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.
People say that the internet never forgets… but they didnt take into account the centralization of the internet and the control they have over the content.
It might be crazy to think this… but imagine in a few years all videos and posts and articles on various sites documenting the genocide were fully purged. Leaving only people’s frail memory of events. Even the IDF and Israeli civilians incredibly incriminating videos would be removed, and anyone caught with an archive on a personal device could be criminally charged or have it taken from them for destruction.
Basically this shit is beyond 1984. And I don’t use 1984 that often as a metaphor.
!it might be crazy to think this… but imagine in a few years all videos and posts and articles on various sites documenting the genocide were fully purged. Leaving only people’s frail memory of events.!<
When you realize that this is the way a majority of people (at least in america) live by default, its really not that crazy. I work a blue collar job and I promise you no one out here gives a shit about any of this. If given the option, they would probably willingly and purposefully “push delete” on this entire topic because they are sick of hearing about “the bullshit”. Also why data archival is of utmost importance.*
deleted by creator
The internet never forgets, but only for those things the internet wants to remember.
Forreal though, the internet isn’t so centralized that records could be purged like this. Made less easily publicly accessible? Sure. But I doubt rumble or bitleaks or the thousand other sites that popped up and mirrored LiveLeaks after it shut down are going to all cooperate with that idea.
YouTube has also quietly deleted all the videos of 9/11 first responders who said they heard explosions.
Well, YouTube obeys its BIG BROTHER like a slave, what did you expect?
But they allow far right extremist content.
They actively encourage it in fact.
This is complicity in genocide.
Does anyone got those videos as a torrent so I can seed them ?
I curse myself for not downloading them… but there was so so so so so so so so goddamn much…
That can’t be. Every time I point out that youtube is a HORRIBLE place for people to make the source of record for movements, history, and general archival, and that blogging and text are more durable and necessary for these exact reasons, I get downvoted into oblivion. It must be a problem with reality because video good and video is the future and only reach matters.
I just want to say, I share your specific species of frustration here and understand it well. Ughhh.
This is what social networks do, the assholes at the top don’t mind erasing accounts and deleting comments when they are inconvenient for them. It is a more effective version of book burning.
Boycott 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.
I moved to NewPipe - no ads, and you can import your yt playlists and subscriptions so you don’t have to start from scratch. Plus it plays in the background and if the phone screen is off
I got newpipe and pipepipe for my phone and freetube for my desktop/laptop.
The major obstacle for me is recommend videos as I almost exclusively use that and youtube knows what to show me (good factual science channels, nothing with AI used at all, gaming and tech news, essays and documentaries etc.) and no other app than the official youtube one does that as far as I’m aware. (I use ReVanced though). I’ve really tried to jump over to newpipe and grayjay but I miss so much and never discover any new channels through them.
Until next year when “sideloading” dies, and we’re back to square one.
There will be workarounds. They are fucking stupid.
It’s still youtube though. The videos are still being hosted by yt
Didn’t know about the subscriptions and playlists. This will probably make me try it.
NewPipe is fantastic and I encourage everyone to use it if they can, but I can’t really see how it’s related to the topic.
Nothing, no matter how bad, evil, terrible, treasonous, or ihumane, will destroy youtube. Except if they fail to honor a C&D from Disney.
This just tells me that Israel has pedo videos of the decision makers at Google.
It isn’t even like that, Alphabet is humoring Trump and the global far right because it’s more profitable, just like being “woke” was more profitable for them in the past.
This is a good point. YouTube is competing with Rumble in this regard and I believe that’s why YouTube recently unbanned many users.
In a move that surprises no one, Alphabet Inc rebrands to MINITRUE
It does make me think twice about ever purchasing a google pixel. What another android phone that has good spam call protection or app?
Buy a refurbished Pixel and slap GrapheneOS on it
Android in general is on its way out because google decided to remove sideloading programs that don’t have their approval.
I’m not sure my pixel has that good of protection against spam
It seems to work pretty well in my opinion.
