15 ms·

YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007

345 points by epaga 5y ago

Y_Y 5y ago
I kind of get it. Punching someone outside a boxing ring is pretty much always a bad move. A funny video where the funny part seems to be an unsuspecting person getting punched may "encourage violence". (I don't feel this way, but I could understand the reasoning.) The cat is out of the bag on this one though. So much so, that I'd argue the video now has cultural and historical significance that justifies its wanton violence. That is to say, even a general purpose video platform that forbade violence should probably still allow war documentaries.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  >I don't feel this way, but I could understand the reasoning. A vanishingly rare sentiment.
- typon 5y ago
  There are literally millions of videos of street fights and sucker punches on youtube. Do they really intend to remove every single one of those videos?
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    They have always removed those that they review, presumably triggered by sufficient reports by users - do you find that unexpected? Unless you're implying that if you can't moderate some threshold percentage of instances of a violation that you should moderate 0% of them, which seems unrealistic, but I've seen people make that argument.
    - typon 5y ago
      Well that's the problem isn't it? If they are going to use their discretion and apply rules selectively, why not make exceptions for videos that most people don't find distasteful, even if they violate your policy?
- fridif 5y ago
  >wanton violence >punching someone outside of a boxing ring I could probably find 100,000 unique instances of violence solely from big Hollywood studios on Youtube as we speak
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    Fiction and non-fiction are almost universally treated differently.
    - fridif 5y ago
      The best part about your comment is that the video in question is fiction!
- some_random 5y ago
  The idea that displaying {bad thing} inherently encourages {bad thing} is a dangerous idea imo, and one that comes up time and time again.
  - awb 5y ago
    It seems self-evident that normalizing a behavior helps to propagate it. It's obviously not the sole driver of a behavior, but trends grow the more they're displayed / normalized, no? For example, many people jaywalk because they see people doing it all the time without consequences.
    - Supermancho 5y ago
      The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory is a thing. Some kid inevitably sees it on the internet with 12m views. He has been wanting to start a channel on his own and thinks "I'll punch my unsuspecting brother on camera, how funny!" now someone's in the hospital. Don't blame the bullets or the gun, blame the wielder who is a minor. Who is to blame for such an eventuality? I see a danger that Goog is potentially liable for. Kids are on the internet. There is a higher bar for moderation than people want now (partly because of it), but that's how it is. I don't have a problem with this video being taken down.
revolvingocelot 5y ago
This is truly wrong. Far from censorship, this is a field test of memory-holing. Deleting a part of the history of the Internet (yes, this silly little nonsense video is now part of Modern Culture) is a Rubicon I'm shocked YouTube has the temerity to cross. I can't wait to see what more conventional history they'll delete. For now, note the conscious blowing-off, on YouTube's part, of all the re-uploads. Will they also get got? If not, why not? I-- I can't believe they've done this.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I think you are confusing Youtube with a NGO. Google is a for profit company. Their mission is to make money, not to archive the internet. They are not your friend. Nor anybody's friend.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    See, I'd have thought that everybody tacitly understood that YouTube's scale has redefined presentation of videos over the Internet and as a consequence is the premier video archive for all of Humanity. This doesn't erase their fiduciary duties, but it does attenuate them -- archiving and presenting videos (to show ads) is actually how the money is made. But I'll bite -- I'm a credulous idiot who's confused YouTube for an NGO. You are a wise cynic who's come to correct me. >Their mission is to make money, not to archive the internet. So how did deleting this make YouTube money?
    - jwmhjwmh 5y ago
      > So how did deleting this make YouTube money? I assume they remove "violent" videos to appease advertisers. In this case, they did not consider the value of the video being removed, instead prioritizing the safety of the content with respect to the advertisers.
      - revolvingocelot 5y ago
        Thanks for the assumption, it clarified a lot about what you think about the situation.
jordemort 5y ago
At this point, Google is pretty much the fae folk of tech: immensely powerful beings with inscrutable motives and mercurial dispositions, inclined to rain ruin on your head at the slightest provocation or even just on a whim. Best to leave a saucer of milk out for them at night, and studiously avoid the areas they control if you value your anything.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Headcanon accepted. The fae are notoriously afraid of iron, and harmed by merely touching it. What's the equivalent for Google?
  - DevX101 5y ago
    Congressional hearings?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      They've been there done that. They've been to the EU as well and came back with a tan (which let's face it is an impressive feat on its own). Have they even "suffered" fines in the EU that the Zuck has received?
  - dariusj18 5y ago
    Magnets?
  - brezelgoring 5y ago
    Copyright law. Don't even need to prove you own your target video, just claim it and boom, you get what you want (redirect monetization to your MCM, takedown the video, etc).
    - dylan604 5y ago
      That's not affecting Googs though, that's affecting users you have a beef with instead. The Googs seem to be impervious to any kryptonite.
hammock 5y ago
