YouTube is going on a deletion rampage, lots of moderation and censorship, because nobody wants an ad for their brand to be shown together extremist or hateful content. There was for example recently lots of news stories about ads for large brands being shown together with neonazi propaganda videos.
The amount of videos uploaded to YouTube is growing much too large for them to moderate manually, so they’ve employed AI algorithms to do moderation. Obviously there will be a lot of false positives, and who should decide what content is too controversial to show anyway?
Here’s some of the things that YouTube’s been deleting lately, some examples are from the Hacker News discussion of the story under
Ironically, by deleting years old opposition channels YouTube is doing more damage to Syrian history than ISIS could
ever hope to achieveAlso gone are the dozens of playlists of videos from Syria I created, including dozens of chemical attacks in playlists by date
Keep in mind in many cases these are the only copies of the videos, and in some the channel owner will have died, so nothing can stop it
I have (had) a channel that had videos about missing people, their last sightings on CCTV etc. The parents of a missing person even used an embed video on their site of a CCTV footage. They emailed me if I still have the video because they need it.
YouTube banned the whole channel for extremist/hateful content. Probably some of the videos/titles told the AI that the footage is extreme or some sort of glorification.
I appealed on some form but don’t even bother anymore.
I hope YouTube as a video platform (not streaming) gets a serious competitor.
YouTube can’t really do anything about this though. Their leaders may not even agree with what videos will be deleted or not, but they do what they have to do to keep advertisers happy and to keep away videos that can be damaging to their brand.
The only way around this issue is a decentralized solution like SAFE. With any centralized solution comes large costs and the need for advertisers etc and again the need for censorship to keep the business afloat.