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YouTube Is Littered With Mass-Produced Videos Made By Automated Bots (hackernoon.com)

A report via Hacker Noon sheds some light on the practice of using bots to mass-produce videos for YouTube. The YouTube channel Breaking News Today, for example, constantly generates new videos from recent news sources, and posts as often as every few minutes. You can tell the videos are bot-produced because they always start off with a cringe-worthy 80's style intro, followed by a robotic voiceover and floating low quality images. From the report: Someone has effectively created a fully automated process running 24/7 that is taking and stripping recent articles, converting them into video format, and posting it on Youtube as their own. And while doing so, they take credit for it and reap all the rewardsâS -- such as revenue and influenceâS -- âSthat come with it. Some videos, especially the ones that gain momentum and get popular, even feature a large juicy ad on the bottom, in which Google displays and shares profits with. Sure, one video with a few thousand views isn't really that significant, but when you have hundreds of videos being pumped out week after week, you can see how quickly things can add up. And while many new videos are still awaiting their first dozen views, others are in the tens of thousands. One even amassed almost 50k views in just two days. In total, the channel's videos have been viewed more than 225,000 times just in the past month, with an average of around 8,000 views per day. Did I mention that there are more than just this one channel? There's also this one, and this one, both following the same concept. There's actually many, MANY more. There are few solutions to deal with this new type of fully automated plagiarism. While you can certainly down vote the videos and report them to YouTube if the uploader is infringing on your copyright, they will likely stay online for days racking up views and revenue before any action is taken. There's also no reason why the videos couldn't be uploaded to separate channels to fly under YouTube's radar.

99 comments

  1. Ban Bot Generated Videos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Simple.

    1. Re: Ban Bot Generated Videos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But google profits off charging clients for ad views, so the only motivation to strip bot generated content will come from loss of viewers or advertisers.

      Plus, YouTube is earning less since their extreme left review teams started demonizing every video that isn't squeeqy Ned Flanders clean. And these bot videos are certainly void of emotion, so they pass through the review gates with flying colors.

    2. Re:Ban Bot Generated Videos by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Or at least highlight them in searches?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Ban Bot Generated Videos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I have reported channels like that in the past, but really Google ought to be paying people for it because it is work and it is doing Google's job for them. Similarly, Microsoft should be paying people to use Windows 10 because they benefit from the spyware and adware.

      If Google offered money to people who report bot channels, then I bet we'd see far fewer of them.

    4. Re: Ban Bot Generated Videos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Remember that demonetize means the video poster does not receive money from the video.

      In contrast, there is nothing in there that stops YouTube from directly receiving money from ads.

      Oh, you just realised that the single entity that sells the ads also gets to choose who gets paid for showing them? Most of the demonetized content on YouTube is still selling ads, the the company/platform can't be trusted a damn.

    5. Re: Ban Bot Generated Videos by Killall+-9+Bash · · Score: 1

      Comrade, you are mixing your scripts.

      You however are not.

      --
      "Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
  2. Racking up views and revenue? Seriously? by StevenMaurer · · Score: 1

    Surely, YouTube/google doesn't just pay people instantly, do they? It would be easy enough for them to either not pay the money or switch it to the actual content creator, long before any check was sent out.

    Yes, this does mean that you have to be watching to see if your content is being plagerized, but this is part of the whole DMCA legislative compromise - just from the content creator's point of view.

    1. Re:Racking up views and revenue? Seriously? by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      Yet the bastards at YouTube continue to fail to enable blocking of uploaders, why the fuck not. Youtube would be so much better if they just implemented the ability for end users to block specific uploaders so they never see their content, never have to deal with that empty crap. Would produce great statistics to be analysed for bad players who should be kicked off. Simply allow blocking and a lot of problems go away.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    2. Re:Racking up views and revenue? Seriously? by Zumbs · · Score: 2

      I have blocked a few uploaders from appearing in my stream some 5-6 years ago. It wasn't easy to find the functionality, though. According to the internet, you go to the channel/user, select the About tab, click the flag and select Block user.

      --
      The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
    3. Re: Racking up views and revenue? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I tried that years ago and it just took effect last year. YMMV.

  3. Sound Familiar by mentil · · Score: 1

    YouTube Is Littered With Mass-Produced Videos Made By Automated Bots

    So is Hollywood. Zing!

