29 ms·

YouTube’s rules are used to silence human rights activists

340 points by headalgorithm 5y ago

everyone 5y ago
YouTube is absolutely not the place for serious content like this. Why is he even using it?
- junon 5y ago
  Where, exactly, is "the place" for "serious content" like this?
  - everyone 5y ago
    Youtube is the home of auto-generated kids videos and content farms. Thats the content they seem to want there. Anything else is randomly taken down. Literally any other site where one can upload videos would be better.
    - jowsie 5y ago
      This sounds a lot like you don't use YouTube at all, as I've not seen auto-generated kids videos or content farm trash in a long time, and YouTube is my primary entertainment/educational video source.
      - dathinab 5y ago
        Yay, content personalization works. But putting that aside from a person using YT often from incognito mode and similar: - there is a overlap between "content farm trash" and "entertainment visdeos" what you might seem as "content trash" other might see as "short simple entertainment". - there is a lot of educational content on YT, sadly it is often not featured that much on a "incognito" front page - there is a lot of entertainment content with a bit of educational content on it. - there is even more purely entertainment content on it - there is questionable kids content on it (but YT explicitly split out YT Kids because it (at least officially) doesn't want kids on the normal YT (kids != teens/young adults) - there is questionable "content farm trash" it also tries most to "play to algorithm" so it might seem that there is a lot of it when you visit YT in incognito mode/without personalized YT preferences. But it's not what keeps the platform alive. - there is a lot of TV content on it (at least in some countries) (e.g. a recordings of TV news programs uploaded by the TV channels which produced it). - there is quite a bit of serious content, discussions, etc. on it sadly mostly demonetized. - there is a bit of more then just a bit of very very wrong and misleading content on it. Or in other words YT is a platform for all content, from extremely serious discussions over good entertainment, grate educational material to pointless 5 minute craft videos and ending with conspiracy theories.
    - NoOneNew 5y ago
      While I agree yt has lots of flaws, you need to curate your feed a bit. 95% of my feed is engineering, dev, history and super niche music. "Dont Recommend Channel" was literally the greatest feature they ever created.
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
      >Literally any other site where one can upload videos would be better. You can make that case, but it's hard to beat youtube. It's not just a matter of the amount of content, but also support on settop boxes/devices, quality of playback,etc. Having said that, I'm starting to go to the effort of building an offline library. To me, the youtube death of a thousand cuts is happening because of their increasingly heinous ads (like google search) and strengthening copyright enforcement (since their position is now in place).
  - izacus 5y ago
    > Where, exactly, is "the place" for "serious content" like this? In a place the creator is in full control and isn't funded by advertisers which will pull their funding for anything they dislike. That's pretty much the nature of publishing content - if you're not independent there's always the tension of your funding source dictating the content.
    - junon 5y ago
      Do you use youtube? Most creators have independent sponsorships.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  YouTube is the most accessible place for content like this. They may be running the site into the ground lately but the initial implementation of a site that allows easy uploading, sharing and discovery of video content still has a lot of merit and is miles beyond anything else if only for the fact that it has the largest market share.
  - junon 5y ago
    This biggest problem any competitor faces is cost. YouTube has a monopoly on this space, unfortunately.
    - silon42 5y ago
      The only alternative would be some kind of distributed torrent index. But would need to work in a browser to be accessible to people. So, unless browsers add first class support for this, this means a web site with ads, probably and then you have the same problems again.
      - junon 5y ago
        There's no way the average content creator would seed videos indefinitely. The whole point of a video hosting service is to not host it yourself.
        testific8 5y ago
        I doubt this. People are willing to reupload videos that they like, so why wouldn't they seed? for example this video has been reuploaded quite a few times because people like it so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu-EA1ruNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu-EA1ruNk The whole point of a video hosting service is to act as an easy directory for finding videos you like. The fact that the same service happens to host the videos in this case is inconsequential.
        junon 5y ago
einpoklum 5y ago
Like, say, the railroads or the phone network, a mass-membership video platform is something which has too many "res publica" aspects to just let it be the property of / in control of a private corporation; but which developed within, or was developed by, one or more such private corporations. The solution seems to be one of: 1. Let said corporations exert such control over public life. 2. Have nation-states nationalize it. 3. Have the UN internationalize it. 4. Have nation-states, perhaps in collaboration, strongly regulate it. 5. Force it (e.g. via regulation) to become distributed, so that no single entity can exert significant control. Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.
