YouTube Will Redirect Searches For Extremist Videos To Anti-Terrorist Playlists

http://www.tubefilter.com/2017/07/20/youtube-redirect-searches-extremist-anti-terrorist-playlists/

by lainon • 9 years ago

71 83 9 years ago

kovalevlad• 9 years ago

That's all very well but perhaps they should also stop deleting Russian opposition videos/channels and justify that by claiming they contain extremist content when there is none. #FixRussianYoutube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZwAVsAgsLQ&t=190s

perlpimp• 9 years ago

Going on a tangent / Google(youtube) is a publicly traded corporation, being banned in a country to support democracy(and missing out on advertising income) is not in their list of fiduciary duties to their investors. As such anti terrorist videos are monetizable while terrorist and antigovernment rhetoric full of bad vibes and forbidden speech is not.

IIAOPSW2• 9 years ago

I got to agree with the other guy on this. Youtube is bound by the laws of whatever country they operate in. If they refuse to cooperate with the Russian gov they will be banned and some other service which does comply will take their place. If you want to #FixRussianYoutube you got to first #FixRussianGovernment.

GhotiFish• 9 years ago

I think your chances are doing that are slim. Maybe a better strategy is to not base our societal discourse on central points of control.

Maybe #FixInternet.

awkwarddaturtle5• 9 years ago

Sure. Companies have to abide by the rules of the nations they operate in. The problem is that we used to have the higher moral ground and could mock their censorship and try to change their censorship of free expression. Now, we really can't.

Synaesthesia• 9 years ago

I wonder if white supremacist videos are gonna count as terrorist https://theintercept.com/2017/07/06/facebooks-tough-on-terro...

throw34away5• 9 years ago

I also wonder if any religious video of any faith that calls for beating one's wife,inequality between men and women, death for non believers and homosexuals, antisemitism or female genital mutilation will also be counted as extremist video.

praulv• 9 years ago

Yes, any religious video as such should absolutely be counted. Feel free to start flagging them with your brave throwaway account:

https://www.youtube.com/results?

search_query=CHRISTIAN+PASTOR+death+homosexuality

StavrosK3• 9 years ago

Even if the video calls for none of those, you mean?

Of course, like you, I would quite like to see all Christian videos banned, but I'm afraid it might set a precedent.

mrkrabo• 9 years ago

There's a big difference between "inequality between sexes" and "death for homosexuals".

Skeptique• 9 years ago

Of course not, because when white people engage in terrorism, they are "deeply disturbed individuals with unmet psychiatric needs" and the public/media sympathize with them.

BartSaM• 9 years ago

And who will decide what is "Extremist Videos"? This is a dangerous game YT plays now. Who will decide who is a freedom fighter and who is an extremist? Who is good and who is bad?

paganel• 9 years ago

Who will decide who is a freedom fighter and who is an extremist?

For the moment the "reagan meets the taliban" search still points to the right, non-brain-washing videos (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=reagan++meets+t...), so on this front we are safe.

On a more serious note, who ever thought this might be a good idea? Censorship never works in this sort of cases, it never has. All it does is it adds legitimacy to fringe beliefs. I for example still think that if it hadn't been for the martyrdoms and censorship they had to suffer early on the Christians and their sect would have had never gained such a following.

megous3• 9 years ago

It doesn't need to be decided in any meaningful or principled way. The metric can simply be: whatever brings in more advertising money and less trouble from people in power.

YouToube is no unbiased public service with higher moral or principled goals. It has to operate in a complicated world with many competing pressures from powerful entities.

oelmekki• 9 years ago

Which also means journalists won't be able to access those videos as sources. Although, I'm not ready to call that a bad decision, because propaganda is indeed the biggest problem with ISIS.

This is just treating the symptom, obviously (why do young people ever consider joining a terrorist group? Certainly not through youtube videos as the only factor), but also treating the symptom is ok if we try to solve the deeper problem at the same time (unemployment? defiance resulting from corruption?).

megous3• 9 years ago

Also normal people who just don't want to be fed the conclusions and sanitized images from the news outlets, and want to watch the actual thing in full length, compare information from multiple opposing sources, geolocate events, timestamp them, or whatever is up to their current fancy, to be able to form their worldview themselves also have a harder time. But that's nothing new, you already have to be quick, as links have been disappearing shortly after being posted for a long time.

awkwarddaturtle5• 9 years ago

Which also means journalists won't be able to access those videos as sources

Journalists and news media are the biggest advocates for censorship on social media as it competes with their narrative.

Although, I'm not ready to call that a bad decision, because propaganda is indeed the biggest problem with ISIS.

