Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Accused Of Censorship
writes "According to WorldNetDaily, Youtube is engaging in censorship. A quote from the article summarizes well:
The popular video-sharing YouTube site, which is being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion, limited access to a political ad that mocks the Clinton administration's policy on North Korea, but contains no profanity, nudity or other factors generally thought objectionable." It's also worth pointing out that WorldNetDaily could be described as just wee bit conservative
Bad, if you consider YouTube a news or public information site.
Good, possibly, if they are pandering to their target audience to maximize viewership. You don't get equal time on the Daily Show either.
And yeah, I'm one of those conservative folks who was annoyed by this; but hey, its a entertainment site.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Frankly, after reading this, I must say that this is more an opinionated editorial than an objective piece of news. I'm shocked that
My work here is dung.
The question of "why" it gets flagged is even easier to understand, when the post itself includes commentary like
"It's also worth pointing out that WorldNetDaily could be described as just wee bit conservative"
Was this comment absolutely necessary or even relevant to the story? Has free speach suddenly become restricted for a person that is "just a wee bit" one way or the other? The entire point of the accusation of censorship is that any speech at any level was moderated.
Certainly YouTube has rules - no sexually explicit content, fine. But I just read their terms of use and I don't see anything about moderation of content that may be a "wee bit conservative."
Then again, it's like mods on Slashdot (which I believe may have been at least a part of the point of the parent post) which is that given the ability to moderate, people will always mod down speech they don't agree with, completely disregarding said person or organization's absolute right to say it.
Disappointing indeed that the "flagged" content wasn't reviewed by YouTube and simply left be, being that it doesn't violate the terms of use of the site.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
If it was any other year besides an election year nobody would care. But since the political karma is high this season, everyone's quick to cry "censorship".
"Maryrose, of The YouTube Team, said if any video viewer flags a video as inappropriate, it is forwarded to a queue for the company's customer support team to review."
Basically, the WorldNetDaily either is too stupid to understand what happened or is ignoring facts. Either way, it raises questions about their competence and/or honesty. If they are stupid or dishonest about this, then what else are they wrong about?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
only the government can censor anything. when a firm makes a decision to purposefully not provide content, that is not censorship. it might not be a policy you or I agree with, fine. every time I hear so and so is "censoring", it makes my blood boil. if you don't like waht a company does, such as Walmart not selling certain cd's, DON"T SHOP THERE, if you don't like YouTube's policies, open you own damn website. when the government says you can't do those things, then cry censorship. until then, just say YouTube made a corporate decision...
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
No, the point was that a site who has no clue about what is actually going on (nor has the desire to check the facts) is crying "'They' are censoring conservatives". That site happens to be -surprize- conservative.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Does anyone else get the feeling that the Slashdot userbase is more conservative than the rest of the population? Bush's approval rating hovers around 35%, but the number of uprated pro-Bush comments on recent political posts is astonishing. Apparently, intelligence and critical thinking don't go hand in hand. Economics is always debatable, but how does any thinking person look at the Bush foreign or social policy and see anything but corruption, insanity, and abject failure?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
"What's wrong with being conservative? One word: greed."
OK, I've already posted something on this thread that'll make me unpopular, so why stop now?
being conservative != greed
To a conservative, wanting to take someone else's money is being greedy. To a liberal, wanting to keep your own money is being greedy.
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Hilarious that you got modded up for this. I fully expect it to get to +5. Did you see, for example, the recent global warming post? Something like 80% of the +5 comments were of the fringe global warming "skeptic" view. The notion that the prevailing view of Slashdot moderators is "anti-American" (ie liberal, translating from dittohead speak) is absurd. Perhaps the editors are mostly liberal, but the community has quite a large number of right-libertarians.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Most likely, someone flagged it because it's essentially a political lie.
Where? I saw it and saw satire and comedy, but nothing outright dishonest. If you disagree with it, does that make it a lie?
There are lot of people who are more disturbed by slander than nudity.
And these are the same people screaming for tolerence and free speech.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
They definitely managed to get a lot more PR than such a tiny, silly, thing deserved.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If any source has a history of being a wingnut, of any persuasion, policital or otherwise, then potential readers will benefit from knowing.
Because a tenet of critical reading skills is to pigeonhole your source, so you can predict what they're going to say in advance. That saves the grubby annoying trouble of deciding for yourself the trustworthiness of the source by, say, examining multiple samples of the source's work.
I know I'm awfully grateful when someone points out the heretics for me in advance.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Also, if you don't see any Microsoft apologists on this website, even browsing at +4, you are not paying attention at all. In general there is an anti-MS bias around here, but if you open your eyes you'll find the dissenting opinions.
