Belta (the state news agency) was using YouTube for propaganda for almost a year since the protests in 2020 in Belarus. Videos of "confessions" by beaten protestors were very common. I'm not sure how much the government spends on ads but you can hardly watch anything on YouTube without stumbling into a propaganda video.
I've not seen Western states using videos of tortured hostages to signal boost their propaganda channels. I think this is a significant difference, don't you think?
I mostly share your view on this, but don't forget that when our TV stations show on repeat how our cops are beating Antifa members in demonstrations, that this has also the same chilling effect on us. They are usually followed by interviews from higher-ups in the police force who then frame their view of things. Also, you don't see them followed by interviews from Antifa members, which might have something just as valid to say.
It is a different thing, but there are similarities.
It's not allowed in the States either, but it still happens. It happens in the EU too. In general, the Western countries are not free from blame when it comes to war crimes due to complicity with the US :/
People aren't outraged at a minimum wage worker though, they are outraged at a billion dollar corporation that insists on making those minimum wage workers the only official contact point.
The ad shows the journalist Roman Protasevich "confessing" that he is being treated well and he has no complaints. However, he looks beaten and scared.
They are also showing parts of the video, outside of the ad, where he "confesses" to organizing mass riots[1]. I'm guessing that's the bit he was beaten into submission for.
Google monetising tortured people, yet another reason why I find them to be a truly evil company and why the “I work in ads at google and I’m not a bad person” people are deluded, in my opinion.
I believe Google is just an ad business unexpectely found itself to be a media company figuring what standards to adhere. IMO their try to be unbiased is a bit awkward.
That's no excuse. If they weren't chasing giant growth, then they could have dealt with the issues as they arose, but instead they're largely turning a blind eye. I've seen so many advertisements served by them that were downright trash (as I've said before in other HN threads... I've seen adverts for: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation, porn, incest porn games) and they are tirelessly working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. Then they claim that at their scale they can't do anything about it (or downright ignore it) yet they're the ones who chose to become that big, in an effort to chase profits.
They chose profits over people, that makes them evil and makes people who work for them, knowingly making it worse in order to collect a higher paycheck, also evil.
My experience with youtube is different. I've never seen an ad which I considered inappropriate, nothing from what you listed. So commenting on that I was mostly focused on content rather than ads. For ads, I think, it is pretty clear that what you mentioned is inappropriate.
But the subj IMO is just an exception which probably sneaked through in the disguise of social ad or something.
It's a bit like being a spy: get caught and you're disavowed.
Now, what I for one would love to see is an extraction of Julian Assange. He's a far more important journalist, who's been held in captivity far longer, and whose mental and physical deterioration as a result of the abuse he's endured has been far greater. He's the Griffith of the journalistic world.
Who wouldn't love hearing that a crack Russian special forces unit dropped into London, hit the Belmarsh hard, incapacitated the prison guards, and sprang Assange? Then vanished from London under cover of night, nursed Assange back to health in Russia, and Assange eventually returns to journalism after a decade of suppression, assuming his mind can be pieced back together, while living as a free refugee, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the former USSR?
I think we're all owed a happy ending at this point. It's been an ugly decade.
(It is of course illegal to crowdfund coup attempts and jailbreaks in foreign countries, although whether a prosecution takes place is entirely political)
There must be a crypto betting market out there where you could create a "Journalist will not be rescued from Belarus" bet and people could start betting against it until it became profitable enough for a mercenary company to do it.
I've seen crypto betting markets [1] that have bets on whether or not Joe Biden will still be President at the end of the month. Ostensibly they are about his old age or Trump proving the election fraudulent or some such. But another way to construe them is as an inducement towards assassination.
The Russians are the world's undisputed masters of this, so it's time we paramilitarize back.
Also, time to fuck Russia, hard. Putin's parkinsons won't come soon enough, and what comes after might even be worse. We should offer a visa for every Russian woman under 18. Starve the country of mothers, and their birthrate is already abysmal.
Who are you going to pay for that? Your neighbor Joey, he will go and perform an intelligence operation in a foreign country? Or maybe some professional CIA-as-a-service corporation?
We'll use you as a distraction. You can walk up to the guards and fake a heart attack. Larry, Moe & Curly will then sneak behind the guards. I promise, it will not be an episode of Keystone Cops.
The main problem is that a paramilitary group (us) has a disadvantage vs a government agency (them). They have the people, the equipment, and the home territory. There's also the language barrier; most of the people we'd recruit wouldn't be able to blend in, which is crucial for an op like this.
