Last night YouTube took to its ‘Official Blog’ to more or less announce that they would be taking steps to censor content they found to be “controversial” even if it didn’t break any laws or violate the site’s user agreement. And while the message vowed to be part of an effort to “fight terror content online,” the move was met wth widespread skepticism among YouTuber’s as nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to censor conservative speech.
Tougher standards: We’ll soon be applying tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism. If we find that these videos don’t violate our policies but contain controversial religious or supremacist content, they will be placed in a limited state. The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes. We’ll begin to roll this new treatment out to videos on desktop versions of YouTube in the coming weeks, and will bring it to mobile experiences soon thereafter. These new approaches entail significant new internal tools and processes, and will take time to fully implement. But it’s not just content creators that will be impacted as anyone who merely searches for keywords that YouTube deems ‘questionable’, for whatever reason, will be promptly redirected to propaganda videos intended to “directly confront and debunk” whatever ‘questionable’ content that user was looking for.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Aug 3, 2017.
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