
By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence - jbegley
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/opinion/syria-youtube-content-moderation.html
======
least
Youtube and Facebook, while convenient, aren't really appropriate mediums for
them to share this sort of footage. Liveleak comes to mind as a service better
suited for a public repository of this video.

Archival of footage shouldn't be dependent on a third party platform that can,
at will, delete every single video on a whim. Likely for this sort of thing a
diligent archivist will need to put in the effort of storing it safely,
because those videos will almost all end up being deleted on platforms that
rely on ad revenue.

~~~
thinkingkong
Been wondering about this phenomenon for awhile. Spotify can delete music
history. Youtube can delete video history. If it's on a streaming service it
may as well not exist. We're at this strange point where convenience may as
well be access, because the same service you used for discovery is the one for
consumption. I don't know if this phenomenon has a name.

~~~
ddiq
Likewise Amazon removing books from its site is much more effective than any
book burning.

~~~
Fnoord
Fahrenheit 451, good movie about that. I just found out Amazon owns Goodreads.
They also own IMDB.

~~~
ddiq
An oft-overlooked aspect of Fahrenheit 451 is that it's everyday people that
report others to the firemen in the book, very similar to how content is
censored these days.

Goodreads will list any book for the time being, even ones banned from Amazon.
One example is The Culture of Critique - the link to Amazon goes to a broken
page, but links to buy it from other vendors remain.

Link to the book -
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182136.The_Culture_of_Cr...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182136.The_Culture_of_Critique)

------
knzhou
In the media, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If tech
companies _weren 't_ removing violent content, there would be twice as many
articles complaining about it. For any choice, whether it's a blanket policy
or a content moderator's personal call, _either_ action can be painted as
"dystopian" or "violating human rights" or whatever else is the flavor of the
day. Reading hundreds of one-sided hit pieces over the years has totally
desensitized me, to the point that I start feeling extreme skepticism whenever
anybody starts talking about human rights or dystopias. That's not a good
thing, but I would say it's not all my fault, either.

Across prestigious universities, mini-think tanks that study "tech and
society" have been popping up. As far as I can tell, they exist solely to
contribute to this tidal wave of narrative. They look at what is happening,
and make up a reason it's bad. I can't think of a single example where they
concluded that tech did something good.

------
codingslave
Not only Youtube, I've noticed a huge disparity between Duck Duck Go results
and Google results when writing queries that could be thought of as containing
a controversial/politically/racially/etc charged topic. Youtube
recommendations and search/ranking suppress searches as it is, even if they
were to leave the content on there, most of it will never be surfaced through
organic means without a direct link or a search with a direct title match.

~~~
LeftHandPath
The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results,
copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking
for, is astounding.

I do think that they are starting to lose the power-user userbase when it
comes to browsers and search engines. But their email, docs/sheets/whatever,
drive, and now their DNS registrar services are all cemented into business
flow.

It makes sense. They don't need the power users - they need the most users. As
long as they have the most users, businesses (where the power-users are
working) are going to use ancillary services like Google MyBusiness, Google
Analytics, and embrace google-backed (and ranking-factor) tech like SSL
certificates and progressive web apps.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results,
> copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm
> looking for, is astounding.

I'll bet it's dwarfed by the number of times I get useful results from Google
and total garbage from DDG.

Earlier today I searched for "CADT syndrome" to figure out what another HN
comment meant by it. Both engines automatically correct that to "cast
syndrome" if you search without quotes. But only Google provided a relevant
result after being corrected "no, I really meant CADT syndrome". DDG gamely
provided the "cast syndrome" results after correcting the query.

~~~
rubatuga
You should use verbose mode

~~~
frittig
are quotes around the search term not the command for verbose mode?

~~~
mkl
Not anymore. Google has a verbatim mode under Tools > All results.

------
campfireveteran
Sounds about right. They demonetize blancoliorio's in-depth commercial
aircraft and pilot industry analysis as "sad content." Oh and donutoperator
gets demonetized despite blurring almost everything and not swearing. Non-
corporate content creators and random people have NO rights on corporate
platforms like YT. The only solution is another platform that respects
creators, has sane/straightforward policies and doesn't permit rampant scams
and extortions.

~~~
notadoc
> The only solution is another platform that respects creators, has
> sane/straightforward policies and doesn't permit rampant scams and
> extortions.

What is that alternate platform?

For many people, web video is YouTube.

~~~
campfireveteran
You're speaking for other people when you can only speak for yourself, and you
need to get out more. A not-yet-existent, co-op-owned platform where creators
share in monetization and have straight-forward/transparent content policies
and processes, not secret ones, and not shady algorithms that curate user
filter-bubbles without telling them how they're being shown recommendations.
YT isn't the only web address on the internet. Apps, integrations, and plugins
can be replaced if people are willing to support quality and minimally-
censored content that respects creators' ability, autonomy and sometimes
livelihoods, rather than a power-law income distribution beholden to random
countries' censorship and corporate advertisers' nearly arbitrary whims.

~~~
EpicEng
>You're speaking for other people when you can only speak for yourself, and
you need to get out more

Millions upon millions of people watching YT, but GP "needs to get out more"
in order to experience your fantasy platform that doesn't exist. Ok.

