16 ms·
YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”
- everdrive 6y agoWhat exactly happens when Youtube shadowbans a video? The creator believes it's accessible, but no one else can access it?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoFrom the Twitter thread, I understand the video becomes secretly unlisted - not reachable in any way other than having a direct URL to it.
- snowron6 6y agoYou can find it by going to his youtube channel, but it doesn't show up in searches or in subscriptions if you're subscribed to him.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoThe shadow ban isn’t even the scariest part of the thread! The Department of Homeland Security confronted him about a video about police brutality: > A few months ago I uploaded a video about police brutality. It showed explicit acts of violence by the police, and it was understandably age-gated. The video was appropriate only for older audiences, but did not break any of YouTube's terms and conditions. > That video earned me a visit from the DHS, who asked me about "Anti-American sentiment" in my videos. That was the first time I realized, wow, I guess people really are monitoring what we say and are willing to try to intimidate us, even if what we say is objectively true. It’s “anti-American” to say that the people ostensibly enforcing our laws should not commit violence against us.
- rubyist5eva 6y agoAbsolutely ridiculous - do Americans even know why the country was even founded anymore?
- dmd 6y ago.
- mirekrusin 6y ago- knock knock - who's there? - homeland security
- chuckSu 6y agoI don’t think most care
- bladegash 6y agoDo you? Not to over simplify things, but freedom, liberty, and equal treatment were pretty much empty words and applied only to white American men (see: treatment of Native Americans, the Mexican-American war, slaves, and women). Federalists were very clear in their commentary and design of the Constitution that they were in favor of broad federal powers and feared populism and direct democracy. The Bill of Rights was not in the original drafts of the Constitution and likely would not have existed had it not been for the Anti-Federalists. Not to mention gems such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, Three-Fifths Compromise, Manifest Destiny, etc. Many of the tensions and fears that existed back then, are some of the same ones we are dealing with now. Edit: Original comment suggested Patrick Henry was against the Bill of Rights - which was inaccurate and a big error on my part. Apologies for the misleading quote!
- forest_dweller 6y agoPeople like yourself that constantly bring up the wrongs of the past and constantly remind people that things were less than perfect in the past constantly don't seem to understand that: * Much like many things society progresses, generally in the western world that progression has tended towards greater liberty (in most respects) of its citizens e.g. Tom Holland (a documentary film maker in the UK) argues the separation of church and state can be traced back to the Bible and it been a steady progression to secularism from there (whether that is valid or not I have no idea). * You cannot judge people of the past by the standards of today. Someone that would have been seen as progressive back then would be seen as some sort of ultra-traditionalist far-right fridge thinker. You have to judge them by the standards of the time. I am sure in 200-300 years people will see us as backwards, poorly educated and barbaric. I don't know the history of the events or the characters that led to American indepedence (I am not an American) but what I do find when people feel the need to character assasinate important figures of the past is that they do massively over simplify events and the people involved.
- adnzzzzZ 6y agoThis happens all the time, example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgqeJi_Z6aM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgqeJi_Z6aM
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- booleandilemma 6y agoI’m upvoting your comment. I hope I don’t get a visit from the secret police.
