YouTube erased more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations

> your personal (not hosted by a corp) website

I'm not sure that's enough. A few years ago there were some set of websites that wanted less censorship than the main corporate sites (or at least, a different set of censorship rules), I forget all their names now - voat, rumble, gab, parler, etc and people who didn't like the content they saw there just went upstream to cloud providers, app stores, registrars, payment processors, CDNs, ISPs and anywhere else in order to shut them down, cut them off or prevent access.

Tons of sites that failed to perfectly comply with American media conglomerate's interpretation of copyright have been forced offline, had their domain names seized, etc.

There was a period of time where the MPAA and RIAA were routinely suing random teenagers and grandparents for life-destroying sums of money because they used Napster to share a song they liked with a friend.

I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed and can't result in people getting arrested, losing their jobs, their visas or their funding for saying things that the people in power don't want said.

I don't think it's about UX at this point. It's more about critical mass. Unfortunately, YouTube is where the videos and audience are... yes, it's a Catch-22 situation.

Does having your personal website even matter when the agents of censorship can just request that search engines delist your urls? Or pay for tons of ads so that your site's ranking drops to the second or third page for whatever keywords it happens to match on. And if they still get sizeable traffic, they can just ask your hosting provider to cancel your account. No need to burn the books when you can just remove them.

And you think it will stop here? Nope, next AWS or whatever cloud where you host your clone will terminate your service, then you go and rent a bare-metal, same thing later, then you go and host it on your own hardware, the CDN will terminate it! Oh you managed to find a mediocre CDN? The ISP next! As long as there's no regulation protecting your rights, whoever has the biggest share in xyz will be in charge.

We're in an attention economy. You don't post on Youtube for preservation, you post there to reach an audience so people know what's going on. If you're not the POTUS you don't have the luxury to use an alternative site and not be utterly ignored.

>It's amazing how people forgot to use the internet in exchange for "easier" UX.

What's so amazing here? This a normal and expected human behaviour.

>forgot to use the internet

What does this even mean in this context?

I wonder if the future should simply be a cloud version of a personal computer. Rather than subscribing to a lot of SaaS where your data distributed across various platforms, you "purchase" a cloud computer (could be a tiny SOC + disk, or a VM), install software on it (licensed, not subscription based), and store all your data on it, as good old-fashioned files only you and your programs can access. Including your video library, part of which you can choose to expose to the outside world through a public IP. When your cloud PC needs more memory or CPU, you upgrade, just like you do your physical device.

You are not spouting any fringe consipracy theory. Videos commenting on Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza ( see https://genocide.live/locations ) on TikTok played a huge role in publicising the genocide to the world. And it is also the primary reason why the western backers of Israel were so hell bent on acquiring TikTok - an IDF soldier, who is a "proud American Jew" and Zionist, already oversees "hate speech" and "antisemitism" policies on TikTok ( see https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/tiktok-hires-former-idf-reservi... ). And Netanyahu also publicly affirmed that social media was Israel’s new ‘weapon’ after the TikTok acquisition ( see https://www.newarab.com/news/netanyahu-says-social-media-isr... ).

The position Wales was taking was that Wikipedia shouldn't be calling it a genocide in its own voice ("wikivoice"), which means taking a side rather than neutrally documenting the controversy.

Larry Sanger also made a similar statement. The two Wikipedia founders had a falling out back in the day, and it's the first time in a long time that they've publicly agreed on anything.

Neither has any special power on the wiki though. One might hope that both founders pointing out NPOV issues could be a wake-up call to stop interpreting the NPOV policy "creatively" to push an agenda,[3] but realistically nothing seems likely to change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

[3] As an example of "creative workarounds" to Wikipedia's neutrality policy, one of the justifications for renaming "Allegations ..." to "Gaza genocide" was a rather bizarre idea that neutrality doesn't apply to titles since they're "topics", not statements. The statement implied by the new title was then predictably used as one of the justifications for changing the article body to use "genocide" in wikivoice.

He's not trying to influence anything - he's trying to safeguard Wikipedia's stated neutral point-of-view policy.

His statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

Whatever your point of view is, he explains clearly why the article is biased:

> At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested. This is a violation of WP:NPOV and WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV that requires immediate correction.

> A neutral approach would begin with a formulation such as: “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.”

>but I'd prefer if people didn't use name-recognition to influence such things

You describe a laradox. If Jimmy Wales didn't say it, you never would have ended up making this comment. And thus attention to the matter that there are even edit wars on Gaza would be suppressed.

We're a social species, so attaching a familiar name or face will always get more attention. You can even observe this on Reddit in how including a person holding the artwork (male or female) instead of the art alone results in more upvotes. so the face doesn't even need a reputation behind it.

For those not clicking random links: this foundation tries to find evidence of atrocities by people with dual citizenship so that they can be prosecuted in their other home country.

Done

These videos were removed because of sanctions against the companies who run the YouTube channels, not because of ToU violations.

Technically, “snuff” is usually defined as at least being made for entertainment (I say “usually”, since commonly other requirements are added as well). But beheading videos and the like are meant to scare their enemies, not to entertain weirdos on the internet. So these are not “snuff” videos.

I looked into writing a script that wires yt-dlp to archive.org, iirc one already existed, but archive.org requested that people only upload videos that are at risk of deletion by YouTube.

I guess this would be a valid contender. I’d encourage anyone to begin mirroring videos for that reason.

We shouldn't rely on YouTube to write our history. It's just an American entertainment website that makes money of ads. It has no other obligations. It can do whatever it wants, or what the US government wants. This is not news.

I'm sure it's technically true, with absolutely no nuance. You can say "BBC pull documentary of life inside gaza" which is completely accurate. What is also true is that the boy who was the main focus of the documentary was the son of a Hamas official which throws the whole thing into question.

YT normally takes down any video depicting violence.

The irony is that JD Vance lectured the Europeans about their lack of freedom of speech in Europe while invited in Germany.

The ICC is not a beneficiary of the Constitution, nor is YouTube bound by the Constitution. I'm unhappy for the same reasons as you, but this isn't how 1A works.

"now pro-Palestinian groups can't post videos of Israeli abuse on YouTube."

Perhaps not, but they could courier the evidence on a DVD to the Hague.

Where were you in the last 6 years? Ah, I see, people you didn't like were being censored so you didn't care.

Freedom of Speech has and will be suppressed by various governments, with various reasons being given. This has been going on for longer than any of us have been alive.

e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918

There is nothing unique about what is happening now.

Did the government force YouTube to take down the videos?

Freedom of speech is meant to protect us from government censorship. Trump sanctions would fall into that category, but a social media site censoring what they don't want to host seems like fair game.

Don't forget how this admin cried up and down about the censorship of the previous on Covid misinformation, and said that freedom of speech was paramount; no surprise a lie again.

For months now word „zionist” is officially banned on Facebook and hasbara bots are ready to tell you that you are antisemite

With even a small percent of population they can do so much !!