YouTube Won't Distinguish Between Misinformation and Reporting, So It Suspended My Channel
The platform punished The Hill's morning show, Rising, for showing a clip of Trump speaking.
On December 9, 2020, YouTube announced it would take down videos that alleged widespread fraudulent voting in the 2020 presidential election. A month later, after President Donald Trump's lies about his loss inflamed a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol, YouTube strengthened those policies to prevent the spread of election-related misinformation.
What casual observers might not understand, however, is just how far the policy goes. Not only does YouTube punish channels that spread misinformation, but in many cases, it also punishes channels that report on the spread of misinformation. The platform makes no distinction between the speaker and the content creator. If a channel produces a straight-news video that merely shows Trump making an unfounded election-related claim—perhaps during a speech, in an interview, or at a rally—YouTube would punish the channel as if the channel had made the claim, even if no one affiliated with the channel endorsed Trump's lies.
I learned this firsthand on Thursday after YouTube suspended my show—Rising—for violating the election misinformation policy, despite the fact that neither my co-hosts nor I had said anything to indicate that we believe the election was rigged.
YouTube has temporarily suspended @thehill's channel for violating one of its policies. For now, you can watch Rising on https://t.co/qTmNtQLeDB and Facebook under @HillTVLive. Sign up for daily emails at https://t.co/fyPCXv2P5n.
— Rising (@RisingTheHill) March 3, 2022
Let me explain: In addition to my role as a senior editor at Reason, I also work for The Hill as a co-host of Rising, the news website's morning show, which airs on YouTube. My co-hosts are Ryan Grim of The Intercept and Kim Iversen, an independent commentator.
Last night, we learned that YouTube had suspended The Hill's entire account for the next seven days, preventing us from publishing new videos. The reason was election misinformation, stemming from two previous videos. The first video in question, which was not aired as part of Rising, was raw footage of Trump's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 26, during which he made false claims about the election.
The second video contained a clip of Fox News host Laura Ingraham interviewing Trump, who claimed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is only happening because of a rigged election. Following that clip, Grim and I both criticized Trump in general—my co-host even called the former president a mad man—but neither of us explicitly corrected the "rigged election" claim.
No one who has watched Rising, read my work at Reason, or read Grim's work at The Intercept, could possibly come away with the impression that either of us thinks the 2020 election was rigged. We have criticized that false claim, both on the show and in our respective publications.
But YouTube has taken the position that merely acknowledging an utterance of the false claim is the same thing as making the claim yourself unless you correct and disavow it elsewhere in the video. (It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that a false election claim makes an appearance. YouTube is thus moving in the direction of trigger warnings.)
This is a policy that effectively outlaws straight news reporting on YouTube. Say a news channel creates a video that merely intends to provide viewers with footage of a Trump speech or interview—minus any additional commentary—where he makes claims about the election. That video is, according to YouTube, in violation of its misinformation policy if the creator does not call out or correct the claims.
It is one thing for YouTube to ban people who are making false claims. It is quite another for YouTube to prohibit people from educating their viewers about the reality that the former president is still spreading these false claims. But the policy makes no distinction: It treats the report about misinformation as misinformation itself unless clearly labeled—even in a video where no commentary is being offered at all.
Such a policy could also imperil work being done by content creators that are trying to counter misinformation. For instance, a news video that introduced a Trump speech by merely noting, "former President Trump continued to call into question the legitimacy of the 2020 election in his recent speech, and said the following," could be flagged for not sufficiently rebutting his false claims. Imagine trying to report on live events.
I am quite surprised that YouTube would willingly put itself in the position of having to vet all content for election-related misinformation, including content produced by channels that are clearly not promoting such claims, even if these channels occasionally reference the fact that Trump, a pivotal national political figure, is indeed making them. This is certainly not doing any favors for Rising's viewers, who are well aware that the show's hosts disagree with Trump's claims that he was cheated.
YouTube is a private company, of course, and it's free to design whatever policies it wants. No one is owed a video channel. But I don't think most people are aware of just how vast the misinformation policy has become. I understood that the platform would punish content creators who made false statements about the election. I had no idea that YouTube would punish news channels for reporting the news.
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“YouTube is a private company, of course, and it’s free to design whatever policies it wants.”
Yup. So let’s stop criticizing them. Instead let’s appreciate the fact that YouTube / Google is on the same side as Koch / Reason libertarianism 99% of the time — we both want open borders and Democrats running the government.
#LibertariansForTrustingBigTech
OpenBordersLiberal-tarian, you ignorant koch-licking slut.
Sarcasm detector needs emergency repairs.
OBL is an anti-market Trump humper. No sarcasm missed.
Ken gonna hate this one:
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/06/04/how-and-why-the-u-s-government-perpetrated-the-2014-coup-in-ukraine/
The second landmark item of evidence that it had been a coup and nothing at all democratic or a ‘revolution’, was the 26 February 2014 phone-conversation between the EU’s Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton and her agent in Ukraine investigating whether the overthrow had been a revolution or instead a coup; he was Estonia’s Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet, and he told her that he found that it had been a coup, and that “somebody from the new coalition” had engineered it — but he didn’t know whom that “somebody” was. Both Ashton and Paet were shocked at this finding, but they proceeded immediately to ignore that matter, and to discuss only the prospects for Europe’s investors in Ukraine, to be able to get their money back — their obsession was Ukraine’s corruption. Ashton told Paet that she had herself told the Maidan demonstrators, “you need to find ways in which you can establish a process that will have anti-corruption at its heart.” So, though the EU was unhappy that this had been a coup, they were far more concerned to protect their investors. In any case, the EU clearly wasn’t behind Ukraine’s coup. Equally clearly, they didn’t much care whether it was a coup or instead what the U.S. Government said, a ‘revolution’.
