
YouTube removes hundreds of the best climate science videos from the Internet - r3bl
http://climatestate.com/2017/02/03/youtube-removes-hundreds-of-the-best-climate-science-videos-from-the-internet/
======
awalton
It's more likely the channel was brigaded by r/The_Donald supporters or 4chan
than YouTube actually doing anything. Their systems are so automated, stuff
like this happens all of the time - the users wield an unseemly huge amount of
power to knock content offline.

So, lessons learned: 1) Keep backups of everything you'd upload to YouTube. 2)
Vimeo.com account 3) Petition YouTube to revamp their content policing
strategies to keep humans in the loop instead of algorithms knocking content
offline because a mob with pitchforks decides they don't agree with you.

~~~
staz
Youtube-dl [1] is a great tool to backup videos from Youtube. (And just a pip
install away)

[1] [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

~~~
dredmorbius
On Android: Install Termux and you can install youtube-dl via pip.

Bonus tip: install the Termux API app, and termux-tools package, and get
clipboard access (along with other Android features).

~~~
icebraining
On Android I use Youtube Downloader, which has the necessary Intents stuff to
let you just open an YT link with it. Shame it went closed source, though.

Is there some terminal app that lets you create new Intents to run commands?
Should be simple to tie the action "Open link to youtube.com/" to running
"youtube-dl $link".

~~~
gman99
Here's [1] an open source app that lets you share a link from youtube which
then uses a hosted version of youtube-dl to get the direct link to the mp4 url
and pass it back to the Android Download app

[1]
[https://github.com/zeronickname/VideoDownloader](https://github.com/zeronickname/VideoDownloader)

------
Taek
I stand up and point my finger again in the direction of decentralization.
Here we have this massive societal infrastructure, a huge education tool and a
hub for culture, and the whole thing is under the control of a single entity
whose primary motive is exclusively profit.

The core infrastructure of the internet (search, social media, archives, etc.)
should not be under the influence of single companies. The internet was
supposed to be decentralized but we ended up with individual companies taking
huge monopolies over our standard internet experiences.

I don't think there is any tech out there today that can properly replace
YouTube. Especially things like the recommendation engine. But I also don't
think it's that far out of reach. We should putting greater effort into
decentralizing the core parts of the internet.

Money, search, email, data storage, social media, DNS, ISP, and I'm sure
dozens of other things. We don't need to be vulnerable like this.

~~~
striking
I mean, you stated it pretty clearly yourself. How would a recommendation
system rivaling YouTube's work in a decentralized fashion?

There's also the fact that people spend a lot of time, effort, and money
making these videos. How would they get paid by a decentralized system?

I want to decentralize too, absolutely. But I'm at a loss as to how we'd
accomplish it in a way that ultimately benefits society instead of making an
inferior product.

~~~
bravomartin
blockchain technologies enable large decentralized systems.

~~~
dualogy
Yeah 'enable' but they clearly don't seem to drive mass adoption in and of
themselves

------
mjolk
Their videos are just clips of others' content, this isn't original work or a
leader on the topic:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateProgressWorld/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateProgressWorld/videos)

This reeks of breaking a ToS and then trying to masquerade their political
site as something more noble to rationalize creating a narrative of victimhood
for marketing/attention.

The group/person behind climatestate.com is either deluded or trying to sell
an aggrandizing message by claiming that they're the subject of a "concerted
attack on climate science originating from the current U.S. Administration".
There might be an attack, but no way was this on anyone's radar.

------
aw3c2
> YouTube removes hundreds of the best climate science videos _from the
> Internet_

No, they did not. YouTube removed them from YouTube.

Don't trust others to host your things or provide you with access to other's
things.

~~~
ivraatiems
What should they have done?

Sure, they could not post videos on the largest video-sharing platform on the
Internet. They could pay someone to host and maintain all that content
themselves and have far fewer people see them.

You're not wrong to distrust YouTube (or any such site), but this isn't all on
the videomakers. They have a choice: put their stuff on YouTube and risk it
being taken down, or put their stuff somewhere else and know for certain far
fewer people will see it.

~~~
CamelCaseName
_What should they have done?_

Keep backups. Otherwise when YouTube deletes it from YouTube, YouTube deletes
it from the everywhere.

------
pmorici
Sounds like fake news nothing but speculation and inuendo.

~~~
logicallee
Did you see the article someone in this thread linked (cached)? It quotes
YouTube's emails verbatim.