- swiley 5y ago
  Eventually people will get fed up with youtube. Peertube is already beginning to become popular and many youtubers are posting there and odesy. Google has become like most large American companies with a self destructive management layer, eventually that will eat Youtube as well. I'd certainly prefer we get a free/distributed alternative to nationalizing and cementing a terrible monopoly.
  - spaceribs 5y ago
    Even worse for Google, when people get banned off YouTube, they get banned across all of Google's services. Every time you upload what is arbitrarily controversial, that outcome has to be weighed, and if PeerTube provides a viable alternative, why not use it?
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    I tend to agree with your conclusion, but not necessarily with your argument. That is, yes, people might be "fed up with YouTube", but the point is that at any one time there can only be one video platform which hosts most videos... it doesn't really matter whether it's YouTube or NotYouTube by some other corporation; and the amount of material on YouTube is so staggering that I doubt we would see a distributed version of it being comparable any time soon. We don't even have a good distributed search engine (that I know of).
- 5y ago
perihelions 5y ago
I'm stunned. YouTube removed testimonial accounts of families of people currently in Xinjiang concentration camps -- because the speakers showed ID cards of their family member, violating YouTube's harassment policies on personally-identifiable information. That's not speculative inference -- the YT representative flat out *tells* the author: >"We welcome responsible [sic] efforts to document important human rights cases around the world. We also have policies that do not allow channels to publish Personally Identifiable Information in order to prevent harassment."
- the_lonely_road 5y ago
  This doesn’t sound bad or wrong at all. Can someone help me understand the outrage? We all know China likes to disappear people and YouTube would be complicit in that if they allowed these people showing their ids to stay up. Sounds like a common sense security step designed to at worst protect YouTube from the liability of being complicit in those people’s deaths and at best an attempt to help them.
  - lessname 5y ago
    afaik these are testimonials for people who are disappeared now, so they are already in the hands of the chinese regime
  - hibbelig 5y ago
    The id cards are shown to help prevent China from disappearing these people. So YT taking the videos down is the opposite of what YT claims to want.
    - kspacewalk2 5y ago
      In what way does that help prevent China from disappearing these people?
      - hibbelig 5y ago
        It helps to increase awareness, and that helps with pressure on China's regime.
LatteLazy 5y ago
People spend half the time complaining YT etc are censoring content, and then the other half complaining they don't censor content (conspiracy theories, fake news, isis. I'm honestly not sure what anyone expects here. It's like they just want to be outraged and big tech is a convenient target
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  >> "I'm honestly not sure what anyone expects here." Discernment.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    Discernment that aligns with their values and is scalable enough to be cheap. Google promised to not be “evil”, which is only as reliable a promise to the degree that “evil” is well-defined.
  - macspoofing 5y ago
    Based on my personal standards?
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Youtube make pennies per video, if you can provide "discernment" at that price, I'm sure they'll take you call. Until then, it's hammers missing nails and smashing walnuts. And that's without worrying that your definition might not match anyone else's...
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "Youtube make pennies per video, if you can provide "discernment" at that price" Thats their problem. Alternatively,maybe they don't give a fuck because they have a monopoly and they have nonreason to spend more money
      - LatteLazy 5y ago
        It's really not their problem though, is it. Because there are 2 fixes: * do nothing and have fake news etc everywhere. * make it much much harder for users to submit material Both of those have serious impacts on us. So it's our problem really isn't it? Before you reply, ask yourself: would I pay a dollar to reply? If the answer is no, you can't really expect YC to spend money on "discernment" for every thread/article/text post can you?
aww_dang 5y ago
I was watching MSM coverage of US politics on YouTube when this channel was advertised. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpmYGObyCW3xgkpY2cFlacQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpmYGObyCW3xgkpY2cFlacQ "Peace and Order in China", and sensationalized coverage of violence against Asians in the US. Clearly propaganda. For all of the demonitization and sometimes outright removal of anti-CCP content, YouTube seems perfectly content to promote CCP propaganda. Twitter is similar. Under suggested accounts to follow, there are promoted accounts presenting China as an utopian dream. Say what you will about Big Tech censoring conservatives, or even CCP human rights abuses. Various rationales exist, and we can disagree on those premises. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, these same companies are willing to take advertising dollars to promote CCP propaganda. Without attributing motive there is an obvious, glaring inconsistency here. If you had to attribute motive, how would you characterize it?
