Google will do whatever makes them profit. They've made it pretty clear that nothing controversial in any way is allowed on youtube. Best find some place else to distribute information.
Unfortunately the audience matters. In the internet of platforms indie websites are visited by those who already have good awareness of the cause. The hope is to reach people who watch entertainment content and the bet is that getting YouTube banned will attract some attention to the forbidden content.
Yes. It's important to have the ability to listen to all sides, that's the only way truth prevails. Even if one side is full of lies, some bureaucrat deciding that for you is not okay, that is generally what a government full of lies does.
apparently, it means you can say whatever the fuck you want, but then you also have to cry about it when you have to face consequences for your actions.
Of course they’re not Hamas operatives. Just like the guys waving swastika flags in the middle of a Republican convention are not Nazi party members. Is there really a difference, though?
Yeah the real issue is the protestors who are somehow dog whistling nazis because you believe a state should be above reproach. The real nazis are those who protest against an actual genocide happening as we speak. I mean think about it, they shout "genocidal" slogans! That's why we should support the actual genocidal state.
> OTOH, the Israeli government is extremely interested in painting all opposition as "Hamas". And they've done so rather successfully.
Seems like they didn't have to try very hard. Many media outlets, talking heads, and politicians seemingly took the view from the start that anything less than full support for the Israeli government automatically makes you a pro-Hamas antisemitic scumbag.
Well, I am serious, why is that such a surprise to you? I'm not puzzled by the fact that there aren't any explicitly organized "pro-Hamas" demos - I would suspect that most democratic countries would not allow demonstrations to support terrorist organizations, and that is what Hamas is considered to be by most Western nations.
I’m not sure you are asking in good faith, but the answer is resoundingly Pro-Palestinian. There may be Hamas supporters in those protests, but you’ll have to look very hard (or more likely stretch [in bad faith] your interpretations of protest slogans) to find their message.
Are we really tho? No one is shutting down protests, they are shutting down encampments that disturb others. They’d do the same for Trump supporters or pro-abortion activists if they just set up camp in the middle of a university.
Wait, disturbance is the prblem? I always thought disturbance is a means of getting attention. But maybe you should talk to FFF activists, I hear they are extremely good with disturbing the common man.
Ah yeah we need to shut down the protests to stop the inconvenience. It would be better for them to go to a park on a Saturday afternoon between 2 and 4:30, permit in hand, and let their voices be heard by the pigeons and fountains.
disrupting daily life is the entire point of a protest. A protest that does not disrupt daily life is not a protest. The point of the protest is to make things difficult for the people you are trying to persuade.
Again we did not win our freedoms through polite discourse.
This is a straw-man argument and a false dichotomy. It is in fact good for society to not tolerate weeks of illegal property occupation, wanton destruction, mob rule, and harrassment of the certain people public on “free speech” grounds. This has never been in the legal scope of free speech in America, and that is a good thing.
No, it's an attempt to deflect any thoughtful discussion about the actual topic. Instead of providing anything of substance about the subject matter, you attempt to gaslight people into an argument about something else entirely.
If you find a distaste for whataboutism "partisan" perhaps you're the one who has the problem.
Because people are getting tiered of being fed which topics they should discuss. Let's discuss the hypocrisy at home before we talk about problems elsewhere
So what do you actually know about the origin of the "covenant", since you're quoting it. Who made it? What's the story behind it? Was it controversial among the group at the time? Is it still relevant? Etc. etc. Please enlighten.
What does this have to do with Hamas? And you realize actually killing tens of thousands of civilians is worse than words written somewhere right? Yet you have no issues supporting Israel openly.
Which protests in the US are being shut down for being pro Palestinian? I’ve seen the ones shut down for trespassing, rioting, barricading themselves in spaces they’re trespassing in, indefinitely seizing both private and public property, causing costly damage, or turning violent, but I haven’t seen one shut down for being pro Palestinian. Which ones are those?
I recall a pretty long period of fiery but mostly peaceful protests that were simply allowed to happen. the police would stand down, and even social distancing / self-isolation / masking / etc did not apply - I vividly remember something among the lines of "stay at home (unless you're out there to protest)" being said unironically.
for some reason, the same media, politicians and twitter checkmarks who giddily encouraged those ones are very upset about these ones.
First, you did not answer my question. Let that be clear.