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    1. Re:Sound Familiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And Netflix

  4. I noticed this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There must be a beginner experimenting with animating a pile of rancid feces talking about subjects so boring even Kim Peek loses interest.

    I think it's called a creimer or something like that?

    1. Re: I noticed this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Creimertard - mod down.

    2. Re:I noticed this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You sound bitter, nipple dick.

    3. Re:I noticed this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There you are spamming amazon and youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!

      You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.

      Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.

      How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????

      The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!

      You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!

      When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!

      Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!

      Bonus:
      Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:

      The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!

      So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!

      Signed:
      Ethell, The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!

    4. Re: I noticed this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You've hit a peek. We know it's you changing proxies and watching the video over and over again.

  5. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Seagull mission - fly in, shit all over Syrian military assets, go home, and leave Russia to mop up the mess.

  6. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Really? I seem to remember a certain Nobel Peace Prize winner that ran out of bombs.

    https://www.theguardian.com/co...

    https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/04...

    So fuck off with your Trump hysteria.

  7. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    What has Obama's Nobel Prize had to do with this? Did Obama award it to himself or what?

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  8. So, no copyright on the videos? by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

    Isn't procedurally generated content with no input from a person outside of copyright protection? So someone can repost the videos on their own account?

    I'm not a lawyer, so a real lawyer's answer would be appreciated.

    --
    Your ad here. Ask me how!
    1. Re: So, no copyright on the videos? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you do that, you don't get the benefit of the army of bots that "watch" the videos. So I'm sure the makers don't mind.

  9. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Rockoon · · Score: 1

    Did Obama award it to himself or what?

    Thats the only explanation.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  10. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Uberbah · · Score: 1

    Really? I seem to remember a certain Nobel Peace Prize winner that ran out of bombs.

    Did Obama do it with the possibility of bombing Russian forces directly, which could result in the sinking of U.S. Navy ships, which results in WW3? No? Then you're full of shit here.

  11. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's exactly the point: everyone thought Obama was such a great guy, he was just another corporate puppet. Everyone thinks Trump is so horrible, but what exactly has he done?

  12. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Uberbah · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    It's nowhere near as intense as the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan.

    Which happened when the U.S. gave support to proto ISIS and Al Queda jihadists to commit atrocities to provoke the USSR into an invasion. But the U.S. was never close to bombing Russian forces directly, as they are right now in Syria.

  13. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by rtb61 · · Score: 0

    Sometimes it is all too stupid to deal with. Much like a lot of youtube content, rehashed banal bullshit apart for US mainstream media showing off it's war erection and now UK media joining, positively orgasming over war, straight up defective genetic traits on display, they are not making it up, that is the way they feel, they are celebrating psychopathic mass murder. There is that same content all over YouTube, same videos, different uploader names. Like Sinclair, same script shared from station to station and the same kind of con artist shameless liars sharing it, though the darkness on display, the obvious sexual stimulation based upon their participation in mass murder, damn they look sick.

    It seems to help, when you use Youtube signed in (for google et al, my treatment of their cookies are all this instance only and require signing in everytime I start my browser), that you remove them from the initial landing page recoomendation and in the suggested column, click the three vertical dots and remove them, it seems to slow down their appearance. Working to kill of all US main stream media, simply not worth watching any more.

    Just like the false flag bullshit, one has to wonder why the bother any more, everyone knows they are lying, no one believes it, they are attacking to keep the war on terror going, whilst being careful not to attack Russia but those US bases in Syria are likely to end up surrounded by Russian soldiers and effectively held hostage (if the US fires on the Russians approaching the bases will be destroyed, they will wait for the Russians to fire and they wont, they will simply barricade them in their bases), now that is the cunning move.

    Same for Youtube, simply allow us to block crap up loaders for fucksake.

    --
    Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  14. I won/t be satisfied by youtube by bobstreo · · Score: 5, Funny

    Until it's full of (free) 4K AI produced 2 hour porn vids, completely indistinguishable from "real" actors.

    1. Re:I won/t be satisfied by youtube by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Selective breeding on these humble ad-farm communities will eventually spontaneously produce this result.