There's also the question of logistics. It would be hard to transport weapons across country borders. The most likely way to do it might be to start the op in a neighboring country. But if you want to drive, you'll probably be stopped at a checkpoint. Walking isn't very appealing. I suppose you could parachute in, Fortnite-style, but that's pushing the boundaries of believability. Plus that Mig they sent to intercept the civilian plane might have a few things to say about that.
That poor guy. I wish there was something to do for him.
I mean Mark Prince has shown that he and his family's companies are happy to murder for hire. That's probably a good starting point if you want killers that operate with at the support of a major Western government.
Executive Outcomes returned this last year, IIRC. They pulled off some extremely crazy thing in Indonesia a long time ago, and still have access to top talent.
The likelihood of collateral damage makes this a bad idea. It's better just to sanction all gov't officials (e.g., refuse to let them travel outside of Belarus, cancel their Netflix, etc.), until he is released.
While Lukashenko may not, some of those dictators have the effective power to assassinate Western leaders in retaliation. I'm really not sure we want to open that can of worms.
It'll also blow right up in our face in terms of the desired effect. In many cases, I figure doing that would actually boost support for the regime. Many dictators are ruling right now on nationalist sentiment -- "I may be a thug but I am strong and I keep our nation safe from the Americans [or whoever]". Bumping them off will not exactly dispel that myth. If they survive, or if power transfers stably to their second-hand-man or woman, they can now portray themselves and their nation as besieged by hostile foreign powers which will stoop as low as assassination to manipulate the nation's destiny for their ulterior objectives. (The best propaganda, after all, is the truth.)
When I was a child, I remember my parents suggesting that instead of whatever war was in the news at the time killing thousands, the leaders of the respective countries should have a duel.
Assassinations aren't quite that, but perhaps the world would be better if that, rather than warfare was how countries that couldn't resolve their differences escalated. Leaders would have a more personal stake in resolving conflict diplomatically, and fewer people would die when they failed.
I should note this is only half-serious before somebody writes up a reply about a scenario where more extreme leaders take their place and there's a worse war as a result, or some such.
I face palm pretty much every time any US administration, Democratic or Republican, makes statements about Venezuela. Seems like every single time it only makes things worse and gives whoever is running the place into the ground at the moment something external to point to as being the source of the people's misery. The desire to "do something" is strong and hard to resist but often is counterproductive.
Anybody can assassinate just anybody. Even heads of G7 can only afford security barely enough to defend against lone attacker with a battalion sized force constantly following them.
It's just they don't want to because they are afraid.
A more effective solution is to sponsor a resistance movement (whether militant or peaceful) and this has been done so often that it's been systematized in both military and civil terms by various imperial powers, but with (imho) increasingly mediocre outcomes and increasing risk of blowback.
What a heck is that "power vacuum?" I never managed to comprehend the mechanics of Western thought process arriving to that philosophical concept.
> It also sends a very strong message to Putin that the US may not want to send
You want to send this message. You want Putin to be intimidated, and scared, and not laughing at you in the face.
Very massive intimidation. Gaddafi's intimate encounter with a bayonet type of one.
It will be also a message of unity, for the world to see that the West can still Desert Storm any Hitler wannabe like was in time when the West was big, and menacing, and not the other way around.
> What a heck is that "power vacuum?" I never managed to comprehend the mechanics of Western thought process arriving to that philosophical concept.
It's called a "vacuum" by analogy with physics, because unscrupulous folks will rush in to fill it. This kind of chaos is not something you actually want, since it lets the worst guys around win easily. You want to give Mr. Dictator the best opportunity to establish well-founded transition/succession mechanisms (including respect for fundamental rights, which is even more important than democratic voting norms!) and then step down willingly and orderly, with a golden parachute to sweeten the deal.
The West has gotten this stuff horribly wrong as of late, even as recently as the latest wars in the Middle East, but that's no reason to do even worse.
It's not even that it lets the worst people seize power (although this is often the case). It's just that someone will seize power; it's less than obvious who that will be to any outside intervenor; and considerable positional/ temporal advantage is likely to be lost during the interregnum.
History has shown that it isn’t, though. ISIS rising up and capturing actual land area and oil infrastructure was a direct result of the US ousting Saddam Hussein. There’s a whole lot more examples of this in history.
This guy rose to power after Tsar Nicolas II and his family were machine-gunned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin Then, Stalin rose to power from the chaos after Lenin’s death, and then when Stalin died, Malankov was ‘in charge’ until Khrushchev took power from him, and so on.
There are counter examples of course, Nicolae Ceausescu being executed in Romania, for instance.
I’ve upvoted your comment because you’re correct that history is full of examples of power vacuums leading to negative outcomes for the general population (such as war or other chaos before a new leader or group eventually consolidates power), e.g., I only learned about the bloody War of the Spanish Succession when I visited Barcelona a few years ago. However, I don’t think the Russian Revolution is a particularly good example as it was more complex series of events and historical forces resulting in the displacement of the existing power structure (Russian Empire).
