7 ms·

YouTube banned most videos from “JCS – Criminal Psychology”

64 points by racecar789 5y ago

racecar789 5y ago
Really sad to lose so much educational content.
rvz 5y ago
That's YouTube for you. They will not change and it will only get worse.
macilacilove 5y ago
That channel had high quality psychological explanations of suspects' and police's behaviour during interrogations.
- rosndo 5y ago
  Except it wasn’t high quality, but incredibly bad pseudoscience.
  - gengelbro 5y ago
    Explain please?
    - rosndo 5y ago
      JCS frames what he does as psychology, most of the things he claims have absolutely nothing to do with the field. He regularly makes wild claims which aren’t supported by research at all. In (real) psychology you rarely have clear “x caused y” situations, in JCS’s “criminal psychology” you do. Stuff like this can be incredibly dangerous, people have literally been sentenced to death based on the testimony of similar quacks.
      - aestetix 5y ago
        Would you also argue that TV shows like "The Search for Bigfoot" and whatnot should be banned? I can understand removing something because it contains personal information or something really obscene (like terrorists beheading someone), but videos like this are mostly just entertainment.
        rosndo 5y ago
        I think “Search for Bigfoot” is obviously different. Nobody is going to hurt themselves or others after watching it. JCS - Criminal Psychology will create idiots who think they’re master criminal psychologists and get innocent people put in prison. There’s a simple solution for JCS, just distance from the pseudoscientific “psychology” and stick to the true crime.
        kolanos 5y ago
        Can you give any specific examples of JCS perpetuating pseudo science?
        effingwewt 5y ago
        Quite the slipper slope you got going on there. I fail to see how a youtube video discussing interrogation techniques is going to magically cause people to 'think they're master criminal psychologists and get innocent people put in prison.' By your reasoning anything discussing anything could be 'harmful'. How about we decide for ourselves what we want to watch/listen/read.
        rosndo 5y ago
        >discussing interrogation techniques Spreading misinformation about interrogation techniques in a sort-of educational format. > How about we decide for ourselves what we want to watch/listen/read. We can, of course. I just also happen to believe that youtube should get to decide what they distribute, and this is a fairly reasonable thing to choose not to distribute.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- anm89 5y ago
  This channel was a flaming pile. It was some guy wildly speculating in hindsight and throwing the word "psychology" to argue that his SWAGs were some kind of scientific endeavor.
  - dang 5y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or name-calling comments to HN? You've been doing a lot of it lately, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. And we've already had to ask you repeatedly not to do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - anm89 5y ago
      Is it just the use of "flaming pile" that you take issue with or the underlying content of the post? Can I call the channel terrible or something? I don't feel that this content is "bad" or "not good". A sandwich is "not good". This channel is dangerous and insidious and I feel like using a phrase that is on the pretty restrained side of strong language is relatively in line. I'll be more careful to avoid it but I also see 20 things a day on here that are more strongly worded and less constructive. This channel promotes an incredibly dangerous narrative and ideology that has the potential to do real damage to peoples lives. He accuses people of terrible crimes that could lose them their freedom for life because he thinks they seem "nervous" or like "they are giving too many details" and then uses a false veneer of science to justify what essentially boils down what I will standby as SWAGs or hunches. This is psycopathic behavior IMO and i believe it deserves to be openly ridiculed. At least having some voices say that they feel this is serious I really don't think is damaging the conversation. I don't feel that I have an obligation to be positive on every topic. Nothing I write is written to elicit a negative response for the sake of eliciting a negative response ie trolling. I write plenty of positive posts. And I don't think the language I used here was even that colorful again especially relatively to the seriousness of the thing being discussed. If something is bad I might criticize it. In this case I think the tone was relatively in line to the seriousness of how dangerous the thing being promoted is and there is a real risk to normalizing these kinds of