The network behind this coup had actually started planning for the coup back in 2011. That’s when Eric Schmidt of Google, and Jared Cohen, also now of Google but still continuing though unofficially as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief person tasked to plan ‘popular movements’ to overthrow both Yanukovych in Ukraine, and Assad in Syria.
Then, on 1 March 2013, the implementation of this plan started: the first “tech camp” to train far-right Ukrainians how to organize online the mass-demonstrations against Yanukovych, was held inside the U.S. Embassy in Kiev on that date, which was over nine months before the Maidan demonstrations to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected President started, on 20 November 2013.
“Hahn’s 2018 book Ukraine Over the Edge states on pages 204-209:
“Yet another pro-Maidan sniper, Ivan Bubenchik, emerged to acknowledge that he shot and killed Berkut [the Government’s police who were protecting Government buildings] before any protesters were shot that day [February 20th]. In a print interview, Bubenchik previews his admission in Vladimir Tikhii’s documentary film, Brantsy, that he shot ahd killed two Berkut commanders in the early morning hours of February 20 on the Maidan. … B”
“Hahn downplays U.S. heading of the coup. But shortly before the coup, the CIA secretly trained in Poland the Right Sector founder/leader Dmitriy Yarosh (“Dmytro Jarosz”), who headed Ukraine’s snipers. So, even the Ukrainian ones were working for the U.S.
On 19 November 2017 was issued Gian Micalessin’s “The hidden truth about Ukraine – Part 1” & II Summarizing them here: Two Georgian snipers say Saakashvili hired them in Tblisi for a U.S.-backed operation. But they know only about the “Georgian Legion” part. They think it was patterned on Georgia’s Rose Revolution. They each got $1000 for the operation and flew to Kiev on 15 January and were promised $5000 on return. (9:00) “We had to provoke the ‘Berkut’ police so they would attack the people. By February 15th the situation [at the Maidan] was getting worse every day. Then the first shots were fired.””
Trump is
anathemamisinformation. You quoted Trump. Therefore you areanathemadisinformation.Welcome to the reductive world of religion, whether you wanted it or not.
This.
And we all saw it coming, but somehow the Reasonistas never did.
They aren’t paid to notice certain things.
Demorgans theorem applies here: they are paid not to notice whole classes of things.
SURELY THERE’S BEEN SOME MISTAKE! If only Comrade Biden knew how loyal you are to The Party!
and then they came for Rico. and I did nothing because most of my long luxurious hippie hair is gone
Build your own YouTube Robby!
Rumble and Odysee are things that exist.
So far…..
Rumble is looking to become a heavy-hitter in the near future. Let’s hope they have enough infrastructure to back it up. Odysee is still punching a few weight-classes down from where it would need to be.
“YouTube is a private company, of course, and it’s free to design whatever policies it wants.”
Except that they are doing it at the behest of / under threat from / as a favor for the party currently in control of the federal government.
Google was never a private company anyway. Facebook and Google got as big as they did due to government investment and sponsorship, either directly via In-Q-Tel, or through their proxies.
Obama: ‘Google, Facebook Would Not Exist’ Without Government Funding https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-google-facebook-would-not-exist-without-government-funding
Privatized surveillance of the citizenry. It is kind of brilliant, gets around that silly constitution.
If you feel like you’ve seen this name recently, it’s because he’s referenced in the article I linked to above…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015,[3] executive chairman of Alphabet Inc.[4][5][6] from 2015 to 2017,[3] and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020.[7]
He also founded “The Groundwork” back before the 2016 election. This company was created to tie into the back end of the tech companies in order to help Democrat candidates, specifically Hillary Clinton.
This company’s existence was probably one of the reasons that the Democrats were so confident in 2016. They had control over so many important lines of communication.
That’s not all: Google employees helped the Clinton campaign massively, in addition to all the donations.
“You didn’t build that.”
Well, in the case of Google and Facebook, it’s actually true.
What’s your point?
Also ignore the billions of public dollars they get, emails showing coordination with democrats, unequal applications for rules (contract issue), etc.
Seems like the channel is back up.
I do watch it – not every day – but it’s always interesting to see Kim’s takes on current events and contrast them with Robby’s and Ryan’s. Ryan is pretty liberal, but he sometimes get things right. Robby is Robby for the most part. Kim is interesting, though. I’m not sure if she’s supposed to be conservative or libertarian or independent – which is kind of refreshing.
I especially enjoyed her bit the other day, debunking some of the propaganda coming out of the Ukraine conflict, where she owned up to the fact that she was taken in by some of it, and how and why she was wrong, and why we should all be skeptical, and the lessons she learned.
OK, so they can’t post new videos until Thursday, but the channel is still available for viewing.
Meanwhile, Kim had her own explanation / commentary video today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-oEaACklrc
Wait …
Wait …
Whose ox is being gored now?
“YouTube is a private company, of course, and it’s free to design whatever policies it wants.”
Bullshit.
Most obviously, they cannot design a policy of “no blacks”, or “no cripples”.
From the Declaration of (American) Independence:
“”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men . . . ”
So governments are to secure our natural rights. Liberty (to speak, for instance) is one of them. Being equal is another. You Tube violates both of those.
Grow a pair Robby; boycott youtube. Convince all of your corporate employers to not advertise on youtube and to not post to youtube. If they won’t, quit.
This is peak idiocy. Well done dumbass.
Why, thank you.
But it is nowhere the peak on this site.
How so?
Explain why, Raspberry.
He was self-referencing.
I am quite surprised that YouTube would willingly put itself in the position of having to vet all content for election-related misinformation,
YouTube doesn’t need to review all the content. They have an army of left wingers willing to prove their loyalty by doing it for free.