I still catch a stray every now and then, but if I had to ball park it off the top of my head I’d say less than once a month.
But they come in spurts, so maybe they all change numbers and get through once, then back to the shadow realm for months in a row.
Is there another alternative to YouTube? One that isn’t a right wing hellscape?
Nebula is the only thing remotely comparable.
I’m loving it. But its not a “search what you want and you’ll find it” like YouTube is. You can’t search for a video to DIY your bathroom tile.
That alternative simply doesn’t exist.
If you treat it like podcasts i.e. follow creators you like (just about all of them are also YouTubers) theres some excellent content there. And the creators are all stakeholders so no daddy capitalist screwing with algorithms.
PeerTube is the open source federated one. But discovery is next to impossible on it.
I moved to NewPipe - no ads, and you can import your yt playlists and subscriptions so you don’t have to start from scratch. Plus it plays in the background and if the phone screen is off
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.
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.
YouTube is one of the platforms that started at just the right time. People only know about it because it popped off in about 2005/6 . The creators didn’t get paid, at least I don’t think they did, it was just a lot of fun. Correct me if I’m wrong, maybe the first content creators did get paid.
Video content creation wasn’t a thing that far back.
YouTube was (in my experience) the first site at all where you could click a video and not wait 3 years for it to load, plus having a UI around it.
Most people’s Internet speeds weren’t even close to being fast enough to consistently load them fast enough to want to watch more than a few in a session. Decent waits and buffers throughout still made it painful. Just less painful than it was before.
Most other videos back then were scattered around on separate sites, and related to the content on the site, and they usually had to download completely before even starting to play. (Kinda like pirating a movie these days)
So given that most people couldn’t use other sites and tolerate it for long, YouTube created a market that didn’t exist before, and there wasn’t a content creation machine in place ready to go.
That kinda took off as more and more people got broadband connections and started being able to watch almost as soon as they clicked a link.
I don’t have hard dates for this, just an impression from memory of the era.
So the “creators” were just random people filming slightly less random things. There weren’t well known channels, or filters for different genes or topics. You could choose from “dude filming an animal do something funny” or “something unlikely to be caught on camera being caught on camera”.
And most of it was shot on terrible cameras (since digital cameras were still going from “looks like objects filmed through 4 layers of plastic” to “really tiny footage of decent quality”, there wasn’t much that existed to draw a lot of people other than a feeling of hoping to stumble on the newest really cool clip.
But, since capitalism exists to make everything worse, the market got its act together shortly after. But not immediately. It took a whole new kind of infrastructure to get it moving.
People needed better digital cameras (unless you thought transferring from analog tapes was a fun weekend), better Internet, and the site itself has to start figuring out how to run things to make a better experience.
Google buying it was both a great infusion of capital to help it as well as being a cancer injection that would poison it.
I like the concept of peertube, but it’s not gonna take off in its current state. I don’t think anything takes off without capitalism happening to it these days. If something takes off, it’s probably fruit of a poisonous tree. Can’t have any good new popular technology without it being tampered with by billionaires
i mean, albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, and ebaums world were things before and around the time of youtube; iirc the main thing youtube had was a clean design and a decent video player that handled buffering without stuttering. it made it easier for people to just upload a video and share it. ebaumsworld kind of had that i think, but the site layout was a mess and i’m pretty sure i remember them basically just stealing the content of other sites like albinoblacksheep
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)
I agree with what I can understand, but I don’t have much expertise in the tech specifics. I’m still working on configuring my Linux desktop, just got a little obsessive about keyboard shortcuts and eMacs orgmode and very busy with working outside of tech.
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.
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).
isn’t right wing censorship worse than right wing propaganda?
There’s nuance for sure (guess I should have worded the root comment better), but I’m referring to activities involving fake/generated content, conspiracy theories, or things like dismissing science or verified historical events.
I think fediverse shows that the model works. Fringe ideas stay fringe because you can’t amplify it with bots.
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.
The blackmail and blood money runs too deep.