The fact that people continue to be surprised by actions like this, betrays a lack of understanding of how content moderation works, and a willful lack of education on the part of YouTube. This video was taken down because 2 or 3 people reported it in short succession. Those reports flagged it for review by a human moderator, who removed it. If it had never been reported, it would have stayed up. If no one ever reported it, it's possible a human never reviewed it in those 14 years. The 14 years it was up doesn't mean YouTube reviewed it previously and decided to keep it. If YouTube did a better job explaining exactly how its content moderation works, outrage like this might be less common. However YouTube doesn't explain better because it encourages gaming the system and report-brigading.
- 015a 5y ago
  If you don't think a meme sensation video that's received millions of views and copycats hasn't been reported thousands of times over the years, for any reason, or no reason, just because people can, because people want to watch the world burn; I want to come live in your world.
- darkwater 5y ago
  > The 14 years it was up doesn't mean YouTube reviewed it previously and decided to keep it. You cannot possibly know, unless you work on YT moderation in Google. Also, moderation rules might vary over the years, so it might have even been checked once per year and survived for 14 years, til now. The real issue here is that nobody outside an internal Google team has voted on these policies.
  - BostonFern 5y ago
    Isn't the real issue that no one knows how they work?
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      As you can see all over this thread, tons of HNers are willing to blithely assert how they work, and isn't that enough?
plainnoodles 5y ago
This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general this is why projects like youtube-dl are important. It might not be glamorous, and it might be a little stupid, but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it. Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce, and they're also exactly the wrong ones to be hosting our collective shared culture for posterity. It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't really work for various reasons, both legal and social. So, short of that, at least being able to download stuff important to us as individuals is an important right to preserve. My personal stake in this fight is a video of "Scotland the Brave" that I used to listen to a lot, which featured an older Scottish gentleman standing in the beautiful highlands, loudly and proudly calling down through the glen. It got randomly copyright-removed recently and I've been unable to find it elsewhere. I don't even know who the person in the video was.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  I also lost access to a most beautiful poetry recitation from an older fellow who has passed. In hindsight, I wish I was more active in saving videos.
  - DelightOne 5y ago
    It should be automatic.
    - knicholes 5y ago
      Can't it be? Like at the router level, maybe?
      - DelightOne 5y ago
        The router has the issue of traffic and the path being encrypted. It does not see the paths that are browsed and so cannot backup or replace/URL with the new one?
fennecfoxen 5y ago
Here is my open letter to people working for Google: Dear googlers: Quit. You’ll make plenty elsewhere; just stop ruining the Internet please.
- aluminussoma 5y ago
  Don't quit! I'd rather have good, honest people working at Google, instead of them quitting Google. What would Google be like if no good people worked there?
  - rflec028 5y ago
    Isn't this already the case?
  - theandrewbailey 5y ago
    Without good people, Google will be driven into the ground faster, and all of us can move on sooner.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      That's a very optimistic view of what happens to a company with a lot of technical power and solid procedure for maintaining it in place if all the people with a conscience leave. You are assuming a correlation between technical competency and moral competency that I've never observed history guarantees.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > What would Google be like if no good people worked there? Can it get worse? Because it looks like whatever good guys are left don't have a voice anymore.
    - mikewarot 5y ago
      >Can it get worse? Because it looks like whatever good guys are left don't have a voice anymore. Yikes... I can't believe you even typed that... inviting it to happen. It can always get worse. There's always whistle-blowing, which would stop if all the good people left.
mentos 5y ago
Reminds me of a scene 'Killed for Reading' from the movie Equilibrium. Partridge: Don't you see, Preston? It's gone. Everything that makes us what we are, traded away. John Preston: There's no war. No murder. Partridge: What is it you think we do? John Preston: No. You've been with me. You've seen how it can be, the jealousy. Rage. Partridge: A heavy cost. I pay it gladly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJf9Pf9rjO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJf9Pf9rjO4
- romanhn 5y ago
  And into the rabbit hole of gun kata scenes I go. Equilibrium is such an underappreciated movie.
12ian34 5y ago
One of my favourite memes of all time, so it's sad for the original video to be removed from Youtube, however, I am confident it'll still be available elsewhere, and, of course, as part of thousands of existing meme compilation videos. Sure, the Youtube team removed it, but ultimately, they're a private company, right? Aren't private companies allowed to moderate kind of however they want based on their own terms of service? They have a "graphic and violent content policy" that they're allowed to enforce. I always found the distinction between a private company's ToS and "the public good" a little tricky to understand. Anyway, maybe this news will, in a tiny way, help other online video-sharing projects like PeerTube or Vimeo.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  I haven't seen anyone argue that what YouTube has done here isn't legal. It certainly is. That doesn't make it right or good.
LamdbaMamba 5y ago
Google would destroy "Liberty Leading the People" for depicting violent content if they could. What's the line here? A scripted video depicting one friend punching another gets taken down, but MMA fights, movie scenes of executions, and Jackass clips stay up? It's dangerous how much of our culture is in the hands of private companies who can restrict or deny your ability to view that piece of culture. They do so on a whim and you have no recourse.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  "Content featuring anything listed above where the viewer is not given enough context to understand that the footage is dramatized or fictional" would be my guess as to the specific stanza of the violent/graphic content service term this video trips over.
