6 ms·
> This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them This comment section is wild. The videos are up.
by Aurornis 1y ago
> This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them
This comment section is wild.
The videos are up. Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel. The most likely explanation is that a competing channel was trying to move their own videos up in the rankings by mass-reporting other videos on the topic.
It's a growing problem on social media platforms: Cutthroat channels or influencers will use alt accounts or even paid services to report their competition. They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while, which creates a window for their own content to get more views.
The clue is the "risk of physical harm". People who abuse the report function know that the report options involving physical harm, violence, or suicide are the quickest way to get content taken down.
- bithead 1y agoEither that or microsoft and/or google will send someone to my house to Raymond Reddington my ass if I install W11 with only a local account.
- silisili 1y agoA tale as old as time. A long time ago I worked in DDoS prevention and the bulk of our first customers were competing gambling sites and online eyeglass retailers. Why? Because they were all paying people to DDoS each other. Kinda silly, but good for business.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- neuvarius 1y ago[flagged]
- worthless-trash 1y agoAs I have limited dealings with eyeglass retailers, why ?
- ornornor 1y agoSelling a 2$ piece of metal wire and a 15$ lens of polycarbonate for obscene markups. It’s also a monopoly, luxottica owns practically all brands and dictates the prices.
- jachee 1y agoZenni Optical is the antidote. Even my too-blind-for-Zeiss-VisionPro-inserts prescription in the highest refractive index lenses is under $100 for a full pair.
- silisili 1y agoThe landscape is a little different now than then. At the time(and really, even now) people would get their eyeglasses from their local provider. Who cares, insurance probably covers some or all of it. Even getting contacts or glasses as a prescription was like pulling teeth, since they wanted to keep it in house. So the new market of get your prescription, then buy online was born. And it was like the wild west, not full of eye care professionals but...mostly less than above board places all fighting for your click. Think about it...if you finally decide to Google eyeglass frames or such, you were entering a whole new realm. And why fight over SEO, when you can just take your competition offline, as most people will click a link, watch it load for 5s, then click back and try the next. I have no idea if the industry is still shady or not, but 20 years ago, it was full of nothing but bad actors. I don't know if it matters at all to the conversation or not, but none of the actors(gambling or eyeglasses) were based in the US, despite their domain names and courting US customers. The DDoS company was based in the US.
- estebarb 1y agoJust a reminder that "insurance covers" doesn't mean society doesn't pay for it: all the people pay for it. The insurance company paying causes prices raises for everyone else, same country and abroad. So the whole world ends up paying more for that "insurance coverage": more for the product, more for the insurance, more in taxes that fund public free healthcare...
- braiamp 1y agoThe problem here is that companies seems to not be the wiser to such tactics and creators are left holding the bag by such aggression.
- lazide 1y agoThe law doesn’t allow companies to do anything other than what they are doing.
- 10000truths 1y agoThey are absolutely aware of these sorts of abuses. I'll bet my spleen that it shows up as a line item in the roadmapping docs of their content integrity/T&S teams. The root problem is twofold: the inability to reliably automate distinguishing "good actor" and "bad actor", and a lack of will to throw serious resources at solving the problem via manual, high precision moderation.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoContent hosts are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they take their time and are cautious with reports, people end up swamped with garbage that people complain about. If they try to be quick to clean up the garbage, some clean stuff get caught and people complain. The only frequent obvious problem I see is Youtube not telling people why their videos get hidden or taken down or down ranked. Long time creators get left in the dark from random big changes to the platform that could be solved with an email.
- andrepd 1y agoIn the olden days this would simply be solved by... having customer support befitting the size of the company. Of course nowadays that's "inneficient". We have companies with billions of customers but smaller customer service than a mid-sized retailer from the 90s. Something is not right.
- throwaway743 1y agoThis is the problem. IME it's especially bad with Admob. They've purposefully kept their email contact option broken for years and the only "help" you can access is from their forum, which is the absolute worst and never provides any meaningful resolutions. It's awful.
- crooked-v 1y agoThe problem I see with that attitude is that it's excusing companies with immense profits from having even the tiniest modicum of actual human review for things.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoAs long as the bad behavior is profitable, platforms aren't going to fix it: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10percent-of-2024-sales-came-from-scam-fraud-ads.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...
- rezonant 1y agoStop making so much sense
- blueboo 1y agoIn certain niches, the marginal value of kneecapping the competition exceeds the viable budget for counteracting gaming. It may be a quirk of this reality’s hyperparameters that a UGC media monopoly inevitably suffers from this. Or maybe at a certain point it hits their bottom line and better enforcement is contrived.
- fastily 1y ago> They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while This can be accomplished with bogus dmca notices too. Since google gets such a high volume of notices the default action is just to shoot first and ask questions later. Alarmingly, there are 0 consequences (financial or legal) for sending bogus dmca notices
- chii 1y agoit is a weapon the music industry wanted, but now has this unintended consequence. I think it's high time google stopped acting as judge jury and executioner in the court of copyright enforcement.
- immibis 1y agoThe law says they have to.
- hdgvhicv 1y agoThe law also says a counter claim can be immediately filed. Google don’t follow that part.
- lazide 1y agoGoogle has nothing to do with filing a counter claim except accepting it if filed. The content owner is the only one who is allowed to file it.
- hdgvhicv 1y agoGoogle do not immediately reinstate on counter claims.