Most people equate ISIS with pure evil because of their propaganda. The biggest problem with ISIS is the killing/murders. Not their propaganda. Just because a few unhinged people are attracted to it doesn't mean that their propaganda is working.

but also treating the symptom is ok if we try to solve the deeper problem at the same time (unemployment? defiance resulting from corruption?).

Don't forget the invasions of iraq/libya/syria/etc by our governments to destabilize the region. Which was supported by the traditional media.

freeflight6• 9 years ago

This recent trend is really worrisome. YouTube also shut down quite a lot of channels in connection with the Syrian civil war. Reddit too closed down a couple of subreddits, and admins banned users who shared ISIS related content on the /r/syriancivilwar/ subreddit.

What an utterly useless and counterproductive exercise in de facto censorship. The only thing this does is drive people deeper into the underground, even closer to actual extremists.

Extremist ideas need to be fought with rational discourse, drag them out into the open and let the sunshine disinfect them. Trying to hide them out of sight, like they don't exist, only makes them fester all the more in secret and partly legitimizes these extremists in their view of being unjustly persecuted.

DelightOne3• 9 years ago

You didnt cite examples where this is working.

Sending them from pro to anti propaganda, assuming propaganda works, does work.

mcintyre1994• 9 years ago

You didn't cite examples either, and I'm skeptical of the premise. If reddit started redirecting /r/the_donald links to anti-Trump propaganda, or Youtube started redirecting his own videos to anti-Trump propaganda, no matter how good that propaganda is, I don't believe you that you could change their mind. And those people aren't even radicalised.

wruza3• 9 years ago

Hiding any thing from the tops and news and making it underground makes it unpopular and orders of magnitude less spread. Imagine what would happen to spinner if youtube redirected it to something different.

Real actions are already underground, extremism only uses public places to recruit masses to get better selection and financial support. Which is good to cut off.

I bet you're living in first-world country saying that you we should just go and rationally talk to extremists.

freeflight6• 9 years ago

Real actions are already underground, extremism only uses public places to recruit masses to get better selection and financial support.

And it's exactly these public places where their ideas need to be opposed. If you drive them, and their ideas, deeper into the underground there will be no one there to oppose any of their ideas, it will be yet another echo-chamber driven by a victim complex.

I bet you're living in first-world country saying that you we should just go and rationally talk to extremists.

What else you want to do with them through the Internet? Would you rather censor them and their ideas away like they don't exist, exactly like they try to censor opposing views away in their territories of influence?

How does that make us any better than them? It doesn't, it's hypocrisy at it's finest and exactly the kind of hypocrisy which also drives recruitment.

It's a giant crying shame on our "western culture" which supposedly values "freedom" so much.

kpil2• 9 years ago

Great then. Do you have any ideas then how to stop the radicalisation of young muslims? I'm less inclined to believe that rational discussions with ISIS warriors and their supporters will lead that far.

I live in what used to be one of the most secular countries in the world, and for various reasons our government have encouraged immigration from the middle east for 20 years, providing free education, free healthcare, generous social welfare, and an actively non-racist society. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to automatically integrate many in our society, mainly because of unemployment caused by the originally low "human capital", and partly due to there are many cultural issues that wasn't even socially acceptable to discuss at all until recently.

While many have done great, there are many more that haven't and the 2nd or 3rd generation are still doing pretty bad compared to the natives, which has created street gangs and criminality in many areas, even in small towns.

Among many bad things, one of the results is that we now have many ISIS warriors here, and no plan on how to handle them. It doesn't even seem to be illegal to be an ISIS warrior here.

Many more are susceptible to the propaganda, and in my book, any means stop the propaganda is more than welcome. I really don't understand how large US companies can carry messages from violent extremist like it's no big deal.

scrollaway• 9 years ago

Great then. Do you have any ideas then how to stop the radicalisation of young muslims?

The stuff GP is talking about is generally not being done to "stop the radicalisation of young muslims" but more likely as CYA/good PR. Maybe for some it's genuinely in good spirit but let's be honest here, it's probably not going to make a big difference.

Ideas to stop radicalization? Well, slowing down marginalization first would be a good move and that's going nowhere good in the US right now. Maybe electing representatives and leaders that don't feed on a self-fueled machine of fear would help. To do that you need an electorate with more critical thinking, which means better education. (And here you see you got a catch-22 since you need leaders that fight for better education in the first place...)

Concretely, what "you" as in any average joe can do is not much, but if you want to do something: help people understand their votes, educate them on politics as well as foreign culture, make them travel more.

