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
It's not YouTube per say, it's people flagging the video as inappropriate. That causes the restriction to be put on. Once YouTube became aware of that, they immediately removed the warning. I just watched the video on YouTube.
http://religiousfreaks.com/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
The video is up and no longer flagged. A video becomes flagged when enough users mark it and then a YouTube employee will either verify it should be removed/flagged. In this case they removed the initial flag and kept the video.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Youtube is a "private" site. It can, and obviously will, censor whatever the hell it will.
There is no constitution on the Internet. There is no free speech. There is only the right to say whatever the hell you want, and hope someone will listen to you. If they don't, too bad.
That said, I don't approve of censoring anything. I think it's cowardly and serves no real purpose other than to shield people from things they may not necessarily want to be shielded from. But it IS the right of youtube to chose what they want to have on their site, and what the don't want. Obviously, they don't want people being overly political. That's their call.
Deal with it.
Blog -
Slashdot's moderation system is a form of censorship. Opinions that don't follow the anti-Microsoft, anti-American party line are regularly censored. People on Slashdot will complain about free speech zones and then mod down posts that they simply don't agree with. Happens all the time.
It's also worth pointing out that WorldNetDaily could be described as just wee bit conservative
Yes, like Charles Manson was a wee bit disturbed.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The problem is that this article seems to be primarily opinion oriented. Meaning it doesn't have a lot of news content.
/. would select this report of YouTube censorship instead of another article from a more reputable news source
I'm shocked that
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.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
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
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.
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.
"Perfectly OK to show our soldiers getting killed, but they'll be damned if they allow that anti-democrat ad," added "Spaceman Spiff" in a "Newsbusters online dialogue. "This [is] very scary to me. However, not surprising. But, now that they are owned by Google, we'll certainly be seeing a lot more of this censoring."
let's see this quote from the article
Sheffield said he believes the intention of YouTube's "censorship squad" was to limit access. Even though the same video may be available somewhere else, such as the Drudge Report, "lots of non-political and moderate folks don't read Drudge, but they might hear about the video from a friend and try to look it up in the search engine, only to be foiled in their attempts to decide whether it was truly 'objectionable.'"
and another gem of reporting
Bloggers also reported that the Council on American Islamic Relations has in the past taken steps to have anti-radical Islamist videos pulled from the YouTube site, and Malkin said she was told her video was pulled because it was "inappropriate."
This article is an opinion piece, it looks nothing like a factual article. It uses quotes form unknown bloggers as evidence. It presents only one side of the story. It does not try for even a second to be objective. For a factual article, it does not know when the movie was posted, how long it was freely availble, how long it was restricted and when it came unrestricted again. It makes a big deal out of nothing because youtubes policy is to investigate after someone marks a video as objectionable. These idiots would be all over youtube if they ran a different policy because children could be potentially exposed to nudity.
This article is about a censorship that is not even a censorship but the normal processes at google. This article simply attempts to resell the story to the American public that the media has liberal bias.
YouTube is not, in my mind at least, capable of censoring. YouTube is a private enterprise, not the Government. You have no First Amendment recourse against YouTube. As there is no recourse, there is no censoring.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
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."
They have banned several Conservative video makers, including Michelle Malkin and HotAir. They have done so recently, despite carrying the videos for over a year without any issues.
Now, Google, the company that bought them, has refused to carry Michelle, LFG, and others as NEWS sites based on the fact that they blog, not present new news. Here are the letters from Google:
And LGF:
BUT they allow several other blogs to be indexed as news, as Charles from LGF points out:
Other sites of questionable news worthyness but indexed as news: Democratic Underground, Uruknet.info, and Dailykos.
Now if you want to hold yourself out as a "News" indexing service that only indexes news and claim no bias, you have serious issues. Lets point out that Google donates almost exclusively to Democrat candidates and causes and you have a clear bias.
A clear bias when you claim to have none is a problem
I am resonably convinced, barring YouTube or Google coming out and saying it, that they scrubbed the videos as part of the merger deal. As in, no scrub, no deal.
Source for above info: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/001431.htm . Yes yes, she is involved and has an axe to grind, but she also puts together the facts nicely.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
Yeah, I generally prefer to filter out content that doesn't contain profanity and nudity.
First, censoring is more than just putting up a warning that the content might not be suitable for certain viewers, which is all YouTube did, according to TFA.
Second, also according to TFA, the warning was automatically added once someone offended by the content flagged it as offensive. The warning wasn't permanent, but was just tacked on until YouTube could have a real person review the video to check if it was accurately flagged. Once reviewed, the warning could removed, left in place, or the video could be deleted.
When I just went to watch, there was no warning. This means either the video got to the head of the review queue by normal processes and was determined to have been improperly flagged, or the tempest in a teapot got it jumped to the head of the queue where the determination was made.
As for users flagging it as offensive... I made a political joke in one post at Slashdot and had so many people hitting it with downmods and upmods, I lost my posting privileges for three weeks (a "timeout") for getting too many downmods in a specific time period (almost all from that ONE post). So it's VERY believable that enough left-leaning people would flag such a video as offensive as to trip whatever limit was needed to get the warning placed. I'm also sure something equally offensive to right-leaning people would be equally flagged.
But in the long run, the warning gets on, the video goes into a reviewing queue, and a human at YouTube eventually reviews it. But with the size of their staff, the size of their traffic, and the potential number of videos getting flagged daily, it's highly probable that they'd take a couple of days for it to reach the top of the queue.
Seems that this is more a deliberate publicity ploy. By fooling people who don't actually pay close attention to the facts, they made it sound like the video was unfairly censored by YouTube itself (or its staff) as opposed to going through a standard process. Then those people, with a sense of moral outrage, tell everyone they know... getting the video hundreds of thousands of future viewings.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic