"Cronin’s YouTube channel was up to about 22,000 subscribers when he received a notice from YouTube about one of his videos, “Relax and Improve Your Sleep with Natural Calm Magnesium.” The notice said the video had been removed for violating YouTube’s community guidelines, but didn’t specify further."
Magnesium isn't even a nootropic. That is, while it may have some ability to boost cognition, it isn't a substance primarily ingested for that reason. It is a substance primarily ingested so that the person ingesting it will stay alive.
A quick cruise around Duck Duck Go suggests that while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea in desperate need of being censored. Certainly the idea that magnesium is generally deficient is widespread, with estimates around 50% not meeting the US RDA for magnesium in the US, and while magnesium may not be a good solution for insomnia qua insomnia, it can be a good solution for many things that may be causing you to be "unable to sleep"[1], whether or not that is "insomnia".
Problem is medical claims are highly regulated in the West. So there is a likely legal liability for youtube in the US and in the UK. In fact, they might have already had pressure from regulators.
It would help if YouTube would say so. I'm not sure Google's usual total opacity is going to play to their favor here. As I said in another comment, I personally see no reason to trust their judgment in these matters, but if they said "Hey, we're getting regulatory pressure from X about Y and we need to remove your stuff" that would be a step in the direction of restoring my trust. (I've got other reasons I'm very unlikely to ever trust them very much overall, but I am capable of nuance, so I have no problem saying I would at least trust them more.)
Did you know that Pepsi is made from dead babies? I didn't, before YouTube [1]. It turns out you can say almost anything you want on video without it being a legal issue. I don't think regulators care about this small-time stuff.
groan
I actually had to address that claim during a lecture once. Ridiculous.
For the record, I think anyone peddling pseudoscience regarding medical conditions should be shutdown hard and fast. People who suffer from chronic pain or incurable illness can become desperate and turn to charlatans whose snake-oil can produce terrible effects. It isn't harmless to prey on such insecurities.
I think this is tricky because as soon as you shut down the obvious stuff (ok, dead babies...) you will quickly arrive at barely or non provable stuff, acai berry level things, and medical claims (fructose intolerance! real thing btw!) which you are going to need a phd to sort out. I am not sure how youtube or any general content site could realistically be expected to have a policy on all these things.
You can't eradicate the nonsense you can just change its nature. In some ways I think having complete nonsense out there is healthy in terms of promoting skepticism amongst normal people.
It's a harder problem than it appears. As I've written about before on Hacker News, I have Celiac disease and over my lifetime I've suffered from a variety of nutritional deficiencies.
In the past year I've gone from suffering heart problems so bad that I was becoming completely unable to sleep at night to having them nearly fixed [1]. (Point here being, we are waaaay beyond anything "placebo" could possibly do. Bright, shining, clear-as-day signals here.) I've done this by finding information from various sources about supplements that can address these problems.
Now, being a HN denizen and reasonably rational, I've done this by figuring out nutritional deficiencies and reading various papers. So I'm not taking random herbs or anything; I'm taking amino acids and magnesium and some other things that I can find various papers that suggest that they may help. I can even find actual doctors who seem to be quite reasonable and respected in their field recommending the core of regimen I'm on, so I'm far away from looney-land. However, in strict scientific terms, that is as far as science has gotten... some papers that suggest that further research is necessary, but said further research has not (as far as I can tell) been done yet, and substantial case reports from doctors but not much in the way of formal studies.
Everything I've tried, generally speaking the worst case scenario is that Nothing Happens, the upside is "maybe my heart will start working better", and the monetary cost has been negligible to me, so I've been able to work through things and figure out what helps, and the things that didn't help my particular problem.
(It is often pointed out that drug companies have little incentive to study the effectiveness of unpatentable substances on disease. My Celiac may be skewing the results, but based on the digging I've done into may various issues over the years, I have to say that it certainly appears to me that there is good reason to believe that there are a lot of cures, treatments, and ameliorations available for a whole host of diseases that are often studied in a cheap paper with a small sample size, or even in the form of case studies, but that are never followed up on because nobody's got the funding if it isn't going to produce a drug. If you've got something even slightly rare and you aren't getting a good treatment, I highly recommend trawling through the sludge of the internet and filtering it through a scientific understanding. You may be surprised at what you can find. You'll certainly find sludge, but there may be unexpected diamonds in there. Very often many of the interventions carry little risk beyond not working and are very cheap to try. I always double-check and triple-check the risks first, but sometimes it's as simple as "have you tried vitamin B supplements?" or something, where the risks are generally very well understood.)
But drawing a bright shining line between the resources I used to do this and "psuedoscience" is going to be very, very difficult. In fact at times the two were outright mixed together, and I had to untangle them myself. Yes, we know the worst stuff when we see it, absolutely, and I am not suggesting this space should be unregulated. However, I am suggesting that free speech is still a concern here, and I will personally be very unhappy if you lop what could very well be 30 years off my life in the name of "protecting" me.
Is it a challenge to filter this stuff correctly? Yeah. Nobody said life would be easy.
[1]: Conventional medicine put me on a heart monitor for a month and proceeded to announce to me that it was all normal that my heart was beating so wrongly that it was literally keeping me up at night. I have to admit this was definitely a bit of a blow in my confidence in the medical field. It all worked out for the best in the end anyhow; fixing the underlying deficiencies is a better idea that trying to take any medication to patch over the broken system, which is probably what would have happened. As my own further digging into the problem revealed, heart arrhythmia medicine can be a lifesaver in some circumstances, but it is also almost as like to cause the problems as to improve them. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have helped me, because my problem was, again, missing nutrients, and generally you can't medicine over that.
