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

Comments

Good or Bad?

[N8F8]

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.

Re:Good or Bad?

[dsci]

Funny that these conservatives never seem to object to the right-wing bias of the private talk radio industry (which even goes out over public radio spectrum).

What bias of the INDUSTRY are you talking about? Let's not be disingenuous here. Liberals have all the opportunities conservatives do to field talk shows. I've heard them on the air, actually. Several of them.

The problem you have to face is that talk radio, like any other radio format (except perhaps NPR, which shows quite a liberal leaning most of the time), is a BUSINESS. The talkers must gain an audience and keep it, so that the stations can sell advertising.

A factual analysis of the liberal attempts at talk radio show that they just don't make money. It seems there is less of a market for liberals bashing of conservatives than most liberals would care to admit.

One last point: those airwaves are not really public - the stations, via their broadcast license, "owns" a frequency in their market. It's misleading to act like this is analogous to "conservatives can stand on the public street corner and say what they want, but liberals cannot." As I opened my reply, liberal talk show hosts have the same opportunities in the business conservative ones do.

Re:Good or Bad?

[DavidTC]

The probably people have with Rush isn't his political stance, it's that he has no trouble lying, and other people repeat these lies.

Seriously, I've listened to him a few times, and, when he talked about stuff I knew about, he was either objectively lying, or at a minimum misrepresenting things. When I say 'misrepresenting' I mean, not in a subjective 'agree to disagree' way, doing shit like comparing 'How many X' there are in two different sized populations, and 'forgetting' to mention that one population was three times the size of another. I'm sorry, but that's lying.

There are at least three ways of being biased: You can selectively report the triumphs of your side and the failures of the other side, you can misrepresent the truth by clever wording and manipulation of facts, and you can lie about actual facts.

All political commentary does the first one. More and more, I see the second done, sometimes by the liberal side, more often by the conservative, but it's possible I'm biased. Either way, I tend to stop listening to such people when I realize they'll say anything that's 'technically' true, no matter how much it misleads people.

But people like Rush, who actually make up facts? Like his recent assertation that the Foley emails were 'planted by a liberal' and that you need abortions to get embryonic stem cells and that Clinton was down to a 20 approval rating at one point and other such inanities. That's way past 'biased' and into 'lying'. Those aren't even vaguely, under any defination, true.

Thinking Rush is 'biased' is part of the problem. He's not presenting an unfair view of reality. He's not presenting reality at all, he's just lying. Not only that, it's been repeatedly documented. Al Franken got a whole book out of it.

Also he says horribly offensive with regard to race and gender, but that's not 'biased' per se, and if people actually like to listen to that, I have no problem with it. WRT the lies, however, I wish someone would sue him for slander.

Re:YouTube Is Not Censoring Dumb @ss!

[IAmTheDave]

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.

Re:YouTube Is Not Censoring Dumb @ss!

[qw(name)]

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".

Re:YouTube Is Not Censoring Dumb @ss!

[El Torico]

Both P and GP posts are correct. The video is available with no restrictions or warnings, and the article has this statement,

"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?

Re:YouTube Is Not Censoring Dumb @ss!

[Lars T.]

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.

Re:Subjective "Reporting"

[dsci]

The problem is that this article seems to be primarily opinion oriented. Meaning it doesn't have a lot of news content.

I'm shocked that /. would select this report of YouTube censorship instead of another article from a more reputable news source

Again, to reiterate the GP's post, WND is not a reputable news source because it's conservative?

You can call this an opinion piece if you'd like, but stating FACTS like the video was available for viewing on YouTube is reporting, not editorial. From the FTA:

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. What in that statement is OPINION?

Further into the article, we get:

"However, after a brief period of accessibility, the verification page started appearing on YouTube. It asked that: "This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up." Today the verification page on the spoof was removed."

I have to say, that seems like some decent FACTUAL reporting.

(1) They state that the verification page was present due to USERS ratings.
(2) The point out that the verification page has been removed.

Your choice of insult for WND is unwarranted.

Re:Slashdot accused of censorship?

[Nasarius]

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.

Re:YouTube Is Not Censoring Dumb @ss!

[ArcherB]

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.

Re:YouTube Is Not Censoring Dumb @ss!

[idontgno]

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.

Re:Slashdot accused of censorship?

[Liselle]

Slashdot's moderation system is a form of censorship

I don't think that word means what you think it means, sir. With two clicks I can see every -1 post in this whole discussion. You're a long-time user that ought to know this, you should be ashamed of yourself for calling the moderation system something that it is not.

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.

Re:Slashdot accused of censorship?

[Stalyn]

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.

It's also worth pointing out...

[artemis67]

that Slashdot is just a wee bit liberal.

Re:YouTube Is Not Censoring Dumb @ss!

[physicsphairy]

You are right, of course.

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.

Tyrany of the Majority

[xzvf]

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.

Re:Slashdot accused of censorship?

[Liselle]

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.

Re:bogus

[SydShamino]

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.

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 /. 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.