We had YouTube take down our church livestream in the middle of service, claiming that we violated their community guidelines (we didn't). The clip in question was blank, and the note said that it was an automated takedown. I immediately appealed, switched our stream key, and let everyone know to refresh their browsers. But still, serious interruption to people's worship because google relies too-heavily on automation.
This is the problem with combining services for infrastructure and services for discovery. Discovery, by definition, requires a carefully curated approach to filter based on interest, applicability. This forces discovery services to take for the material shown and promoted. Given the scale that services like YouTube operate at, this requires automation that is invariably going to make stupid mistakes.
Infrastructure services on the other hand are dumb pipes, giving them a lot more leeway. Historically (e.g., the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, the recent debates around Cloudflare and the far-right), society has proven to be far more tolerant of services simply hosting a video or a stream, than services promoting it or deriving benefit from it (e.g., through ads).
Arguably, the latter is also the more critical. A lot of smaller-scale entities (like your church) can tolerate losing promotion for a day or a week far better than they can tolerate losing their infrastructure.
Youtube claims to be both though.
This comment is sort of victim blaming.
...but I agree that people should not rely upon social media companies whenever possible to distribute content and communications, due to increasing efforts to police content.
I may be reading it wrong, but to me it seems less like victim blaming and more like explaining the situation that lead to the environment that lead to this event.
This was exactly my intent. The problem is with YouTube trying to be a discovery service, while simultaneously requiring the use of its own infrastructure service to benefit from discovery. What is needed is discovery services that are not tied to any underlying infrastructure.
So in the case where Youtube's automated filter flags an infraction, what about them just removing channels from the discovery service rather than pulling the underlying infrastructure out from under them?
I would think that would work, although I could see it going south in the case of "Google tried to hide the fact that they allowed this video to stay up."
What emphasizes this issue further is the insane content you can wind up browsing after just 3-4 “suggested” clips on YouTube. I’ve watched folks get from pretty banal comedy sketches and the like to Ben Shapiro and Jordan Sather with no effort on brand new accounts.
Indeed. The best place I have found new accounts is a bigger youtube recommending them. Namely Austin McConnell.
I would guess there are some passages from many religions' sacred texts which could get your whole channel deleted if promoted. Unless there's a written or unwritten exception.
The conflict or tension that troubles me the most is between platforms' incentive to have the most vague and broad TOS and users' reasonable expectation of consistency and explanation.
The same tension exists in government police/arrest powers and resulted in many historic documents and rights. YT is not a government but their power rivals many actual countries. It will be interesting to see if the same revolutionary actions result. I don't think it's clear yet that it will or could happen.
* This section of the Bible is copyright BMG Music Group and has been removed. This is your first strike.
Turn Turn Turn by the Byrds
To paraphrase Red Dwarf:
Newsreader: Good evening. Here is the news on Friday, the 27th of Geldof. Archeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." The page has been universally condemned by church leaders.
That's a quote, not a paraphrase
I can't find an authoritative source for the original quote, so I found something that I believe to be close but didn't want to give it the authority of "quote" as it could be innacurate.
Many bible translations are in fact copyrighted.
Hopefully not by unrelated third parties that like to release bots that claim all sorts of random content is under their copyright and take it down.
I don’t think this is surprising? KJV, for example, is such a foundational and original cornerstone of English language poetry that if it were to have been created in 2020 I would fully expect it to be copyrighted.
It's under copyrightish in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version#Copyright_s...
"[T]the letters patent are held by the Queen's Printer [… T]he Queen's Printer is now Cambridge University Press […] Cambridge University Press permits the reproduction of at most 500 verses for 'liturgical and non-commercial educational use; if their prescribed acknowledgement is included, the quoted verses do not exceed 25% of the publication quoting them and do not include a complete Bible book."
The monarchy is founded on "the grace of God" so it makes a kind of twisted sense that they should collect the license fee to peddle God's book.
Given that God himself is credited as author of at least parts of the Bible, the "life of the author plus 70 years" doctrine of copyright should help keep the Bible out of the public domain for the foreseeable future.
It's OK nobody agrees on who actually represents god so nobody has clear standing to sue or rather everyone thinks they do and would most certainly spend the next century suing each other and you could claim to need to hold any suit against you until all their suits against each other were settled.
> nobody agrees on who actually represents god
That's only true if “nobody” can reach up to approximately 1 billion people.
“Not everybody” ≠ “nobody”.
Is the crown ripping off God? Or have they been giving the Almighty his royalty checks every month?
It sounds like an MIT license.
THIS INCOMPLETE NON BIBLE BOOK IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND EXPRESS OR IMPLIED...
But would it have attained that status if it could not Have been reproduced easily?
I find it surprising; inhibiting the copying of the Bible would seem to contradict most of the goals of the Church.
Many (most?) of the full texts are available online through authorized sources. Copyright is exercised as a means of quality control as much as if not more than as a mean of generating revenue/restricting distribution.
>through authorized sources
That can be just God's bookshelf itself right?
>Copyright is exercised as a means of quality control
Is that God too, or another 'authorized source' like the Vatican? ;)
Protestant translations tend to be held by publishers, I believe, with Zondervan being the biggest player, I think. I can't speak too much about how all of that works.