(So, for the aforementioned reasons, I don't have an official diagnosis, but I'm pretty sure it would be called "Vagal Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation". My mother suffers from AF, though I'm not sure of the exact subclassification, and I get my celiac from my father, so... yay genes.)
Absolutely bogus. I just spent 30 minutes verifying this claim. They used HEK 293 cells combined with taste receptors as a tool in the development of a totally unrelated molecule by Senomyx called Sweetmyx.
Sweetmyx has zero embryo cells in it. The embryo cells were used to test how the human taste receptors would respond to Sweetmyx.
“Nothing illegal, no medical advice offered, I've always been incredibly careful about this.”
The article then goes on to name several videos with titles like "increase energy," "improve concentration and memory," "improve sleep," etc.
Are there any lawyers around who know of a legal definition for "medical advice" or "medical claims?" Because these videos sound a lot like medical advice despite his insistence that they aren't.
Youtube censorship sucks sometimes, but this guy experimenting on himself is not nearly rigorous enough to figure out what's really happening when he is taking these supplements. When a person sets out to improve themselves with drugs, test the process on themselves, and interpret and analyze those results themselves, it's a viper's pit of biases. Obviously the experimenter has a huge personal stake in the experiment (arguably the largest; his person is the experiment!) and that generally is great for motivation but bad for science.
I like playing with nootropics but I'm also relatively healthy and I can't imagine how damaging it might be for a seriously ill person who is taking advice from youtube in a desperate and futile attempt to improve their condition and survive. The ethics are pretty complex, above my pay grade for sure.
If you're talking about the FDA, the basic rule is that you can't claim a product treats or cures any diagnosable condition it hasn't been certified for. Claims like "improve concentration" and "improve sleep" are generally permissible, where specific statements like "helps with ADD" and "cures insomnia" are not.
Based on those video titles, I don't see anything which constitutes medical advice in the narrow sense. Someone could well have decided the overall effect was tacit medical advice, but these titles in isolation aren't clear violations.
Those are called non-functional claims and are allowed in the US.
Any time you see something non-specific like "boosts the immune system" or "increases energy" it means the product is likely worthless because those claims don't actually mean anything.
Because the FDA has very specific rules as to what constitutes medical advice and what doesn't. The claim of "helps you sleep" is not medical advice and not regulated.
It's the reason so many "nutrition" companies can get away with claiming all kinds of things such as "burn fat faster". That statement means something to you and I, but it's not a medical statement.
The comment I was replying to said the claims had no meaning, not referring to the FDA.
They might be "meaningless" to actual medical professionals or people with decent knowledge of the ways that companies skirt product labelling laws. But the average layperson who might buy these products is probably neither of those things and is more likely to interpret them literally.
Because if the products actually worked they'd be allowed to claim they work for actual diagnoses (e.g. "Fixes Insomnia from dose 4" vs "Promotes sleep")
I agree with the other two replies, but I wanted to add: the claim is going to be the strongest they think they can get away with. If they’re not making specific claims about specific outcomes, that implies they know they can’t get away with it. And, if they could make those claims, it would no longer be a “supplement,” but a “drug.”
While I disagree that the titles are medical advice, I do see your point. It's funny because actually my YouTube mentor suggested use titles like that so people who didn't know what the products were could get an idea for what they were used for. I still made disclaimers in my videos.
>Problem is medical claims are highly regulated in the West.
so highly regulated that I can buy a one-time dose vial of mystery liquid at my local liquor store that promises harder erections and improved cognition, without the active ingredients printed anywhere.
If this was triggered by pressure from any group like the FDA, i'd sure be curious why they decided to start regulating medical woo-woo at the YouTube level, and not at the "homeopath that can cure any cancer" level, which is totally prevalent in the U.S.
When I had a commute I used to count the car windshield banner stickers that advertised the sale of miracle juices, berrys, extracts, whatever. Those 'Avon-esque' pyramid schemes are dangerous from both sides -- both for suckers that get pulled in as sellers , and for the folks consuming the stuff hoping to cure colon cancer, but that stuff is still as prevalent as ever..
When, exactly, does western medical regulation kick in? It seems to be when you're making lots of money on-shore.
So does adding a question mark at the end of the title fit your position? It's a title and you did not watch the video, it's the same when you buy that product at whole foods and the label says something, then you turn it over to see it's not medical advice.
Y’know, he’s right: that’s technically not a medical claim, it’s a “non-functional” claim. Of course, I also get what you mean; to you and I, that looks exactly like a medical claim! The regulations for all this are slightly mental, which is why things like homeopathy and those bullshit “skinny tea” pyramid schemes survive
>while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea
taking nutritional supplements without any evidence that they accomplish anything useful and without a physician's advice is generally a bad idea (the default mode is not 'take until suggested otherwise' but 'only take if necessary'), and trying to make money off it by marketing them on youtube is even more miserable.
I'm very much in favour of youtube taking a proactive stance here. As a related note on nootropics, most of the products advertised under that label don't actually do anything at all. There's two very well known nootropics, caffeine and nicotine. So the next time someone tries to sell you weird nutrition supplements, just get a good old cup of coffee.
The difference between established science, and medical advice is that the latter needs to look at the body as a holistic system.
Magnesium deficiency may be a documented problem, with documented symptoms. Taking magnesium to correct it may have unfortunate side effects, due to other drugs that you're taking, or other conditions that you may have.
