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We had YouTube take down our church livestream in the middle of service, claiming that we violated their community guidelines (we didn't). The clip in question

We had YouTube take down our church livestream in the middle of service, claiming that we violated their community guidelines (we didn't). The clip in question was blank, and the note said that it was an automated takedown. I immediately appealed, switched our stream key, and let everyone know to refresh their browsers. But still, serious interruption to people's worship because google relies too-heavily on automation.

valuearb 6y ago
It was bots will.
- asah 6y ago
  You should be ex-communicated for that joke. :-)
ballenf 6y ago
I would guess there are some passages from many religions' sacred texts which could get your whole channel deleted if promoted. Unless there's a written or unwritten exception. The conflict or tension that troubles me the most is between platforms' incentive to have the most vague and broad TOS and users' reasonable expectation of consistency and explanation. The same tension exists in government police/arrest powers and resulted in many historic documents and rights. YT is not a government but their power rivals many actual countries. It will be interesting to see if the same revolutionary actions result. I don't think it's clear yet that it will or could happen.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrese 6y ago
  * This section of the Bible is copyright BMG Music Group and has been removed. This is your first strike.
  - kangnkodos 6y ago
    Turn Turn Turn by the Byrds
  - wlll 6y ago
    To paraphrase Red Dwarf: Newsreader: Good evening. Here is the news on Friday, the 27th of Geldof. Archeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." The page has been universally condemned by church leaders.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      That's a quote, not a paraphrase
      - wlll 6y ago
        I can't find an authoritative source for the original quote, so I found something that I believe to be close but didn't want to give it the authority of "quote" as it could be innacurate.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    Many bible translations are in fact copyrighted.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      Hopefully not by unrelated third parties that like to release bots that claim all sorts of random content is under their copyright and take it down.
    - gorgoiler 6y ago
      I don’t think this is surprising? KJV, for example, is such a foundational and original cornerstone of English language poetry that if it were to have been created in 2020 I would fully expect it to be copyrighted.
- sixothree 6y ago
  Imagine posting some of the things our president posts or says verbatim. Just start with the whole white genocide and banning of muslims....
  - Natanael_L 6y ago
    That gets people banned https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-donald-trump-suspendthepres-experiment-policies-suspension-glorifying-violence-2020-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-donald-trump-suspend...
    - sixothree 6y ago
      I imagine most people would get fired for such an offense. Not sure why I was getting downvoted.
- msla 6y ago
  Psalm 137:9 Yes, there's context. How often does context help?
  - xamuel 6y ago
    The whole of Psalm 137 is actually quite relevant in this whole censorship discussion. "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willows we hung our harps, for there our captors requested a song; our tormentors demanded songs of joy: 'Sing us a song of Zion.' How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?" Be sure to check out the awesome Reggae take on it by The Melodians, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tAb5rYRXvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tAb5rYRXvs, as well as the great pop cover by Boney-M, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYK9iCRb7S4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYK9iCRb7S4. Although, unfortunately, yes, both versions leave out the bit about dashing infants against rocks. After all, this is a foreign land, and if the Psalm were sung in full, it would be unacceptable to our captors!
okennedy 6y ago
This is the problem with combining services for infrastructure and services for discovery. Discovery, by definition, requires a carefully curated approach to filter based on interest, applicability. This forces discovery services to take for the material shown and promoted. Given the scale that services like YouTube operate at, this requires automation that is invariably going to make stupid mistakes. Infrastructure services on the other hand are dumb pipes, giving them a lot more leeway. Historically (e.g., the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, the recent debates around Cloudflare and the far-right), society has proven to be far more tolerant of services simply hosting a video or a stream, than services promoting it or deriving benefit from it (e.g., through ads). Arguably, the latter is also the more critical. A lot of smaller-scale entities (like your church) can tolerate losing promotion for a day or a week far better than they can tolerate losing their infrastructure.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Youtube claims to be both though. This comment is sort of victim blaming. ...but I agree that people should not rely upon social media companies whenever possible to distribute content and communications, due to increasing efforts to police content.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    I may be reading it wrong, but to me it seems less like victim blaming and more like explaining the situation that lead to the environment that lead to this event.