- syshum 5y ago
  The irony in your comment is you seem to only be able to recognize a problem when it impacts people you deem to be victims and.or agree with politically, but when it impacts people you disagree with it is "we can disagree on those premises" Censorship by these platforms is real, ever present and has been highlighted for many years by many groups only to be meet with "mah private platform". People like me has been warning that censorship is never the solution, but as usual as long as the people being censored where deemed "wrong thinkers" it is perfectly fine
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    Right, it is met with "mah private platform" because it is a private platform, and this is a good argument.
    - Covzire 5y ago
      I wonder how proponents of this argument would feel if another industry was squarely in the hands of the right, like education. Let's say all the best educations were in private colleges and they didn't tolerate much in the way of left wing speech. Everyone knows that 3 SV companies have a politically charged uber-monopoly that they are exploiting to silence the political enemies of the DNC and increasingly enemies of the CCP. Everyone.
dominotw 5y ago
> censorship > private company something something > society, ethical standards something something > whose standards summary every single thread on topics like this
zarkov99 5y ago
Not to mention genuine scientific inquiry as demonstrated by the Ivermectin scandal. A harsh reckoning is due, but will it come?
- justaman 5y ago
  Not as long as Google/Alphabet has the market dominance it currently has.
thejackgoode 5y ago
A thought experiment. What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship? I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure. Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No? It just seems very strange, the situation that platforms that have become truly global can silence people without any enforceable appeal system, using a weird mix of western moral and eastern business incentives in deciding to do so.
- danaris 5y ago
  The trouble is, we already know more or less what would happen: They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech. We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.
  - wussboy 5y ago
    There is an idea in human culture that we make decisions by looking at the evidence and then changing our minds to coincide with the truth. In this world unlimited Free Speech makes sense. But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now. Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
    - barbacoa 5y ago
      The key thing here to recognize is that this unlimited free speech on platforms ended the day Trump was elected. It's presented as about hate speech or preventing misinformation but it's really about class and culture. The top 20% or so of the population, those that are employed by and control all the American mega corporations comprise the professional managerial class. There is nothing they despise more than the cultural values of the Walmart-shopping working class. When those people elected that insane clown as president is the day the professional managerial class decided they need to play a more active role in projecting their moral and cultural values onto everyone else. Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.
deadalus 5y ago
Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Vidlii Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
- st1ck 5y ago
  LBRY is barely decentralized. AFAICT, you can't go and upload videos without either going through verification (and many regions are not allowed) or buying LBRY which are listed only on a few exchanges.
williesleg 5y ago
No shit, same as hacker news. I can't wait for when they start banning the communists. That's gonna be a festive shitshow!
FlacoJones 5y ago
Yet another case of big tech applying the letter of their law over the spirit of their law. People who have disappeared can't exactly be harassed as a result of a YouTube video...
mc32 5y ago
A picture is PII. I doubt they would take down pictures of the Jan rioters just because PII. If that’s not the case, I will admit they are being pedantically consistent but socially irresponsible for erasing evidence of systemic and illegal harassment and imprisonment of their own people.
- hfdrghbc 5y ago
  YouTube is obviously carrying water for the CCP. Now think about all those videos they said were election or pandemic related propaganda, like the videos about ivermectin from Bret Weinstein, and ask yourself what makes those situations different?
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Sundarajan Pichai studied in IIT Kharagpur. FYI.
    - chroem- 5y ago
      I have seen Indian posters allude to this before, but I'm not familiar with what the connection is. Could you please elaborate?
      - baybal2 5y ago
        Kharagpur IIT was the most Maoist/extreme left of all IITs. Even Jyoti Basu wanted to shut it down. I read once somewhere that back in seventies, they had Mao, Zhou, and Enver Hoja portraits hanging in their halls. The whole Kharagpur area was a Maoist hotbed, and I believe still is to lesser extend to this day.
        advisedwang 5y ago
        Sundar is worth $600b, did an MBA at Wharton, and is CEO of a trillion dollar multinational. It's pretty funny to me that people would be implying he's Maoist.
root_axis 5y ago
