This looks like it's going to be an increasingly big problem for the platform giants, as it pertains to their increasingly aggressive speech restrictions. As they ramp those restrictions up, I'd expect the need for security to increase accordingly.
A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. They'll feel isolated and it'll very likely feel like a personal attack by the tech company. The platforms today are so large, it surely can seem like being cut off from society in general, like a human right is being revoked.
The people the platforms are looking to restrict based on expressed views or behavior, I suspect, are going to tend to have higher than normal rates of mental illness (emphasis that I think it's likely to be a higher rate, not universal).
I don't want to debate the state of her mental wellness as we can only speculate at this time, but I don't think a healthy person would feel that a tech giant is specifically targeting them, even if they think it might be unfair and arbitrary.
She didn't think she was being specifically targeted. In one of her rants she specifically stated that she knew of many other content creators having their videos censored, age restricted, and demonetized.
Her methods are nuts, obviously, but her beef with Youtube is entirely justified.
The end result, unfortunately, isn't going to be Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc... realizing the error of their ways - it's going to be them over-reacting to protect themselves.
I expect Silicon Valley campuses will get locked down. I expect any content that even slightly might maybe insinuate violence will get taken down.
tldr; The problem is going to get worse before it gets better.
I don’t agree that will happen, but it may be good if it does.
It’s about time many of these companies start to realize their decisions have very real consequences on people’s lives (in who makes money/a living and who doesn’t, harassment levels) and their seemingly capricious decisions and rule changes are very problematic.
They’re not the small semi-isolated bubbles they used to be, they’re powerful entities that have large effects on the online economy.
Obviously they shouldn’t be subject to physical attacks/assaults/etc. But YouTube is not what it was in 2007 anymore.
Yeah, they should probably have censored way earlier to prevent that. They now have to go through with getting rid of the radicals they raised. Or re-open the floodgates, accept even more radicalization and thus even more painful consequences later down the line. Just like most problems, ignoring them rarely makes them go away and you instead loose you most pleasant remaining ways out.
> "...but her beef with Youtube is entirely justified."
I am curious as to how we concluded that? Until now, we have only heard her side of the story, and not that of YouTube. May be she was violating ToS? There could be thousands of well-justified reasons for YouTube to terminate her account.
Without hearing the other side of the story, how do we know that her beef was entirely justified?
And, of course, there is the usual argument that YouTube is a platform owned by a private entity. Nobody has a justifiable right to put their video on YouTube and earn revenue from it.
Of course. I emphasized that I believe it's likely to be a higher than normal rate of mental illness, specifically to preempt the obvious responses I'd get, people will emotionally jump to a conclusion that I'm saying everyone falls into that category.
I personally know a few extreme conspiracy theory prone people, that drift into some pretty terrible areas intellectually (from lizard people to anti-semitism). In one case, the person has gotten progressively worse as the years have gone by, they seem crazy at this point. Their views are now being aggressively silenced/blocked by Facebook. I believe mental illness is a not uncommon context with a lot of people that end up like this person and end up getting silenced by the platforms.
The implication being that private companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) now fill the role that common carriers did a few decades ago, and that, curiously, they enjoy many of the privileges usually allotted to common carriers (eg. can't be prosecuted for content passing through their networks) without the responsibilities.
Isn’t that fact quickly changing with laws like SESTA? I feel like tech companies have been at forever war against not being afforded common carrier protections in a way phone companies were not, and I wonder if that regulatory uncertainty has led to self-policing & hedging
There are a bunch of these in society that are interesting and very deserving of more public discussion, including that one (broadly communication access).
Given the importance to work and life of having access to the wireless networks today, owned by AT&T, Verizon etc., should they be allowed to blanket deny you access to them as a customer (assuming you can pay)? Especially given the wireless carriers are essentially a group monopoly (spectrum limitations).
Or how we take away voting rights for felons, until a certain amount of time after they've been released, or in some states permanently (unless altered by a court order or governor's action). Something like 1 in 40 American adults can't vote right now because of that. It revokes the ability to participate in a critical democratic function.
I'd expect an increasingly large societal debate about the context of the platforms and what their rights are when it comes to restricting access. Whether they increasingly get treated as public utilities and if the FCC sets down guidelines/rules for them to comply with on access restriction. That overall conversation probably accelerates the longer they're part of a big part of society. I'm not sure how far that debate will get in the US in regards to actions/regulations, I expect it'll get pretty far in some nations though.
"In the national elections in 2012, the various state felony disenfranchisement laws together blocked an estimated 5.85 million felons from voting, up from 1.2 million in 1976. This comprised 2.5% of the potential voters in general." (emphasis mine)
If your speech causes enough problems? Yes. Remember Kevin Mitnick was banned from using computers at all, and I think was banned from the phone system for a while too?
It didn't prevent the abuse, even though it exposed it.
"Dubbed the "most dangerous hacker in the world," Mitnick was put in solitary confinement and prevented from using a phone after law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone, he said."
https://www.cnet.com/news/social-engineering-101-mitnick-and...
As far as I know, her videos were demonetized, not rejected. There's a huge difference between being silenced and being refused ad placement on your videos.
Getting paid to express your opinion is not a human right.
Tru, but if it is your primary income, I can see how people get mad. Mind you, not, lets go shoot some people mad, but still. Being fired by a demonetization algorithm is kinda shitty.
Loads of people rely on YT for there income and recent changes to the content algoritms are demonetizing all kinds of video's without any warning or clear indication that it happened (or why ftm) and no real recourse to fix things. It already was a bit of a crap shoot, but now it is quite easy to loose months of income without being acknowledged as a person. I mean, even if you reach the 'you-get-human-support' level of views, you still only get to mail with bots...
> There's a huge difference between being silenced and being refused ad placement on your videos.
If there's a huge difference between the impact that being silenced has on someone compared to having their primary source of income abruptly taken away, I would expect the latter to be worse for most people.
I don't believe it's a human right. I believe it hurts to be demonetized. I believe it is enraging to the creators to be demonetized for making content that doesn't have good optics from YouTube's own self-serving point of view.
Some of them were also made age-restricted even though, according to her, they did not include graphic content. From a glance I took at her videos, she did seem quite a bit off. Whoever is saying she is a far-leftist is plain wrong. She never talks about politics, just animal rights and little bit about culture). Most likely she could've been diagnosed with a mental condition if she ever bothered to get herself checked out. Unfortunately criticizing such people now-a-days usually backfires on the person criticizing.
You are talking about people with mental illness. I think the platforms produce mental illness. If you influence and produce a certain kind of behaviour through appropriate reward mechanisms and then after a few years of conditioning reduce/remove the reward what do you think happens? Mental illness.
YouTube has conditioned a generation of people to chant "subscribe like and share" like a robots. The day the "subscribe like and share" model stops being viable the robots will break down.
For those who care about doing something here is a starting point - humanetech.com
People doing things that you consider irrational is not automatically "mental illness." To conflate the two is both to absolve criminals and terrorists of moral responsibility and to stigmatize the mentally ill, most of whom are not homicidal.
Unless you have specific evidence of a particular mental illness, this kind of statement is irresponsible.
A position doesn't become "relativism" just because you don't want to hear it. It's not relativism to point out that people have responsibility for their actions, nor to point out that mental illnesses do not generally make people homicidal.
Regardless of what is ultimately found out about the case, people were claiming mental illness before they had information to support that, as they do in nearly all of these cases.
Mental illness is described in terms of deviance from "normal" behavior and conformance to generally accepted morals. I think this is trivially proven from a lay read of the DSM.
A shooting spree in reaction to an website's policy change is both immoral and irrational. No conceivable context would make that chain of actions acceptable.
How could one look at this action and assume mental illness does not exist?
It's not relativism to point out that people have responsibility for their actions, nor to point out that mental illnesses do not generally make people homicidal.
Saying mental illness exists based on their behavior is not even close to the same thing as saying that they did not have culpability for their actions, and it's both unfair and disingenuous to imply I did.
>Mental illness is described in terms of deviance from "normal" behavior and conformance to generally accepted morals. I think this is trivially proven from a lay read of the DSM.
Deviation from normal behavior and generally accepted morals is absolutely not a definition of mental illness. A bank robber isn't mentally ill by virtue of robbing a bank. I don't believe you've ever read the DSM in any of its editions.
>No conceivable context would make that chain of actions acceptable.
No one said they were acceptable.
>How could one look at this action and assume mental illness does not exist?
People do horrible, outrageous things without diagnosable mental illnesses all the time.
>Saying mental illness exists based on their behavior is not even close to the same thing as saying that they did not have culpability for their actions, and it's both unfair and disingenuous to imply I did.
The assumption that any horrible, irrational crime must be due to mental illness--obviously this diminishes culpability. Have you never heard of pleading insanity? If someone is genuinely out of their mind, they cannot be held responsible for their actions in the same way a normal person would be held responsible.
Diminishes and eliminates are two different words for a reason. The other thing I think you're missing here is that there's a certain level of rationality implied with someone who robs a bank. Ignoring morals, sure, but rationality nonetheless.
Random shooting sprees tend to lack that rationality - as this one does. There's no chain of cause and effect that goes from "youtube demonetized my videos" to "I'm going to shoot random people at youtube with no understanding of their responsibility, and later myself".
This I just wrong from the start. If there’s a single overarching definition of mental illness, it’s “clinical significance” and not deviation from the norm. Of course it’s not that simple either, but it is a common thread throughout all of them.
This only moves the definition down one level. If clinical significance (in general, not just in psychology) isn't based on deviation from a norm, what is it based on?
The degree to which something interferes in someone’s life, their ability to function, etc. If you’re suicidally depressed, or psychotic, it’s a clear distinction for obvious reasons. It’s not about comparing to some standard, you can believe strange things, be unhappy, and so on, but if it starts to make you unable to live your life, it might be a problem.
Maybe with some AI we could target unhealthy people and flatter their egos. Like fake accounts subscribing commenting and agreeing with the troubled soul.
If you have a profile on Instagram and try to build a following through hashtags, this may as well already be true. You tend to get random international followers (at least temporarily) who post fairly inane comments trying to seem engaging.
Fake AIs could probably come up with better content!
It certainly doesn't help that Google's customer support is so terrible. There have been several articles posted here about well known people having to use their high level Google connections or "go viral" just to make Google pay any attention.
Combine mental illness with that feeling of helplessness, and it's not going to end well.
This was nearly 20 years ago at the same building the news station was in. Maybe a news station was a platform giant in 1999. I guess it was a very restrictive platform. They talked and you listened.
> A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced.