    - okennedy 6y ago
      This was exactly my intent. The problem is with YouTube trying to be a discovery service, while simultaneously requiring the use of its own infrastructure service to benefit from discovery. What is needed is discovery services that are not tied to any underlying infrastructure.
      - tux1968 6y ago
m0zg 6y ago
Did you guys find a self-hosted solution to this? I think we should really start self-hosting all aspects of free speech content, or at least be able to switch to self-hosting at a moment's notice.
- reid 6y ago
  For live content, you can host your own RTMP ingest server and serve HLS video using this Docker container: https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx-rtmp/tree/falcon https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx-rtmp/tre... If you're a church or nonprofit, you can run it for free on Azure by applying for a sponsorship. I wrote automation to setup and teardown the system on Azure: https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure Video playback is handled by Video.js with the HLS plugin. Our existing frontend web server reverse-proxies to the Docker instance serving HLS playlists and video chunks. I used this software from 2016 until about 6 months ago. We use Vimeo + Restream nowadays. If we ever needed to self-host again, it would be easy to switch back.
kodoro08 6y ago
When it’s that easy to fix surely it’s pretty easy to say “goto otherstreamingsite.com”? Why is the narrative “Google relies too heavily on automation”? Why not “I rely too heavily on Google”? In the attention economy all it takes is giving them less attention.
- dyingkneepad 6y ago
  I totally get what you mean, but there's the thing where most people know how to use the most common platforms, and youtube is probably among the top, so it's the first thing people try. Go tell your grandma her next service is going to be on Twitch and she'll think you're planning to attend it high. This does not invalidate your questions, but still it's something to be considered.
  - otterlicious 6y ago
    Grandma isn't going to YouTube and looking up the "Holy Trinity Church Sunday service", she is just clicking on the link the deacon sent her. As long as the page it sends her to has a play button like her VCR remote she will be fine.
    - dyingkneepad 6y ago
      This is true for the majority of people, but not everyone. If my mom gets to a page she has never seen before, even if it's as simple as clicking the "play" triangle in the middle of the screen, she may be confused and ask for directions before proceeding.
      - CarbyAu 6y ago
        You reminded me of my own mom. My mother (diagnosed schizophrenia in the '70s) tried to get to her webmail one day, but the ISP had moved the page. She got some generic 404 message like: "We couldn't find the page you were looking for." She immediately spazzed out asking who the "We" was and how did they know what she was looking for!?? She shutdown the computer and many years later, to this day, will not use a computer. So yeah, some people handle disparities in user experience better than others, and mental health is a thing in the population at large.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
lawsuit for lost viewership
TwoNineFive 6y ago
> google relies too-heavily on automation Consider that you may be relying too much on a free service that you paid nothing for. I'm not saying that google sucks. It does. But it will never get better unless you actually move to another service and take your money with you.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  > Paid nothing for. People pay everyday with their data. If it was truly a free service that provided no benefit to Google do you think they'd keep running it? They definitely have no aversion to shutting shit down. I guarantee the only reason they really shutdown google plus was because they weren't getting as much datamining out of it as they wanted.
ProAm 6y ago
If you read the old testament word for word on YouTube it violates their policies and would get taken down. They dictate modern day public appropriateness. Turns out it goes hand in hand with advertising dollars.
- ananonymoususer 6y ago
  Same goes for Mark Twain.
kayfox 6y ago
The furry AV community has been seeing lots of policy takedowns for furry convention streams on YouTube. This was especially apparent during a POC DJ's stream at a recent virtual furry convention. I suspect that theres a certain number of reports to viewership that allows streams to be taken down by trolls.
lazysheepherd 6y ago
I regret to to say that I'm quite familiar with religious text, thanks to my childhood & younghood. Religious texts and religious conversations use words like war, murder and rape quite generously. Those words used mostly in context of discussion, or prohibition, but automated systems cannot yet distinguish that reliably. There's a great chance that's what happened to your stream. Should be noted however, it's not so rare that religion orders their followers to do unfathomably gory things to other human beings. Which is sadly excused by most people quickly and in great effort, instead of scrunitizing further and pondering on it.