After the Tsar was forced to abdicate as a result of the spontaneous, popular and bottom-up February 1917 Revolution, his government was replaced by a provisional government led by Kerensky which tried to incorporate all political classes and factions in Russian society. However, the provisional government was both weak and unstable – vulnerable to a coup by monarchists in the army while being effectively dependent on the co-operation of the Soviets (workers’ councils / citizen assemblies) of the more industrialised cities, particularly St. Petersburg. Just as important, they had been unable to extricate Russia from the disastrous and unpopular war with Germany (Eastern front of the First World War) and had been unable to resolve much of the material conditions (food shortages) that precipitated the February Revolution.
The Bolshevik party had been organising as a revolutionary party (previously a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) since the turn of the century. Unlike orthodox Marxists, they weren’t content to wait for the capitalist class to become powerful enough to institute modern, industrialised capitalism in Russian society and they believed it was their role to revolutionise Russian society, by-passing the capitalist stage of development.
By 1917, the Bolsheviks had become a well-disciplined and effective political force. They successfully worked towards gaining the support of the majority of the working class in St. Petersburg and Moscow (but not the peasants). After they gained control of the Soviets, they were strong enough to carry out their own coup d’état (known as the October Revolution) and become both the “de facto” and “de jure” ruling party.
The Tsar and his family were executed (horribly, by both bayonet and gunshot) only after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power in order to prevent monarchist/counter-revolutionary forces (known as the “Whites”) from rescuing them.
This guy rose to power after Tsar Nicolas II and his family were machine-gunned
Well, Lenin (with peers like Trotsky and to some extent Stalin) was the architect of the Russian revolution that got rid of the Tsars. Rather than being a lucky opportunist he was dedicated to that project for a long period, motivated significantly by the execution of his brother. I don't think it's a great example of a power vacuum so much as the payoff for a singular focus on a specific goal.
On the other hand, Lenin's debilitation and death following being shot in an assassination attempt and then suffering a series of strokes did create a power vacuum, and Stalin had cleverly positioned himself to fully exploit it and push aside his rival Trotsky - arguably a more capable military and political leader, but one so dedicated to his cause that he failed to defend his own position.
The idea is also captured in lots of western post-apocalyptic science fiction. The absence of a functioning government gives rise to local warlords. The "vacuum" is made up of weak semi-states that are usually horrific. Chinese history is full of periods of warlordism, too.
One of the things I found so bizarre as a liberal... I was against the Iraq war on the basis that it would create a power vacuum, which it did. When six years later, liberals lined up to applaud the Arab Spring, I was against American support for it for the same reason. Both of those things were sold to the American public as a form of liberation from dictatorship. In the former, we would supply democracy after overthrowing Hussein. In the latter, we would expect countries with no history of democracy and almost no independent civic institutions to do it for themselves.
The goal is great, but it never seems to be reached. People here haven't mentioned the Iranian revolution which was the most vivid example in modern history of a sudden vacuum in a dictator's absence, with the presence of a drifting democracy movement, being filled by a bloodthirsty lunatic.
France "improved" after the Revolution if you ignore that minor tangent where, in the chaos and confusion that followed, a man declared himself emperor and thought to conquer all of Europe (starting a series of wars that lasted for more than ten years and killed millions.)
But at least Europe got much needed civil reform in the process, I guess?
He's Belarusian citizen. Why do you want to rescue him? There are thousands of people in a similar situation all over the world. What about sending a team to UK to rescue Assange?
Citizenship does not imply loyalty to a government. I live in the UK and would fully support anyone rescuing Assange and everyone else in a similar situation, as long as they do it carefully and don't start a war.
I don't get these "confession" videos. Not only is it usually obvious that they are coerced, either by the person's demeanour or obvious signs of violence. They are such a trope of dictatorships it wouldn't even be possible to broadcast the most truthful of any such confession video without looking suspicious. Indeed the very act of humiliating your enemies in public is incompatible with the idea of democracy.
So, what gives? Is it supposed to demonstrate the regime's ability to break you? Do these dictatorships just suck at PR as much as they suck at other aspects of governing?
Some people may be fooled, but more importantly, if you are an ally of the regime it helps you to an alternative story (fairy tale) that you can claim to believe in, and then pressure others to act on the premisse that the fairy tale is true.
Precisely. It becomes a talking point, whether for true believers in support of the current Belarussian regime or its allies, or useful idiots; one of the challenges of an open society is how to move without becoming hopelessly bogged down in bad-faith argumentation: "skeptical environmentalists", pro-tobacco fake science, or the latest push from apparently Russian-based PR agencies to pay influencers for an astroturf campaign against vaccination.