Stop relying on corporate ad delivery networks to host your videos for free. YouTube, like all big businesses, cares only about money, they would slap ads onto everything on the website if advertisers would permit it. When advertisers pay for your hosting they are the ones that determine whether or not it stays online.
slumdev 5y ago
Keep in mind as you comment here, on this anonymous forum, that China has a well-documented policy of paying people (wu mao) to post positive comments about the Chinese Communist Party and derail any criticism of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
- einpoklum 5y ago
  It doesn't seem to be well-documented. Examining the links, there's talk about such practices, rumors, a scientific paper about trying to identify "wu mao" posts (which concludes it's difficult to identify them for certain) etc. It is perhaps more accurate to say there is some evidence to indicate this may be happening.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines. They're very clear on asking you not to post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want explanation as to why, there's many years worth at these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20-recycling%20chin&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
devwastaken 5y ago
Google wants in the china market bad, and have changed their "do no evil" policy to reflect that. To be in the Chinese market requires compliance with the CCP.
pverghese 5y ago
You are asking a free site to comply with rules in each country and not piss off all members of said countries. The outrage should be directed at your governments who have done nothing substantial regarding the China situation or any other humar rights situation around the world. It is not the duty of a private company to be at the forefront of foreign policy.
- fouric 5y ago
  This comment isn't remotely related to the article. Nobody is asking YouTube to comply with any rules - instead, this is YouTube using a contorted reading of their own rules (which they inconsistently apply) to do something that people generally agree is bad.
Black101 5y ago
"Atajurt has collected thousands of video testimonies from family members of Turkic Muslims who have disappeared in Xinjiang. Witnesses show their identification to prove they are real people." We are truly living in the future
nickdothutton 5y ago
If you believe that YouTube is simply an open and neutral “village square” for information and ideas then I have a bridge to sell you. Same goes for all the large platforms.
tut-urut-utut 5y ago
Censorship is censorship is censorship, no matter how hard you try to explain, justify or deny it, regardless if it's about prisoners, Covid, fake news or whatever someone somewhere decided it should not be accessible by a wide auditorium. But it's not only Google at fault here, it's the voter that allowed government to push such censorship laws upon Google.
ctrlp 5y ago
It would be great to hear some inside baseball from some peers working on Youtube content moderation. Not just tech and policy, but whether there is any internal dissent about policy and who decides. Surely there are some on HN?
ctrlp 5y ago
There was a rumor that YT, FB, and Twitter have a deal with the Gov't regulators to leave them unregulated if they give a back channel of control to state censors. There were some leaked documents about internal government "partner" programs. Did anything come of that? It read to me like they were outsourcing some of their censorship to state agents, or perhaps they were setting up rapid response customer service teams to implement state censorship policies (e.g., question the election, vaccine safety, pandemic origins, etc...) I had thought they "just knew" what content to prohibit based on where the political winds were blowing, but maybe it was more coordinated.
- sneak 5y ago
  I imagine it would become formalized real quickly in wartime, too, even if it isn’t yet today. Centralized censorship platforms are an existential threat to a free society, an accident waiting to happen.
anovikov 5y ago
Question is - what is the fuss about? Everyone and their dog knows that Communism is a torturous system that can't exist without killing lots of people. I was born in the Soviet Union and i know it and everyone out of the couple billion people who lived in the Soviet bloc knows, there is no need to prove it time and again. What is the value of these videos since we can't do anything with China anyway?
- jkingsbery 5y ago
  I personally don't know what to do about it. But it seems like it's worth establishing what at least the truth is before we do something (either by deciding to, or by deciding not to do anything). I wish it were so that everyone knew that "Communism is a tortuous system," but it unfortunately does not seem to be the case anymore. People who were born and never lived in a world with the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall are now voting age, and they don't have an aversion to communism. Even before the Soviet Union fell, a lot of people in the west were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Fortunately we had people like Solzhenitsyn who documented how bad it was. Atajurt and the Uigher witnesses are giving us what may become our generation's equivalent of "In the First Circle."
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pkphilip 5y ago
Is it that difficult for Youtube to differentiate between someone doxing someone vs someone volunteering identifying information about themselves or their family members with absolutely no malice? Surely for a company which prides itself in having AI which can determine emotions, do natural language analysis etc, this is pathetic.
Shorel 5y ago
YouTube rules only exist to protect YouTube.