valuearb 6y ago

It was bots will.

asah 6y ago
You should be ex-communicated for that joke. :-)

ballenf 6y ago

I would guess there are some passages from many religions' sacred texts which could get your whole channel deleted if promoted. Unless there's a written or unwritten exception. The conflict or tension that troubles me the most is between platforms' incentive to have the most vague and broad TOS and users' reasonable expectation of consistency and explanation. The same tension exists in government police/arrest powers and resulted in many historic documents and rights. YT is not a government but their power rivals many actual countries. It will be interesting to see if the same revolutionary actions result. I don't think it's clear yet that it will or could happen.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jandrese 6y ago
* This section of the Bible is copyright BMG Music Group and has been removed. This is your first strike.
- kangnkodos 6y ago
  Turn Turn Turn by the Byrds
- wlll 6y ago
  To paraphrase Red Dwarf: Newsreader: Good evening. Here is the news on Friday, the 27th of Geldof. Archeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." The page has been universally condemned by church leaders.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    That's a quote, not a paraphrase
    - wlll 6y ago
      I can't find an authoritative source for the original quote, so I found something that I believe to be close but didn't want to give it the authority of "quote" as it could be innacurate.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  Many bible translations are in fact copyrighted.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Hopefully not by unrelated third parties that like to release bots that claim all sorts of random content is under their copyright and take it down.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    I don’t think this is surprising? KJV, for example, is such a foundational and original cornerstone of English language poetry that if it were to have been created in 2020 I would fully expect it to be copyrighted.
sixothree 6y ago
Imagine posting some of the things our president posts or says verbatim. Just start with the whole white genocide and banning of muslims....
- Natanael_L 6y ago
  That gets people banned https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-donald-trump-suspendthepres-experiment-policies-suspension-glorifying-violence-2020-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-donald-trump-suspend...
  - sixothree 6y ago
    I imagine most people would get fired for such an offense. Not sure why I was getting downvoted.
msla 6y ago
Psalm 137:9 Yes, there's context. How often does context help?
- xamuel 6y ago
  The whole of Psalm 137 is actually quite relevant in this whole censorship discussion. "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willows we hung our harps, for there our captors requested a song; our tormentors demanded songs of joy: 'Sing us a song of Zion.' How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?" Be sure to check out the awesome Reggae take on it by The Melodians, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tAb5rYRXvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tAb5rYRXvs, as well as the great pop cover by Boney-M, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYK9iCRb7S4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYK9iCRb7S4. Although, unfortunately, yes, both versions leave out the bit about dashing infants against rocks. After all, this is a foreign land, and if the Psalm were sung in full, it would be unacceptable to our captors!

okennedy 6y ago

This is the problem with combining services for infrastructure and services for discovery. Discovery, by definition, requires a carefully curated approach to filter based on interest, applicability. This forces discovery services to take for the material shown and promoted. Given the scale that services like YouTube operate at, this requires automation that is invariably going to make stupid mistakes. Infrastructure services on the other hand are dumb pipes, giving them a lot more leeway. Historically (e.g., the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, the recent debates around Cloudflare and the far-right), society has proven to be far more tolerant of services simply hosting a video or a stream, than services promoting it or deriving benefit from it (e.g., through ads). Arguably, the latter is also the more critical. A lot of smaller-scale entities (like your church) can tolerate losing promotion for a day or a week far better than they can tolerate losing their infrastructure.

koheripbal 6y ago
Youtube claims to be both though. This comment is sort of victim blaming. ...but I agree that people should not rely upon social media companies whenever possible to distribute content and communications, due to increasing efforts to police content.
- Shared404 6y ago
  I may be reading it wrong, but to me it seems less like victim blaming and more like explaining the situation that lead to the environment that lead to this event.
  - okennedy 6y ago
    This was exactly my intent. The problem is with YouTube trying to be a discovery service, while simultaneously requiring the use of its own infrastructure service to benefit from discovery. What is needed is discovery services that are not tied to any underlying infrastructure.
    - tux1968 6y ago

m0zg 6y ago

Did you guys find a self-hosted solution to this? I think we should really start self-hosting all aspects of free speech content, or at least be able to switch to self-hosting at a moment's notice.