Even at that rate, they aren’t reducing content willingly.
more like willfully
Has Soave not been paying attention at all to what the Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration have been demanding of the platforms over the last few years. Here seems to be unaware that vetting everything is exactly what the Dems have wanted.
I don’t know, but perhaps if they are going to this level to censor, perhaps there is actually something to hide?
Just sayin’…
They are not hiding it.
The goal is total suppression of dissenting opinion.
Vote for fascists, get fascism.
We’ll end up voting for fascists even if we don’t even vote.
“I don’t know, but perhaps if they are going to this level to censor, perhaps there is actually something to hide?
Just sayin”
This can’t be a serious comment, can it?
…but, Robbie, for Wales?
Nice. God what a great movie. May be time to watch it again
You may not be interested in the gleichshaltung but the gleichshaltung is interested in you.
every censorship effort ever winds up over-broad
They are always targeted and very specific.
We have been saying that Alphabet’s and the other Big Tech platforms are insane and against a culture of free speech. The Reason staff have pooh-poohed any concerns as being anti-free speec.
And now they have come for you, and you seem to think you should be treated special because you are “straight news”, you are in the journalism guild? That you are actually anti-Trump. Maybe now you will realize this behavior on the part of the Tech companies is a tremendous cultural problem that will make political discourse impossible.
Sorry Robby, this is what you cheered for and demanded you ignorant fascist twat. Funny how everything is a lie when you don’t like the person so they deserve the banning because, private company doing government’s dirty work, but as soon as it’s you for the exact same fucking thing you’re all “if only comrade Susan knew”.
“And you seem to think you should be treated special because you are ‘straight news.'”
But Reason isn’t even straight news. They offer more opinion/editorial style content than straight fact reporting. Even the stuff that begins as fact reporting often has plentiful injection of editorializing language and characterizations.
Case in point: Robby said he was just reporting the news about the 2020 election.
Actually he was broadcasting his opinion about the election and his theory about what caused a disruptive protest at a building.
A month later, after President Donald Trump’s lies about his loss inflamed a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol
Cleanest election ever narrative is misinformation Robbie.
Ignore the 2 dozen complete lawsuits showing illegal election changes. A basis for many of trumps statements. Youre pushing misinformation.
The dreaded “W” word is creeping into the narrative as further facts come out.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/03/wisconsin-special-counsel-finds-widespread-election-fraud-in-2020-nursing-homes/
This has been going on for decades. I mentioned it right after the elections and the usual biden sycophants denied it despite the half dozen links o gave them. Nursokg homes have been known as a source of fraud for a long time.
Even worrying over January 6 is a lie.
Whether or not the whole thing was orchestrated by outside groups, it is indisputable that this was not a serious threat in any way, despite the misinformation about bringing handcuffs and hunting AOC and all the other ridiculous fictions pushed in the media. It was a modest number of people mostly wandering around unaware of the scuffle that preceded them. Note how polite and reserved even the insane people were inside the capital.
Compare and contrast with all of the assaults, arson, vandalism, theft, murder and surprisingly rape associated with “mostly peaceful” protests that went on for most of the year, cheered and actually funded by the politicians of the left.
Even bringing it up like that makes you out as not just a liar, but a coward. Because the only reason to include it is to wave the flag of surrender and loudly scream ‘but I am one of you!!! Please don’t shoot!!!!”.
This is all of those far left actors being shocked when #MeToo turned on them, even as they proclaimed their support louder and louder.
I’m highly doubtful their policy is to ban reporting on election misinformation. It’s much more likely this is just another example of what Techdirt has been reporting on for years, that content moderation at scale is extremely hard to do well. Mr. Soave is far from the first to experience something like this. Maybe we’ll even see this on Techdirt soon as another example in their ongoing series.
Robby, you use the words ‘false claim’ 6 times. Almost as if you are propagandizing to convince people of something through repetition. If you want to call Trump a liar, then be a man and call him a fucking liar. Otherwise, use the proper term for news reporting when something has not been proven, i.e., alleged, as in Trump alleged that the election was rigged.. The grown-ups know what it means.
Journalistic integrity. That is the thing that your little show should have been removed for, but wasn’t. Just because CNN, NPR and Youtube have gone full TDS doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still hold yourself to the standards.
Amen. Real fact reporting entails not making sweeping and absolute claims about things one doesn’t have sufficient evidence to prove/disprove. Robby’s writing is more op/Ed than fact and it’s lazy. He takes shortcuts by declaring statements false, rather than giving the full context and allowing his audience to come to their conclusions based on the evidence.
Thankfully, you’re still perfectly free to allege the 2016 election was stolen, however.
Build your own video streaming platform.
I understood that the platform would punish content creators who made false statements about the election. I had no idea that YouTube would punish news channels for reporting the news.
Robby doesn’t read the comments, because not only did we KNOW this, we repeatedly MENTIONED it in the comments, for the last few years.
There is such a thing as hysterical blindness, so why be surprised that there’s also dogmatic blindness?
Oops! Better retract that Mitt Romney for president endorsement before twitter takes you down too, Robby. IF they do ENB will never link to you again.
You can keep calling Trump’s accusations baseless all you want, but the truth is coming out, as is its want. The Wisconsin special prosecutor issued a report on the illegal and fraudulent election activities in assisted living facilities during the 2020 election, and it says that Trump is right and Robby is wrong wrong wrong.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/03/wisconsin-special-counsel-finds-widespread-election-fraud-in-2020-nursing-homes/
This is an interesting study on the numerous anomalies present in the 2020 election. Biden’s victory was an historical miracle.
https://democracyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Chronicles-October-2021-Bidens-Inexplicable-Victory.pdf
This “interesting study” has few citations, often making claims with dubious support, and the statistics it references are based on the finest of cherry-pickings with no actual casualty to election fraud. I could easily counter with a bunch of personally selected figures that would make Biden’s victory look right as rain. Neither would tell you a thing other than that the person who created it had an agenda and selected whatever figures would appear to align with it. Statistical misrepresentation is a very easy thing to perform and every side uses it to their advantage to a certain extent.