A mentally unwell person is equally likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by a platform that harbors content which, in fact or merely their perception, endorses, advocates, or directly does any of targeting, oppressing, threatening, or harming them or any group they identify with.
Heck, even a mentally well person might reasonably feel that way, though they may be less likely to respond to it violently.
I'm struggling to understand the difference between a mentally unwell person and a mentally unwell corporation or government.
I don't think YouTube is mentally unwell, but there have certainly been examples in the past of corporations acting in ways that resulted in the deaths of individuals - either through negligence (justified economically) or through rare but not nonexistent direct corporate violence.
Contemporary examples of murderous governments are trivially easy to find.
Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill, but not murderous groups of individuals once they're beyond a certain level of political and/or economic influence?
> Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill, but not murderous groups of individuals
Other way round, surely? Recieving a diagnosis of mental illness is one of the few things that will save a murderer from punishment.
There is a tendency for news and the public to reclassify certain kinds of crime as "mentally ill" when they can't, or don't want to understand, the motivations. Often it's a form of terrorism and radicalisation.
> I'm struggling to understand the difference between a mentally unwell person and a mentally unwell corporation or government.
Corporations and governments are collections whose concrete eleemtns are individuals. If corporations or governments act out of mental illness, it is the mental illness of one or more of the individuals comprising the collection.
The aggregate might be subject to dysfunction distinct from but in some way analogous to individual mental illness, but that isn't mental illness, just a loosely analogous state.
> Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill
We generally don't, though mental illness is an explanation for some personal violence.
WRT corporate mental illness, I'm not convinced it's widespread mental illness rather than simply the way humans are combined with poor/unethical/apathetic/etc leadership. The vast majority of us just go along with whatever an "authority" tells us is right. The Milgram Experiment [1] illustrated this well.
>Why do we consider murderous individuals mentally ill, but not murderous groups of individuals once they're beyond a certain level of political and/or economic influence?
Because "might makes right" is an implicit virtue for many of the most powerful of people.
He could have gone with "extreme animal rights activist"[1] too, depending on how you want to spin it. Mentally unwell best sums up her beliefs + actions.
> Interesting that we’re going for “mentally unwell” rather than “gun owner” this time.
We're?
Your response comes off as quite rude and dismissive. When in the past did I go for "gun owner" instead of "mentally unwell" or similar, such that your statement makes any sense?
Your assumption/s about me and what I believe, have no place on HN, in my opinion. If you want to know what I think about something, you should ask. There's a polite, collegial way to add to the conversation in doing so.
Right, that's my point: I'm not the collective narrative, I'm an individual person, with a mix of beliefs and thoughts on any given subject. You apparently assumed I was projecting something (a narrative?), based on some past experiences you've had.
If your guess is incorrect about what I believe and why I'm saying what I am, what then? That's why you ask.
She feels paranoid like everyone is out to get her and it probably didn't help that when YouTube "attacked" her online, it was direct, unambiguous, attributable to a distinct entity (to her at least), etc.
When she ran over some debris in the road she came to the conclusion that anti-vegan (she identifies strongly as a vegan) businesses hired unspecified criminals to harm or kill her, and that they did it because of the stickers on her car.
She might have honestly been deluded into thinking that YouTube wanted her dead.
I've seen first hand something similar with a person I have known. It was similar detail (in a sense that it would seem inconsequential to everyone else - bent pages in some work log on a day he made a mistake only he knew about) that mightily added to his sense that peope at the company he worked at were after him for some small oversight he made. He was not sleeping well or at all, ruminating, and well on the road to a major breakdown or suicide.
We managed to save him, by taking him to a psychological crisis management center, where he stayed for a few weeks, got a big change in his daily routine, found some new friends and was able to recover.
Might as well be that she simply was unlucky, that she stayed in contact with people who added into her fears/anger and paranoia, instead of pulling her out of her daily context and meaningfully opposing what seemed overblown and crazy about her thinking, helping her see alternative ways to achieve what she wanted, etc.
On the one hand it surprises me that a screw could accidentally get pushed into a wheel at that angle. On the other, it would be a really ineffective attack.
Isn't it possible that her content just wasn't that good? I mean her website is a pretty typical looking 'illuminati controls everything' crazy conspiracy site, if her content is similarly poorly produced getting down ranked seems natural.
300k or even a million viewers a month that no one wants to pay to reach should still be worth $0. Assuming that just collecting eyeballs gives you some expectation of an income is erroneous.
A lot of those videos were of content that no company in their right mind would want to place their ad on. One of her channels was demonetized completely and from the look of it she separated her channels by language so if one isn't eligible entirely and the other channels are basically the same content in a different language it doesn't sound unlikely that many of those videos were demonetized as well.
That isn't remotely true. I spend a big part of my day making sure my company's ad budget isn't wasted on websites/videos etc that we don't want to associate with.
If we could get 1 million views for a penny, we wouldn't want it if it was on a video showing a cat being brutally murdered.
Also look at the videos that are still up on her website... There is a video about the "Anal Sex Safety and Health Concerns". How much do you think views on that video are worth?
Do you want to associate your brand with hatred of homosexuals? This lady was a really weird mix of values. Vegan + Anti Gay. No matter what side of the political spectrum you are on she was probably offensive.
Are you sure? There are certain coveted demographics that advertisers are willing to pay a lot more money for than others. I don't think it's true that all views are counted the same for monetization purposes.
And then there's views that are desired so little (e.g. those on whacko conspiracy theorist channels) that advertisers aren't willing to pay to put ads on them at all, and you end up with "demonetization".
>Are you sure? There are certain coveted demographics that advertisers are willing to pay a lot more money for than others. I don't think it's true that all views are counted the same for monetization purposes.
I'm not saying any kind of 350,000 views will pay the same -- but unless there's something off (e.g. monetization off, copyright infringement, etc) 350,000 views pay substantially more than $0.1 whether the demographic.
There's plenty of content that advertisers are not willing to spend any amount of money to be associated with. To use a trivial example, imagine if the KKK had a YouTube channel. And as a more nuanced example, this woman's channel. There is some minimum cost per view, and if the ads aren't even worth that much then there won't be any revenue, rather than a small amount.
There's been a rash of negative blowback over the past couple years for being associated with certain types of content, to the point where being monetizable at all is increasingly not the default state. Advertisers would rather not risk it.
By that same logic, aren't paranoid audiences ready to throw their money at post-nuclear-war supply kits and male vitality pills gold patches for advertisers?
Curious if you feel that way about other people who have been in the limelight lately like Logan Paul (I think that's his name), Pewdiepie, or even Alex Jones.
I'm in the camp which agrees with you, but people often say this until it's about content which they disagree with.
Many Youtuber's pay for a package of Bots to watch their videos.
You can get 1 million views for less than 10 dollars. It used to be a great way to cheat Youtube and Advertisers, but they have gotten better and better at catching it. My guess is that she probably did this.
You can still get away with it big time, if the bots are not the majority of your traffic. If you just use them to get to sort of prime the pump. ESPECIALLY if you don't have ads enabled on the video. Then Youtube doesn't care AT ALL. Then you just use your massive view count to approach a real advertiser directly.
She could have bought the views. But if she did and she knew she did, she wouldn't have been so outraged when she doesn't get any money then. I guess this person was genuinely feeling being ripped off by Youtube because she really had an audience but then with no money in return.
>If she did and she knew she did, she wouldn't have been so outraged.
Maybe a rational person would think like that...
But besides knowing she wasn't a rational actor because of the crime she committed, if you spend any time in with the criminal justice system you will find many people 'feel' they have a right to things, even if they procured them illegally.
She could be also a liar -- but I think that's a separate mental problem from being a shooter.
There are several things that suggested to me that she was telling the truth. First, she was complaining about not getting views - If she could buy views, she wouldn't have complained about not getting views then. Second, on her page, she said explicitly that she didn't buy views and followers.
As the Occam's razor dictates, we should rely on the simplest explanation: She really was not getting views while she did before, and it made her mad.
Looks like it. Considering that she would have needed to increase her views by 3 orders of magnitude to scratch out $100/month from them. She should have did affiliate marketing & patreon.
She did get some wider attention to a problem that has been discussed inside the YouTube community before. While that's not something I'd want to die for, she may have reached her goal.
This is the modern version of "as seen on TV" ads, I've started unsubscribing to anyone that does it regularly. Advertising intermixed with content is the worst form of advertising.
But why? I understand that the content creators whose videos I enjoy need to earn a living. I understand that in video advertisements offer more stable income. I'm not expecting a free lunch when it comes to these videos that require lots of time, money, and skills. Sure, people used to make and still do make videos out of a passion for the subject but there is far more content now than there used to be. Some creators use Patreon, and I support the ones I really like using that platform but I can't do that for everyone. I think listening to an ad for a VPN service or for the new Intel products is reasonable to access the content I'm not otherwise paying for.
Some channels do it acceptably. CGP Grey comes to mind, usually an ad for a service at the end of the video the advertiser has effectively funded.
It's far worse when people do it without saying, ie product placement. Can't think of any good examples since people usually get away with it, although the obvious blatant example would be any of the Jenner's on Instagram which got into issues for not reporting paid endorsements IIRC.
Can't think of any good examples since people usually get away with it,
Well, that's the thing. I can think of a good few respected tech sites that run "sponsored" articles that are disclosed in the smallest text possible and basically look like normal content. Not that I'm going to start industry beef by pointing them out :-D
This literally never happens, and you are completely wrong.
I would explain how totally wrong your are more... but I don't have enough time in my day to make the full commitment this comment should require.
I would have more time in my day if I was better organized, or kept my tasks in a program like Asana. But alas, I haven't even signed up for the free trial, because i have so little time. If I actually had Asana, I could even put writing an adequate reply to your comment as a task, so that I wouldn't forget, and I could make sure it got done.
But again. I don't even have Asana, so that won't be happening.
> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.
> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."
HN seems to discourage jokes, although I don't see it explicitly in the guidelines. Jokes in the context of people dying probably are even less well-received.
Inquiry, recognition, and then correction of behavior. If something is ‘wrong’ with you, you should hold on to it for dear life because you just demonstrated one of the hardest things for an adult to do. Personal growth.
To be fair, jokes are frequently downvoted here, at least initially. Some people on HN seem to have a big "thing" about it not "turning into Reddit." But I appreciated it. Thanks :-D
The only channel I follow that does it regularly is Spectre Sound Studios, and I accept it because the services Glenn pimps are actually really damn good. And he makes it very clear that it's a paid interlude, not part of the actual content.
