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YouTube removes hundreds of the best climate science videos from the Internet
- laurentdc 10y agoScary.
- fleshweasel 10y agoServer is responding pretty slowly (maybe not used to this much traffic?) so here's a Google cache for it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lxQe4zCXSVwJ:climatestate.com/2017/02/03/youtube-removes-hundreds-of-the-best-climate-science-videos-from-the-internet/&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lxQe4zC...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kalms 10y agoWtf. Is this for real? Furthermore: Could it be due to an automatic process?
- chinhodado 10y agoEverything at Google is automated. It's just that to get a response from an actual person when you appeal a decision, you usually need to have a blog post that reaches the front page of HN, and a couple of known friends inside Google. Sometimes even that is not enough. Google's support has become a meme at this point, on par with Valve's support.
- marssaxman 10y agoDid Google ever actually have human tech support staff? That just doesn't sound like the sort of thing they'd do.
- chrisper 10y agoYes. The Google Play Store (the part where you can buy phones etc.) has actually good support. I think the only other area they have support is Google AdSense and maybe the paid Google Apps.
- Cyph0n 10y agoOn par with Valve? I would say Google has the worst online support system of any company, by far.
- stefantalpalaru 10y ago> Could it be due to an automatic process? Of course it's automated. Algorithmic censorship is the name of the game when you want to avoid hiring an army of humans. Most companies also cut on the help desk costs by not providing a mechanism for complaints. Only those who manage to make waves in public get handled by the PR department, but those are a very small percentage of all the victims.
- jdormit 10y agoThis is the problem with using any privately-owned server as your primary vehicle for hosting your content. By all means, post your videos to YouTube - but please, host secondary copies yourself, especially now that government censorship seems to be becoming the norm. [Edit] "government censorship seems to be becoming the norm" is perhaps too extreme. Still, the link between the article's evidence of increased censorship and the Trump administration's stance on climate change (and other issues) is concerning.
- krapp 10y agoCensorship aside, content creators should never depend on a single third-party service for hosting their videos, especially if they intend to make a living from that content. Google has already proven willing to remove arbitrary content, delete channels, etc. from Youtube with no apparent rationale or recourse given. I suspect a lot of their recent "glitches" are an attempt to poison the well for public content and to drive potentially copyright infringing channels[0] away in order to eventually turn the service into an entirely subscription based, big media friendly platform. But who knows? The point is, it doesn't matter. Unless you're Sony, you might well wake up tomorrow to find your entire channel erased, and you'll never know why. If your content is important to you, consider hosting it elsehwere, or else offering it as a torrent. It may require a bit more of a technical investment, be less convenient, and even reduce revenue, but in the long run, the more channels for distribution you have, the more you can afford to lose. [0] infringing from the point of view of media conglomerates, who refuse to respect the legitimacy of fair use.
- cuckcuckspruce 10y agoThis is why MediaGoblin is such an important project. By all means, publish to YouTube, offload different codec/bitrate copies to BitTorrent, place a copy on the Internet Archive, but also run a MediaGoblin server. [0] http://mediagoblin.org/ http://mediagoblin.org/
- CaptSpify 10y ago> content creators should never depend on a single third-party service No business should never depend on a single third-party service
- pmorici 10y agoSounds like fake news nothing but speculation and inuendo.
- logicallee 10y agoDid you see the article someone in this thread linked (cached)? It quotes YouTube's emails verbatim. I don't really have anything to be outraged about because we don't now why they did it. Certainly one thinks of Trump's positions but this would not extent to YouTube's actions.
- mjolk 10y agoYoutube is owned by Google. Google is not at all pro-republican party, so this is not a Trump-related thing.
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- wybiral 10y agoNot all fake news is political. This looks a bit like a marketing stunt. Their Twitter update is "YouTube/Google shuts down largest climate science channel". Notice that they don't say "our largest channel" or something less click baited.
- pmorici 10y agoThe fake part is that they are cherry picking facts from several unrelated things and putting them in the same article. The intent is clearly to give the impression to readers that they should think that their channel was somehow taken down do to government censorship when there is in fact zero evidence to suggest that. This is the _exact_ MO of all those sites people love to hate for fake news. The only real difference here is that because this fake story is about something that jives with a lot of peoples political opinions here they were primed to believe it w/o questioning.