unixhero 5y ago
To be fair, it is violence. The guy took it like a champ, and quipped something funny which I found the reaction to be really hillarious. But the internet, including MMA sports and other things have really de-sensitized people on real violence. I for one can't say I like real violence.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  To be more fair, there is far more violent content all over YouTube that hasn't been up for 14 years and become part of Internet culture.
- jjice 5y ago
  It is, but at what point do we start not allowing people to display a fist connecting with another person? Violence isn't good in most situations, but do we really need to just not allow it at all, even in this comedic setting? I don't know anyone that sees someone get assaulted in real life and think that that isn't a bad thing. We're desensitized, but I don't think we're that desensitized.
kunagi7 5y ago
That's why I archive my favorite videos with tools like youtube-dl. Their automated systems, censorship mechanisms, user reports (even if they're fake), even the "fact checkers" ask and remove videos without a real reason. If the account is still active the owner can start an appeal process that rarely works. Most of the times no appeal is done and the video is lost until someone risks his account and reuploads it again. Never trust an online website to keep your content up for you. Always back it up since it can be removed anytime and without asking.
vortico 5y ago
YouTube removing content on a whim is one of the primary reasons to join, watch, and upload to PeerTube. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube Example instance: https://peertube.cpy.re/ https://peertube.cpy.re/
marcodiego 5y ago
People should remember that there are alternatives like peertube.
- janandonly 5y ago
  My thinking exactly... but it's a vicious cycle.... As long as YT is the biggest source, people will flock to it to search there first... A proposed solution is: What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's: 1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory 2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID 3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com https://odysee.com or https://d.tube https://d.tube 4. If not, upload the file. 5. Delete the file.
josh_today 5y ago
Looks like “YouTube will remove all content against vaccines” quickly got replaced with this on the front page
solarkraft 5y ago
I’ve been archiving some content before, but recent occurrences keep strengthening my belief that there needs to be a collaborative archive. A single party can’t archive everything they may ever look for, often enough you don’t even know what it may be (and when you do it’s too late). Are there any projects like this? I imagine a decentralization through something like torrents or IPFS (with the caveat that different encodings of the same video will of course have different hashes). Is such a project already a thing? Are other people interested in doing this?
- est31 5y ago
  https://reddit.com/r/datahoarder https://reddit.com/r/datahoarder https://archive.org https://archive.org
deadalus 5y ago
Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
- frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  There's also Gab TV and several others. Unfortunately, I actually believe that the people behind the YouTube censorship actually benefited from their censorship and scattering of the community by producing an environment where antitrust actions are far harder to argue because YT can now claim there are many "competitors", which none of the alternatives really are. It first dawned on me that this was possibly a tactic when Google was catching heat for manipulating results. I found it odd that DuckDuckGo was given the duck.com domain that Google owned, free of charge. It makes no sense other than that Google was trying to support controlled opposition in order to claim that there was a competitive market.
throwamon 5y ago
Sorry to take the low-hanging fruit, but... I can't believe they've done this.
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I know people may be desensitized at this point, but if you can't see the correlation with the book 1984's consistent theme of the past and current being scrubbed of "wrongthink" that is thrown down the "memoryhole" to dispose of it, then I think we are all in for a far worse future than we would like.
- hawthornio 5y ago
  Cringe
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rozab 5y ago
  To explain in a few more words: 1. 1984 is not a religious prophecy. That something has happened which bears some aesthetic similarity to a part of the book is not significant or interesting by itself. If you wish to assert that Google has the power to shape the truth then you will first have to explain why, 2. The video still exists, in a thousand forms, both on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet where YT has no power. If YT wished to scrub it from the site they could do so, but they didn't.
  - willhinsa 5y ago
    > That something has happened which bears some aesthetic similarity to a part of the book is not significant or interesting by itself. If you wish to assert that Google has the power to shape the truth then you will first have to explain why, Man, if only there were other examples of Google's censorship of videos on even more important issues. Maybe an example at the top of Hacker News from today... [0] I'm vaccinated and I'm not a fan of insane anti-vax conspiracy theorists. But I absolutely don't think the government or the de facto public space owners being able to ban entire topics of discussion. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/29/youtube-ban-joseph-mercola/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/29/youtube...
gambler 5y ago
If only Hacker News crowd noticed when thousands of videos with interviews, medical lectures, news footage and even congressional testimonies were removed for political reasons within the last couple years.
- giarc 5y ago
  I see you submitted 0 of those news stories to Hacker News.
- rewma 5y ago
  > If only Hacker News crowd noticed when thousands of videos with interviews, medical lectures, news footage and even congressional testimonies were removed for political reasons within the last couple years. Do you happen to have any reference that points out which content was removed for political reasons? You're on HN. If said censorship exists then nothing stops you from pointing it on HN.
