14 ms·

On Being Disappeared

158 points by k1m 5y ago

ycombigator 5y ago
PaulHoule 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
micromacrofoot 5y ago
RT is a Russian propaganda outlet, no? why in the world would you ever publish a podcast with them?
- ridruejo 5y ago
  He explains it in the article
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Not really! If I was “blacklisted” I wouldn’t just jump to a worse bad actor. Out of the pot and right into a gigantic bonfire.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    What he explains is he chose poor bedfellows, unfortunately.
- davidw 5y ago
  > I was on RT because, as a critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. Looks like he ended up throwing in with en even more imperialistic, militaristic one party crowd.
  - drewcoo 5y ago
    There was no "throwing in" as he said "not one show that dealt with Russia."
    - mdoms 5y ago
      Your content can deal with Russian interests without dealing with Russia.
      - aunty_helen 5y ago
        Hey Marty :) hope you’re well. Saying that though, it’s not a necessity and it’s his show to to cover the topics he wants. Other people in this thread telling him what he should’ve covered to make himself less of a target for censorship… smh.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        mdoms 5y ago
        Hello Helen :) I'm very well thank you.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  There's a special niche of perpetually online people who pretend to be liberals while simultaneously entertaining virtually every thought that the alt-right Russian media complex has to push. You'll know them when you see them because they inevitably end as regular guests up on Fox News' primetime shows.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    Like, yikes.
  - usbline 5y ago
    You clearly have no idea who Chris Hedges is, and it shows.
  - kristofferR 5y ago
    Chris Hedges is far from a liberal, he's more of the "everything wrong Russia does is NATO's fault" type of guy.
- rodgerd 5y ago
  1. You're a tankie (in which case, good riddance). 2. You're an anti-Western contrarian. 3. You've got sound criticisms of the US, NATO, etc, and haven't thought about how you can end up a useful idiot (see also: Ed Snowden).
  - the_af 5y ago
    None of these are good arguments for blocking/deplatforming. "Being a useful idiot" or a "contrarian" is subjective. And don't Western democracies, the US foremost, congratulate themselves on always allowing contrarian points of view? It's in their DNA... allegedly.
  - ttybird2 5y ago
    A useful idiot? He is an idiot only if you consider heroic acts that reveal unjust violations of the rights to privacy and protection from unwarranted searches as well as the sabotage of public standards and the infiltration of their organization bodies as "idiotic". If anything he showed his loyalty to the residents of America and to a lesser extend to these of Europe.
- btilly 5y ago
  Actually they worked to deliver high quality content on anything which didn't directly impinge on Russian interests. Granted, they did it to give their propaganda more respectability. But most of it was not propaganda. It can be thought of as the Russian attempt to create an equivalent to Al-Jazeera and the BBC.
  - the_af 5y ago
    Agreed. They are not impartial about Russia, but their coverage of, say, Latin America was pretty good quality. "Not being impartial about Russia" isn't a crime. Even not being truthful about Russia isn't a crime. If it were, a lot of mainstream Western media conglomerates should be banned. I really don't get the need to block access to any news channel or conglomerate, no matter who funds them or what's their agenda. I don't want Fox News to be banned, either.
    - vba616 5y ago
      >Agreed. They are not impartial about Russia, but their coverage of, say, Latin America was pretty good quality. People said similar things about Al Jazeera, but how many people actually were aware that they were state media? I wasn't for a long time, and I still can't remember the country offhand without looking it up. I'm not saying that they made it a big secret, and I'm not saying that it is shocking that "Russia Today" is what it is, but I dunno, why did KFC start using its initials or Dunkin change its name? Marketers know there is a benefit to not saying words like "Russia", "Fried", or "Donuts" because a significant number of people will not think of them. And it doesn't make sense to assume that bias towards something can't affect reporting on anything else, because everything is interrelated.
      - the_af 5y ago
        Well, I like that Al Jazeera exists and their coverage of many things was good. That RT is "state sponsored" or "funded partly by the Russian state" was plastered all over YouTube, Twitter, etc. Why was that not enough? I know for a fact RT's coverage of current affairs in Latin America was pretty good. The "interrelated" argument is dangerous, because it cuts both ways -- Western news media wouldn't escape unscathed, for example.
- kradeelav 5y ago
  Long time ago, it was a pretty decent (not perfect) place to get news internationally, especially when it related to War on Terror information that certain US corporations didn't want to touch.
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  Now turn around and tell me that you’re not being sold propaganda by your local news services
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    my local news services might support american imperialism to some degree, but I dont think they’re compelled to avoid criticism of the government entirely… I also don’t think they run government-provided stories
uniformlyrandom 5y ago
I get the argument. Not everything on RT is a 100% propaganda. Maybe the low watermark is around 60% (as defined by Dr. Joseph Goebbels), and this channel accounted for the majority of the content in that 60%. However, the world is currently at war with Nazi Russia. At war, you do not risk reviewing the enemy propaganda content. You block anything related to this propaganda, and deal with it later. Sorry. Also, you should have picked your friends better. Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about.
- the_af 5y ago
  Not everything in RT is propaganda, indeed. The Spanish language edition is pretty good, and its affiliated podcasts such as Ahi Les Va are definitely good and are very insightful about Spanish language events and politics. All of it has been blocked/blacklisted. Very sad.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lamp987 5y ago
  "However, the world is currently at war with Nazi Russia. At war, you do not risk reviewing the enemy propaganda content. You block anything related to this propaganda, and deal with it later. Sorry." "Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about." Maybe thats why your mentality considers it fine?
- yucky 5y ago
  >Nazi Russia The Azov Battalion is Russian?
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    Sigh.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    Your username is very appropriate.
gameswithgo 5y ago
pmalynin 5y ago
I waffled on my response to this piece, or rather if it even deserved one. First of all, you are not disappeared -- just by the mere fact of you being able to post this. Want to give it a go and redeem yourself? Try writing some anti-war stuff in Moscow (you can even join your role-model). Second, you are not Edward Snowden. And your comparison to him in the latter parts of the article do not do your point any justice. You risk very little by posting this, whereas Mr. Snowden became exiled from his home country by exposing illegal surveillance and is now wanted for treason. Third, pick better friends and maybe don't work for propaganda outlets? I'm no saint myself, and I understand sometimes you have to put food on the table. But don't claim you're innocent (no snowflake ever feels responsible in avalanche, as the saying goes). Move on, do something better and be remembered for doing good things?
- pdonis 5y ago
  > you are not disappeared -- just be the mere fact of you being able to post this Exactly. So YouTube no longer has his shows. Doesn't he have his own copies? Can't he post them wherever he wants?
  - fphhotchips 5y ago
    So many people use YouTube as their archive - particularly if they're naive about their relationship with YouTube. He may not have his own copies. This doesn't necessarily imply total naivety - plenty of journalists would be used to it being the publisher's role to archive the work, not their own.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      As a content producer it’s baffling to me when people don’t have local backups of exports and original media. Storage has never been cheaper. 3-2-1 is so easy to implement.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      YouTube isn't the publisher in this case: RT is. I would be extremely surprised if they don't have their own copies.
lettergram 5y ago