~~~
notadoc
You know the type, we've all worked with them before.

------
kazinator
Is this pure populism, or does the principle apply to the "little guy" as
well?

If I set up a machine under my desk at home with a domain (courtesy of dynamic
DNS), and provide a few terabytes of free-of-charge storage to a small bunch
of people, am I "erasing history" if I can't keep all their stuff forever?

Or do I have to be a Youtube-sized corporate entity before I'm a fucking
asshole?

~~~
taneq
Depends what you say to them.

If you say "hey guys, feel free to use this storage to host stuff" and then
delete it, then yes, you're an asshole.

If you say "hey guys, I have some hard drive space, send me stuff you think I
might like and if I like it I'll host it for a while before deleting it" then
no, you're not an asshole.

If you say something that sounds like the first statement but is actually the
second statement because of some obfuscated legalese attached to a footnote,
and then delete it, then you're back to being an asshole.

~~~
marshray
What if you promote this service with a name that starts with "You" and ends
with a word referencing one of the most dominant media of public record for
over a half century?

~~~
kazinator
The only way that is a "public record" is if we consider the perspective that
anything that was ever broadcast is still radiating in space.

------
mdszy
Why would you trust a for-profit company to archive anything and care? They
don't. It's unreasonable to expect anything different.

If you want things archived, non-profit solutions exist, or you should be
doing it yourself and making sure the content is shared among people who are
also able to archive it.

~~~
archgoon
"To organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible"

Because they claimed they cared about this sort of thing. For a while, it
seemed as if they meant it.

------
root_axis
Stop relying on for-profit companies to host your videos for free. If you need
reliable hosting try paying for it.

------
justcorrect
This is a digital content issue, not so much an issue of extremist content.
Almost 10 years ago now, Geocities was shut down and took 38 million of the
most popular pages of the Internet 1.0 with it.

~~~
selimthegrim
Wasn’t there an attempt, neocities, to bring back the aesthetic?

~~~
chongli
The aesthetic is one thing, the content is another. The former is easy to
replace, the latter irreplaceable.

------
rolph
I think most of the reason we have history, is due to physical media, such as
print. newspapers books diaries and scrap books would live for decades and
centuries even, so investigators could elucidate the past and bring it to
light.

internet media in the current form is subject to great purges of intentional
and accidental nature. no matter the corporate intention, there is a great
danger of major events being deleted from social memory, and the engineering
attempts currently in play, will easily become best practice in gov parlance.

~~~
nemo44x
This is an insightful comment. The audio engineer Steve Albini often comments
that one reason he only records artists using analogue tape is because digital
is easily lost either through obsolete and proprietary formats, or deliberate
governance. Analogue tape, although inconvenient, requires a physical action
to be destroyed in possibly many physical places and isn’t subject to evolving
digital formats.

------
stebann
Oh yeah! Now they're taking down videos showing the Chilean soldiers and
Chilean police unleashing their rage and violence against their own civilians.

~~~
taneq
Sadly the flip side of "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"
is "a freedom fighter is always someone's terrorist."

------
PhasmaFelis
> _" Ogrish was a very serious site, it wasn't like a lot of the gore sites
> you might see now that are based off that model. It was tremendously
> serious, everything was researched, there was no laughing at dead people or
> anything like that"_

...Just a _bit_ undermined by the screenshot of Ogrish video titles in the
article...
[https://media.businessinsider.com/images/54117ca9ecad04406f2...](https://media.businessinsider.com/images/54117ca9ecad04406f25dd39-750-460.jpg)

------
anfilt
I have said this before and will say again:

Honestly, why do platforms need to delete anything. Why not just have options
like most search engines sort have... Let the users decide if they want to see
objectionable or even violent content. They are adults they can make up their
own mind.

Consider duckduckgo's search results you can choose:

    
    
      Strict
       *No Adult content*
      Moderate
       *No Explicit images or video*
      Off
       *Don't filter content*

------
urda
Go ahead and add reddit into the mix as well. It's starting to be really
concerning only a few people control these important discussion and meeting
places, and exercise (often) power abuse from such a position to push their
agenda. History isn't pleasant, that doesn't mean reddit and YouTube should be
white washing it.

~~~
bafflingworld
The sheer amount of pro-Chinese government moderators on Reddit is absolutely
insane. So much dissent being either erased or forced into "megathreads." This
is not how we should be reacting to genocide.

~~~
betterbeehome
Thanks for helping me think differently about megathreads. political
containment and pruning is the result.

~~~
bafflingworld
Yup, another classic tactic is a moderator stepping in and doing some
variation of "This thread has gone out of control! Locked." This has become
very common in Hong Kong threads. I strongly believe that TenCent needs to be
rooted out of U.S. tech and media, and fast.

~~~
betterbeehome
I'm starting to come around to the idea of rejecting Chinese investment. They
clearly have a negative influence. See Hollywood, political coverage,
historical programming, video games, current affairs... If nothing is done, in
a few decades they'll have manipulated the entire social political landscape
of the West. All of us will be using the Social Credit system. Worse, we'll
defend it, too.