I guess that stoking anti-vax sentiment in the US increases political division. Moreover, it delays recovery from the pandemic, leaving the US economically worse off.
I think a lot of "Russian influence campaign" suspicions held by people are just because they cannot fathom the other side being genuine. Helped by the fact that Russia does, in fact, run the occasional influence campaign in the US.
Aha, got it, it initially is not for internal consumption, so I'm not that aware of that.
Can you share some links? I'm really curious how does it look like.
I don't have any links. I am not sure whether Russia even is stoking anti-vax.
It is clear that they have been attempting to influence elections. In the US but also in other places, like Austria. It seems unlikely they stick to elections.
> what is told about Russia here on HN slowly kills me with its striking primitivism.
I can believe it! I do judo with a Russian and it's interesting the difference between how others talk about Russia and knowing even a single actual Russian. I should be clearer that I'm describing the Russian government, not actual Russians, my apologies.
As to the point - the only explanation offered that really makes sense to me is that it's an extension of the arguments that a number of governments are having around the various vaccines. The Russian government is in conflict with e.g. Brazil around the Sputnik vaccine. The Chinese government has been suggesting it will only allow travel to China from people who have been vaccinated with a Chinese-developed vaccine, not any others. And, of course, there is the ongoing argument over the patent status of a number of the European and US vaccines.
> I should be clearer that I'm describing the Russian government, not actual Russians, my apologies.
No problem, I don't take this personally :) Sometimes I just can't help diving into political argument despite outcome in most cases is disappoining and HN is not inteded for such discussions in the first place.
As for vaccines, in most cases it is pretty clear why something happens and motives are obvious. Spreading lies about competitors vaccine is definitely a dirty play but at least understandable tactic. Using toursts as a trade war weapon puzzles me a bit but still can probably be useful to improve negitiation position or whatever. But antivaccination propaganda has just rung a bell - it doesn't pass qui bono test. Antivaccination groups in any country are a minority (AFAIK) and it is hard to use them to "divide and conquer". IMO this kind of campaign most likely has been initiated by some antivaccination activists.
The point is to flex their power while still maintaining a veneer of deniability. Everyone knows what's going on, but their supporters will still use it as a pretext to argue that nothing is wrong.
It's the same reason Israel claims that every building they level in Gaza is a military target.
It's the same reason cops in the US cite noncompliance as a justification for violence.
It's the same reason Republicans allege voter fraud when they make laws to suppress millions of votes.
Authoritarians will never, ever, ever admit "we're dictators" or "this is about power". They will always have an excuse for it.
Well if assumption is gaza itself is military threat basically there are no innocent people or buildings there, so no evidence will suffice.
It is extremely hard to believe that at least by accident that Israel has not bombed civilian target, harder still to believe that all the "Intel" they have is so accurate that they know exactly always which civilian buildings Hamas operates out of during the middle of a war.
Extraordinary claims that not a single civilian target was bombed needs extraordinary proof .
> Well if assumption is gaza itself is military threat basically there are no innocent people or buildings there, so no evidence will suffice.
I don't think that Israel is claiming that, although some
people might make such a stupid claim.
>It is extremely hard to believe that at least by accident that Israel has not bombed civilian target, harder still to believe that all the "Intel" they have is so accurate that they know exactly always which civilian buildings Hamas operates out of during the middle of a war.
That seems sadly quite possible and hard to verify either way. Also my guess would be that most of the intel was gathered prior to the war.
Yup. Equally offensive and ignorant. Why does one get this (justified if you thought I meant it) response but not the other? For asking for "proof of innocence" of people murdered by state violence.
"It's the same reason cops in the US cite noncompliance as a justification for violence."
That's a misunderstanding, if you act like a buffoon the police are required to treat you as one. There not dictators, just blue collar workers doing there jobs.
Just goes to show what a distorted view of the world you get when watching through the lens of the media.
Selection bias, you see the videos that outrage you the most well you don't see the day to day reality.
Police don't beat calm sensible people, they beat the kind of people who are out there resisting arrest.
It is supposed to induce terror and thus compliance in population.
>incompatible with the idea of democracy
So is Belarusian regime.
>suck at PR
Do concentration camp administration suck at PR? Beating random prisoners to death for no reason is quite efficient way of keeping people under control.
But if Lukashenka gets torn to bloody pieces by the crowd - then yes, he did suck at PR indeed.
The hypocrisy of it is the entire point. It's a demonstration of power. Combined with the rhetoric what it clearly communicates is "play the farce or we'll do this to you too."