insidious things if the only response allowed is to agree or dissent with flowery language. I come here generally because it is well moderated but I feel that there is a difference between trolling and expressing a viewpoint that something is genuinely really bad and it's not very interesting to have a discussion where the only acceptable viewpoint is to agree/support or even to make very weak statements of disagreement. If someone actively supports genocide or something like that politely saying "I disagree" is not a measured response. In this case they are advocating for things that not only could ruin people lives but aim to use the megaphone of youtube to normalize this philosophy. I'm not equivocating it with genocide but it is serious and I would suggest that saying "I disagree" is similarly not proportional to the seriousness of the topic at hand. If you really feel like I'm trolling / flamebaiting just ask me to leave and I'll kill my account. I get vastly more positive feedback for what I write on here than negative and I think it's because I try to write honestly and clearly both on the positive and negative side of topics. I will try to avoid use of phrases like "flaming pile" in the future but if it's more than that than I wouldn't even know what I'm supposed to be saying or not saying
__m 5y ago
One of the channels for which I would bother to sign up to a different platform
rosndo 5y ago
Crazy to see multiple comments treating this as legitimate content as opposed to harmful pseudoscience.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with this channel. But even if it is really "harmful pseudoscience", is that really a reason to ban it? And if so, then who's in charge of deciding what's harmful pseudoscience and what's legitimate content, and what happens when they're wrong?
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > But even if it were really "harmful pseudoscience", is that really a reason to ban it? It is really a reason to decide not to distribute it. > And if so, then who's in charge of deciding what's harmful pseudoscience and what's legitimate content Anyone who is asked to actively participate in the chain of distribution. > and what happens when they're wrong? If someone disagrees with their decision not to distribute, they seek some other distribution. Except when it is a decision to distribute and the content is harmful in a way which produces liability, their decision being “wrong” in any authoritative sense isn't really an issue, only disagreement.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rosndo 5y ago
    It all comes down to the exact nature of the content, which you admit to not be familiar with. Do you genuinely believe that youtube should host videos attaching various involuntary physical traits to criminal behaviour? It’s obviously not okay to say that “this guy is black, so he’s probably guilty”. But is it okay to say “this guy is jittery under stress, he’s probably guilty”? Why should it be okay to say one or the other? Both will result in equally harmful outcomes.
    - effingwewt 5y ago
egberts1 5y ago
“PROFILERS” are racists — YouTube, 2022.
thenanyu 5y ago
Feels like a tipping point of sorts. Nothing about this channel is “problematic” in any mainstream consensus. Spotify might be the landing place of choice for the time being.
rPlayer6554 5y ago
I see a lot of people commenting that his channel is "pseudoscience." After watching several of his videos in full, he mainly talks about the interrogation techniques officers use over the actual subject or their psychological reaction. He also does any the analysis of a subject after the case has concluded with full knowledge of what the end result is. He is more looking back, trying to explain the subject's actions based on the full knowledge that the person is found guilty or not. He also analyzes full videos and takes into consideration all the facts of the case. He doesn't make assumptions based on one small tell or the other. He also actively shows that not everyone reacts the same. One of his videos is fully based around an innocent man who seems to react differently than the average person and is kept in jail because of it. He makes the point that cops sometimes do read too much into these tells and forget the facts. If you think that this could somehow be problematic; after watching the channel the only conclusion you can reasonably come to is "if the police suspect me of a crime, shut the hell up and get a lawyer." He is quite clear that the police are way better at psychological games, and the absolute last thing they want you to do is get your lawyer involved. Heck, he shows a cop who murdered someone get caught to show that even cops can't keep up with their own interrogation tactics! This is actively helpful and exactly what anyone under investigation should do.