  15. Looks like a bot posted this mess of a sentence by ArchieBunker · · Score: 3, Funny

    they take credit for it and reap all the rewardsâS -- such as revenue and influenceâS -- âSthat come with it.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    1. Re:Looks like a bot posted this mess of a sentence by tonique · · Score: 1

      I love the smell of rewardsâS in the morning!

  16. No, that's not how that works. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "report them to YouTube if the uploader is infringing on your copyright, they will likely stay online for days racking up views and revenue before any action is taken."

    Youtube, as you may not have noticed, is a lot more on point with this than ever before.

    Now, you might be thinking "Well even if they get 3 strikes and lose the channel, they can just start a new channel", but you'd be both right and wrong. Yes, they could start a new channel... and not be eligible for revenue until it has amassed 4,000 hours of watch time AND 1,000 subscribers.

    240,000 minutes watched. With an average video length of 2 minutes, they need 120,000 views, about 2 weeks.

    The main channel sited in the article, has 0 subscribers. The other two channels had 4, and 8. If these are taken down, they'll never get monetization again no matter how many videos they post.

    1. Re:No, that's not how that works. by fibonacci8 · · Score: 1

      Thank goodness there haven't been any security breaches of sufficient personal information that could be used to make fake youtube accounts for the foreseeable future. That sort of thing could very readily be automated to get around the penalties of starting a new channel.

      --
      Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
    2. Re:No, that's not how that works. by Leuf · · Score: 1

      If they have 0 subscribers then they are already demonetized. Every channel with less than 4000 hours and 1000 subscribers was retroactively demonetized. My second channel being one of them. I reached the new thresholds a couple weeks ago but am still in review.

      So if the idea of screwing over all the smaller channels was to get these guys to stop doing this, well guess what, they are still doing it.

    3. Re:No, that's not how that works. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If they didn't do it before this to keep their monetization status, what makes you think they'd do it now? As someone else points out, they retroactively demonetized all YouTube accounts with less than 1,000 subs.

      So, they've already been cut off. And no swarm of fake youtube accounts giving them subs has happened. Wonder why that might be...

  17. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The fact that you pay attention to Google's "recommended" videos at all means you're already voluntarily letting them influence you. ('Them' being Google, and by extension the corporatocracy including the mainstream media).

  18. Re:Idea for bot produced video by Kaenneth · · Score: 2, Funny

    Sounds like a snowflake got their feefees hurt by the FBI investigating crimes.

  19. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    They love selling us fake wars. I wish I knew how to stop it. Practically everyone is complicit.

    I guess there's a change.org petition. Not much, but at least it's a start.

  20. Why YouTube changed monetization policy by jetkust · · Score: 1

    This is likely the main reason YouTube changed their monetization policy, contrary to the whole "YouTube is against me!" or the "YouTube is censoring me!" narrative. People were using bots and stolen/fake content etc.. to exploit their advertising platform. Unfortunately their solution couldn't distinguish between scammers and small YouTubers trying to grow their channel. But YouTube would rather play the bad guy than to admit advertising dollars were being wasted on con artists.

    1. Re:Why YouTube changed monetization policy by nnull · · Score: 2

      With youtubes recent act of removing content, the video reposts are getting more prevalent in my searches. It's making youtube completely useless.

    2. Re:Why YouTube changed monetization policy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's impossible to do a simple search like the recent goals scored in a football match. The article heading has the game and date, you click on it, and it's some fucking video with floating pictures of ronaldo and a shitty dance track.

    3. Re:Why YouTube changed monetization policy by swb · · Score: 1

      Why would Google care, provided people watch the videos and Google doesn't get copyright notices?

      My kid watches what I would swear are videos produced by high levels of automation. I tell him the voiceover sounds like speech synthesis reading a newspaper article, but to him it's about some sports topic he doesn't know anything about and he finds it informative.

      I'd kind of guess that the future will be filled with AI-generated videos, especially non-fiction content where you can easily use a source text article for narration as well as performing contextual analysis to obtain images and video content.

      I don't think the problem is that it happens, the problem is that it doesn't (yet) produce a very compelling product.

    4. Re:Why YouTube changed monetization policy by minstrelmike · · Score: 1

      Yup. It sounds to me like someone has reinvented Reader's Digest for this century--fully automated but otherwise similar, showing ez2consume infobites about popular topics to the general viewer. "Oh the humanity."

  21. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Remember when Bill Clinton bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia?