reid 6y ago
For live content, you can host your own RTMP ingest server and serve HLS video using this Docker container: https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx-rtmp/tree/falcon https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx-rtmp/tre... If you're a church or nonprofit, you can run it for free on Azure by applying for a sponsorship. I wrote automation to setup and teardown the system on Azure: https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure Video playback is handled by Video.js with the HLS plugin. Our existing frontend web server reverse-proxies to the Docker instance serving HLS playlists and video chunks. I used this software from 2016 until about 6 months ago. We use Vimeo + Restream nowadays. If we ever needed to self-host again, it would be easy to switch back.

kodoro08 6y ago

When it’s that easy to fix surely it’s pretty easy to say “goto otherstreamingsite.com”? Why is the narrative “Google relies too heavily on automation”? Why not “I rely too heavily on Google”? In the attention economy all it takes is giving them less attention.

dyingkneepad 6y ago
I totally get what you mean, but there's the thing where most people know how to use the most common platforms, and youtube is probably among the top, so it's the first thing people try. Go tell your grandma her next service is going to be on Twitch and she'll think you're planning to attend it high. This does not invalidate your questions, but still it's something to be considered.
- otterlicious 6y ago
  Grandma isn't going to YouTube and looking up the "Holy Trinity Church Sunday service", she is just clicking on the link the deacon sent her. As long as the page it sends her to has a play button like her VCR remote she will be fine.
  - dyingkneepad 6y ago
    This is true for the majority of people, but not everyone. If my mom gets to a page she has never seen before, even if it's as simple as clicking the "play" triangle in the middle of the screen, she may be confused and ask for directions before proceeding.
    - CarbyAu 6y ago
      You reminded me of my own mom. My mother (diagnosed schizophrenia in the '70s) tried to get to her webmail one day, but the ISP had moved the page. She got some generic 404 message like: "We couldn't find the page you were looking for." She immediately spazzed out asking who the "We" was and how did they know what she was looking for!?? She shutdown the computer and many years later, to this day, will not use a computer. So yeah, some people handle disparities in user experience better than others, and mental health is a thing in the population at large.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

lawsuit for lost viewership

TwoNineFive 6y ago

> google relies too-heavily on automation Consider that you may be relying too much on a free service that you paid nothing for. I'm not saying that google sucks. It does. But it will never get better unless you actually move to another service and take your money with you.

ethanwillis 6y ago
> Paid nothing for. People pay everyday with their data. If it was truly a free service that provided no benefit to Google do you think they'd keep running it? They definitely have no aversion to shutting shit down. I guarantee the only reason they really shutdown google plus was because they weren't getting as much datamining out of it as they wanted.

ProAm 6y ago

If you read the old testament word for word on YouTube it violates their policies and would get taken down. They dictate modern day public appropriateness. Turns out it goes hand in hand with advertising dollars.

ananonymoususer 6y ago
Same goes for Mark Twain.

kayfox 6y ago

The furry AV community has been seeing lots of policy takedowns for furry convention streams on YouTube. This was especially apparent during a POC DJ's stream at a recent virtual furry convention. I suspect that theres a certain number of reports to viewership that allows streams to be taken down by trolls.

lazysheepherd 6y ago

I regret to to say that I'm quite familiar with religious text, thanks to my childhood & younghood. Religious texts and religious conversations use words like war, murder and rape quite generously. Those words used mostly in context of discussion, or prohibition, but automated systems cannot yet distinguish that reliably. There's a great chance that's what happened to your stream. Should be noted however, it's not so rare that religion orders their followers to do unfathomably gory things to other human beings. Which is sadly excused by most people quickly and in great effort, instead of scrunitizing further and pondering on it.