On Christmas Eve reports started dropping onto Twitter of major YouTube Channels having large amounts of content censored and deleted. The common factor was talking about crypto currencies or blockchain technology. No warnings were given and the damage was widespread.
I put this into the wider context of mass censorship on YouTube away from alternative and non-main stream topics and creators and toward the mainstream “safe” for advertisers content that YouTube is able to consistently make money on.
My extra thoughts on this: there’s definitely an element of the fall out from the COPPA settlement, this saw Google fined for collecting data on children watching videos in contravention of a clear law. Whatever directed them to take this action, it is yet another reason why our Crypto Class Action case, links below, is so important!
My videos on YouTube that mention Tommy Robinson are being hidden and buried. The Unpersoning of Tommy Robinson is proceeding as planned. Also discusses the way in which Avi Yemini was blocked from entering the USA.
On Friday the UK Labour Party’s Shadow Minister for Digital Censorship and banning any speech that isn’t both Sharia compliant and politically correct, Tom Watson, issued a chilling public letter to the Chief Executive of Google (YouTube). He put this out as an image (which is annoying as hell) but I’ve turned it into text and will publish it in full here with my comments back to Mr Tom Watson.
Dear Mr Watson
Dear Mr Pichai
I am contacting with you regard to the use of your YouTube platform by a violent, racist, Islamophobic campaigner called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known in the UK and globally as Tommy Robinson.
I’ll skip over the grammatical issues, as usual you appear to make a big deal out of Tommy Robinson’s “real name”. Most people quickly come to terms with why people stepping into the public eye chose to use pseudonyms. This is especially true when others who have challenged Islam have been murdered or are under continuous death threat (Pim Fortuyn or Salman Rushdie are just two examples). Tommy himself has had a number of serious attempts to take his life with multiple Islamic terrorists currently in UK prisons for attempting to blow him and other to kingdom come in the past.
On Tuesday Facebook and Instagram removed his page, related pages and materials from their platforms for breaching their “Organised Hate” policies. However, as is quite clear from the comments threads on stories documenting this decision, Yaxley-Lennon supporters are transferring over their virulent hate to YouTube.
This paragraph is also filled with grammatical disasters, we’ll just take it as read from here that this letter is something I’ll be showing to my kids as an example of how not to write. Yes, Facebook caved to far-left pressure and deleted Tommy Robinson’s wildly successful Facebook page 24 hours after the posting of his devastating Panodrama documentary and it reaching more than 1 million views on Facebook. Why did this devastating exposé of the BBC trigger such a swift response from Facebook?
Yaxley-Lennon had 294,000 subscribers as of Wednesday. Since then, with YouTube his only remaining platform of global significance, his subscribers have leaped to 325,000. Recent videos he posted have been watched by between one and two million people. He is also using YouTube to move his supporters over to a website www.globalaim.co.uk and encouraging them to make donations to keep his movement alive.
Instead of becoming the UK’s new thought police, do you want, perhaps, to consider why so many people in the UK and world wide are eager to hear what he has to say? You’ve got a problem now: if you truly believe Tommy Robinson represents an ultra-extreme position, why are so many people watching his videos so soon after they’re published?
YouTube’s policy on hate speech prohibits content which promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on attributes including religion, race, immigration status or nationality. Many of his videos are clearly in breach of this policy.
Which videos on his YouTube channel today breach policies? Why haven’t they been taken down already? Clearly, if you believe it to be “many” you’ll have found them and will be able to provide them to us all as an appendix to your letter. I will be calling your office on Monday morning and asking for this list. I am in touch with Tommy and will take up any complaints you have directly with him and consider if any of his videos should be withdrawn.
If you believe Tommy Robinson has breached any of the UK’s draconian, anti-free speech laws, which have been enacted in recent years, why has he not been arrested? As you well know, I’m sure, he was wrongly imprisoned for speaking outside Leeds court. That case was overturned by the highest court in the land, last year, and his wrongful conviction quashed.
I understand YouTube suspended all adverts on his channel in January, cutting off significant revenue stream. I am now writing to implore you as a matter of the utmost urgency to follow the lead that has been, belatedly, set by Facebook, and remove forthwith all “Tommy Robinson” and related pages from your YouTube platform.
Advertiser friendly and contravenes YouTube’s community standards are two totally different categories, for now. Rational people who value free speech hope this remains so.
As the UK’s Shadow Digital Secretary I have recently been making the argument that the social media companies have failed to regulate hate speech and harm on their platforms. It is clear, as I am sure you are aware, that UK legislators are now moving rapidly towards introducing legal regulatory powers to deal with this those who seek to use the garb of freedom of speech to, instead, preach violent hate with the aim of damaging and undermining our society.
I hope UK voters can see that however bad restrictions on what was once considered “free speech” by the “mother of parliaments” are under the current Theresa May Conservative regime, they would be much worse if your Jew hating, Corbyn Labour Party ever seized power.
Tommy Robinson YouTube views – geography
It is also the case that 30% of Tommy Robinson’s YouTube views come from outside the UK. What right does an out of power politician from the losing political party at the last UK general election have to determine what viewers in America can see?