I’m a free speech absolutist - i.e. I believe in the first amendment, including the idea it should protect you from corporations. If you host a public square you must allow the speech. There’s a very simple reason for that, freedom comes at a price. The price is an open, but critical mind. It would and is easy to silence opposition, it has been done for the past few years increasingly in the US. Truly it’s been happening even longer, the internet changed that dramatically. To those that say “it’s enemy propaganda” who’s the enemy? Those striping you of rights — no? It’s fair to argue aggressors in a conflict are an enemy as well. Both can be true.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Free speech absolutism has literally never been a thing anywhere on this planet at any time in the history of the world because it is neither thoughtful nor practical.
  - revscat 5y ago
    I am quite certain they do not oppose laws against making false statements to investigators, lying about income/losses on tax returns or shareholder reports, making violent threats, and etc. As you say, there are no free speech absolutists.
    - paskozdilar 5y ago
      Those things are unlawful because of the effect they directly cause to the real world. Speech, in general, is just sharing information - it does not cause any direct effect on the real world (actions of other people with whom we have shared the information do not count as direct effects, or otherwise the legal system would get really messy).
      - vharuck 5y ago
        >Speech, in general, is just sharing information - it does not cause any direct effect on the real world If this were true, free speech wouldn't be worth defending or even debating. Speech has effects, which makes it valuable.
fphhotchips 5y ago
There are two points to make here: 1. If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, because Google has made it more than clear there's no guarantee they'll do it for you forever. 2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that. People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so, and YouTube has made it very clear that they can and will bounce you whenever they like. As of today, you are entitled to free speech, but no one has to give you their soapbox to stand on. I think there's a valid conversation to be had about whether that's how it should be, but I don't think this article is that.
- rektide 5y ago
  > If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation. I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics. On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics. All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are. Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae [2] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
patchtopic 5y ago
you should compare notes with Anna Politkovskaya about this
paxys 5y ago
So a self proclaimed critic of American imperialism and corporate control is complaining that a trillion dollar American corporation won't help him spread his message. No, you haven't been "disappeared". Your content still exists. YouTube just doesn't owe you anything. Go find somewhere else to distribute it. In fact try being a free thinker in your beloved Russia and see how far that gets you.
- tejohnso 5y ago
  > Go find somewhere else to distribute it When all of the major distribution systems exclude anyone that is not aligned toward accepted narratives, this becomes less and less feasible. And so the question remains "Are we a more informed and better society because of this censorship?"
- lamp987 5y ago
- rob74 5y ago
  TBF, he writes "I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow." Now, of course I didn't know Havel, but while he may have had "no love for the policies of Washington", he did want to make his country more democratic and liberate it from Russian influence. So I don't think these mental gymnastics really justify producing a show that provides legitimacy to a channel that spreads Russian propaganda, amplifies conspiracy theories and promotes Russian imperialism (which, as opposed to US imperialism, he seems to be Ok with).
- throwaway15908 5y ago
  Free thinking means not projecting your prejudices by affiliation and extracting meaning even from biased sources. Just to clarify.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    It also means having the wherewithal to take the source's prejudices and priors into account, as part and parcel of the meaning and intent you glean from the true portion of their argument. Which is to say, any true thing spoken by an American shill for RT has to also be considered for what specific purpose its inclusion on that channel serves. To accept information without understanding the purpose and bias behind it is even worse than not knowing anything at all.
seaourfreed 5y ago
Elon Musk needs to create competitors to Twitter / YouTube / Reddit that won't censor people like Twitter / YouTube / Reddit does.
- wavefunction 5y ago
  If it was that easy someone would have done it already. Just for the ad revenue or whatever.
  - duxup 5y ago
    Yeah I also think people really don’t want / don’t value for a platform where anything goes.
    - x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
      People do, but advertisers don't. It doesn't help that these "anything goes" platforms pretty much devolve into right-wing themed racist gathering points at best, or a den of scams and prosecutorially interesting media.
      - Forgeties79 5y ago
        I’m sure the FBI has made fantastic use of Gab, VOAT, etc.
    - 542458 5y ago
      I think it’s also that such a service would be wildly unprofitable. Almost nobody wants to advertise over ISIS beheadings. LiveLeak existed, but eventually shut down due to not being profitable.
      - duxup 5y ago
        > Almost nobody wants to advertise over ISIS beheadings I sure wouldn’t. I’m also pretty sure many people don’t want to see it. It’s really hard to get around a lot of aspects of an anything goes forums.
sandworm101 5y ago
"Disappeared" is not the correct word. People who are disappeared dont write stories about it. If a journalist writes of a witness being disappeared it means a body is rotting in some swamp, not moaning about loss of personal data. It means that a political dissident got on the helicopter, but didnt step off at the destination. This article is about simple de-platforming. Leave the hyperbolic homicide terminology alone.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  > People who are disappeared dont write stories about it. Solzhenitsyn. Checkmate.
  - na85 5y ago
    Being disappeared is a different phenomenon than being sent to the gulag. People knew (in the general sense) where Solzhenitsyn was and why.
- coffeeblack 5y ago
  Being disappeared doesn’t always refer to murder. For instance, Ma Yun (Jack Ma) was disappeared for some time last year.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    Depends a lot on context. Here in Chile, you can't be a poindexter with technicalities when people whose dictionaries were incinerated along with all their other books tell you of their uncle's (usually uncles) tragedies. But in this context, HN, it's fine. And you're right in many ways. So in fact the way Chilean human rights lawyers nailed some, but not all, of the military (but not civilian) torturers of the coup despite their amnesty when the military lost power, was by saying, well you have amnesty, but you don't have the body, so you can't prove you murdered him some time ago, for all we know he's still alive and you're kidnapping him to this day, so it's an ongoing crime, so you're still on the hook. Maybe his family is right in hoping he comes back any day now. And you deliberately wanted the family to hope that, you had decades to tell them you really were terrorising them. Or maybe you weren't, maybe he's in some attic in a jail somewhere, caught in a secret passage in a dungeon (real life dungeon adventure! real secret passages, traps, monsters, minibosses and final bosses!) but you lost track. Oh you looked twice? Look again! Looked again? Look again! And the subtext is "fuck you, obviously you're an asshole. You put remains into the subduction zone, you must accept the consequences of your actions, if you want to see the light of day again you'll have to take a submarine and then dig, dig with your hands and nails you piece of shit, until you find the body and bring it back. And don't resurface until you find it. If you don't like that, maybe you should have given him a funeral and informed the family of his death."
roca 5y ago
Complaining about censorship when you've thrown in with the Russian state media is just absurd. Here's an experiment for Chris Hedges: try doing a show on RT denouncing Putin and his war on Ukraine. At the very least RT will do exactly what Youtube has done and refuse to carry it. Or how about doing a show on RT denouncing the much worse censorship going on inside Russia right now? Hedges is practically the definition of the "useful idiot".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- drewcoo 5y ago
  RT allowed editorial control; it was not controlled by the Russian government. It allowed people effectively blacklisted by US mainstream media to have an outlet. I think the talking heads who parrot government propaganda, stenographers to the powerful, on CNN or MSNBC would closer fit the definition of "useful idiot."