- apostacy 5y ago
  JCS has actually spawned an entire new genre of YouTube videos. Just search for "JCS inspired" to find more. I find it really compelling, because it is much more grounded and less sensational than documentaries that would be shown on cable television. It makes me sad that so many people have a knee-jerk reaction that anything amateurish must be fake news.
  - hollerith 5y ago
    I have watched many police interrogations on Youtube including many that contain "JCS inspired" in the description. Most of the latter simply present the interrogation unedited whereas the JCSCriminalPsychology channel edits out most of the interrogation and have a lot of talk by a narrator on the strategy being employed by the police or on the suspect's body language. My point is that the presence of the "JCS Inspired" language should not be interpreted as evidence that the channel JCSCriminalPsychology was a seminal influence on later YT creators. BTW I found what the narrator says to be worthless and consequently have told YT to stop recommending the channel JCSCriminalPsychology to me. This comment would be more satisfying if I could explain why "JCS Inspired" occurs so often in the descriptions of videos on YT, but alas, I cannot. (Nor can I explain why YT chose to ban most of its videos. All very mysterious.)
antman 5y ago
Youtube’s claims are that the channel violates “sensitive events” or “violence” themes, which I don’t really take at face value. Especially with all the actual gore promoting content of youtube this was an presentation vlog, without claiming any specific accuracy. Most likely it was maliciously flagged for presenting the simplistic methodologies of said agencies. Presenting agency methodology is absolutely free speech and has been a target of random and sometimes unrelated harassment and legal actions for many years in many cases (stop and frisk, polygraph pseudoscience, racial profiling, journalist harassment in general etc)
no_time 5y ago
They could single-handedly make peertube 100x more popular by moving there. The only problem being money from ad revenue of course. Brave style micropayments are starting to make more and more sense as I think about it.
tentacleuno 5y ago
I really hope he switches platforms. This serves as a valuable lesson, though: archive everything from YouTube channels you like! Treat it as totally ephemeral. YouTube seem to just take things down at the turn of a hat. I hope Jim also mirrors his content to alternative platforms, instead of just using that as a threat. He has been a huge inspiration to many, as you can clearly see from the amount of 'JCS inspired' videos popping up on the platform.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > This serves as a valuable lesson, though: archive everything from YouTube channels you like! Just threw together a script to do just this, if anyone wants it: download () { local directory="/archives/YouTube Archives/$1" mkdir -p "$directory" pushd "$directory" # youtube-dl --download-archive https://youtube.com/$2 -o "%(title).%(ext)" youtube-dl --playlist-reverse -o '%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' --write-annotations --download-archive .archive --add-metadata --write-info-json --write-thumbnail -f bestvideo[ext=vp9]+bestaudio[ext=opus]/bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mkv --all-subs --embed-subs -i --embed-thumbnail "https://youtube.com/$2" popd } download "Jim Can't Swim" c/JCSCriminalPsychology # etc. etc. Throw this into a weekly cronjob and you should be golden!
  - apostacy 5y ago
    The only thing that function does is create a directory, and you could just as well have done an mkdir output && youtube-dl -o output/ I would also advise against using the mkv container, and use mp4 instead.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      > "I would also advise against using the mkv container, and use mp4 instead." Why? What exactly is wrong with Matroska? Almost every media player these days supports it just fine (as has been the case for a while now) and it's a great deal more featureful than the mp4 container. (Embedded subtitles, file attachment support for extended cover art and related files, DVD-type menu support, etc.)
juanani 5y ago
mrkramer 5y ago
I'm interested in criminology and I found his videos really good. YouTube is no longer place suitable for free speech; they are banning everybody left and right no matter what if you are going against popular consensus and their agenda.
anm89 5y ago
I support this channel's right to exist but this channel is still pseudoscience garbage. Then again, a non trivial portion of what is going on in academic psychology is pseudoscientific garbage so maybe this is state of the art?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