- commentrix 6y agoBut I think it's "anti-American" to deliberately editorialize and misrepresent the police as illegally violent and biased, when the facts are otherwise: - black people kill black people far more than police or white people kill black people, but the dominant story about it is, police violence is at fault - police have to deal with 1000s of violent encounters with unstable and dangerous individuals every week, and aside from security guards, they're the only officers in civilian society authorized to use physical force, and each year dozens of uniformed officers are killed[0] and thousands are violently assaulted[1], but again, the dominant propaganda is the fake story about the "plague of police violence" against "poor innocent victims" If some officers murdered people, and that's enough to produce this persistent propaganda about "police brutality", then the dozens of murders and thousands of assaults by people against police should be enough to create a greater story about "anti-police brutality" -- but it's not. The "police brutality" narrative is a lie that's trying to be born as truth through endless repetition, spread by corrupt and irresponsible media. It's obviously propaganda and a divisive tactic, but people lap it up. It's very, very sad, that it is used as an outlet for people, who twistedly see it as a way to vent their unrelated frustrations, with someone to incorrectly blame, a "cause" to disguise their anger about their other problems. The same tactics are used to recruit and radicalize terrorists. One of the saddest thing's about these myths is how they are being used to whip up anti police sentiment, which funnels into anti police violence, which results in really bad outcomes for the perpetrators, who probably were otherwise OK people, but got deluded by this propaganda into making mistakes that ruined their lives, and the lives of others. But, go on, keep spreading this delusion and apologizing for violence against police, like idiots, manipulated by forces you don't understand. [0]: https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/officers/national/united-states/leoka https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/officers/national/u... [1]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-assaulted https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-assaulte...
- greenie_beans 6y agoYikes, welcome to hacker news?
- Technically 6y ago"Illegally violent" police isn't meaningful. They're legally violent; that's the problem. Take your racism elsewhere, please. You're regurgitating state propaganda for no conversational benefit.
- peteretep 6y ago> That video earned me a visit from the DHS I wasn’t there, so I’ve no idea if that really happened, but the statement definitely makes his videos more exciting and click worthy :eye-roll:
- stiray 6y agoWell I have encountered this article a while ago - "How CIA made Google": https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... From this perspective, youtube blocking CIA criticizing video seems like something completely normal.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- est31 6y agoIt's not normal, even if there is such a connection. If there is such, it's way more powerful if it's kept in secret. In which instance does the CIA benefit more? If people believe that GAFAM are a front of the CIA and thus enemies avoid GAFAM products? Or if enemies of the CIA use GAFAM products, believing that data collection is only done to improve ads?
- leftyted 6y agoThe DHS was established in the panic following 9/11. If they're knocking on doors trying to intimidate dissidents, it seems clear that it has outlived its usefulness (if it ever had any) and should be dismantled. You'd think that would be something small-government republicans progressive democrats could agree on...
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoYou would think. But both sides also feel like they have to look strong on security, or the other side is going to beat them up in the next election.
- freeflight 6y agoI mean, it's not really that surprising, the DHS is an organization that openly calls for Americans to snitch on each other, it's even a registered trademark: "If You See Something, Say Something®" [0] Also not only reserved to the DHS. There have also been examples of people being under surveillance by the FBI, and ultimately going to jail, over Facebook posts [1] [0] https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-interview-black-identity-extremists-fbi-surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-...
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago> It’s “anti-American” to say that the people ostensibly enforcing our laws should not commit violence against us. No. Everybody knows that, everybody agrees with that, and you can say it. But it's "anti-American" to point out that the people ostensibly enforcing our laws do commit unreasonably unnecessary violence against us.
- fwsgonzo 6y agoThis is the delisted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI
- fit2rule 6y agoThanks. I've used YouTube-dl to download it and be sure I still have access to it after it is removed.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI have no views on the video, I didn’t watch it, but tech companies censoring and pushing back against free speech troubles me. Individuals and companies have the right to do what they want with their own property, and I don’t have any great ideas on how to solve this dilemma. One solution would be to have many platforms but we live in a winner take all world and platforms like YT get more powerful because of network effects.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jeanlucas 6y agoLet me try being the devil's advocate here. With so many content being uploaded, it's better to err and not promote any video that could be an allusion to terrorism, sexual content, and so on. If humans were moderating youtube it would be worse and the amount of people needed would be impractical. At the same time, the author gets much more views saying his video was censored than if he was just one more video made on the platform. Just like singers would look for the +18 black mark on their LPs back in the 80s/90s.