And beta-blockers lower blood pressure, that doesn't mean you should take them because someone on youtube tells you to. You should take drugs or supplements when a physician tells you that something is wrong that needs fixing.
Exactly last Autumn I was in a renal clinic recovering from surgery.
One of the patents on my ward was an OAP who had been taking a lot of Zinc which reacted with the meds he was on and it Totally shut down his Kidneys FFS.
First result: The effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in elderly: A double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial.
CONCLUSION:
Supplementation of magnesium appears to improve subjective measures of insomnia such as ISI score, sleep efficiency, sleep time and sleep onset latency, early morning awakening, and likewise, insomnia objective measures such as concentration of serum renin, melatonin, and serum cortisol, in elderly people.
btw I was a fan of Steve Cronin's channel and of reddit's nootropics subreddit. Steve's stuff was hardly experimental. Lots of this stuff is heavily researched. Youtube probably has input from Big Pharma. What's next, eliminating smoothy and juicing videos? Vegan recipes? Will they let themselves become a perfect shady of the corporate lifestyle?
Indeed, and I find my zinc/magnesium tablets an excellent way to induce it. I also find my 3000IU of vitamin D excellent in the other direction, for waking me up. Quite probably they’re both placebo, but it works, is safe in the amounts I take, and is cheap :)
hey homie!!! you know when I said, "hardly experimental," I meant non-controversial, right? I mean, you're not some risky, crazy quack, just a regular dude reviewing the well-known stuff that we should all know!
It’s not censoring of ideas. It’s removing video ads for quackery that is probably illegal under strict reading of US law.
YouTube is on borrowed time (as is all social media) in skirting regulations that normally were enforced on TV and radio. It will catch up with YouTube, Instagram, etc and they are realizing it and trying to prepare.
Heck, my mother and I both independently were recommended to supplement with extra magnesium. Most people are also deficient. It’s also useful for cognitive and GI function.
YouTube isn't going after 'crazy idea[s] in need of being censored.' They're going after anything they can to shut down as many small channels as they can. Their end goal is a situation akin to traditional TV networks. Far less variety, very much walled off from participation, and much more centralized. This will enable Eric Schmidt and his colleagues to exercise much more control over human culture. He explained that Google has a responsibility to manipulate human culture in his book "The New Digital Age." They are rich, and as such, better. As far as he is concerned, protecting the masses from themselves is his duty and responsibility.
Well, I mean when you write a book and explicitly say that you believe your company needs to take an active role in guiding global human culture, does it really make it a 'conspiracy'? His viewpoint is not as radical as some people might take it to be. Up until the American Revolution, basically every society operated under the notion that some people are fundamentally 'better' than other people. Kings, queens, chieftans, whatever, were not simply people who were good at leading, they were all believed to be either chosen by or literally a god. It was seen as natural and proper that those people would lead, and that other people were born to follow.
To accomplish great things, it was believed, those leaders have to take the reigns and direct the commoners or else they would tear themselves apart in anarchy. A great many of the upper class still believe this to be the situation (which is partially psychological self defense, believing that they were simply lucky would lead to many feeling very bad about having so much more than almost everyone else). While something like YouTube becoming a way for tons of people to make a decent living, and that becoming the dominant means through which media is created and consumed, as opposed to centralization of media production and consumption under a handful of more directly controlled companies sounds like a renaissance to most people, to them it sounds like outrageous stupidity. It sounds like letting the rats chew through one of the pillars holding our society aloft.
No, I don't believe it because it sounds like a really stupid idea. YouTube isn't going to have much less variety, because YouTube makes money by selling ads to viewers, and they're going to have a significant number fewer viewers if they try to do that.
And I suspect that they want to make money even more than they want to reshape the culture into the image of what they think it should be...
The theory as I've heard it goes that youtube believes manual human review of videos is becoming increasingly necessary and creates a significant expense (hiring human reviewers is more expensive than algorithmic review). The less monetized channels there are on youtube, the less money youtube has to spend manually reviewing videos. And if youtube users all 'choose' to watch only a relatively small portion of channels, youtube users will be less distressed when smaller channels start complaining about being demonetized. If the vast majority of their users are only watching a handful of channels, youtube becomes more efficient and more profitable.
Therefore culture shaping and profit are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they both reinforce each other.
I don't believe this idea, but allow me to play devil's advocate.
>And I suspect that they want to make money even more than they want to reshape the culture into the image of what they think it should be...
Groups often do this to secure future profits at the cost of current profits. It would be to the advantage of YT to reduce costs by funneling as many users as they can to the same result, allowing for the reduction of dynamic elements within their structure.
It could be that they are juggling total lost customers with a total cost of operation and trying to achieve a more profitable ratio with cheaper/easier to substantiate channels/results
tl;dr : Google would be cheaper to run if there were only 20 results. Google would be #1 if they could keep their current audience happy with that style of operation, due to the disparity in income versus outward expenses.
Maybe some group of psychologists is discussing what channels to bar next that won't hurt the bottom line...
(but, like I said in the beginning , I doubt it very much -- it's just a fun exercise to imagine why they would want to destroy content)
Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website. Nobody's stopping makers of these videos from hosting the videos themselves.
This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It's the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.
If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)
My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.
In the mean time, I'll shout "i told you so" from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.
The "my preferred definition of censorship specifies that it can only be done by governments, and [company] is not a government" rhetoric that always appears with these sort of stories is truly tiring and pedantic. Nobody here thinks that youtube is a government. The problem isn't people thinking that youtube is a government; the problem is people thinking that censorship is something only a government can do, or thinking that because censorship is legal (when done by corporations) people shouldn't complain when it happens. Many things that are legal are worth complaining about.