340 points by headalgorithm 5y ago

everyone 5y ago

YouTube is absolutely not the place for serious content like this. Why is he even using it?

junon 5y ago
Where, exactly, is "the place" for "serious content" like this?
- everyone 5y ago
  Youtube is the home of auto-generated kids videos and content farms. Thats the content they seem to want there. Anything else is randomly taken down. Literally any other site where one can upload videos would be better.
  - jowsie 5y ago
    This sounds a lot like you don't use YouTube at all, as I've not seen auto-generated kids videos or content farm trash in a long time, and YouTube is my primary entertainment/educational video source.
    - dathinab 5y ago
      Yay, content personalization works. But putting that aside from a person using YT often from incognito mode and similar: - there is a overlap between "content farm trash" and "entertainment visdeos" what you might seem as "content trash" other might see as "short simple entertainment". - there is a lot of educational content on YT, sadly it is often not featured that much on a "incognito" front page - there is a lot of entertainment content with a bit of educational content on it. - there is even more purely entertainment content on it - there is questionable kids content on it (but YT explicitly split out YT Kids because it (at least officially) doesn't want kids on the normal YT (kids != teens/young adults) - there is questionable "content farm trash" it also tries most to "play to algorithm" so it might seem that there is a lot of it when you visit YT in incognito mode/without personalized YT preferences. But it's not what keeps the platform alive. - there is a lot of TV content on it (at least in some countries) (e.g. a recordings of TV news programs uploaded by the TV channels which produced it). - there is quite a bit of serious content, discussions, etc. on it sadly mostly demonetized. - there is a bit of more then just a bit of very very wrong and misleading content on it. Or in other words YT is a platform for all content, from extremely serious discussions over good entertainment, grate educational material to pointless 5 minute craft videos and ending with conspiracy theories.
  - NoOneNew 5y ago
    While I agree yt has lots of flaws, you need to curate your feed a bit. 95% of my feed is engineering, dev, history and super niche music. "Dont Recommend Channel" was literally the greatest feature they ever created.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    >Literally any other site where one can upload videos would be better. You can make that case, but it's hard to beat youtube. It's not just a matter of the amount of content, but also support on settop boxes/devices, quality of playback,etc. Having said that, I'm starting to go to the effort of building an offline library. To me, the youtube death of a thousand cuts is happening because of their increasingly heinous ads (like google search) and strengthening copyright enforcement (since their position is now in place).
- izacus 5y ago
  > Where, exactly, is "the place" for "serious content" like this? In a place the creator is in full control and isn't funded by advertisers which will pull their funding for anything they dislike. That's pretty much the nature of publishing content - if you're not independent there's always the tension of your funding source dictating the content.
  - junon 5y ago
    Do you use youtube? Most creators have independent sponsorships.
throwaway316943 5y ago
YouTube is the most accessible place for content like this. They may be running the site into the ground lately but the initial implementation of a site that allows easy uploading, sharing and discovery of video content still has a lot of merit and is miles beyond anything else if only for the fact that it has the largest market share.
- junon 5y ago
  This biggest problem any competitor faces is cost. YouTube has a monopoly on this space, unfortunately.
  - silon42 5y ago
    The only alternative would be some kind of distributed torrent index. But would need to work in a browser to be accessible to people. So, unless browsers add first class support for this, this means a web site with ads, probably and then you have the same problems again.
    - junon 5y ago
      There's no way the average content creator would seed videos indefinitely. The whole point of a video hosting service is to not host it yourself.
      - testific8 5y ago
        I doubt this. People are willing to reupload videos that they like, so why wouldn't they seed? for example this video has been reuploaded quite a few times because people like it so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu-EA1ruNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu-EA1ruNk The whole point of a video hosting service is to act as an easy directory for finding videos you like. The fact that the same service happens to host the videos in this case is inconsequential.
        junon 5y ago

einpoklum 5y ago

Like, say, the railroads or the phone network, a mass-membership video platform is something which has too many "res publica" aspects to just let it be the property of / in control of a private corporation; but which developed within, or was developed by, one or more such private corporations. The solution seems to be one of: 1. Let said corporations exert such control over public life. 2. Have nation-states nationalize it. 3. Have the UN internationalize it. 4. Have nation-states, perhaps in collaboration, strongly regulate it. 5. Force it (e.g. via regulation) to become distributed, so that no single entity can exert significant control. Option (1.) is the status quo and is the worst. The others each have pros and cons.