A protest is not a hostage taking situation, and when you treat it as such, don’t be surprised when laws that apply to all of us all the time are sometimes applied to your protest. We’re not talking about quelling speech here. We’re talking about illegally seizing property and buildings and refusing lawful orders to vacate until forceful eviction is the only way out.
This is just basic civic society stuff. You don’t have a right to occupy property and block others from using it without the consent of the property owner any more than any of us have a right to enter your home and kick you out and refuse to leave until our demands for a free Tibet are met.
In Texas there have been a few shut down for being Pro-Palestinian, including in the University of San Antonio.
But the context here is that the explicit reason for student protests (outside of Texas) is context-independent, the reality is that it is highly unlikely that they would have been shut down for the same reason if they were e.g. Pro-Ukrainian, anti-Segregation, etc.
Show me one instance when Google changed anything significant like this (say something that risks it getting blocked in a coutnry with > 100 mil. people) after a simple public appeal.
Youtube isn't your friend. It's not going to act in its own interests and those interest will rarely align with yours.
This includes willing cooperation with any government they want to do business with, including Russia. This is one reason why I think China banning Youtube is a policy mistake (for them): they could exert more control over Youtube if they allowed it in mainland China.
I feel like every story like this is like Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football. Just how many times do we need to do a surprised Pikachu face?
Youtube, Meta and Twitter all suppress content related to a certain current Middle East conflict [1] and they do so largely to keep the US State Department happy.
My point here is that this "free speech" and "censorship" tends to get used very selectively by people in a way that oddly coincides with their world view on certain topics. If you're against Youtube censoring anti-Russian content as per this post (as I am) you should also be against suppression of Middle Eastern news and content too yet I so often find a complete double standard here.
Oh and literally nobody is a free speech absolutist (including me, except arguably for Noam Chomsky) yet many pretend to me but again, this tends to be self-serving in a way aligned with their own views on things.
> This is one reason why I think China banning Youtube is a policy mistake
China didn't ban YouTube, Google just refused to comply with the strict regulations. So China tried to do exactly what you said, but they can't exactly force YouTube to stay (it would involve a lot more than just seizing local physical assets).
Well there's banning and there's effective banning. If you make the regulatory structure so cumbersome that no one wants to participate, that's an effective ban, whether you intend it or not, whether you realize it or not.
Given the almost complete lack of foreign Internet companies in China, I'd say there's good evidence the effective ban is intentional. That's really what I mean when I say "China banned Youtube".
Also, Google has shown prior willingness to comply with Chinese regulation (eg participation before the pullout in ~2010 and Dragonfly [1]).
China does have strict media regulations which can be expensive for foreign companies to implement, but there are still a TON of Western brands that operate very successfully in China.
> Oh and literally nobody is a free speech absolutist (including me, except arguably for Noam Chomsky) yet many pretend to be
The ACLU used to defend the 1A rights of neonazis and left wingers alike. Wouldn't that qualify them as free speech avsolutists? Or did they not count because they didn't lobby for the legalization of libel?
Google wants YouTube to be a place for cat videos and shitty listicals, where people escape from their lives to laugh and be influenced by advertisers. If your content is even remotely confronting, advertisers don't want it, and Google doesn't want it.
We really have nobody to blame but ourselves for this. Sure, video hosting is expensive, and most people can't be bothered to visit more than their default 6 or 7 apps, but we've had a decade of people shouting that from the wings and nobody has managed to fix it yet.
most people can't be bothered to visit more than their default 6 or 7 apps
I don't think it's fair to blame network effects on the user. If you're a popular YouTuber it's very difficult to convince your audience to move to another platform just to see your videos there. What's in it for them? It's much easier for an audience to switch to another video creator than it is for a creator to find a new audience.
In other words, YouTube makes it a viewer's market by commoditizing content producers. This is the exact opposite of the old TV model where networks were king and viewers had to put up with whatever shows they decided to run. Unfortunately, this means it's very hard for content producers to do anything to unseat YouTube's stranglehold on the market.
Google wants YouTube to be a place for cat videos and shitty listicals
I think you're being unfair with this remark though. YouTube has tons and tons of educational and hobby-related content which makes it an incredibly valuable resource for anyone who wants to learn pretty much anything!