With regard to the rest of your comment, I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem. If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn't it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space? How would you actually solve that? Split youtube itself into several "Baby Youtubes"? How would that work, which one would get the domain name?
Fair enough. The confusion seems to be so common I wonder where it comes from originally. Evidently it's not coming from dictionaries... maybe schools are creating this misconception by primarily discussing government censorship.
Its not confusion, its a specific talking point used to advocate pro-censorship ideology. Arguing against the 1st amendment would be arguing against american values - this conveniently side steps that association.
I doubt Randall Munroe of XKCD created it, but he certainly popularized it on internet with his free speech comic.
The confusion seems common to America, where the constitution is seen as the source of the rights, rather than as a document referencing pre existing ideals.
> the problem is people thinking that censorship is something only a government can do,
It's not. Private companies can attempt to silence people.
But Youtube isn't preventing the creators from hosting content elsewhere. They aren't hitting them with a slapp lawsuit. They aren't colluding with other websites to ban these videos.
Youtube is just saying "host these somewhere else." How is that different from a publishing company choosing not to publish a book?
Well it is a little different. For the reason I mentioned in my post. Because youtube is the only game in town.
> I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem.
The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly.
>"But Youtube isn't preventing the creators from hosting content elsewhere. They aren't hitting them with a slapp lawsuit. They aren't colluding with other websites to ban these videos."
Again, you're not refuting anything that anybody here actually thinks.
>"Well it is a little different. For the reason I mentioned in my post. Because youtube is the only game in town."
Exactly, which is why the devil's advocate routine is so tiring.
>"The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly."
I agree, but how could that actually be accomplished? If the government split up google/youtube like they split Bell, what would go to who? Would one of the Baby Youtube's get the "youtube" domain/brand? Or could they all? Would youtube.com just give you a "web portal" that impartially linked to all the various Baby Youtubes that were created by fracturing youtube? Would third party video websites unrelated to the youtube breakup get a place on that web portal?
> Again, you're not refuting anything that anybody here actually thinks.
And you aren't refuting what I said. How is this any different than a book publisher deciding what books to publish? Are you saying youtube and other websites should be forced to host content they don't agree with? Should HN be held to the same rules? How would that work?
"The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly."
And the way to get that is to start using the alternative sites. If everyone is going to continue to use YouTube to host their videos, nothings going to change.
* >With regard to the rest of your comment, I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem. If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn't it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space? How would you actually solve that? Split youtube itself into several "Baby Youtubes"? How would that work, which one would get the domain name? *
Not OP, but IMO breaking Google into smaller chunks would increase responsibility on each smaller chunk to provide a pro-customer experience, and require specific (and slower to act) government requests to affect large swathes of data. Smaller corporations simply can't afford to screw users as quickly or in such numbers as mega-groups.
Right now, 'Google' can be asked to affect data for many services? Is that good? It doesn't feel good to me.
Having a large backing company , in nearly every instance i've encountered it, reduces overall customer satisfaction, reduces communications between company and consumer to as bare minimum as possible, and makes the service much more likely to attract, and fold to, government pressure.
YouTube could not survive on its own. YouTube only exists so that Google can guarantee they see no competition in the video space. It loses money by the mountain-load. It is propped up by Google Search and the titanic amounts of money AdSense brings in. If you wanted to build a competitor to YouTube, you would need investors willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build the infrastructure - and willing to accept tremendous losses for potentially decades. Google will continue to prop up YouTube in order to guarantee competent competition will never exist.
Maybe this makes this problem a candidate for nationalization then, but it's questionable at best if that would actually improve the situation (particularly for people residing outside of the country that nationalized it, presumably America.)
I'm just spitballing here, but if Youtube were handed over to the United States Postal Service (which has a reasonable but far from untarnished reputation for being content neutral. probably a better recent track record than google's), maybe that would be an improvement. Using tax dollars to subsidize a content neutral video platform would raise a lot of questions though, no least of which being how to handle monetization so that content producers get paid for what they upload. If the replacement platform can't compensate content producers, I don't think it will succeed. And of course it would also open the platform up to government directed censorship which can have more serious consequences than corporate directed censorship, but on the other hand gives the censored an arguably better chance of rectifying the situation through the courts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_censorship#Countries_kn...)
I don't think nationalization is the answer, but busting up that monopoly probably is.
Google's entire business model seems to be to operate everything as a loss-leader for AdSense. It turns out that that's extremely anti-competitive and I'm growing to think that it probably should be illegal.
The only way that anyone can compete with the free services that Google provides is to run it off the profits from a massive cash cow like AdSense. Until somebody finds some service/revenue model that provides that, it's just not going to happen.
The only way that anyone can compete with AdSense is to own users interactions with the browser like Google's free services do. Until somebody owns that much of your traffic, no-one will compete with AdSense.
But as otakucode points out, the resulting Baby Youtubes from a broken up Youtube probably wouldn't be economically viable. Independent 'Baby Youtubes' would probably be surmounted by another nu-Youtube kicked off by the likes of Facebook or Amazon; companies that could afford to subsidize the platform to out-compete independent video platforms. It would become the Google/Youtube situation all over again. And sure, you could break that one up too, but it would just turn into a truly awful demoralizing game of wack-a-mole.