- lazide 1y agoThey shouldn’t, because the original claimant has 10-14 days (depending on exact timing) to sue. If they don’t, they reinstate. Which considering many other folks it can take 6 months… [https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/the-digital-millennium-copyright-act-dmca/dmca-notice-takedown-process/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...] Not saying Google is good or anything, but this is well trod ground at this point.
- gusgus01 1y agoThey have a history of removing videos that describe things they don't like under the guise of "harm", eg Linus Tech Tips video on De-Googling your life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdZ7xmytiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdZ7xmytiQ
- ddtaylor 1y ago> Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel That's not the argument IMO. They don't have to be intentionally malicious in each action. A drunk driver doesn't want to kill a little girl in the road. Their prior choices shape the outcome of their later options. A drunk driver decides to get behind the wheel after drinking. A large company makes a decision to make more profit knowing there are repercussions and calculating the risk.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lazide 1y agoThe DMCA laws prescribe the process. Google (or any other party) isn’t allowed to decide for themselves what is or is not a valid DMCA complaint. Complain to Congress, they’re the ones who set this up to work this way.
- RobotToaster 1y ago> they’re the ones who set this up to work this way. Who lobbied for it to work that way? I'm assuming google aren't entirely innocent here.
- ninkendo 1y agoThe DMCA is from 1998. I don’t think Larry and Sergei were taking a break from inventing google so they could lobby congress from their Stanford dorm room.
- smw 1y agoGoogle had only been founded a month before, I don't think they had vast lobbying powers yet!
- zeven7 1y agoFrom what I remember Google fought against DMCA abuse by media companies and lost.
- not_a_bot_4sho 1y agoThank you for the sane reply People are so quick to assume conspiracy because it is mentally convenient
- Arch-TK 1y agoYouTube claim these were not automated actions. This explicitly rules out "algorithm/LLM makes a stupid mistake" but also seems to rule out "hits a threshold of community reports and gets automatically taken down pending manual review". Also, it doesn't even need to be collusion between Microsoft and Google, but to pretend like that's never a thing is to be ignorant of history. Stop defending these big companies for these things. Even if your version of the story is true, the fact they allow their platform to be abused this way is incredibly damaging to content creators trying to spread awareness of issues. But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements? Regardless of what happened here, Google is to blame at least for the tools they have made. As for Microsoft, I don't think there's anything disagreeable with saying that they've tried hard to get people to switch to hardware with their TPM implementation and lying about the reasons. Likewise for forcing Microsoft accounts on people. I am not certain they were involved in this case, but they created the need for this kind of video to exist, so they are also implicated here.
- intended 1y ago> But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements Enough to cause this behavior. I don’t know if theres a mathematical or organization law or something, but it seems like theres always a way to abuse review mechanisms for large communities / sites. Never enough manpower to do review for each case. Or reviews take a long time.
- ethbr1 1y ago> Never enough manpower to do review for each case. Manpower at a given salary cost. All content platforms could throw more money at this problem, hire more / more skilled reviewers, and create better outcomes. Or spend less and get worse. It's a choice under their control, not an inevitability.
- miki123211 1y agoSo Google is between a rock and a hard place here. If they don't react quickly and decisively to reports of "possible physical harm", even if the reports seem unfounded, they'll eventually get the NY Times to say that somebody who committed suicide "previously watched a video which has been reported to Youtube multiple times, but no action was taken by Google."
- franga2000 1y agoYou can act quickly and decisively and also correctly. Take the average number of reports per day times the average length of a reported segment times two, divide effective work hours per day by that number and hire that many people to process reports. Congrats, your average time to resolution is 24 hours. If that's too expensive, your platform is broken. You need to be able to process user reports. If you can't, rethink what you're doing.
- mcherm 1y agoPlease explain what kind of magic your solution uses to ensure that reports always come in at a perfectly even pace without any peaks or valleys. Because without that, your proposed approach will not work.
- macintux 1y agoPerhaps the current process becomes the backlog management system. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, were the incentives in place.
- StackRanker3000 1y agoNot saying you’re wrong in this particular instance, but there are all sorts of areas where we accept that harm will occur at scale (e.g. that 40,000 people per year die in motor-vehicle incidents just in the US). How do we determine what is reasonable to expect?
- ethbr1 1y ago
- dns_snek 1y agoYour theory is baseless given that YouTube claimed that decisions weren't automated: > The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
- Andrex 1y agoYouTube frequently claims this and are frequently caught lying. (Oh, you really watched this one hour video and reached your decision in an email sent 96 seconds after the appeal was submitted? Yeah okay...) They'll silently fix the edge case in the OP and never admit it was any kind of algorithmic (OR human) failure.
- dns_snek 1y agoI'm aware that there's a chance that Google is lying, I'm just pointing out that their comment doesn't make any sense if they believe that Google deserves the benefit of the doubt.
- xbar 1y agoGoogle incentivizes takedown vote abuse. 1. 3 Strikes rules for channels 2. Automatic takedown systems based on votes 3. Incentivizing competing channels with ads 4. No verification/limits/punishment of bogus takedown voters and vote bots 5. Lack of democritized, universal takedowns of equivalent content Does Microsoft unfairly benefit from Google's takedown tirefire? I do not know. But if I were designing a voting system for takedowns it would be: 1. 1 non-DMCA takedown vote per user per year 2. No takedown votes for accounts less than 1 year old 3. Takedown all equivalent content when a video is voted down. 4. Verification of DMCA ownership before taking down DMCA-protected content.
- BeFlatXIII 1y agoIMO, major hosting providers ought to implement a function to neuter mass-reporting. Some threshold past which each additional report lowers the priority in the stack.