They don't suck at PR, they are doing exact what they want and it is extremely effective. You simply are coming into it with the wrong frame, one based on viewing it in the detached and abstract hypothetical, vs the embodied view of someone who is in that society and has everything to lose.
Everyone ultimately knows the Big Lie is false. The PR is showing that the truth does not matter vs the power of the regime.
One of the most chilling examples of this is the footage from when Saddam took absolute power. He paraded out a "confessor" that showed signs of torture in front of the legislature. The confessor started reading a list of names of sitting members of the legislature. As he continued, the entire congress became panic'd. Many of them began screaming hyperbolic pledges of loyalty to Saddam, prostrating in the aisles, etc.
Once the list of names was done, roughly half the legislature was named. Saddam took everyone outside, distributed firearms, and made the half that was not named execute the half that was. He did that to make the survivors complicit in his new dictatorship. The message was: if I go down, you go with me now.
That's what this sort of stuff is about. Not some armchair platonic musing about whether it's hypocritical vs the ideals of democracy.
It seems like the years of power created some kind reality distortion field around him so that he don't see all the futility of his attempts to look good. There is no escape from "dictator vs.freedom fighter" narrative. The dictator is always bad nevermind the net effect of his years in power. The freedom fighter is always good and no insinuations about him beign paid by foreing agencies or turning his country into war or just chaos would change that.
It's also used to break people. It reduces a person's self worth when he confesses to something he didn't do. It makes him feel like he let people down.
Well you can try to reach a human being at Google and see how frustratingly impossible that is.
Even Amazon has live chat any time I need it. Google has no real competitor, so doesn't have to provide customer service at all. It's more fuel for the "break up big tech" meetings that I hope come soon.
> Is it true, though? It seems easy to make this up, and get everyone riled up.
I took this as questioning the how to verify that the tweet is reporting authentically on the video being played in an ad. I admit that I hadn’t considered this. That said, such seems in line with news coverage that I’ve seen so far.
Hat tip for reminding me to think critically regardless of whether somethings sounds plausible.
Yeah, sorry for being unclear. It’s so tempting to believe youtube is evil enough to make money off someone’s suffering. But such an accusation would be as simple as copying the video into a YouTube ad mock-up and claiming it’s legit.
Not sure what to think. No one seems to know. I was hoping for something like “it’s true because the video itself came from the ad,” or... something.
I pay for G-Suite and I have access to live-human chat support.
---------------
...but I recognize that having live-chat support for "how do I do $this in Google Exce...Sheets?" or even "why aren't my MX records for Gmail not working?" is not the same thing as having someone to speak to regarding systemic (but not inherent!) problems with Google's business.
> I pay for G-Suite and I have access to live-human chat support.
Yep. The only reason I pay for G Suite is so I can complain to a human when something in Google is properly fucking up. They hate me but they always talk to me.
Don’t forget about the problems you’re likely to have accessing this support if they ever decided to cancel/lock/terminate your Google account (and any linked/associated accounts they feel like).
Even the few paid support channels they do have are fragile. Support is an afterthought, Google supports GSuite to both attract and retain customers now the product is stable… if they decide your business is not wanted then your S.O.L.
The same can be said with any cloud "productivity solutions" provider: Office 365, DropBox, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc. It's just that Google already has a bad reputation in this regard.
When you try to return some products, the only choice is to speak to an agent via live chat.
Also relatedly, I made a complaint via feedback-form about Amazon Prime issues a couple years ago on a Friday. An Amazon support agent called me on a Sunday* to help me work through my issues. It was the middle of Summer and I was out adventuring, so I didn't have time to get into the issues, but it sure surprised me.
*Here in Austria almost everything is closed on Sunday, except public transport, care homes/hospitals and restaurants/bars, so it was doubly-shocking to receive a phone call.
I doubt that, free speech is for people not for governments. And an ad is a commercial relationship, both parts have to agree. They are still free to upload it as a normal video to their channel, they went the ad route because people would not normally support it but as an ad they can force them to watch.
So you consider it ethical to watch videos hosted on the YouTube platform with their own servers/datacenters, that a creator is earning non-zero revenue from and block all ads?
Like block ads if you want man, whatever, but to take a moral high road lol...
No, I took the argument that would logically follow instead of purely reading it literally.
Ethics is the basis of parent's argument. If what you are saying is true, that parent would yield their action is unethical, then the comment completely spelled out would be:
"Do not take YT's prescribed course (YT premium) because they are unethical. Instead, take my suggested route, even though it is also unethical"
Additionally, OP presented their option with * which means it's a correction or superior form, and not just an alternative. If they had said 'or alternatively use ublock' then maybe it would have been okay.
It actually took several reads here to figure out where you disagreed with me. You were like 90% of the way there.