- dredds 6y ago> "If humans were moderating youtube it would be worse" That's quite an assumption that human moderation is worse than an algorithm. > "and the amount of people needed would be impractical." What is up-voting and down-voting and reporting? It's not like there's a lack of human eyeballs on the issue already. If no one watched, then no impact.
- musingsole 6y agoBut why is that? Shouldn't the only bar to putting some videos up on the internet be bandwith? We can solve that with IPFS. The content hosting with youtube is nice, but the bigger problem solved by YT is search. So a video up on a server somewhere might as well be dark unless something can link to it and someone looking for it or something similar can be pointed to it. That search feature itself can't be centralized or else we have the same censoring problem. It would be nice if a type of searching system could be bundled with IPFS, though I don't know what that would look like. The sooner we have a system where no one can close the gates, the better.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThis premise/statement is misinformation in the west, and true information in Iran. YouTube has signed up for determining what is true in the west, and it will definitely upset some people, so shadow banning is the best happy medium. (I personally think most people should start shadow banned and then an algorithm should slowly start opening the sphere of influence/votes to see if information is spreading more widely).
- 7636528A 6y agoI hope YouTube and other platforms for user content will be replaced by something decentralised eventually. I wonder if a decentralised media platform over something like bittorrent or IPFS is or will ever be technologically feasible.
- musingsole 6y agoThe content hosting is feasible. The problem is search. If all the videos ever produced where captured in an IPFS hash somewhere...how do you find them?
- cblconfederate 6y agoThe problem is how to make the search itself uncensorable, unlike bittorrent ttackers
- fsflover 6y agoTake a look at PeerTube. It's federated and they have a global search.
- zpeti 6y agoPeople who cheer when "right wing" misinformation is censored, should think very carefully about what just happened here. And why, for 200 years, free speech and anti-censorship has been extremely important to Americans. There's a reason the ACLU defended nazis being able to protest. Because eventually censorship will ALWAYS be turned on your side. Whichever side you are on.
- bzb6 6y agoThey made their bed and now they are lying on it.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoThe availability and ease of distribution of "fringe" content is a 100 times higher today than it ever was in those 200 years you're glorifying.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoYou're phrasing this as though censorship of leftism were a hypothetical, when in fact it's been happening for over a century. Read about the Red Scare (both the well-known one in the 1950s and the lesser-known one after World War I) [1] and COINTELPRO [2] for a start. There's even an example in the thread: the DHS confronted the person about "anti-American sentiment" for posting a video about police brutality. Continuing a proud tradition of censorship and propaganda — of the people, by the people, for the people. You'll forgive me for questioning whether Americans really care about free speech and anti-censorship. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
- Natsu 6y agoYou'd do better with examples that aren't from the 1950s. And #2 was run by Deep Throat (Mike Felt) himself.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
- Triv888 6y agoThe Sheriff's deputies came hovering with their helicopter about 20 ft over me in my backyard a few days after they had an issue with me... The whole law enforcement industry in the USA is in need of "re-structuring". They also harassed me because I went to pee in the desert a few miles from the Mexican border (3 different law enforcement agencies came by (well, one was already present)). We don't need to de-fund them (maybe a little bit), but they need better training for sure. Also, I'm white and they were white.
- 3663288262 6y agoSpeaking as a lurker, this seems basically like what people have been asking for for awhile now including here. I remember seeing numerous top comment chains over the last four years (and of course before that but not here) that all boiled down to very eloquent defenses of censoring fringe thinkers. Who knows, maybe in theory land there's no reason we can't have it both ways. But it seems to me that in the real world precisely the opposite is true. We can't demand increasingly invasive and opaque mechanisms to prevent the spread of misinformation (once upon a time many examples of which would have just been called "gossip" or the "rumor mill") and then act surpised when radicals for our own important causes get swept up in the net. At some point we either have to admit that what we really want to build is a like-minded dictorship or we have to start discussing (in a sober manner devoid of the histrionics and gamesmanship that have come to envelope contemporary dialogues) what an intellient compromise in objectives might look like.