swiley 5y ago
Eventually people will get fed up with youtube. Peertube is already beginning to become popular and many youtubers are posting there and odesy. Google has become like most large American companies with a self destructive management layer, eventually that will eat Youtube as well. I'd certainly prefer we get a free/distributed alternative to nationalizing and cementing a terrible monopoly.
- spaceribs 5y ago
  Even worse for Google, when people get banned off YouTube, they get banned across all of Google's services. Every time you upload what is arbitrarily controversial, that outcome has to be weighed, and if PeerTube provides a viable alternative, why not use it?
- einpoklum 5y ago
  I tend to agree with your conclusion, but not necessarily with your argument. That is, yes, people might be "fed up with YouTube", but the point is that at any one time there can only be one video platform which hosts most videos... it doesn't really matter whether it's YouTube or NotYouTube by some other corporation; and the amount of material on YouTube is so staggering that I doubt we would see a distributed version of it being comparable any time soon. We don't even have a good distributed search engine (that I know of).
5y ago

perihelions 5y ago

I'm stunned. YouTube removed testimonial accounts of families of people currently in Xinjiang concentration camps -- because the speakers showed ID cards of their family member, violating YouTube's harassment policies on personally-identifiable information. That's not speculative inference -- the YT representative flat out *tells* the author: >"We welcome responsible [sic] efforts to document important human rights cases around the world. We also have policies that do not allow channels to publish Personally Identifiable Information in order to prevent harassment."

the_lonely_road 5y ago
This doesn’t sound bad or wrong at all. Can someone help me understand the outrage? We all know China likes to disappear people and YouTube would be complicit in that if they allowed these people showing their ids to stay up. Sounds like a common sense security step designed to at worst protect YouTube from the liability of being complicit in those people’s deaths and at best an attempt to help them.
- lessname 5y ago
  afaik these are testimonials for people who are disappeared now, so they are already in the hands of the chinese regime
- hibbelig 5y ago
  The id cards are shown to help prevent China from disappearing these people. So YT taking the videos down is the opposite of what YT claims to want.
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    In what way does that help prevent China from disappearing these people?
    - hibbelig 5y ago
      It helps to increase awareness, and that helps with pressure on China's regime.

LatteLazy 5y ago

People spend half the time complaining YT etc are censoring content, and then the other half complaining they don't censor content (conspiracy theories, fake news, isis. I'm honestly not sure what anyone expects here. It's like they just want to be outraged and big tech is a convenient target

mkr-hn 5y ago
>> "I'm honestly not sure what anyone expects here." Discernment.
- afarrell 5y ago
  Discernment that aligns with their values and is scalable enough to be cheap. Google promised to not be “evil”, which is only as reliable a promise to the degree that “evil” is well-defined.
- macspoofing 5y ago
  Based on my personal standards?
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Youtube make pennies per video, if you can provide "discernment" at that price, I'm sure they'll take you call. Until then, it's hammers missing nails and smashing walnuts. And that's without worrying that your definition might not match anyone else's...
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "Youtube make pennies per video, if you can provide "discernment" at that price" Thats their problem. Alternatively,maybe they don't give a fuck because they have a monopoly and they have nonreason to spend more money
    - LatteLazy 5y ago
      It's really not their problem though, is it. Because there are 2 fixes: * do nothing and have fake news etc everywhere. * make it much much harder for users to submit material Both of those have serious impacts on us. So it's our problem really isn't it? Before you reply, ask yourself: would I pay a dollar to reply? If the answer is no, you can't really expect YC to spend money on "discernment" for every thread/article/text post can you?

aww_dang 5y ago

I was watching MSM coverage of US politics on YouTube when this channel was advertised. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpmYGObyCW3xgkpY2cFlacQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpmYGObyCW3xgkpY2cFlacQ "Peace and Order in China", and sensationalized coverage of violence against Asians in the US. Clearly propaganda. For all of the demonitization and sometimes outright removal of anti-CCP content, YouTube seems perfectly content to promote CCP propaganda. Twitter is similar. Under suggested accounts to follow, there are promoted accounts presenting China as an utopian dream. Say what you will about Big Tech censoring conservatives, or even CCP human rights abuses. Various rationales exist, and we can disagree on those premises. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, these same companies are willing to take advertising dollars to promote CCP propaganda. Without attributing motive there is an obvious, glaring inconsistency here. If you had to attribute motive, how would you characterize it?