Simply put, this study has zero merit and no one worth their salt would take this seriously. Even as far as stolen election “evidence” goes, this one is exceedingly weak. I’ve seen much better.
Bwaaaa ha ha ha … sucks to be you. Private company, indeed. You yourself have a phone, right? So, that means you pay a company so much money every month so you can say whatever into your phone. Like, oh, what exactly you laid out here. You could hold conference call with 20 people every hour to say exactly this like in the article, right? And the phone company isn’t. going. to. block. your. call. because. you. might. be. spreading. air-quote. misinformation. end-air-quote.
But, sure, go ahead and keep saying Google/YouTube/Formerly “Don’t Be Evil” is a private company. Go build your own YouTube look-alike so you don’t suspended for pulling a stupid stunt like this.
Reason will never understand corporate fascism is also bad.
You might say it takes also takes cooperative corporations to really have fascism.
The video was of Donald Trump saying something he’s not allowed to say. They banned Trump on YouTube himself for saying things our government won’t let him say. Why would you be treated differently?We won’t get the First Amendment back in this country until the progressives no longer have 100% control of the government. Eight months–that’s all they’ve got left.
They’re trying to get Putin to lob a nuke so they can declare marshal law.
Me and my wife once uploaded a naughty video to YouTube and it was up for two whole months before they took it down. True story.
Your “wife” is inflatable isn’t she?
She is. That’s probably why they kept it up so long.
Or that’s why you did.
Hey-o!
Stop using YouTube to host your videos.
You’re welcome.
^THIS……
I cannot believe the shock.
Like, literally cannot believe. How could you have lived through the last half decade and have any shock at all that discussing topics the left doesn’t like could get you banned?? It isn’t like this is a secret. There have been hundreds of screeds about it posted here in the comments section, bit more importantly, you can see it in the language used on the right, everywhere on social media.
Nobody says “covid 19”, for fear they be banned. They use nonsense words like “the food”. They say “the p word” instead of pandemic. They tiptoe all around things related to this topic.
They do the same about the election, medical information, global warming, and most worrying, about any political opinion they think the left will attack.
This has to be willful ignorance at this point. Hell, it would have been willful ignorance back when Alex Jones got banned. Nobody is even pretending that this isn’t happening. “Both sides” are on about it all the time, with the only difference being that one side says they are not banning hard enough.
And Robby was the only reliable voice on this subject at reason… Yet he didn’t even remotely get it.
That is….. Sad.
Or we can boldly call it the Communist Chinese Virus, because it originated in Communist China, and the Communist Chinese let workers fly all around the globe for weeks / months after they locked down internal travel.
I say boldly because I have no (anti)social media accounts to be scanned & banned.
And the real point is that the way to combat such statements is to counter them with facts.
Banning speech never ends well. It often results in people believing the banned things all the more fiercely. See:. Bible, the. Koran, the.
Google got me. I even checked twice. I typed “the coof”, and it autocorrected to the food, so I changed it back and backed up to make sure it stuck.
And it still changed it after submission. Damn you, autocorrect!
Either one word for you, or three words for you;
DuckDuckGo
If you’re at all familiar with Google and their automated systems this should come as no shock at all to you.
Tyrannical tech is cool ‘cuz AuToMaTeD.
Wirrd how the automation works 90% in one direction. And relies on human maintained lists.
The oligarchy is a private company.
Let us examine the ban and your objection.
You got banned for talking about other people saying something that is banned as “misinformation”. And you agree that it is misinformation and should be banned… But you should be allowed to talk about it because you agree with them and they totally should get that.
Ok, strike one for free speech right there.
But let’s look further.
They claim was that the election was “stolen”.
This was immediately labeled misinformation. Immediately.
So, let us think about your righteous indignation at this misinformation. Without any investigation of any sort, it was misinformation.
So the next time there is an election, are all parties banned from claiming there were irregularities? What if a Republican in Maricopa county rigs the sheriff election? Can the Democrat even make the allegation?
Or is it only Republicans that are banned from making allegations?
Hillary Clinton still claims Trump was not the legitimate president. Somehow that is not “misinformation”, even though we now have fairly complete documentation of exactly how her campaign made the whole thing up, engaged willing accomplices in the government and media, and pushed a complete fabrication on the American people. But since the chairman of Alphabet (Google and YouTube) is a close supporter, that is just fine and dandy. And even Robby does not call it “Misinformation”. And nobody is calling for her to be banned.
This entire phenomenon is outrageous, and the notion that there is a single libertarian anywhere who thinks banning “misinformation” is a good idea, or even acceptable in any way is astonishing. Every libertarian knows that the antidote to bad speech is more speech.
Why is anyone who is not a DNC party activist pretending that this is anything other than a partisan power grab, attempting to prevent any rivals from being heard?
Whining about being the by-catch on a net cast too widely is almost as bad as being the censor yourself. This is about party approved voices being the only voices. It isn’t even a little bit ambiguous.
Those who still don’t get it should read the works of Ann Rommelman. Her reporting on Antifa documented a smaller version of this same gambit. But instead of tech companies as enforcers they had street thugs. Both used willing accomplices in the media.
She talks about physical world censors, activists with umbrellas blocking cameras from unapproved sources. How is this any different than Google and Facebook and Twitter blocking Robby from saying his piece about elections?
The current communications oligarchy is just a bigger, better organized and more powerful version of the thugs she described in her reporting.
Why is this so difficult to perceive is you are on the left?
That’s a very good point about antifa, something that hadn’t occurred to me before.