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- tehwalrus 10y agoOkay, USA, I guess you're going to be losing a lot of business to countries with less crazy governments now. I wish I could say the UK will benefit, but I doubt it.
- throwaway729 10y agoI find it incredibly difficult to believe that the US government is demanding the removal of climate science videos from YouTube, and even more difficult to believe that YouTube would acquiesce to such a request. I'm sure we'll learn of a far more mundane explanation in short order. My money is on some automated process mistakenly removing content (possibly triggered by trolls, but just as likely triggered by a sub-par algorithm).
- tehwalrus 10y agoI hope you are right, I really do.
- ptaipale 10y agoIt's not really a mistake. It's the design of those automated systems. There is little to no human control in taking down material that people complain about. There have been activists - e.g. Muslim immigrants who work against Islamism - who are targeted by complaints from hard-line Islamists and whose accounts have been suspended. So this is nothing to do with Trump administration.
- arjie 10y agoThe USA could mess up how it treats the Internet a few hundred times and not get to how the UK is. The UK censors a huge number of websites on the basis of content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni... > Categories blocked across the major ISPs include: Dating, Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco, File sharing, Gambling, Games, Pornography, Nudity, Social networking, Suicide and Self-harm, Weapons and violence, Obscenity, Criminal Skills, Hate, Media Streaming, Fashion and Beauty, Gore, Cyberbullying, Hacking and Web-blocking circumvention tools It's apparently what the British want, so that's what they're going to get, but the idea that US censorship will lead to British prosperity is ludicrous.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoTime to start archiving to the Internet Archive.
- cseelus 10y agoI hope they have Servers outside the control of the US government.
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- dredmorbius 10y agohttp://www.thehill.com/policy/technology/307942-internet-archive-putting-database-in-canada-to-keep-it-from-trump http://www.thehill.com/policy/technology/307942-internet-arc...
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- gagabity 10y agoHow can they not have copies of their videos? Are these original content or taken from other sources without permission?
- jerkstate 10y agoi'm not ready to jump to conclusions that this is government-related as implied in the article. i'd like to know more, but youtube's takedown policy is not a court of law and no rulings are ever published.
- awalton 10y agoIt's more likely the channel was brigaded by r/The_Donald supporters or 4chan than YouTube actually doing anything. Their systems are so automated, stuff like this happens all of the time - the users wield an unseemly huge amount of power to knock content offline. So, lessons learned: 1) Keep backups of everything you'd upload to YouTube. 2) Vimeo.com account 3) Petition YouTube to revamp their content policing strategies to keep humans in the loop instead of algorithms knocking content offline because a mob with pitchforks decides they don't agree with you.
- hackermailman 10y agoMore likely it was rival climate channels that want their subscribers so are just going through the vids, finding something that looks copyright and spamming google with the license in hopes the channel is taken down. If you have any kind of popular channel you will experience this as there's money to be made by somebody else gaining all your views.
- wybiral 10y agoIs anyone else wondering why they're selling domains like SpaceAlpha.com [1] or their own domain ClimateState.com [2]? And that they're using clickbait titles like "YouTube/Google shuts down largest climate science channel" to say that their channel was shut down? Doesn't it look a bit fishy? [1] http://climatestate.com/product/domain-spacealpha-com/ http://climatestate.com/product/domain-spacealpha-com/ [2] http://climatestate.com/product/domain-climatestate-com/ http://climatestate.com/product/domain-climatestate-com/ Edit: auto-correct typo
- morsch 10y agoThat is weird, though climatestate.com is "out of stock" (and it's $100k). Also fishy: they have another very large YouTube channel[1], which is still up and running. Seems like it would have been worth mentioning? It's referenced in their shop page for site sponsorship[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateProgressWorld https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateProgressWorld [2] http://climatestate.com/product/climate-hawk/ http://climatestate.com/product/climate-hawk/
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- z3t4 10y agogoogles automatic takedowns has a lot of false posetives. and their support is bad or non existing. they dont do manual takedowns though. if your lucky they will restore.
- mjolk 10y agoTheir videos are just clips of others' content, this isn't original work or a leader on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateProgressWorld/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateProgressWorld/videos This reeks of breaking a ToS and then trying to masquerade their political site as something more noble to rationalize creating a narrative of victimhood for marketing/attention. The group/person behind climatestate.com is either deluded or trying to sell an aggrandizing message by claiming that they're the subject of a "concerted attack on climate science originating from the current U.S. Administration". There might be an attack, but no way was this on anyone's radar.
