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On June 5th, YouTube announced in a post on its official blog that it is going to be:
Removing more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube
by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.
Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.
Reducing borderline content and raising up authoritative voices
In January, we piloted an update of our systems in the U.S. to limit recommendations of borderline content and harmful misinformation
We're looking to bring this updated system to more countries by the end of 2019. Thanks to this change, the number of views this type of content gets from recommendations has dropped by over 50% in the U.S. Our systems are also getting smarter about what types of videos should get this treatment, and we'll be able to apply it to even more borderline videos moving forward. As we do this, we'll also start raising up more authoritative content in recommendations
Continuing to reward trusted creators and enforce our monetization policies
we are strengthening enforcement of our existing YouTube Partner Program policies. Channels that repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies will be suspended from the YouTube Partner program, meaning they can't run ads on their channel or use other monetization features like Super Chat.
In an article discussing this, Silicon Valley reporter Casey Newton of The Verge notes that this "is expected to result in the removal of thousands of channels across YouTube."
The crackdown goes into effect today and will "ramp up" over the next few days.
Aristarchus adds from Time:
The video streaming company says it has already made it more difficult to find and promote such videos, but it's now removing them outright. YouTube will also prohibit videos that deny certain proven events have taken place, such as the Holocaust.
The changes come as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online services face mounting concern that the services allow, and in some cases foster , extremism.
YouTube's new policies will take effect immediately. Specifically, the service is banning videos "alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion." The ban applies to a range of characteristics, including race, sexual orientation and veteran status.
[...] The companies have said they are walking the balance between creating safe spaces while also protecting freedom of expression. With little government oversight on online material, internet companies have become the arbiters for what is and isn't allowed.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday June 10 2019, @06:34PM (24 children)
Some content is clearly undesirable (pro-Nazi rants, holocaust deniers, Islamic State promotional videos) but a lot is borderline. Who's the censors at Google, and by what rules do they judge what's acceptable and what isn't? And acceptable for whom?
I realize Google is a private company and they decide what activities they want on their networks. Still, Youtube videos have an impact on public opinions and policies, so I feel we-the-people and our elected representatives should have a say in this - at least those representatives who happen to be honest.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday June 10 2019, @06:45PM (19 children)
In the end, it is really simple. Either private companies have no right to dominate public speech channels or private companies have to comply with free speech rights.
We should give them a choice - stay below 1% of population engagement or allow free speech.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 10 2019, @07:20PM (17 children)
The thing is, to replace Youtube, all that needs to happen is that some other video site offers competing content that's better. And hosting videos is a pretty easy thing to do: There are free tools you can use as video players, the data is a few hundred MB, it's so simple I could figure it out without a lot of research when I had to do it. And there are already competitors, e.g. DailyMotion and Vimeo. As an example of how any particular middleman cutting someone doesn't actually stop them from getting a message out, Alex Jones has been kicked of off FB, Youtube, and a bunch of other places, and yet he's still putting out his stuff for his audience, just on his own servers.
Also, your argument applied to print media would demand that the New York Times (or any other big-name publication that you like) print the letter of every crank that writes in to announce that they've solved the Kennedy assassination, because anything else is censorship.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Monday June 10 2019, @07:59PM (7 children)
> Also, your argument applied to print media would demand that the New York Times....
Don't be a tard, or expect everyone else here to be one. The NYT is clearly a publisher and this free to publish or not publish with very few restrictions other than settlements in or out of court when (not if)( they libel someone.
The problem, as I keep saying, is Youtube and other social media types keep demanding they receive all of the benefits of a publisher and none of the liabilities. That they ALSO receive all of the benefits of being a platform / common carrier while accepting none of the responsibilities that normally go with that status. Because Internet or something.
Kinda like Uber gets to ignore the taxi regs, labor laws, etc. because internet. Sorry, wild west Internet is over; time to grow up and realize all previous laws, conventions, customs and even common sense do not vanish the second an IP address gets assigned.
No. Make them choose, platform or publisher. And be damned because their current business model can't survive under either set of laws and regs.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 10 2019, @10:33PM
Damn jmorris, always asking for more regulation...
(Score: 3, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday June 10 2019, @11:09PM (2 children)
Soo~ooo, what you're saying is some sane, targeted regulation might be just what the doctor ordered...? :) My, my, my...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Touché) by jmorris on Monday June 10 2019, @11:58PM (1 child)
More like I'm adopting the wisdom of Malcolm Reynolds. If somebody is trying to kill me, I'm gonna kill em right back.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @08:55PM
Hah, you have to bury doing the right thing under a mask of violent bravado because it shows the cracks in your own worldview. I guess any improvement is good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @12:01AM
"Kinda like Uber gets to ignore the taxi regs"
Those taxi regs that required a sate sanctioned limited medallion to limit competition should have never existed to begin with. They only exited because monopolistic businesses lobbied for them and the only people that benefited from them is those businesses. They hurt the public.
