Here is a startling example that I will let the creator tell you about. Blogger will not embed:
Yes, the creator of this clip about Shostakovich discovered that if he mentioned the name of the political leader that Shostakovich had to deal with he was demonetized!!!
Second example: Scott Adams discovered that if he mentioned a very notorious hoax having to do with Donald Trump, every clip that mentioned it was also demonetized.
What next?
Comments?
9 comments:
A real problem, sure. But people don't put the videos we want to see onto Vimeo or Dailymotion or wherever (not that I've looked at those sites in a very long while). There are several alternatives to Facebook and Twitter (MeWe, Gab, Telegram etc etc) but none that I know of to YT other than Vimeo and DM.
I think we have reached a point where there will have to be a real division of platforms into those concerned with real news and serious enquiry and those designed purely for mass amusement. The situation now, as shown by these two disparate examples, is that any serious discussion or just one that mentions a serious issue, is going to be, at least, demonetized. In some cases complete censorship was evoked. I'm not sure how this will play out, but one avenue would be to declare entities like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to be public utilities that will have to follow clear and transparent rules. Right now they are completely unaccountable and the processes and principles they use in deciding how to handle individual cases are secret. Rather like a Star Chamber of social media. Alternatively, the companies themselves could set up different realms to serve different purposes. YouTube is already thinking of launching a channel for children. What is needed is a forum where all issues can be discussed without bias or favor and no-one will be punished for simply mentioning Joseph Stalin!
Hey, if this works we might even start applying it to academia!
Yeah, there is another side. If you have a YouTube channel that is popular, Google will force you to monetize, see this story: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-videos-worldwide/
There are people who are trying to have an alternative online experience. Some notable efforts are listed here: https://switching.social/
There are downsides to such alternative lifestyle, your mileage may vary.
There's a review of a book called Youtubers by an American writer named Chris Stokel-Walker in the current TLS that might be of interest. I don't need to be reminded of the children's subjection to the yoke of 'influencers' but apparently things are worse than even I imagined them to be.
"This kind of trust and adulation can be dangerous. Stokel-Walker emphasizes the “crazy menageries of lunatic theories that lend legitimacy to far-right groups, fake news and alternative facts”. A film called Loose Change, which alleges that 9/11 was an inside job, has been seen 100 million times. In the platform’s early days it was vital viewing for jihadists.
“Around 31,000 videos every month are taken down for being too violent or graphic”, Stokel-Walker points out, but he makes it clear that YouTube cannot keep up with the speed at which new videos are added, nor are its policies on acceptable content sufficiently strict in the first place. A team of 10,000 moderators and automated filters may be effective in removing most pornography, copyright violations and instances of bullying, but conspiracy theory videos, generally associated with the alt-right, are under current guidelines marked as merely “borderline”."
I don't suppose that there are any radical Left or radical Progressive videos uploaded to YT? I'd link to the review but it's behind the paywall.
As much as I almost reflexively refuse to countenance the exercise of power by the contemporary feds, it's good to be reminded that it has legitimate and indeed praiseworthy uses, and the application of the anti-trust laws etc etc may be one of them, sure, sure. The practicalities will be a quagmire to wade through, however, requiring Solomon's wisdom, which I think lives in about a total of six heads in the metro DC area not all of whom are chief magistrates or legislators. But maybe it gets so obviously bad that we are willing to watch the bureaucrats parse whether XYZ.com is a 'real news' site or if all those cats playing the harpsichord are in fact instead 'entertainment'. Academia already has its credentialed bureaucrats who are distinguished by their objectivity, freedom from partisan motivation, and exemplary ethical standards; I don't understand how there can be trouble in that happy country.
Thanks, ./MIS, for noting that switching.social site. The one 'ethical alternative' to YT, eh: even the one 'instance' (I don't pretend to understand what is going on with the P2P business) I saw that is ostensibly devoted to music is full of videos devoted to the Net, Net issues, and cartoons; at first glance, anyway. Sigh. I didn't realize Medium requires an 'ethical alternative'! :-)
Marc, this is the funniest thing you have ever said: "Academia already has its credentialed bureaucrats who are distinguished by their objectivity, freedom from partisan motivation, and exemplary ethical standards; I don't understand how there can be trouble in that happy country."
I have seen the analogy made with Ma Bell when it had a virtual monopoly over telephone calls. Imagine if it monitored every call and whenever someone tried to access the phone network to express a conservative viewpoint they were blocked. Not a perfect analogy, but it does capture how very odd it is to have one private company control so much of the public forum and to do so with a very obvious bias.
It didn't occur to anyone but the paranoid in Ma Bell's last decades that she paid any attention to the content of telephone conversations, nor do I remember that 'privacy' was much of an issue during the anti-trust etc etc business that killed her but I could easily be mistaken about that. (When I was a child there were 'party lines', with more than one telephone subscriber on the same line somehow, so that Miss Chatterbox could listen to her nemesis Mr Gossip's conversations, and vice versa, so long as they were on the same line; I remember being told what an awful high crime and misdemeanor it would be to listen in on private conversations. And I guess back in the day of human telephone operators, it was a comic trope that they sometimes listened in.) Now the feds (the NSC/whichever agency it is can and are expected to monitor a billion telephone conversations all the time, but (as I understand it) to only actually pay attention if there is a warrant. Sure, sure.
"What is needed is a forum where all issues can be discussed without bias or favor and no-one will be punished for simply mentioning Joseph Stalin!" Entirely agree, certainly; as ./MiS pointed out there are such fora. But where is the audience if you take TMS to, I don't know, Disroot or Medium (does Medium allow video embeds?) or one of Medium's 'ethical alternatives'? Some of us would follow of course but here, via Blogger, you have a potential audience of tens of millions and software, UI etc etc all familiar and simple. Not that anyone is acting the censor at Blogger yet, not that I know of anyway, unless the site runs ads; in that case one has to be careful lest text & comments alarm the ad-generating machinae.
As Glenn Reynolds mentions in his recent book, the difference between the blogosphere and YouTube or Twitter is that the blogosphere is "loosely coupled," that is, while there are more and less trafficked nodes, no-one is actually in control of the network. YouTube and Twitter are tightly connected with very alert administrators.
In engineering parlance, the early blogosphere was a “loosely coupled” system, one where changes in one part were not immediately or directly transmitted to others. Loosely coupled systems tend to be resilient, and not very subject to systemic failures, because what happens in one part of the system affects other parts only weakly and slowly. Tightly coupled systems, on the other hand, where changes affecting one node swiftly affect others, are prone to cascading failures. Usenet was one such system, where an entire newsgroup could be ruined by a spreading “flame war.” If a blogger flamed, people could just ignore the blog; when a Usenet user flamed, others got sucked in until the channel was filled with people yelling at each other. (As Nick Denton wrote, the blogosphere “routes around idiots” in a way that Usenet didn’t, because the blogosphere doesn’t depend on the common channel that a Usenet group did.) Social media – especially Twitter – is more like Usenet than blogs, but in many ways is worse.
Reynolds, Glenn Harlan. The Social Media Upheaval (Encounter Intelligence) (pp. 10-11). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
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