syshum 5y ago
The irony in your comment is you seem to only be able to recognize a problem when it impacts people you deem to be victims and.or agree with politically, but when it impacts people you disagree with it is "we can disagree on those premises" Censorship by these platforms is real, ever present and has been highlighted for many years by many groups only to be meet with "mah private platform". People like me has been warning that censorship is never the solution, but as usual as long as the people being censored where deemed "wrong thinkers" it is perfectly fine
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  Right, it is met with "mah private platform" because it is a private platform, and this is a good argument.
  - Covzire 5y ago
    I wonder how proponents of this argument would feel if another industry was squarely in the hands of the right, like education. Let's say all the best educations were in private colleges and they didn't tolerate much in the way of left wing speech. Everyone knows that 3 SV companies have a politically charged uber-monopoly that they are exploiting to silence the political enemies of the DNC and increasingly enemies of the CCP. Everyone.

dominotw 5y ago

> censorship > private company something something > society, ethical standards something something > whose standards summary every single thread on topics like this

zarkov99 5y ago

Not to mention genuine scientific inquiry as demonstrated by the Ivermectin scandal. A harsh reckoning is due, but will it come?

justaman 5y ago
Not as long as Google/Alphabet has the market dominance it currently has.

thejackgoode 5y ago

A thought experiment. What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship? I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure. Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No? It just seems very strange, the situation that platforms that have become truly global can silence people without any enforceable appeal system, using a weird mix of western moral and eastern business incentives in deciding to do so.

danaris 5y ago
The trouble is, we already know more or less what would happen: They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech. We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.
- wussboy 5y ago
  There is an idea in human culture that we make decisions by looking at the evidence and then changing our minds to coincide with the truth. In this world unlimited Free Speech makes sense. But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now. Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
  - barbacoa 5y ago
    The key thing here to recognize is that this unlimited free speech on platforms ended the day Trump was elected. It's presented as about hate speech or preventing misinformation but it's really about class and culture. The top 20% or so of the population, those that are employed by and control all the American mega corporations comprise the professional managerial class. There is nothing they despise more than the cultural values of the Walmart-shopping working class. When those people elected that insane clown as president is the day the professional managerial class decided they need to play a more active role in projecting their moral and cultural values onto everyone else. Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.

deadalus 5y ago

Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Vidlii Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

st1ck 5y ago
LBRY is barely decentralized. AFAICT, you can't go and upload videos without either going through verification (and many regions are not allowed) or buying LBRY which are listed only on a few exchanges.

williesleg 5y ago

No shit, same as hacker news. I can't wait for when they start banning the communists. That's gonna be a festive shitshow!

FlacoJones 5y ago

Yet another case of big tech applying the letter of their law over the spirit of their law. People who have disappeared can't exactly be harassed as a result of a YouTube video...

mc32 5y ago

A picture is PII. I doubt they would take down pictures of the Jan rioters just because PII. If that’s not the case, I will admit they are being pedantically consistent but socially irresponsible for erasing evidence of systemic and illegal harassment and imprisonment of their own people.

hfdrghbc 5y ago
YouTube is obviously carrying water for the CCP. Now think about all those videos they said were election or pandemic related propaganda, like the videos about ivermectin from Bret Weinstein, and ask yourself what makes those situations different?
- baybal2 5y ago
  Sundarajan Pichai studied in IIT Kharagpur. FYI.
  - chroem- 5y ago
    I have seen Indian posters allude to this before, but I'm not familiar with what the connection is. Could you please elaborate?
    - baybal2 5y ago
      Kharagpur IIT was the most Maoist/extreme left of all IITs. Even Jyoti Basu wanted to shut it down. I read once somewhere that back in seventies, they had Mao, Zhou, and Enver Hoja portraits hanging in their halls. The whole Kharagpur area was a Maoist hotbed, and I believe still is to lesser extend to this day.
      - advisedwang 5y ago
        Sundar is worth $600b, did an MBA at Wharton, and is CEO of a trillion dollar multinational. It's pretty funny to me that people would be implying he's Maoist.

