5 ms·

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

quenix 5y ago
Unfortunately, Bitchute appears to be a complete and total cesspool of conspiracy theories.
- bogwog 5y ago
  The first sentence of its Wikipedia page: > BitChute is a video hosting service known for accommodating far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists, and for hosting hate speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute
  - efitz 5y ago
    I know nothing about bitchute, but I am skeptical of the Wikipedia article you cite. This Wikipedia article excerpt seems like editorial, not information. It might be 100% accurate but the spin is so blatant that I don’t trust Wikipedia on this. Similarly, I wouldn’t trust a Wikipedia article about Adolf Hitler if it began “Hitler was one of the most evil men of the 20th century”. Although I believe that statement to be true, there’s too much editorial bias. I want an encyclopedia to tell me unbiased facts and let ME make the moral conclusions. “Conspiracy theories” and “right wing” are labels of opinion, not fact, these days. They don’t inform, they label.
    - quenix 5y ago
      The claims you mention are backed by eight (8) sources. Additionally, there has been extended discussion on the Wikipedia talk page for this article about this exact "neutrality" issue. You should have a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BitChute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BitChute
      - thu2111 5y ago
        So what though? There is no shortage on the internet of left wing outlets that consider any non-hard-left opinion to be "conspiracy theories" and "far right hate", and any website that doesn't censor conservatives to be guilty by association. They could find 20 or 30 such sources, but that is meaningless and tells us nothing. Especially in the modern era where the term "conspiracy theory" has become a largely meaningless insult, due to the prevalence of actual conspiracies.
        quenix 5y ago
        I understand your point, but I think you haven't quite grasped the type of stuff we find on Bitchute. On their front page: 1. "Why the COVID Delta variant is a scam" 2. "THEY'RE IN CONTROL OF EVERYTHING ON EARTH" 3. "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD!!!" 4. "I'm Asking You Who Took the Shot / Horror Movie Countries" It's just an endless stream of conspiracy and FUD.
        thu2111 5y ago
        I took a look just now to see what you mean. Not surprisingly, a lot of the videos are the sort of things YouTube would ban, but that doesn't automatically mean they are wrong, bad or "FUD", which is again a kind of meaningless insult given that a lot of what official sources claim about COVID is specifically designed to create fear, by their own admission! See e.g. the the SAGE SPI-B subcommittee and their reports. I don't see all the same videos you do, but here are some titles that should cause us to think twice before writing off this site as "far right": 1. "Pfizer whistleblower exposes the corrupt and unethical company for what they really are" - although BitChute seems mostly to be conservative videos, this one could easily be a headline found in the Guardian. 2. "NSA whistleblower demonstrates Biden administration spying on political opponent's communications" - haven't watched it so have no idea if it's true, but this is pretty much the core theme of the Snowden revelations which, again, was spearheaded by the Guardian just a decade ago. This is hardly "far right" or "hate". 3. "Fine print in Biden's tax proposal will have middle class Americans fuming". This sounds like a bog standard centre-right reaction to tax changes. Very much not far right or hate. 4. "Remembering dogs in warfare on memorial day", sounds quite nice actually. 5. "Journalism jobs disappeared faster than coal miners, according to Dpt of Labor" - sounds again like something the left would care about. I took a look at the "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD" video to see what it was about. It turns out to be some guy getting agitated because (so he says) he shared a video of a doctor on Facebook who treated people with COVID talking about ways the doctor (claims he) helped save them, and was banned from Facebook as a result. From this event the speaker takes a large leap and infers that because discussion of saving people with COVID is banned, "they want to kill you". You can argue that this is a ridiculous inference, but frankly it's inevitable people will look for explanations of otherwise apparently inexplicable events, like people being banned for hosting doctors talking about doctor-ing, and some of those explanations will be extreme. Is this so different to YouTube? I just did a quick search and found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLpW76qpHUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLpW76qpHUU titled "WHY I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS", which consists of some dude exhorting violence against them. The YT front page doesn't show these sorts of videos because it's normally filled with pop content or very personalized stuff. BitChute has way less content and is a refuge for people who get banned from other platforms, so, no surprise that stuff is more visible. Finally, BitChute is currently advertising at the top of their site a new content policy: https://support.bitchute.com/policy-changes/2021-06-01/ https://support.bitchute.com/policy-changes/2021-06-01/ Their previous policy on prohibited hate speech said: "There should be a reasonable probability that the content would succeed in inciting actual action against the target, recognizing that such causation should be rather direct." This is a reasonable policy! But the UK government forced them to remove this requirement because a reasonable probability that something will happen is, apparently, not a requirement to be hate speech in the UK. Same for "inciting violence". So they've now updated their policies to not even require direct incitement. Ironically the YouTube "I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS" video would be banned under both BitChute's new and old policy because it directly incites people to violence. This is not the document of some far right extremist hate speech site, it's a content policy that tried to follow US norms and apparently is getting whacked by Ofcom to make it follow the far vaguer and abuse-prone EU definitions (which are still in effect in the UK). At any rate, from my browse through the BitChute site it actually seems more reasonable than I expected. There's a lot of anti-liberal US politics stuff, but also some left wing stuff, some non political stuff, and a content policy that was already reasonable but was just changed to be even more "anti hate speech" (whatever that ends up meaning).
    - epgui 5y ago
      I would invite you to improve the wikipedia article and contribute.
      - efitz 5y ago
        I would love to but on politically charged topics, zealous Wikipedia editors revert any change in tone, even from an emotional to neutral tone.
        epgui 5y ago
        When that happens, how often do you wonder whether you could be mistaken?
      - the_third_wave 5y ago
        I've attempted this several times when I noticed blatant NPOV violations or political propaganda in articles on the most diverse subjects. The result tends to be swift, the edits are reverted without any clear explanation. When I make edits I tend to add a section to the "Talk" page inviting other editors to discuss the proposed change and - after making the edit - add a note to the change calling for a discussion instead of a reversion. The discussion tends to be limited to "this is not a NPOV violation" or "there are sources" where the former is clearly untrue and the latter tend to be circular references to articles in activist publications. As it stands Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything which involves politics - which is getting close to being just about everything now that even mathematics is getting challenged by critical theorists. This is a classical example of the tragedy of the commons with political activists abusing the platform for their own purposes without taking into account whether this abuse weakens the platform - which it clearly does.
        zaik 5y ago
        Would you be willing to point us to some of the edits you made?
        epgui 5y ago
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    > Earlier Monday, Right Wing Watch said it had received a notice of a permanent ban related to rules violations in the video clips that it posts, which often show examples of alleged hate speech, conspiracy theories and other prohibited content. So it sounds like that's the type of hosting provider they might want. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-reinstates-channel-devoted-exposing-conservative-extremism-rcna1286 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-reinstates-ch...
- TheFreim 5y ago
  Shouldn't you want to bring the "debunking" to the place where the "conspiracy theories" are?
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    The people who would go to that site for the conspiracies will only get upset by the debunking.
    - TheFreim 5y ago
      Okay? They will get upset and RRW will get an extra place to host their content free of charge.
    - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
      But we'll never know, because it's taboo to see for ourselves.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    That's largely a good way to discover that anti-"cancel culture" folks tend to engage in quite a bit of "cancel culture" of their own. Parler, for example, had a bit of a hair-trigger on left-wing accounts trolling on the site, as well as being stricter than Twitter itself on porn/swearing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-conservative-twitter-alternative/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-... https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/parler-app-ban-free-speech-trump-b1721710.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/pa...
- Huwyt_Nashi047 5y ago
  Censorship or right-wing. Pick one. There is a very strong correlation on every somewhat-popular forum and platform on the net.
paulpauper 5y ago
some of these censor heavily too and their audience is tiny compared to you tube. Also, not as good usability or streaming. YouTube is unmatched in terms of audience and user interface. It's like competitors cannot even come close in terms of making something that works as well as YouTube. Look at Microsoft and Bing...15 years later despite billions in R&D it still sucks. DuckDuckGo offers privacy but the results are still worse than Google. It's just so hard to overcome this.