  - roca 5y ago
    Of course RT is controlled by the Russian government. Can you find Zelensky's recent interview with Russian journalists on RT?
chris_wot 5y ago
So... perhaps it could be republished on another platform? This is hardly being "disappeared".
noduerme 5y ago
- p1necone 5y ago
  I really don't understand the audience for articles like this. It's so blatantly disingenuous, and just... stupid. I guess there's a lot of suckers in the world who fall for stuff like this though.
- jzb 5y ago
  More people need to read “Mother Night.” “We are what we pretend to be.”
- yucky 5y ago
  >RT, the propaganda organ of a totalitarian state which has currently banned the entire YouTube site. In all honesty though - RT banned YouTube, and YouTube banned RT. Why would one be ok and the other not?
  - noduerme 5y ago
    RT didn't block Youtube. The Russian government did. And up until the minute it did, RT continued to make money from advertising on it. The reason one would be okay and the other wouldn't be is, to the extent that RT is a "private" enterprise, it's their right to determine what content is on their own platform, just as it's Youtube's right to determine what content is on theirs. It is not the government's right (in a free society) to determine what sites citizens can or cannot access. RT's actual website with videos is still available in America.
- mathlover2 5y ago
  > What a wonderful person. I agree with the sarcasm here, but I must elaborate on how terrible a person Mr. Hedges is. There's a whole saga behind how he went from being a noted journalist to whining on Substack, and I've been tracking it for quite some time. * First came the plagiarism revelations, which are detailed quite nicely here: https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer-winner-lefty-hero-plagiarist https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer... * Then came the self-plagiarism revelations (many of his Truthdig columns are rewarmed passages from his books). He's apparently also been editing his own Wikipedia page to remove critism, and at one point got into an edit war with another longstanding contributor. All the while, he's called Wikipedia a "tool of the elite". https://twitter.com/Mathlover2/status/1499650487481683968?s=20&t=sW8kf_bIoxqbTlrLtoEZpA https://twitter.com/Mathlover2/status/1499650487481683968?s=... * Finally, we have his aforementioned show on RT. While it may not be on YouTube, it's still very much available on rt.com, which I can access from the US as of this writing, and which allows people to download individual episodes.
allears 5y ago
There are many naive and misinformed posters in these comments, as well as many thoughtful ones. The basic truth is, you are entitled to free speech in the US, but you are not entitled to a platform from which to speak it. This is especially true if the platform is privately owned, as just about all platforms are. (I can't think of an exception offhand.) It doesn't matter in the slightest if some platform has monopolized the market. They are still not obliged to carry your speech. End of story.
- csande17 5y ago
  YouTube is allowed to make content moderation decisions, and we are allowed to talk about why we think it's wrong for them to make the decisions they did. Or, to slightly paraphrase another pro-censorship cliche, freedom not to carry someone's speech is not freedom from consequences.
mdoms 5y ago
Oh no, this Russian propaganda is no longer available on Youtube. How sad.
duxup 5y ago
I grow weary of people comparing not reviving free services from private companies to serious violations of human rights. Even more so from someone who has associated themself with a media outlet created by a despotic nation who is busy violating human rights.
patientplatypus 5y ago
Lazare 5y ago
It does seem problematic that on some level we treat YouTube (and Twitter, and to a lesser extent other platforms like Spotify) as a sort of public square or generic "communications utilities"; the default virtual place we go to hear and be heard, open to all. Of course, as they exist now, they are technically and legally nothing of the sort, which is a big reason why this specific complaint is tedious, absurd, and self refuting. Obviously he wasn't "disappeared", obviously there's no right beyond the terms of whatever contracts you have signed for arbitrary corporations to host video files for you, obviously all those videos he claims are "gone" still exist on the internet (hosted by a different corporation, at least for now...), obviously almost all of his claims are factually wrong. Still... ...it feels like it'd be nice if we did have something a bit like the YouTube (and Twitter, and Apple App Store, and Spotify, etc.) that he seems to vaguely imagine exists? If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website. That's good! And yet almost every other area I look, I see walled gardens and closed platforms that can (and do) censor their users at a drop of the hat. I don't know if the Fediverse, as it exists today, is a step towards a solution for this, but man, I think we need one.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- noduerme 5y ago
  Storing and serving other people's videos still costs money. Suppose we're all just doing this on a federated basis one day, decentralized and anonymous. Shouldn't we each have a right to know what we're paying to host? Just because I'm willing to leave a server on seeding esoteric documentaries from the 50s doesn't mean I'm willing to let people use it to spread hate speech or child porn or whatever someone thinks they have a "right" to be heard saying. It is a shame that control of major channels tends to become centralized and ultimately that weakens free speech on those platforms, but this is a cyclical process. When one falls, there's a period of anarchy before another arises. The underlying reason is that most people don't have the time or patience to run their own servers, so they delegate that, but they also expect whoever they delegate it to to follow certain basic principles, and those become harder to enforce as it scales without causing the initial freedom of the platform to deteriorate. Like, Elon's idea of making a more free Twitter, or someone else who launches a no-holds-barred Youtube, just won't gain traction right now. That's not because they're going to be suppressed by a hidden cabal bent on silencing unpopular speech. It's because the majority of people who currently delegate the task of weeding out bad things to Youtube are more or less okay with people like this guy being removed. If or when that changes, something else will rise up in its place, but it's doubtful that such a platform won't run into the exact same problems a few years later.
gumby 5y ago
Was it preserved on archive.org? The government doesnt want things that allow a Russian entity to profit from it, and YouTube decided to take the same tack. But, without ads paying RT, I doubt any attempt would be made to remove it from the way back machine. In fact I wonder why YouTube didn’t just remove ads from that content.
somishere 5y ago
Interesting that this post is now flagged, or "disappeared" from HN. Shame, as the conversation around it is enlightening. Just wondering, do people think it's OK to curtail reasoned discussion around a topic prompted by a post of this nature?
- yucky 5y ago
  >do people think it's OK to curtail reasoned discussion Yes, this has become the norm, and pretty quickly.
  - hnov 5y ago
    In particular, the level of discourse (and diversity of position on divisive topics) on HN has been trending towards reddit in my opinion.
- aunty_helen 5y ago
- mathlover2 5y ago
  What are you talking about? I got here from the front page seconds ago where it was featured.
  - somishere 5y ago
    My comment was from 3 hours ago when the post was flagged and disappeared from the front page. Looks like it's been unflagged since :) Question still stands.
    - mathlover2 5y ago
      I wouldn't know. Sorry :)
    - mistermann 5y ago
      From rereading this whole thread now, I notice that about 90% of the commenters are only interested in 2 or 3 of the hundreds of attributes involved in this situation. It's amazing the lack of diversity in thought, and the amount/rate of simple, unforced(?) cognitive errors, on a site with such relatively high intellect. I think something important and unseen is going on here.
joeman1000 5y ago
Why butcher language like this? Your videos were deleted, you were censored. I get that it’s cute to say you’re ‘adulting’ and got ‘disappeared’ but please stop.
- sdoering 5y ago
  He did not get censored. Did the US government force YouTube to delete his stuff? I doubt it. It was the (probably algorithmic) decision of a private entity not to provide free hosting and traffic for something they didn't like. Can we please not denigrate real censorship victims because someone felt entitled to YouTube hosting and spreading their stuff? Maybe banned, deplatformed or something like this. But technically (and legally) only government can censor you. At least in my jurisdiction free sprach protection does protect you "only" against the government. They are not allowed to use censorship. A private entity doesn't need to accept you on its platform. To me at least that is quite a difference.