On behalf of slashdotters with a clue, thank you for contributing to the dilution of a perfectly good word. Henceforth, let's associate "censorship" to mean "viewing threshold" on a stupid interbutts forum. That way, when REAL censorship happens, nobody will care.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Slashdot's moderation system is a form of censorship
Censorship is the removal of material. Moderated comments are never removed but "removed from view" depending on your personal settings. However the comments are still there.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
that Slashdot is just a wee bit liberal.
If you're surprised, you're not paying attention.
Nice! Slashdot is now entering the field of discriminating against conservative news sources by tagging them as such. Good idea, folks! After all, we know that liberalism is 99% of time correct, while conservatism is 99% of the time wrong. Our teachers in high-school and college, who made it sure we learnt such an obvious fact of nature, wouldn't lie to us, nor would MTV, or the NYT, would they?
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
It's also worth pointing out that WorldNetDaily could be described as just wee bit conservative
What kind of fucking excuse is that? Is the editor insinuating that it's okay to censor and limit the speech of conservatives? That it's okay to say anything you want if you're a liberal, but if you're a conservative you should not have free speech?
The new progressive definition of Free Speech: "the freedom to express any opinion you want, so long as it's a progressive opinion."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
However, it is also worth pointing out the pervasive hypocrisy. For example, during all the instantiations of Robert A Kennedy's election conspiracy theories, the +5 modded comments have taught us the error of judging the validity of content by the politics of the source. But when anybody who has committed the grievous error of being conservative has anything to say, we learn about the essentials of using knowledge of bias to sieve information.
In short, people only care about logical fallacies when they're not amicable to their own personal cause.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
The censorship comes from the culture of the users at YouTube. It works the same way in real life verifying the importance of the 1st amenendment. Movies that draw full theaters in NY and LA bomb when released nation wide. Pro-Abortion activists have poor results speaking in southern towns. Bush avoids the NAACP convention, Clinton avoids predominately white churches. While I don't use youtube, I suspect the audience is not friendly to content they don't agree with. I suspect Google and YouTube want everyone to participate, but like slashdot unpopular opinions get shouted down.
Actually, its not "soooo yesterday" if you watch the commentary.
Its about how talking to dictators generally doesnt change them and actually allows them to flourish.
And that specifically applies to Kim Jong Il and his nukes and missiles in North Korea, which has gotten worse under the "all carrot no stick" approach.
Itr pretty relevant to today - and a warning to the Bush administration to not repreat the mistakes Jimmy Carter forced on Predident Clinton's administration (and that Albright pushed for as well - and so she is rightfully the butt of the jokes).
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
Gimme a break, Slashdot is overwhelmingly "left wing"... every once in a while a libertarian/conservative post gets modded up but it's fairly rare. Generally if an article is posted, the same 120 bland nonthinking comments are posted because everyone is afraid of getting moderated downward. This place is just a shrill greek chorus to the political bias of the editors.
I avoid political things on /. because of the huge right-wing bias.
HAHAHAHAHA.
I seriously hope you're kidding, or else you meant to type "free republic" instead of "/." or something. Slashdot's to the right of Stalin, perhaps, but that's about it.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
You need to work on your reading comprehension, sir. My issue with the grandparent is the mis-use of the word "censorship". I'm not denying that unpopular opinions get moderated down, I'm saying that moderation is not censorship. Additionally, the tools exist for users to read whatever unpopular posts that they like. You don't have to browse at the default threshold.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
but contains no profanity, nudity or other factors generally thought objectionable
If you filter out content based on profanity, isn't that also censorship?
What is objectionable in one person's opinion is just entertaining in another person's opinion.
Obviously, someone found the political mockery to be objectionable. So they censored it, just like they censor out the nekkid breasts.
What I am getting at is this: youTube has always practiced censorship, and we have always been okay with it. Someone is just upsed over what, specifically, is being censored.
Like most people, you're confusing logical argumentation with rational argumentation.
The source is irrelevant in logical argumentation because the information is either true or false and can be determined as such by a set of logical rules. This has little practical purpose in politics because, contrary to what some rather uninformed people desperately want to believe, very few political matters are clean black and white issues.
The source is extremely relevant in rational argumentation - which is the practical form of argumentation that normal human beings use when discussing political matters - because the goal of rational argumentation is not to ultimately come to a simple true or false conclusion on a given statement, but to sway opinion that can travel through myriad gray areas. As a result, if a source is consistently proven unreliable and/or biased - both categories which WorldNetDaily firmly falls under - the value of information from the source is necessarily decreased by any rational and honest person.
In rational argumentation, statements of "fact" have a certain amount of weight attached to them which will sway an honest opinion one way or another to a certain extent. If enough of this weight builds up in one direction, a reasonable opinion can be obtained. That's not logical argumentation.
WorldNetDaily is not a valid source of neutral or honest information to any person seeking to form a rational opinion on a matter through reason. Its explicit purpose is to cater, for-profit, to extremist neoconservative and paleoconservative (which is always amusing since the two sometimes cross paths and get in little lovers spats) ideologies. It makes no secret of this, and, as a result, most of the information it presents is extraordinarily skewed and misrepresented.
Just to drive the point home, if you didn't consider sources, you'd be one massively confused individual if you tried to come to an honest opinion on most things.
+ Partisan liberal group A says "George W. Bush is responsible for North Korea's nuclear test because the cameras were removed on his watch and because the inspectors were kicked on his watch".
+ Partisan conservative group B says "Bill Clinton is responsible for North Korea's nuclear test because he gave reactors to them".
Both supporting statements are technically true so in a purely logical sense you cannot discount either. Yet each one "proves" a completely different point by ommitting crucial information: the liberal group explictly doesn't tell you about Bush's attempt to switch policy to six party talks, and the conservative group explicitly doesn't tell you that the reactors were light water and nearly useless for bomb-making. If you'd have taken a rational approach you could have simply rejected both groups' partisan garbage outright and sought out a more reliable, neutral source that had an interest only in accurately accounting the history surrounding the matter.
Logical argument != Rational argument just because the two share some similar structures.
From the documentation on youtube.com, when users flag a video as being inappropriate, it is forwarded to youtube employees for review. Therefore, the fact that access to the video was indeed limited for a while indicates that the censorship did come from youtube- at least for a while until that decision was overturned.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Well, maybe now isn't the time for blame, but for doing something about it. On the other hand, since blame is being handed out, don't you think it ought to go to the people who gave NK nuclear technology with no weapons inspections for years?
Kim Jong Il has admitted he never followed the agreement that gave him billions of dollars and nuclear components, paid for by American citizens.
You simply cannot negotiate with these people (dictators). It simply doesn't work.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Yeah, except in this case, I think the flagging unnecessary. "A tad conservative" is a tad sarcastic. Anyone with any critical thinking skills would be able to tell from the article that this is just a nutjob spewing. It really has nothing to do with which bias his site has. The article is of such poor quality that it shouldn't be featured on slashdot. Especially when it goes on to detail Google's political bias because of some blogs it hosts on blogger, and the results that search results return. There is a serious lack of any but the most circumstantial evidence of what is going on, and anybody with even a passible knowledge of technology could point out that all of his arguments are fundementally flawed.
I feel that Google is unfairly biased against ants. I mean look at the first search result if you type in "ant"!
They might be wrong about this video, but the fact is that plenty of Michelle Malkin stuff has been outright removed *by youtube*. At the same time, the jihadi videos aren't removed, even if they're flagged. While Michelle Malkin may be controversial, the videos that I've seen which were subsequently removed definitely didn't fit any definition of inappropriate.
Do you have ESP?
Slashdot is now entering the field of discriminating against conservative news sources by tagging them as such.
It's called context, shit-for-brains. It's like if some pro-alien-invasion newspaper said that NASA was hiding information about aliens. You would think differently about it if the Wall St. Journal said the same, thing, no? It's still up to the reader to decide if the information is reputable or not. You'll notice that the editor's comment simply says that the article comes from a periodical that is a "wee bit conservative", not that it is conservative trash (which it is). Nor did they outright reject the story submission, which I suppose you could spin as "censorship".
Fact is, the conservative press has pounded this idea into the heads of conservatives that the "mainstream press", which is arguably conservative itself, censors and distorts the truth in favor of "the liberals". This is a fabrication in order to make sure you get your news from the vetted talking heads-- the channels and conservative talkers who stick to the party-line. You sure as shit don't hear much anymore from the traditional (fiscal-responbility, states' rights, and so on) conservatives anymore, do you? That's because they don't stick to the Republican party-line.
If anyone should be accused of discriminating against sources it's Fox News, which screams "liberal!" (like you) any time someone disagrees with them, like it's a crime to have a different opinion.
Others have a RIGHT to point out when they believe that a site like YouTube is stiffling speach from conservative sources just like the left likes to point out that FOX news tends to omit things presented by the left. That's how the free market works. Maybe it will be in YouTube's best interest for anyone who's not a liberal to realize they're not a valued member of YouTube's community and to leave so that YouTube can officially pigeonhole itself as another intolerant liberal website that competes with MoveOn.org for traffic.
YouTube has a mechanism in place whereby users can mark a file as "objectionable". Because of a possible flaw in this system, a file was allowed to be marked inappropriately for a nonzero length of time. It is reasonable to assume that YouTube is responsible for their own code.
/. for this, despite the fact that they are responsible for their own code. Allowing public input in moderation always introduces the possibility of intentional manipulation. If there was a story here at all, it would be a piece on the overall phenomenon, with reference to Slashdot, Wikipedia, and of course YouTube. It would also have views of people on the other side, where the benefits of such a system can be explained as well.
And plenty of posts in this thread have been moderated inappropriately, with "overrated" and "flamebait" and "offtopic" tags used on this that are merely alternate viewpoints.
I don't blame
It doesn't hurt to be nice.