  - zepolen 5y ago
    HN is cens^H^H^H^H moderated too, you're in lala land if you think otherwise.
    - reducesuffering 5y ago
      Even 4chan is moderated. You're welcome to join 8chan or whatever other unmoderated cesspool exists and enjoy it's riveting discussion...
      - zepolen 5y ago
        Even 8chan contains more thought provoking two sided discussion than some <ahem> echo chambers.
        reducesuffering 5y ago
        Personally, I’d let the results of the audience decide which is considered more “thought provoking”; a dozen CEO’s or some mass murderers?
sergiotapia 5y ago
"youtube is a safe place for all" YUCK
btbuildem 5y ago
Here's the video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g (reupload).
3pt14159 5y ago
Is it this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g I've never heard of the meme before, but that seems pretty benign.
mgdlbp 5y ago
The original video was at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk The Wayback Machine archives YouTube videos. I don't know how it archives or determines which videos to archive, but it has a surprising number of popular videos (but also ones with only a few thousand views and not some of those with billions, possibly because they're so high-profile due to copyright?). It also archives the video only once (creators may alter videos slightly, IIRC) and not always with the highest-quality format (possibly due an underlying problem with youtube-dl's `best` option). YouTube is special-cased with processing to replace the player on the archived video page with the archived video (which is indexed with a mangled googlevideo.com URL, the same type as retrieved by youtube-dl), but this doesn't always work. Fortunately, archived videos can also be accessed directly by video ID through the (very undocumented) WB Machine-specific 'fake' URL: http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/<ID> http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/<ID> The video in question is at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/wKbU8B-QVZk https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive... Edit: A very early reupload (2007-10-28, compared to the original video's 2007-07-13) is still up at _X6VoFBCE9k, but is of degraded quality and has an additional watermark.
- carabiner 5y ago
  Looks like the video is back up. As always, going viral worked.
jdlyga 5y ago
I can't believe they've done this
pvaldes 5y ago
The video is still there... (and it was disappointing).
ClassAndBurn 5y ago
The past is judged by the values of the present.
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
I can see it from UK no issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g
- usui 5y ago
  this is a re-upload
- hexane360 5y ago
  That was uploaded in 2017. It's not the original.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  That's not the original
robd003 5y ago
Can we all agree that censorship sucks? I've been using Odysee/LBRY which has a P2P video platform and all of the metadata is stored on blockchain.
- janandonly 5y ago
  YES! What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's: 1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory 2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID 3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com https://odysee.com or https://d.tube https://d.tube 4. If not, upload the file. 5. Delete the file.
ggggtez 5y ago
Honestly boring. Likely just it got flagged as violence, and an underpaid 3rd world worker clicked a button. Sorry about the inconvenience to this guy, but at the same time, it got 14 million views and I'm sure he made some cash. He can probably not whine so much. It's likely an honest mistake by someone overworked.
carabiner 5y ago
The video has been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk
cryptonector 5y ago
Vaccine misinformation, right?
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Someone is missing a sense of humor.
xroche 5y ago
> I'm really sorry you feel this way The corporate wording for "Fuck you!".
annadane 5y ago
I can't believe you've done this.
rasz 5y ago
YT: "Im really sorry you feel this way" YT: "K,bye"
cma 5y ago
Maybe related to the panic over the TikTok property damage/theft spree stuff?
awb 5y ago
Reinstated? You can still watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk&t=11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk&t=11s
beckman466 5y ago
we need a distributed torrent-like distributed youtube yesterday (maybe peertube, maybe something else). a system which democratically shares the load and where people can vote which videos get the most bandwidth. this dumb technocratic stewardship is just getting annoying.
DeBraid 5y ago
And, it's back up per OP. https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443250484458962953 https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443250484458962953
- qqii 5y ago
  Although I'm glad it is up, it was sadly only restored after the tweets became popular. The "review" that claimed it still violated policy: https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443099098438045697/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443099098438045697/pho...
- ta1234567890 5y ago
  Even though I’m glad it’s back up, it sucks that it takes things being publicly blown up for Google/Youtube to do anything about their users/customers problems. Earlier this year my Google ads account got banned after not having used it for more than a year. The reason given was some vague message about violating their terms. Which terms or why? They didn’t say. Which ad or campaign? They didn’t say. Tried an appeal, rejected by a robot, tried again, rejected by a robot again. So they still ran the campaigns back in the day, they took my money, they didn’t say a thing, but then a year later they auto-ban my account? smh. Man I feel so powerless sometimes.
  - ylee 5y ago
    >it sucks that it takes things being publicly blown up for Google/Youtube to do anything about their users/customers problems. Facebook, too. I don't have an Oculus Quest 2 but have heard good things about it. But I can't get one because my Facebook account was shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response. If a Facebook employee is reading this ... I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account (which would be against the TOS, anyway). I want my own back.
    - bryan_w 5y ago