- Taek 10y agoI stand up and point my finger again in the direction of decentralization. Here we have this massive societal infrastructure, a huge education tool and a hub for culture, and the whole thing is under the control of a single entity whose primary motive is exclusively profit. The core infrastructure of the internet (search, social media, archives, etc.) should not be under the influence of single companies. The internet was supposed to be decentralized but we ended up with individual companies taking huge monopolies over our standard internet experiences. I don't think there is any tech out there today that can properly replace YouTube. Especially things like the recommendation engine. But I also don't think it's that far out of reach. We should putting greater effort into decentralizing the core parts of the internet. Money, search, email, data storage, social media, DNS, ISP, and I'm sure dozens of other things. We don't need to be vulnerable like this.
- striking 10y agoI mean, you stated it pretty clearly yourself. How would a recommendation system rivaling YouTube's work in a decentralized fashion? There's also the fact that people spend a lot of time, effort, and money making these videos. How would they get paid by a decentralized system? I want to decentralize too, absolutely. But I'm at a loss as to how we'd accomplish it in a way that ultimately benefits society instead of making an inferior product.
- luke-stanley 10y agoMaybe at least mirroring YouTube videos would be a good start.
- CaptSpify 10y ago> How would they get paid by a decentralized system? Is something like Patreon tied to youtube? Could you fund someone on vimeo or your own website with it?
- RileyKyeden 10y agoPatreon doesn't support video uploads, at least as an embed. You can embed them from other sites and (I think) attach them to posts as downloads, but that's it.
- aw3c2 10y ago> YouTube removes hundreds of the best climate science videos from the Internet No, they did not. YouTube removed them from YouTube. Don't trust others to host your things or provide you with access to other's things.
- ivraatiems 10y agoWhat should they have done? Sure, they could not post videos on the largest video-sharing platform on the Internet. They could pay someone to host and maintain all that content themselves and have far fewer people see them. You're not wrong to distrust YouTube (or any such site), but this isn't all on the videomakers. They have a choice: put their stuff on YouTube and risk it being taken down, or put their stuff somewhere else and know for certain far fewer people will see it.
- CamelCaseName 10y agoWhat should they have done? Keep backups. Otherwise when YouTube deletes it from YouTube, YouTube deletes it from the everywhere.
- melbourneblues 10y ago.
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- grzm 10y agoWhat reason do you have to doubt it?
- melbourneblues 10y ago.
- grzm 10y agoWhich has been focused generally on the social sciences. There's also a difference between questioning the studies and questioning the data. We can't be skeptical of everything. We can't start from square one on everything. Otherwise we have nothing to build on. I try to be skeptical and value critical thinking, but pragmatically there need to be limits where we put some trust in at least a small subset of people. This trend to question absolutely everything smacks of attempts to undermine and destabilize destructively.
- arca_vorago 10y agoYou see, this is the problem with automated DMCA stuff. If enough people don't like your stuff, they just brigade report you until youtube or $company gets rid of you. The second they bought youtube I knew eventually their evil would infiltrate it, unfortunately though no competitor has done a good job replacing them. My favorite comment on youtube comes from one of the founders, Jawed Karim, back when google was trying to merge all accounts and force you to use real names in google+ and then to tie google+ to youtube: "why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment" I whish people wouldn't deride those of us critical of google for being essentially NSA's best friend and reminding people they basically started by the CIA's venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Please attempt to refrain from accusing those of us who do "paranoid conspiracy theorists" because I feel like over time we are being proven correct and being vindicated, as much as I would like it to be otherwise. *Edited to take dijit's advice and be less negative/combative.
- dijit 10y agoI find it highly likely that you're going to be downvoted due to being so hostile. If that's the case, please don't assume it's because of a conspiracy, or that everyone loves google. Plenty of people on HN are very critical of google and centralisation in general, myself included.
- kordless 10y agoAgreed with the brigades. I've been watching Rust videos on building bases and evidently some of the more popular streamers get hammered by take down requests all the time from the Zerg clans. Zerg is evidently a term used by players to refer to the "group think mentality" players. Learn something new every day!
- derptron 10y ago>Zerg is evidently a term used by players to refer to the "group think mentality" players. Welcome to the internet.
- rycho 10y agothe dmca is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the internet. i hope one day we get rid of it.