not live in houses that I would call "secure systems". The reason locks in residential homes are not that sophisticated is because it's not worth the cost to make them secure when there is still going to be a glass window right next to it.
It's a true belief for companies like Equifax, who can offload all of the liability so long as it's the criminal that is guilty instead of them. For Equifax, securing reads is worth very little because as long as they can A. stop competitors from using their data and B. have no liability all of their needs are met.
I would say yes, since "secure" is a spectrum and there's nothing about a YouTube video that means the information is lower quality or less valuable than any other source.
I wonder why YouTube has to be the go-to source for useful video in the first place. Seems steps like this drive important content to other, hopefully more privacy-conscious platforms.
This is a bigger loss for YouTube than the security community.
It's interesting that Google had an issue with Pixie Dust. This makes no sense: more people should know this type of attack exists as many of not most home routers are vulnerable.
Hey , it lowers their security costs, that s very reasonable. Next they ll ban videos that teach how to install an ad blocker. It lowers their advertising loss, thats reasonable.
YouTube has network effects which are hard to beat; the uploader can use a YouTube alternative but will take a hit in discoverability. Is d.tube still a viable option?
I bet that this new policy incorrectly flagged this video, it will be restored, and none of the apocalyptic descriptions in the other comments will come to fruition.
It feels weird to think that this kind of content might be safe on PornHub. To teach people how to secure things, they need to appreciate attack vectors.
Maybe they just figured they have enough of how to bypass their android factory reset protection and someone who wrote new rule stated too general policy?
Well, this is dumb as hell. Basically, YouTube (i.e. Google) is unwilling to close the holes in their security systems, so they hope to keep everyone in the dark about them??? Any sane person would want people to find and report these vulnerabilities so they could be repaired...
There's a fine line between pentesting education and "how to break into a computer", and it's sad that instructional videos are now being banned due to this policy.
I also don't understand how a video teaching how to make your software more secure is different from a video teaching how to exploit insecure software. For all I know, they are the exact same video.
If I create a video that shows "how to hack into Facebook Corporation", that is teaching an illegal act. You do not have authorization to hack Facebook.
If you teach "how to hack your own system, that you own", that's a different thing entirely.
The question is why? Is this something G decided to do or is it required by a government? If it's the first, it's just G being idiotic. The second would worry me very much.
A move that will achieve little other than to damage Google's image further.
There are other prevalent video upload/streaming websites who will not as actively enforce their content restrictions. The impact of YouTube's aggressively purging cybersecurity content will be minimal in a practical sense.
In a philosophical sense, the internet has no intrinsic governing body, and as such content restrictions are placed in the hands of content hosts.
It is when the content hosts are so massive that they are effectively dictating law (not to say that YouTube is forcing a precedent on other hosts, but rather by placing restrictions on such a massive traffic volume) that the "Big Brother" scenario is unsurprisingly brought up.
I think if Google tracked everyone who uploaded and/or watched said content and then transmitted their information to the authorities, this would be Big Brother level. And they may very well do this already, I lack the knowledge on the topic to say.
But content restrictions are theirs to impose. I think most of us will judge them by the execution of the prohibition of said content.
If they successfully keep their filters narrow enough to remove content that is uploaded for the purposes of causing damage/harm to others, I do not think many of us would judge. There are those who speak of freedom of speech, but if I had a list of user credentials for an internet banking website or GMail, I do not think my transmission of them to the masses would be a responsible thing to do, and neither would I think that freedom of speech obstruction would be a valid defence of my actions were I to transmit everybody's user credentials to the masses for anyone to play with.
People are not simply recruited as pentesters or similar straight out of school, they are typically required to have qualifications or at least core competencies and I imagine an attitude appropriate to the sensitive work and material involved.
It's not as simple as many contend. Many are content with videos about murder, child abuse etc. being prohibited. They talk of their content options being dictated, but look at prior mediums. Television never included these things, because it was considered improper and/or illegal to disseminate material instructing or capable of instructing people to commit or get away with committing acts of crime. The internet had no such restrictions because people are the content producers, not studios.
However, the internet has not changed. If you desire freedom of speech, put your own website up as we all did in the beginning, rather than relying on a mainstream host whose legal obligations are proportionate to its mass and its media presence. If you use YouTube, you sacrifice your freedom for convenience and access to traffic volume, just as you would if you were to broadcast on TV or Netflix.
Regular reminder that Hacker News automatically removes content the community doesn't like. Think about that before complaining on Hacker News about YouTube removing videos.
Sorry for the delay—only saw this now. The problem isn't the profanity, it's that the comment didn't contain any information. Also, we're trying to avoid pure indignation here—it tends to lead to more of the same and that makes for low quality discussion.
