A DOCUMENTARY FEATURING mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.
YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Disgusting complicity in genocide. These tech companies are evil.
Did anyone make backups of these videos? People can republish these can they not?
Boycott Google
In a move that surprises no one, Alphabet Inc rebrands to MINITRUE
I feel like aiding war criminals in deleting evidence should get your company destroyed.
Maybe not all of Alphabet unless we can prove this was an initiative started from the top, but Youtube should be diassembled for one-sidedly purging evidence. Hopefully, those accounts kept offline copies.
I moved to NewPipe - no ads, and you can import your yt playlists and subscriptions so you don’t have to start from scratch. Plus it plays in the background and if the phone screen is off
The major obstacle for me is recommend videos as I almost exclusively use that and youtube knows what to show me (good factual science channels, nothing with AI used at all, gaming and tech news, essays and documentaries etc.) and no other app than the official youtube one does that as far as I’m aware. (I use ReVanced though). I’ve really tried to jump over to newpipe and grayjay but I miss so much and never discover any new channels through them.
People say that the internet never forgets… but they didnt take into account the centralization of the internet and the control they have over the content.
It might be crazy to think this… but imagine in a few years all videos and posts and articles on various sites documenting the genocide were fully purged. Leaving only people’s frail memory of events. Even the IDF and Israeli civilians incredibly incriminating videos would be removed, and anyone caught with an archive on a personal device could be criminally charged or have it taken from them for destruction.
Basically this shit is beyond 1984. And I don’t use 1984 that often as a metaphor.
Is there another alternative to YouTube? One that isn’t a right wing hellscape?
Peer tube?
Problem with PeerTube is the content is pretty scattered and there’s frankly just not that much normal content. There’s relatively a lot for like Linux stuff, but other than that there’s not a ton. Also, there’s no way to compensate people, so hard to attract content creators (this is both a plus and a negative tbh).
Other problem is that, like pretty much all fediverse stuff, it’s possible to wind up on an instance with a bunch of Nazi content federated to it. Of course, since YouTube has Nazi content, this isn’t really much different.
YouTube is one of the platforms that started at just the right time. People only know about it because it popped off in about 2005/6 . The creators didn’t get paid, at least I don’t think they did, it was just a lot of fun. Correct me if I’m wrong, maybe the first content creators did get paid.
Video content creation wasn’t a thing that far back.
YouTube was (in my experience) the first site at all where you could click a video and not wait 3 years for it to load, plus having a UI around it.
Most people’s Internet speeds weren’t even close to being fast enough to consistently load them fast enough to want to watch more than a few in a session. Decent waits and buffers throughout still made it painful. Just less painful than it was before.
Most other videos back then were scattered around on separate sites, and related to the content on the site, and they usually had to download completely before even starting to play. (Kinda like pirating a movie these days)
So given that most people couldn’t use other sites and tolerate it for long, YouTube created a market that didn’t exist before, and there wasn’t a content creation machine in place ready to go.
That kinda took off as more and more people got broadband connections and started being able to watch almost as soon as they clicked a link.
I don’t have hard dates for this, just an impression from memory of the era.
So the “creators” were just random people filming slightly less random things. There weren’t well known channels, or filters for different genes or topics. You could choose from “dude filming an animal do something funny” or “something unlikely to be caught on camera being caught on camera”.
And most of it was shot on terrible cameras (since digital cameras were still going from “looks like objects filmed through 4 layers of plastic” to “really tiny footage of decent quality”, there wasn’t much that existed to draw a lot of people other than a feeling of hoping to stumble on the newest really cool clip.
But, since capitalism exists to make everything worse, the market got its act together shortly after. But not immediately. It took a whole new kind of infrastructure to get it moving.
People needed better digital cameras (unless you thought transferring from analog tapes was a fun weekend), better Internet, and the site itself has to start figuring out how to run things to make a better experience.
Google buying it was both a great infusion of capital to help it as well as being a cancer injection that would poison it.
I like the concept of peertube, but it’s not gonna take off in its current state. I don’t think anything takes off without capitalism happening to it these days. If something takes off, it’s probably fruit of a poisonous tree. Can’t have any good new popular technology without it being tampered with by billionaires
Kinda like pirating a movie these days
Not really. More like pirating a movie in 2012. These days, there are excellent-quality pirate streaming services, there’s the ability to stream videos over bittorrent (if there are enough seeds), and probably other options I’m not thinking of that make pirated video more accessible than ever.
Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now? I haven’t done it in years but last time I did it just downloaded little pieces of the files until it has them all assembled, meaning that playback would be impossible if you try until it’s finished.
Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now?
I remember my bittorrent client having an option to do that even back in like 2010, though I never used it to actually stream, because my Internet wasn’t good enough.
