Comment by Animats
9 hours ago
This encourages self-censorship, or what's called "anticipatory obedience".
YouTube has become much worse about censorship. Pepe's Towing, LA's main towing company for major truck accidents, complains that YouTube took down some of their videos. Their videos are simply detailed coverage of the complex but effective process by which large vehicles that had accidents are lifted, rotated upright, placed on their wheels or on a large dolly as necessary, and towed away. Their people wear body cams, like cops, their cranes have cameras, and sometimes they use a DJI drone. (They bring out the drone when someone drives off an embankment and they need to plan a difficult lift.) The main purpose of all the video is to settle arguments with insurance companies over the cost of recovery. But they started a YouTube channel for PR purposes.
Almost all this video is taken on public property on LA county roads and freeways, with the cooperation of the cops, CALTRANS, local fire departments, and other organizations that clean up other people's messes. These are very public activities, with traffic streaming by and sometimes news helicopters hovering overhead. Totally First Amendment protected. Not a violation of YouTube's stated policies.
So what's the YouTube censorship about? Preventing corporate embarrassment. Their older videos have clear pictures of truck doors with ownership info. Container markings. License plates. Pictures of damaged goods. Now. out of fear of being cancelled by YouTube, they're blurring everything identifiable. Recently someone rolled over a semitrailer full of melons, and they blurred out not just the trucking company info, but the labels on the melons. Which the people from Pepe's say is silly, but they don't want to fight with YouTube.
If the intention of the videos is to cover the process of towing the cars in general, then there is no need to include specific personally identifiable information, so removing those details seems quite reasonable to me.
Regardless of Youtube's rules, this just seems like good practice. Surveys and opinion polls in newspapers and scientific research normally redact that sort of information, for example.
I wonder when people in the west will start flocking to Telegram groups (or equivalent) to get the real information the way they do elsewhere.
In almost every context when someone says something like "real information" it almost always means "information I like or agree with".
Clearly “real information” here means “not blurred”. Stop spreading FUD.
Trading one "private sector" state surveillance and narrative control platform for another isn't much of an improvement.
That said, I hate to break it to you, but there is no real question of 'when', or even 'if'. The general public simply does not care, no matter how much abuse they are subjected to by mainstream platform operators.
There will always be a minority who care enough to embrace decentralization, open source, good e2ee, but they are the exception to the vast majority, at least inside the US, who simply do not care enough to change their behavior.
What percentage of Americans do you think would voluntarily, permanently relinquish their own fourth amendment rights for $5000? Scary thought experiment when you recall studies that have found only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech.
https://studyfinds.org/constitution-americans-rights/
> ... "only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech."
Mere decades ago, not knowing this kinda stuff would get you failed in grade-school Civics class, and again in junior high, and yet again in high-school (at least where I grew up, here in the "Great NorthWest" Rocky Mountains area USA).
Used to be that knowing the basics about how your government worked and what your rights and responsibilities are as a citizen was considered "required knowledge" (right alongside basic history, math, reading, etc) to help prepare you for "life in the real world".
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Outside the US, WhatsApp already fills that role, but like Telegram, "real information" is an optimistic descriptor.