- musingsole 6y agoI think an open system is emergent, not something that can be planned around intelligent compromises. I have an intuition that planning government systems is about satisfying the shepherds that there are fences against the chaos and convincing the sociopaths there are rules to exploit. Otherwise, it'll just turn into DnD 3.5e where every action has a rule in a book somewhere, it'll be blasphemy if you handwave it before looking it up, and yet somehow that one guy always has their character just so to skirt that same rule.
- cblconfederate 6y agoIt s as if we rediscover liberalism in full circles
- belval 6y agoMy pet theory is that there will always be a constant loop much like the prey-predator relationship. We start by going in one direction i.e. liberalism, then we realize that some pieces of authoritarianism might be good for a problem we currently have, so we water it down a bit. Fast forward 50-70 years, we realize that the balance has swung too much to one side so we try to do a sharp turn. That action causes an overcompensation which is when revolution and violence happen. Finally we end up back at some sort of liberalism and the circle begins anew. I see it as a result of generation gap. We don't know the value of something until we lose it. Right now the public doesn't value freedom of speech as much as it used to so we are right on track to have it more limited.
- kossTKR 6y agoTalk about the military industry, crime financial complex, pretexts to war or history of US foreign policy - anything with actual weight that isn't just "culture wars" - and see yourself get delisted from Google, smeared in the media, then get harassed by various agencies until you either flee the country or end up like Hastings or car bombed like Daphne. There is only freedom of speech until you actually go against those in power.
- jmnicolas 6y agoVoltaire said something like "to know who your masters are, look at who you can't criticize".
- gruez 6y agoAnd the popular reply to that is "orphans with leukemia"
- betaby 6y agohttps://montreal.ctvnews.ca/comedian-mike-ward-seeks-permission-to-take-freedom-of-speech-case-to-the-supreme-court-1.4778825 https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/comedian-mike-ward-seeks-permiss...
- gruez 6y agoThat meets the "can't criticize" criteria, but not the "are your masters" criteria, unless there's some sort of secret cabal of disabled boys ruling over us.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoright, which means that Voltaire's quip, although clever as everything he said, did not happen to actually cover all the possibilities of censorship in every possible society. In his time, certainly, the people you couldn't criticize were the rulers, in our time there is a wider range of people you can't criticize.
- jeanlucas 6y agoJust watched the video, read the thread. Here are some thoughts. First of all, the video uploader is promoting a competitor to YouTube. This is not disclaimed clearly. The video goes over criticism to the CIA, which are fair enough. But it takes some things as axioms, for example, that only the US are interfering/meddling in the world. He presents it as "the US is the bad guy and the world would be fair without the CIA." Which also is a form of propaganda. It's a bit näive to not see this as anti-government propaganda. The crude reality is: true democracies never existed, and influence between countries is as old as society. About the "censorship" itself: Youtube's goals is not the same as the authors, why would they promote something that is not what they want to be? They have a huge infant audience, they want to be advertiser-friendly. This is not something hidden or unknown. They did not delete the video, but they shouldn't promote it. No fault in my eyes. And at the same time, the buzz around saying "my video is being suppressed" get more views and is even a badge to prove the content "hits where it hurts". Just like rock bands in the 80s/90s would go after being censored or considered 18+ just to sell more.
- jeanlucas 6y agoDon't get me wrong, it's a great video with lots of research in the most known CIA meddling like Cuba, Latin America, Iran, and so on. But it's literally nothing new to anyone with any political knowledge that countries meddle in each other business all the time. The difference is that it is exposed in a way to make it sensationalist.
- dredds 6y agoThe buildup to the Iraq war (WMD) was sensationalist. Propaganda propagated by powerful corporations on the American people to instigate a fake excuse for war. If it's sensationalist to speak truth regards power of the US propaganda machine, them yes, there is no other way. One cannot downplay the fact that the machine is all-powerful. The internet was supposed to be the antidote to old propaganda, but corporations have taken over the mainstream internet, and wield even more power over our lives. Again, we should not downplay this fact.