I'd bet that some employees at Google got their interest and possibly initial exposure to infosec by watching, or reading similar (like Phrack 'zine back in the late 80s). Perhaps they're even doing very important things, like working for Project Zero. It would be interesting to know how many people who work in infosec started "on the dark side." I don't think it would be rare, at all. The few actual whitehats I've met sure didn't start out as white hats, and got their start with info publicly available.
But showing people how to hack systems... that seems like an OK thing to ban. It's a crime. Teaching people how to commit a crime has always been not OK.
I know it's just a throwaway comment, but you don't take a course on "learning to paint" to do vandalism.
You don't see courses on "ethical painting" like the person teaching it has to qualify that they're teaching the legal type of painting. You don't hear people talking about "white hack" and "black hat" painters.
I assume you know hacking has a huge illegal component such that it always has to be qualified as good or bad when talking about it.
I see your point, but I don't think the fact that society has created a dichotomy of hackers means that we should ban all knowledge of hacking.
This might be a better analogy for my feelings on the topic. Abortions are determined to be legal or illegal based on the time you have one. This is the dichotomy that we as a society have created. The method to abort a child at 1 month, and 1 month and 1 day will be exactly the same, but the legallity might be the opposite. Does that mean we need to ban all information on how to have a safe abortion? No, it means we need to enfore the laws already on the books for those having unsafe/ illegal abortions.
The fact that knowledge is abused does not mean it should be censored. And on top of that maybe I want to know how to craft a pair of brass knuckles, or how to program a guidance system for a missle just because I'm curious.
"It shall be unlawful for any person... to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction..."[1]
Teaching bomb making is not legal. Passed the senate 94-0, no objections. There are things you can't teach.
You omitted the important part: "...with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence." The teaching alone is legal. The intent to set up someone to commit a crime is what makes it illegal. I can legally teach you how to make a bomb if I do not intend for you to use it for crime.
I challenge you on that last point. If you tried teaching bomb making in the United States, you would likely have be visited by a couple of ATF folks to have a talk.
I was pointing out that your quote was incomplete and cannot be used to support your point. Being visited by law enforcement does not imply that you have committed a crime.
How are security professional supposed to learn how to secure systems? This is silly, and I'm not surprised that Google is leaning towards censorship again. Where are all the Google cloud employees when you need them commenting on threads?
> Where are all the Google cloud employees when you need them commenting on threads?
I am a Google employee though not in Cloud. I am not really sure what commenting is going to accomplish here?
I don't agree with this and many other things Google does, whether it be in my org or elsewhere. I am sure this is the case for many employees just from internal communications.
Google is a huge company so I suppose this is just natural, and frankly I don't think the people who make these decisions really care what I or other Googlers think. After all, as the population increases it becomes increasingly difficult to make everyone happy.
Given that laws vary wildly from county to county, city to city, state to state, country to country, sometimes stuff like this is simply CYA for YouTube.
You also have to keep in mind that YouTube is not a webhosting service or content delivery network, they exist to sell adspace for 99% of their income, if advertisers don't want to appear around guns/pornographic material/material of questionable legality/etc then it's well within YouTube's right to prohibit such content whether or not is legal to distribute.
People always rush to scream YouTube/Google is censoring them when they aren't. YouTube is not a government, YouTube is a business that sells ad space.
That site is wrong, lock picking tools in all those States are still legal to possess for non-criminal purposes same as all the other states. They just consider possession of such tools to be prima facie evidence that you have criminal intent. Prima facie evidence is basically evidence that if not disproved by the defense is by law sufficient to convict.
So that means it's still legal to possess such tools in those states. But if prosecuted for criminal possession you basically lose the presumption of innocence and must prove you had no criminal intent rather than the state being required to prove that you did.
There is a difference however between demonetizing clips (ie not showing ads associated with certain content) and outright banning them. I feel the latter should be reserved for very few types of contents (mostly contents that is illegal to host).
Hacking is not only not necessarily a crime, you can actually get a job doing it responsibly (red team security professional). I'm looking forward to seeing Amazon refuse to sell the Red Team Field Manual because it's about "hacking".
This is a very important argument. It may sound stupid. But the point is the recent censorship efforts had even lower levels of pseudo logic.
They censored away voices that were fully covered under free speech. To be honest I can sympathize with your 'crime tutorial' argument even slightly more than banning hate mongers. Hate is not a crime.
I don't know about banning something because it leads to illegal activity, however I do see why they ban some content.