You’re correct, they are fundamentally the exact same. It’s simply a difference of medium.
I believe it’s Nancy Rommelman, not Ann.
Corect. Should have checked before hitting submit.
So your issue is antitrust. Libertarians are finding all sorts of new roles for the government lately.
That marketplace was great for you until it started kicking you in the nuts. What failed cowards you are.
It’s not the marketplace restricting the flow of ideas.
Ideas have never been more free to flow than they are now, unfortunately for us all.
Bullshit. You and your Fellow Travelers make coordinated efforts to silence all dissent.
Yet here you are.
Have you not been given direction on this? You sound like Kamala Harris trying to answer a direct question, stammering around looking for a random phrase to connect to a talking point.
Nobody said a single syllable about government in any way.
I get it. Your puppeteers want complete control, and you have to say something, even if it is irrelevant and mind-numbingly stupid.
If you don’t want the government to force Twitter to do something, then what are we having a conversation about? You’re whining that a private company is doing something you don’t like? Get in line behind me, I have some issues with Exxon I’d like to bring up.
Nancy, but otherwise you are on a roll
Businesses get to make their own policy for uses their resources. That was always the case when we were talking about whether restaurants could boot people out for being black.
If you want to stop lies from spreading, you report that the 2020 election was fair, and any future election that is stolen should be reported as such.
There are fucking facts in this universe, and you’re not going to find them on FOX News or scum Russian propaganda on the internet.
SUBMIT, AND YOU WILL BE FREE!
/tony
Actually they abide by their contracts.
Tony will listen to CNN or Rachel Maddow all day long, but only Fox News is miSinF0rmaTIoN.
i don’t have cable anymore, but you’re not wrong about which ones tell the truth and which one lies all the time.
It’s not easy to decide what is truth in the best of times, but here’s a clue about FOX News: It’s them vs. every mainstream journalistic outfit on the planet. It could be that their hysterical racist constant anti-Democratic drumbeat is all the facts and everyone else is in a giant global conspiracy to report the same lies. Just not likely.
But you’re not being manipulated. Not by FOX News. Nope. I wonder why the CIA lets them stay on the air.
I don’t get my news from Fox or CNN.
Ana you may have noticed that democrats are threatening Fox, and you are just echoing the party line.
There not much point debating with Marxists like Tony, we just need to get rid of them. If they can’t learn to leave people alone then they have to go.
No, FOX News lies all the time. All day, straight into your earholes. I can’t convince you otherwise until you make an effort to turn it off for a few weeks.
I don’t watch Fox, Tony.
But you couldn’t convince me of anything anyway, Tony, because you are dumb as a rock and know nothing.
God, I was hoping to avoid that name for a couple of days.
I was reading Taibbi’s Substack piece on Putin and my stomach churned when I had the thought that Rachel Maddow and Anna Politkovskaya have both been described with the same word: Journalist. It’s an insult to the job, and to a truly courageous woman.
Businesses get to make their own policy for uses their resources. That was always the case when we were talking about whether restaurants could boot people out for being black.
But then we decided THEY CAN’T DO THAT and we made it illegal because the businesses WERE VIOLATING PEOPLE’S RIGHTS. Remember, Tony?
But you guys rejected that argument on free-market grounds, every time. It’s one of libertarianism’s founding arguments.
I like government regulation, and I believe government should regulate the media.
I’m not “you guys”, I’m just me. I believe the original federal civil rights act that prohibited racial discrimination by businesses providing public accommodations was a good and necessary law. “Jim Crow” coerced businesses into enforcing racial discrimination, and, as I have repeatedly said here, the government cannot be allowed to contract out violations of our rights prohibited to government to private businesses. Unfortunately, state laws and case law have allowed a ludicrous expansion of the definition of “public accommodation”, to the point of coercing private businesses in flagrant violation of their own rights. This is the position I have expressed here consistently.
I believe government should regulate the media.
Because you’re a moron. Government has no businesses regulating the content of expression, nor may it enlist/coerce private businesses into doing that for them. Again, this has been my consistent position here.
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!
The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying, “I love you”
I hear babies cry, and I watched them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!
You were paid not to listen
Now your house is on fire.
—Tears For Fears
Vote the cheating, seditious sniveling incompetent Democrat cowards off our backs and out of our lives!
We did. Point is, it didn’t matter.
^
In business, I never cared to run the meeting; I wanted to take the minutes.
So, Robby….
Should you be allowed to make true claims about the 2020 election?
Because you can get banned for doing that.
Louder With Crowder got banned for their efforts after the election. They sent a couple of reporters to investigate the locations of several suspicious voters. They had the reporters physically go to the address listed and confirm that the person in question did not live there.
The locations were empty lots, bridge overpasses, industrial sites.
They explicitly and repeatedly said they made no claims as to the validity of the election. They said they were using the official voter records and even gave the state elections officials a chance to comment on the story and explain why the addresses were listed.
Taken down as Misinformation.
Every syllable indisputably true.
So… Should you be allowed to publish provably true statements? Or can they call it Misinformation and ban you?
“Allowed” is decided by the private company in question.
Zitter or Gapcrap or the whatever the fuck pro-Trump social media companies out there are all perfectly happy banning anyone and everyone who does say facts, so it seems pretty fair to me.
“Allowed” is decided by the private company in question.
No grasshopper, it is not.
Okay, so who do I ask whether I can trample all over your property against your will? Joe Biden?
So you want a civil rights law that protects your right to say whatever you want on private social media. I mean, it’s literally the opposite of libertarian, but it’s certainly an idea.
I guess the good old days of no child porn on Twitter will be over.
No, Tony, I was just answering your question: government certainly could do this, but it’s not what I want.
