Tag: youtube

YouTube Deleted 2.5 Million ‘Dislikes’ From Biden White House Videos, Data Indicates

YouTube has deleted about 2.5 million ‘dislikes’ from videos on the official White House channel of President Joe Biden, according to data collected and posted online by a researcher who wished to remain anonymous. YouTube recently announced that it’s testing a new page design that hides the dislike count.

The Google-owned video platform allows users to give videos either a thumb up (like) or thumb down (dislike). For at least two years, it’s had a policy to remove likes and dislikes it considers spam.

“We have policies and systems in place to ensure that the engagement on YouTube is authentic, and remove any fraudulent metrics,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email, but when asked, wouldn’t go into details on what criteria it uses to make these calls.

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YouTube bans independent Italian media outlet Byoblu

In yet another crackdown on independent media and creators, YouTube has removed the channel of Byoblu – an independent Italian media outlet that had more than 525,000 subscribers.

The popular channel had uploaded more than 2,000 interviews to YouTube in its 14+ years on the platform and racked up over 200 million total video views. It featured interviews with magistrates, presidents of the Constitutional Court, politicians, lawyers, scientists, and more.

YouTube deleted Byoblu’s channel after targeting it numerous times over its coverage of protests and interviews with scientists.

According to Byoblu, YouTube had removed several unpublished videos of demonstrations in Cesena and Milan, removed a video discussing a leading British Medical Journal columnist’s thoughts about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, removed a months-old video featuring an interview with a senior scientist from the University of Siena because he talked about the benefits of vitamin C, demonetized the channel, and removed 5,000 of the channel’s subscribers before it was permanently suspended.

Byoblu added that YouTube’s final action against the channel before permanently suspending it was to remove a September 2020 video of a street demonstration where the Pan-African activist Mohamed Konare spoke.

In a post about YouTube’s takedown of the channel, Byoblu suggested that it was targeted by YouTube because of its obsession with wanting ordinary people to speak and showing the news from an alternative point of view.

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YouTube To Remove ‘Dislike’ Feature As Biden WH Content Continues To See Likes Massively Trail Dislikes.

As President Biden’s White House YouTube channel continues to see videos’ “dislikes” massively trump “likes,” the video platform announced it is testing a new design that obscures a public dislike count.

The move was announced via Twitter on March 30th, with YouTube explaining “in response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns, we’re testing a few new designs that don’t show the public dislike count.”

As a result, only the accounts publishing videos will be able to see the dislike to like ratio.

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Youtube was So Afraid of What Came Out in Two Senate Hearings, It Banned U.S. Senate’s Videos

The United States Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs saw two videos vaporized in Stalinist fashion because Youtube’s censor didn’t see them as fit for public consumption.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the disturbing, Chinese-level act of censorship, which is raising alarms about where this is all heading:

Google’s YouTube has ratcheted up censorship to a new level by removing two videos from a U.S. Senate committee. They were from a Dec. 8 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on early treatment of Covid-19. One was a 30-minute summary; the other was the opening statement of critical-care specialist Pierre Kory.

It is interesting that one of the committee hearings relates directly to cheap drugs that might be used to treat COVID-19.

“At the December hearing, he presented evidence regarding the use of ivermectin, a cheap and widely available drug that treats tropical diseases caused by parasites, for prevention and early treatment of Covid-19,’ the Journal reported. “He described a just-published study from Argentina in which about 800 health-care workers received ivermectin and 400 didn’t. Not one of the 800 contracted Covid-19; 58% of the 400 did.”

Big Tech now seems fully committed to preventing transparency on public policy issues, even to the extent that it would ban videos from the U.S. Senate. That level of brazenness suggests that the corporations feel like they are untouchable. And beyond some lip service to holding these companies responsible, the U.S. government has thus far done nothing to challenge that assessment.

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YouTube Financially Deplatforms Swath Of Indie Media Accounts

The Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube has demonetized numerous independent media accounts, a jarring escalation in the steadily intensifying campaign against alternative news outlets online.

Progressive commentators Graham Elwood, The Progressive Soapbox, The Convo Couch, Franc Analysis, Hannah Reloaded and Cyberdemon531 have all received notifications from YouTube that their videos are no longer permitted to earn money through the platform’s various monetization features, as has Ford Fischer, a respected freelancer who films US political demonstrations. No explanation has been offered for this decision beyond the vague claim that “your channel is not in line with our YouTube Partner Program policies” due to “harmful content”.

Like all large online platforms, YouTube’s appeals process is notoriously opaque and unaccountable. These accounts could remain demonetized for months, or forever, without any clear explanation at all. Ford Fischer, who has been in this situation before, said on Twitter that his account was left demonetized for seven months before YouTube reversed its decision.

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Esteemed Academic Conference on Dangers of Censorship — Reportedly Censored by YouTube

An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” said Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College, California. “My initial reaction was ‘that’s absurd;’ there must have been a mistake or an accident or it must have got swept under somehow. There is no violation, there was no reasoning, there was no warning, there was not an explanation, there was no nothing. The entire channel was just gone,” he told MintPress. Huff is also the director of Project Censored, an organization that sponsored the event.

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Private/Unlisted YouTube Videos of U.S. Government Agencies

Many U.S. government agencies and military branches have public YouTube pages. That is no secret. However, within these channels, lies a hidden treasure trove of PRIVATE/UNLISTED videos NOT accessible by the general public.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, The Black Vault along with another researcher has tackled trying to get access to these videos listings. That researcher has donated the requests they did, along with the documents, to the archive below. However, they asked for their identifying information to be redacted.

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YouTube will now remove videos disputing Joe Biden’s election victory

On Wednesday, YouTube announced that it will begin removing any content alleging widespread voter fraud influenced the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election.

In the immediate aftermath of the November 3rd election, YouTube came under fire for allowing channels to publish videos making false claims about election results. In one instance, One America News Network, a verified YouTube channel, published a video declaring that “Trump won” the election. At the time, YouTube defended its decision to let the video stand, saying in a statement, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YouTube.”

The company went on to say that content from “authoritative news organizations” were “the most popular videos about the election.”

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QAnon Legal Battle Against YouTube Could Transform Free Speech Online

The welding of American politics with social media may be the defining moment of a sea change that is taking place at the very top echelons of power in the United States and the world. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. elections, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all revealed their inescapable ties to the establishment when they launched an information warfare campaign against their own users and content creators in a bid to shape perceptions and control national discourse on the government’s behalf.

As the most contentious election in living memory drags on days after the vote, itself, the massive purge of profiles and content deemed politically dangerous carried out by the most popular social media platforms just over two weeks before Election Day, went practically unnoticed by everyone other than those who were actually de-platformed and their followers.

In mid-October, Google-owned YouTube and other social media giants purged the accounts of the most popular QAnon channels, spurring a class-action lawsuit against the video streaming platform filed in the Northern District of California later that month.

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