>And he makes it very clear that it's a paid interlude, not part of the actual content.
I have to say that with the content creators I follow, that is the norm rather than the exception. There is always a clear delineation between advertisement and the content, even if the advertisement is embedded in the content (i.e native advertising).
That's right, but if you're going to try to make a living creating content, you have to be able to provide for yourself. Outside of advertising, there aren't that many options for generating income - and most of the time, you have to do all of them (adverts, patreon, live appearances, swag sales, etc.) to make a living because individually they aren't enough. And this is what 'hustle' looks like in this space.
There is something off-putting about expecting some of those guys to devote hundreds of hours creating their content and then criticizing them because it's not free enough. High quality content is hard and requires talent, equipment, time and money to do.
> There is something off-putting about expecting some of those guys to devote hundreds of hours creating their content and then criticizing them because it's not free enough
I don't think this is "expected" of anyone. "YouTube creator" is not a career, it's a glorified hobby that can sometimes be lucrative, most of us wish we had the time and financial freedom to mess around with our hobbies and get paid for it but at the end of the day this is a fickle dream that one cannot reasonably expect to work out.
Advertising intermixed with content is also the only type of advertising YouTubers actually have control of. It may be annoying or inconvenient but it's a hell of a lot better than them complaining about the site that hosts their content not doing the work for them.
Those two events have nothing to do with each other.
In Paypal people send each other money, and the man in the middle is blocking it.
In YouTube, Google decides whether or not to put ads on your video and give you part of the money. You aren't entitled to that cash just because you uploaded a video and people saw it.
It's still terrible and irresponsible for YouTube to be arbitrary about it and have no clearly defined rules; it's clear they're unfair. But I don't think the comparison with PayPal makes sense.
Slightly off topic but PayPal doesn't just block it, it seizes the funds entirely for a long period of time. In any case, you're right, YouTube not advertising on videos is not at all like PayPal stealing payments.
Usually personal sites and social media accounts for such people are quickly taken offline, so reliably that I've wondered how it is that there's always someone with the authority and access around to quickly pull the plug. Not in this case, so strange to see this site still online and open to all.
One of the reasonable conclusions to all this is that revenue sharing on user generated content is a live wire that platforms would rather not touch from now on, despite it being morally correct.
One of her complaints was that YouTube age-restricted her yoga videos (which were modest by Western standard, she was just wearing shorts, a shirt and no socks), while not age-restricting much more explicit Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus videos. Is there any explanation to why YouTube does this?
The big boys like VEVO get on YouTube's "Preferred Partner" program where the policies are way less strict. Last year Pewdiepie got kicked off the Preferred Partner program and makes jokes at the beginning of his videos about how he's constantly getting demonetized nowadays. Watch the first 1:20 of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBJcC6ZqVPY
I'm really not a fan of the policy, and it would be a real shame if it wasn't changed. But it would also be a shame if it was changed because of a shooting. It shouldn't have come to this in the first place.
She had a pretty good point. Any given popular music video is loaded with borderline porn. Why were her fully clothed yoga videos (that weren't even questionably sexual) not allowed but the former were?
Part of this is obvious: youtube restriction policies are largely based on what is advertiser-friendly, and popular music videos are advertiser-friendly by definition.
I don’t know what caused her videos to be demonetised, but she’s not wrong - it does seem pretty much arbitrary with no proper channel for disputing it.
Is it possible that the decision to demonetise or age-restrict was algorithmic, then she was too small-fry to get any interest/reconsideration from support?
We've heard loads of stories of people getting AdSense accounts shut unfairly and without recourse, for example. If that was your entire income, you already felt hard done by, and were so inclined, I could see how you might go off the rails.
For sure. Its like if your boss used an algorithm to decide your pay, and he wouldn’t disclose this algorithm to you. Some months “the algorithm” declares all your work bad and the boss pays you nothing. Meanwhile, you can see other employees’ much worse work getting paid regularly, essentially because they’re more popular and the boss likes them more. Anyone would feel unfairly treated under those circumstances, and would harbour a great deal of resentment.
Most people would leave such a “job” or try to game the algorithm, but killing the boss does also look like an obvious (if wrong and probably unproductive) option!
This just made me realize how much of a pass Youtube gets compared to Uber. Youtube expects you to provide it with content and it may arbitrarily choose to never pay you for your work. With Uber you will at least get something.
With uber you are paid when you serve a customer. Creating content, on its own, is not serving either a customer or an end user, so there can be no expectation of payment.
>But it would also be a shame if it was changed because of a shooting.
Well I put this 100% on the greed of Alphabet/Google. Building up a huge base of creators on your platform over the course of a decade, only to bow to advertiser pressure over a slim minority of your videos and demonetize algorithmically is terrible, straight up inhumane really. Youtube represents some of these creators livelihoods, and they don't seem to recognize that; I really think that the salary levels in the Valley insulate people here from how much more money is worth literally everywhere else. Honestly I've been waiting for something like this to happen, it only seemed like a matter of time to me and unless distribution platforms are much more careful about how they demonetize going forward, I don't think it will be the last. They should be promoting a campaign to shame their advertisers for acting so rashly and putting this front and center. "See what happens when you force a major overhaul of advertisements? People lose their livelihoods and lives. People think less of you on Youtube because we can't control our creators calling you out for demonetizing, it's bad PR and we're gonna make it worse because these actions resulted in this tradgedy."
The presence of the 'Advertiser-friendly content guidelines' document isn't an answer to the question, which is why the guidelines aren't consistently applied.
Mix "other quite similar videos are explicit" with "other videos from the uploader are inappropriate for children" and pour it into an overly-aggressive automated algorithm.
What a terrible disaster this afternoon. It should never finish like this.
The only thing I hope out of this is that it will maybe relaunch the debates about the megaplatforms and censorship. (Facebook, youtube, Google,...). The bigger they become, the more they will start censoring everything.
More people need to launch the movement to host their videos independentlty. Peertube is a good start for example https://joinpeertube.org/en/home/
The people who say that don't have much in the way of independent thought in the first place, so they're probably right in thinking it will never affect them.
There are links to her (4?) youtube accounts, which have all been terminated. There's a link to her instagram, which has also been terminated, however there is a cached-copy here http://www.pictame.com/tag/yesilnasim
It's a pity that Google terminated those accounts - I don't know what scrutiny scares them.
As for the lady, she seems to genuinely believe in veganism and fitness. Whatever weird things she did to propagate that seemed to be working (330K views?!!).
> Why she resorted to gun violence is much awaited.
My theory is this: I went through some of her past images. One of them showed a picture of a dog that was being mutilated (alive). She states that dogs in China are skinned alive because they believe that it makes the meat taste better.
Well, that is going to invoke strong feelings, especially if that's part of your core cause (to expose the mistreatment of animals to the world). When YouTube censors that, they might as well be part of the problem, from her perspective.
BE AWARE! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care for
personal short term profits & do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people,
hiding the truth, manipulating science & everything, putting public mental & physical health at risk,
abusing non-human animals, polluting environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism &
sexual degeneration in the name of freedom,..... & turning people into programmed robots!
"Make the lie big, Make it simple, Keep saying it, And eventually they will believe it" Adolf
Hitler... There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is not
supported by the system. Videos of targeted users are filtered & merely relegated, so that people can
hardly see their videos!
Yeah I think you’re onto something. I’m also sure that pictures of animals a lot of people in Youtube’s major markets see as pets being mutilated, generated scads of complaints. When you’re dealing with many millions of people, it is not unusual to respond to large concentrations of complaints. We should probably talk more about how thst works, and how it sometimes allows for careless or bad actors to silence people. Still, it’s understandable in a context other than attempting to be a censor, and just acting like a business. She comes across as angry and rigid in her views, but that describes quite a lot of people. Still, if someone “knows” something and is very angry, it can be hard to reach them.
> It's a pity that Google terminated those accounts - I don't know what scrutiny scares them.
Because they don't want to encourage people to gawk at the death spectacle? This includes all the times a suicidal killer leaves behind a manifesto that could serve to inspire copycat killers.
The Elliot Rodgers videos are still up on YouTube, though. On the balance, it’s probably more helpful to allow people to understand what led up to these events rather than suppressing the shooter’s words for the sake of some theoretical safety benefit.
Although this is negated by the strong positive correlation between media coverage of a shooting and an uptick in following shootings (which I'd suggest is more than "some theoretical safety benefit".)
Google can censor someone as effectively as any government. This is, in effect, the same as the government banning a book. It's not something I'm ever comfortable with, and I'm especially uncomfortable with it when it's an unaccountable company in charge.
To be fair, YouTube/Google just had an active shooter on their campus. If there's anything that justifies terminating someone's account, it would be opening fire on the company directly and injuring people.
You made me scroll through the youtube TOS to see if that was considered a violation.
As far as I can tell it's technically not... in fact, I can't even find a blanket "YouTube reserves the right to remove any content, for any reason, whatsoever" statement. They don't actually need to state that in the TOS, because they do have that right, but, still.
That's indeed quite telling about the TOS nowadays: two people from HN double/triple checked the TOS to find a simple statement and couldn't find it. Yet, it's there.
I saw those, but the first is couched within the copyright violation rule, so I assumed it was associated. I.e. we can remove it for copyright violation at anytime.
For the second, I assumed that "if your content was removed for a reason we justified here, we don't have to warn you beforehand."
I'm no lawyer though and I'm sure in court those clauses would be summarily smacked across my face one way or the other.
You made me scroll through the TOS again and triple check. Indeed, there is no clause for wholesale termination, but they do require you to follow the community guidelines. Those guidelines do say that you can't promote violence -- and while committing an act of violence isn't necessarily promotion, it could be interpreted as such.
Still interesting to see that there's no blanket termination policy, though. I stand thoroughly corrected.
If they left it up, it would get millions of hits due to the media coverage and associated buzz. They can't let her create a precedent where "1. Film an angry rant, 2. Shoot up YouTube HQ" is seen as a guaranteed way to reach large numbers of people with your message.
"people like nicki minaj, miley, many others who have sensual things so inappropriate for children to watch, don't get age restricted. But videos, my workout videos, get age restricted."
Very valid points. Has coherent thoughts, and from her videos doesn't appear to be mentally crazy.
We're obviously thinking about this in light of the fact that she just went on an attempted killing spree. I can see how that might prejudice our thinking.
But I personally have had quite a bit of experience interacting with mentally-ill individuals both as a volunteer and through visiting family members who are in institutional care.
I am in no position to diagnose anyone, but I'd be very surprised if it does not come out that this woman had long-standing mental issues for which she refused any intervention or treatment.