> YouTube has tons and tons of educational and hobby-related content
I think the parent's comment is about how a lot of this (even well-meaning) content is not aligned with Google's advertising profile and won't be promoted in order to increase ad-revenue. On a platform that is reliant on advertising to offset the cost of video storage, it's a sinister but logical move.
The struggle really does revolve around the network effect, and how inadvertently helpless the average user has made themselves. We have no choice but to play by Google's rules because we don't know of a better way. We swipe down to search something on our iPhone, and we get a YouTube video in response. What, are we going to ideologically oppose the default response? Are we "too good" for the ordinary privacy-destroying, time-disrespecting vehicle of YouTube? No, we watch a 15 second bumper ad and then someone shows us how to fix our sink. And you can damn-well bet nobody will ever know what DailyMotion is because they're not paying phone OEMs a king's ransom to show up before everyone else.
I mean...you say it's the opposite of the old TV model, but it comes to the same result, doesn't it?
Before, the networks were king and viewers had to put up with what shows they decided to run.
Now, Google is king and viewers have to put up with what video creators they are both willing to platform, and palatable enough that they put their stuff on YouTube.
There will always be some viewers willing to follow a creator or show they like, in both of these scenarios (eg, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved from the WB to UPN in 2002), while others can't or won't—but there's much more difference, now, between moving from YouTube to, say, Vimeo than there was in the cable TV era moving from one channel to another, so long as you actually had that channel. (For some, these differences will not matter, and they may even claim they don't meaningfully exist; for others, they will be dealbreakers.)
...And I also agree that aftbit is being unfair with the cat videos remark. Google wants YouTube to be the place people go to watch videos on the internet, period. (Aside from, perhaps, porn.) That not only means that they get all your ad-watching eyeball time, it also means they get to control the narrative. Cat videos and shitty listicles are fantastic for Google, because they're an easy dopamine hit for viewers, but they absolutely want to be hosting more in-depth and controversial content, too. They just want to have unquestioned final say over what's actually allowed to be there, which sometimes means they'll remove things in order to make Russia happy, so Russia doesn't try to block Google/YouTube and replace them with a homegrown alternative.
you say it's the opposite of the old TV model, but it comes to the same result, doesn't it?
The same result? The old network TV model gave users a choice of ~5 channels to watch. Cable TV expanded this to ~50 and later a few hundred. With YouTube there are effectively infinite channels to choose from (tens of millions). It's a HUGE difference.
A channel all about knitting would never had existed on TV. A quick YouTube search for knitting yields dozens of knitting channels, each with audiences numbering from thousands to millions.
Sure; my point was about the specific dynamic of "what happens if the creator wants to move to a different venue," not the general differences between YouTube and network/cable TV.
YouTube still gives the creator way more control over the type of content they produce than anything you ever saw on network TV. What it does not give them is a captive audience. But then, why should anyone deserve a captive audience? Users should have all the choice of what they want to watch.
> Google wants YouTube to be a place for cat videos and shitty listicals
Not sure what corner of Youtube the algorithm has been feeding your suggestions with, but I've found higher-quality educational content on Youtube in the last year than I've seen on TV in my entire life, and videos of that kind make up for the majority of my recommendations. (The rest are indeed cat videos, which I happen to also enjoy watching.)
Sure, there's also tons of content I don't care for at all, but I've so far found it pretty easy to just not watch that.
This runs complete opposite to what I’ve seen, YT eventually starts to recommend alt-right gargbage if you start going down the recommended videos rabbithole and you watch anything political or featuring current events.
Didn't YouTube (and many others) make it clear that they're plenty willing to work with government officials to censor free speech that the officials don't like?
Don't get me wrong, YouTube is well within its rights to decide what content they do and don't want to host and distribute. Its clear that these companies are, in fact, for profit businesses though.
They aren't going to stand behind free speech and wouldn't even touch the idea of "absolute free speech" which is itself a confusing and misunderstood argument that we can somehow have free speech with limitations.
At best, YouTube will inconsistently protect free speech in some areas and censor it in others. The only real answer is for users to go elsewhere, ideally to something they themselves control, if they want to avoid most risks of censorship.
If you are an international company, you play by their rules. If you are dealing with a totalitarian dictator, then expect you're going to have some unsavory rules to contend with and have a PR team ready for any blow back. This is some groups unhappy with mean person in charge being mean.
Civil society would be better if people were not taking advantage of free speech and posting whatever non-sense that gets passed as legit causing chaos and turmoil within the masses.