  - hnov 5y ago
    So if you privatize censorship it ceases to exist?
    - sdoering 5y ago
      No. If a government censors it is censorship. Regardless if it forces a private entity to do so or does it themselves But me showing someone the door because they state that vaccination causes autism is not censorship. Just as an example. There is a clear distinction between the two.
andrewstuart 5y ago
It probably wasn't even a choice some person at Google made, it was just a computer program deciding that this show is over. There's no sign at all that Google has the slightest interest in its many years of abusing its customers and users. When true competitive choices arise to Google products, people will jump at them. The real outcome here is that Google must offer creators the ability to backup/download their videos. Does that exist already? There might be an opportunity for a startup to create a service that downloads YouTube videos as backups for the owners of the channels.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  The creators have, or had, all of the data when they uploaded the video to have it mangled by YouTube. Why would they throw out the masters, and why should YouTube (or anyone else) be in the business of worrying if creators still have their masters? Here we are again, counselling users to backup their own shit...20+ years later they are now using someone else's computer to store files and act dumbfounded when their data is lost.
  - ai_ja_nai 5y ago
    Doesn't this apply at least to live streamed data? I mean, is there content that is born right on the plaftform without masters? Just asking
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      Yes, but the streaming client can capture a master...and should.
Projectiboga 5y ago
So he didn't keep copies of his own work and we are supposed to feel bad he didn't have an offline back up? Nope, he messed up.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  RT will still have all the original files. He can just pay Vimeo to host them, or stick them on Rumble. If he thinks the content needs to be seen that badly he can do something about it.
sdoering 5y ago
This piece lost me the moment I saw the image created to visualize the content. The big "censored" banner across made me instantly regret clicking it. If people, and (I need to use it here) so called "journalists" don't know the difference between a private corporation and a nation state I just can't tske anything they produce seriously. You can't be censored by YouTube. You can be deplatformed if you would like to call it that way. But until a government forced YouTube to not show your content to their citizens you are not being censored. The outcome might be the same, but there is still a structural difference between me showing someone the door as I don't like what they say on my platform and the government coming and gagging them. Maybe I am just to sensitive to the usage of the term, but imho it denigrates the victims of actual censorship.
- lukeholder 5y ago
  If the government is the instrument that directs/coerces the private corporations. Is it really the private corporations doing the de-platforming?
  - noduerme 5y ago
    That's how it works in Russia and China. It's not how it works in the West. Corporations here have fiduciary responsibility and are beholden to their shareholders. To the extent government tells them to do anything, it's a big public fight in front of elected officials who we (citizens and shareholders) can also vote out of office and replace. That cannot and does not happen in dictatorships, so in China, for example, the government tells corporations what to do. That is not the case in America. I'll allow that the situation in Australia is a lot cozier when it comes to certain things like mining, but the Australian government has literally zero control over Youtube, so the argument falls flat.
    - juanani 5y ago
- deodorel 5y ago
  Often when I look at how us works it seems to me that a lot of political action, censorship and coercion is privatised there, so it looks superficially like you have more degrees of freedom because you are limited by private actors and not the state.
vvendigo 5y ago
Old saying: "caught together, hanged together."
ttybird2 5y ago
I am wondering if Stallman's appearances on FT have also been removed from RT and if they have been archived.
noduerme 5y ago
This came up in several subcomments, but it's worth a headline: RT.com and its videos, and this guy's show, are still available and streaming in America, while all of YouTube is banned in Russia.
- hnov 5y ago
  On one hand YouTube and rt.com are both websites... on the other hand one is the #1 platform for discovering long form video content on the planet while the other is a website, so it stands to reason that being deplatformed from YouTube is similar to having packets to YouTube get blackholed.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    on the other other hand, one is sponsored by a government that maintains the world's largest strategic nuclear arsenal, and the other is a publicly traded company. Seriously though - Russia banned Youtube throughout the country. Youtube banned a channel. America banned nothing. How is removing a channel from your own website even remotely similar to blackholing packets on a national network?
    - hnov 5y ago
      The technical minutia is mostly irrelevant though, if the next generation of "the internet" is IP->TCP->TLS->HTTP->YouTube, getting punted from YouTube is effectively getting punted off the internet. I see incredible symmetry in the two actions once you look past organizational differences: Youtube is censoring videos and channels that run counter to the Western narrative, for the purposes of this conflict Youtube is a Western mouthpiece, Roskomnadzor bans all of Youtube. The Russian government shapes the content that RT publishes especially as it pertains to Russia, for anything that pertains to Russia, RT is a mouthpiece, Youtube bans all of RT. The difference in the above is that one actor is a private entity and the other a government agency.
      - noduerme 5y ago
        It's not technical minutiae, it's the difference between government censorship and private property rights. Almost all web traffic follows the pattern you laid out, and almost none of it in the US is broken in that pattern. Having your content hosted on the end service is entirely up to who runs the end service, and entirely outside the control of democratic government. And it's a privilege, not a right. Would you have our government force Youtube to host content it's decided it doesn't want to host?! I suppose if your understanding of the world were as simplistic as that of someone who believed RT, you would just assume government makes everything up and creates corporations as shells to put out their message. That's not how it works in the free world. Youtube is just one site in Russia. RT is one site in America. RT is not banned in America. Does RT let me post anything I want about Ukraine on their website? When they do, let us know.
strathmeyer 5y ago
If the videos were posted straight to YouTube they would never have been deleted.
krnlpnc 5y ago
Deplatformed, not disappeared. Freedom of speech is not protected within the context of corporate employment. Say or do something that crosses advertisers, people in power or generally the wrong persons and you’ll be fired. Same applies to creators who effectively work for youtube. If they care so much about making this info available then time to re-upload to a new distributor.
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
You weren't disappeared or censored, Chris. If you were, we couldn't hear you calling yourself a victim. Sorry working for foreign governments cost you your free hosting. Upload it somewhere else. We spend way too much time pretending that people have some kind of right to be on a private platform.
tedmiston 5y ago
I'm not familiar with the author, but I see he's well known enough to have a Wikipedia page [1]. I just can't help but to appreciate the irony of complaining about censorship on one major tech platform while publishing on another major tech platform. It seems Substack is much looser on censorship than other social media, but at the end of the day, anyone can be "deplatformed" from any managed service / platform for many reasons at any time, and they may never even find out why. Why not run your own (e.g., Ghost) instance and mitigate that risk to protect your content and business upfront? > I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges
bob2222 5y ago
bradgranath 5y ago
Julian Assange still gets occasional contact with the outside world. Julian Assange has yet to be 'dissappeared'. You sir, are talking to us from your SubStack. Which still pays you money. YouTube kicked you off? Line up behind all the devs who've lost their livelihoods because a bot hicupped.