I'm far from confident that nationalization is the answer, but I don't know what is. I think we're perhaps dealing with a new sort of problem that requires a new sort of solution, that has yet to be devised.
I'm not so certain I agree. For one, I don't think corporations this large should be able to entirely subsidize entire mature businesses (and control them) period. That's the force they exert in the market that's anti-competitive. If an alternative isn't economically viable, than the business just isn't there.
Given the little I know about Facebook's server infrastructure, they don't really have the capability to deliver a "Baby Youtube" anytime soon. They don't have the physical space available for the hardware they'd need and if they did it would rapidly be absorbed by their larger teams who need it already. Plus they just don't do high quality video well. That combined with the visibility limitations of the feed don't really make it a great platform for self-branding, unless you're willing to shell out major cash for promotion.
Amazon makes more sense as Twitch is already a good analogue for Youtube. It also pairs well with their budding media empire. That said, Twitch actually brings in money -- it doesn't depend entirely on subsidy to function.
I think what I'm getting at, ultimately, is that hosting your own video content probably shouldn't be free. I'm sort of tonedeaf to complaints over the streaming Adpocalypse because these streamers/person-brands exist purely through advertising subsidy in the first place. If the quality of your content is good, it's worth paying for distribution (and/or self-hosting) because you will see a return.
So it turns out that Vimeo is probably the right choice. Reviewing their content guidelines, it seems as though most of the commercial content that has been kicked off other platforms fine as long as it isn't spammy or sexually explicit.
There should be a social network for lonely, security-obsessed linux people who refuse to partake in social media. Maybe we should start raising homing pigeons and send little notes to each other.
Mastodon, steemit, maidsafe, and all the other stuff built on distributed networks. This stuff is out there, but it will die off if people don't use it and improve it.
A ham license is a great idea given where things are headed. Might even be worthwhile to set up a functional sneakernet among friends as a hobby. Something like FidoNet over USB sticks?
There's not just "private company" and "the government". There's "informal group", "association of people", "single person hosting their own stuff".
In the world I dream of, I could easily (and "easily" is the key word wrt the fact we're not there yet) host my own stuff and it would be visible to other people without a company or a government as intermediaries (except maybe for infrastructure, but that's something that can be solved, in the abstract, by mesh networks).
Of course we're not even close to having that, but the point is we should (IMHO) point our efforts in that direction. Is there money there? I don't know. Should I care there is no money there? I'm not sure.
IANAL, but my non-expert understanding is that exercising editorial control (as opposed to just having site standards and censoring content that violates them) makes websites liable for content infringement.
If you derive a significant portion of your income from streaming video content, you should probably be using hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo only to mirror your self-hosted content and drive traffic back to servers you control if you can.
You never know when companies like Alphabet or Facebook or Amazon or Apple will pull the rug out from beneath you and yank away that source of income, so don't stand on their rugs. If you let someone stand between you and your money, there will be someone standing between you and your money.
And as there is no way they could possibly review all uploaded videos with actual humans, much of this enforcement is done by machine detection and automated processing, and you will never get any explanation from a human, unless you are in the top 1000 accounts ranked by how much money they make for YouTube.
Not that this sort of content needs to be in video form, anyway. If I feel the need to learn about new, unregulated, or misregulated drugs, I'd prefer reading text, with as few still images as is possible to convey the needed information.
Aside the snark, its time to regulate how our data is used, what decisions are made upon it, and a proper grievance for companies that do that. The GDPR is a good start, to be honest.
Depends on who gets to decide what "false/misleading" is. I'm not sure how this could be any less transparent. I personally see less than no reason to trust YouTube's judgment in these matters.
Any time you open the paper, turn on the TV, crack open a book, or visit Hacker News, you are trusting some curator, gatekeeper, editor, or censor's judgement.
And the unmoderated spaced of before don't exist any more (Usenet), because companies didn't make money on it. Or worse, because it violated some company's "right".
Now, in order to speak, you nearly have to go through one of Their gateways. If you piss off FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon), you're gone off the net. Some of those gatekeepers are big scripts with no human intervention for your level. If you fall between the cracks, then you have no recourse, other than find a place like HN and beg publicly - lest you get shitcanned by the HN gatekeepers.
And that they grew to this point before imposing this "curation". It seems to be a recurring theme with these companies to grow to a monopoly with a place for relatively free discourse and then to do this as soon as they feel safe.
To be fair information is a weapon and there should be no free reign for anyone. If you are on purpose suppressing some information to fulfil political agenda - that should be a criminal act.
Because if they have a huge defacto monopoly, and also a outsized impact on our culture, the impacts of them doing so are far more far-reaching than, say, LiveLeak removing some video (trying to think of a competitor for YT is surprisingly hard).
It's interesting. I think we're at a strange period in history where personal speech can reach such a huge audience, thus new ways of suppressing speech are being invented.
Youtube is a private service, thus they can remove content as they wish. Of course, most forms of historical media have also removed or suppressed controversial content. But in the old days it was preemptive. There was only so much room in a newspaper, you had to own presses and a distribution network, and they didn't hire just any schmoe to write columns.
It was a proactive system of censorship. They got people invested in a career of finding the proper stories and promoting what was acceptable to the establishment. Obviously common people could say whatever they like in their daily lives, but their freedom to put content into a newspaper or television show for all to see was extremely limited.
We have enormous freedom in self-publishing mass media today. So much content is being created that no mortal person can serve as gatekeeper and pick and choose what gets published like a newspaper editor could. So on one hand, we're living in a utopia of free speech. But new ways are being devised to automatically manage content all the time. And even though human moderators don't catch everything, but they slowly do what they can.