- leto_ii 6y ago
- mmaunder 6y agoGreenwald and Snowden discuss this issue 3 days ago re valley companies having intelligence contracts and opening themselves up to pressure: https://youtu.be/5qEuKCS-czU https://youtu.be/5qEuKCS-czU
- motohagiography 6y agoIt would be helpful for people who have previously come out against cancel culture and deplatforming to defend the principle for someone who is not a member of their political tribe. Independent of the content of the video and who it happened to offend, the deceptive practice of shadow banning is reprehensible. Tar-pitting spammers is one thing, deceiving creators, especially ones who are politically engaged as to the impact of their work discredits the legitimacy of the platforms, and the agencies. Are the government agencies "persons," deserving protection in this case? A major part of the problem is the language platforms use in their alerts, which is patronizing, gaslighting, and from what I have read in posts like these, basically enraging (which is what their business does best, so no surprises there). If platforms would use language that made it clear they owned their role as referees it would go a lot more smoothly, and mitigate the effects of this "for your own good," deception bit. Of course I see it as the effect of platform employees who culturally reject the idea of binding principles in favour of exercising arbitrary power, but if that's not going to change, they can't reasonably complain about explosive reactions to their "dynamic choices" either.
- mellosouls 6y agoIt would be helpful for people who have previously come out against cancel culture and deplatforming to defend the principle for someone who is not a member of their political tribe Granted. Principle defended and censorship of other political tribes condemned. So does that mean we now get an apology from the other lot if the tables have indeed turned?
- happytoexplain 6y agoThis is pretty snarky.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoNo more so than the original comment's presumption that "people who have previously come out against cancel culture and deplatforming" only care about the issue as some kind of tribal marker. I don't want to defend tit-for-tat snark, but it's super frustrating to see people making snide remarks about this issue even as it starts to affect their own beliefs.
- Hnrobert42 6y agoI hope HN doesn’t become the next place conspiracy theories are peddled.
- cochne 6y agoWhat is the conspiracy theory you see being peddled here? The theory that the video was shadow banned as a result of its content, or the theories presented in the video itself?
- moultano 6y agoThat the difficulty of finding the video in YouTube search was a deliberate change made at the request of the CIA.
- andrewHN_ 6y agoseems like for an american like you, truth hurts. better just ignore the truth and call everything a conspiracy theory, so you don't have to deal with negative facts
- question000 6y agoI think it important to entertain the possibility that this person is simply lying. I don't see any evidence that backs up his claim that this was intentional and his claim that he was visited by DHS officials is doubtful to me. There's plenty of videos like his on YouTube already, so I can't really imagine this caused a real government intervention. But maybe I missed something.
- sudoaza 6y agoYou can easily search for the exact title, order by all the right things and is not there, you can see a reaction but not the actual video. https://ibb.co/j8rbkks https://ibb.co/j8rbkks
- question000 6y agoVideos don't always appear in search results immediately. He could have also just unlisted the video. I've uploaded hundreds of videos and many don't really show up in the results if they are similar to many other videos. If you just search "CIA terrorist organization" you get plenty of other video that are similar to the one described, so it's doubtful this one was censored for content.
- bradlys 6y agoI don’t recall an option on YouTube to delist a video from search but still have it be accessible from a channel. It’s either publicly searchable (public) or it’s only viewable with a link (unlisted) or completely private (private). The ones viewable with a link will not appear anywhere but this video does appear on the channel. So clearly there is a fourth option youtube has behind the scenes.
- siliconmountain 6y agoEventually something you agree with or think is reasonable will be censored by a corporation. censorship is always a problem
- happytoexplain 6y agoWithout forming a specific argument, this popular expression is meaningless by its very nature. Yes, of course people won't like when a system they live in punishes them. That's not avoidable.