Future is bleak if we do nothing.

------
drewbt
Inappropriate content can be flagged, and continuing to view or partake in
discussion of extremist things, that are counter to the interests of every
living thing on the planet, waive the users right to privacy, and logs of
activity automatically get passed on to public protection agencies.

Or something better.

Keep refining and optimizing the system.

------
facorreia
They still haven't understood that they're the product being sold, not the
customers.

------
anfilt
Very similar topic discussed about 6 months ago.

Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes (theatlantic.com)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864994)

------
squarefoot
Which brings us to a couple good practices: never trust the cloud or any other
online storage and always back up sensitive information offline, multiple
times and in multiple places, _before_ putting it online.

------
mindgam3
YouTube could solve this problem by throwing money at it, i.e. investing much
more heavily in human moderators. They are extremely unlikely to ever do so,
as the market would punish them for it in the short term and Google is
unlikely to prioritize human rights over revenue.

This presents an opportunity for another Internet Archive-like repo as
mentioned in earlier comments. Unfortunately the barrier to entry (just
getting people to know about it) would be super high.

The WITNESS movement associated with one of the authors is worth checking out:
[https://www.witness.org/](https://www.witness.org/)

~~~
dageshi
Isn't it well documented that the human moderators who do exist at places like
facebook and youtube end up having their mental health screwed after they
watch so much disturbing content?

Just throwing human moderators at the problem probably has more cost than just
the salaries involved.

~~~
tenpies
How does 4chan do it? Last I checked they have moderators (well "janitors").
They are volunteers, work for almost no recognition (still Anon), and probably
do not have the mental health problems that regular people do.

There is also clearly an ability to follow direction or enforce appropriate
(e.g. the janitors of /b/ /pol/ /g/ and /fit/ are clearly all operating on
different sets of rules).

I am 100% in agreement that you cannot hire an army of temps off the street
and tell them to moderate the internet, but it's clearly not something beyond
human capability. You just have to be hiring in the right places.

~~~
mindgam3
I’m sorry, if we’re looking to 4chan for inspiration on how to do the internet
properly we’ve already lost.

------
aussieguy1234
As far as I'm aware, knowingly destroying evidence of a crime is illegal. So
would this be illegal also?

~~~
skissane
Do they actually delete the files? Or do they just remove public access to
them, but keep them on their servers?

Maybe they send the data to law enforcement automatically? (I've heard that
they do that for child pornography; maybe they do, or could do, the same for
terrorist material as well.)

~~~
bilbo0s
This.

It's naive to think these videos are deleted. Homeland Security shows up and
YouTube has no problems giving them the videos. (They probably have an
entirely separate search interface that does nothing but surface that
extremist content for the Feds. So Homeland Security probably doesn't even
have to leave their office.)

------
lonelappde
Are these videos newsworthy? If so, why isn't NYT hosting them?

------
pif
People should go back to understanding the difference between a public service
(i.e. operated by the people for the sake of the people) and a private company
(i.e. operated by _some_ people for _their_ sake).

------
wavefunction
They don't have to delete it, just stop publishing it for consumption by their
users. I would expect them to turn over evidence of crimes to appropriate law
enforcement.

------
andryshko
This is sad, I'm waiting for YouTube and others to f*ck up even more to move
masses to decentralized solutions.

------
dvt
This is a volume problem that has no real solution. On one hand, it's a shame
that this kind of content is getting removed, but on the other, it's also
untenable for YouTube to hire thousands upon thousands of video moderators.
It's a sad reality that if anyone uploaded content akin to Shoah[1] -- the
9-hour-long Holocaust documentary; a personal favorite and an absolute
masterpiece -- it would get promptly removed. But it's a _reality_
nonetheless.

YouTube is trying to straddle the line between platform and publisher and it
feels like the hammer will soon drop.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_\(film\))

~~~
bilbo0s
> _This is a volume problem that has no real solution. [...] it 's a shame
> that this kind of content is getting removed_

It's not a volume problem though, because the videos are never removed. They
are just effectively delisted. Homeland Security shows up and I guarantee
YouTube hands the videos over to them. So YouTube has plenty of space.

Of course that also means that the original complaint of YouTube destroying
evidence is also bogus, but answering a bogus complaint with a bogus excuse as
the pro YouTube crowd seems to be doing doesn't really get us anywhere.

------
jedmeyers
While NYT themselves just shadow-edited the article about HRC calling Tulsi a
Russian asset to a Republican asset.

Video from Tim Pool about it:
[https://youtu.be/tzTod38VS8c](https://youtu.be/tzTod38VS8c)

~~~
jakeogh
[https://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg)

~~~
jedmeyers
“Paper of making up the record”, as they say.

------
m0zg
Edit: original title was about YouTube "erasing history"

They're erasing a good chunk of the present as well. It is widely known and
observable that they algorithmically throttle and aggressively demonetize
anything even remotely conservative in the US. E.g. Tim Pool (a liberal who
nevertheless likes to point out the lunacy and hypocrisy of the leftist "free
press") often gets demonetized under the flimsiest of pretenses.