There are some genuinely harmful ideas out there, of course. Some things that ought to be restricted. Who gets to decide? Is it right for a private company to choose? I doubt it, but private companies have always been choosing what gets into media. In the past their decisions were much more totalitarian than today.
The channels in question aren't accused of containing false/misleading videos, they're accused of containing disallowed facts. Noone disputes that modafinil promotes wakefulness or that magnesium makes many sleepy.
Websites have always been allowed to decide which facts to allow on their site. Right now, if I visited an anti-vaxxer forum, and posted "vaccines don't cause autism" in the comments, I'm sure it would be removed.
I agree with you. They shouldn't. I'm playing devils advocate to make a point. You can't expect websites to treat all opinions as equal. Even 4chan has moderators.
Youtube only differs from other websites in scale. They are moderating content as we see fit. We can disagree with their reasoning behind moderation. But it's silly to act like they didn't have this right all along
(And that's what I see in this comment section. Comments like "why should youtube say what I can and can't watch?" I'm pointing out that those arguments are a dead end.)
> "False/misleading videos that perpetuate a scam."
You seem to be implying that Jones' videos are truthful/informative and totally-not-a-scam, while the videos in the article, which actually contained educational content, were false, misleading, and perpetuating a scam.
Meanwhile, Jones has a supplement business that pulled an estimated $15 mil over two years (some estimate $25 mil) [1]. Here is a sampling of reviews from an independent lab that tested the substances:
- "Both of these products are most likely safe, but ineffective."
- "This product is a waste of money. The claim that 'Anthroplex works synergistically with the powerful Super Male Vitality formula in order to help restore your masculine foundation and stimulate vitality with its own blend of unique ingredients' is fluff on multiple fronts."
- "This product's claims related to 'nascent oxygen' also have no real
basis in science."
- "We tested this product on the chance that it might be potassium iodide or sodium iodide, which it wasn't. Survival Shield is just plain iodine."
etc.
This is a guy who "... repeatedly asserted the Sandy Hook shooting was staged and the parents were liars and frauds who helped in a cover-up" [2].
So, what's your definition of false and/or misleading?
Ooops. If so, I deserve what's coming. There's another reading possible, though, so I'm leaving my response up for those who read it the same way I did.
My point is to show that these criteria are very hard to apply consistently, particularly when there's money to be made. Alex Jones' channel is alive and well.
"You seem to be implying that Jones' videos are truthful/informative and totally-not-a-scam, while the videos in the article, which actually contained educational content, were false, misleading, and perpetuating a scam."
I can assure you wholeheartedly that I am implying that Alex Jones videos are squarely in the "false/misleading/perpetuating a scam" camp.
However if the title was "PHP is the best programming language in the world", then the account should be banned, and they should possibly forward the authorities the offenders IP Address so they can get the crazy person on a watch list.
Then that definition of free speech ignores the changes in culture and communication, no? (I’m not even disagreeing with you, I’m more curious here. This article and discussion has brought up interesting points I think)
He’s right about free speech. Even in countries where free speech is a right, it is strictly defined as government can’t punish you for your opinion. Private companies can show users the door at any time.
What I fail to see is what has his retort about free speech anything to do with my comment on the youtube monopolistic position.
yep, but the tide is changing. my last comment on the slippery slope and youtube didn't go minus fifteen as usual, so at least the tech community around here is coming to term with the issue being real.
The question I have about this, gun related content and anything else that is "A violation of our T&C" is this: when does YouTube/FB/whatever stop being a safe harbor according to the DMCA? Which special interest group (NRA?) is going to bankroll the law suit against Google for hosting copyrighted content without permission and that they are entirely liable because they're exercising editorial control? Or is the safe harbor provision toothless because Google is a giant?
YouTube will probably remove fitness videos soon, since some people invariably are stupid and will hurt themselves with the exercises on display, a completely analogous situation.
Exercise is much different from research chemicals. One difference is you don't need to buy exercise from shady sites that will eventually be shut down by the FDA.
I think the validity of exercise being beneficial to one's health is so thoroughly proven that nobody is going to remove those videos as "false medical claims."
It's not the same as saying that an untested supplement will improve some aspect of your mind. Not analogous at all imho.
Soon to be followed by train videos, which could put people in harms way to view rare trains, then siren videos, as prolonged exposure to high intensity sound can cause hearing loss. And storm spotting as well, clearly the only safe space when there are large threatening clouds in the sky is in a 300ft underground nuclear silo...
Without having watched any of this stuff, my assumption is these videos are not clear enough in disclaiming any confirmed medicinal or FDA-approved effects. If the content is tantamount to advertising on the level the supplement manufacturers are prohibited from (and careful to avoid) doing themselves, it's probably appropriate for YouTube to close down the channels. Especially if these YouTubers are somehow generating income from the "product reviews".
I remember when I was in high school, I got onto Something Awful and saw some posting about nootropics and was interested in the possible effects, like improved memory and sharper concentration, so I got some (I think piracetam). In the instructions it said it would take some time to work, like a week or two, and after a few days of feeling the same and seemingly having no effects I stopped taking them and the only benefit I got afterwards was selling the remaining pills to my friend since they apparently make the high from pot more intense.
Beyond the anecdote I don't think this is censorship from Youtube, it's likely the creators were either venturing into advertising/selling products as the primary purpose of their videos, or giving some kind of medical advice about how they can improve your life/body, or both, both of which I think are against Youtube ToS. Given that it's a story from Motherboard we're probably just getting a partial part of the story and the article is just making it seem like Youtube is censoring something they shouldn't, rather than putting the creators at fault.
