Censorship: Action, Reaction

So Youtube hates guns and is trying to demonitize shooting channels.  So one of the channels decided to follow the rules, with hilarious results.

Youtube Shadowbans Climate: The Movie

The Feral Irishman emails to saw that my post about the climate movie looked weird from his Windows computer.  He could watch the movie but there was nothing displayed about Youtube.  Everything looked normal from Safari on his iPhone.

Well, it turns out that Youtube has shadowbanned the film.  This almost certainly made the post look wonky.  If they disappear it I will update the embed to Rumble or something.

You know that you're over the target when you're taking flak.

The Internet interprets censorship as damage

It routes around it.  Big Brother Google (you do love Big Brother, don't you?) cast Big Country into the Outer Darkness, yea with bell, book, and candle.

He's baaaaaaaack.

Looks like this may have wedged Divemedic's blog, though.

UPDATE 24 October 2022 11:53: Divemedic's blog is back.

Why I'm not on Twitter or Facebook

 They're not even trying to hide the fact that they own you:

Twitter has locked the account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany because she shared a story about Hunter Biden and Ukraine.

Now in all honesty, I haven't cared for the platforms for quite a while.  I don't like Facebook because it has always been rotten about its user's privacy, and all y'all know that I just can't keep myself to the 17 character (or whatever it is) tweet limit.  It's the same reason that I pretty much dropped off of Gab.ai.

But this underlines the fact that they own their users.  Not cool.  I'll stick with our little corner of the Blogosphere, thank you very much.

But probably the biggest objection that we've heard (and heard again, and again) about Donald Trump is that he violates long standing norms of behavior.  What's interesting is that his opponents are the ones who are now the biggest violators of norms.  Here is a media company censoring the White House Press Secretary.  [blink] [blink]

Heck, even a lefty hack like Jake Tapper sums up the situation:

So no thanks.  It's so bad that a raving libertarian like me is totally down with the Fed.Gov breaking up the Twitter and Facebook (and Google) monopolies and declaring them to be publishers, not platforms.  Let it all fight out in the courts, but just those announcements will tank the stock prices which will make it hard for them to acquire new companies and executive talent.  They're the modern Robber Barons and some Trust Busting is well past due.*

Note: blogger Ann Althouse looks at the story's provenance and is skeptical about the emails.  It's an interesting read - not calling them "fake" but rather suspicious.  But she agrees that Twitter and Facebook haven't covered themselves in glory here.

* UPDATE 15 October 2020 09:37: Interestingly, Miguel posted the exact same idea about libertarians.

UPDATE 15 October 2020 09:47: This is an interesting perspective about why the "Streisand Effect" applies so closely here:

Simply put, there is not enough staff at Facebook & Twitter, and they are neither smart enough nor subtle enough, to censor ALL the “fake news” while also suppressing the politically sensitive (read “damaging to Democrats”) real stories. As a result, they are Ham Handed and focus on the “stuff that matters” (as all major corporation management does). The necessary consequence of this, much like the Streisand Effect, is that attempts to HIDE stores become advertising of the stories AND become strong evidence for the veracity of the Story. Essentially: Their actions are a negative indicator. The more they holler “Fake” the more we hear “Here Be Truth”.

... 

Here’s the original story:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/

UPDATE 15 October 2020 11:48: Lawrence has the second drop from the New York Post about Hunter's corruption with China.  No doubt the Post is getting a lot more views today because of the Streisand Effect.  Oft evil will shall evil mar, and all that.

Observe the power of this fully operational MiniTru

 George Orwell's prophetic 1984 had a dystopian future where everything was controlled by the government.  The agency charged with rewriting history was called the Ministry of Truth, or MiniTru.  Lawrence has discovered that Orwell wasn't a novel, but rather an instruction manual.

A note to people taking video in Richmond today

Don't upload your video to YouTube.  We've seen a long record of them censoring conservative video as a "violation of terms of service".  You're wasting your time uploading it there.

Use Bitchute instead.  I've never heard of them censoring videos.

UPDATE 20 January 2020 10:24: Heh:

The blackface is a nice touch.

Spycraft, Google, and Donald Trump

The problem facing an Intelligence Agency is the same as the problem facing a historian studying some past civilization: what are the sources you have, and how much do you trust them?  For both the Intelligence Analyst and the Historian, sources may be few and far between.  A great example of this in history is the Heroninos Archive, a set of ancient Roman records literally rescued by accident from a trash heap.  The archive is the most complete set of documents about how a large Roman farm was run, and we almost didn't have it.