345 points by epaga 5y ago

Y_Y 5y ago

I kind of get it. Punching someone outside a boxing ring is pretty much always a bad move. A funny video where the funny part seems to be an unsuspecting person getting punched may "encourage violence". (I don't feel this way, but I could understand the reasoning.) The cat is out of the bag on this one though. So much so, that I'd argue the video now has cultural and historical significance that justifies its wanton violence. That is to say, even a general purpose video platform that forbade violence should probably still allow war documentaries.

happytoexplain 5y ago
>I don't feel this way, but I could understand the reasoning. A vanishingly rare sentiment.
typon 5y ago
There are literally millions of videos of street fights and sucker punches on youtube. Do they really intend to remove every single one of those videos?
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  They have always removed those that they review, presumably triggered by sufficient reports by users - do you find that unexpected? Unless you're implying that if you can't moderate some threshold percentage of instances of a violation that you should moderate 0% of them, which seems unrealistic, but I've seen people make that argument.
  - typon 5y ago
    Well that's the problem isn't it? If they are going to use their discretion and apply rules selectively, why not make exceptions for videos that most people don't find distasteful, even if they violate your policy?
fridif 5y ago
>wanton violence >punching someone outside of a boxing ring I could probably find 100,000 unique instances of violence solely from big Hollywood studios on Youtube as we speak
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  Fiction and non-fiction are almost universally treated differently.
  - fridif 5y ago
    The best part about your comment is that the video in question is fiction!
some_random 5y ago
The idea that displaying {bad thing} inherently encourages {bad thing} is a dangerous idea imo, and one that comes up time and time again.
- awb 5y ago
  It seems self-evident that normalizing a behavior helps to propagate it. It's obviously not the sole driver of a behavior, but trends grow the more they're displayed / normalized, no? For example, many people jaywalk because they see people doing it all the time without consequences.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory is a thing. Some kid inevitably sees it on the internet with 12m views. He has been wanting to start a channel on his own and thinks "I'll punch my unsuspecting brother on camera, how funny!" now someone's in the hospital. Don't blame the bullets or the gun, blame the wielder who is a minor. Who is to blame for such an eventuality? I see a danger that Goog is potentially liable for. Kids are on the internet. There is a higher bar for moderation than people want now (partly because of it), but that's how it is. I don't have a problem with this video being taken down.

revolvingocelot 5y ago

This is truly wrong. Far from censorship, this is a field test of memory-holing. Deleting a part of the history of the Internet (yes, this silly little nonsense video is now part of Modern Culture) is a Rubicon I'm shocked YouTube has the temerity to cross. I can't wait to see what more conventional history they'll delete. For now, note the conscious blowing-off, on YouTube's part, of all the re-uploads. Will they also get got? If not, why not? I-- I can't believe they've done this.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I think you are confusing Youtube with a NGO. Google is a for profit company. Their mission is to make money, not to archive the internet. They are not your friend. Nor anybody's friend.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  See, I'd have thought that everybody tacitly understood that YouTube's scale has redefined presentation of videos over the Internet and as a consequence is the premier video archive for all of Humanity. This doesn't erase their fiduciary duties, but it does attenuate them -- archiving and presenting videos (to show ads) is actually how the money is made. But I'll bite -- I'm a credulous idiot who's confused YouTube for an NGO. You are a wise cynic who's come to correct me. >Their mission is to make money, not to archive the internet. So how did deleting this make YouTube money?
  - jwmhjwmh 5y ago
    > So how did deleting this make YouTube money? I assume they remove "violent" videos to appease advertisers. In this case, they did not consider the value of the video being removed, instead prioritizing the safety of the content with respect to the advertisers.
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      Thanks for the assumption, it clarified a lot about what you think about the situation.

jordemort 5y ago

At this point, Google is pretty much the fae folk of tech: immensely powerful beings with inscrutable motives and mercurial dispositions, inclined to rain ruin on your head at the slightest provocation or even just on a whim. Best to leave a saucer of milk out for them at night, and studiously avoid the areas they control if you value your anything.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
Headcanon accepted. The fae are notoriously afraid of iron, and harmed by merely touching it. What's the equivalent for Google?
- DevX101 5y ago
  Congressional hearings?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    They've been there done that. They've been to the EU as well and came back with a tan (which let's face it is an impressive feat on its own). Have they even "suffered" fines in the EU that the Zuck has received?
- dariusj18 5y ago
  Magnets?
- brezelgoring 5y ago
  Copyright law. Don't even need to prove you own your target video, just claim it and boom, you get what you want (redirect monetization to your MCM, takedown the video, etc).
  - dylan604 5y ago
    That's not affecting Googs though, that's affecting users you have a beef with instead. The Googs seem to be impervious to any kryptonite.

hammock 5y ago

The fact that people continue to be surprised by actions like this, betrays a lack of understanding of how content moderation works, and a willful lack of education on the part of YouTube. This video was taken down because 2 or 3 people reported it in short succession. Those reports flagged it for review by a human moderator, who removed it. If it had never been reported, it would have stayed up. If no one ever reported it, it's possible a human never reviewed it in those 14 years. The 14 years it was up doesn't mean YouTube reviewed it previously and decided to keep it. If YouTube did a better job explaining exactly how its content moderation works, outrage like this might be less common. However YouTube doesn't explain better because it encourages gaming the system and report-brigading.