64 points by racecar789 5y ago

racecar789 5y ago

Really sad to lose so much educational content.

rvz 5y ago

That's YouTube for you. They will not change and it will only get worse.

macilacilove 5y ago

That channel had high quality psychological explanations of suspects' and police's behaviour during interrogations.

rosndo 5y ago
Except it wasn’t high quality, but incredibly bad pseudoscience.
- gengelbro 5y ago
  Explain please?
  - rosndo 5y ago
    JCS frames what he does as psychology, most of the things he claims have absolutely nothing to do with the field. He regularly makes wild claims which aren’t supported by research at all. In (real) psychology you rarely have clear “x caused y” situations, in JCS’s “criminal psychology” you do. Stuff like this can be incredibly dangerous, people have literally been sentenced to death based on the testimony of similar quacks.
    - aestetix 5y ago
      Would you also argue that TV shows like "The Search for Bigfoot" and whatnot should be banned? I can understand removing something because it contains personal information or something really obscene (like terrorists beheading someone), but videos like this are mostly just entertainment.
      - rosndo 5y ago
        I think “Search for Bigfoot” is obviously different. Nobody is going to hurt themselves or others after watching it. JCS - Criminal Psychology will create idiots who think they’re master criminal psychologists and get innocent people put in prison. There’s a simple solution for JCS, just distance from the pseudoscientific “psychology” and stick to the true crime.
        kolanos 5y ago
        Can you give any specific examples of JCS perpetuating pseudo science?
        effingwewt 5y ago
        Quite the slipper slope you got going on there. I fail to see how a youtube video discussing interrogation techniques is going to magically cause people to 'think they're master criminal psychologists and get innocent people put in prison.' By your reasoning anything discussing anything could be 'harmful'. How about we decide for ourselves what we want to watch/listen/read.
        rosndo 5y ago
        >discussing interrogation techniques Spreading misinformation about interrogation techniques in a sort-of educational format. > How about we decide for ourselves what we want to watch/listen/read. We can, of course. I just also happen to believe that youtube should get to decide what they distribute, and this is a fairly reasonable thing to choose not to distribute.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
anm89 5y ago
This channel was a flaming pile. It was some guy wildly speculating in hindsight and throwing the word "psychology" to argue that his SWAGs were some kind of scientific endeavor.
- dang 5y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or name-calling comments to HN? You've been doing a lot of it lately, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. And we've already had to ask you repeatedly not to do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - anm89 5y ago
    Is it just the use of "flaming pile" that you take issue with or the underlying content of the post? Can I call the channel terrible or something? I don't feel that this content is "bad" or "not good". A sandwich is "not good". This channel is dangerous and insidious and I feel like using a phrase that is on the pretty restrained side of strong language is relatively in line. I'll be more careful to avoid it but I also see 20 things a day on here that are more strongly worded and less constructive. This channel promotes an incredibly dangerous narrative and ideology that has the potential to do real damage to peoples lives. He accuses people of terrible crimes that could lose them their freedom for life because he thinks they seem "nervous" or like "they are giving too many details" and then uses a false veneer of science to justify what essentially boils down what I will standby as SWAGs or hunches. This is psycopathic behavior IMO and i believe it deserves to be openly ridiculed. At least having some voices say that they feel this is serious I really don't think is damaging the conversation. I don't feel that I have an obligation to be positive on every topic. Nothing I write is written to elicit a negative response for the sake of eliciting a negative response ie trolling. I write plenty of positive posts. And I don't think the language I used here was even that colorful again especially relatively to the seriousness of the thing being discussed. If something is bad I might criticize it. In this case I think the tone was relatively in line to the seriousness of how dangerous the thing being promoted is and there is a real risk to normalizing these kinds of insidious things if the only response allowed is to agree or dissent with flowery language. I come here generally because it is well moderated but I feel that there is a difference between trolling and expressing a viewpoint that something is genuinely really bad and it's not very interesting to have a discussion where the only acceptable viewpoint is to agree/support or even to make very weak statements of disagreement. If someone actively supports genocide or something like that politely saying "I disagree" is not a measured response. In this case they are advocating for things that not only could ruin people lives but aim to use the megaphone of youtube to normalize this philosophy. I'm not equivocating it with genocide but it is serious and I would suggest that saying "I disagree" is similarly not proportional to the seriousness of the topic at hand. If you really feel like I'm trolling / flamebaiting just ask me to leave and I'll kill my account. I get vastly more positive feedback for what I write on here than negative and I think it's because I try to write honestly and clearly both on the positive and negative side of topics. I will try to avoid use of phrases like "flaming pile" in the future but if it's more than that than I wouldn't even know what I'm supposed to be saying or not saying

__m 5y ago

One of the channels for which I would bother to sign up to a different platform

rosndo 5y ago

Crazy to see multiple comments treating this as legitimate content as opposed to harmful pseudoscience.

josephcsible 5y ago
I'm not familiar with this channel. But even if it is really "harmful pseudoscience", is that really a reason to ban it? And if so, then who's in charge of deciding what's harmful pseudoscience and what's legitimate content, and what happens when they're wrong?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > But even if it were really "harmful pseudoscience", is that really a reason to ban it? It is really a reason to decide not to distribute it. > And if so, then who's in charge of deciding what's harmful pseudoscience and what's legitimate content Anyone who is asked to actively participate in the chain of distribution. > and what happens when they're wrong? If someone disagrees with their decision not to distribute, they seek some other distribution. Except when it is a decision to distribute and the content is harmful in a way which produces liability, their decision being “wrong” in any authoritative sense isn't really an issue, only disagreement.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rosndo 5y ago
  It all comes down to the exact nature of the content, which you admit to not be familiar with. Do you genuinely believe that youtube should host videos attaching various involuntary physical traits to criminal behaviour? It’s obviously not okay to say that “this guy is black, so he’s probably guilty”. But is it okay to say “this guy is jittery under stress, he’s probably guilty”? Why should it be okay to say one or the other? Both will result in equally harmful outcomes.
  - effingwewt 5y ago

egberts1 5y ago

“PROFILERS” are racists — YouTube, 2022.

thenanyu 5y ago

Feels like a tipping point of sorts. Nothing about this channel is “problematic” in any mainstream consensus. Spotify might be the landing place of choice for the time being.