What a big company like Google/Youtube could do if they cared to fight for it? Probably a hell of a lot more, but they're not in that business honestly.

williamle83002• 9 years ago

Heartily agree.

YouTube is trying to be Big Brother for us. What they don't realize is they're infantilizing all of their users by doing this.

awkwarddaturtle5• 9 years ago

Reddit too closed down a couple of subreddits

It is disappointing what reddit has become in the past few years. From a genuine open platform to where the admins and the mods are now open and unabashed propagandists.

It is also scary how the traditional media has so easily forced social media to conform to their standards. The promise of social media was that it was the anti-traditional media. Unfiltered, raw, source and open discussion. Now reddit has adopted the exact same standards of traditional media and the rest of social media are following along.

Extremist ideas need to be fought with rational discourse, drag them out into the open and let the sunshine disinfect them.

I agree. But it isn't just extremism. Look at how the admins are so openly anti-trump. They shut down subs that they disagree with ( alt-right ) and punished trump subs for "spamming". And yet, they openly support the dozens of anti-trump subs.

I'm a liberal who supports free speech and I loved reddit/social media that it allowed open raw discourse ( even if it offended me ). But what is happening to reddit and the rest of social media is really disappointing and quite frankly scary.

mistermann3• 9 years ago

To be fair, is the problem with reddit not mostly subreddit moderators? Obviously reddit admins are guilty as well with modifying the algorithm to hide certain types of speech, but it seems to me the biggest problem is moderators.

For the time being, I think a widespread movement to create a well-known convention of /r/{subreddit}_uncensored would help things immensely.

IIAOPSW2• 9 years ago

I hate the fact that if I voice anything skeptical of this policy someone will call me a terrorist sympathizer. I'm of the conviction that the idea of blowing yourself up is bad enough that we don't really need to censor it. Furthermore I've noticed that the public largely stops thinking the moment "terrorists" or "ISIS" is mentioned. We now live in a state where we can't move ~5000 USD without informing the government because "anti-terrorism money laundering laws". We can't mail certain food products into the US because "bio terrorism act of 2003". Our FBI wants to back door encryption because "ISIS". Notice a pattern yet?

Will it stop with ISIS? Once the precedent is set how long will it be before other search results are manipulated for political reason?

And its not like there's any side of the political spectrum I can vote for. Both Hillary and Trump wanted to censor extremism on Twitter. Both wanted to expand the no-fly list into a no-buy-guns list (constitutional implications be damned). Left, right, center and abroad the civil libertarian is under siege.

dangero2• 9 years ago

The other day I was considering commenting in a negative way about something the NSA tweeted, but a voice in my head said, "Do you really want to be put on a special surveilance list?" That's when I realized our freedoms are under threat by those that are tasked with defending them. Think what you will about the NSA, but they certainly have not gone out of their way to make clear to me they care about my freedoms. Lying to congress, private courts granting warrants via secret constitution interpretations -- something is very wrong here. I fear the NSA as an upstanding citizen and they seem to be OK with that.

Also more related to your comment the "don't watch ISIS videos it gives them power." I think it's misguided. Just out of curiousity I tracked down a couple of them online and it was very thought provoking. It did not make me fear ISIS more, but it did help me understand the situation more. Just not convinced intelligent people should avoid uncensored information collection, but there is so much being censored in the US right now and the media encourages you to not educate yourself on both sides.

nerdponx2• 9 years ago

+1 for watching ISIS videos. I needed to understand the situation, I needed to internalize it better. I watched an execution. I watched combat footage. And I am glad I did. I now understand the severity and urgency of the problem. I didn't use a VPN or anything. NSA, come get me.

abhi3• 9 years ago

Also more related to your comment the "don't watch ISIS videos it gives them power." I think it's misguided. Just out of curiousity I tracked down a couple of them online and it was very thought provoking. It did not make me fear ISIS more, but it did help me understand the situation more. Just not convinced intelligent people should avoid uncensored information collection

I think there has to be a better way to educate oneself/understand the situation than to watch terrorist propaganda. ISIS does not create videos 'to help people understand the situation more' but to radicalize suspectible people into becoming terrorists

alextheparrot• 9 years ago

I get your point - we've slowly, and sometimes quite quickly, seen some of our rights eroded as a result of policies that are advertised as being anti-terrorist.

Speaking directly to this policy, though, isn't your man premise that blow oneself up is bad enough in a vacuum unsupported? Many of these videos are crafted by the terrorist organizations as a recruitment tool. Wouldn't th see organizations not create them if they didn't wield at least some power to actually recruit or radicalize? I don't think arguing that line is consistent, even if I agree that we shouldn't censor these videos.