015a 5y ago
If you don't think a meme sensation video that's received millions of views and copycats hasn't been reported thousands of times over the years, for any reason, or no reason, just because people can, because people want to watch the world burn; I want to come live in your world.
darkwater 5y ago
> The 14 years it was up doesn't mean YouTube reviewed it previously and decided to keep it. You cannot possibly know, unless you work on YT moderation in Google. Also, moderation rules might vary over the years, so it might have even been checked once per year and survived for 14 years, til now. The real issue here is that nobody outside an internal Google team has voted on these policies.
- BostonFern 5y ago
  Isn't the real issue that no one knows how they work?
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    As you can see all over this thread, tons of HNers are willing to blithely assert how they work, and isn't that enough?

plainnoodles 5y ago

This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general this is why projects like youtube-dl are important. It might not be glamorous, and it might be a little stupid, but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it. Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce, and they're also exactly the wrong ones to be hosting our collective shared culture for posterity. It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't really work for various reasons, both legal and social. So, short of that, at least being able to download stuff important to us as individuals is an important right to preserve. My personal stake in this fight is a video of "Scotland the Brave" that I used to listen to a lot, which featured an older Scottish gentleman standing in the beautiful highlands, loudly and proudly calling down through the glen. It got randomly copyright-removed recently and I've been unable to find it elsewhere. I don't even know who the person in the video was.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
I also lost access to a most beautiful poetry recitation from an older fellow who has passed. In hindsight, I wish I was more active in saving videos.
- DelightOne 5y ago
  It should be automatic.
  - knicholes 5y ago
    Can't it be? Like at the router level, maybe?
    - DelightOne 5y ago
      The router has the issue of traffic and the path being encrypted. It does not see the paths that are browsed and so cannot backup or replace/URL with the new one?

fennecfoxen 5y ago

Here is my open letter to people working for Google: Dear googlers: Quit. You’ll make plenty elsewhere; just stop ruining the Internet please.

aluminussoma 5y ago
Don't quit! I'd rather have good, honest people working at Google, instead of them quitting Google. What would Google be like if no good people worked there?
- rflec028 5y ago
  Isn't this already the case?
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  Without good people, Google will be driven into the ground faster, and all of us can move on sooner.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    That's a very optimistic view of what happens to a company with a lot of technical power and solid procedure for maintaining it in place if all the people with a conscience leave. You are assuming a correlation between technical competency and moral competency that I've never observed history guarantees.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > What would Google be like if no good people worked there? Can it get worse? Because it looks like whatever good guys are left don't have a voice anymore.
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    >Can it get worse? Because it looks like whatever good guys are left don't have a voice anymore. Yikes... I can't believe you even typed that... inviting it to happen. It can always get worse. There's always whistle-blowing, which would stop if all the good people left.

mentos 5y ago

Reminds me of a scene 'Killed for Reading' from the movie Equilibrium. Partridge: Don't you see, Preston? It's gone. Everything that makes us what we are, traded away. John Preston: There's no war. No murder. Partridge: What is it you think we do? John Preston: No. You've been with me. You've seen how it can be, the jealousy. Rage. Partridge: A heavy cost. I pay it gladly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJf9Pf9rjO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJf9Pf9rjO4

romanhn 5y ago
And into the rabbit hole of gun kata scenes I go. Equilibrium is such an underappreciated movie.

12ian34 5y ago

One of my favourite memes of all time, so it's sad for the original video to be removed from Youtube, however, I am confident it'll still be available elsewhere, and, of course, as part of thousands of existing meme compilation videos. Sure, the Youtube team removed it, but ultimately, they're a private company, right? Aren't private companies allowed to moderate kind of however they want based on their own terms of service? They have a "graphic and violent content policy" that they're allowed to enforce. I always found the distinction between a private company's ToS and "the public good" a little tricky to understand. Anyway, maybe this news will, in a tiny way, help other online video-sharing projects like PeerTube or Vimeo.

jaywalk 5y ago
I haven't seen anyone argue that what YouTube has done here isn't legal. It certainly is. That doesn't make it right or good.