  22. It wouldn't be so annoying if it weren't bots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It wouldn't be so annoying if it weren't so obviously bots. After all, some people actually watch mainstream media like Fox News.

  23. Automated bots? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As opposed to the manual ones?

  24. I now downvote any bot-voiced video instantly. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Everyone else should too .Report them if possible as well.

    Perhaps we could make a robo-DMCA reporter tool to overload them with takedown requests.

  25. Sky News Cuts Off Former British General While He by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sky News Cuts Off Former British General While He Questiones Douma âChemical Attackâ(TM)
    https://southfront.org/sky-new...

    Just jew's last stand to protect the petro-dollar

  26. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Trump is a traitor and a punk ass bitch in every respect. You supporting him makes you that also.

  27. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Uberbah · · Score: 1

    Was China closely aligned with Serbia? Was China sending troops to help the Serbians? If not, your anecdote is a red herring.

  28. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So bombing foreign nations like a bully is fine if you don't hit the russians.

  29. Journalistic privilege by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cant the bots just reference the source report as typical news reports do, it is then not plagiarism but simply automated news aggregations of which many news outlets already have some form of?

    Sounds more to me that someone is annoyed that people have found clever ways to make money.

  30. Google's priorities by execthis · · Score: 1

    Google prioritizes censoring channels that engage in legally protected speech but allows video spam en masse.

    Google is fucked up. Really fucked up. Maybe fucked up in a different sort of way than Facebook, but just as grubby and noxious.

    1. Re:Google's priorities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No speech is legally protected on Google's services. They are a company, not a government. They get to decide what is and isn't allowed and if you don't like it, you are free to not use those services.

      They might be dicks, but they have every right to be.

  31. How is Slashdot any different? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It seems pretty similar to the automated news video.

  32. We can do all this, and yet... by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    And while doing so, they take credit for it and reap all the rewardsâS -- such as revenue and influenceâS -- âSthat come with it.

    We can do all these amazing things with modern technology, and yet Slashdot STILL CAN'T SUPPORT UNICODE.

    At the very fucking least, you could implement something to identify Unicode in a submission and strip it out.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:We can do all this, and yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You've got it wrong. Look closely at the definition of what is required to claim Unicode compliance, you will realize Slashdot is FULLY Unicode-compliant. (Hint: the minimum number of codepoints you must support is neither negative nor positive).

    2. Re:We can do all this, and yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Go to soylentnews if unicode is so bloody important to you

  33. They should be spam-filtered by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Honestly just mark them as spam and shove them down the rankings. There's hundreds of thousands of videos made from experts-exchange *written* comments which look automated and are similar to this.

    They consists of slide shows of text spelling out the answer sentence by sentence.

    So you search for help on a particular subject and you get the text based formu websites answering the question (stuff like experts-exchange) and some youtube ones which rank higher because Google favors its YouTube over normal search results. You then click the video and it's the same text as the forum answers, only in the form of a slideshow (!) A completely useless video created from the answer to those questions from the forums!

  34. I noticed similar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Some of my favorite videos end up in rather random different vids of roughly the same topic over time with sliced narration or robo music. I figured it was click bait of some kind.

  35. Jealousy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I seriously don't know how jealous and retard you have to be to write an article like this but the site name "hackernoon" speaks for itself.

    I am one of those youtubers who have over 20K videos what I made with automated upload framework in linux. I have spent couple of days coding it but then the system was on autopilot for a year or so.

    I was accepted to the monetization program but since copyright bs I haven't earn anything on the videos but I was still doing it for fun eventually this year they even throw me out of the monetization program (once again I haven't made 1$ overall under a year while if I have to pay for my infrastructure, which was not the case it would cost me thousands of dollars to colocate the video converter servers).

    Eventually I had enough and stopped the channel as is. It was a nice "idea" to try to make some passive income next to my dayjob but companies make it impossible for you to do your own business on any possible way. Welcome to the new world of corporate slavery, one way or another they step on you like a cockroach.

    I advise everyone to move AWAY from youtube and let it die. D-tube Steem and other decentralized platforms which remove the evil corporate middle man are the way to go!

  36. ewardsâS influenceâS âSthat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WTF

  37. And that us why.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    .. Everybody should adblock everything..

  38. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe you should also look up "peace and security" and see what follows. Wait for this to be heard worldwide. Watch when governments turn on their enemy that has been riding them all along.

