[seanmcelroy]

It's a mistaken position to believe sharing "how to" information somehow mints cybercriminals; however, this is the position YouTube has repeatedly and is increasingly taking with striking innocent content creators sharing information about how security vulnerabilities work and how to test for them.

This type of content is widely available on mainstream online blog sites, in published books, and through established, expensive training outfits like the SANS Institute. YouTube has really missed the mark thinking there are real risks they are mitigating by culling it out from their platform.

This is an editorial decision by YouTube on what they want to groom YouTube's community to be, not a content decision based on sound public policy or realistic threat models.

[jjbinx007]

It would be nice if Youtube had a clear policy written in clear English (or indeed made a series of videos on the subject) explaining what's not allowed on the platform.

Some channels post videos which stay up for years without any strikes or problems and then out of the blue the whole channel gets taken down under a vague "you violated our T&Cs" notice without Youtube bothering to highlight which of the T&Cs. They sometimes take down huge channels without first contacting the channel owners to warn them in advance and give them the opportunity to do something about it.

Rather than take down the channel why can't Youtube just remove the videos?

It's not a civilised way to conduct business.

[AndrewUnmuted]

> It's not a civilised way to conduct business.

It's true, and the way they try to hide this fact is by pretending that the censorship and policy switch-up is done in the name of "anti-racism."

YouTube & co could not have been more lucky that an entire segment of the culture came up with the perfect catch-all term to enable them to walk back their horrible business blunders.

[hmry]

They're taking down hacking videos in the name of anti-racism? I don't know about that...

[Mountain_Skies]

YouTube doesn't have a defined policy because they say if they do, the racists will abide by it while finding ways to still be racist that don't violate the policy. By not having a defined policy, they can declare anything racist. It's not that they're declaring hacking videos to be racist, it's that they're using the perceived threat of racists using the letter of the law to continue to post racist content as a way of not needing to justify their deletion of anything on any topic without explanation. If racism didn't exist, YouTube would want to invent it to justify their policy of not having a defined content policy.

[hda2]

> YouTube & co could not have been more lucky that an entire segment of the culture came up with the perfect catch-all term to enable them to walk back their horrible business blunders.

I don't think they were lucky at all. There's always a "ism" assholes can hide behind to justify their actions, whether it's Racism, Terrorism, Communism, Nazism... etc. As well as the timeless "Think of the Children" shtick.

[AndrewUnmuted]

Racism is a particularly effective vehicle today, as it deals with conditions common in a globalized society. It has the added bonus of being seen to transcend ideology (in many of the same ways Nazism did in America during WWII). This makes the effects of its invocation extremely fluid and potent throughout the culture.

It's becoming painstakingly difficult to be actively against all of the overwhelming misinformation leveled one's way, because anti-racism's tenants are so easily generalized.

[TameAntelope]

I can't stop thinking about the concept of "policy-based innovation" a new startup could build off of to disrupt an industry, but I feel like it violates one of the primary tenets of Starting a Startup because a big player can theoretically "just change their policy" to eat your lunch.

For example (given enough capital), is there genuinely an opportunity to build a YouTube-like platform that simply doesn't have the policies YouTube has (e.g. shares revenue more fairly, has a more-sane copyright law enforcement, explains their moderation actions)?

The idea here is that while it's true, in theory, that YouTube could make those policy changes and your YouTube alternative would then be pointless, the reality is they never will, even if it begins to cost them.

I really wish I could talk to someone more about this, or if there was targeted reading, but I haven't really found much, because I think most folks dismiss this as a viable strategy.

[MiddleEndian]

Ideally people would host their own content. Then there would be no "policy" at all. Every channel should be its own website, and if they want they could engage in mutual link agreements with other content creators they like. Something like wordpress for video content, and maybe with some torrent tech involved so more viewers would distribute the bandwidth.

[master-lincoln]

There is Peertube which is part of the Fediverse, where multiple instances each with their own policies exist. You can have an account on an instance and still discover/follow content on other instances (if they were not banned by your instance owner)

To me this seems like a good middle ground between having your own website and relying on a monopolistic service. Downside still is that your identity is fixed to an instance, but there are discussions on how to change that.

[Miner49er]

It can work, just depends. DuckDuckGo is an example of a success doing this. For things like YouTube it's much harder. Content creators go where the consumers are, and consumers don't know about or care about these types of policy things until it effects content they watch.

TIDAL tried this as a Spotify competitor and have basically failed.

[colejohnson66]

Tidal’s still trying. I see ads for it every so often. But you’re correct: they haven’t “broken through” yet like Spotify and Netflix did. First mover advantage?

[TameAntelope]

Yeah I was thinking about this -- when you try to innovate via policy, do you basically start at the bottom? That is, do you have to more or less a) match features with the incumbent, b) baseline need to meet the incumbents user volume (or a substantial fraction) and c) be able to benefit from the scale that the incumbent already benefits from?

Or can you throw money at it until you have those? TIDAL seems to be trying the "throw money at it until it's winning" strategy...

[blunte]

I suspect one big problem for Google is the ignorant politicians and lawmakers/enforcers who think that the dissemination of information which _could_ be used for illegal activities is akin to the promotion of such activities.

And since you cannot without great effort educate people who are incapable or intentionally unwilling to learn, the easiest solution is to sacrifice some of your users to placate the idiots.

Maybe this is not Google's excuse, but it certainly applies to many other internet companies (craigslist for example).

Edit: typing on phone is miserable :(

[kevin_thibedeau]

All of said people swore an oath to uphold a core document with detailed restrictions on government power. They don't get a say in the dissemination of information.

[nobody9999]

It's not politicians or enforcers, it's advertisers.

Advertisers pay the bills, not governments. And the golden rule[0] applies.

[0] "He who has the gold makes the rules."

[reaperducer]

It's a mistaken position to believe sharing "how to" information somehow mints cybercriminals

How so? I wouldn't have gotten into phreaking in the 80's without Phrack.

However, I think you would be correct if you amended your statement to read, "It's a mistaken position to believe sharing "how to" information solely mints cybercriminals."

[_wldu]

I believe this is why it's important to have your own domain name, so you can have your own website with content you create and control. If you just want to make funny cat videos (or something similar) then YouTube is probably not a bad choice.

[berryjerry]

It still doesn't work. It's sad but even payment processors are able to make editorial decisions on who can accept payments. You can control all your content and still be at the mercy of payment processors, ISP, domain hosts, and even getting delisted or hidden from Google basically kills your website. It's even worse when you see all of these working in concert together. I believe all in the same weekend Alex Jones was banned from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and even Paypal after he made a video harassing a journalist. It's not like Alex Jones was doing anything that bad, basically just shouting at some dude for like 10 minutes, but they basically said that's enough and somehow all together decided in one fell swoop to implement the Ban. Apple joined shortly after banning him from iTunes. Pornhub recently just had Mastercard and Visa cooperate together to stop providing payments to them. Now whether all those were deserved is a debate, but it just shows that even without government intervention, no company, business, or person is safe from basically being forcibly removed entirely from where all traffic on the internet occurs, at the whim of a consortium of massive companies working together.