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.

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    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.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca
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    7 hours ago

    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.

  • qarbone@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    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.

    • HurricaneLiz@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      Nothing, no matter how bad, evil, terrible, treasonous, or ihumane, will destroy youtube. Except if they fail to honor a C&D from Disney.

  • Gary Ghost@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    It does make me think twice about ever purchasing a google pixel. What another android phone that has good spam call protection or app?

  • Devolution@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Is there another alternative to YouTube? One that isn’t a right wing hellscape?

    • HurricaneLiz@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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

    • lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      18 hours ago

      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.

      • arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        20 hours ago

        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.

        • sloppysol@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          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.

          • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            14 hours ago

            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)

            • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              14 hours ago

              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)

    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      14 hours ago

      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).

        • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 hours ago

          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.

          • majster@lemmy.zip
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            1 hour ago

            I think fediverse shows that the model works. Fringe ideas stay fringe because you can’t amplify it with bots.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      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.

  • SpankyDoodle@eviltoast.org
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    21 hours ago

    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.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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    22 hours ago

    Skimmed the article (yay for reader view) but it doesn’t really say WHY the channel was deleted?

    I am not in the slightest bit shocked by google bending over backwards to pleasure trump and netanyahu. But this also doesn’t seem like their MO. They are usually “good” about explaining what new rule they invented and why that suddenly gave a channel 40 strikes retroactively and I am not seeing that here?

    Whereas there are a few mid-size channels that have allegedly been flagged “by AI” as being other bad channels? Which… actually seems more likely since it is less youtube taking an actual stand on anything and more just deciding the ai slop channels that stole footage are the originators and to ban everyone involved.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      22 hours ago

      It’s also possible, not having seen the videos in question, that they simply did violate YouTube’s rules regarding graphic content. YouTube has had a terrible record of banning important content despite its societal value because of rigid adherence to ill-thought-out content policies. AI takes that problem and turns it up to 11.

      • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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        20 hours ago

        that they simply did violate YouTube’s rules regarding graphic content

        I’m 99% sure this is the actual reason

        • Doorbook@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          The reason why I don’t think this is the case is I do believe they were flagged by Zionist to be violating the rules, yet YouTube didn’t do anything until now.

          Most of the YouTube video are blurry and obtain from Instagram, tiktok and telegram, both tik Tok and Instagram would delete them if the violate any rule.

          It is more relastic to assume the administration pushed for this. It help them to know what exactly they need to do, in order to take similar videos in the next attempt of genocide or war crimes.

          Remember they literally spent millions to stop tiktok and control Meta, Google, and Wikipedia. They did the same for traditional media, but didn’t pay enough attention to social media effects until now.