For Catholic translations there's a requirement that a Bishop sign off on the accuracy/suitability of the translation and its accompanying commentary (at the minimum, a Catholic Bible will include references to parallel/related passages in the other parts of the Bible and usually also includes significant additional commentary). The most commonly used Catholic Bible in the US has its copyright held by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops who have published the full text on their website as well as have authorized multiple (20, according to Wikipedia) publishers to produce print editions.
A lot of Christian worship music is also copyrighted, and churches pay for licenses.
To be more specific, there is no royalty required to perform music as part of a worship service. However, the church is required to pay to license sheet music for all performers.
>there is no royalty required to perform music as part of a worship service.
An in-person service yes. But if it's streamed online I think a license is required.
I just looked and it appears to be the case based on the music publisher's website that I looked at. When I used to do liturgical music, there was no such thing as streamed online.
Imagine posting some of the things our president posts or says verbatim. Just start with the whole white genocide and banning of muslims....
That gets people banned
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-donald-trump-suspend...
I imagine most people would get fired for such an offense. Not sure why I was getting downvoted.
Psalm 137:9
Yes, there's context. How often does context help?
The whole of Psalm 137 is actually quite relevant in this whole censorship discussion.
"By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willows we hung our harps, for there our captors requested a song; our tormentors demanded songs of joy: 'Sing us a song of Zion.' How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?"
Be sure to check out the awesome Reggae take on it by The Melodians, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tAb5rYRXvs, as well as the great pop cover by Boney-M, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYK9iCRb7S4. Although, unfortunately, yes, both versions leave out the bit about dashing infants against rocks. After all, this is a foreign land, and if the Psalm were sung in full, it would be unacceptable to our captors!
When it’s that easy to fix surely it’s pretty easy to say “goto otherstreamingsite.com”?
Why is the narrative “Google relies too heavily on automation”?
Why not “I rely too heavily on Google”?
In the attention economy all it takes is giving them less attention.
I totally get what you mean, but there's the thing where most people know how to use the most common platforms, and youtube is probably among the top, so it's the first thing people try. Go tell your grandma her next service is going to be on Twitch and she'll think you're planning to attend it high.
This does not invalidate your questions, but still it's something to be considered.
Grandma isn't going to YouTube and looking up the "Holy Trinity Church Sunday service", she is just clicking on the link the deacon sent her. As long as the page it sends her to has a play button like her VCR remote she will be fine.
This is true for the majority of people, but not everyone. If my mom gets to a page she has never seen before, even if it's as simple as clicking the "play" triangle in the middle of the screen, she may be confused and ask for directions before proceeding.
You reminded me of my own mom.
My mother (diagnosed schizophrenia in the '70s) tried to get to her webmail one day, but the ISP had moved the page. She got some generic 404 message like: "We couldn't find the page you were looking for."
She immediately spazzed out asking who the "We" was and how did they know what she was looking for!?? She shutdown the computer and many years later, to this day, will not use a computer. So yeah, some people handle disparities in user experience better than others, and mental health is a thing in the population at large.
> google relies too-heavily on automation
Consider that you may be relying too much on a free service that you paid nothing for.
I'm not saying that google sucks. It does. But it will never get better unless you actually move to another service and take your money with you.
> Paid nothing for.
People pay everyday with their data. If it was truly a free service that provided no benefit to Google do you think they'd keep running it?
They definitely have no aversion to shutting shit down. I guarantee the only reason they really shutdown google plus was because they weren't getting as much datamining out of it as they wanted.
Did you guys find a self-hosted solution to this? I think we should really start self-hosting all aspects of free speech content, or at least be able to switch to self-hosting at a moment's notice.
For live content, you can host your own RTMP ingest server and serve HLS video using this Docker container:
https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx-rtmp/tre...
If you're a church or nonprofit, you can run it for free on Azure by applying for a sponsorship. I wrote automation to setup and teardown the system on Azure: https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure
Video playback is handled by Video.js with the HLS plugin. Our existing frontend web server reverse-proxies to the Docker instance serving HLS playlists and video chunks.
I used this software from 2016 until about 6 months ago. We use Vimeo + Restream nowadays. If we ever needed to self-host again, it would be easy to switch back.
If you read the old testament word for word on YouTube it violates their policies and would get taken down. They dictate modern day public appropriateness. Turns out it goes hand in hand with advertising dollars.
Same goes for Mark Twain.
The furry AV community has been seeing lots of policy takedowns for furry convention streams on YouTube.
This was especially apparent during a POC DJ's stream at a recent virtual furry convention.
I suspect that theres a certain number of reports to viewership that allows streams to be taken down by trolls.
I regret to to say that I'm quite familiar with religious text, thanks to my childhood & younghood.
Religious texts and religious conversations use words like war, murder and rape quite generously. Those words used mostly in context of discussion, or prohibition, but automated systems cannot yet distinguish that reliably. There's a great chance that's what happened to your stream.
Should be noted however, it's not so rare that religion orders their followers to do unfathomably gory things to other human beings. Which is sadly excused by most people quickly and in great effort, instead of scrunitizing further and pondering on it.
It was bots will.
You should be ex-communicated for that joke. :-)