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Why I'm a Defender of YouTube (vortex.com)
Lauren Weinstein writes: In a time of fascist politicians spouting simplistic slogans about race, religion, terrorism, and censorship, along with whatever other pandering platitudes they believe will win them votes, prestige, power, and control — it's worth remembering how much good the Internet brings us, and how much poorer we'd all be in so many ways for the shackling of Internet services like YouTube, in the name of such self-serving proclamations and damaging false solutions.
Sorry, who are you? YouTube is the successful product of a wealthy and powerful company. It doesn't need defending.
Youtube's biggest problem isn't really the struggle that the article presents, it's that it's a monolithic entity that can be censored or manipulated by the nation-state, even if that state is limited to blocking. It's also subject to the whims of the corporation that owns it, as was demonstrated very poignantly by the integration of a social networking site and the adjustment of the way that usernames and the comments system function.
Granted, Youtube is not the sole video site on the Internet for personal content, and sometimes the huge amount of content that is acceptable to a nation-state makes it hard for them to justify blocking the whole site just to get a little bit of unacceptable content, but when one site emerges as the de facto default it becomes more likely that users don't even consider other sites or other options. Usually a competitive system is a healthy system, and this lack of competition threatens the health as it leaves the concept threatened to unilateral manipulation despite the interests of the users.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Newspeak for 'people I don't agree with'.
Who are you?
What on earth are you talking about?
Why do you write a sentence instead of a summary?
Why the hell is that sentence so long and so difficult to read?
Even if I was interested in what you had to say, I don't know why or what you're on about. But any inkling I may have had to click that link has disappeared due to fear that I will have to spend 10 minutes attempting to understand what each poorly constructed sentence actually means.
The only time in memory that I can think of a fascist action against youtube or a youtube poster, was after the Benghazi embassy was attacked, and some guy was arrested and imprisoned for posting a video critical of Islam. I'm sure that's not the kind of Fascism that TIMMMAAAY! or Ms. Weinstein had in mind, as I'm sure they are both Obama, and Clinton supporters. They should really re-evaluate their political inclinations. Nice straw man, though.
One thing has struck me recently, which is that YouTube allows us to catch out misrepresentations and media bias.
In previous years, we would *only* have the media interpretations of current events. My parents, for instance, would read the newspaper article about some incident or other, and have no way to judge whether the opinions and position were in any way correct.
Nowadays we can easily dig down to the source, and verify what we are told.
As an example that everyone knows about, we can look to some of the things said about Trump:
What he actually said:
They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.
An accurate representation of what he said was "some illegal immigrants are criminals", which is true simply by the law of averages, with the implication that if they went through a vetting procedure we could perhaps filter out the criminal portion.
This was taken so completely out of context that WaPo rephrased it as "He referred to Mexicans as “rapists.", with the implication that he insulted the entire population of another country, and a fair portion of our own citizens.
It's highly interesting to me that, as individuals, we now have the ability to find the evidence and come to our own conclusions, rather than blindly listen to the pronouncements of the elite.
And a little bit, I think that's why Trump's supporters are so immovable. When the MSM cries "but he's a *racist*!", most of the people who were at the rally think "he didn't actually say that".
It's definitely interesting the effect that YouTube has had on the political landscape.