RT isn’t even close to a news website. I’m sure you have access to all Russian media that justify this name (kommersant.ru and other business media are probably one of the most objective ones there).
I'm from Russia and I watch pro Ukraine videos on YouTube without any problems. Yes, it may have blocked some videos, but if it didn't, it could get blocked in Russia completely, and then what? Me and all the other people who wants to see content from other countries won't be able to do that, which will only make things worse.
If anything, YouTube search in Russian context is extremely West-biased. It's impossible to find any original source of Putin saying anything, for example. Yesterday he was talking about Zelensky not being legitimate. The search results are literally: Radio Liberty, some Azerbajani channel, Ukrainian channel called FREEДОМ - obvious pro-western vibes, DW, Ukrainian UNIAN, BBC etc. It's one thing if they were blocking these and only showing goverment propaganda, but it's actually the other way around.
112 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadThere are:
1) Naive college students who latch onto righteous political causes
2) Passionate lifelong anti-apartheid, anti-war activists who support the human rights of Palestinians
Neither of these groups are "Hamas operatives". Slinging a contentious slogan here and there is not that.
OTOH, the Israeli government is extremely interested in painting all opposition as "Hamas". And they've done so rather successfully.
Seems like they didn't have to try very hard. Many media outlets, talking heads, and politicians seemingly took the view from the start that anything less than full support for the Israeli government automatically makes you a pro-Hamas antisemitic scumbag.
Again we did not win our freedoms through polite discourse.
If you find a distaste for whataboutism "partisan" perhaps you're the one who has the problem.
Why can't we discuss both?
for some reason, the same media, politicians and twitter checkmarks who giddily encouraged those ones are very upset about these ones.
it's a mystery.
I think you all with this perspective are forgetting how many of the freedoms we enjoy today were won through violence.
A protest is not a hostage taking situation, and when you treat it as such, don’t be surprised when laws that apply to all of us all the time are sometimes applied to your protest. We’re not talking about quelling speech here. We’re talking about illegally seizing property and buildings and refusing lawful orders to vacate until forceful eviction is the only way out.
This is just basic civic society stuff. You don’t have a right to occupy property and block others from using it without the consent of the property owner any more than any of us have a right to enter your home and kick you out and refuse to leave until our demands for a free Tibet are met.
But the context here is that the explicit reason for student protests (outside of Texas) is context-independent, the reality is that it is highly unlikely that they would have been shut down for the same reason if they were e.g. Pro-Ukrainian, anti-Segregation, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kOo3N6CRPE
Most European countries have significant restrictions on what is "free speech", Google will censor those as well to follow local laws.
You can not ask a corporation to act criminally, that is an absurd demand.
This includes willing cooperation with any government they want to do business with, including Russia. This is one reason why I think China banning Youtube is a policy mistake (for them): they could exert more control over Youtube if they allowed it in mainland China.
I feel like every story like this is like Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football. Just how many times do we need to do a surprised Pikachu face?
Youtube, Meta and Twitter all suppress content related to a certain current Middle East conflict [1] and they do so largely to keep the US State Department happy.
My point here is that this "free speech" and "censorship" tends to get used very selectively by people in a way that oddly coincides with their world view on certain topics. If you're against Youtube censoring anti-Russian content as per this post (as I am) you should also be against suppression of Middle Eastern news and content too yet I so often find a complete double standard here.
Oh and literally nobody is a free speech absolutist (including me, except arguably for Noam Chomsky) yet many pretend to me but again, this tends to be self-serving in a way aligned with their own views on things.
[1]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
China didn't ban YouTube, Google just refused to comply with the strict regulations. So China tried to do exactly what you said, but they can't exactly force YouTube to stay (it would involve a lot more than just seizing local physical assets).
Given the almost complete lack of foreign Internet companies in China, I'd say there's good evidence the effective ban is intentional. That's really what I mean when I say "China banned Youtube".
Also, Google has shown prior willingness to comply with Chinese regulation (eg participation before the pullout in ~2010 and Dragonfly [1]).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
The ACLU used to defend the 1A rights of neonazis and left wingers alike. Wouldn't that qualify them as free speech avsolutists? Or did they not count because they didn't lobby for the legalization of libel?
Either way, I think you're projecting a bit.