Your re-write should read
> "Do not take YT's prescribed course (YT premium) because they are unethical. Instead, take my suggested route"
to accurately reflect my sentiment, although I actually wasn't claiming that YT is unethical, only that user
davesque seems to think they were. If I said "How can I stop this man from hitting me?", the response "pay him $5" would be poor, so I was suggesting an alternative.
It is Belarus, yet he is talking in Russian. Though it is pretty obvious that he isn't really talking, he is reading the text behind the camera, and evidently that text is in Russian.
FYI the main language spoken in Belarus is Russian. Lukashenko effectively abandoned the Belarusian language early in his days of power. Most people under 35 can't even speak proper Belarusian.
I saw ad which called on storming government building in Kazakhstan at the day of the elections. It was on Youtube and I saw it twice with few days in-between. I sent a report first time.
YouTube has never shied away from monetizing human rights abuses. I guess this is no different.
Before watching this video of a journalist who was kidnapped and possibly tortured to give you this false statement, here’s an ad about liberty mutual life insurance. Liberty!
You don't have to be working for FAANG. There are literally thousands of companies that do not require you to serve brutal European dictators as your daily job. Yes, the salary would be just "good beyond the dreams of any average American" instead of "obscenely and ridiculously high, I mean who even gets this kind of money?!" - but it's possible to survive in America on low-to-middle six figures, surprisingly.
I'm not trying to defend Google here but could it be the case that they're simply not aware of the issue, or rather the issue didn't reach the appropriate people within the organisation who can get these ads removed?
I don't know how much Google is profiting from the Belarusian government, but unless it's a lot, I doubt Google would actively try keeping these ads. If it is a lot of money, that's indeed a data point which supports the theory that they're acting out of greed.
The above of course doesn't excuse Google's mismanagement of the situation, but doing something bad out of incompetence is a different kind of failure (with different remedies necessary) than doing the same out of greed.
They ban literally hundreds of thousands of videos for all kinds of sins, from all kinds of people - from US Congressmen to Bob Dylan. But the hostage video made as a result of the most prominent event that happened in Europe, where the last European dictator has hijacked a foreign plane to snatch a dissident - they just never heard anything about it, and nobody can find anybody to contact about it. Yea right, totally believable.
I'm not saying that YouTube employees are not aware of the kidnapping, most of them probably are.
I'm saying that most of them — including those who can do something about it — are probably not aware that this ad got through their approval system. If you think this is not the case, you underestimate how inefficiently information travels in large organisations.
I think their filtering system by now is powerful enough to catch anything they want. And it's not some anonymous account as I understand that uploaded it in the dark hour of the night under the guise of unpacking video - they knew who the canal belongs to, and they took money from them. They knew, or they should have known and willfully ignored it - which bears the same responsibility.
They're probably not aware of it, but this isn't an isolated case. Google clearly is not aware of a ton of problematic stuff in the ecosystem they've created. That's the problem here.
As for how much they're profiting off of it? Probably not much from just the Belarusian government, but they don't just have morally awful ads by Belarus, they have morally awful ads coming from probably thousands of advertisers. This one is just exceptionally disgusting. But I doubt an actual human was even involved in the responses about this ad.
I think the usual argument is more along the lines of: Google's greed prevents them from putting the proper controls in place to prevent these sorts of abuses of the system, because those controls would cost too much. Not so much that any particular specific instance of abuse is particularly profitable.
The problem is that groups have been raising it for a year (mentioned in the article). Google have structures / policies in place to avoid things like this appearing on the radar of those who make policy. Therefore any screw up is nobodies fault and they can keep banking the cheques.
I happened to attend the retirement party for the Dean of the Faculty of Business at my alma mater, and he recounted the story of the hardest term of teaching he ever had, in his early days at the institution.
At 11:30-12:20, he taught a course on advertising. At 12:30-13:20, he taught a course on business ethics. Every time a student asked a question, he had to stop and remember which course he was teaching before he answered!
There was an article I read some time ago about a guy who writes term papers and such assignments for sale - he said his most frequent customers are "business ethics" course students. Makes you think.
It still appears as problematic as ever to me because a judge is pretty much the last person I would trust to decide what is and isn't evil.
I can't even imagine how a hypothetical well-intentioned judge who wanted to apply that provision correctly would proceed. The judge would basically have to choose between imposing their own personal view on good and evil or declaring the provision nonjusticiable.
Maybe the license could include a mandatory arbitration clause with an arbitrator who shares the author's values, but that still sounds like a terrible idea.
Still does. Nobody wants to be beholden to what one guy's definition of "evil" would be this morning. That doesn't mean ethics does not exist. It's just not done through copyright licensing.
I went in assuming someone's in charge, but honestly, most of the mistakes Google makes are in the category "nobody's in charge." They operate at a scale where everyone tries to use them to do everything. That's everything good and everything bad. They've been both a force for normalizing LGBTQ identity and a force against it, a mass communication tool and a mass oppression tool, a platform to help people and a platform to stalk people. They actively manage, observe, maintain, and regulate only a subset of the space of uses their tools allow.
This is explanation, not excuse. I'm not there anymore because I think it should be their responsibility to take responsibility reflective of their size and impact. I lost faith that the leadership agreed.
In this specific example, my assumption from personal priors is they let this ad in because there's nobody in charge of negative-filtering ads like this until complaints come, and in the absence of policy the default policy is "allow." They have categories to catch ads for illegal substances, various forms of illegal activity, and so on, but "A state-level actor will use our ad platform to paint a false message of the status of a political prisoner" is a new one for them.
> I'm not there anymore because I think it should be their responsibility to take responsibility reflective of their size and impact. I lost faith that the leadership agreed.
I fully agree with you, and I don't think that there's any going back: the founders don't care about this, a CEO generally only takes a principled stand on things like this when it's their baby, but Google is not Sundar's baby.
If it looks like nobody in Google is in charge, it's only because the execs refuse to take action and the board refuses to properly incentivize the execs.
And perhaps importantly: the board can't incentivize the execs. Not alone.
Alphabet is still majority-owned by the founders as of 2019. In practice, the board is advisory; 100% of stockholders who's names aren't "Larry Page" and "Sergey Brin" could vote the same on an issue, and the issue will carry in whatever direction Larry and Sergey say it should if both agree.
I dislike a lot of Google's practices as much as the next guy, but this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice. We all (should) know that moderation at Google is mostly black-box bots that may or may not work properly.
Whether it's malicious or not, Google created this ecosystem where you need to process and serve a bazillion ads to compete with them, if they're unable to properly vet those ads it's on them to scale back to a size where they can properly vet them.
If this was a one-off issue then sure - but Google runs a lot of really slimy advertisements.
Yeah - beyond political issues they also just outright advertise pyramid schemes. I live in Hong Kong and most of the adverts here are for a clearly fraudulent scheme
that advertises by having young women screaming and showing a bank balance on a phone.
It's pretty telling that even small-ish video producers are willing to vet their advertising partners more thoroughly.
I think it does matter, because a decentralised system would have much greater problems moderating content than Google does today. If this was coming from the Belarusian government bidding for ad time on thousands of peertube instances and the response was piecemeal requests to each federated instance's admin team, then it would also take a very long time to remove from the system as a whole. It might well be impossible to remove it from every popular instance.
A better solution is for Google to hire more people to help with moderation. It's just that Google doesn't want to spend more money, it wants to make more profit.
> but this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice.
Hate to break it to you, but that is how most evil in the world works-- through callous indifference and incompetence, not through some cartoon villain.
> this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice
That's always been the case and it still doesn't matter. It would matter if this was an isolated thing that happened every once in a while, but the outcome has been the same, which makes it not matter when it's been going on for so long.
Except (if the allegations in the tweet are true) the issue has been brought to YouTube’s attention. It’s hard to plead innocent inadvertent ignorance if you were specifically put on notice.
It seems like preemptively complaining about downvoted, somehow increases your karma, so inb4 I get downvoted for being a "shill".
This is the kind of reactionary attitude that causes YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing. Later, even more people will complain that their favorite YouTuber is being demonetized. Everyone has their own brilliant ideas of perfect moderation, but at the end of the day, they would never be willing to accept that responsibility themselves and the blowback that comes with it. See the grandstanding that occured during the section 230 Congressional hearings as a perfect example.
Why can't YouTube simply just make a mistake and correct for it? When governments failed to protect a plane from being forcibly escorted, I don't see why people expect a private business to fix all the world's geopolitical issues.
It's a reactionary attitude to ask that services you pay for with time or money work well? Yes, I expect YouTube to remove objectionable content and not remove innocuous content. I don't expect them to be perfect, but I do expect "pretty good and getting better" and they fall far short.
It matters that they are falling short and only correct their mistakes when massive social pressure is applied because most issues can't generate the social pressure needed to get Google to notice. That means most of their errors won't actually get fixed.
Google makes insane amounts of profits, but they don't have the resources to moderate content well?
This is such a brilliant comment. Everyone seems to know what perfect moderation is because they see something they don't like and know it should be removed, which is fair enough I suppose, but if we wrote policy on all those events to cover them pre-emptively then they can probably kiss 50% of their popular streamers away, especially those who lean conservative (hatespeech, bigotry, and ironically Russian propaganda problems) and gamers (lots of n word drops, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, etc).
