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YouTube Will Put Disclaimers On State-Funded Broadcasts To Fight Propaganda (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube's latest strategy to fight the spread of misinformation involves putting a disclaimer on videos from certain news sources. The online video website announced it will start labeling videos posted by state-funded broadcasters to alert viewers that the content is, in some part, funded by a government source. YouTube will begin labeling videos today, and the policy extends to outlets including the US's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Russian government broadcaster RT. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, PBS videos will now have the label "publicly funded American broadcaster," while RT will have this disclaimer: "RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government." The new policy is YouTube's way of informing viewers about where the content they're watching is coming from, a piece of information often hidden or left unsought by the viewers themselves. "The principle here is to provide more information to our users, and let our users make the judgment themselves, as opposed to us being in the business of providing any sort of editorial judgment on any of these things ourselves," YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan told the WSJ.
I will take a "funded by my mom, from my moms basement"!
L'Idiot
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, PBS videos will now have the label "publicly funded American broadcaster," while RT will have this disclaimer: "RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government."
Though mainstream media in the US aren't directly funded by the US government, they get favors from time to time. Otherwise how would one explain the fact that *all* mainstream media basically regurgitated the government's position in previous [unfortunate and unnecessary] wars?
These are wars that are continuing to some degree even as I write this. After causing chaos, mayhem, confusion in distant lands, the US basically stated, "It's not our problem."
Just ask the Europeans who now have to deal with the refugee influx by what our leaders caused with no checks from the media whatsoever!!!
Disclaimers on SPECIAL-INTEREST/ACTIVIST GROUP funded broadcasts and also CORPORATE funded broadcasts.
Also, Comments made to government officials by people being paid by a corporation should be required to contain a disclaimer identifying the relationship and whether they are being paid in general, or whether they are being paid to influence government officials, And any comment to a town hall or regulatory body's comment process paid for by a corporation must begin with disclaimer "This comment is a paid comment by XX corp".
Furthermore, any "paid protestor" must carry high-visibility signage identifying that they are being paid to take this action.
STATE-FUNDED broadcasts should be identified too, but they are the least of our worries ---- the real worry should be paid political messages in general.
People don't trust CNN, MSNBC, etc because they lie fucking constantly. If you start saying all the guys not lying are foreign government sponsored people will just start to like those governments.
We finally remember the word for "fake news"... Propaganda
Fuck off with your Captcha cancer. Eat all of the dicks in the universe.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
I've seen more politics on HGTV than I have seen on PBS. It's rather preposterous to claim that PBS is pushing some sort of political agenda. Their news coverage is arguably the least politically biased of any network that you can watch in the US.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We've seen a lot of those politically correct moves by Alphabet pushed via their various products. They even locked down private documents in drive which seemed to the parsing algorithm, AI for the rest, that it had racist content.
You cannot trust people with internet, they are too stupid, inb4 "your to stupid", to recognize what's targeted and what's not, so they say let's start flagging what we don't like. Beware little person, Russia Today is propaganda, our beloved Hillary lost to sum damn drank adidas wearing hackers.
Deutsche Welle is propaganda... oohh no wait, we agree with those guys, they are SJWs and they have fetishes with dark skinned 30yo registered as teens. DW is good, RT is bad.
On another note, youtube's algorithms have been becoming shittier and shittier by the year, from censoring to recommending and the list never ends. I don't have hopes that they will ever manage to make it work properly, they are going to fuck up, like they are doing since they bought their propaganda megaphone.
And don't forget, they are going to leech more money off of content creators... because that's their kingdom and they are the rulers who decide what's good for them.
Are they saying there's a difference between government propaganda and corporate propaganda (advertising)? That's a bit off I would say...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's your own personal responsibility to consider everything critically, and the the wisdom to separate the bullshit fro the value. This used to be taught in public school. I suppose educators prefer when the kids DON'T ask tough critical questions.
Story-time:
I recently attended "Science night" At my Sons Jr. High. (It was really disappointing, nothing of note) my biggest takaway was the disgust I felt when I overheard what I assume to be a history teacher discussing womens suffrage. I'm paraphrasing...
Teacher: the right to vote was won for American women in 1920.
Smartass kid: When was prohibition enacted?
Annoyed, blind-sided, and stuttering Teacher: I don't know, google it.
