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/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
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.
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.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
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.
"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.
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.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?