I'm Pro 2a but YouTube was demonetizing, and even removing some, many firearm videos 1-2 years ago and it had everyone in the firearm community in an uproar and the people screaming the most were the uploaders that had videos along the lines of:
"what happens if I shoot a barbie doll with a 50 cal"
"what happens if I shoot a watermelon full of tanerite"
"what happens if I microwave ammunition" (Demolition Ranch has an entire series of these)
"what happens if I microwave a full ak mag" (Demolition Ranch has an entire series of these)
"what happens if I put the wrong caliber ammunition in a firearm" (Demolition Ranch, also I believe King of Everything did this as well he also was in the news for at least two of his videos and had legal action taken against him for making explosives around the same time)
Like, you aren't teaching people how to safely shoot or reviewing firearms, you're doing stupid stuff that is extremely dangerous and absolutely should not be replicated by viewers at home.
Similarly Cody's Lab was losing it last year or the year before when his account was suspended... after he literally rushed through an airport talking to his phone animatedly about making explosives and --- blowing himself up --- in a previously uploaded prank video, and this year he's been griping about how his videos are being demonetized again... well... yeah... you poured liquid mercury into your mouth and were squirting it through your teeth... and you previously almost blew your finger off when you were whacking home-brew nitro glycerine with a steak knife... and you had the federal agents visit your house in response to when you talked about how to make yellow cake at home and were showing your incredibly poor storage methods for radioactive dust. You aren't being persecuted, Google and/or the authorities are trying to make sure you aren't going to do harm to others or instruct others how to do harm.
I imagine the spirit behind this is more to ban videos like
"hack your girlfriend's phone to install secret tracking apps"
and
"how to hack our neighbors WiFi"
instead of "how to assess vulnerabilities in your network"
I seem to recall Mythbusters baking a loaded .44 Magnum in an oven, and that was on corporate broadcast TV.
I can't speak for the average person, but if I find myself curious about the results of something obviously dangerous, I like to look up a video of someone else doing it so I can find out with no risk. I don't find myself wanting to replicate dangerous experiments once I've watched a video.
>I seem to recall Mythbusters baking a loaded .44 Magnum in an oven, and that was on corporate broadcast TV.
If this did happen in an episode they likely had firefighters and EMTs on hand, an entire safety crew, ballistic glass and/or a proper bunker, etc.
Demolition Ranch though... he's a veterinarian that had a microwave in his field in Texas with some cinder blocks around the sides. Likely with one other person on hand in case he injured himself.
You're probably right. But.. so? Mythbusters has a huge budget and paid a bunch of people to run something safely, vs. dude with a microwave--this does not change one iota what was recorded and broadcast.
The point of those videos (besides providing some entertainment) is satisfying one's curiosity. I don't need to put bullets in a microwave, I can just watch the video to see what happens (personally I don't really care but I'm sure there is some young person somewhere who is curious about it and these videos might save their life).
> Like, you aren't teaching people how to safely shoot or reviewing firearms, you're doing stupid stuff that is extremely dangerous and absolutely should not be replicated by viewers at home.
I agree. We should only publish videos of things that are safe for viewers to replicate.
I'm afraid this comment may fall afoul of Poe's law - but I think I agree.
In my elementary school, That Favorite Science Teacher made gunpowder as an in-class demonstration, as well as hydrogen balloons.
Should that content be allowed on YouTube? There are plenty of college-level chemistry demonstrations which have serious safety concerns; if not in the performance, then in the safe and ethical disposal.
Cody's views on elemental mercury being vilified push me over the edge to wanting that type of speech protected on the platform, lest fears of dihydrogen monoxide rule.
Channels like NileRed discuss that this is dangerous, that is dangerous, I'm properly venting and wearing a respirator, I have to do these steps so this is safe to dispose of etc. That is safe, channels like this are commendable.
Channels like BackyardScientist and Cody's Lab where you are making your own nitro and whacking it with a steak knife or making weapons firing rather fast moving (and heavy) projectiles in your backayrd in the suburbs... yeahhh not so much (or worse, the time DemolitionRanch fired a proper firearm inside his HOUSE).
Channels like TheSlowMoGuys and Hydraulic Press Channel/Beyond the Press are the grey area. They both use some safety precautions and both often stress "don't try this yourself" or some such, but they also do stuff that is still pretty dangerous and questionable at best like getting inside giant water balloons for Slow and making rocket engines out of "play doo" for Beyond.
IIRC, even Cody's steak knife NG video had pretty serious "don't do this" disclaimers. And, I genuinely think it had educational value as an example of a project gone wrong.
The biggest problem for me in this train of thought is whether the danger lies in the danger (if emulated), the attractiveness, or the availability.
At what point do you start banning extreme sports videos from the platform? There are some activities which simply aren't safe, and are clear outliers. (Say, free soloing vs typical rock climbing.)
And how many people injure themselves doing stupid "science experiments" vs any type of sporting activity? By your logic youtube should ban anything to do with soccer, football, cheerleading, skateboarding, extreme sports. Definitely anything to do with getting cars to go faster as cars kill about 30k people a year in the US.
Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts.
Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here.
In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?