rPlayer6554 5y ago

I see a lot of people commenting that his channel is "pseudoscience." After watching several of his videos in full, he mainly talks about the interrogation techniques officers use over the actual subject or their psychological reaction. He also does any the analysis of a subject after the case has concluded with full knowledge of what the end result is. He is more looking back, trying to explain the subject's actions based on the full knowledge that the person is found guilty or not. He also analyzes full videos and takes into consideration all the facts of the case. He doesn't make assumptions based on one small tell or the other. He also actively shows that not everyone reacts the same. One of his videos is fully based around an innocent man who seems to react differently than the average person and is kept in jail because of it. He makes the point that cops sometimes do read too much into these tells and forget the facts. If you think that this could somehow be problematic; after watching the channel the only conclusion you can reasonably come to is "if the police suspect me of a crime, shut the hell up and get a lawyer." He is quite clear that the police are way better at psychological games, and the absolute last thing they want you to do is get your lawyer involved. Heck, he shows a cop who murdered someone get caught to show that even cops can't keep up with their own interrogation tactics! This is actively helpful and exactly what anyone under investigation should do.

apostacy 5y ago
JCS has actually spawned an entire new genre of YouTube videos. Just search for "JCS inspired" to find more. I find it really compelling, because it is much more grounded and less sensational than documentaries that would be shown on cable television. It makes me sad that so many people have a knee-jerk reaction that anything amateurish must be fake news.
- hollerith 5y ago
  I have watched many police interrogations on Youtube including many that contain "JCS inspired" in the description. Most of the latter simply present the interrogation unedited whereas the JCSCriminalPsychology channel edits out most of the interrogation and have a lot of talk by a narrator on the strategy being employed by the police or on the suspect's body language. My point is that the presence of the "JCS Inspired" language should not be interpreted as evidence that the channel JCSCriminalPsychology was a seminal influence on later YT creators. BTW I found what the narrator says to be worthless and consequently have told YT to stop recommending the channel JCSCriminalPsychology to me. This comment would be more satisfying if I could explain why "JCS Inspired" occurs so often in the descriptions of videos on YT, but alas, I cannot. (Nor can I explain why YT chose to ban most of its videos. All very mysterious.)

antman 5y ago

Youtube’s claims are that the channel violates “sensitive events” or “violence” themes, which I don’t really take at face value. Especially with all the actual gore promoting content of youtube this was an presentation vlog, without claiming any specific accuracy. Most likely it was maliciously flagged for presenting the simplistic methodologies of said agencies. Presenting agency methodology is absolutely free speech and has been a target of random and sometimes unrelated harassment and legal actions for many years in many cases (stop and frisk, polygraph pseudoscience, racial profiling, journalist harassment in general etc)

no_time 5y ago

They could single-handedly make peertube 100x more popular by moving there. The only problem being money from ad revenue of course. Brave style micropayments are starting to make more and more sense as I think about it.

tentacleuno 5y ago

I really hope he switches platforms. This serves as a valuable lesson, though: archive everything from YouTube channels you like! Treat it as totally ephemeral. YouTube seem to just take things down at the turn of a hat. I hope Jim also mirrors his content to alternative platforms, instead of just using that as a threat. He has been a huge inspiration to many, as you can clearly see from the amount of 'JCS inspired' videos popping up on the platform.

tentacleuno 5y ago
> This serves as a valuable lesson, though: archive everything from YouTube channels you like! Just threw together a script to do just this, if anyone wants it: download () { local directory="/archives/YouTube Archives/$1" mkdir -p "$directory" pushd "$directory" # youtube-dl --download-archive https://youtube.com/$2 -o "%(title).%(ext)" youtube-dl --playlist-reverse -o '%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' --write-annotations --download-archive .archive --add-metadata --write-info-json --write-thumbnail -f bestvideo[ext=vp9]+bestaudio[ext=opus]/bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mkv --all-subs --embed-subs -i --embed-thumbnail "https://youtube.com/$2" popd } download "Jim Can't Swim" c/JCSCriminalPsychology # etc. etc. Throw this into a weekly cronjob and you should be golden!
- apostacy 5y ago
  The only thing that function does is create a directory, and you could just as well have done an mkdir output && youtube-dl -o output/ I would also advise against using the mkv container, and use mp4 instead.
  - blooalien 5y ago
    > "I would also advise against using the mkv container, and use mp4 instead." Why? What exactly is wrong with Matroska? Almost every media player these days supports it just fine (as has been the case for a while now) and it's a great deal more featureful than the mp4 container. (Embedded subtitles, file attachment support for extended cover art and related files, DVD-type menu support, etc.)

juanani 5y ago

mrkramer 5y ago

I'm interested in criminology and I found his videos really good. YouTube is no longer place suitable for free speech; they are banning everybody left and right no matter what if you are going against popular consensus and their agenda.

anm89 5y ago

I support this channel's right to exist but this channel is still pseudoscience garbage. Then again, a non trivial portion of what is going on in academic psychology is pseudoscientific garbage so maybe this is state of the art?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]