I assume that was a pretty sharp kid, I'm certain he knew the answer to that question, and he asked it on purpose to mess with the teacher. I think the teacher knew too. That's a single kid thinking critically out of the whole damngaggle. This is a good thing, even if he was trying to be an asshole. The lame ass teacher punted in front of all of us parents in the face of a politically non-correct teaching point. Blew me away. The point being, we wouldn't NEED warning labels on information sources if the consumers would consider them critically, and they would, if thinking critically was rewarded and encouraged. Right now, asking tough questions and questioning the narrative is so frowned upon there's almost no hope for those after genX.
When your main source of information is google, and googles word is gospel, there's no need to critically consider anything. Now, we need warning labels and disclaimers on news sources and entertainment, because by the nature of location, somebody might actually believe the shit they spew.
If everybody could just go ahead and think for themselves, that sure would be swell.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I wish Youtube would go back to being normal old youtube and stop trying to be the morality police. I don't know of a single category of youtuber who hasn't been complaining about the censorship and demonetization going on over there. It's not just a political thing, it's gamers and travel vloggers too. They've all been impacted.
Everyone gets that we're watching subjective opinions on youtube. Here's a hint, there is no authoritative unbiased source of information on anything. Everyone should be skeptical of everything. You don't need warnings for that. As for the advertisers, tell them to take a walk, if they don't want to advertise on the most popular streaming site on the net. It's not worth attempting to cater to them. Without content and viewers, the ad revenue dries up anyway.
But the worst is the newer algorithms that have driven everyone to putting out watered-down daily content, over the more polished stuff, that would actually be worth sharing from time to time. It's become such a grind over there to make anything at all. The established youtubers get bigger and bigger, while I get less exposure to anything new or innovative. It's not as fun anymore. Feels more like cable TV.
Yes. They will.
And PBS, NPR, RFA, RFE, RL, and any other news source that is funded by a government.
Imagine the labels Hillary or the Donald would have been covered with.
Or the Australian ABC? The TV station that the government loves when they are running for election and hates when they are in power?
(The ABC are well known for having their funding threatened by just about every in power government for pointing out every mistake they make and being very unbiased about things no matter who it makes look bad.)
Because no government has ever funded something surreptitiously, sending the money through five offshore bank accounts and a dozen shell companies before it arrives at the intended recipient. No sirree, that has never happened in the entirety of modern history. So this move by YouTube will completely expose government-funded propaganda.
This is gonna backfire massively. The honest and "open" governments will get their content flagged as state-funded propaganda. The dishonest and lying governments will take measures to hide their funding so their propaganda isn't flagged.
It's what's not said that matters. YouTube could publish harmless cat videos until the end of time while neglecting the important stories. This form of state funded broadcasting is just as insideous as videos of in your face propaganda.
Trust the goolag...
Does it go on forever?
It's remarkable how easy the transition was from fake news to anything that can be linked to Russia.
As far as I can see fake news started off as stuff pulled out of thin air without any background, and presented as news. From there to 'competing narratives' is a big step. Now Russia Today is fullfilling a role Voice of America used to play: give a voice to dissidents that don't get a voice in their own country. In that respect for an eastern european VoA was sometimes the best source of information available. I'm thinking Russia Today, just pursuing its own interest the way VoA is, is starting to fullfill the same role. At least in principle because it's not that many people watch it. It's giving room to the smartest dissident voices. So is effectively happening is that western commercial players are suppressing western dissident voices by associating them with Evil Russia. I think it is very effective. Soon enough people will stop linking to these dissident voices because it will affect their facebook reputation and the reputation of their friends. Google ads and search results will be tuned the same way, all softly dissuading people from discussing the 'wrong issues'.
Robert Parry just died. People like him are more relevant than ever.
Think how easy it is to make a bot that does this.
Oh boohoo, your cable company might inconvenience you slightly! But who gives a shit about the hundreds of thousands of people the US government has slaughtered in the Middle East in your name? I guess their lives don't matter as much because they're poor and brown and you don't have to see their corpses piled high on your (propaganda) news networks? As long as your monthly mass murder service fee conveniently comes out of your paycheck you simply don't care.
But please, go back to telling us about your first world problems; the total lack of empathy from stereotypical entitled Americans is simply breath taking.
The problem is not so much propaganda that can readily be identified as state-sponsored, but propaganda that is paid for (often in difficult-to-trace ways) by people (not necessarily state actors) with a vested interest in pushing a political agenda. Something like the "this message is paid for by..." on TV would be good, though the latter is increasingly powerless against ingenious funding schemes and lax regulation...
Zing!!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.