I don't really have anything to be outraged about because we don't now why
they did it. Certainly one thinks of Trump's positions but this would not
extent to YouTube's actions.

~~~
pmorici
The fake part is that they are cherry picking facts from several unrelated
things and putting them in the same article. The intent is clearly to give the
impression to readers that they should think that their channel was somehow
taken down do to government censorship when there is in fact zero evidence to
suggest that. This is the _exact_ MO of all those sites people love to hate
for fake news. The only real difference here is that because this fake story
is about something that jives with a lot of peoples political opinions here
they were primed to believe it w/o questioning.

~~~
logicallee
okay but the channel was taken down for some reason - what is it? I guess we
don't know. If they were spamming or abusing policy in some active way they
certainly hid it well in the write-up. (Dangerously so - it would take half a
sentence for any reader, even a YouTube employee writing anonymously, to call
them out on it.)

There must be some "real" (actual) reason - and no one has even speculated as
to what it is. The writeup (which you can see in the cached copy elsewhere in
this thread, if the site is still down or unresponsive) makes it really clear
that they haven't broken any policy and actively sought guidance on what their
infraction might have been.

~~~
wybiral
YouTube says:

>This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of
YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or
other Terms of Service violations.

~~~
logicallee
They asked for clarification and did not receive any, and didn't have any
violations they knew about. They certainly sound like they don't believe they
have any violations and were not doing anything wrong.

I will say that the word "ongoing" sounds like they admit they did some
specific thing wrong in the past, that they rectified. It doesn't sound like
"this came as a _total_ surprise to us." I'm curious why they didn't choose to
elaborate on the word "ongoing". Still, there had to be some reason for this
action.

They're curious what that was. (Or are faking being curious what that was -
and they're faking it well; I believe them.)

~~~
pmorici
If their videos are anything like this blog post then they certainly fall into
the "deceptive" category. No mystery there.

~~~
logicallee
What is deceptive about the blog post?

~~~
pmorici
Everything? They are implying that their some some conspiracy against them.

~~~
logicallee
There is literally a conspiracy -
[https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+climate+change+social+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+climate+change+social+media+ban)

by the administration, so... I'm still waiting for the misleading part? I am
sure you will agree that there is a conspiracy (two or more people in Trump's
administration, conspiring.)

You're saying it doesn't affect them, but if the conspiracy doesn't aeffect
them then...why did this happen?

I guess I just don't see anything misleading about their report. If I had my
blog about climate change removed since Trump's administration and was told
not to open any new blog, period (despite having thousands of views) I'd come
to the obvious conclusion that this was the reason. I would (as they did) ask
for clarification.

I mean what other reason is there? What did they do wrong exactly - and why
wouldn't YouTube clarify in their human-written email on the subject which
they quoted in full?

I guess I don't understand your perspective at all.

~~~
pmorici
You think that because the administration asked executive agencies to stop all
posting to social media under _official_ government accounts that that means
YouTube took down a _private_ parties youtube channel run by a private party /
individual company not associated with the US government?

There is literally ZERO evidence that is true.

What you are saying is like saying I saw the president's dog poop on the white
house lawn and today I found poop on my lawn. Then concluding it must have
been the president's dog that pooped on your lawn. It's nutty false and
untrue.

You are taking two completely unrelated facts and making a wild unsupported
claim which most people would call misleading if not a lie.

------
jdormit
This is the problem with using any privately-owned server as your primary
vehicle for hosting your content. By all means, post your videos to YouTube -
but please, host secondary copies yourself, especially now that government
censorship seems to be becoming the norm.

[Edit] "government censorship seems to be becoming the norm" is perhaps too
extreme. Still, the link between the article's evidence of increased
censorship and the Trump administration's stance on climate change (and other
issues) is concerning.

~~~
krapp
Censorship aside, content creators should _never_ depend on a single third-
party service for hosting their videos, especially if they intend to make a
living from that content. Google has already proven willing to remove
arbitrary content, delete channels, etc. from Youtube with no apparent
rationale or recourse given.

I _suspect_ a lot of their recent "glitches" are an attempt to poison the well
for public content and to drive potentially copyright infringing channels[0]
away in order to eventually turn the service into an entirely subscription
based, big media friendly platform. But who knows? The point is, it doesn't
matter. Unless you're Sony, you might well wake up tomorrow to find your
entire channel erased, and you'll never know why.

If your content is important to you, consider hosting it elsehwere, or else
offering it as a torrent. It may require a bit more of a technical investment,
be less convenient, and even reduce revenue, but in the long run, the more
channels for distribution you have, the more you can afford to lose.

[0] infringing from the point of view of media conglomerates, who refuse to
respect the legitimacy of fair use.