What I actually want is for government to stop subsidizing, colluding with, and protecting the social media giants so that the market can destroy them. Facebook and Google are not private companies, they are minions and creations of the state.
Deal. We’ll include News Corp. and Koch industries in our purge, which I’m sure you won’t mind.
Right. For the government to contract out violations of the Bill of Rights to private businesses is just as forbidden as the government violating rights directly. The government can’t kill you without due process of law, but they also can’t hire a private hit man to do it for them.
The government can kill you without due process. The government can’t violate your free speech.
Private companies can’t kill you without due process. Private companies can violate your free speech.
In doing so, YouTube cannot be considered a platform but a publisher.
And what you failed to see Tony is that YouTube is censoring users at the request of the government, which the latter has no right to do. Do you support government telling companies to censor individuals?
Hm, there’s actually a Wikipedia page called “Censorship of Youtube.” There isn’t even an entry for the United States.
I know I’ve said this before, but that is perhaps your stupidest post here ever.
YouTube and Facebook are not private companies in any meaningful sense.
Furthermore, I don’t know of anybody seriously suggesting forcing Facebook or Google to publish speech they don’t want to. All people are suggesting is that these companies lose all their government granted privileges if they don’t, like immunity from lawsuits.
“YouTube and Facebook are not private companies in any meaningful sense.”
Then whatever criteria you’re basing this excuse on can be applied to many, many companies.
I’m very much enjoying the new libertarian project of regulating every corporation you don’t like.
Yet you’re the one making an explicitly fascist argument.
Exit > Voice
Ditch YouTube.
Hahahahahahahahaha, funniest article in weeks.
Can’t think of a better smarmy dickless repeater for it to happen to – no, that’s a lie, but you’re still up there on needing to be hoisted on your own petard, Robby.
First the cocktail party invites, now deplatforming… Gosh, it’s almost like you’re being treated like one of those disgusting unvaxxed deplorables.
Maybe if you apologise in tears and virtue signal harder you’ll be allowed back in the big zher club again.
Kim Iversen is still hot as fuck at 41 and much smarter than Robby. He looked like a drooling idiot on the Ukraine show
Robby, here is a little paraphrased quote to remind you of what happened:
Good riddance to you, Robby. I hope they keep you off YouTube forever. As far as the left is concerned, as a self-proclaimed libertarian, you are just as bad as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Republicans, and Trumpsters. Learn to live with it.
May I be the last to tell Robby to GFHs
For an hour, media has been pushing this “reckless attack on nuclear plant that’s going to be way worse than Chernobyl, so NATO must intervene”. It’s a lie. There was never any meltdown risk, and video shows Ukrainian forces firing anti-armor rounds from the plant. It is another in a long line of lies from Ukraine. But here’s Zelenskyyyyyyyyyyy:
Video clearly shows #Ukraine army firing RPGs from inside the power plant compound. This tells me all I need to know about the propaganda effort of Zelenskyy and his crew.
NATO is trying to bait us, the public, into supporting war with Russia to protect their Ukraine grift.
“Zelensky issues an urgent new message warning that Russian artillery fire at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant risks a nuclear radiation catastrophe that threatens the entire continent. “You know the word Chernobyl,” he says grimly.”
[Video]
Oops, forgot link (it comes after Zelenskyyyyyyyy:)
https://twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/1499611532430168066?t=nD24yUj69v3GIu5A6f1zQw&s=19
Damn it, I’m redoing this whole thing.
For an hour, media has been pushing this “reckless attack on nuclear plant that’s going to be way worse than Chernobyl, so NATO must intervene”. It’s a lie. There was never any meltdown risk, and video shows Ukrainian forces firing anti-armor rounds from the plant. It is another in a long line of lies from Ukraine. But here’s Zelenskyyyyyyyyyyy:
https://twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/1499611532430168066?t=nD24yUj69v3GIu5A6f1zQw&s=19
Video clearly shows #Ukraine army firing RPGs from inside the power plant compound. This tells me all I need to know about the propaganda effort of Zelenskyy and his crew.
NATO is trying to bait us, the public, into supporting war with Russia to protect their Ukraine grift.
“Zelensky issues an urgent new message warning that Russian artillery fire at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant risks a nuclear radiation catastrophe that threatens the entire continent. “You know the word Chernobyl,” he says grimly.”
[Video]
https://twitter.com/emeriticus/status/1499557606523908122?t=jnTfXINqpRM-pBc2DygJ1g&s=19
Said it before and I’ll say it again: Zelensky is the Fauci of world leaders
[Link]
The West has been psyoped with Marvel and Star Wars analogies into blindly worshiping a Slav Trudeau who is trying to drag us into WWIII so his oligarch friends will have their investments protected
So, the Ukrainian army has absolutely no business defending the source of 25% the country’s electricity
Nardz thinks Ukraine defending itself against a Russian military incursion is a terrible act of aggression against Russia that justifies Putin’s war.
Robby, If you believe Trump is “lying” about the Election, Ballot & Voter Fraud, and its all “false” and made up, you haven’t done any of the homework that a real journalist is expected to do. You seem to know nothing about the hundreds of thousands of illegal votes turned up by the forensic audits in Arizona, and even the more limited ones in Georgia and Pennsylvania, such as they are, and the special counsel investigation in Wisconsin. In All Four States, the number of fraudulent ballots far exceeds the margin by which the election was supposedly decided. When you also consider the rules changes, enacted by bureaucrats or state officials without the constiutionally required legislative authority, there is no doubt that Pres. Trump is correct. How many of the more than 1,600 elements of fraud in the HereIsTheEvidence (dot) com database are you able to refute with contrary factual evidence? In fact, how many have you even bothered to learn about? Were you even aware such a database exists? Parroting the same DNCIA blather as the MSM, that “there’s nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along…” is unbecoming for The Hill, but positively scandalous for Reason, which has always had higher standards.