158 points by k1m 5y ago

ycombigator 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

micromacrofoot 5y ago

RT is a Russian propaganda outlet, no? why in the world would you ever publish a podcast with them?

ridruejo 5y ago
He explains it in the article
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Not really! If I was “blacklisted” I wouldn’t just jump to a worse bad actor. Out of the pot and right into a gigantic bonfire.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  What he explains is he chose poor bedfellows, unfortunately.
davidw 5y ago
> I was on RT because, as a critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. Looks like he ended up throwing in with en even more imperialistic, militaristic one party crowd.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  There was no "throwing in" as he said "not one show that dealt with Russia."
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Your content can deal with Russian interests without dealing with Russia.
    - aunty_helen 5y ago
      Hey Marty :) hope you’re well. Saying that though, it’s not a necessity and it’s his show to to cover the topics he wants. Other people in this thread telling him what he should’ve covered to make himself less of a target for censorship… smh.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - mdoms 5y ago
        Hello Helen :) I'm very well thank you.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
There's a special niche of perpetually online people who pretend to be liberals while simultaneously entertaining virtually every thought that the alt-right Russian media complex has to push. You'll know them when you see them because they inevitably end as regular guests up on Fox News' primetime shows.
- mbg721 5y ago
  Like, yikes.
- usbline 5y ago
  You clearly have no idea who Chris Hedges is, and it shows.
- kristofferR 5y ago
  Chris Hedges is far from a liberal, he's more of the "everything wrong Russia does is NATO's fault" type of guy.
rodgerd 5y ago
1. You're a tankie (in which case, good riddance). 2. You're an anti-Western contrarian. 3. You've got sound criticisms of the US, NATO, etc, and haven't thought about how you can end up a useful idiot (see also: Ed Snowden).
- the_af 5y ago
  None of these are good arguments for blocking/deplatforming. "Being a useful idiot" or a "contrarian" is subjective. And don't Western democracies, the US foremost, congratulate themselves on always allowing contrarian points of view? It's in their DNA... allegedly.
- ttybird2 5y ago
  A useful idiot? He is an idiot only if you consider heroic acts that reveal unjust violations of the rights to privacy and protection from unwarranted searches as well as the sabotage of public standards and the infiltration of their organization bodies as "idiotic". If anything he showed his loyalty to the residents of America and to a lesser extend to these of Europe.
btilly 5y ago
Actually they worked to deliver high quality content on anything which didn't directly impinge on Russian interests. Granted, they did it to give their propaganda more respectability. But most of it was not propaganda. It can be thought of as the Russian attempt to create an equivalent to Al-Jazeera and the BBC.
- the_af 5y ago
  Agreed. They are not impartial about Russia, but their coverage of, say, Latin America was pretty good quality. "Not being impartial about Russia" isn't a crime. Even not being truthful about Russia isn't a crime. If it were, a lot of mainstream Western media conglomerates should be banned. I really don't get the need to block access to any news channel or conglomerate, no matter who funds them or what's their agenda. I don't want Fox News to be banned, either.
  - vba616 5y ago
    >Agreed. They are not impartial about Russia, but their coverage of, say, Latin America was pretty good quality. People said similar things about Al Jazeera, but how many people actually were aware that they were state media? I wasn't for a long time, and I still can't remember the country offhand without looking it up. I'm not saying that they made it a big secret, and I'm not saying that it is shocking that "Russia Today" is what it is, but I dunno, why did KFC start using its initials or Dunkin change its name? Marketers know there is a benefit to not saying words like "Russia", "Fried", or "Donuts" because a significant number of people will not think of them. And it doesn't make sense to assume that bias towards something can't affect reporting on anything else, because everything is interrelated.
    - the_af 5y ago
      Well, I like that Al Jazeera exists and their coverage of many things was good. That RT is "state sponsored" or "funded partly by the Russian state" was plastered all over YouTube, Twitter, etc. Why was that not enough? I know for a fact RT's coverage of current affairs in Latin America was pretty good. The "interrelated" argument is dangerous, because it cuts both ways -- Western news media wouldn't escape unscathed, for example.
kradeelav 5y ago
Long time ago, it was a pretty decent (not perfect) place to get news internationally, especially when it related to War on Terror information that certain US corporations didn't want to touch.
aunty_helen 5y ago
Now turn around and tell me that you’re not being sold propaganda by your local news services
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  my local news services might support american imperialism to some degree, but I dont think they’re compelled to avoid criticism of the government entirely… I also don’t think they run government-provided stories

uniformlyrandom 5y ago

I get the argument. Not everything on RT is a 100% propaganda. Maybe the low watermark is around 60% (as defined by Dr. Joseph Goebbels), and this channel accounted for the majority of the content in that 60%. However, the world is currently at war with Nazi Russia. At war, you do not risk reviewing the enemy propaganda content. You block anything related to this propaganda, and deal with it later. Sorry. Also, you should have picked your friends better. Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about.

the_af 5y ago
Not everything in RT is propaganda, indeed. The Spanish language edition is pretty good, and its affiliated podcasts such as Ahi Les Va are definitely good and are very insightful about Spanish language events and politics. All of it has been blocked/blacklisted. Very sad.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lamp987 5y ago
"However, the world is currently at war with Nazi Russia. At war, you do not risk reviewing the enemy propaganda content. You block anything related to this propaganda, and deal with it later. Sorry." "Disclaimer: I am Russian. I know wtf I am talking about." Maybe thats why your mentality considers it fine?
yucky 5y ago
>Nazi Russia The Azov Battalion is Russian?
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  Sigh.
- Forgeties79 5y ago
  Your username is very appropriate.

gameswithgo 5y ago

pmalynin 5y ago

I waffled on my response to this piece, or rather if it even deserved one. First of all, you are not disappeared -- just by the mere fact of you being able to post this. Want to give it a go and redeem yourself? Try writing some anti-war stuff in Moscow (you can even join your role-model). Second, you are not Edward Snowden. And your comparison to him in the latter parts of the article do not do your point any justice. You risk very little by posting this, whereas Mr. Snowden became exiled from his home country by exposing illegal surveillance and is now wanted for treason. Third, pick better friends and maybe don't work for propaganda outlets? I'm no saint myself, and I understand sometimes you have to put food on the table. But don't claim you're innocent (no snowflake ever feels responsible in avalanche, as the saying goes). Move on, do something better and be remembered for doing good things?

pdonis 5y ago
> you are not disappeared -- just be the mere fact of you being able to post this Exactly. So YouTube no longer has his shows. Doesn't he have his own copies? Can't he post them wherever he wants?
- fphhotchips 5y ago
  So many people use YouTube as their archive - particularly if they're naive about their relationship with YouTube. He may not have his own copies. This doesn't necessarily imply total naivety - plenty of journalists would be used to it being the publisher's role to archive the work, not their own.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    As a content producer it’s baffling to me when people don’t have local backups of exports and original media. Storage has never been cheaper. 3-2-1 is so easy to implement.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    YouTube isn't the publisher in this case: RT is. I would be extremely surprised if they don't have their own copies.