Because from a game theoretic POV it creates the biggest impact. The media cycle will after every shooting will surely keep her message in the spotlight for weeks to come.
I have never met her but my guess is that she is orthorexic with a narcissism disorder and few friends. Maybe many thousands of 'Facebook friends' which is no replacement for family and a small handful of real friends.
I've never heard of othorexia until today. Funny that in a country with an obesity epidemic whose number one killer is heart disease that obsessing about eating healthy food is considered a mental illness.
>that obsessing about eating healthy food is considered a mental illness.
Mental illnesses, at least in present times, are defined and diagnosed when they are an impediment to functioning in a normal manner in society. A lot of people like to say, for example, that they "have OCD" but a psychiatrist would only diagnose you as having OCD if it cripples your life, not just if you have a mild obsession like double checking if you closed your door before leaving home.
In the case of something like orthorexia, it would be a mental illness when it reaches the point where you think of it for a large % of your days, that you would argue and get angry at people for not sharing your views on food, that you would get paranoid and be unable to participate at a family dinner and many other things that add up and make a person maladjusted in society. Can you really say she was not a mentally ill person ?
>"my car attacked by anti vegan animal business supporting criminals"
Her obsessions ran deep into paranoia that people who were not vegans were out to get her. This is the true face of mental illness. Let's not downplay the realities of it. Someone "obsessed with healthy food" as you put it can be more mentally ill and dysfunctioning in society than someone who's fat and eat fast food stuff on a daily basis. It all depends on how deep your obsession runs. The fat person might still be able to not think about food much of the day and function, work, have hobbies outside of food.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Can we honestly and objectively say that being extremely health conscious is a sickness while habitually eating extremely unhealthy food to the point of obesity is not?
>>"my car attacked by anti vegan animal business supporting criminals"
>Her obsessions ran deep into paranoia that people who were not vegans were out to get her.
So anyone who suspects their car was vandalized by someone who disliked a controversial bumper sticker on it is mentally ill?
That's kinda what I thought, but I figured I'd give twenty spot the opportunity to say what the signs are. I've not spent a lot of time around schizophrenics, so I wouldn't know what to look for. I have, however, spent a lot of time around Aspies and would have a gut feeling for that after watching for an hour, so it doesn't seem implausible to me that he sees something I don't.
That’s a style of web design I’ve seen before - lots of colors, different font sizes, wall of text rants... something about it screams mental instability. See Time Cube for an extreme example.
No, there is a certain distinct style that is different from those other subcultures you have listed. One that is definitely linked with mental instability.
See timecube and "blacks for trump" as a reference.
I'm sorry to report that in my experience something like a 'schizophrenic aesthetic' does exist, at least in video.
I worked for years in the film industry, in a position where people would send videos over-the-transom to try to get financing and publicity for their projects.
Several of Ms. Aghdam's videos (i.e. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x39ovcb) look alarmingly similar to some that I received from people who were clearly not well.
To be fair we were pretty crazy back then, this was before the medication boom. Thankfully we got treatment, now our moods are even and flat like our UI design.
I like this style, and wish more people followed their own instincts when designing their blogs, rather than reverting to the standard corporate web-style we see so often these days.
I think you should consider her age. She is 39 (old) so it is hard to keep up with the new trends in web design and movie making, plus she doesn't look very smart.
I am not trying to insult her but I saw that "style" of making youtube videos and web sites in other people most of them are above 30 and not to bright. I saw similar videos from one old man that likes to talk about demons and how to save our souls from satan and he makes this videos with demons and people in some kind of old graphics.
They all think that what they do is nice and beautiful and nothing wrong with what they say or do. And I also remember hi5, they let you change color of your page and usually the people that were not that smart used a lot of ugly colors similar with these websites.
There is a video in which she's edited footage from "America's Got Talent" with footage of her performing a cringey act. Can't tell if it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek parody or if she's being delusional about being TV famous: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5dax32
As I see it: She posted on her site that she made 10 cents for 366,000 views these days. She must have been making quite a bit and then probably the algo determined that she is not making advertiser friendly videos so the spigot got closed. Must have appealed, we all know how those work.
And the fact that there are so few examples of women who commit multiple homicide where they don't target domestic partners, friends, families, coworkers, etc. Genuinely, the only known instance I've read of in the US was the San Bernadino shooter, and she was pretty clearly religiously motivated.
That's true, too. Do you think that unclear or arbitrary rules tend to aggravate individuals as often as rules that are clearly laid out, enforced evenly, and can be appealed?
From what I've seen in a forum where the rules are pretty much arbitrary (don't piss off the boss), such rules aggravate individuals just as much as clearly laid out rules. But in case of unclear or arbitrary rules, the appeal process is non-existent and the application uneven.
As a general principal, there is no logical or moral reason why a victim should be beyond blame. The goal should be to judge the situation fairly; just as much as you don't want to automatically blame the victim, neither should you automatically find the victim blameless.
Just so we're clear, I'm not blaming a "random" Google employee, as you are suggesting. I don't want to downplay this tragedy, and I wouldn't say that anyone deserved it. It's horrible that you had to witness what happened, and I'm sorry to hear it.
We consider crimes against young children to be particularly bad precisely because they're genuinely blameless.
Once you get past childhood, though, you're a moral agent making choices. If you work at a company, yeah, you are in a small part contributing to their actions and by continuing to work there, assenting to those actions.
After all, a random Googler lunching in the cafeteria wants the prestige associated with all the good things Google does, that's got to come with some measure of blame for the bad things Google does. You can't have it both ways.
So, wanting to work at a reputed place for software engineering == endorsing every single policy the company (a collection of over 70K individuals) might adopt? To the point that you should be expected to take a bullet for it?
Even if it was, as opposed to the individual employees involved, victims can play a role in situations that come to be. Making an observation about this is not victim-blaming, nor does it absolve the aggressor.
Can you expand on that? Did she make irrational comments, accuse people of impossible acts, was she threatening? I looked at the 1.5 minute video someone copied out and she was upset but not frothing at the mouth.
You don't have to be "frothing at the mouth" to be mentally unstable. I saw her videos on Dailymotion and I had the impression that something is not right with her, can't really pinpoint or explain what it is. but definitely very awkward in front of the camera. Just my personal take on it.
You mean like Poppy who has millions of views on youtube? If you saw her before she was known you'd probably think she was just as likely to shoot up youtube HQ.
The truth it's not as easy as it seems to separate the "merely deviant" and the violently deviant. That's why censors often choose blanket censorship of any deviance.
Arguably the only reason Poppy got popular was because people weren't sure if she was an act. For a long time she was just "OMG who is this freaky youtube girl!!!"
Obviously in hindsight we know she was an act and correspondingly interest in her has declined.
Blurring the line between act and reality is one of the foundations of entertainment. It's the reason people admire good method actors so much. It's the reason people like Andy Kaufman are considered artistic gods.
My rule with Youtube is that, if the production value is relatively high, the character is an act (ie, scripted). I don't know who poppy was had to look it up and saw some of her older videos and it seemed to me that right from the beginning her videos had good lighting, makeup, dress code and overall editing quality was higher than your typical amateur youtube videos.
As someone else mentioned below that easy to have an opinion after the fact, my observation of the shooter, as well be biased, but I feel that even I didn't know anything about her - I would still think the videos were odd. I can't exactly pin-point whats odd about it.
I watched one video. It's possible that something was "not right with her" but then I think that's true in some small way with almost all of us (personality foibles, etc).
But it's also possible she was on-edge because she was angry and frustrated by a situation that was important to her (earnings, passions, etc). Lots of people act like that when they feel upset, then you add in the pressure of a camera...
So if this person was not an employee, it's amazing to me how she got into the building? Usually these large tech campuses are pretty locked down, with at least one badged entrance, and security or front desk staff watching who comes and goes.
That said, I've never visited the YouTube campus, so maybe it bucks the norm.
It was outdoors. Also, I have only been to a couple SV tech companies where they had solid enough doors/etc. at entrance to actually stop someone going in shooting from getting inside; the security is really just there for keeping homeless out, as well as to enforce corp secrecy/etc.
I see, early reports seemed to indicate the shooter was at a party, possibly inside. Really sad when employees in the bay area, which is generally very safe, have to fear for their lives because of something their employer may have done to piss someone off.
This incident was enough of an outlier that probably the correct thing to do is nothing, although that's really hard for people to accept. I'd just recommend improved first aid/trauma response (put AEDs around, train people to CLS standard).
> Really sad when employees in the bay area, which is generally very safe, have to fear for their lives because of something their employer may have done to piss someone off.
It would be if that were true, but it isn’t. Even if there were an order of magnitude more attacks along these lines it would not warrant anyone having to fear for their life as they would still be exceedingly rare.
And, so, you're proposing a civilized society where such a thing should be accounted for, and every specific, nuanced experience should be catered to, no matter how personal?
Well, perhaps they should consider the morality of their employers' actions then. If everyone who considered working at Alphabet/Google/YouTube lived by 'Don't Be Evil', either the company would have less employees or they wouldn't inspire such rage and pain.
EDIT: You know, I do find it interesting that every time I use the original Google slogan in a post, I get downvoted. Why do people not want to remember how much they have changed?
The times I've visited Apple or Facebook, there's always one if not several security guards watching each person badge in, to ensure you don't tailgate. Facebook's main building even has those optical turnstiles, to make it harder (as if the guards weren't imposing enough).
Probably the smaller buildings are much easier to tailgate? Or maybe Facebook and Apple just don't represent the norm in the valley.
Apple (maybe FB too, I have no direct knowledge) is an extreme case where they take physical security extremely seriously. From day one employees are instructed that everyone badges in, even if it’s a whole group of employees entering who all know each other. You badge even while someone is holding the door for you. If you see someone behind you who forgot to badge you stop them: even if they’re the Senior VP, doesn’t matter.
The terms of service permits Google/YouTube to terminate an account for basically any reason. On a purely reactionary level, shooting at a company's employees is a pretty good reason for account termination.
Edit: As mentioned in an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751945), apparently YouTube doesn't have a blanket account termination clause in the terms of service. I stand by my rationale, but want to make it clear that I actually got this wrong.
I do know what she put there, though, since on the internet is is fairly trivial to see what was on a publicly available and commonly crawled website before it was removed.
And there was nothing that related to the killing, and nothing even tangentially related to the ban message. No 'final manifesto' or anything like that.
Firstly, my sympathies with the people at Youtube HQ. I have many, many friends in the bay area and so this kind of thing hits close to home.
