A DOCUMENTARY FEATURING mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.
YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
It does make me think twice about ever purchasing a google pixel. What another android phone that has good spam call protection or app?
I’m not sure my pixel has that good of protection against spam
This just tells me that Israel has pedo videos of the decision makers at Google.
I feel like aiding war criminals in deleting evidence should get your company destroyed.
Maybe not all of Alphabet unless we can prove this was an initiative started from the top, but Youtube should be diassembled for one-sidedly purging evidence. Hopefully, those accounts kept offline copies.
Nothing, no matter how bad, evil, terrible, treasonous, or ihumane, will destroy youtube. Except if they fail to honor a C&D from Disney.
In a move that surprises no one, Alphabet Inc rebrands to MINITRUE
Is there another alternative to YouTube? One that isn’t a right wing hellscape?
Not an exact alternative, but a lot of Youtube creators are on Nebula. It does require a subscription, but every creator is part owner of the service so your money goes directly to them.
Anything that allows distributed hosting without any central accountability will inevitably have right-wing content uploaded - we have this problem in the fediverse as well. I think the best solution is to create an instance within these platforms that can stick within a certain niche to build trustworthyness (ie: an instance solely dedicated to news footage/documentaries).
Peer tube?
Problem with PeerTube is the content is pretty scattered and there’s frankly just not that much normal content. There’s relatively a lot for like Linux stuff, but other than that there’s not a ton. Also, there’s no way to compensate people, so hard to attract content creators (this is both a plus and a negative tbh).
Other problem is that, like pretty much all fediverse stuff, it’s possible to wind up on an instance with a bunch of Nazi content federated to it. Of course, since YouTube has Nazi content, this isn’t really much different.
But for documentation of significantly newsworthy footage, it seems like the place to upload. Which might spread awareness of the site itself.
For content that needs censorship, I’m stumped on a suitable solution.
Wouldn’t just a peertube instance dedicated to a particular purpose (say for academic purposes or just for documentary archives) be sufficient, with allowances for the content within to be downloaded/cloned if need be, but the root instance having a dedicated admin(s) with rules on quality control and making sure appropriate content is updated? (Not in terms of political spectrum, but making sure uploaded content is not fabricated and relevant to the instance’s purpose)
Think of this like a Wikimedia-esque entity but just for a single peertube/Odyseey group (that would allow distributed cloning ala piratebay/annas archive)
That work at such a scale, with “popular” content creator being able to actually share their content, for free? No, not really. There are small scale initiatives, but you likely won’t find much of the mainstream people on them. And, depending on what you use, you won’t find much at all, because searching for content is a mess unless you are directly pointed to it from somewhere else.
There is a big issue with making up an alternative to youtube, at anything approaching the scale of youtube: it represents a lot of content, streamed from servers under strict time constraints, to many dozen/hundreds/thousands of people. With a centralized infrastructure that requires a lot of servers, spread over many places and many different networks. And these cost money. Using peer to peer at such a scale isn’t that great either, although with more popularity it could improve.
Existing large providers such as youtube can handle this because they have such a vast CDN available, which allows sending one copy of a video into a region once, then spreading it across multiple diffusers, who then have a reasonable load on them.
That was my first thought. Some variation of https://peertube.tv/
Knowing why in these examples is important but it’d be nice to NOT see every big name just lean right this model of government we’re struggling with. STOP BEING COMPLICIT WITH ISRAEL. They are acting as terrorists. Anyone who commits those atrocities needs to be exposed, doesnt matter who. This is a humanitarian issue with our whole civilization.
Skimmed the article (yay for reader view) but it doesn’t really say WHY the channel was deleted?
I am not in the slightest bit shocked by google bending over backwards to pleasure trump and netanyahu. But this also doesn’t seem like their MO. They are usually “good” about explaining what new rule they invented and why that suddenly gave a channel 40 strikes retroactively and I am not seeing that here?
Whereas there are a few mid-size channels that have allegedly been flagged “by AI” as being other bad channels? Which… actually seems more likely since it is less youtube taking an actual stand on anything and more just deciding the ai slop channels that stole footage are the originators and to ban everyone involved.
It’s also possible, not having seen the videos in question, that they simply did violate YouTube’s rules regarding graphic content. YouTube has had a terrible record of banning important content despite its societal value because of rigid adherence to ill-thought-out content policies. AI takes that problem and turns it up to 11.
that they simply did violate YouTube’s rules regarding graphic content
I’m 99% sure this is the actual reason
nice censorship youtube.
