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By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

nytimes.com

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Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#121

Post by mynameishere »

crummy wrote: post #39
cft wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anything not technical, I use DDG or Bing (If I need recency). Google results omit anything politically controversial.

Can you give some examples of politically controversial results google might be censoring?

I have no idea what Google is censoring in the search results, but compare the "search suggestions" for almost anything even slightly controversial. For example type "is stephen miller" (a Trump advisor) in Google and Bing and you can see how Google just removes stuff.

I suspect they are partly worried about results being gamed there...but everything is gamed. Maybe the main search results should be empty too.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#122

Post by dependenttypes »

least wrote: post #3

Youtube and Facebook, while convenient, aren't really appropriate mediums for them to share this sort of footage. Liveleak comes to mind as a service better suited for a public repository of this video. Archival of footage shouldn't be dependent on a third party platform that can, at will, delete every single video on a whim. Likely for this sort of thing a diligent archivist will need to put in the effort of storing…

> Archival of footage shouldn't be dependent on a third party platform that can, at will, delete every single video on a whim

Thankfully censorship-resistant anonymous p2p file sharing systems exist, I hope they become more popular for archival work.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#123

Post by nemo44x »

rolph wrote: post #94

I think most of the reason we have history, is due to physical media, such as print. newspapers books diaries and scrap books would live for decades and centuries even, so investigators could elucidate the past and bring it to light. internet media in the current form is subject to great purges of intentional and accidental nature. no matter the corporate intention, there is a great danger of major events being delet…

This is an insightful comment. The audio engineer Steve Albini often comments that one reason he only records artists using analogue tape is because digital is easily lost either through obsolete and proprietary formats, or deliberate governance. Analogue tape, although inconvenient, requires a physical action to be destroyed in possibly many physical places and isn’t subject to evolving digital formats.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#124

Post by gbear605 »

chongli wrote: post #63
schoen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your interpretation of the latter case is quite right. In my understanding, the Archive is willing to disable display of the site content retroactively due to a new robots.txt, but they won't delete that content. It will still be present in their files.

What you’re describing may have been a recent change that I wasn’t aware of. If so, it’s at least some consolation. We could still do better.

I believe that that has been the case for the entire existence of Wayback, not just recently.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#125

Post by anonytrary »

campfireveteran wrote: post #4

Sounds about right. They demonetize blancoliorio's in-depth commercial aircraft and pilot industry analysis as "sad content." Oh and donutoperator gets demonetized despite blurring almost everything and not swearing. Non-corporate content creators and random people have NO rights on corporate platforms like YT. The only solution is another platform that respects creators, has sane/straightforward policies and doesn't…

> The only solution is another platform that respects creators, has sane/straightforward policies and doesn't permit rampant scams and extortions.

This is how every platform starts out. Success is a curse that drags companies into politics and money games, causing them to succumb to censorship and other unintended policies.

The only solution is a platform that can prove that it has no ability to censor content. This requires advanced cryptography knowledge. Never trust the "word" of a company or a platform.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#126

Post by crummy »

mynameishere wrote: post #121
crummy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of politically controversial results google might be censoring?

I have no idea what Google is censoring in the search results, but compare the "search suggestions" for almost anything even slightly controversial. For example type "is stephen miller" (a Trump advisor) in Google and Bing and you can see how Google just removes stuff. I suspect they are partly worried about results being gamed there...but everything is gamed. Maybe the main search results should be empty too.

I opened an incognito window and tried it.

Google suggestions for "is stephen miller":

* is stephen miller married?

Bing suggestions for "is stephen miller":

* is stephen miller gay?

* is steven miles married?

Maybe there's location stuff going on, or maybe they're guessing at what you're searching for based on previous searches or something.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#128

Post by jxramos »

mindgam3 wrote: post #100
least wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes to mind for that very reason. The rules for uploading to it are less stringent than other services because it's there to provide a platform for things that don't fit on other video platforms on the web. If you're going to be hosting videos of the horrors of war, it's much more likely to stick on liveleak than any other platform.

I agree that it works from a technology perspective, but from the product/marketing perspective it's a non-starter. People who want to watch violent videos != human rights activists. There's the "blood and gore" people, and the "social justice warrior" people, and not a ton of overlap. In order to solve this use case there would really need to be a site that combines LiveLeak's content moderation policy with an activ…

Or at least with a filtered tag that's fairly reliable. All around a pretty risky site for this use case along other considerations.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#130

Post by jxramos »

corodra wrote: post #62
corndoge wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, exact title searches will usually not turn up videos with that title unless you use quotes. YouTube will return clickbait and Jimmy Kimmel, entirely unrelated to the search, for exact title searches of videos with only a few tens of views.

Heaven forbid I ever accidentally click on or get interested in some random talk show video, video roughly about video games or a big media news video. All of my normal engineering, business, programming, guns, history, and mechanics recommendations go right the fuck out the window. For the next week, half my recommendations are just filled with dogshit because of one accidental video. I stopped watching movie traile…

Ditto on the meta tag!
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