Like, I know YouTube has always censored comments in general, but it’s getting worse.
I wrote a comment on the clip by MSNBC on youtube titled “Police pepper spray pro-Palestinian protestors in D.C.”
I didn’t call for violence, and my message wasn’t pro-Hamas. I can’t remember the exact text, but it was something akin to:
'I’m sick of this. I’m just so sick of this. People can care about the lives of more than one group of people.
I care about Israeli civilians. I care about Palestinian civilians. I don’t care about Israel attacking Hamas; all I want is for Israel to stop killing innocent civilians. The attacks by Hamas don’t give Israel a carte blanch to murder Palestinian civilians.
(Can’t remember this bit exactly) Joe, I hope your ratings take a dive to get you laughed off the air; you’re acting no different to Hamas Mickey Mouse calling for the death of civilians.’
I don’t support rioting, but I’m sick of these idiots like Joe Scarborough constantly conflating protests of the Israeli government’s actions with bigotry against the Jewish people.
YouTube is letting spam and bland right-wing comments run wild while censoring any comments against violence.
I noticed the feeds suppressing any protesting at all. YouTube needs to be removed from Alphabet and turned into a public utility or boycotted severely.
It would appear they are attempting to put us in a grey-out starting around 8 days ago. Alphabet is doing some sinister things it would appear.
They are using AI to do this moderation. This is a product of what happens when you allow economic capture of the media, have we not learned?
Honestly, I wish a YouTube boycott would work, but it’s too vital in communication, now. You’d need a massive backlash affecting advertisers for it to work and considering it’s an international company affecting the entire world, you’d need social media itself to boycott social media; it’d be impossible to coordinate.
You may not know but YouTube couldn’t be recreated without investment and a burn rate that is reflective of modern server side bandwidth prices given expectations of curation / throughput. Not to mention capture of the industry that would work as a de facto bulwark to barrier to entry.
This means you would have to innovate and / or bring some deep pockets to the table.
If the statement above seems correct here is some reading:
In my opinion, once you get to the level that you’re not just providing the services of a company, but the infrastructure of a state, you have a certain responsibility to follow similar ethics and guidelines.
The state should be independent, politicians might be partisan and have their own preferences, but the state itself should have no bias towards one group or another.
YouTube reached that level over a decade ago, they should be acting in an unbiased manner possible, or the company should sell off its infrastructure to someone or something that can.
You should read that link. It explicitly says “Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit.” And rightfully so.
The link you posted as an attempt to say section 230 does not allow a platform owner to censor the content on their platform actually says the opposite. Platform owners can censor the content on their site just like the moderators on this site can remove offensive content. Rightfully so.
Pretty much, yeah, that’s my point. It’s not that YouTube shouldn’t be allowed to censor stuff as it likes, but that when it gets to the scale that they’re providing vital communications infrastructure, they shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose which political positions they censor; and they’ve been doing that big time with a variety of topics, not just Palestine.
As an example: pretty much any video that involves China in a negative sense; or the China-Taiwan conflict gets demonetised and hidden from feeds.
I get censoring stuff if people are calling for violence, posting NSFW content, or performing blatantly illegal acts; but censoring political and historical discussions shouldn’t be allowed by any means because we have no idea what they might decide to censor next.
It’s like a phone company deciding to set up an AI that listens in on all phone calls and automatically drops the call if someone discusses abortion in any way, positive or negative.
Another example of youtube censorship: go do a search for this on youtube RIGHT NOW.
We have to get our news from INDIA now!
The Associated Press doesn’t report on it either:
“What to know…”
The story at the time of this post mentions nothing about the policeman not lifting a finger to help (and I know many policemen and women who WOULD…)
Sheez! The AP should just stay at home and turn over their operations to the NYPD…
NYPD are trained at the Academy to roll a person on the ground and cover them with a coat to smother the flames. Each second counts, and “going to get fire extinguishers” was a preposterous course of action.
The NYPD tried to engage in some what-aboutism, pointing out that bystanders had filmed it. Most bystanders don’t know what to do when a person is on fire; a cop has been trained to handle it.
My point of sharing the story is the tremendous control that corporations (including google and youtube…) and the NYPD has on media. It took the same paper that held a spotlight on Epstein and corrupt law enforcement to bring that police officer’s heartless inaction to light.
And I want to reiterate: many police WOULD have acted to save that woman’s life, no matter that she was homeless. It’s just that the one that happened to be on scene did not…
I was just thinking that there are plenty of us out here who do not fit in the “Pro-Israel” “Pro-Palestine” botched dichotomy framework (just as there are plenty of us who do not fit in the Left/Right botched dichotomy framework). I agree with the gist of what you posted on youtube as to not slaughtering civilians. I can’t speak to the MSNBC points, as I don’t have a sense of what they’re saying.
As to youtube censorship, my guess is that when you chose to get a bit more strong-worded toward Scarborough and such, this increased the ability of someone somewhere to use this as an excuse to report your post, or for youtube to flag it. I am not trying to excuse youtube and other systems for having a hair-trigger, but as soon as you go into that territory, such as talking about “idiots”, then, to be practical, you’re complicating the matter.
Then again, it may have been, as you say, simply unfair censorship of Gaza discussion.
You may have already considered these options, but just in case you or others have not done so:
The Israel/Palestine subreddit is (in my opinion) of high quality for you or others who may be looking for discussion alternatives. I would not expect to get upvoted if you take the course of not strongly agreeing with either side, and I do think there is some pro-Israel bias, but the high quality comes into play in terms of at least allowing each person the space to say what they want to say, as long as they focus on the topic and not on insulting the other person, and obey other reasonable (in my opinion) rules. I’m not sure how your post (or similar) would have done under their rules, but I do encourage you to consider contributing your thoughts there, once you’ve read through. There is also the MSNBC subreddit.
I would like Turks and other progressive outlets to start organizing a peertube federation, tied directly to relevant comments.
My point of these posts was to wake people up from their denial, that they really are redacting stuff all over the place. Pictures of that incineration incident and the cop not lifting a finger were all over activist and foreign sites, but nowhere to be seen on youtube or in coprorate media for DAYS. That was not an accident; that was censorship, to protect a bad actor at the NYPD.
And in youtube comments on Biden/Harris videos, I constantly saw unflattering FACTS redacted through shadow banning. When the Biden/Harris campaign paid for youtube media coverage, they got a hotline to get anything negative shadow banned (except on far right channels -what undecided voter was going to them to gather facts?)