Secondly, I struggle when thinking about if we should give airtime to a shooter's grievances, or reasons. Or even mention who they are. I tend to be on the side of: don't give them any air time. And certainly, don't acquiesce to this type of behavior because it is almost by definition "terrorism" (using violence to cause change in policies).
On the other hand, I have been hearing a lot about YouTube demonitization, censorship, etc. Should this shooting be a part of the discussion about censorship? Should YouTube and the tech community let it affect the discourse around censorship?
>On the other hand, I have been hearing a lot about YouTube demonitization, censorship, etc. Should this shooting be a part of the discussion about censorship? Should YouTube and the tech community let it affect the discourse around censorship?
I think the answer to this is clearly no. I feel like people here feel very strongly about censorship, so maybe they'll disagree. But I think we need to get a bit of perspective here. She attempted to kill people to get what she wanted.
Should people's motives not be inspected simply because they were willing to kill over them? Following that maxim would give us an infantile understanding of human history.
The exact quote by Thomas Jefferson was: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."[0][1]
Though, if the hired guns that enforce and enable their corporate/cultural owners, to silent the voices of societies dissenters and the marginal in various forms, cannot see the roles they play (albeit, indirectly at times, perhaps blinded by their own incentives, maybe this is the lethargy Jefferson talked about), then I will not be surprised to see things to continue to escalate.
Plenty of soft targets abound that corporate and cultural owners rely on for dominating the public for their own ends.
At the same time, they may be propping up a tyrannical system. "Just following orders" is not a solid argument for your morality.
It's clearly a complicated mess. My personal hope is that we eventually learn the lesson that sufficiently influential social networks need to be subject to democratic oversight and a transparent judicial system. That will likely make them more expensive to run, but that's a price we have to pay for three sanity of our society.
> if we should give airtime to a shooter's grievances, or reasons
I think in this case she represents a significant number of YouTubers, and is like an extreme version of discontent that is happening. Imagine a hive of bees growing until they start getting annoying and one of them stings you; by removing one you don't solve anything, you need to do something with the whole hive. So you can remove any traces of her from the Internet so that nobody knows about her motives, but all it does it to let discontent bubble and then erupt in unexpected ways, instead of doing some needed correction.
"...I think in this case she represents a significant number of YouTubers, and is like an extreme version of discontent that is happening..."
Doesn't really matter though. We shouldn't be giving these people the infamy they are looking for. If anything, it's made me think a little less of disgruntled youtubers, and some youtubers have legit gripes.
I don't think it's about being "famous" (some narcissists of course would be like that). I'd treat it as a valid feedback from within a dynamic system that there's a built up pressure somewhere and it's time to do some tweaks for system to continue working, instead of saying everything is wonderful, the feedback was just a deranged singleton instance, or even that we need to double down.
If you look at the whole as a non-personal system, then yes. When you e.g. see your city has suddenly more murders than before, you probably take it as a valid feedback and try to do something about underlying causes.
Murders go up and down all the time. Average resident of that city doesn't really see that as "feedback". In fact, the average person is completely unaffected by that. Probably less than 0.01% of any demographic in the US is murdered in any given year in any given city. Even if the rate went up by an order of magnitude, most would barely notice. (Local TV news not withstanding.)
It hip to talk about the "systematic" nature of Bad Things, but it's very rare for people to actually consider the systems at play. Nobody bothers pushing past inventing a just-so mental state of the actor and looking at the tools they use.
I like your post, you're looking for the bigger picture.
I agree with your sentiment, but I also think we need to make America the kind of place where people don't think a murder-suicide like this is their only remaining option. I'm not too optimistic about that at the moment.
Blowing people up got Ted Kaczynski's anti-technology manifesto printed in the NYTimes. Even if got through to one person I bet he feels like it was worth it.
It's not something to admit in polite company but violence is a great way to start a conversation.
Big companies are morality load balancers. Technically a CEO is morally responsible for what their company does, but this does not truly feel right either. The example scenario goes like this:
The shareholders decide that more money must be made
The CEO decides that more money will be made by obtaining more wood. The hows and whys are kept vague at this stage. Nothing concrete will be put on paper. Upper management decides that resource acquisition will be guided by a study on the various pros and cons of chopping what wood where.
The study confirms that we the best place to get wood is the amazon rain forest. Middle management receives the plans and guidelines from on high. Slowly the moral responsibility is distributed through the ranks. Until, years later, when some pollution case comes to light the question is asked: who to blame? The workers? The results of an objective study? The incentives set by shareholders and a cutthroat market for wood?
"Morally correct" as in according to one's moral principles? Is that, in its turn, something that we all agree on and share?
Terrorists definitely hold moral principles that are different from mine. To a terrorist, blowing people up to bring attention to their point may be the morally correct thing to do.
Hence we have terrifying people like Kaczynski with extremely strong moral convictions that deviate far from what is generally considered normal and socially acceptable, whose ill deeds are consistent and true to their moral principles.
Sure, terrorists disagree, but you're avoiding the fact that most people here - on this site, in this industry, in this country - agree that blowing people up for attention is morally incorrect.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing. That it's possible for someone to believe terrorism is good? I suspect most people already know that, but thankfully most of us disagree.
It's mostly a semantic argument. I'm arguing against using "correct" in a context where correctness evidently depends on morality, which is individual enough that this kind of person exists and thrives. That nullifies the whole basis of the argument that "There are correct ways to start a discourse around censorship." I'm not sure that it was meant as an argument. Maybe it's just a cheap way to score points among "most people here", because it's rather pointless as an argument regardless of its validity.
Also, I assume that by this country you mean the U.S., where killing people at least partly to draw attention (for the purpose of general deterrence) is practiced by the justice system. I bet you'll find a lot more people in this crowd that agree with this on the basis of their morals. I know people who believe one thing but will at least briefly change their mind learning of some particularly heinous crime or some particularly tragic wrongful conviction. Correct/incorrect isn't really a scale, so which would pick for something a little more polarized like this?
I disagree with the premise of your post. There are not "correct" ways to "start a discourse" about censorship, because there are no ways to start a discourse about censorship.
There are a bunch of people doing the media dance around a topic, all within the confines of the status quo. The disagreements are loud, but the questions at stake are fixed. In appearing to debate conclusions, everyone is tricked into accepting the form of the argument.
The outcome of censorship arguments will be exactly the same as the outcome of privacy arguments: whatever benefits the system. Eich was run out of town on a rail after the status quo moved beyond thing he gave minor support to, while Zuckerberg is only experiencing a momentary PR blip until they can get everyone back on track of unironically defending his contract of adhesion as if it's not on-the-face abusive to end users.
The unfortunate truth is that this woman got more exposure for her message by taking the action she did then would have been possible by any other means.
That has some rather frightening implications for society.
I want to know what happens in the public sphere. I don't want some bureaucrat deciding what is and is not "too dangerous to public safety" to allow to to be broadcasted because some copycat MIGHT get inspired. To quote Charlton Heston's response in "Touch of Evil" when the corrupt cop played by Orson Wells complains how effective policing isn't easy, "your job isn't supposed to be easy. The only job where policing is easy is in a police state."
We have "censorship" in Europe and we don't have people murdering others because of it.
The problem isn't censorship. The problem is that the US is far more violent than other developed nations, and there is easy access to deadly weapons for anyone who wants one.
>We have "censorship" in Europe and we don't have people murdering others because of it.
Europe has a long history of mass murder intertwined with censorship. This history was the basis for the US Bill of Rights, notably the first and second amendments.
YouTube (and other social media services) usually take down the accounts of headline-making killers. You're asking if they should make an exception in this case?
In parallel, there has been a conversation going on about demonitization, censorship, etc (see the removal of the gun videos recently). My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation? I feel like we should restrain ourselves from letting violent acts like this impact those conversations, even if the violent acts were done "in the name of" fighting against censorship
> My question is, should such a shooting have any impact on that conversation?
Did you expect that the shooting would have a meaningful impact in the debate? Certainly, people will mention her name in the next few months, because of the infamy of her acts. But no, I don't think Google is going to openly say that an attempted mass murder of their employees was an incentive or disincentive. For likely the same reason why governments don't typically negotiate with ransomers and terrorists.
> Did you expect that the shooting would have a meaningful impact in the debate?
Not upstream comment author, but I can see how it could. People make a living off YouTube. YouTube purposefully hides the metrics by which they judge videos and choose to promote them to or hide them from different audiences, and which cause a video to become demonetized, which means no revenue can be obtained from it. They have valid reasons for wanting to do this (which isn't to say those reasons should win out in the end, it's an active debate AFAIK), but on the other hand they heavily encourage content creators to make it their full time job and embrace YouTube.
The stress of having your livelihood drastically affected due to an algorithm change in some opaque way that nobody will explain may contribute heavily to stress individuals feel. That doesn't in any way excuse the actions of this person, but if it contributed, is this not a valid, if extreme, data point about the impact in people when they feel powerless and in the dark about their livelihood?
Thousands of people got massive "wealth shocks" from YouTube's massive wave of perceived-as-arbitrary (or at least unexplained) and unanticipated "demonitization" wave. YouTube has no worthy competitor so these people had nowhere else to go and could only try to trade even more labor for far less income. It's no surprise that this has led to quite a few suicides:
https://www.daytondailynews.com/business/midlife-wealth-shoc...
No the shooting shouldn't be about the discussion on "censorship". The discussion should be about the tendency to resort to extreme levels of violence to settle disputes and settle perceived wrongs.
As far as the attention question, I'm in the same boat. The more I've read about school shooters and the like the more apparent it is how much of an inspiration their predecessors (starting with Harris and Klebold) are. There is this obsession with "Why'd they do it" which leads to a level of attention that appears to be desirable.
No justification for her actions, but Google does act as a serf master over the entire internet. It can single handedly decide who succeeds, who fails, and there is no recourse. There is no recourse, no appeal. Some 20 year old dude in Menlo Park decides, and your website, your life, your work, your future, is changed forever. Here's our account: https://www.medgadget.com/google
People need to realize that using "free" platforms, means they are beyond your control and your fate is up to their vagaries.
I'm against censorship (private censorship which takes political sides especially) but ultimately, unless you're hosting your own content, just enjoy what you get for free while you can and don't bank on it.
YT is not there to make _you_ money. They are there to make money for themselves. If you get in the way of that (via potential boycotts, online bandwagoning, etc.) they will likely cut you loose.
PS most of the censorship is done overseas, mostly SEAsia, not San Bruno, etc.
Agreed, but the sudden change of the rules - when a lot of people use the platform for their income - is causing a lot of heartache.
