Also see this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/896358097320636416
> Ironically, by deleting years old opposition channels YouTube is doing more damage to Syrian history than ISIS could ever hope to achieve
> Also gone are the dozens of playlists of videos from Syria I created, including dozens of chemical attacks in playlists by date
> Keep in mind in many cases these are the only copies of the videos, and in some the channel owner will have died, so nothing can stop it
That is a little insane... Makes me wish there was some sort of website that archived specific YouTube videos marked as historical or criminal evidence or some sort of qualification, as long as they don't abuse copyright just to make sure if places like YouTube delete them they can remain. Or a service that uploads to multiple video streaming sources at once (though I imagine these might violate the TOS of YouTube for w/e reason).
Kind of sad where you have video evidence being deleted by YouTube. It would be nice if they allowed some sort of option for political type videos like these to actually be uploaded by users, especially if the original uploader was killed, to be downloaded with metadata (upload date to youtube, youtuber username, etc) so anyone can reupload it elsewhere.
Another case where I wish TPB had made their own YouTube clone already. I'm sure they would of not taken down these sort of videos.
Wondering where Wikileaks is in these sort of cases? Do they download these sort of videos? That begs the question: why don't they? It seems right up their own alley. I don't always agree with them, nor do I digest their content but at the very least for a site like theirs it would make sense for them to archive YouTube and other politically sensitive videos no?
An YouTube clone is expensive. TPB only hosts simple HTML pages (they no longer have torrent files, and even those were just a few KBs), not files with hundreds of MBs or more.
As others said, the Internet Archive may be a good option for these videos. I wouldn't mind writing a system for backing them up to archive.org, but I'm not sure how would I detect them. Marking those videos requires the user to know they should be marked, which just moves the question to how they would know.
> A YouTube clone is expensive.
A YouTube clone that uses a clone of YouTube's infrastructure is expensive, but what about a distributed p2p YouTube clone?
Obviously it's hard to quantify, as it doesn't exist yet, but I think it's technologically feasible.
Meaning, you just have data stored on people's hard drives?
That would be more expensive because
- You have a much higher failure rate of the storage media as people say "I'm running out of hard drive space. What should I get rid of?"
- You need to recruit those people to give up a resource that (unlike the spare compute cycles that SETI uses) they are likely currently using.
- You have to convince people to trust you to put arbitrary video content on their hard drives. Therefore, you need to have some process for deciding what video content is objectionable enough that you won't store it.
> You have a much higher failure rate of the storage media as people say "I'm running out of hard drive space. What should I get rid of?"
Not really, because data is replicated between many people. People can delete it and other people would still have it.
> You need to recruit those people to give up a resource that (unlike the spare compute cycles that SETI uses) they are likely currently using.
It's no different than people seeding torrents or people just using ipfs. Simply accessing the system would transparently increase availability. In fact, ipfs is probably suited as-is.
> You have to convince people to trust you to put arbitrary video content on their hard drives. Therefore, you need to have some process for deciding what video content is objectionable enough that you won't store it.
No, data will become more accessible as people would consume it. People only need to understand how the system works, they don't need to trust "me" (whoever you refer as "you" in your post).
As I said, ipfs probably works as-is.
> because data is replicated between many people
Yes, so you are designing a distributed system with a higher failure rate of the underlying media. That means you need more replication, so you need more people to donate space.
"what about a distributed p2p YouTube clone"
Same reason Bitcoin and its ilk can't scale. Decentralization throws in essentially a log x exp growth rate on bandwidth and storage for every additional peer on the network. Technology can't keep pace, period.
Not to pick on you because this seems to be a popular opinion but I would just like to point out the insanity of your what you just wrote.
"as long as they don't abuse copyright"
Would we delete videos of the liberation of concentration camps if there was Nickelback music playing in the background? This just demonstrates how successful media companies have been in distorting the true purpose of copyright laws: to promote science, art, and culture for the public's benefit. It does not exist for fairness or personal gain. Copyright laws should be changed to better reflect this. Nobody should be able to silence any information that has a public benefit.
Like, Nickelback is in the original footage or someone overalyed the track on top of the footage? I would imagine if this ever really happened it would be fine in the former, and muted in the latter.
You're forgetting that 'promote...' means give the creator control of that content for the purpose of limiting access and making money. Promote in the sense that it becomes possible to actually sell artistic works like commodities. And then once the value has ben extracted the public can do what they please with it.