lettergram 5y ago

I’m a free speech absolutist - i.e. I believe in the first amendment, including the idea it should protect you from corporations. If you host a public square you must allow the speech. There’s a very simple reason for that, freedom comes at a price. The price is an open, but critical mind. It would and is easy to silence opposition, it has been done for the past few years increasingly in the US. Truly it’s been happening even longer, the internet changed that dramatically. To those that say “it’s enemy propaganda” who’s the enemy? Those striping you of rights — no? It’s fair to argue aggressors in a conflict are an enemy as well. Both can be true.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Free speech absolutism has literally never been a thing anywhere on this planet at any time in the history of the world because it is neither thoughtful nor practical.
- revscat 5y ago
  I am quite certain they do not oppose laws against making false statements to investigators, lying about income/losses on tax returns or shareholder reports, making violent threats, and etc. As you say, there are no free speech absolutists.
  - paskozdilar 5y ago
    Those things are unlawful because of the effect they directly cause to the real world. Speech, in general, is just sharing information - it does not cause any direct effect on the real world (actions of other people with whom we have shared the information do not count as direct effects, or otherwise the legal system would get really messy).
    - vharuck 5y ago
      >Speech, in general, is just sharing information - it does not cause any direct effect on the real world If this were true, free speech wouldn't be worth defending or even debating. Speech has effects, which makes it valuable.

fphhotchips 5y ago

There are two points to make here: 1. If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, because Google has made it more than clear there's no guarantee they'll do it for you forever. 2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that. People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so, and YouTube has made it very clear that they can and will bounce you whenever they like. As of today, you are entitled to free speech, but no one has to give you their soapbox to stand on. I think there's a valid conversation to be had about whether that's how it should be, but I don't think this article is that.

rektide 5y ago
> If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation. I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics. On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics. All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are. Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae [2] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

patchtopic 5y ago

you should compare notes with Anna Politkovskaya about this

paxys 5y ago

So a self proclaimed critic of American imperialism and corporate control is complaining that a trillion dollar American corporation won't help him spread his message. No, you haven't been "disappeared". Your content still exists. YouTube just doesn't owe you anything. Go find somewhere else to distribute it. In fact try being a free thinker in your beloved Russia and see how far that gets you.

tejohnso 5y ago
> Go find somewhere else to distribute it When all of the major distribution systems exclude anyone that is not aligned toward accepted narratives, this becomes less and less feasible. And so the question remains "Are we a more informed and better society because of this censorship?"
lamp987 5y ago
rob74 5y ago
TBF, he writes "I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow." Now, of course I didn't know Havel, but while he may have had "no love for the policies of Washington", he did want to make his country more democratic and liberate it from Russian influence. So I don't think these mental gymnastics really justify producing a show that provides legitimacy to a channel that spreads Russian propaganda, amplifies conspiracy theories and promotes Russian imperialism (which, as opposed to US imperialism, he seems to be Ok with).
throwaway15908 5y ago
Free thinking means not projecting your prejudices by affiliation and extracting meaning even from biased sources. Just to clarify.
- noduerme 5y ago
  It also means having the wherewithal to take the source's prejudices and priors into account, as part and parcel of the meaning and intent you glean from the true portion of their argument. Which is to say, any true thing spoken by an American shill for RT has to also be considered for what specific purpose its inclusion on that channel serves. To accept information without understanding the purpose and bias behind it is even worse than not knowing anything at all.

seaourfreed 5y ago

Elon Musk needs to create competitors to Twitter / YouTube / Reddit that won't censor people like Twitter / YouTube / Reddit does.

wavefunction 5y ago
If it was that easy someone would have done it already. Just for the ad revenue or whatever.
- duxup 5y ago
  Yeah I also think people really don’t want / don’t value for a platform where anything goes.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    People do, but advertisers don't. It doesn't help that these "anything goes" platforms pretty much devolve into right-wing themed racist gathering points at best, or a den of scams and prosecutorially interesting media.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      I’m sure the FBI has made fantastic use of Gab, VOAT, etc.
  - 542458 5y ago
    I think it’s also that such a service would be wildly unprofitable. Almost nobody wants to advertise over ISIS beheadings. LiveLeak existed, but eventually shut down due to not being profitable.
    - duxup 5y ago
      > Almost nobody wants to advertise over ISIS beheadings I sure wouldn’t. I’m also pretty sure many people don’t want to see it. It’s really hard to get around a lot of aspects of an anything goes forums.

sandworm101 5y ago

"Disappeared" is not the correct word. People who are disappeared dont write stories about it. If a journalist writes of a witness being disappeared it means a body is rotting in some swamp, not moaning about loss of personal data. It means that a political dissident got on the helicopter, but didnt step off at the destination. This article is about simple de-platforming. Leave the hyperbolic homicide terminology alone.

drewcoo 5y ago
> People who are disappeared dont write stories about it. Solzhenitsyn. Checkmate.
- na85 5y ago
  Being disappeared is a different phenomenon than being sent to the gulag. People knew (in the general sense) where Solzhenitsyn was and why.
coffeeblack 5y ago
Being disappeared doesn’t always refer to murder. For instance, Ma Yun (Jack Ma) was disappeared for some time last year.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Depends a lot on context. Here in Chile, you can't be a poindexter with technicalities when people whose dictionaries were incinerated along with all their other books tell you of their uncle's (usually uncles) tragedies. But in this context, HN, it's fine. And you're right in many ways. So in fact the way Chilean human rights lawyers nailed some, but not all, of the military (but not civilian) torturers of the coup despite their amnesty when the military lost power, was by saying, well you have amnesty, but you don't have the body, so you can't prove you murdered him some time ago, for all we know he's still alive and you're kidnapping him to this day, so it's an ongoing crime, so you're still on the hook. Maybe his family is right in hoping he comes back any day now. And you deliberately wanted the family to hope that, you had decades to tell them you really were terrorising them. Or maybe you weren't, maybe he's in some attic in a jail somewhere, caught in a secret passage in a dungeon (real life dungeon adventure! real secret passages, traps, monsters, minibosses and final bosses!) but you lost track. Oh you looked twice? Look again! Looked again? Look again! And the subtext is "fuck you, obviously you're an asshole. You put remains into the subduction zone, you must accept the consequences of your actions, if you want to see the light of day again you'll have to take a submarine and then dig, dig with your hands and nails you piece of shit, until you find the body and bring it back. And don't resurface until you find it. If you don't like that, maybe you should have given him a funeral and informed the family of his death."

roca 5y ago

Complaining about censorship when you've thrown in with the Russian state media is just absurd. Here's an experiment for Chris Hedges: try doing a show on RT denouncing Putin and his war on Ukraine. At the very least RT will do exactly what Youtube has done and refuse to carry it. Or how about doing a show on RT denouncing the much worse censorship going on inside Russia right now? Hedges is practically the definition of the "useful idiot".