root_axis 5y ago

Stop relying on corporate ad delivery networks to host your videos for free. YouTube, like all big businesses, cares only about money, they would slap ads onto everything on the website if advertisers would permit it. When advertisers pay for your hosting they are the ones that determine whether or not it stays online.

slumdev 5y ago

Keep in mind as you comment here, on this anonymous forum, that China has a well-documented policy of paying people (wu mao) to post positive comments about the Chinese Communist Party and derail any criticism of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

einpoklum 5y ago
It doesn't seem to be well-documented. Examining the links, there's talk about such practices, rumors, a scientific paper about trying to identify "wu mao" posts (which concludes it's difficult to identify them for certain) etc. It is perhaps more accurate to say there is some evidence to indicate this may be happening.
dang 5y ago
Please don't break the site guidelines. They're very clear on asking you not to post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want explanation as to why, there's many years worth at these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20-recycling%20chin&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

devwastaken 5y ago

Google wants in the china market bad, and have changed their "do no evil" policy to reflect that. To be in the Chinese market requires compliance with the CCP.

pverghese 5y ago

You are asking a free site to comply with rules in each country and not piss off all members of said countries. The outrage should be directed at your governments who have done nothing substantial regarding the China situation or any other humar rights situation around the world. It is not the duty of a private company to be at the forefront of foreign policy.

fouric 5y ago
This comment isn't remotely related to the article. Nobody is asking YouTube to comply with any rules - instead, this is YouTube using a contorted reading of their own rules (which they inconsistently apply) to do something that people generally agree is bad.

Black101 5y ago

"Atajurt has collected thousands of video testimonies from family members of Turkic Muslims who have disappeared in Xinjiang. Witnesses show their identification to prove they are real people." We are truly living in the future

nickdothutton 5y ago

If you believe that YouTube is simply an open and neutral “village square” for information and ideas then I have a bridge to sell you. Same goes for all the large platforms.

tut-urut-utut 5y ago

Censorship is censorship is censorship, no matter how hard you try to explain, justify or deny it, regardless if it's about prisoners, Covid, fake news or whatever someone somewhere decided it should not be accessible by a wide auditorium. But it's not only Google at fault here, it's the voter that allowed government to push such censorship laws upon Google.

ctrlp 5y ago

It would be great to hear some inside baseball from some peers working on Youtube content moderation. Not just tech and policy, but whether there is any internal dissent about policy and who decides. Surely there are some on HN?

ctrlp 5y ago

There was a rumor that YT, FB, and Twitter have a deal with the Gov't regulators to leave them unregulated if they give a back channel of control to state censors. There were some leaked documents about internal government "partner" programs. Did anything come of that? It read to me like they were outsourcing some of their censorship to state agents, or perhaps they were setting up rapid response customer service teams to implement state censorship policies (e.g., question the election, vaccine safety, pandemic origins, etc...) I had thought they "just knew" what content to prohibit based on where the political winds were blowing, but maybe it was more coordinated.

sneak 5y ago
I imagine it would become formalized real quickly in wartime, too, even if it isn’t yet today. Centralized censorship platforms are an existential threat to a free society, an accident waiting to happen.

anovikov 5y ago

Question is - what is the fuss about? Everyone and their dog knows that Communism is a torturous system that can't exist without killing lots of people. I was born in the Soviet Union and i know it and everyone out of the couple billion people who lived in the Soviet bloc knows, there is no need to prove it time and again. What is the value of these videos since we can't do anything with China anyway?

jkingsbery 5y ago
I personally don't know what to do about it. But it seems like it's worth establishing what at least the truth is before we do something (either by deciding to, or by deciding not to do anything). I wish it were so that everyone knew that "Communism is a tortuous system," but it unfortunately does not seem to be the case anymore. People who were born and never lived in a world with the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall are now voting age, and they don't have an aversion to communism. Even before the Soviet Union fell, a lot of people in the west were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Fortunately we had people like Solzhenitsyn who documented how bad it was. Atajurt and the Uigher witnesses are giving us what may become our generation's equivalent of "In the First Circle."

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pkphilip 5y ago

Is it that difficult for Youtube to differentiate between someone doxing someone vs someone volunteering identifying information about themselves or their family members with absolutely no malice? Surely for a company which prides itself in having AI which can determine emotions, do natural language analysis etc, this is pathetic.

Shorel 5y ago

YouTube rules only exist to protect YouTube.