And we just need 140 years to extract it! :P
Not quite on the level of concentration camp liberation videos, but wasn't there a video of a 2 year old dancing that had like a 20 second clip of some popular song playing on the radio in very low quality in the background, and it got deleted for copyright infringement?
I think this was the video, but it is obviously back up now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ
> Like, Nickelback is in the original footage or someone overalyed the track on top of the footage? I would imagine if this ever really happened it would be fine in the former, and muted in the latter.
While I agree that would be the most sensible course of action, if this in reality happened right now, the whole video would be deleted in both cases, automatically (assuming it's clear enough to trigger detection in the first example).
Nope, today they mute the audio.
I only mentioned the copyright thing, because whatever site archives YouTube videos shouldn't focus on archiving all of YouTube just specific segments of it, though it might not be a bad idea to archive a good chunk of YouTube to avoid losing internet history / real world history. It'd be highly unlikely to be a factor if these videos were archived at politically targeted / history preserving archive sites though.
> Makes me wish there was some sort of website
Can't people just use liveleaks for that kind of videos?
I guess we need more education about online video hosting is also a factor, most people from other sides of the world will know mainly the most popular websites and the smaller ones (by comparison) might not be even heard of by these people.
> Makes me wish there was some sort of website that archived specific YouTube videos marked as historical or criminal evidence or some sort of qualification
Make one. Add it as warrior project to archive team; save them and re-upload them if they are deleted.
Unfortunately we all need to participate, because https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a...
Fair enough, been looking more into the projects from the Archive Team. They at least had one project, will have to see how functional it may or may not be.
https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/riptube
People really need to download videos from YouTube if they are that important, not doing otherwise is in my opinion reckless. YouTube is not a service you can expect to actually archive important videos, if I look through my favorites or other playlists, a ton of videos are deleted.
Use youtube-dl, download it to your own server and back them up yourself. Yes, this is awful and sucks on so many levels, but please, please, back up data.
In my opinion the important thing to remember is that Youtube could easily do something about this. It seems like there's a trend in a lot tech-centric companies to save money automating away actual content review as well as customer interaction. But humans are entirely capable of reviewing content and giving detailed explanations for why something has been judged a certain way, especially if you have them work alongside an automated system that simplifies the process for them.
I realize that minimizing human labor is a big part of how these sorts of business models achieve their profitability, but problems like this aren't going to go away as long as that's the norm. And I don't just mean poor explanations for policy decisions either. The core issue is bigger than that imo.
The information age has privatized a lot of the modern 'public' social/cultural spaces. For nations that value both the freedom of speech and the preservation of historically/culturally significant speech this is problematic. It reduces the public's ability to express itself but also their ability to look back on old expressions and learn about the history or cultural paradigms behind them.
This isn't really supposed to be a rant at Google in specific. They're just the topic at hand so they're the easy punching bag. In general, customer service aside, I think they do good work and more importantly they exercised the necessary foresight and resources to develop their products into what they are today. I'm by no means implying we should socialize social media... no pun intended. But I do think there needs to be more discourse about how these trends will affect the future of speech and historical censorship. Right now it's just a modern problem in its infancy, but decades from now people who want to see visceral content depicting firsthand experiences from events like those happening in Syria, or the Arab Spring, are going to be getting censored history. What if China started pressuring foreign companies, via benevolent coercion such as financial incentives, to implement systems that made finding information about Tienanmen Square more difficult? The privatized nature of these platforms makes this sort of attack easier as well. And I don't have a good solution, but that's why I think there needs to be more dialogue about the future of online media in general and what direction we want to steer it in.
Try some back of the envelope math to see if it is possible. Start with 300 hours of video uploaded every minute.
I calculated the cost to be 6bn USD/yr assuming the fully loaded cost of a full time reviewer is 20k, which dwarfs the revenue YouTube has.
So please, lay out a plan that actually works with the economics of YouTube.
What about payed arbitrators? The bad incentives i can imagine are less bad than the current system. E.g. for a DMCA dispute, each party could give YT maybe $5 to have a look at the case, winner will get his share back. If the case isn't obvious both get it back and a court has to decide. Non-payment means yielding. For YT vs user, YT would only pay in case their algorithm is wrong. Those cases would need some 3rd party arbitrator, thou...
It's ridiculous easy to sensor the web for corporations and Governments (but for some reason, they keep saying that once something it's posted online, it's over and it will stay there forever)... which is why I use youtube-dl for the videos that I really want to keep...
Why wouldn't Youtube pass on any extremist material on to the FBI before making it unavailable for the wider public?