For an example of whether you can trust a source, you can't do better than Procopius.  He was the personal secretary of the great general Belisarius who tried to (and nearly succeeded) reconquer the western portion of the Roman Empire for Justinian the Great.  Procopius wrote about the campaigns in The History Of The Wars, and wrote about Justinian's many building projects in The Buildings.  Both books describe the glories and virtues of Emperor and General in glowing terms.  So far, so good.

But all is not what it seems.  In 1623 another of Procopius' books was discovered in the Vatican Library.  The Secret History is a savage description of the private lives and moral failures of the Emperor and his wife, and the General and his wife.  Procopius pours scorn on them all, sometimes in X-rated detail.

So we have Procopius' sources, but which do we believe?  Aye, there's the rub.  They can't both be true, can they?

We see this in our day.  A huge set of Google internal documents were released yesterday, describing how the company (allegedly) purposely changes search results:

A Google staffer today released documents exposing a massive censorship campaign where the ubiquitous Google search engine purposefully censored pro-life and conservative web sites, including LifeNews.com.

Google Insider Zachary Vorhies has given an interview to watchdog group Project Veritas where he discusses how he documented Google censorship of leading pro-life and conservative web sites for over a year. He made the decision to go public in an on-the-record video interview after Google went after him following the release of the information to Project Veritas.

He decided to go public after receiving a letter from Google, and after he says Google allegedly called the police to perform a “wellness check” on him.

This effects us in our daily efforts to understand the world in which we live.  What sources do we have?  Do we trust them?  I haven't trusted Google, for a very long time.  I use and recommend Duckduckgo, which combines multiple sources and which also doesn't spy on you.  But even here there's a problem, because Google results are included there - there's a ripple effect of Google censor algorithms that spreads far into the online world.  And since Google is a near-monopoly, the spread of these ripples is unknowable but presumably far indeed.

We are entering a new election cycle, one where Google is accused of manipulating election outcomes:

Google’s biased search algorithm actually flipped seats in the 2018 US midterm elections, according to a researcher who found the search engine’s “dramatically biased” results could have shifted over 78 million votes to Democrats.

“Upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world are being decided without people’s knowledge by Google’s search algorithm,” senior research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology told RT, calling the search engine the “deciding factor” in close races.

This is a source.  Do we believe it?  RT is the rebranded Russia Today, paid for (to some extent) by the Kremlin.  Do they have an agenda?  Certainly.  Does what they say sound like it might be true?  As the Mythbusters might put it: plausible.

Google is clearly opposed to conservative views in general, and to Donald Trump in particular.  It's been known for years (detailed in my post above) that they manipulate results in furtherance of their ideology.  This much seems clear.  How much they manipulate the results - and their ability to swing elections - is less clear.  But it's not zero.

This is a problem for us today, as it is for historians.  What if everything you hear about Donald Trump is worse than things actually are, because the sources are biased?  It's like everything you know comes from a Donald Trump version of Procopius' Secret History.  Actually, when you consider the stories in the press about him, that's perhaps not very far off the mark.

But what if everything a person hears is distorted?  The sources are unreliable, because they either are pushing an opposite agenda or they're being hidden (like a Heroninos Archive that ends up in the incinerator)?  This isn't far fetched at all - we see this in history, where it may be that everything that we know about the Byzantine Emperor Thomas the Slav is wrong, because of this very problem. (Note: if you don't want to listen to the Life and deeds of Thomas, skip to the last 4 or 5 minutes of this podcast where it discusses the reliability - actually the lack thereof - of the sources).

We know that opinion polls in the run up to elections are inaccurate.  Polls are a source, but how much do you trust them?

Quite frankly, you shouldn't trust them.  You shouldn't trust your search results - while they may not turn up biased sources, the most important sources may not turn up at all.  This is the most important thing that you should tell your friends and family.  Certainly people are trying to manipulate them, even if we don't know by how much.  In today's "Information Age", they need to have a healthy skepticism over what they see.  What sources are they seeing?  How trustworthy are they?

Oh, and tell them to use Duckduckgo instead of Google.  It's more accurate, and it doesn't spy on you.

Youtube loses $70B in market cap

Pull quote: "You know what made Youtube great?  Youtubers."

And yet Youtube is getting rid of (or at least de-monitizing) lots of conservative voices.  While the pelt of Alex Jones' wookie suit may be luxurious indeed, he had a ton of followers and a lot of ad revenue for Youtube.  Not anymore.  Multiply by all the other folks who have been banned/shadow banned/de-monitized, and you're talking real revenue.

It's sort of a "growth by subtraction" strategy.  Sure, this makes the Left happy, but it's not like they spend any more time or money (ad clicks) at Youtube.  Folks on the other side?  They spend less time and clicks at Youtube.

Tagged under The decline of the Progressive West because, well, you know.

Damned Facebook

Seen on Gab.ai.  All the Cool Kids hang out there, because nobody censors you there.