I follow a mainstream comedy channel about fitness hosted by a satirical gym guy (brosciencelife) that's fairly mainstream comedy - you'd see darker, less classy comedy in regular TV watching Stephen Colbert discussing Trump philating Vladmir Putin - but the writers, Mike and Gian, are demonotised all the time because there's no granularity in 'controversial'. Meanwhile big channels like Jake Paul were bothering corpses and YouTube didn't care until other creators caused an uproar.
There was a similar case where a new female rapper had a sexy video, and it got demonetised, comparing it to a bunch of more explicit videos from well known rappers which YouTube didn't care about.
It's exactly like Twitter - rules aren't being enforced consistently and it drives people nuts.
Except, I can choose to not use Google and still be adversely impacted.
Google controls the vast majority of search, and if they decide to not include me in their results because they don't like me, I am negatively impacted. Ditto for Youtube, its the default online video platform. If they don't like my content, they can just ban my account. Sure I can host it elsewhere, as long I don't care about advertising or dealing with the scale that video brings.
> People need to realize that using "free" platforms, means they are beyond your control and your fate is up to their vagaries.
People need to realize that there is no such thing as free. Nobody is getting anything for free here, because usage of the service generates analytics data, and it goes into a thick file connected to your account. Those so-called "free" platforms also monopolize the market space, creating less incentives for alternative implementations and competing platforms. Few alternatives are therefore developed, further monopolizing the space, and further cementing the fact that having a choice in the matter isn't in the cards.
you can use them without being tracked by watching in anon mode, or deleting your cookies first. google doesn't block you. i watch it that way all the time. and its free.
Why downvoting? We have an honest website since 2004! That's more than 14 years. We do interviews, reviews, conferences reports. Medical technologies: no politics, no controvertial content. All our staff is US and European-based MDs and PhDs, hard working professional people. And starting with Panda update by Google, we can barely survive... Read our account: the story is true and is very honest.
I didn't up or downvote, but speaking only for myself, as someone who's not working in the space your site covers, your post looked to me like an ad for your site, and that kindof rubbed me the wrong way. Some of the wording ("serf master", for example) also rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe that's just me, though.
Maybe before downvoting people need to realize that Google, instead of fostering a better internet, by working on promoting honest and hard working publishers and creators, decided that it will concentrate on goals of increasing its own profitability? Do you see new publishers popping up on the internet? Have you heard of such as thing as VC investment rounds in start ups in publishing? No? Maybe Google has something to do with it. And internet is poorer, as a result, and your experience on internet is poorer.
well google is a money making enterprise, so is say medium, the blogging service. medium aren't doing anything to help other publishers, just themselves, right? i think google has done some stuff to help the world, the internet, but they are so big when they make changes to reduce spam say, millions or thousands of people get pushed out of the way too.
I also saw those reports. I found that WNYC's "Breaking News Consumer Handbook"[1] was a useful tool for sorting through the various reports. Many of the reports citing a "domestic dispute" either cited other news outlets (in some cases, without even citing any particular outlet) or attributed its facts to vague "reports."
Of the sources I was following, KRON seemed to have the lowest standards (at times even publishing contradictory statements as fact in consecutive paragraphs of their story), while NYT had the highest (but, correspondingly, stuck with the "the shooter has not been identified" line for hours longer than most other outlets).
I find looking at the Wikipedia history page [2] for incidents like this educational for understanding how our knowledge of events changed over time. In this case, the Wikipedia article attributed the domestic dispute claim to two law enforcement officials who spoke to CBS News. The cited CBS News article no longer supports the facts in the Wikipedia article, but presumably did at one time.
Yes we understand that - but these were her options: continue hosting on YouTube, host on another site/hosting service (a lot of new anti-YouTubes are popping up), or self-host. She had a choice in this. YouTube being the most popular of them all doesn't mean she has to host her videos there.
It also seems to be standard corporate training procedure to tell employees that they should report any behavior like this that might suggest that a coworker is "at risk" for doing something like this.
A lot of people in this thread are attempting to describe Nasim as a 'weird' or 'unstable' individual. I wonder if there's some narrative building here going on here? Many want to explain it away with a cliche.
It's a shame what happened. Too bad our world isn't more like K-Pax.
Serious question here. What are the liability laws like in the US for producers of propaganda? Can you hold say inforwars or brietbart (used as proxies here) liable if they insight or inflame this sort of person to go on a rampage?
You could easily prove in a court of law that what they peddle is not factual so I don't see how they can't have some liability. Freedom of speech is freedom to speak, not freedom from consequences.
I watch a vegan channel that Youtube recommended to me quite often, and Im not even vegan.
Based on her page, showing dogs being boiled alive, I think vegan isnt perhaps the best description for that content. A vegan channel is someone showing how to make salads.
YouTube should be smarter than having a Boolean for 'monetiziable'.
Eg, vegan channel showing animal cruelty should be marked as showing 'animal cruelty (newsworthy)' and advertisers should be able to say they do/don't want to advertise on the 'animal cruelty (newsworthy)' tag.
A big game hunting company might not want to advertise on that tag. Nor would a children's toy manufacturer. Fine.
But the RSPCA, an environmentalist politician, or The Body Shop might want to advertise and if I was a vegan I might want to give them my money.
> A vegan channel is someone showing how to make salads.
I can see that's the most common case, but check out for example /r/vegan - it's mostly content about vegan ethics.
Couldn't agree more. Google is in the business of deciding what users want to see, and also apparently deciding, for the advertisers, who they want to do business with.
I dont disagree that makes sense, in that it theoretically makes Youtube more money as well. Based on that, it seems like they are incentivized to figure it out. Unless that long tail of "non wholesome" videos really doesnt have enough money behind it to make it worthwhile to bother with. Which Im guessing is the case.
She’s obviously a weirdo, and while many thousands of weirdos operating on her level usually turn out to be harmless, if eccentric, she seems to willfully blunder into explicit and vulgar territory, with no understanding or appreciation for the chilling effect it has, and instead, reacting with confusion when it doesn’t go her way, seemed to court the negative attention further, without differentiating between the end games that each carries.
Negative attention tends to isolate, while positive attention holds opportunity for sustained returns. But she obviously was profoundly untethered from reality or consequence for too long.
The amount of victim blaming in these comments is astounding. Three people are in the hospital because of an armed maniac, and a bunch of the comments are about how YouTube brought this on themselves with their policies about videos.
I completely disagree. YouTube is a victim too. Using an incident like this to criticize a policy you don’t like is completely beyond the pale. The fact that they apparently drove a crazy person to attempted homicide has no bearing whatsoever on whether those policies are good or bad.
Even if you want to insist that YouTube can not possibly be a victim, it’s still horrible to jump on a multiple attempted homicide to criticize policies about videos posted on a web site.
If we can assign victimhood to the shareholders then surely we can assign blame as well? Seems like you’re just slightly moving the pointers with no actual consequence here.
People got shot and HN commenters are using it as a platform to criticize content policies of the company they work for. That is the pertinent thing here. Semantic quibbles about which specific entities count as the “victims” are not terribly relevant.
"Especially when corporate policies directly incited the attack."
Wow. This woman was clearly unwell, and while these policies may have triggered her, they can't be reasonably said to have incited the attack, as "incite" means that it's actually encouraging violence, not merely that it caused someone to go nuts.
Seriously, y'all need Jesus. Put the blame for these hospitalized gunshot victims where it belongs, on the armed maniac who shot them.
For the relatively uninvolved individuals who were shot, yes, the blame is on the angry woman who shot them. For YouTube as an organization - not an individual - whose corporate base was the target of a violent act? I do blame the overall policies and actions.
Tech companies realize they owe a lot to their users. They owe them their entire existence, I'd say. It's quite obvious from their behavior and the fact they try to attract and hoard user attention. Users are valuable in general.
It's not like it's one way transfer of value from companies to users.
Because if YouTube decided to hoard all ad revenue as of tomorrow (putting aside for a minute how bad of a long-term business decision that would be), that would still not be a valid reason to shoot up the HQ.
I'm just saying that YouTube and likes of it would be nothing without producers of content, big and small. It's a mutual relationship. Both owe each other their business.
It's orthogonal question to the effectiveness of going somewhere and shooting some people.
If she were to be working for an employer in an EU country, it would be illegal to just fire him person from a job without compensation.
The situation is different (AFAIK she lives in the US which has far fewer job protection policies, and earning a living through YouTube doesn’t count as an employer-employee relation), but there are analogies. Few countries and jobs have so little job security as being a YouTuber.
If you search her name on twitter, around 40% of what you see is right wing conspiracy theorists who assert, without evidence, that she was a member of ISIS. I also noticed a smaller percentage of people asserting, again without evidence, that she was an NRA member. And neither appear to be true.
How do these get spread on Twitter? Are partisans mindlessly voting them up? Are bots behind this?
Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking.
I look at Facebook and Twitter, and the bad greatly outweighs the good. I chose a career in web dev, thinking I would be doing something beneficial, but everything we've done amounts to nothing.
> Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking.
The internet is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for both good and evil. It depends on the people using it. In fact, the internet is arguably a victim of it's own success. It has democratized thought so well such that people whose ideas are morally depraved have the same ability to reach an audience that those whose ideas are praiseworthy are. That's why we are having this specific conversation, is it not?
> I look at Facebook and Twitter, and the bad greatly outweighs the good. I chose a career in web dev, thinking I would be doing something beneficial, but everything we've done amounts to nothing.
Don't judge your work by what others are doing. It's not right. You can choose to use your skills for good by doing things that are beneficial. You can work for a non-profit, a church, a community to connect, build-up, and support people. Technology for technology sake will not bring you peace or joy—technology for the sake of others just might.
>It has democratized thought so well such that people whose ideas are morally depraved have the same ability to reach an audience that those whose ideas are praiseworthy are.
I don't think a majority of people hold these views. What we're doing is amplifying vocal minorities and drowning out everyone else.
Granted, no communication mass platform is going to accurately reflect the public. That's why we hold media especially accountable for spreading falsehoods. We haven't seen that sort of criticism of Social Media, however, until very recently. Twitter, Facebook, etc make editorial decisions to make some content more visible than others, and they chose to reward this kind of crap. But because they outsource their decisions to an algorithm, we have treated them less like television channels and more like telephone companies (dumb pipes).
> You can choose to use your skills for good by doing things that are beneficial. You can work for a non-profit, a church, a community to connect, build-up, and support people.
I strongly agree. And tech skills aren't even necessary. Try to get involved with local politics, volunteer, give money to good causes, and help your neighbors and friends in need. It's the antidote to the division and loneliness in our world.