This was the purpose of the deibold misinformation campaign. They had former military intelligence feeding lies about using the machines to fix the election, with credible histories and resumes and seeming to speak from authority. And once the bait was set, they pulled the plug.
By discrediting one argument, they discredited some of the key supporters, and thus, all can be ingnored.
In 2000, after several attempts to gerrymander a recount to help Gore win failed, a coalition of press and Democrat activists did a private recount with the intention of proving that Bush was “selected, not elected”. They found that a full recount increased Bush’s margin of victory.
No such efforts have been allowed anywhere in these disputed elections. No access at all has been given to the most contentious evidence, the chain of custody and signatures on the mail in ballots.
Is it “misinformation” to wonder why not one of the contested states allowed a proper audit of the mail in ballots, particularly the signature match?
The line between “policing misinformation” and pushing propaganda is really, really thin.
a full recount increased Bush’s margin of victory.
The Gore campaign never asked for an actual recount. What they were suing for was to be allowed to subjectively reinterpret ballots on which no vote was cast (the infamous “dimpled chads” and other other spoiled ballots), and only in selected counties. Actual counts of actual votes always showed that Bush won. The Supreme Court rightly rejected a farcical “recount” including spoiled ballots.
I told you months ago this was coming.
Funny how Trump supporters celebrate when their enemies are censored. Principles shminciples. You guys are just like the leftists you hate.
Cope and seethe, progshit.
Notice how the leftist shill talking points have changed. For years it was “this doesn’t exist! You are just paranoid. There is no such thing as shadow banning!”.
Then it was ” they are fringe but cases. Probably white supremacists or something. Nothing to see here.”
Now we have graduated to “it is a private company, they can ban whoever they want! How dare you complain about what a private company does, you fascist!!”
All because someone said, “Hey, don’t do that…”
I didn’t say anything about YouTube. I simply observed that conservatives who supposedly support freedom of speech for everyone are celebrating censorship against people they don’t like. That makes them just like the leftists they hate.
Nobody said anything about YouTube.
We’re laughing at progshits suddenly being bitten by their own bullshit and how incredibly amusing it is to watch you flail and justify suffering your own medicine.
Well that’s pretty dumb being that I’ve never said anything in support of the political left. Ever.
Cut down on the booze, it’s rotting your brain.
Just because you have been trying to pretend the last few years didn’t happen doesn’t mean the rest will play along.
You aren’t paying attention, Sarc. What a surprise!
No one here is celebrating Robby’s being censored. Everyone is amused because–contrary to all conventional wisdom–Robby fed the alligator, and he’s now pissing and moaning because the alligator bit him.
If you say so.
Everybody says so. You’re just such a blind progressive partisan with TDS that every civil libertarian, libertarian, liberal, and independent polls like a “Trump supporter” to you.
Seems like less of a celebration than an ‘I told you so’.
This has been the foundation of censorship since the Skokie march. You can’t say some speech is not okay because before you know it any speech can fall into that category. MDM is a cute way of saying censorship. What is Dis? What is Mis? What is Mal? First and foremost, who decides?
Once that is allowed to be defined by vague, arbitrary definition the idea of free speech is threatened.
Muh private company is doing the Gov bidding now. What happens when the ‘other guys’ get in power and decide to rain down the same shit on their opponents? Who do you think pays the price?
Seems like less of a celebration than an ‘I told you so’.
I don’t see much of a difference.
Celebration – I am so happy this happened to you!!
I told you so – I told you, if it happened to others it could eventually happen to you so quit your cryin’.
Like when your mom says quit teasing that cat, he’ll scratch you. Does she do the happy dance when the cat scratches you and you come crying to her? Nope
Obviously you wouldn’t. But that’s your problem, not ours.
I’m not a Trump supporter, I am a libertarian. I despise Robby because he pretends to be a libertarian but really just pushes a progressive agenda.
And YouTube censorship is a fact. People like Robby claim people have to live with it. I celebrate when people who are fire bad laws, cronyism, and authoritarianism are hosted by their own petard.
“YouTube is a private company, of course, and it’s free to design whatever policies it wants.”
And if Democrats in Congress don’t like its policies, its bosses are free to be the subjects of a Congressional hearing or twelve.
EweTube has been pulling this crap for years. When they say “misinformation” it’s ALWAYS code for dissent.
I suggest you, and everyone else affected by its idiotic policies, dump YouTube entirely and post on Rumble.com or BitChute.com instead.
Even if you do manage to believe the election wasn’t stolen.
Is one required to be a completely naive simp in order to work in the liberty movement, or what? You never would have guessed? How is that possible? How are all libertarian writers so insufferably stupid?
You never imagined that a bunch of Marxists would ban reporting about things they dislike? The people who act like third graders all their lives, and will cancel someone for saying that someone *else* said this or that word? The people who see an apology as blood in the water and double down on any sign of weakness? The people who want everyone micromanaged at gunpoint from cradle to grave?
Mark my words, these people will start editing videos to show the opposite of what someone said, for example if you say, “There are a bunch of idiots out there saying that the election was rigged,” you will be quoted as saying “the election was rigged” and in fact they will be correct in saying that you said that. These are the people we are dealing with, these are the enemies trying to destroy us, and our supposedly “best and brightest” minds on the front lines “never would have imagined”?
We are so screwed.
Was wondering why I hadn’t seen the regular morning reporting pop up the past couple of days.
Bet you’re relieved Alphabet didn’t write the software that autopilots your car, huh Soave?
A liquor store has the right to deny service to someone who’s not wearing a shirt or is associated with a hate group. But if they start kicking out people who ARE wearing a shirt, or because some Twitter mob made up stories, it’s entirely reasonable for government to step in.
