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YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

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Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#191
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like yourself that constantly bring up the wrongs of the past and constantly remind people that things were less than perfect in the past constantly don't seem to understand that: * Much like many things society progresses, generally in the western world that progression has tended towards greater liberty (in most respects) of its citizens e.g. Tom Holland (a documentary film maker in the UK) argues the separa…

> Tom Holland... argues the separation of church and state can be traced back to the Bible and it been a steady progression to secularism from there This is basically what's known as survivor bias. I think if you look at history you will find that power shifted to and from faith (and the church) in many waves. But true secularism was not, to my knowledge, seriously suggested for the first thousand years or more of Ch…

> This is basically what's known as survivor bias.

The number of times this comes up on here it is a bit of a meme. So I will counter with the maxim of "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail".

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#192
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" (soon to be "Chinese agents" as our geopolitical focus shifts)? Or harassing them by having their websites deranked and hidden on Google, like what happened to WSWS (among many other "dissident" sites)? Or simply disappearing them on Facebook and Twitter with unexplained and unappealable shadowbans and account suspensions? Do you think the widespread establishme…

>You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" ? Strange, I'm not seeing any of that for the topics mentioned: "military industry": https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/e0b1ui/dwight_d_eis... "crime financial complex": https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3r93j0/til_t... "pretexts to war": https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1aiszn/new_eviden... These have all received high amount of u…

To be fair, you picked examples from subreddits that are somewhat "balanced" or have recently swung very heavily to be critical of the US after Trump was elected president, like r/politics did.

Which is a rather recent development, before Trump got elected Reddit wasn't nearly as hot and tolerant on "anti-Americanism", particularly when r/Trump was still a thing.

r/worldnews for example can often still be quite a circle-jerk, often perpetrated by barely months old accounts.

Just yesterday on r/news I had a bunch of people accuse me of an "anti-USA agenda" and one account pretty much harass me because I dared to point out how the US government had broken virtually all treaties they had with Native American tribes, linking to the Wikipedia article on that as citation, on a submission about Native Americans renewing their claims to land in the Black Hills.

Compared to that subs like r/videos and r/todayilearned tolerate a much wider range of opinions.

I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if this tolerance of "anti-Americanism" will slowly roll-back, now that Trumps was voted out of office, as his controversial nature was a very big factor for finally allowing that kind of "unpatriotic" criticism on any bigger scale.

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#193
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The sooner people realize that, the better. Beyond that, there is an argument here for having transparent practices. There is nothing preventing youtube from saying the truth about what they do. Indeed. About the criticism, it really sounds like that to me in the video. It implies in the way it is written, and I don't wanna go over details of the script, but pay attention to moments when he mentions "like a good dem…

> The current status of world dominance/power is an evolution of previous iterations (be it good or bad). But we never had a democratic system the CIA is breaking. True > The video is presented in a way that if you don't know all of that you will assume the CIA is making the world bad. Maybe true, but this is an unintended consequence. In no point does the uploader make such a claim or presents evidence to make you t…

It’s not just absence of mentions of actions by other clandestine actors, it’s absence of even acknowledging what kind of world does cia operate in - everybody all the time is engaged in secret operations to advance their agenda. Everybody does that in multiple parallel projects, operated in different capacities with people of varying competency.

Any “storytelling” about single agency or project or a person is incomplete almost to the point of being misleading/disinformational. The legacy of ashes is one such example.

Does it mean one shouldn’t be (allowed) telling those stories? Certainly not. But without actively and profusely apologizing and warning that the story is definitely incomplete and almost certainly incorrect without proper context, which often is unknowable - the value to the consumer is negative.

The producer knowingly or not is acting as a propaganda actor for one or many competing agencies.

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#194
I draw a line between promotion and discoverability.

I don't need YouTube to advertise the video, but if I do an exact string search on the title of the video and don't find it, that's suppression.

The content of the video is innocuous. It appears to be a factual recounting of CIA ops with some editorializing. It doesn't present new information or a new opinion.