> I don't think a majority of people hold these views. What we're doing is amplifying vocal minorities and drowning out everyone else.
Then I'd argue perhaps people haven't thought about it well enough. My point in another comment was that people formerly who could find no audience would likely get shut down since there was a bit of inoculation against certain ideas. However, with the internet you can reach an audience who finds your ideas acceptable far more easily than you could before.
> And tech skills aren't even necessary.
Absolutely. If you care enough, you'll find a way to help. My opinion is that tech thinks way too highly of itself. It thinks that technology itself can actually be a panacea. I've found that generally to be the opposite—that tech most often gets used to "get around" the hard work. However, that's probably just my cynicism speaking.
>The internet is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for both good and evil.
I prefer to view the internet as amplifier. Per se, it's not good or bad. It just amplifies whatever it has on its inputs. The inputs of early internet were nerdy, but we mistook this nerdy utopia of internet as good force for axiom. Now internet amplifies whatever humans are and boy its ugly.
Absolutely. The barrier to entry initially was high, so the SnR was really high. However, now anyone can create 1080p videos and the tools to do basic editing are practically free. Whereas someone whose ideas were unpopular with those around them might find themselves unwelcome and perhaps would quiet down, now you can address your message to your specific audience and get positive feedback which wasn't possible before.
> t has democratized thought so well such that people whose ideas are morally depraved have the same ability to reach an audience that those whose ideas are praiseworthy are. That's why we are having this specific conversation, is it not?
No. We only heard about her ideas when she murdered people. No-one on HN had heard anything from her before then. The internet did nothing to promote or supress her ideas, other than the news coverage she got after killing people.
When you read "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Stephen Levy, you can just feel how excited they all were about bringing people together. Maybe that was just Levy's twist on it, but it's feeling tragic to me right now.
I just searched her name on Twitter, and I didn't see a single reference in the first 50 posts to ISIS, or the NRA. So 0% for me.
Maybe it's just your feed? I searched by her real name AND her instagram name.
I did see a lot of weird things praising her, saying RIP, which I totally don't understand. Twitter is such a weird gross place. And some rather excellent yoga almost pornography, that might be her.
It seems like the most common right wing talking point I can see is saying that this was because she was 'a radical vegan'.
Does claiming someone is a member of ISIS automatically make you a right-wing conspiracy theorist or is it different under these circumstances?
How is the number 40% actually determined, surely it must be an assumption from scrolling through the feed for a little while? To my knowledge it's difficult (near impossible without 3rd party tools) to determine in real-time the number of tweets pertaining to a certain topic.
I thought it was clear from my post i was guesstimating.
I don't typically do rigorous analysis of what I see in twitter results, so I'll just say, it seemed like a lot of right wing accounts implying that media was covering up the shooting, or that the shooter was actually motivated by radical islam.
I wasn't complaining about labeling. I was complaining because assertions that she was an NRA or ISIS supporter were false.
I believe my assertions were true.
Here are the first two people I saw on my twitter search:
Jack Posobiec
Wikipedia: "John Michael "Jack" Posobiec III (/pəˈsoʊbɪk/ pə-SOW-bik; born 1985) is an American alt-right[1][2][3] internet troll, conspiracy theorist,[4][5] and self-described journalist, known primarily for his controversial and pro-Donald Trump comments on Twitter."
He was claiming that google removed her videos from youtube as part of a coverup because she didn't fit the narrative of conservative white males causing mass shootings
Laura Loomer
Wikipedia: "Laura Elizabeth Loomer is an alt-right[1] American political activist and Internet personality. She was a reporter for Canada's The Rebel Media during the summer of 2017, resigning that September.[2][3][4][5][6] Prior to June 2017, she worked for Project Veritas with James O'Keefe.[3]"
Her tweets are calling the youtube shooting "an act of jihad". Also made a tweet that seemed to imply, because the shooter has an androgynous name and muscular build, that she could be trans. As if that has anything to do with it.
I followed this story last night into a live youtube stream where the presenter asserted everything with an authoritative voice:
After bumbling his way through some half-hearted doxing attempts and watching her videos, he was smugly confident in his extrapolations of her psychological diagnosis, political affiliations, family history, &c. And his commenters formed a sycophantic chorus.
Ideology is the failure of a mental model to adapt to error. It's an inflexible coping strategy that rams all perceptions into presuppositions.
Its air of authority is evidence of the delusion, not of successful reality-checking.
FWIW, I checked Twitter (hashtags #YouTubeShooter) this morning, and it was ugly, but I only saw one tweet that made inferences to Islam. Most of the right wing comments were to the effect of "Gun laws didn't stop this" or pointing out that her beliefs (veganism, animal rights) are traditionally associated with left wing beliefs. The left wing comments were to the effect of "NRA is a terrorist organization" and "ban AR15s" and general wishes of harm on 2A supporters.
I took special note of this because there is this meme of conservatives applying the "terrorist" label on the basis of race or ethnicity, and this meme has scarcely matched my experiences.
EDIT: Some people are downvoting, presumably because they think I'm making a political statement. I'm not; just sharing my data points.
> Man, do I feel stupid for thinking the internet would be a force for good. That it would promote democracy, free speech, and critical thinking.
It did, once. Unfortunately, we have to accept that the average person's contribution will generally be thoughtless, emotional, and not very substantive. I wouldn't say it's their fault. They honestly do not know any better and feel like they are honestly expressing themselves in that manner.
Just saying that perhaps we should take it with a big grain of salt.
I know this may seem like a silly response, but i mean it in all earnestness: Democracy may not be a basically "good thing." I know this flies in the face of a ton of social programming, but at some point we have to take the evidence as it comes to us, and if it is consistently pointing to something we did not expect or like, we can only re-jigger the pretext so many times before we have to confront the fact that maybe our assumptions were wrong. Maybe the internet is the perfect vehicle for democracy, and mob rule isn't such a great thing.
That is an interesting delineation. Disregarding Platonic definition, how would you argue they are different, or at least distinguished from each other?
>If you search her name on twitter, around 40% of what you see is right wing conspiracy theorists who assert, without evidence, that she was a member of ISIS. I also noticed a smaller percentage of people asserting, again without evidence, that she was an NRA member. And neither appear to be true.
>How do these get spread on Twitter? Are partisans mindlessly voting them up? Are bots behind this?
Propaganda is part of the standard far right response to any outbreak of violence, I wouldn’t put too much stock in it. They’ll usually link the shooter to which ever group is closest to their skin color (isis, antifa, or blm) and probably doctor some photos if any evidence surfaces which could otherwise generate cognitive dissonance (e.g., Nicolas Cruz wearing his MAGA hat). The NRA angle is interesting though, I wonder if those are just more right wingers trying to muddy the waters or if the far left is adopting propaganda tactics of their own.
I think a critical examination of the political sphere would show you that the far left has been using propaganda tactics for a very long time. It might even be most accurate to say that throughout recent human history that most of our current propaganda tactics were first discovered or invented by the far left.
Could you give me a rundown on American far left propaganda tactics you think I’m not aware of? Could you give me a rundown on why you believe the far left invented modern propaganda tactics?
As far as I can tell, most modern propaganda tactics originate or start with Russia’s new nonlinear warfare campaigns (gerasimov doctrine), and have been used heavily by Putin in Ukraine and more recently across Europe. I have a hard time seeing him as a far left figure, for obvious reasons.
I don't think that a comment on Hacker News is the right place for me to write an expository essay, but I was making reference to a few things in particular. Before I briefly respond I should point out that I don't necessarily think propaganda is inherently bad, it's just a fact of democracy and the need to influence large groups of people to a particular viewpoint. There's a huge negative connotation in the term, but propaganda in a lot of ways is no different socially than advertising.
1. Both the far right and the far left are utilizing memes and "fake news" on social media in order to influence opinion through directed propaganda. This is a relatively new development, because social media is a relatively new development. Interestingly, politicians on the left and similar activist groups have been far more effective and successful in this regard, partly because they're often the first to make use of new platforms and they tend to be managed and composed of younger audiences which innately are more familiar with the social media territory including the uses of meming. If you look back to the early 2000s you'll see that social media was an important gathering place for activists and organizers on the left preparing for the push after the 2nd term of Bush and how effective social media was in helping the election of Obama. Not all of this was strictly propaganda, but a lot of it was.
2. Most of the basic techniques of manufacturing and spreading propaganda were created far before the Internet was even a concept. Many of them were explicitly created and used by the Left as a method to organize people across wide geographic areas to do coordinated activities. This is most strongly associated with the way that Marxist rebellions occurred in many parts of the world in the early parts of the 20th century. This later morphed under these Leftist government to adopt some of the propaganda techniques developed during WWII by both sides of the conflict along with other new techniques in order to effectively control the populace after they seized power. Probably the primary outcome of this, and a doctrine which was extensively used by the USSR in particular, was the creation of the model for agitprop. Agitprop continues to be created to this day and is an effective method of inculcating ideas into a populace and shifting the Overton window. It's used by Leftists in Hollywood to help influence the viewpoint of Americans and those abroad, and in some cases is used through the US's worldwide cultural influence to spread the ideas of democracy itself. I reiterate that propaganda isn't necessarily inherently bad.
3. The Gerasimov Doctrine doesn't exist. Not only that, if it /did/ exist, the outcome of it is that it makes the US look weak and particularly makes Trump/Republicans look weak on the international stage. While there is strong evidence that the Russian government influenced the outcome of the 2016 election in the US, this does not in and of itself imply that this is "right-wing propaganda" or that it's necessarily a tool of the Right. The person who originally coined the term "Gerasimov Doctrine" has written an editorial on this topic [1]
Thank you for the thorough reply, and for arguing in good faith.
I disagree with (1): I don’t see this as a ‘both sides’ issues, and I don’t believe that the left, as a whole, has been as amenable to inflammatory propaganda as the right has been. As my prime example, I’d note the Macedonian fake news phenomenon that occurred right around the election. As the creators themselves have stated, those articles targeted right wing voters because those were the people who were interested in reading, spreading , and talking about the propaganda they were spreading. Since these creators were solely interested in financial profit, it stands to reason that they would have preferred to make money appealing to left wing audiences as much as they did right wing ones. There was no explosion in fake news from these sources to the left because there was no demand. As my secondary examples, I’d maintain that most left wing media outlets (tyt, mother jones) have much higher journalistic standards than their counterparts Breitbart and infowars - and the equally opportunistic propagandadists as Russia Today. If you’d like to point me towards the cases you believe the left has pushed fake news I’d be interested in learning more.