LamdbaMamba 5y ago

Google would destroy "Liberty Leading the People" for depicting violent content if they could. What's the line here? A scripted video depicting one friend punching another gets taken down, but MMA fights, movie scenes of executions, and Jackass clips stay up? It's dangerous how much of our culture is in the hands of private companies who can restrict or deny your ability to view that piece of culture. They do so on a whim and you have no recourse.

shadowgovt 5y ago
"Content featuring anything listed above where the viewer is not given enough context to understand that the footage is dramatized or fictional" would be my guess as to the specific stanza of the violent/graphic content service term this video trips over.

unixhero 5y ago

To be fair, it is violence. The guy took it like a champ, and quipped something funny which I found the reaction to be really hillarious. But the internet, including MMA sports and other things have really de-sensitized people on real violence. I for one can't say I like real violence.

jaywalk 5y ago
To be more fair, there is far more violent content all over YouTube that hasn't been up for 14 years and become part of Internet culture.
jjice 5y ago
It is, but at what point do we start not allowing people to display a fist connecting with another person? Violence isn't good in most situations, but do we really need to just not allow it at all, even in this comedic setting? I don't know anyone that sees someone get assaulted in real life and think that that isn't a bad thing. We're desensitized, but I don't think we're that desensitized.

kunagi7 5y ago

That's why I archive my favorite videos with tools like youtube-dl. Their automated systems, censorship mechanisms, user reports (even if they're fake), even the "fact checkers" ask and remove videos without a real reason. If the account is still active the owner can start an appeal process that rarely works. Most of the times no appeal is done and the video is lost until someone risks his account and reuploads it again. Never trust an online website to keep your content up for you. Always back it up since it can be removed anytime and without asking.

vortico 5y ago

YouTube removing content on a whim is one of the primary reasons to join, watch, and upload to PeerTube. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube Example instance: https://peertube.cpy.re/ https://peertube.cpy.re/

marcodiego 5y ago

People should remember that there are alternatives like peertube.

janandonly 5y ago
My thinking exactly... but it's a vicious cycle.... As long as YT is the biggest source, people will flock to it to search there first... A proposed solution is: What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's: 1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory 2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID 3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com https://odysee.com or https://d.tube https://d.tube 4. If not, upload the file. 5. Delete the file.

josh_today 5y ago

Looks like “YouTube will remove all content against vaccines” quickly got replaced with this on the front page

solarkraft 5y ago

I’ve been archiving some content before, but recent occurrences keep strengthening my belief that there needs to be a collaborative archive. A single party can’t archive everything they may ever look for, often enough you don’t even know what it may be (and when you do it’s too late). Are there any projects like this? I imagine a decentralization through something like torrents or IPFS (with the caveat that different encodings of the same video will of course have different hashes). Is such a project already a thing? Are other people interested in doing this?

est31 5y ago
https://reddit.com/r/datahoarder https://reddit.com/r/datahoarder https://archive.org https://archive.org

deadalus 5y ago

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

frankfrankfrank 5y ago
There's also Gab TV and several others. Unfortunately, I actually believe that the people behind the YouTube censorship actually benefited from their censorship and scattering of the community by producing an environment where antitrust actions are far harder to argue because YT can now claim there are many "competitors", which none of the alternatives really are. It first dawned on me that this was possibly a tactic when Google was catching heat for manipulating results. I found it odd that DuckDuckGo was given the duck.com domain that Google owned, free of charge. It makes no sense other than that Google was trying to support controlled opposition in order to claim that there was a competitive market.

throwamon 5y ago

Sorry to take the low-hanging fruit, but... I can't believe they've done this.

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

I know people may be desensitized at this point, but if you can't see the correlation with the book 1984's consistent theme of the past and current being scrubbed of "wrongthink" that is thrown down the "memoryhole" to dispose of it, then I think we are all in for a far worse future than we would like.

hawthornio 5y ago
Cringe
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rozab 5y ago
To explain in a few more words: 1. 1984 is not a religious prophecy. That something has happened which bears some aesthetic similarity to a part of the book is not significant or interesting by itself. If you wish to assert that Google has the power to shape the truth then you will first have to explain why, 2. The video still exists, in a thousand forms, both on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet where YT has no power. If YT wished to scrub it from the site they could do so, but they didn't.
- willhinsa 5y ago
  > That something has happened which bears some aesthetic similarity to a part of the book is not significant or interesting by itself. If you wish to assert that Google has the power to shape the truth then you will first have to explain why, Man, if only there were other examples of Google's censorship of videos on even more important issues. Maybe an example at the top of Hacker News from today... [0] I'm vaccinated and I'm not a fan of insane anti-vax conspiracy theorists. But I absolutely don't think the government or the de facto public space owners being able to ban entire topics of discussion. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/29/youtube-ban-joseph-mercola/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/29/youtube...

gambler 5y ago

If only Hacker News crowd noticed when thousands of videos with interviews, medical lectures, news footage and even congressional testimonies were removed for political reasons within the last couple years.

giarc 5y ago
I see you submitted 0 of those news stories to Hacker News.
rewma 5y ago
> If only Hacker News crowd noticed when thousands of videos with interviews, medical lectures, news footage and even congressional testimonies were removed for political reasons within the last couple years. Do you happen to have any reference that points out which content was removed for political reasons? You're on HN. If said censorship exists then nothing stops you from pointing it on HN.
- zepolen 5y ago
  HN is cens^H^H^H^H moderated too, you're in lala land if you think otherwise.
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    Even 4chan is moderated. You're welcome to join 8chan or whatever other unmoderated cesspool exists and enjoy it's riveting discussion...
    - zepolen 5y ago
      Even 8chan contains more thought provoking two sided discussion than some <ahem> echo chambers.
      - reducesuffering 5y ago
        Personally, I’d let the results of the audience decide which is considered more “thought provoking”; a dozen CEO’s or some mass murderers?

sergiotapia 5y ago

"youtube is a safe place for all" YUCK

btbuildem 5y ago

Here's the video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g (reupload).