"time to grow up and realize all previous laws, conventions, customs and even common sense do not vanish the second an IP address gets assigned."
Many of those previous laws were intended to limit media competition to the detriment of the public. Same with taxi cab medallion laws. IE: Laws that limit who can use spectra and laws that limit competition for cable and internet providers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @12:23AM (1 child)
Nice try, but you're very wrong about this, in two ways:
1. What are the liabilities of being a publisher you're referring to? The fact is that publishers can and do publish pretty much whatever the heck they'd like. And no, they aren't liable for libel if they publish something that's inflammatory: That's on the authors, or "content creators" in the new jargon. As for their copyright-related responsibilities, they have both a legislative requirement that they follow, and court settlements with copyright owners that quash content that breaks copyright regularly.
2. A platform isn't the same thing as a common carrier. For instance, Fox News is a platform, but I doubt you would demand that they cover the Biden presidential campaign in a way that Biden was happy about, because Fox News viewers have the simple remedy of changing the channel. By contrast, if AT&T were preventing all traffic related to the Joe Biden campaign from reaching all of their Internet customers, especially if AT&T is a telecom monopoly for an area, that's a different issue entirely, because the remedy is either ridiculously expensive or non-existent.
If video creators or viewers don't like the rules of Youtube, they can create or view videos on a competing service. And it's entirely possible to set up your own service if one of the existing competing services doesn't meet your needs. If any competitor does well enough, they can hire some of the smart people who have worked on Youtube's algorithms to make good search and recommendation engines. All of this can happen under current law with no government action or further government regulation, and the cost to users for switching is a matter of a different word in a browser address bar.
So again, how is your complaint boil down to anything but "A private company won't allow me to use its resources and popularity to make my statements available to a wider audience, but I want to, so the government should force them to change that policy"? If so, why is that same principle not in play for the New York Times print edition, or online news websites like InfoWars, but is in play for Youtube? Or is it that your real principles in play here have jack squat to do with free speech or law and everything to do with wanting your viewpoint spread by all means available and you're mad that somebody is making that harder?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 12 2019, @01:56AM
Responsibility for what -THEY- publish. They can't just say "We aren't responsible for user generated content, but if you notify us we will remove illegal stuff." If they are a publisher, no Safe Harbor provision of the CDA, DMCA, etc. for them. If they are a platform, then they can't exercise editorial control but they DO get the Safe Harbor.
Ok, let me stop you right there, I see your problem. You are a retard. *** RETARD ALERT *** You will just have to imagine the GIF of Mr. Garrison ringing the bell since this isn't an imageboard.
Fox News is a publisher, not a platform. Doh. They make no pretense of being a neutral carrier open to anyone to publish content across. Other than their comment section of course, that is sorta open. At least they still HAVE a comment section, which is more than most other media outlets can say.
Being a monopoly isn't the problem. (OK, it is a problem, just not the problem under discussion today.) Again, your mental defects are impairing your reasoning to the point it is hard to even communicate across such a gulf. The second AT&T starts picking and choosing who you can connect to across their network for any reason other than legal problems (takedown notices, blatant infringing behavior, etc.) or purely technical network administration issues / problems (trying to HOST the Biden campaign website on the end of your cable modem or something equally idiotic, trying to fairly ration finite bandwidth to all customers, etc.) they stop being a platform and become a publisher.
Actually, it isn't. YouTube operates as a loss leader to prevent any competitor from being economically viable. The libertarians will say they make it up on the back end by driving traffic through the Googleplex so it is OK, but the cynic would say it is to maintain a monopoly on the global conversation. And if it really were so easy, if moving off YouTube were so painless, why so much angst among the banned and more tellingly why so much political agitation on the Left to deplatform all of their foes from it? And please don't be so dumb you fail to see the power of the network effect at work on YouTube and the far greater one at work on Facebook, Twitter and the others. It isn't QUITE like telling someone in 1970 that if they don't like AT&T, or that AT&T closed their account, they are free to start a competitor, but it is pretty close.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday June 10 2019, @08:55PM
People choose YouTube over IndieWeb solutions in order to have a chance to be listed in the recommended videos at the right colum of a YouTube video page. Recommendation is something that IndieWeb has historically failed at [indieweb.org].
Let's say I were to set up video on my own website. Now I need to emulate the right column. How would I go about automatically finding videos on other websites that are related to a given video in order to link to them?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday June 10 2019, @09:31PM (3 children)
From what I understand, Youtube was operating at a loss because a monster like Google could afford to host fuckhuge amounts of data files like videos, for free, to be data-mined. Unfortunately, only monsters have the pockets deep enough to maintain an unpaid video hosting service.