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#195

Just watched the video, read the thread. Here are some thoughts. First of all, the video uploader is promoting a competitor to YouTube. This is not disclaimed clearly. The video goes over criticism to the CIA, which are fair enough. But it takes some things as axioms, for example, that only the US are interfering/meddling in the world. He presents it as "the US is the bad guy and the world would be fair without the C…

> And at the same time, the buzz around saying "my video is being suppressed" get more views and is even a badge to prove the content "hits where it hurts".

The videos on that channel regularly have hundreds of thousands of views with many videos even having millions of them a long time before it had this "badge" to "get more views" [0].

So while it could be an attempt to utilize the Streisand effect for marketing, I consider that rather unlikely because the channel really doesn't need it and I can't think of a way the creator could force YouTube to reliably delist the video to make it a viable PR tactic.

[0] https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCJm2TgUqtK1_NLBrjNQ...

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you? Not to over simplify things, but freedom, liberty, and equal treatment were pretty much empty words and applied only to white American men (see: treatment of Native Americans, the Mexican-American war, slaves, and women). This is nonsense. The US was a left-wing experiment. It was a repudiation of the way things were done in Europe. The fact that it didn't solve every single inequity in one blow is not an i…

It's understandable that you have been misled in this way; enforcing this particular myth seems to be the primary purpose of USA public schools. I recommend historian Gerald Horne. He has identified Somerset v Stewart as an important event in inspiring American slaveholders and their sometime lawyer John Adams to start the Revolutionary War. That is, they fought a war in large part so that they wouldn't have to give…

Horne is a clumsy propagandist and you've been thoroughly propagandized.

In this kind of history, all nuance (like Adams' views on slavery) is lost and all historical events are made to fit a predetermined narrative. In addition to being wrong, it's incredibly boring stuff.

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#197
The YouTube shadow ban is bad enough, but to me the even scarier part comes further down the thread:

> A few months ago I uploaded a video about police brutality. It showed explicit acts of violence by the police, and it was understandably age-gated. The video was appropriate only for older audiences, but did not break any of YouTube's terms and conditions.

> That video earned me a visit from the DHS, who asked me about "Anti-American sentiment" in my videos. That was the first time I realized, wow, I guess people really are monitoring what we say and are willing to try to intimidate us, even if what we say is objectively true.

The video in question is, I suspect, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEVoX-RwMJw

To me it's beyond disturbing that this kind of stuff still happens, it's the kind of thing that you'd think went away in the 50's or so.

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#198
post #170
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children are taught to not question what they're told, because it's much easier on parents and teachers when children don't question what they're told. Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation. To me, the solution is obviously better education. When people believe the Earth is round only because that's what the…

> Children are taught to not question what they're told, because it's much easier on parents and teachers when children don't question what they're told. Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation. I'm gonna guess you don't have children. Children like easy-to-follow directions. They don't understand nuance at al…

> You add nuance later in middle and high school.

If you take children to be under 18 then the statement seems valid because I don't think there's a lot of nuance going on in most middle or high schools.

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#199
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But just about all of those people listed are alleged to have committed actual crimes. They may have done so for noble reasons, and a large group of people may not agree that they should be crimes, but they are currently still crimes.

You can't just kill dissidents (if they are known), you have to discredit them first, otherwise you create mortars

I think you mean “martyrs” - but the typo is fitting and illustrative.

Re: YouTube shadowbans video titled “The CIA is a Terrorist Organization”

#200

I have no views on the video, I didn’t watch it, but tech companies censoring and pushing back against free speech troubles me. Individuals and companies have the right to do what they want with their own property, and I don’t have any great ideas on how to solve this dilemma. One solution would be to have many platforms but we live in a winner take all world and platforms like YT get more powerful because of network…

Let me try being the devil's advocate here. With so many content being uploaded, it's better to err and not promote any video that could be an allusion to terrorism, sexual content, and so on. If humans were moderating youtube it would be worse and the amount of people needed would be impractical. At the same time, the author gets much more views saying his video was censored than if he was just one more video made o…

> "If humans were moderating youtube it would be worse"

That's quite an assumption that human moderation is worse than an algorithm.

> "and the amount of people needed would be impractical."

What is up-voting and down-voting and reporting? It's not like there's a lack of human eyeballs on the issue already. If no one watched, then no impact.

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