YouTube is now altering comments? [video]

Honestly I'd be more inclined to write this off as a bug with Polymer.js or something rather than jumping to a conclusion from the YouTube comments like "Say goodbye to free speech" -- It's much more plausible to be a technical issue than an attempt at controlling the contents of YouTube comments.

The guy says it was an amalgam of his previous comments he'd made that day and I'm sure if you have a channel of his size, you're likely to have YouTube open for quite a while, and since it's an SPA, you could get all sortsa concurrency bugs or whatever.

I guess the main critique here would be the question of authenticity. How can you prove that it was actually youtube and not some homebrew lookalike site he cooked up?

With that said, I'd like to add the obvious "BIG if true"

I post YouTube comments frequently and I've never seen this.

I'd be inclined to think it's a bug in some extension he's using, or Chrome's automatic translation feature is doing something it shouldn't.

The author does not even bother to mention which video, which browser plugins he is using, or even what domain he is on. I am skeptical of these claims with no attempt to reproduce.

I would like to know if another browser would show the original comment or the altered one. Because the comment shows up and is then altered after the fact, I would blame a translation plugin on the client side.

I could see a poor-quality plugin being fooled by a different-language version of YouTube and auto translating.

That it's YouTube is utterly irrelevant - if this is not an external factor (e.g. a clientside translation plugin, as suggested elsewhere) it sets a very dangerous, and likely illegal, precedent, even more notable from being a Google-owned site.

I strongly doubt that this is on YouTube's end, however - not because I trust Google not to alter comments if they believe it fits their interests, but rather because I believe they could do it in a more subtle manner (test backlash by only fixing typoes at first, for example, and probably hide major alterations from users).