We really have nobody to blame but ourselves for this. Sure, video hosting is expensive, and most people can't be bothered to visit more than their default 6 or 7 apps, but we've had a decade of people shouting that from the wings and nobody has managed to fix it yet.
I don't think it's fair to blame network effects on the user. If you're a popular YouTuber it's very difficult to convince your audience to move to another platform just to see your videos there. What's in it for them? It's much easier for an audience to switch to another video creator than it is for a creator to find a new audience.
In other words, YouTube makes it a viewer's market by commoditizing content producers. This is the exact opposite of the old TV model where networks were king and viewers had to put up with whatever shows they decided to run. Unfortunately, this means it's very hard for content producers to do anything to unseat YouTube's stranglehold on the market.
Google wants YouTube to be a place for cat videos and shitty listicals
I think you're being unfair with this remark though. YouTube has tons and tons of educational and hobby-related content which makes it an incredibly valuable resource for anyone who wants to learn pretty much anything!
I think the parent's comment is about how a lot of this (even well-meaning) content is not aligned with Google's advertising profile and won't be promoted in order to increase ad-revenue. On a platform that is reliant on advertising to offset the cost of video storage, it's a sinister but logical move.
The struggle really does revolve around the network effect, and how inadvertently helpless the average user has made themselves. We have no choice but to play by Google's rules because we don't know of a better way. We swipe down to search something on our iPhone, and we get a YouTube video in response. What, are we going to ideologically oppose the default response? Are we "too good" for the ordinary privacy-destroying, time-disrespecting vehicle of YouTube? No, we watch a 15 second bumper ad and then someone shows us how to fix our sink. And you can damn-well bet nobody will ever know what DailyMotion is because they're not paying phone OEMs a king's ransom to show up before everyone else.
Before, the networks were king and viewers had to put up with what shows they decided to run.
Now, Google is king and viewers have to put up with what video creators they are both willing to platform, and palatable enough that they put their stuff on YouTube.
There will always be some viewers willing to follow a creator or show they like, in both of these scenarios (eg, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved from the WB to UPN in 2002), while others can't or won't—but there's much more difference, now, between moving from YouTube to, say, Vimeo than there was in the cable TV era moving from one channel to another, so long as you actually had that channel. (For some, these differences will not matter, and they may even claim they don't meaningfully exist; for others, they will be dealbreakers.)
...And I also agree that aftbit is being unfair with the cat videos remark. Google wants YouTube to be the place people go to watch videos on the internet, period. (Aside from, perhaps, porn.) That not only means that they get all your ad-watching eyeball time, it also means they get to control the narrative. Cat videos and shitty listicles are fantastic for Google, because they're an easy dopamine hit for viewers, but they absolutely want to be hosting more in-depth and controversial content, too. They just want to have unquestioned final say over what's actually allowed to be there, which sometimes means they'll remove things in order to make Russia happy, so Russia doesn't try to block Google/YouTube and replace them with a homegrown alternative.
The same result? The old network TV model gave users a choice of ~5 channels to watch. Cable TV expanded this to ~50 and later a few hundred. With YouTube there are effectively infinite channels to choose from (tens of millions). It's a HUGE difference.
A channel all about knitting would never had existed on TV. A quick YouTube search for knitting yields dozens of knitting channels, each with audiences numbering from thousands to millions.
Not sure what corner of Youtube the algorithm has been feeding your suggestions with, but I've found higher-quality educational content on Youtube in the last year than I've seen on TV in my entire life, and videos of that kind make up for the majority of my recommendations. (The rest are indeed cat videos, which I happen to also enjoy watching.)
Sure, there's also tons of content I don't care for at all, but I've so far found it pretty easy to just not watch that.
Other people have also noticed this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline
Don't get me wrong, YouTube is well within its rights to decide what content they do and don't want to host and distribute. Its clear that these companies are, in fact, for profit businesses though.
They aren't going to stand behind free speech and wouldn't even touch the idea of "absolute free speech" which is itself a confusing and misunderstood argument that we can somehow have free speech with limitations.
At best, YouTube will inconsistently protect free speech in some areas and censor it in others. The only real answer is for users to go elsewhere, ideally to something they themselves control, if they want to avoid most risks of censorship.
Civil society would be better if people were not taking advantage of free speech and posting whatever non-sense that gets passed as legit causing chaos and turmoil within the masses.