quenix 5y ago

Unfortunately, Bitchute appears to be a complete and total cesspool of conspiracy theories.

bogwog 5y ago
The first sentence of its Wikipedia page: > BitChute is a video hosting service known for accommodating far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists, and for hosting hate speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute
- efitz 5y ago
  I know nothing about bitchute, but I am skeptical of the Wikipedia article you cite. This Wikipedia article excerpt seems like editorial, not information. It might be 100% accurate but the spin is so blatant that I don’t trust Wikipedia on this. Similarly, I wouldn’t trust a Wikipedia article about Adolf Hitler if it began “Hitler was one of the most evil men of the 20th century”. Although I believe that statement to be true, there’s too much editorial bias. I want an encyclopedia to tell me unbiased facts and let ME make the moral conclusions. “Conspiracy theories” and “right wing” are labels of opinion, not fact, these days. They don’t inform, they label.
  - quenix 5y ago
    The claims you mention are backed by eight (8) sources. Additionally, there has been extended discussion on the Wikipedia talk page for this article about this exact "neutrality" issue. You should have a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BitChute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BitChute
    - thu2111 5y ago
      So what though? There is no shortage on the internet of left wing outlets that consider any non-hard-left opinion to be "conspiracy theories" and "far right hate", and any website that doesn't censor conservatives to be guilty by association. They could find 20 or 30 such sources, but that is meaningless and tells us nothing. Especially in the modern era where the term "conspiracy theory" has become a largely meaningless insult, due to the prevalence of actual conspiracies.
      - quenix 5y ago
        I understand your point, but I think you haven't quite grasped the type of stuff we find on Bitchute. On their front page: 1. "Why the COVID Delta variant is a scam" 2. "THEY'RE IN CONTROL OF EVERYTHING ON EARTH" 3. "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD!!!" 4. "I'm Asking You Who Took the Shot / Horror Movie Countries" It's just an endless stream of conspiracy and FUD.
        thu2111 5y ago
        I took a look just now to see what you mean. Not surprisingly, a lot of the videos are the sort of things YouTube would ban, but that doesn't automatically mean they are wrong, bad or "FUD", which is again a kind of meaningless insult given that a lot of what official sources claim about COVID is specifically designed to create fear, by their own admission! See e.g. the the SAGE SPI-B subcommittee and their reports. I don't see all the same videos you do, but here are some titles that should cause us to think twice before writing off this site as "far right": 1. "Pfizer whistleblower exposes the corrupt and unethical company for what they really are" - although BitChute seems mostly to be conservative videos, this one could easily be a headline found in the Guardian. 2. "NSA whistleblower demonstrates Biden administration spying on political opponent's communications" - haven't watched it so have no idea if it's true, but this is pretty much the core theme of the Snowden revelations which, again, was spearheaded by the Guardian just a decade ago. This is hardly "far right" or "hate". 3. "Fine print in Biden's tax proposal will have middle class Americans fuming". This sounds like a bog standard centre-right reaction to tax changes. Very much not far right or hate. 4. "Remembering dogs in warfare on memorial day", sounds quite nice actually. 5. "Journalism jobs disappeared faster than coal miners, according to Dpt of Labor" - sounds again like something the left would care about. I took a look at the "THEY WANT YOU AND YOUR KIDS DEAD" video to see what it was about. It turns out to be some guy getting agitated because (so he says) he shared a video of a doctor on Facebook who treated people with COVID talking about ways the doctor (claims he) helped save them, and was banned from Facebook as a result. From this event the speaker takes a large leap and infers that because discussion of saving people with COVID is banned, "they want to kill you". You can argue that this is a ridiculous inference, but frankly it's inevitable people will look for explanations of otherwise apparently inexplicable events, like people being banned for hosting doctors talking about doctor-ing, and some of those explanations will be extreme. Is this so different to YouTube? I just did a quick search and found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLpW76qpHUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLpW76qpHUU titled "WHY I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS", which consists of some dude exhorting violence against them. The YT front page doesn't show these sorts of videos because it's normally filled with pop content or very personalized stuff. BitChute has way less content and is a refuge for people who get banned from other platforms, so, no surprise that stuff is more visible. Finally, BitChute is currently advertising at the top of their site a new content policy: https://support.bitchute.com/policy-changes/2021-06-01/ https://support.bitchute.com/policy-changes/2021-06-01/ Their previous policy on prohibited hate speech said: "There should be a reasonable probability that the content would succeed in inciting actual action against the target, recognizing that such causation should be rather direct." This is a reasonable policy! But the UK government forced them to remove this requirement because a reasonable probability that something will happen is, apparently, not a requirement to be hate speech in the UK. Same for "inciting violence". So they've now updated their policies to not even require direct incitement. Ironically the YouTube "I HATE ANTI-VAXXERS" video would be banned under both BitChute's new and old policy because it directly incites people to violence. This is not the document of some far right extremist hate speech site, it's a content policy that tried to follow US norms and apparently is getting whacked by Ofcom to make it follow the far vaguer and abuse-prone EU definitions (which are still in effect in the UK). At any rate, from my browse through the BitChute site it actually seems more reasonable than I expected. There's a lot of anti-liberal US politics stuff, but also some left wing stuff, some non political stuff, and a content policy that was already reasonable but was just changed to be even more "anti hate speech" (whatever that ends up meaning).
  - epgui 5y ago
    I would invite you to improve the wikipedia article and contribute.
    - efitz 5y ago
      I would love to but on politically charged topics, zealous Wikipedia editors revert any change in tone, even from an emotional to neutral tone.
      - epgui 5y ago
        When that happens, how often do you wonder whether you could be mistaken?
    - the_third_wave 5y ago
      I've attempted this several times when I noticed blatant NPOV violations or political propaganda in articles on the most diverse subjects. The result tends to be swift, the edits are reverted without any clear explanation. When I make edits I tend to add a section to the "Talk" page inviting other editors to discuss the proposed change and - after making the edit - add a note to the change calling for a discussion instead of a reversion. The discussion tends to be limited to "this is not a NPOV violation" or "there are sources" where the former is clearly untrue and the latter tend to be circular references to articles in activist publications. As it stands Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything which involves politics - which is getting close to being just about everything now that even mathematics is getting challenged by critical theorists. This is a classical example of the tragedy of the commons with political activists abusing the platform for their own purposes without taking into account whether this abuse weakens the platform - which it clearly does.
      - zaik 5y ago
        Would you be willing to point us to some of the edits you made?
        epgui 5y ago
- Thorrez 5y ago
  > Earlier Monday, Right Wing Watch said it had received a notice of a permanent ban related to rules violations in the video clips that it posts, which often show examples of alleged hate speech, conspiracy theories and other prohibited content. So it sounds like that's the type of hosting provider they might want. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-reinstates-channel-devoted-exposing-conservative-extremism-rcna1286 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-reinstates-ch...
TheFreim 5y ago
Shouldn't you want to bring the "debunking" to the place where the "conspiracy theories" are?
- rbanffy 5y ago
  The people who would go to that site for the conspiracies will only get upset by the debunking.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    Okay? They will get upset and RRW will get an extra place to host their content free of charge.
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    But we'll never know, because it's taboo to see for ourselves.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  That's largely a good way to discover that anti-"cancel culture" folks tend to engage in quite a bit of "cancel culture" of their own. Parler, for example, had a bit of a hair-trigger on left-wing accounts trolling on the site, as well as being stricter than Twitter itself on porn/swearing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-conservative-twitter-alternative/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-... https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/parler-app-ban-free-speech-trump-b1721710.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/pa...
Huwyt_Nashi047 5y ago
Censorship or right-wing. Pick one. There is a very strong correlation on every somewhat-popular forum and platform on the net.

paulpauper 5y ago

some of these censor heavily too and their audience is tiny compared to you tube. Also, not as good usability or streaming. YouTube is unmatched in terms of audience and user interface. It's like competitors cannot even come close in terms of making something that works as well as YouTube. Look at Microsoft and Bing...15 years later despite billions in R&D it still sucks. DuckDuckGo offers privacy but the results are still worse than Google. It's just so hard to overcome this.