New Ask HN thread: where are creators migrating to in lieu of YouTube?
Vimeo? Twitch? Facebook? Metacafe or Dailymotion? There are also also already dozens of dapps for streaming like dtube, lbry, viewly, lino, flixxo....(etc, just see https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+youtube), but I don't see any particular venue rising above the rest, as a lot of creators seem to choose "all of the above" as an answer, syndicating content across as many domains as possible.
AFAIK nothing. From what I've seen nearly everybody is remaining on youtube and is counting on using alternative monetization platforms such as patreon or selling merchandise. This gives them a security net if youtube decides to demonetize their videos (or simply if their youtube revenue drops off), but doesn't help them if youtube just starts deleting their videos or bans them from the platform.
For instance Cody's Lab has a patreon page which doubtlessly helps with falling revenue from youtube, but it doesn't prevent youtube from giving him various community guideline strikes and locking his channel for videos that were considered acceptable years ago when they were uploaded but are now retroactively in violation.
(Some specific 'genres' of content creators have alternative platforms. For instance gamers have twitch, and gun channels have full30. But I've not seen any alternative platform becoming popular that targets the full range of youtube content)
(Incidentally the ubiquity of patreon makes me wonder if it too will shape up to be considered a harmful monopoly one day in the not so distant future.)
There is nowhere to go, no platform wants to host polarizing videos, which will alternatively be attacked by both the far left and the far right (mostly by the left today since tech companies employees mostly sympathize with them thus they get more favorable outcomes)
Looking into DTube, their about page says, "Because of the decentralized nature of IPFS and the STEEM blockchain, D.Tube is not able to censor videos, nor enforce guidelines. Only the users can censor it, through the power of their upvotes and downvotes."
YouTube has a monopoly on free online video and this is what monopoly looks like.
When Google bought out YouTube, as those that were online back then can attest, there were dozens of not hundreds of competing sites. None of those could hold a candle to the resources Google’s cash could buy, and they quickly dropped out of the running. The only site still around is probably vimeo, and only because they were smart enough to not target the masses and instead pick a niche to serve.
The few video sites that have managed to compete with YouTube all have interesting angles. There is DailyMotion, which is popular in France and seems to play fast and loose with IP laws. Tudou for when you're behind the great Chinese Firewall. Facebook videos, which compete in view counts with YouTube by force of their own monopoly on social media. And Twitch which carved out a niche in video game streaming. Maybe we should consider Twitter videos too. RIP Vine.
Add their lobbying, that is participating and influencing a limited, largely invitation-only discussion of what video distribution is and will be on the Web.
(I say largely invitation-only, because 10's and 100's of thousands of us can mount campaigns "of the masses" without moving the needle, or generating only a temporary reaction until the powers that be can slip their changes through another avenue or after simply wearing us out.)
Now, they are no longer "just" a commercial provider, free to choose what they wish to host.
They are defining the very nature of Web video (and, more broadly, content) distribution -- to suit their own purposes.
THAT's why you worry when big players start doing stuff. Because it tends to become "the law".
Look, I know there are plenty of people here who will sing the praises of their chosen Nootropic stack, but quite honestly, the majority of the videos I have seen on the subject online tout over-the-counter supplements as miracle pills with limitless-esque possibilities.
9/10 pieces of advice I see on Nootropic use amount to dangerous and misinformed medical advice.
I can understand why YouTube would want to avoid looking complicit in all of this, especially with more than one popular Nootropic supplement sending users to the hospital in recent months.
Big pharma are untouchable on TV (the silence around mass shooters and prescription meds is deafening) so my guess is you will soon see more pharma ads on YouTube etc. Can't upset the sponsors now.
TL;DR
It is suggested they improve cognitive function (memory, focus, etc.). They are not fully regulated and you can find examples for sale on Amazon. As such, no idea if short or long-term usage is safe but it's interesting product if you simply read what the labels claim.
Nootropics aren't really products in and of themselves. Caffeine is a nootropic for example. There's a pretty broad range from herbals all the way to perscriotion and illicit drugs.
This type of comment should really be somehow differentiated from the rest. It's about defining a common idea (within large subsets of society), that if you don't know, you can't really talk about intelligently.
YouTube isn't deciding what you can watch, they are deciding what they are going to use their resources to show you. You can still watch whatever you want, provided you don't use YouTube's resources.
As to who YouTube is to make that decision: they are the entity providing the resources.
They are not a public service nor to they have to pretend to be one.
But they do pretend that, all the time. They are a common carrier when it suits them and a publisher with editorial control when it suits them. That’s not reasonable and they must be forced to choose one or the other.
Google, who owns Youtube, are distributors at best, and distributors who didn't come by their trade first hand.
They bought into it. They are pretenders who, for the first time in recorded history, are able to perform a massive product recall in the name of censorship without incurring backlash on a scale that would cause bankruptcy or riots.
To wish away all that context in the name of "digital" is a fool's errand.
YouTube essentially has a monopoly on video. Monopolies and other actors can be forced to comply with public space laws or to respect principles that normally apply only to the government.
Well, they are the de-facto curator of the bulk of our civilizations videos. Lets be honest, if you aren't on YouTube your chances of being searched/promoted/seen are greatly diminished. Maybe to nearly zero.