  39. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    Everyone thinks Trump is so horrible, but what exactly has he done?

    ...you're joking, right?

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  40. Botnets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Author is not getting the whole picture. Views on many of these channels are automated as well. In fact, it's an issue on YT in general.

    It is one reason why monetization is all fucked up on there right now. They're getting rolled by highly sophisticated botnets more or less.

  41. Don't click the videos by No+Longer+an+AC · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I felt giving them a click myself.

    Why feed the people who produce this crap?

    I went to their channel, selected a news story I was interested in and what was really " cringe-worthy 80's style" was the digitized audio reading the script no doubt lifted directly from other sources. Then there's the video. It appears they just lifted images from other sources and display them drifting across the screen. Apparently the one I clicked on only had one image.

    That video has 1359 views. I didn't even watch the whole thing and at least my ad-blocker still works on YT (do they still get ad revenue if I don't see the ads?). It wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know and that audio was truly cringeworthy.

    I used to think Newsy and other sources like them were bad. If you've never seen any of their videos it's basically the same rehashing of stories from other sources but at least they have actual humans compiling them and repeating what you could have gotten from dozens of other video sources.

    It sort of makes me a little envious. Why didn't I think of doing this?

    Someone on Reddit wrote a little bot that does an okay job at summarizing articles. If they can do that, it's just one more step to grabbing images and putting the words on the screen and having a cheesy digitized voice read them too you.

    If you're really lazy you could just randomly grab text off any other news site, string them together, put them in a video and collect revenue. Why am I wasting time posting on /. when I could be doing that right now?

    1. Re:Don't click the videos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One thing I've noticed is that even the watchable-quality videos lift ideas from other channels. You see one video that elaborately discloses one (1) factoid to the audience, five more channels will put out the factoid a few weeks later. Memes get beat to death.

  42. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Killall+-9+Bash · · Score: 1

    If they let us block crap, how would they make money off of our kids watching Elsa and Spiderman dancing in their underwear, getting drunk, injecting each other with needles, and dry humping each other?

    --
    "Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
  43. Re:Sky News Cuts Off Former British General While by Killall+-9+Bash · · Score: 1

    The petro-dollar is just a means to an end. When the time is right, the'll support the petro-yuan.

    --
    "Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
  44. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Killall+-9+Bash · · Score: 0

    Traitor? Was he the one that sold all our uranium mines to Russia?

    --
    "Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
  45. Aargh, more pestilence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've seen those sorts of videos. They're impossible to sit through and easy enough to thumbs down, so I don't see how they can be all that profitable. Just as easy to google news stories, assuming that you can read, of course. If real news stories are paywalled, then I guess that's the only reason why bot-videos are getting any viewers.

  46. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What, exactly, has he done? Hint: Use facts.

  47. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2, Informative

    I remember the "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave Russia 20 percent of our uranium" story.

    The claim (by Donald Trump and others) is that Hillary Clinton approved a deal giving a Russian company named "Rosatom" 20 percent of our uranium.

    But that's not true. The Clinton State Department had no power to veto or approve the Rosatom transaction, AKA "Uranium One". It could do neither. Here’s how it does work:

    Uranium One is the name of a South Africa-based mining company.

    Back in 2007 it merged with "Urasia Energy" based in Canada. And in 2010 the mining arm of the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom, bought controlling interest in the company. Among other places, that mining company had operations in Wyoming that amounted to what the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions or the NRC said was at the time was about 20% of the uranium production capacity in the U.S.

    By law, when a foreign company wants to buy ANYTHING with potential national security implications, an interagency committee of the federal government must approve it. The committee was given a broad mandate under President Reagan to advise the president on foreign investment transactions.

    That committee is called CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States). It includes nine department heads. The Secretary of the Treasury is the chair person. The rest are the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, Defense, State and Energy, plus the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That’s CFIUS. The nine department heads all approved the sale of Uranium One.

    It was unanimous - not a Hillary Clinton approval.

    Also, the State Department wasn't even represented by Hillary Clinton at CIFUS. The Assistant Secretary of State, Jose Fernando, represented the State Department on CFIUS, not Hillary Clinton. And Jose Fernando stated that Clinton never intervened.

