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- Hacker News
- It turns out that it's much easier than anyone thought to end freedom of speech in the United States. If no one cares about the Constitution, then it's just paper.
Trump sanctions the International Criminal Court and anyone who provides evidence to it, and now pro-Palestinian groups can't post videos of Israeli abuse on YouTube. The First Amendment is nowhere to be seen.
- 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.
by _heimdall - 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.
by StarGrit - Where were you in the last 6 years? Ah, I see, people you didn't like were being censored so you didn't care.by EdiX
- "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.
by ta20240528 - 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.by mpalmer
- The irony is that JD Vance lectured the Europeans about their lack of freedom of speech in Europe while invited in Germany.by jackjeff
- If all this is true, then it's another step towards freedom.
Freedom to delete and rewrite history.
by notorandit - 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.
by FridayoLeary - 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.by dncornholio
- Did anyone mirror the videos on their own servers?by Bender
- 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.
- Youtube takes down snuff. News at 11.
It doesn't matter if the snuff is an Israeli shooting a Palestinian, or a jihadi beheading a cartoonist. It's all removed because YouTube doesn't accept snuff on its platform.
by boxed - 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.by teddyh
- These videos were removed because of sanctions against the companies who run the YouTube channels, not because of ToU violations.
- Afaik they also remove hamas atrocities and genocide videos. So it's a fair game at least.by aristofun
- Fed up by status quo? Consider donating.by xyzal
- Doneby nujabe
- 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.by bjoli
- Not gonna lie, Boot Bullwinkle is an awesome name.by manyaoman
- There was an article yesterday about Jimmy Wales commenting on edit wars on the Wikipedia entry for Genocide in Gaza (or similar title). The article didn't indicate his taking one side or the other, but I'd prefer if people didn't use name-recognition to influence such things (yes, even if they take the same side as me because others will do the same in the other direction).
Fwiw, I downloaded a torrent of footage documenting the genocide last year. I don't think it would be considered appropriate for me to link to it here on HN, but I wanted to raise awareness that torrents such as this exist.
I'm also on a torrent full of CDC data that was taken down by the current admin plus a couple of other public-service torrents. You can find stuff like this too. I got mine from a certain federated clone of the R site.
by alsetmusic - >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.
by johnnyanmac - 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.”
- 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.
by dlubarov - The deleted videos did, in fact, violate YouTube's rules, but it's questionable whether YouTube would have taken them down if they hadn't shown an Israeli soldier carrying out a lynching.
- 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... ).by thisislife2
- That's why we have Peertube and your personal (not hosted by a corp) website. It's amazing how people forgot to use the internet in exchange for "easier" UX.by isodev
- 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.by hliyan
- >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?
by konart - 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.by johnnyanmac