2) that’s why I specified ‘modern’ propaganda- things like troll farms, planting anti immigrant stories (faking rapes, murders, massacres) along with investment into finer targeting mechanisms (the hacking of state voter rolls and CA data to be used for micro-targeting). I should note that I brought up the election collusion because it is propbabaly the place the left could be most prone towards conspiratorial fantasies, and the first place you’d find such ideas.
3) I liked the piece but I thinks it’s a stretch to try and use it to refute my points. We could call them active measures, political warfare, nonlinear or hybrid warfare, but the point still exists that Russia is pioneering new weapons to attack western and western leaning democracies. And you’re saying if those measures did exist the result would be making the us look weak on the international stage - isn’t that ‘exactly’ the point of them? I assume when Russia launched a chemical weapons attack in the UK the purpose was exactly the same - to underscore British weakness and estrangement from her allies.
Propaganda is part of the standard for any group trying to control the narrative in a democracy. I would suggest Chomsky and Herman's book "Manufacturing Consent" for more details.
The American far left creates and disseminates far less propaganda than the far right does, although I’m open to hear evidence otherwise. For whatever odd reason it seems that the left in general is far less amiable to inflammatory propaganda - for example, there’s much more evidence that Donald trump coordinated his campaign with foreign intelligence services than there is evidence that Obama is a socialist Muslim or that Hillary Clinton was complicit in child sex trafficking or satanic rituals.
In my estimation I’d say that the main tools of the far left are currently censorship and ostracism within communities, although the far right engages in these practices just as avidly.
That reads as condoning it despite your saying you don't—and that breaks the site guidelines. Please (re-)read them and follow the rules if you want to keep commenting here.
No one should or does approve this kind of violence. Or any violence really.
But it does show the impact that YouTubes rules can have on someone's livelihood. For us such a change in the algorithm is something we read about and forget. For someone else they might lose their income.
For this one person resorting to violence, there are probably thousands that were financially destroyed by Youtubes rigorous change in algorithm and demonetization.
>For this one person resorting to violence, there are probably thousands that were financially destroyed by Youtubes rigorous change in algorithm and demonetization.
Yes, this isn't even the first time changes to Youtube's algorithm or policies have affected the livelihoods of people on the site, or destroyed the viability of entire genres of content (see rubberross' video on animation for instance[0].) But Youtube is in business for Google, as are the users, whether they're aware of it or not. They exist to generate content that drives ad revenue for Google, and they're not owed a livelihood in exchange for that.
And the answer is to either change the content you provide to whatever the algorithm sorts for, which many have, or else find another job.
A few months or a year ago Youtube was accused of 'sponsoring' alt-right vloggers who played a role in domestic US politics. These people uploaded videos to Youtube and got paid based on the views. Just like everyone really. But mainstream media kept blaming Youtube for enabling these videos. Even though they practically enable everyone as a neutral platform.
So advertisers started to pull out of Youtube in general over this and Youtube went all out and reformed the entire global website to a 'better safe than sorry' policy. Removing anything even resembling 'undesirable content'.
This caused a lot of what Americans would call 'collateral damage'.
This wasn't just right wing vlogers, the spread of ISIS is at least partially attributed to their videos posted to youtube. A few years ago when there was a research project on censoring them everyone said this would happen, it's a shame that it involved people getting shot.
I'm sure this submission will get flagged off the front page too because "Iranian woman bears arms against YouTube for censorship" doesn't really fit the narrative around here, but here's her page before it's wiped out too. Her YT and Insta have already been nuked.
For my edification, would someone care to explain the torrent of downvotes? I simply reported a factual, indisputable observation: That the grandparent, with a timestamp saying 16 minutes old, was displayed to me as 'flagged' and 'dead'.
I must admit my first thought on hearing there was an attack on YouTube was that their recent monetisation changes have put a lot of people out of work, and some of those people must be feeling pretty desperate.
Surprised google survived Panda and related changes that more or less stopped unpaid traffic to sites. Yes, it's their platform blah blah, but when people kill you for looking at them the wrong way, shooting at the "person" that took away your livelihood is much more understandable. I was making $1000x, now I make $x, no money for rent, food...and people go into revenge mode. My life is over anyway so, at least I'll get some of them with me.
This got too long, but to summarize my point there's a vast amount of content on the internet and those people feeling that someone not finding them via google is a cheat are over-reacting. The world is so big that there are lots of people no one ever hears about, who may be doing interesting stuff. Feeling that people don't find your cool stuff is a complaint you can make against google, facebook, instagram, maybe bing if anyone used it, any indexing site.
For every person that youtube or whatever other ranking site give them lots of viewers, there are millions of people posting stuff that hardly anyone ever sees. It's not a conspiracy that no one really watches my son's youtube game discussion site. There are thousands of videos every day created with similar content.
So all these people mad that they don't have lots of viewers, a bunch of that can be explained because there are lots of people doing the same thing.
Now for the people who used to get lots of views and then things drop off after a google ranking change, sure, the change must have had some impact. So your site with videos in say Farsi about how to exercise with a particular style of workouts, probably there are 100 other people doing videos for working out in Farsi or whatever. There's basically no way google or anyone else can balance it out. They make changes that they think will serve their users. Google works for a lot of people because it's a good clearing house. But it's good for people cause they can find things they want. Google cannot show all the thousands of videos every day on say fortnight. But my son's video game discussion site hardly gets any views. but thats because he's not famous and he's not doing anything that other people are.
I also think people try to make their site go higher by paying for links to their site. In a previous job, (I heard) they paid someone who was a wikipedia editor to create entries for their company and the founder, of course this is a known problem.
I think I'm sounding like a google or big company apologist. I have seen a similar issue in phone apps. My friend had a bunch of android and ios programs for tracking various things that he sold for a dollar, and the ideas got copied by people doing similar things multiple times and now he's just one person is a sea of solutions. He used to get a few $100 a month from people buying his $1 software, now he gets $5. It's not a conspiracy.
> those people feeling that someone not finding them via google is a cheat are over-reacting.
> So all these people mad that they don't have lots of viewers
That's not the issue at all. They're mad they HAVE lots of views and their videos are being demonetised, and the rules around demonetisation aren't enforced consistently.
okay, maybe i don't get that. Is that what the point that was in the supposed shooter's screen grab with 300k views and 10c of payment was about? I had forgotten about the problems around terrorist or violent racist videos and ads for random stuff showing up on them so youtube was going to cut off advertising on such videos - I guess google screwed it up and went too far?
It seems very unfair the way this works at youtube and there's no human to appeal to. I can see that would be frustrating. So there's no other place to take their videos to get money?
I remember a time when there wasn't a place where people could get money for playing video games, except maybe a few people working at computer magazines writing reviews.
But I also still think theres also a lot of similar content for certain broad categories. Like say exercise videos.
> But I also still think theres also a lot of similar content for certain broad categories. Like say exercise videos.
Yeah but just because a niche is crowded doesn't mean that all creators produce equally good content.
You will notice that many of the top channels, say those that have more than 100K subscribers, very often have very good production standards, and are the creator's full time job.
Sometimes the reason why a specific channel is more popular than another is not obvious, but very often it's because they spent more time carefully crafting their videos, even if in the end they appear like candid shots.
Please consider not giving this person the online attention she sought as a result of her actions, and join me in flagging stories that dwell on her motives.
Would you have said the same thing about Mark Conditt? Or is there a difference? Should we talk about some murderers and not others? Was he a terrorist? Was she?
We know that reporting on a killer's identity and motives in detail encourages ideation in others. I think it's fine to talk about these people, but context is important.
In this case, it appears to be someone who was frustrated with a lack of social media attention; we should be careful in not rewarding her heinous act in a way that encourages a future shooter.
Content platforms have no place policing content. All the algorithms currently used are utterly flawed, and they will always be flawed, both technically and morally. Technically, they'll always have false positives, especially at scale. Morally, they turn the platform owners into political figures inherently, siding with or against certain thoughts and sentiments.
The only solution is for platforms to be completely content agnostic and allow absolutely everything except outright graphic violence and adult content.
No removing any kind of speech whatsoever, including so-called "hate speech", no policing political topics, no identifying "fake news" and so forth -- words cannot hurt anyone, objectively, and everyone has their own personal agency to decide what they want to watch and make their own decisions based on what they see, even if it's state-funded propaganda.
If the police or FBI come to them with a warrant and take down notice, then sure. Otherwise, allow absolutely everything, and allow the free market of popularity to reign supreme.
In fact, all sides of all political and social issues should be outraged that content platforms think they have a place deciding what we can and cannot see.
And advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise by realizing two simple truths: a) if I'm watching a video with your advertisement on it, it's because I made the conscious choice to watch that video, and even if the video is about apartheid or waterboarding or guns, it's content that I want to consume, so they have no place stripping me of my personal agency, and b) the old model of advertisers being seen as endorsers for TV shows doesn't apply to on-demand online content.
> advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise
I agree, but good luck convincing the Tide executives that its okay for their ad to play before a video of a KKK rally.
Furthermore, how do you even create a content platform that doesn't police content and not have it immediately attract scores of users that are only there because they were banned from everywhere else, thus turning your platform into a cesspool that the more mainstream users avoid? (see voat.co)
If it's tagged 'racism (news)' and Tide says they're OK with that (Tide advertise after news segments like this all the time), sure, if it's tagged 'race relations' then maybe not.
Google can and should do better than a boolean for monetisable.
That used to be the case until the "limited state" was introduced specifically for videos that don't break any rules but are not politically correct or are otherwise uncomfortable or controversial, which makes them not appear in search results, removes all voting and commenting, and basically makes YouTube a content hosting provider, not a content platform, for the creators of said videos.
I have a theory about workplace shootings. American companies have a very pronounced dog-eat-dog culture. So much so that whole books have been written about the workplace asshole [1]. I'm wondering if some of the shootings can be explained as the workplace asshole going one step further and bringing his guns to work.
How does that have anything to do with the shooting at YouTube? It comes off like you didn't even read beyond the headline. (yes, it's happened at a workplace, but this wasn't some disgruntled employee in the sense that you're making it out to be)
A mentally unwell person is likely to feel targeted, oppressed, threatened, harmed, etc. by being silenced. They'll feel isolated and it'll very likely feel like a personal attack by the tech company. The platforms today are so large, it surely can seem like being cut off from society in general, like a human right is being revoked.
The people the platforms are looking to restrict based on expressed views or behavior, I suspect, are going to tend to have higher than normal rates of mental illness (emphasis that I think it's likely to be a higher rate, not universal).