    Further, neither Secretary Clinton nor the committee as a whole could stop any deal of this kind, even if they wanted to.

    The committee members evaluate the sale of anything potentially related to national security.

    By law, if just one member objects, the president and only the president can veto such a transaction. No committee member of the nine objected.

    The whole "Uranium One" accusation is predicated on the charge that "Secretary Clinton approved the sale". She did not, and more to the point, she couldn't because the as Secretary of State, she didn't have the power to do that.

    This whole "Clinton and Obama gave away our uranium" thing is just plain bullshit.

    Go ahead, think whatever you like. Don't take my word for it. These are the facts and you can verify all of them by spending a minute or two on Google.

    That was just one example of a lie that was made up out of whole cloth to damage a candidate. Clinton wasn't the only one hit with these stories. Remember the "Ted Cruz's father was with Lee Harvey Oswald" story? It was pure bullshit too, and we all know it.
    Modify message

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  48. Re:Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    Well, I don't even know where to start... Government corruption? Support for torture? Incessant lying? Sabotaging wind power projects in foreign countries? Hell, the list must be half a page long.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  49. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You just rattled off a bunch of words with no supporting evidence. You will have to do better than that.

  50. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    I won't have to do anything, Mr. Sea Lion.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  51. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Uberbah · · Score: 1

    So you're being willfully obtuse. Bombing Iraq, Libya, Yemen etc etc is not "okay", dumbass. The point is that none of that warmongering placed us one step away from a few decades of nuclear winter.

  52. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is why we as a nation are doomed.

    No one gives a shit about facts anymore. My side vs your side.

  53. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hint: use your brain.

    Or just cry how the media is lying.

  54. Woodworking Enthusiasts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This woodworking channel:
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOzQZI_wz4O_je8KpgIzMDw

    Woodworking Enthusiasts

    seems to be automated too. I believe some human is tweaking things here and there..

  55. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by nonBORG · · Score: 0

    Do you mean you are smarter than history? If you don't learn the lessons of history you will be doomed to relearn them. What I posted was fact, the idea that people are basically good and you don't need to enforce laws, fight wars etc is just plain wrong idealistic crap. There are very real enemies in the world and criminals. If we do nothing they will not stop. This does not mean that Trump was correct to bomb Syria, but it means he is very correct not to bow to Russia and act in fear of them. Russia is wrong here, very wrong. That does not make the US right but it does mean we should not listen to the Russians.

    --
    You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
  56. Re: Nevermind that shit, here comes Mongo by nonBORG · · Score: 0

    Funny how I get down modded as a troll for posting facts, it shows that people are not interested in truth and facts just winning their arguments (even when their arguments are totally wrong, winning is all that matters. If you disagree you must be a troll.)

    Those who are under the control of the leftwing thinking can justify doing the wrong thing for the "right" reasons. This is why the modding system on this site does not work too many left wing utilitarians who believe the 1st amendment should be struck off.

    --
    You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
  57. I don't see why anyone bothered doing this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    On average, revenue on youtube i about $1 per thousand views. So 225000 views is only $225 is revenue. For a month.

    No one is getting rich off this. 8000 views a day is $8 a day. Woohoo, Got my daily coffee covered!

    There have to be better ways to make money.

  58. Excellent. Dilute and destroy the marketplace. by edris90 · · Score: 1

    Youtube took a huge nose dive, contentwise when it monitized. It had almost zero oversight so on content, making it place of free expession for the sake of sharing fun and learning. Now it's just a another anerican whore, trying to catch a trick to gimd a buck. Sadness indeed for our poor internet. RIP. The internet was sillently murdered and replaced by eccomerce

  59. If you're reading (viewing) news on YouTube by rickb928 · · Score: 0

    You so deserve this cr*p.

    It's bad enough the so-called mainstream outlets spew forth so much redundant cr*p, but to go to a third-party distributor?

    Nope.

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  60. What's the problem? by JThundley · · Score: 1

    What's the problem? Sure it's bad content, but I don't submit Slashdot articles when Jake Paul uploads. The truth is that some people like it and would rather be read the news rather than read it themselves. Maybe other AI researchers are seeing what these bots can do. The worst case scenario is that all of the bots' views are from other bots in which case the view bots are the still the real problem here, not the fact that the videos are being made.