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
This is why MediaGoblin is such an important project. By all means, publish to
YouTube, offload different codec/bitrate copies to BitTorrent, place a copy on
the Internet Archive, but also run a MediaGoblin server.

[0] [http://mediagoblin.org/](http://mediagoblin.org/)

------
jerkstate
i'm not ready to jump to conclusions that this is government-related as
implied in the article. i'd like to know more, but youtube's takedown policy
is not a court of law and no rulings are ever published.

------
fleshweasel
Server is responding pretty slowly (maybe not used to this much traffic?) so
here's a Google cache for it:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lxQe4zC...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lxQe4zCXSVwJ:climatestate.com/2017/02/03/youtube-
removes-hundreds-of-the-best-climate-science-videos-from-the-
internet/&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
arca_vorago
You see, this is the problem with automated DMCA stuff. If enough people don't
like your stuff, they just brigade report you until youtube or $company gets
rid of you. The second they bought youtube I knew eventually their evil would
infiltrate it, unfortunately though no competitor has done a good job
replacing them.

My favorite comment on youtube comes from one of the founders, Jawed Karim,
back when google was trying to merge all accounts and force you to use real
names in google+ and then to tie google+ to youtube: "why the fuck do i need a
google+ account to comment"

I whish people wouldn't deride those of us critical of google for being
essentially NSA's best friend and reminding people they basically started by
the CIA's venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Please attempt to refrain from
accusing those of us who do "paranoid conspiracy theorists" because I feel
like over time we are being proven correct and being vindicated, as much as I
would like it to be otherwise.

*Edited to take dijit's advice and be less negative/combative.

~~~
dijit
I find it highly likely that you're going to be downvoted due to being so
hostile.

If that's the case, please don't assume it's because of a conspiracy, or that
everyone loves google.

Plenty of people on HN are very critical of google and centralisation in
general, myself included.

------
gagabity
How can they not have copies of their videos? Are these original content or
taken from other sources without permission?

------
rycho
the dmca is one of the worst things that has ever happened to the internet. i
hope one day we get rid of it.

------
kalms
Wtf. Is this for real?

Furthermore: Could it be due to an automatic process?

~~~
chinhodado
Everything at Google is automated. It's just that to get a response from an
actual person when you appeal a decision, you usually need to have a blog post
that reaches the front page of HN, and a couple of known friends inside
Google. Sometimes even that is not enough.

Google's support has become a meme at this point, on par with Valve's support.

~~~
marssaxman
Did Google ever actually have human tech support staff? That just doesn't
sound like the sort of thing they'd do.

~~~
chrisper
Yes. The Google Play Store (the part where you can buy phones etc.) has
actually good support. I think the only other area they have support is Google
AdSense and maybe the paid Google Apps.

------
kordless
Agreed with the brigades. I've been watching Rust videos on building bases and
evidently some of the more popular streamers get hammered by take down
requests all the time from the Zerg clans. _Zerg_ is evidently a term used by
players to refer to the "group think mentality" players. Learn something new
every day!

------
z3t4
googles automatic takedowns has a lot of false posetives. and their support is
bad or non existing. they dont do manual takedowns though. if your lucky they
will restore.

------
toomuchtodo
Time to start archiving to the Internet Archive.

~~~
cseelus
I hope they have Servers outside the control of the US government.

~~~
dredmorbius
[http://www.thehill.com/policy/technology/307942-internet-
arc...](http://www.thehill.com/policy/technology/307942-internet-archive-
putting-database-in-canada-to-keep-it-from-trump)

------
laurentdc
Scary.

------
melbourneblues
.

~~~
grzm
What reason do you have to doubt it?

------
tehwalrus
Okay, USA, I guess you're going to be losing a lot of business to countries
with less crazy governments now. I wish I could say the UK will benefit, but I
doubt it.

~~~
throwaway729
I find it incredibly difficult to believe that the US government is demanding
the removal of climate science videos from YouTube, and even more difficult to
believe that YouTube would acquiesce to such a request.

I'm sure we'll learn of a far more mundane explanation in short order. My
money is on some automated process mistakenly removing content (possibly
triggered by trolls, but just as likely triggered by a sub-par algorithm).

~~~
ptaipale
It's not really a mistake. It's the design of those automated systems. There
is little to no human control in taking down material that people complain
about.

There have been activists - e.g. Muslim immigrants who work against Islamism -
who are targeted by complaints from hard-line Islamists and whose accounts
have been suspended. So this is nothing to do with Trump administration.