So youtube can do this but if they did it, the very same people who claim to want this would lose their collective minds. They don't realize they're baddies too on some level, and want only their own kind of baddies to have free reign in the media.
Great point about the governments too! Youtube can't fix what trillions in collective worldwide military spending can't fix. If dictators are this brazen and getting away wit this, as well as the American dictator wanna-be getting away with 1/6, sorry but FAANG can't help you. We're too fargone for tech solutions at this point. Fix your governments first.
> YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing.
Yeah but this video is of a political prisoner who was tortured and the account is a government account.
The youtubers getting improperly demonetized are often minorities with content that could be offensive to some group of people (eg. gay youtubers talking about their life... is offensive to extremely religious people).
There is a big moderation quality gap between "official government posts torture prisoners" and "random gay 21yo in LA describes college life". I DO expect youtube to be able to get this balance at least right, all of the time.
The problem with YouTube isn’t the specific way it is moderated it is the entire ecosystem it creates. It is addictive for end users. It devalues “content” (an advertising term for the things on the page that aren’t ads) that doesn’t hook users. It is hostile to creative projects that don’t carefully avoid IP or monetization guidelines. It has no incentive to uphold the public interest in terms of information distributed, liberties upheld, or mental health. Like a paper clip maximizer YouTube has a singular goal of increasing revenue; users, children, content, creators, employees, and international peace be damned.
I get responding to this with something like "YouTube's processes are broken." What doesn't make sense is "YouTube is happy to profit off human rights abuses."
YT must deal with probably hundreds of new ads a day. They stand to gain nearly nothing from running this particular ad, and stand to lose quite a lot, even from a pure corporate-self-interest perspective. Which is more likely: that YT said "screw human rights abuses, gimme the cash" in full knowledge of what was going on, or that some contractor who had already reviewed a dozen that day and maybe hasn't even seen the news articles clicked a button without proper due diligence, and YT hadn't factored "what if a developed nation's government openly advertises human rights abuses" into its oversight processes?
Yeah but you know it's hard to defend when they take money, show a tortured confession, don't reply to signal, then act as sorry pikachus years later when Belarus, so emboldened by western impotence, just pretends there are terrorist attacks just to arrest one journalist
It's really strange how companies are so quick to advertise human rights violations while demonitizing any content that is even slightly sexual or not brand friendly. There are arguments for both sides but companies aren't even internally consistent.
For those who aren’t aware of Evo Morales’ plane being forced down (by denial of airspace), this comment provides relevant context. Perhaps, the Belarussian state learned from this and decided to take abuse of airspace regulations one step further. It’s not “whataboutism” if one considers both incidents to be an abuse of power.
I mean you’re getting down voted and yet at the same time there is literally another front page thread on the exact same topic filled with Greenwald fanboys doing exactly this.
Personally I think whataboutism to excuse bad behavior is awful, but using it to criticize an accuser's hypocrisy or double-standard is fair and legitimate.
For instance, the event with Evo Morales' plane being forced down in Switzerland, while not exactly the same, clearly set a bad precedent and we're paying the price now. I don't have any problem with saying that what Belarus just did and what happened then with Evo Morales' plane were both wrong. (At the same time I support European countries sanctioning Belarus even if they were the same countries that just a few years ago denied their airspace to Morale's plane for political reasons.)
Interesting. To be fair, in that case (assuming the article is accurate) the plane departed from Kiev, so it would seem that Ukraine would in that case have a reasonable claim that the plane is in their jurisdiction. I don't know the specifics of aviation treaties, so I can't really say for sure if this was improper.
On the other hand, if Ukraine did this just to harass a journalist saying things they didn't like (once again if we take the RT article at face value), then that's a questionable action that deserves to be criticized.
It reminds me of calling 'slippery slope' on an argument. Slippery slope arguments are sometimes fallacious, and sometimes very pertinent. You actually have to use reason to distinguish the two scenarios, not just use pattern recognition to try to spot a match to a list of fallacies.
Lots of people using 'what about' are doing so to try to make reasonable comparisons between two cases. Lots of people do it to avoid blame or confuse the argument. You have to actually read to figure out which it is.
Had to google whataboutism, which sent me into a fallacy wiki-hole. Only then could i come back, understand and laugh at your comment lol.
After some thinking it seems a lack of authority on what 'Truly' constitutes a logical fallacy during a conversation, but claiming the other is using a fallacy is a fallacy in it's own right. May I suggest Fallaception?
I think the problem is people cry whataboutism as a way of silencing dissenting opinions rather than engaging in a discussion rebutting the premise(s).