Which is why we all should be doing the decentralized blockchain thingy for stuff like this. A little more processing power required on the user end, but not nearly as easily censored or shut down. Downloading movie files piecewise like traditional BitTorrent style won't work well enough, we need a functional web platform with a more real-time interface. We could make this happen and then hope the ISPs keep their grubby hands off of the protocols.
Of course what will happen with this might be interesting. Trump or the government could force their hand, or Google could simply decide it isn't worth the hassle and shut it down! It is curious that both the Democrats and Republicans are both going after Google and Facebook etc. The Republicans are pissed about the obvious bias and the Democrats are still salty about that Hillary losing thing.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @06:22PM
bit.tube
lbry.io
https://joinpeertube.org/en/ [joinpeertube.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @09:00PM (1 child)
Was there a point in there?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 15 2019, @04:41AM
I guess the two dominant parties would call it a "lose/lose" situation, eh, doc?
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday June 11 2019, @12:20AM (3 children)
No, we are talking about the medium of exchange of free speech. NYT can print or not to print whatever as long as it is produced by their employees. A better analogy is to require a printer to print any material. For example, a Holocaust denial paper has to be printed if paid for even if the business is Jew owned.
But you gave me an idea. Similar to banking separation, we need to separate opinion producing business with opinion exchange business. There is apparently conflict of interests. The same joints publish their opinions and censor others in a scale not seen ever before.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @12:46AM (2 children)
Right now, no such law exists requiring printers to print anything at all, nor is any bookstore or library required to have any particular books on hand. That material gets printed because there are neo-Nazi publishing houses in the US and other countries that will print it. So the free market is preventing the censorship - why should online be any different than print media in this regard, when it's even easier for the free market to prevent censorship?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday June 11 2019, @02:50AM (1 child)
That's because print media was way less monopolistic than internet media. Also, print did not have that much influence and was way more difficult to fake. Today we have monopolies on one hand and technology to cheaply manipulate opinions on the other. The next elections might be hacked by a gang of teenagers with a few bitcoins.
Free market needs strong limitations such as anti-monopoly policies. Otherwise free market will either die or become not so free.
Besides, free speech assumed that the air where sound waves propagate is not censored and free. Once print became "speech", it would be vise to make the same true for printing process. In the Internet times, broadband should be virtually free and definitely not censored. Large platforms, such as Facebook, go into the same bucket.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @11:04AM
You continue to insist that Youtube is a monopoly when there are a bunch of existing competitors, and the cost to switching services is a matter of changing a URL in an address bar, and the cost to creating a new service is relatively low - rent out some cloud servers, install some FOSS, do a bit to make it a decent-looking website, done. There have even been some advertising efforts from those competitors that amount to "Your stuff is being blocked by Youtube? Put it on our service instead." That all makes Youtube not a monopoly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 10 2019, @10:23PM
That's not really necessary. All we have to do is actually give them the option of complying with the common carrier rules (no moderation of content) or they get the same regulation (and liability) as other publishers. That'd shut this down quickly, because they simply can't afford to actually curate the content properly, so they'd have to stop.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 10 2019, @06:54PM (1 child)
Solution: Nationalize Google. Do not allow private companies to operate websites or networks which could impact public opinions and policies. Only the government should be allowed to decide policies and especially public opinions are correct.
I think that addresses your complaint with a workable1 solution. I cannot think of anything that could go wrong. Therefore it should be enacted at once!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
1See: Great firewall of China
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 10 2019, @07:40PM
This solution is unworkable as described. How will it lead to increased taxes, increased spying, and/or increased bans on stuff people like?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Mer on Monday June 10 2019, @07:33PM (1 child)
The stinker is that despite cranking the vice again and again they each time take down pundits that have unpopular opinions but are by no mean fascists and the nazi problem doesn't really shrink. It's true you've got the scum of the earth using the platforms, actual nazis, pedophiles, terrorists... They're not lying on that front.
But whether you think it's incompetence or they keep them so they always have a justification for the latest change targetting wrongthink alphabet's actions have done very little to fight against it.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday June 29 2019, @03:16PM
Those folks are there in negligible quantities of course, but that's not what it is about, regardless of putting on appearances.
The vast majority of what is putatively being cracking down on migrated elsewhere years ago. The individuals being caught in these crackdowns are not generally Nazis, pedos, or terrorists. They are Trump supporters, libertarians, devout individuals, large or small government conservatives, classical liberals, gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, global warming skeptics, anti-vaxxers, free speech proponents, pro life individuals, and lately people that would be considered 'moderate' or even 'liberal' that foolishly try to keep their party from drifting further towards the far ends of left wing ideology.
A number of the above I truly would rather faded into obscurity organically, however if you take all of the above together (and probably a bunch I'm leaving out) and tally them up, I suspect you are far past 50% of the population. I can't see this as being a winning play for these companies in the long term, although leveraging an effective oligopoly controlling the public square to disrupt the speech of those with different or opposing views may gain some advantage in the short term.
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