That's so far from true. A "video hosting services" search away is >10 results, of which I recognize at least 3 as professional level excluding Youtube (Vimeo, Ooyala, and Wistia). They may not have the entire ecosystem around it, but you need to be a little specific if you want anything approaching a valid claim for "monopoly on video" _hosting_. If you're talking about traffic, that's a separate story and is only a sign they are generally providing a usable product.
When I search for video on search engines, I only see hits to YouTube and far far fewer hits to Vimeo. I never see hits for Ooyala and Wistia; honestly, you could be making those sites up for all I know.
And the other ones won't ever see more popularity if everyone keeps saying that YouTube is the only game in town, and doesn't start using the other sites.
Quoting from that article: These spaces are usually the product of a deal between cities and private real estate developers in which cities grant valuable zoning concessions and developers provide in return privately owned public spaces in or near their buildings.
TV stations decide what shows they want to air, and which ones they don't. And nobody calls it censorship. Youtube feels like public infrastructure. But legally, it's no different than a TV station deciding to cancel a show.
A TV station has limited bandwidth. They have a constant ongoing algorithm to choose what to fit in there.
YouTube could keep all videos forever. There can be no commercial reason to 'cancel' a YouTube video. So we know that this decision is almost completely unrelated to the TV Station reasons.
1. Hosting videos costs Youtube money. It's probably a tiny amount per video. But that doesn't mean they can host every video forever.
2. They have a commercial reason to cancel these videos. Maybe they think the use of these drugs is risky, and gives their website an unsavory reputation. That hurts their brand (and potentially their bottom line). This is not unlike a TV show canceling a successful show when it's star actor becomes embroiled in controversy.
Number 1 is pretty much yes, they can. It's a diminishing cost, and the price of storage is very likely diminishing faster than the rate of video production is rising.
Number 2, agreed, we in fact know it can only be censorship (and not competing viewership) that drives the decision. That's my whole point.
YouTube content is created by human beings. There is an absolute bound to that (record everything everybody does all day long). No, its not geometric and can never be, right?
Storage and network charges are already pennies per terabyte-day. So currently and in the forseeable future, YouTube's costs will probably be administrative.
And that's all beside the point. There's not hard 24-hour one-channel limit to what YouTube can 'broadcast'. So their model is completely unlike a traditional TV station. So that analogy is flawed. So we can conclude, YouTube's decision to show (or not show) anything is based on completely different criterion. Pedantry notwithstanding.
1. https://xkcd.com/605/
Hard drives are dropping in price. That doesn't mean they will ever be zero.
1a. Youtube has other expenses besides hard drives. Bandwith. Server infrastructure. Employee salaries. To name a few.
2. It's not censorship. It's editorial judgement. Are you saying websites should be forced to host opinions they don't agree with? There is no "fairness doctrine" for sites like youtube.
I run an independent music label in Toronto, and our group has been considering for some time to create a semi-serialized web series but one of the big prohibiting factors in us actually getting it done is that nobody wants to use YouTube.
If we generate a serious following that is dependent on the platform we're giving up a tremendous degree of creative control and direction for our fans.
Not to mention the serious lock-down on live-streaming musical content, and copyright restrictions. If so much as five seconds of the wrong song is playing in the background, the whole episode gets pulled.
Can we do a cover of 'x'? Other people have, but will ours get pulled?
Here we have an instance where hundreds of other similar videos and channels exist, yet these three individuals were singled out.
If there was at least consistency in the censorship and copyright stuff, or a proper channel for communication, the platform would still be viable.
But, like the Apple iOS App Store, you can produce an entire project, upload it, and, if it even gets up there to start, you've basically just gotta cross your fingers and hope it stays there, because the right to pull it at any time is there.
tl;dr: at least if YouTube, Apple, etc, were consistent with censorship and offered proper channels of communication they would be much more viable platforms.
I mean, I think you'd find they would stop at content that was suitable for their ad partners to run profitable ad campaigns on. That is after all how they keep the lights on.
So a creator trusts the guidelines provided by youtube and invests in a business to find out later youtube can actually shut that business down without a tangible reason. I don't understand how being a private entity gives youtube the right to make a false advertisement and treat their creators as fools.
Is it clearly stated that youtube can remove your videos just because? (considering, claiming it's not fitting guidelines is as vague as claiming it is bad for the environment)
I get that. I wish I emphasized "clearly" because it seems common practice to create a false perception of justice/security/privacy with almost every single online service now. I just don't understand how this practice can be the "right" of any entity not just private. This sounds like an excuse for people who know to despise others for not knowing.
While it seemed against the times when I, in the age of YouTube, Spotify and Netflix, decided to start to build my media library with Plex...
...with artists suddenly withdrawing their music from streaming services...
...and Netflix constantly upping their price while enforcing ever more stringent HW-requirements for “good enough” DRM throughout your media rig for “premium” content...
...and YouTube happy to censor anything not approved by the Sanfran extreme left...
I have to say I really start appreciating having a personally curated, persistent library of media which is mine to own, and mine to decide where and how I use.
Magnesium isn't even a nootropic. That is, while it may have some ability to boost cognition, it isn't a substance primarily ingested for that reason. It is a substance primarily ingested so that the person ingesting it will stay alive.
A quick cruise around Duck Duck Go suggests that while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea in desperate need of being censored. Certainly the idea that magnesium is generally deficient is widespread, with estimates around 50% not meeting the US RDA for magnesium in the US, and while magnesium may not be a good solution for insomnia qua insomnia, it can be a good solution for many things that may be causing you to be "unable to sleep"[1], whether or not that is "insomnia".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_deficiency_(medicine...