- swiley 6y agoIt's been known for a while that youtube is not a good platform for anything political. Google has been shadow banning political videos they didn't like since Obama was in office and publicly talking about it. There are other video sites you can go to for this sort of thing.
- dalbasal 6y agoWe have long reached the point where, if we want to keep making analogies between social media and analogue media (pun intended), then we need to compare social media to a publication with an editor. Demonetization, age-gating, recommendation engines, bans, shadowbans and their subtler varieties are many-2-many media's equivalent of an editor. Every one impacts the distribution of a video on youtube. Every one of these also impacts what content gets made/posted, because views are like currency. It doesn't matter if it's algorithmic, and it doesn't matter if there are other reasons for (eg) demonetisation to exist. It's still an editor. You need to make the editor happy to succeed on youtube. The single difference between an editor and a censor is scale. If you edit all the magazines, magazines are censored. The innocuous type example for censorship is (as usual) pornography. IDK what the consequences of posting pornography and its juniors (nudity, etc) on youtube, but they're obviously sufficient to make youtube mostly nudity free. It's not because no one wants raunchy videos. The same toolkit can be used (and is) to make any kind of content more or less prevalent on youtube. It's funny that "section 230" is being mentioned by so many under informed politicians and pundits. Changing 230 is unlikely to "fix" the problem, considering that most politicians obviously don't even understand the problem. But section 230 at least captures the main part of the problem. Youtube is not "dumb pipes." Youtube is a content business, and they have a lot of control over content. It's not direct, "delete this segment" control like they have at FOX, but it is editing nonetheless. At youtube, twitter or FB scale, editing is censorship.
- georgeplusplus 6y agoOP makes a bunch of tweets alleging mistreatment and foul play with a completely valid response by the host, YouTube, yet he continues to claim baselessly without proof he is wronged. Sounds like a certain president. Present proof or leave the conspiracies to 4chan.
- andrewHN_ 6y agoworst country on this planet. "the world police", who just wants to bring democracy to 3rd world countries by killing hundred thousands innocent civilians... good gob
- danoloan 6y agoimagine thinking counter-subversion is not justified
- villgax 6y agoGoogle Trends also shows spike in Second Thought being searched from Virginia at 100 on their relative scale.
- saasideas 6y ago" Plain spam, even your pricing section has different amounts. " I'm sorry but you have a toxic mind. We pay for access to the best data on public, venture-backed, and private companies available, as well as utilize independent analyst research, to identify profitable markets. If you don'y want to give your email. No problem just read an example here before say any no sense: https://saasideas.net/f/Free_Saas_Idea.pdf https://saasideas.net/f/Free_Saas_Idea.pdf For prices. I made a free plan where readers can get 1 SaaS idea every Friday. If you want more you can pay for 6 Months subscription. If you feel the price not right! Give feedback otherwise don't be a toxic person. Thanks
- villgax 6y agoLol, first off you replied to a wrong thread. Secondly, get a proof reader for both your website & whoever manages this HN account. And lastly if you re-read what I wrote, I mention that the prices within a given plan are different than what the header of that plan suggests. $48 -> the button says 'Get Access for $58' LOL You removed the third pricing plan. Simply put you're just spam marketing a paid newsletter. PS: Your post did get flagged by mods for spamming.
- itronitron 6y agoSearching the video title on DuckDuckGo gives the Youtube video as the top search result. Put that into your crack pipe and smoke it.
- sudoaza 6y agoSearch that in Youtube and in Google and you'll see it's nowhere, only the reactions to it being shadowbanned.
- jancsika 6y ago> Yesterday morning I released a video titled "The CIA is a Terrorist Organization." Unsurprisingly, it was instantly demonetized. Fine. I'm used to that. Everything after, "Fine. I'm used to that," is irrelevant. This thread is apparently content using services built with a spirit functionally equivalent to, "Let's see if we can do the opposite of all four of the freedoms of the GPL." And as long as everyone is content with these algorithmic blackboxes controlling discoverability for most of the population, we'll continue discussing heinous second-order effects of these systems. Here and now it happens to be free speech, but there are plenty of others waiting in the wings for as long as we avoid the main problem.
