Woooow what a huge dick move.
That's the one massively imbalanced power dynamic that I hear people really fear losing their livelihood to for no good reason, and they're leaving it there to terrorize and ruin livelihoods for future generations.
I put up a video of a funeral service for my grandma and like 5 minutes later I was getting threatening legalese mail about my channel by cancelled forever because some record label has a recording of a thousand year old hymn and they don't give a shit about threatening people with no legal basis at all
YouTube: We fucked up. A little.
And I love how they're framing it as a "Second Chance". Like, you fucked up but we're going to be big and compassionate just this once.
The cynical me suspects that this instead is a more sweeping plan to cover for their coming re-listing of all the hate-filled, extremist channels that they had delisted in the past.
That's exactly what this is. And they're probably going to be pushed to delist LGBT content under some vague upcoming project 2025 indecency regulation by the FCC.
The whole thing reads like institutionalized selective enforcement.
The State forced their hands here. Comply and let certain favored creators back, or else they might find themselves subject to political prosecution.
AP News chooses to still call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico; a different choice from the outlets that no longer do. The New York Times, NBC News, the Hill and CNN chose to rather have their Pentagon access revoked; a different choice than the one made by New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, HuffPost News and others.
It's important to keep repeating this. Companies, organizations and individuals all have choices. Not every one of them makes the same choice given the same situation - in fact, they make opposite choices.
As far as how this YouTube scenario is different, people can host their content elsewhere, but there's only one Pentagon in the US.
In less strange times this would merit the hammer coming down, but in 2025...
AI training is fair use. For pirating books, they probably calculate that the fine will be lower than their profits.
Assuming you're putting videos on YouTube, you should care because they have leverage over you and can ban you.
You seem to imply some kind of moral terms or reasons based on principles but that's not how corporations work. And either way they will get a pass because their stuff is extremely valuable for intelligence agencies and the military.
You say that so confidently as if it's not the subject of a heated controversial debate this very moment.
But I'm generally disinterested in the US style of these debates where it's all about twisting words and creatively interpreting old laws. In functioning countries they just adopt new and clear laws.
Piracy is fair use.
Ad blockers work great to get rid of ads. Playing videos in the background on mobile is a basic feature that should never be behind a paywall.
For channels I watch frequently, I support them financially in ways that do not involve Google taking a ridiculously-sized cut of my money.
Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.
If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"
For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.
They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.
So I'm curious, what does your list look like?
1) If a person's channel is terminated, can they not already open another channel?
2) How is this different from a person either opening a new channel or getting a new Gmail and opening a new channel?
>If your YouTube channel is terminated, you are prohibited from using, possessing, or creating any other YouTube channels. You are also prohibited from letting others whose YouTube channels have been terminated use your YouTube channel to bypass their termination.
>This applies to all of your existing channels, any new channels you create or acquire, and any channels in which you are repeatedly or prominently featured.
and ban evasion is a persistent problem on any platform
Basically running out of videos to serve their ads alongside to.
Compare that to the gate-keepers that were before: Movie, TV and Music production companies, as well as book publishers. Those were severely limiting free speech according to their own policies, as well as mostly only accepting creators from wealthy and well connected families, or people who they could rip-off financially or sexually abuse. And this was when creativity was severely regulated.
So with all their flaws, YouTube and friends are still a million times better than the regulated creator economy of the past. Even though they've done absurd things like co-ordinated banning the president of the United States, and much more.
We’ve been casually throwing around the phrase “free speech” so much that it seems to have lost its meaning. Free speech was never about guaranteeing anyone and everyone a platform and an audience. At least within the context of US law, it’s about expressing ideas without government persecution, with some limits.
It’s an important distinction because now it seems some people are less concerned about the government protecting these rights and more about making sure they can still host videos on Youtube.
No matter what, YouTube and social media enables more people to express themselves to an audience than ever before.
In practice, social media brings free speech to the modern mass society, in a way that was very lacking before.
aspenmayer•4mo ago