If Donald Trump becomes president again and unleashes his vengeance on social media by forcing them to consider context before removing videos, or require them to offer clear explanation for demonetization (a common complaint of content creators) guess what – no tyrannical government overreach occurred. A libertarian who supports it has not turned Judas. It will protect consumers who use youtube, and they wouldn’t have to worry about their ad revenue being stopped because their vid displayed a Swatstika in an educational context. It will lead to more discussions, more free speech, and protect unpopular thought disapproved by the elites.
YT is a business, and it functions essentially as a publishing media. There types of businesses are already under certain regulations and oversights. Reason writers becomes absolutists when it comes to certain issues, and would exist in a world where ALL regulations are tyranny, and landlords should be able to evict new tenants after 3 weeks because due to petty partisanship. They effectively support a private contract in which one party signs away all or most of their rights to the other.
YouTube and Facebook don’t even need to be forced to do anything. All that needs to happen is for the government to end their regulatory capture. Allow lawsuits and allow internet providers to block Google ad traffic and this will soon be over.
Rumble, Odyssey, BItChute – try a platform that actually values open debate and discussion and is not simply shilling for whatever megalomaniac happens to be sitting on the throne at the time.
YouTube is worthless for intelligent discussion of any serious issue where there are multiple viewpoints.
Great for cat videos, though. Or maybe some lame Neil (who the f@#k is he) second-rate tunes.
You are your reason contributors regularly defended youtube, twitter, et. al. when this shit started going down a few years ago. When you should have been advocating why these platforms were morally wrong to censor and especially wrong to use dishonest pretexts to justify censoring for the Democratic Party, instead you chose to highlight their 1st amendment right to censor. Over and over again you claimed that the real threat was government censorship.
Now you can choke on the shit you failed to oppose.
What, specifically was censored? Was it the lie that Donald Trump was cheated out of the election? The lie that sparked a coup attempt against the United States?
..Or that ‘lie’ of calling it a lie that Trump was overwhelmingly elected by REAL IN-PERSON PEOPLE….
Trump claimed that every primary, caucus, and general election in which he took part was rigged. Before that he said the president was born in Kenya. He’s a liar. He lies.
There IS no difference between reporting and misinformation.
If “the man” don’t like it, it is misinformation.
If you falter from the truth you are told, out you go.
Deal with it.
Is the Nazi-Regime funding and co-operating with the ‘private’ industry?
Ya; I think so… (and there’s plenty of Commie-Law evidence)
Is the solution to put more Nazi(National Socialism) upon the USA ‘private sector’ in hopes it will correct the problem?
NOPE……………….
Either address the actual ‘roots’ of the problem or accept that a free-market will eventually decide to fix the problem itself. Why is “The Hill” using YouTube anyways; since it’s now being well-known as a lefty-censorship platform???? Were they forced to use YouTube? Is anyone forced to use YouTube; so really the ‘root’ of the problem is ‘us’ the people refusing to get-off lefty-censorship platforms right????????
I see far too many here cheering the RINO line; that government must REGULATE the media in order for it to be “free”… After years of watching RINO-Legislation turn to Nazi-Regime dictation why would anyone still be entertaining this narrative???????
LIMITED GOVERNMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1st Amendment…
“This is a policy that effectively outlaws straight news reporting on YouTube.”
Outlaw, you say? OutLAW? Careful – you’ve come dangerously close to admitting that these tech companies have power commensurate with the government. Just find that inevitable YouTube competitor and post there, amirite?
Again, going full John McClain with a big Welcome to the party, pal!
Their power is not just “commensurate with the government”. The government is openly directing them.
Rubs the wrong way if Reason is adopting MSM phrases like “false claims” instead of maybe, “allegations.” Not saying it’s untrue, but it screams of an agenda.
They don’t care. The crocodile will eat them last.
To be sure.
Geiger Goldstaedt, you ignorant boot-licking slut.
“YouTube is a private company, of course, ”
Indeed it is, so stop whining and go build your own internet!
Bwahaha!
After you see the man behind the curtain, you don’t want to play the game anymore.
This.
I had no idea that YouTube would punish news channels for reporting the news.
Then you have just demonstrated that you are a complete and utter fucking retard who hasn’t opened their eyes even once in the last five years.
It isn’t bad if it is happening to people i disagree with…..
Is Butler’s sarcasm detector busted, or is mine?
Is that Solzhenitsyn?
Yup. This is him being coy. There’s been verboten topics of actual public interest that youtube has been clamping down on for years now.
I swear, it’s like the dude is saying “But, but, but… I called Trump a liar, so I get a pass like you guys do, right?” No, you don’t. When are people going to realize that this sort of attempted appeasement means nothing?
Google is evil. They have loads of power, and their employees are almost universally progressive and Democrat. Lie down with dogs, wake up with progressive censorship. I have no sympathy for this Soave prick.
Well, he did respond to OBL in a similar manner. I think your detector is safe, Mother’s.
It’s a response we’ve heard wrt social media platforms, repeatedly, lacking only
“You’re free to build your own Google.”
This. Robby is too stupid to realize he’s in a purity spiral and so arrogant he thinks he won’t be affected by this stuff.
YTs censorship is well established, as are their outright lies about said censorship. Robby is too busy trying to pump the breaks on the regulatory bandwagon that he’s missed the fact that the folks calling for regulation have legitimate greivances, even if Robby can disagree with them on a solution.
YT and a few other tech cos have effectively achieved regulatory capture of their industry, while enjoying protection from any civil liabilities that naturally arise in the form of complaints about defamation thanks to Section 230. The way 230 is written extends protections to companies that don’t exist for other industries. He’s not really defending against new regulation, he’s protecting an existing regulation that is poorly written and creates a safe harbor effect that ultimately helps YTs monopoly.