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
drewcoo 5y ago
RT allowed editorial control; it was not controlled by the Russian government. It allowed people effectively blacklisted by US mainstream media to have an outlet. I think the talking heads who parrot government propaganda, stenographers to the powerful, on CNN or MSNBC would closer fit the definition of "useful idiot."
- roca 5y ago
  Of course RT is controlled by the Russian government. Can you find Zelensky's recent interview with Russian journalists on RT?

chris_wot 5y ago

So... perhaps it could be republished on another platform? This is hardly being "disappeared".

noduerme 5y ago

p1necone 5y ago
I really don't understand the audience for articles like this. It's so blatantly disingenuous, and just... stupid. I guess there's a lot of suckers in the world who fall for stuff like this though.
jzb 5y ago
More people need to read “Mother Night.” “We are what we pretend to be.”
yucky 5y ago
>RT, the propaganda organ of a totalitarian state which has currently banned the entire YouTube site. In all honesty though - RT banned YouTube, and YouTube banned RT. Why would one be ok and the other not?
- noduerme 5y ago
  RT didn't block Youtube. The Russian government did. And up until the minute it did, RT continued to make money from advertising on it. The reason one would be okay and the other wouldn't be is, to the extent that RT is a "private" enterprise, it's their right to determine what content is on their own platform, just as it's Youtube's right to determine what content is on theirs. It is not the government's right (in a free society) to determine what sites citizens can or cannot access. RT's actual website with videos is still available in America.
mathlover2 5y ago
> What a wonderful person. I agree with the sarcasm here, but I must elaborate on how terrible a person Mr. Hedges is. There's a whole saga behind how he went from being a noted journalist to whining on Substack, and I've been tracking it for quite some time. * First came the plagiarism revelations, which are detailed quite nicely here: https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer-winner-lefty-hero-plagiarist https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer... * Then came the self-plagiarism revelations (many of his Truthdig columns are rewarmed passages from his books). He's apparently also been editing his own Wikipedia page to remove critism, and at one point got into an edit war with another longstanding contributor. All the while, he's called Wikipedia a "tool of the elite". https://twitter.com/Mathlover2/status/1499650487481683968?s=20&t=sW8kf_bIoxqbTlrLtoEZpA https://twitter.com/Mathlover2/status/1499650487481683968?s=... * Finally, we have his aforementioned show on RT. While it may not be on YouTube, it's still very much available on rt.com, which I can access from the US as of this writing, and which allows people to download individual episodes.

allears 5y ago

There are many naive and misinformed posters in these comments, as well as many thoughtful ones. The basic truth is, you are entitled to free speech in the US, but you are not entitled to a platform from which to speak it. This is especially true if the platform is privately owned, as just about all platforms are. (I can't think of an exception offhand.) It doesn't matter in the slightest if some platform has monopolized the market. They are still not obliged to carry your speech. End of story.

csande17 5y ago
YouTube is allowed to make content moderation decisions, and we are allowed to talk about why we think it's wrong for them to make the decisions they did. Or, to slightly paraphrase another pro-censorship cliche, freedom not to carry someone's speech is not freedom from consequences.

mdoms 5y ago

Oh no, this Russian propaganda is no longer available on Youtube. How sad.

duxup 5y ago

I grow weary of people comparing not reviving free services from private companies to serious violations of human rights. Even more so from someone who has associated themself with a media outlet created by a despotic nation who is busy violating human rights.

patientplatypus 5y ago

Lazare 5y ago

It does seem problematic that on some level we treat YouTube (and Twitter, and to a lesser extent other platforms like Spotify) as a sort of public square or generic "communications utilities"; the default virtual place we go to hear and be heard, open to all. Of course, as they exist now, they are technically and legally nothing of the sort, which is a big reason why this specific complaint is tedious, absurd, and self refuting. Obviously he wasn't "disappeared", obviously there's no right beyond the terms of whatever contracts you have signed for arbitrary corporations to host video files for you, obviously all those videos he claims are "gone" still exist on the internet (hosted by a different corporation, at least for now...), obviously almost all of his claims are factually wrong. Still... ...it feels like it'd be nice if we did have something a bit like the YouTube (and Twitter, and Apple App Store, and Spotify, etc.) that he seems to vaguely imagine exists? If I want to post my thoughts on my own space on the internet I can still throw up a website. That's good! And yet almost every other area I look, I see walled gardens and closed platforms that can (and do) censor their users at a drop of the hat. I don't know if the Fediverse, as it exists today, is a step towards a solution for this, but man, I think we need one.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
noduerme 5y ago
Storing and serving other people's videos still costs money. Suppose we're all just doing this on a federated basis one day, decentralized and anonymous. Shouldn't we each have a right to know what we're paying to host? Just because I'm willing to leave a server on seeding esoteric documentaries from the 50s doesn't mean I'm willing to let people use it to spread hate speech or child porn or whatever someone thinks they have a "right" to be heard saying. It is a shame that control of major channels tends to become centralized and ultimately that weakens free speech on those platforms, but this is a cyclical process. When one falls, there's a period of anarchy before another arises. The underlying reason is that most people don't have the time or patience to run their own servers, so they delegate that, but they also expect whoever they delegate it to to follow certain basic principles, and those become harder to enforce as it scales without causing the initial freedom of the platform to deteriorate. Like, Elon's idea of making a more free Twitter, or someone else who launches a no-holds-barred Youtube, just won't gain traction right now. That's not because they're going to be suppressed by a hidden cabal bent on silencing unpopular speech. It's because the majority of people who currently delegate the task of weeding out bad things to Youtube are more or less okay with people like this guy being removed. If or when that changes, something else will rise up in its place, but it's doubtful that such a platform won't run into the exact same problems a few years later.

gumby 5y ago

Was it preserved on archive.org? The government doesnt want things that allow a Russian entity to profit from it, and YouTube decided to take the same tack. But, without ads paying RT, I doubt any attempt would be made to remove it from the way back machine. In fact I wonder why YouTube didn’t just remove ads from that content.

somishere 5y ago

Interesting that this post is now flagged, or "disappeared" from HN. Shame, as the conversation around it is enlightening. Just wondering, do people think it's OK to curtail reasoned discussion around a topic prompted by a post of this nature?

yucky 5y ago
>do people think it's OK to curtail reasoned discussion Yes, this has become the norm, and pretty quickly.
- hnov 5y ago
  In particular, the level of discourse (and diversity of position on divisive topics) on HN has been trending towards reddit in my opinion.
aunty_helen 5y ago
mathlover2 5y ago
What are you talking about? I got here from the front page seconds ago where it was featured.
- somishere 5y ago
  My comment was from 3 hours ago when the post was flagged and disappeared from the front page. Looks like it's been unflagged since :) Question still stands.
  - mathlover2 5y ago
    I wouldn't know. Sorry :)
  - mistermann 5y ago
    From rereading this whole thread now, I notice that about 90% of the commenters are only interested in 2 or 3 of the hundreds of attributes involved in this situation. It's amazing the lack of diversity in thought, and the amount/rate of simple, unforced(?) cognitive errors, on a site with such relatively high intellect. I think something important and unseen is going on here.

joeman1000 5y ago

Why butcher language like this? Your videos were deleted, you were censored. I get that it’s cute to say you’re ‘adulting’ and got ‘disappeared’ but please stop.

