Pre-internet there was a certain amount of natural limit on how much bullshit one could spread, because you had to print physical newspapers and find distributors, which meant that you had to have a name and a business address people could find you at.
With 2000s Internet this limiter was removed, but counterbalanced by everyone being able to present their own side for the marketplace of ideas.
Now in 2025 we’re in the worst of both worlds, where a tiny number of trillion-dollar companies control 98% of Internet traffic and are making it clear that they have no qualms abusing that power to shape public discourse.
You can still make your own website and publish whatever you like (local laws may apply).
Only in the same way that you could always write your own newsletter and hand it out in the street. I feel like you’re wilfully missing the point there.
Big platforms have a lot of power. They need to control the content published for reasons ranging from following laws to pleasing advertisers. These decisions always have political implications.
Yeah, the point is these fucks shouldn’t have ever been allowed to be this big in the first plar.
The fuck does Google even get out of this? At some point I really just do not understand why people are so aggressively supporting Israel’s genocide. Like, the fervor behind their support is crazy for all people who aren’t directly responsible for creating the problem and who could so easily just not support this shit.
I know there’s money involved but this is ridiculous.
money, MOSSAD/IDF paid google millions to spread propaganda ads, and recently israeli signed a deal with google for its AI services(1.2bn), and also prevent other nations that requests data from said ai services when accusing IDF soldiers. googles video AI is very useful making alot of propaganda, the ones that been showing up on shorts alot.
Boycott YouTube…
The Nazis also tried to cover up evidence of their genocide
Google’s slogan 15 years ago
Don’t be EvilGoogle’s slogan today
Don’t beEvilNow google doesn’t just steal your data! but they back a genocide too!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA
Can someone let that reporter know that PeerTube and other YouTube alternatives already exist.
Yes there are less viewers comparing to YouTube but at least the content willl be not removed.
they could even host it themselves on their own hardware ensuring it stays up
This really isn’t a viable long term solution for most individuals.
LiveLeak was killed for a reason. You might not like what it was, but it would have been fine with hosting these things.
No community guidelines violated
soldiers shooting civilians, including children
I mean, it’s right there. YouTube ain’t LiveLeak.
Coverage of the Tienanmen Square Massacre is on YouTube and includes exactly this.
Hell, it’s practically a meme to shout “Nobody in China knows about Tienanmen Square!” at the villainous Lemmy Tankies, precisely because the Chinese government has a policy of taking down media coverage while the US media proudly reproduces it at every opportunity.
Why would YouTube, a company that has repeatedly expressed its commitment to breaking down the barriers of government censorship and oppression, suddenly decide it needs to censor a state-sanctioned massacre of civilians? What would lead us to conclude that the genocide in Gaza should be treated differently than the Tienanmen Square massacre?
I wonder if we could pressure the BBC or PBS into pushing these videos to force Google/Israel to do this even more blatantly.
Not under the current Zionist administrations
repeatedly expressed its commitment to breaking down the barriers of government censorship
That was only and will only ever be done when it’s in favor of whatever government reigns over the company.
Displaying the Tiananmen Square Massacre is in line with the USA gov. Displaying Israeli crimes is not.
Don’t be naive. Youtube and Google don’t give half a shit to go against censorship.
Don’t be naive.
Hardly naive. Just pointing out the obvious.
YouTube clearly has no problem hosting snuff films with the correct political valence.
YouTube has no problem with multiple different ai generated gory videos of Rebecca Madeupname being mauled alive by an orca. Every time I opened a private window, one of these was recommended. No age restriction, nothing.
They have no problem with porn bots spamming family friendly channels with pro-paedo comments, even though they use the same avatars and messages so should be easy to filter out. Videos promoting dangerous hacks stay up even after multiple reports. They’re fine monetising reaction channels that are nothing more than freebooting other people’s work.
So YouTube’s tos really comes down to: it’s fine if it makes money.
I wish there was proper competition, even if it was run by another awful company like Microsoft or amazon. AFAIK no other platform offers monetisation like yt does, so people stay and put up with their crap.
(Personally I’m hoping to reupload mf stuff to peertube if I ever come out this slump.)
the post says coverage of. was actual video of the acts shown?
We really live in a world where “YouTube took down my warcrime videos” is bigger news than “there are warcrimes being committed”
google is waaaaaaaaay beyond “don’t be evil”. Right now, for them any kind of statement is just a temporary transportation between their position and more tech monopoly.
This is why the world is so terrible: centralization of capital and thus also attention in the hands of unscrupulous monsters.
In Western countries, we may convince ourselves that we are better than the neglected Third World countries because of all our technology. That is not the case—in fact, the opposite is true, because our inhumane rulers have incomparably more power.
We are all Palestine.
Today Palestine. Tomorrow us.
I have to wonder: did they seriously mean it when they made “don’t be evil” their company motto way back in the day? I’d be open to the idea that they were sincere at the time and then had their brains broken and their souls corroded by extreme wealth.
Or, maybe they were being dishonest even back then, and that mercenary attitude is what you need to succeed in Corporate America.
The people running Google are not the same people that built Google. It’s not even the same Google from the days you’re taking about.
It’s not even Google now.
It’s Alphabet.
Oh fuck that makes so much sense now.
Don’t mean to burst your bubble but if you’ll look at what the founders of Google are saying today you’ll find that they’re on par with Googles current leadership. Then again, we can’t know if they were like this from the start or if it’s just the wealth and power and corrupted them.
Google went public & since before they did that they were (had to be) absolutely dead-set to become a monopoly & exploit that position via experience enshitification (but they had to first make sure they de facto didn’t have any competition - launching gmail helped a lot).
There was still a period of a few years where Google was saying “we won’t show ads” but was valued on the market into billions (whilst having no profit but promising extreme revenue growth any year now - they were being valued on their potential for ads).
Much like Uber - the strategy is to shovel enough capital for the company to undercut the competition by any means necessary & then squeeze the market.
And founders kept stocks, so they’ll say they want Google to kill all puppies in the world, slowly & painfully, if it nets them even more free wealth.
(Free I mean without any labor, just capital ownership.)
It’s difficult to describe the world in the pre-social media age. There was a time when Google was just a cool software company building cool things, and the don’t be evil motto was probably genuine.
Software used to be an thing that you would buy and use if you needed it. It came on a disk. It wasn’t this ever pervasive network of always on tools living in our homes and devices working to cultivate the ultimate consumer unit
did they seriously mean it when they made “don’t be evil” their company motto way back in the day?
When they weren’t raking in tens of billions of dollars in government surveillance contracts and state-sponsored media ad buys? Probably.
But Google is under completely different management in 2025 relative to what it had at the outset in 1998. Perhaps the company’s commitment to “Don’t Be Evil” was violated the day they IPO’d. But Larry Page and Sergey Brin aren’t in the driver’s seats anymore. They sold their souls to join the oligarchy. Perhaps they assumed they could do more with an infinite line of credit than a rising star social media company. Or perhaps Google simply wouldn’t be allowed as the global leader in search without spreading its cheeks and admitting corrupt bureaucracies to puppet it from below.
There was a time in the early 2000’s when tech companies got their customers by being better than the alternatives instead of just being obscenely wealthy and buying out all competition.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In fairness they do this with ISIS videos too. It’s hard to preserve warcrimes evidence that gets posted to social media no matter who committed it as every platform just deletes it. We need government policy here
I never had “wished we had a warcrimestube.com” on my 2025 disaster bingo, but here we are.
It was called liveleaks and it shut down.
Peertube?
We need government policy here
So government will decide what to censor? What do you think government will decide to censor?