3pt14159 5y ago

Is it this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g I've never heard of the meme before, but that seems pretty benign.

mgdlbp 5y ago

The original video was at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk The Wayback Machine archives YouTube videos. I don't know how it archives or determines which videos to archive, but it has a surprising number of popular videos (but also ones with only a few thousand views and not some of those with billions, possibly because they're so high-profile due to copyright?). It also archives the video only once (creators may alter videos slightly, IIRC) and not always with the highest-quality format (possibly due an underlying problem with youtube-dl's `best` option). YouTube is special-cased with processing to replace the player on the archived video page with the archived video (which is indexed with a mangled googlevideo.com URL, the same type as retrieved by youtube-dl), but this doesn't always work. Fortunately, archived videos can also be accessed directly by video ID through the (very undocumented) WB Machine-specific 'fake' URL: http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/<ID> http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/<ID> The video in question is at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/wKbU8B-QVZk https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive... Edit: A very early reupload (2007-10-28, compared to the original video's 2007-07-13) is still up at _X6VoFBCE9k, but is of degraded quality and has an additional watermark.

carabiner 5y ago
Looks like the video is back up. As always, going viral worked.

jdlyga 5y ago

I can't believe they've done this

pvaldes 5y ago

The video is still there... (and it was disappointing).

ClassAndBurn 5y ago

The past is judged by the values of the present.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

I can see it from UK no issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g

usui 5y ago
this is a re-upload
hexane360 5y ago
That was uploaded in 2017. It's not the original.
skhr0680 5y ago
That's not the original

robd003 5y ago

Can we all agree that censorship sucks? I've been using Odysee/LBRY which has a P2P video platform and all of the metadata is stored on blockchain.

janandonly 5y ago
YES! What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's: 1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory 2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID 3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com https://odysee.com or https://d.tube https://d.tube 4. If not, upload the file. 5. Delete the file.

ggggtez 5y ago

Honestly boring. Likely just it got flagged as violence, and an underpaid 3rd world worker clicked a button. Sorry about the inconvenience to this guy, but at the same time, it got 14 million views and I'm sure he made some cash. He can probably not whine so much. It's likely an honest mistake by someone overworked.

carabiner 5y ago

The video has been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk

cryptonector 5y ago

Vaccine misinformation, right?

cryptonector 5y ago
Someone is missing a sense of humor.

xroche 5y ago

> I'm really sorry you feel this way The corporate wording for "Fuck you!".

annadane 5y ago

I can't believe you've done this.

rasz 5y ago

YT: "Im really sorry you feel this way" YT: "K,bye"

cma 5y ago

Maybe related to the panic over the TikTok property damage/theft spree stuff?

awb 5y ago

Reinstated? You can still watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk&t=11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk&t=11s

beckman466 5y ago

we need a distributed torrent-like distributed youtube yesterday (maybe peertube, maybe something else). a system which democratically shares the load and where people can vote which videos get the most bandwidth. this dumb technocratic stewardship is just getting annoying.

DeBraid 5y ago

And, it's back up per OP. https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443250484458962953 https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443250484458962953

qqii 5y ago
Although I'm glad it is up, it was sadly only restored after the tweets became popular. The "review" that claimed it still violated policy: https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443099098438045697/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443099098438045697/pho...
ta1234567890 5y ago
Even though I’m glad it’s back up, it sucks that it takes things being publicly blown up for Google/Youtube to do anything about their users/customers problems. Earlier this year my Google ads account got banned after not having used it for more than a year. The reason given was some vague message about violating their terms. Which terms or why? They didn’t say. Which ad or campaign? They didn’t say. Tried an appeal, rejected by a robot, tried again, rejected by a robot again. So they still ran the campaigns back in the day, they took my money, they didn’t say a thing, but then a year later they auto-ban my account? smh. Man I feel so powerless sometimes.
- ylee 5y ago
  >it sucks that it takes things being publicly blown up for Google/Youtube to do anything about their users/customers problems. Facebook, too. I don't have an Oculus Quest 2 but have heard good things about it. But I can't get one because my Facebook account was shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response. If a Facebook employee is reading this ... I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account (which would be against the TOS, anyway). I want my own back.
  - bryan_w 5y ago