- shap3 6y agoSorry is there evidence that the DHS were actually involved here as claimed in the author's twitter feed? Or do we take this at face value? edit - and what does a DHS visit look like? Do they knock on your door at 6am or leave a card to call them back? Sorry I've never been in this situation before so I'd be interested in more details on that side of things.
- geongeorgek 6y agoThere is a public video with 3.6 million views exactly titled: "Bohemian Grove - Alex Jones" Trying to watch this for the first time I had to find some other website that embed this. If it were any other video finding this shouldn't have took more than 10 seconds. Maybe youtube wants to prevent spread of misinformation but making something inaccessible is whole nother level of evil.
- cblconfederate 6y agoThis happens all the time internationally with organized and state-supported social media mobs . Interestingly, there seems to exist a law in germany that requires services like twitter to tell users when they have been flagged from accounts in germany, and this happened multiple times recently with the conflict in caucasus[1]. I wonder if youtube has something similar 1. https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1328460455380193286 https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1328460455380193286
- crazydoggers 6y agoThere’s a lot of comments here about what’s happening to America. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that we’ve always been fighting to preserve our rights under the constitution. Freedom and democracy doesn’t just come for free. Take another period in US history... at a time of another pandemic, the Spanish flu, and a World war. The 1918 Sedition Act [1] made illegal the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States. The effects of this law were so successful, that at a time when a pandemic killed 20 million Americans, the newspapers never wrote about the flu. In fact this is why that virus was named the Spanish flu, since during the war Spain was neutral and allowed its press to freely report on it. Not because the virus came from Spain. History of course repeats itself. But the real lesson for us is that we need to always be vigilant. And it’s not a time to despair that things are at their worst, or can’t get better, or everything is downhill. Instead look at how far we’ve come. Look at what we’ve overcome in history. We just need to keep moving the ball forward. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918
- iandanforth 6y agoI draw a line between promotion and discoverability. I don't need YouTube to advertise the video, but if I do an exact string search on the title of the video and don't find it, that's suppression. The content of the video is innocuous. It appears to be a factual recounting of CIA ops with some editorializing. It doesn't present new information or a new opinion.
- leto_ii 6y agoThe YouTube shadow ban is bad enough, but to me the even scarier part comes further down the thread: > A few months ago I uploaded a video about police brutality. It showed explicit acts of violence by the police, and it was understandably age-gated. The video was appropriate only for older audiences, but did not break any of YouTube's terms and conditions. > That video earned me a visit from the DHS, who asked me about "Anti-American sentiment" in my videos. That was the first time I realized, wow, I guess people really are monitoring what we say and are willing to try to intimidate us, even if what we say is objectively true. The video in question is, I suspect, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEVoX-RwMJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEVoX-RwMJw To me it's beyond disturbing that this kind of stuff still happens, it's the kind of thing that you'd think went away in the 50's or so.
- golemotron 6y agoShadow-banning is particularly awful. It's a deceptive business practice.
- mandragon 6y agosomewhat related: youtube selectively deploys objectively malicious psyops on American citizens. bleep you, Google.
- leephillips 6y agoYouTube has been playing these games for a long time, often to mollify the Chinese and Pakistani governments, and various extremist groups: https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/ https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/
- snowron6 6y agoDoes anyone else find it strange that this thread is one the third page of hackernews despite being newer, with more upvotes and comments than the majority of posts on the front page? I know the site isn't meant for political discussion, but other stories about tech companies censoring political opinions haven't fallen from the front page as quickly as this one.
- aminozuur 6y agoHere is the video in question: The CIA is a Terrorist Organization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI
- foolzcrow 6y agoThe history of the CIA speaks for itself. Terrorists for sure.