sdoering 5y ago
He did not get censored. Did the US government force YouTube to delete his stuff? I doubt it. It was the (probably algorithmic) decision of a private entity not to provide free hosting and traffic for something they didn't like. Can we please not denigrate real censorship victims because someone felt entitled to YouTube hosting and spreading their stuff? Maybe banned, deplatformed or something like this. But technically (and legally) only government can censor you. At least in my jurisdiction free sprach protection does protect you "only" against the government. They are not allowed to use censorship. A private entity doesn't need to accept you on its platform. To me at least that is quite a difference.
- hnov 5y ago
  So if you privatize censorship it ceases to exist?
  - sdoering 5y ago
    No. If a government censors it is censorship. Regardless if it forces a private entity to do so or does it themselves But me showing someone the door because they state that vaccination causes autism is not censorship. Just as an example. There is a clear distinction between the two.

andrewstuart 5y ago

It probably wasn't even a choice some person at Google made, it was just a computer program deciding that this show is over. There's no sign at all that Google has the slightest interest in its many years of abusing its customers and users. When true competitive choices arise to Google products, people will jump at them. The real outcome here is that Google must offer creators the ability to backup/download their videos. Does that exist already? There might be an opportunity for a startup to create a service that downloads YouTube videos as backups for the owners of the channels.

datavirtue 5y ago
The creators have, or had, all of the data when they uploaded the video to have it mangled by YouTube. Why would they throw out the masters, and why should YouTube (or anyone else) be in the business of worrying if creators still have their masters? Here we are again, counselling users to backup their own shit...20+ years later they are now using someone else's computer to store files and act dumbfounded when their data is lost.
- ai_ja_nai 5y ago
  Doesn't this apply at least to live streamed data? I mean, is there content that is born right on the plaftform without masters? Just asking
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Yes, but the streaming client can capture a master...and should.

Projectiboga 5y ago

So he didn't keep copies of his own work and we are supposed to feel bad he didn't have an offline back up? Nope, he messed up.

kingcharles 5y ago
RT will still have all the original files. He can just pay Vimeo to host them, or stick them on Rumble. If he thinks the content needs to be seen that badly he can do something about it.

sdoering 5y ago

This piece lost me the moment I saw the image created to visualize the content. The big "censored" banner across made me instantly regret clicking it. If people, and (I need to use it here) so called "journalists" don't know the difference between a private corporation and a nation state I just can't tske anything they produce seriously. You can't be censored by YouTube. You can be deplatformed if you would like to call it that way. But until a government forced YouTube to not show your content to their citizens you are not being censored. The outcome might be the same, but there is still a structural difference between me showing someone the door as I don't like what they say on my platform and the government coming and gagging them. Maybe I am just to sensitive to the usage of the term, but imho it denigrates the victims of actual censorship.

lukeholder 5y ago
If the government is the instrument that directs/coerces the private corporations. Is it really the private corporations doing the de-platforming?
- noduerme 5y ago
  That's how it works in Russia and China. It's not how it works in the West. Corporations here have fiduciary responsibility and are beholden to their shareholders. To the extent government tells them to do anything, it's a big public fight in front of elected officials who we (citizens and shareholders) can also vote out of office and replace. That cannot and does not happen in dictatorships, so in China, for example, the government tells corporations what to do. That is not the case in America. I'll allow that the situation in Australia is a lot cozier when it comes to certain things like mining, but the Australian government has literally zero control over Youtube, so the argument falls flat.
  - juanani 5y ago
deodorel 5y ago
Often when I look at how us works it seems to me that a lot of political action, censorship and coercion is privatised there, so it looks superficially like you have more degrees of freedom because you are limited by private actors and not the state.

vvendigo 5y ago

Old saying: "caught together, hanged together."

ttybird2 5y ago

I am wondering if Stallman's appearances on FT have also been removed from RT and if they have been archived.

noduerme 5y ago

This came up in several subcomments, but it's worth a headline: RT.com and its videos, and this guy's show, are still available and streaming in America, while all of YouTube is banned in Russia.

hnov 5y ago
On one hand YouTube and rt.com are both websites... on the other hand one is the #1 platform for discovering long form video content on the planet while the other is a website, so it stands to reason that being deplatformed from YouTube is similar to having packets to YouTube get blackholed.
- noduerme 5y ago
  on the other other hand, one is sponsored by a government that maintains the world's largest strategic nuclear arsenal, and the other is a publicly traded company. Seriously though - Russia banned Youtube throughout the country. Youtube banned a channel. America banned nothing. How is removing a channel from your own website even remotely similar to blackholing packets on a national network?
  - hnov 5y ago
    The technical minutia is mostly irrelevant though, if the next generation of "the internet" is IP->TCP->TLS->HTTP->YouTube, getting punted from YouTube is effectively getting punted off the internet. I see incredible symmetry in the two actions once you look past organizational differences: Youtube is censoring videos and channels that run counter to the Western narrative, for the purposes of this conflict Youtube is a Western mouthpiece, Roskomnadzor bans all of Youtube. The Russian government shapes the content that RT publishes especially as it pertains to Russia, for anything that pertains to Russia, RT is a mouthpiece, Youtube bans all of RT. The difference in the above is that one actor is a private entity and the other a government agency.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      It's not technical minutiae, it's the difference between government censorship and private property rights. Almost all web traffic follows the pattern you laid out, and almost none of it in the US is broken in that pattern. Having your content hosted on the end service is entirely up to who runs the end service, and entirely outside the control of democratic government. And it's a privilege, not a right. Would you have our government force Youtube to host content it's decided it doesn't want to host?! I suppose if your understanding of the world were as simplistic as that of someone who believed RT, you would just assume government makes everything up and creates corporations as shells to put out their message. That's not how it works in the free world. Youtube is just one site in Russia. RT is one site in America. RT is not banned in America. Does RT let me post anything I want about Ukraine on their website? When they do, let us know.

strathmeyer 5y ago

If the videos were posted straight to YouTube they would never have been deleted.

krnlpnc 5y ago

Deplatformed, not disappeared. Freedom of speech is not protected within the context of corporate employment. Say or do something that crosses advertisers, people in power or generally the wrong persons and you’ll be fired. Same applies to creators who effectively work for youtube. If they care so much about making this info available then time to re-upload to a new distributor.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

You weren't disappeared or censored, Chris. If you were, we couldn't hear you calling yourself a victim. Sorry working for foreign governments cost you your free hosting. Upload it somewhere else. We spend way too much time pretending that people have some kind of right to be on a private platform.

tedmiston 5y ago

I'm not familiar with the author, but I see he's well known enough to have a Wikipedia page [1]. I just can't help but to appreciate the irony of complaining about censorship on one major tech platform while publishing on another major tech platform. It seems Substack is much looser on censorship than other social media, but at the end of the day, anyone can be "deplatformed" from any managed service / platform for many reasons at any time, and they may never even find out why. Why not run your own (e.g., Ghost) instance and mitigate that risk to protect your content and business upfront? > I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges

bob2222 5y ago

bradgranath 5y ago

Julian Assange still gets occasional contact with the outside world. Julian Assange has yet to be 'dissappeared'. You sir, are talking to us from your SubStack. Which still pays you money. YouTube kicked you off? Line up behind all the devs who've lost their livelihoods because a bot hicupped.