The public interest is demanding an end to the laissez-faire approach to regulation not just in the UK but globally. However that should not mean that the social media firms avoid their responsibilities in the meantime to take action where it is clearly and vigorously required.
It would appear, seeing as how the Labour Party lost the most recent UK election, the last time this proviso was actually tested before the electorate, they chose the least bad option with regard to destruction of the necessary freedoms for maintaining a recognisable democracy. Freedom of speech, even unpleasant speech, is absolutely necessary to a functioning democracy. The freedom to challenge, with speech, a violent and aggressive ideology would appear to be a basic right you wish to remove from UK citizens like Tommy Robinson and the millions who wish to watch and share his videos.
I would ask that you immediately close down all of Yaxley-Lennon’s sites on YouTube before the virus of his views grooms countless more followers via your platform. I should also inform you, as a matter of politeness, that I will be releasing this letter to the media.
Fortunately the truth is sometimes a particularly virulent virus while the lies you peddle (such as “Islam is a religion of peace” for example) must be reinforced by draconian laws and repeated until the slaves understand the cost of challenging them is too high. Fortunately a few brave people exist to challenge your totalitarian dictates, people like Tommy Robinson.
I look forward to hearing from you. Yours sincerely
Tom Watson MP Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
I hope Google has the sense to resist this, I don’t have a lot of confidence. I look forward to hearing all the specific details of videos on Tommy Robinson’s channels which you have painstakingly identified to be “hate speech”. I shall be contacting your office by telephone on Monday (I’m working here on Sunday in Israel because we Jews start our week while you’re still in Church or at the mall). As a matter of politeness, I wish to inform you that I too have released this letter to the world.
Breitbart has published a pretty devastating new report based on leaked internal documents. To the surprise of almost nobody, there is manual intervention on YouTube to promote or demote topics and videos that don’t match the prevailing Social Justice Warrior SJW culture that has captured control of Google.
The most specific charge levelled at YouTube by Breitbart is around the suppression of anti-abortion material and the promotion of the pro-abortion position.
In sworn testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform – including a recent intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for “abortion.”
The term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.
The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.
All of this goes right into the best explanation I know of as to why wildly successful companies, especially those whose success derives from a deeply engineering based idea, eventually tend toward what we call “the left” today. Or, in more useful language, companies that start Mundian tend to become Modian, move away from engineering and the real world and toward the world of human interpersonal relationships, power dynamics and social skills.
All human institutions tend to become Modian over time, for the simple reason that they are made up of people. The more subjective the criteria for success, the more Modian the organization will become. Those institutions that have little or no exogenous criteria for success, like government, academia, or the non-profit sector, will inevitably come to be dominated by Modians, whatever their explicit goals may be. Businesses, which must make a profit to survive, are not immune to this tendency. Though they have exogenous criteria for success, it is a difficult task to propagate the objective criteria for success down through the ranks – at each level of decision making there will be some degree of subjectivity, and by the time we reach the bottom rank, decisions might be completely Modian. But in the business world, there is some good news for Mundians: those businesses that become too Modian will fail.
Right now, like most institutions that the Modians capture, failure will follow as they try to coerce the world to fit their social hierachy based system which looks only to who is powerful and popular at the moment and which business strategies or “scientific theories” are trendy. Modians don’t have the aptitude or skills to judge scientific theories or business strategies on merit, so they figure out which ones to follow by looking for the most powerful people.
We’re in a phase of declining civilisation because the huge technological and human advances made possible by Mundians are being taken and mutated by Modians. I’m still tied to YouTube: it’s by far and away the biggest place to be seen, but already all my videos are mirrored on Bitchute and I’ll promote their site wherever I can.
I don’t trust Google, and I’ll do my best to move my digital life away from its control.
I received this email from YouTube over the weekend. At first I thought it was another malicious copyright or flagging strike but no, this one turns out to be different. Here’s the text (my highlights):
Regarding your account: Brian London
We have received a legal complaint regarding your video from the government. After review, the following video: Robert Spencer on Fox and Friends has been blocked from view on the following YouTube country site(s): Pakistan
YouTube blocks content where necessary to comply with local laws. Please review our help center article on legal complaints.
Sincerely, The YouTube Team
YouTube email
This bit catches my eye: “We have received a legal complaint regarding your video from the government.”
THE GOVERNMENT?
Banned in Pakistan email from YouTube
Oh…. let me read on, this is from THE GOVERNMENT of Pakistan! Strange how it just reads “The Government” at the beginning though.
What we have here is Google/YouTube enforcing the censorship laws of an Islamic State (Pakistan) even though those laws should not apply to me or to Google. Google have chosen to be good Dhimmis, respecting the laws of superior Muslims.
The video itself, which I’ll embed below, is one of the very first clips I put on YouTube in 2006. I taped it off Fox News and it is Robert Spencer of JihadWatch and the most remarkable thing about it is how consistent Robert has been through the years. And right. He even talks about an Islamic State, long before what came to be known as ISIS or The Islamic State emerged in the ruins of Iraq and Syria.
Of course Robert doesn’t get booked on Fox and Friends these days: I guess the influence of Pakistan extends beyond YouTube.
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