Retric• 9 years ago

99.9999% of people don't blow themselves up. It's not a significant issue because it's such a bad idea. Don't get me wrong lightning strikes are also a non issue, but that does not make swimming in a thunder storm a good idea.

Basic airport screening is useful, but you very quickly hit diminishing returns.

megous3• 9 years ago

There are also videos made by murderous dictatorial regimes as a recruitment tool. YouTube has no problem with that. There are videos made by US to get more cannon fodder for their wars which also killed millions of innocent people over the decades. Where do you stop?

I'm fine with stopping recruitment videos for war, but at least do it on principle as against the war, not just against a few particular organizations. It's ridiculous otherwise. It's just one belligerent suppressing the other one in a conflict. Nothing else.

nerdponx2• 9 years ago

I get your point - we've slowly, and sometimes quite quickly, seen some of our rights eroded as a result of policies that are advertised as being anti-terrorist.

Honestly when I first heard of ISIS I was pretty sure it was going to turn out to be some kind of "false alarm" excuse to continue war in the Middle East and continue curbing rights in the US. Somewhat like how Al Qaeda didn't really exist until the US started telling ghost stories about them, which turned into free recruiting.

What are the chances that the CIA is behind ISIS?

wruza3• 9 years ago

What do we do with those who thinks and is dead sure that blowing himself up in a crowd is a good idea?

We all are able to see patterns, but seeing patterns is not what solves complex problems. When doctor cuts your rotten fingers and then it happens it didn't help to save an entire arm, there is a pattern too. What does this pattern tell us? Doc wants to cut all your limbs to be sure you're not leaving his clinic, right?

g00gler2• 9 years ago

What does this pattern tell us? Doc wants to cut all your limbs to be sure you're not leaving his clinic, right?

Yes.

Kenji• 9 years ago

It's simply called authoritarianism. The problem is that the left AND the right are authoritarian. The benefit of all those 'anti terror' laws is not only not proven but also largely debunked, however, you just need to instill a bit of fear in the population and they give up all their oh so cherished freedoms.

awkwarddaturtle5• 9 years ago

I hate the fact that if I voice anything skeptical of this policy someone will call me a terrorist sympathizer.

It's a form of bullying and intimidation in order to take away once voice. It's reminiscent of the red scare and the mccarthy era. If you don't agree with our censorship, you are an commie/terrorist/etc sympathizer.

It's a well-used method of silencing opposition. The catholic church used to do that to silence opposition.. You don't think the earth is the center of the universe? You are a heretic.

And its not like there's any side of the political spectrum I can vote for. Both Hillary and Trump wanted to censor extremism on Twitter.

This is the problem. Money ultimate dictates who we can vote for. By the time the selection gets whittled down to 2, they are pretty much the same - indebted to the elite and the pretense of "left/right" is just a superficial distraction.

logicallee3• 9 years ago

what's interesting is that Google has been doing this for some time! For the longest time I was curious what would happen if you did a specific but obviously wrong search such as "how do I poison someone and get away with it" or "how do I join ISIS without being caught" or something. Well as you can imagine for obvious reasons I did not do those searches! (To spell it out, I did not want them in my search history, and also they show pretty clear criminal intent, and also we have clandestine agencies who presumably watch for such things perhaps with Google's cooperation, etc.)

Well some time ago I had the brilliant idea that I could test an "obviously wrong" search to see what kinds of results it would give.

So I'm male, and I decided to search "How do I trick a man into thinking he's the father" or something (as though I'm pregnant) which is pretty clearly wrong but which I'm obviously immune to the idea of intent for. (To spell it out, because males obviously don't get pregnant.)

I expected search results like forum discussions, a Yahoo Answer question phrased with that exact word, etc. You know, same as if you Google any other specific question like that.

Well that's not what I got at all. Despite my very specific question phrased something like the above, ALL of the top ten links were to pages about "paternity fraud" - which I didn't even know was a thing. (I just thought it was just a shitty thing to do, and anyway could always be played off as a genuine mistake.)

So I instantly learned that what I was Googling was fraud, and closed the page without clicking any of the links to learn more. But my reaction was: well played, Google!!

If I had actually started out with that thought, it's likely I would have abandoned it after that search.

To be clear, Google did NOT answer my question directly (even though no doubt there are tons of pages that would have answered it exactly as asked), instead teaching me why it's wrong.

I was very impressed. I can only imagine the same would be done for some of the worse types of queries someone can do.

Note: just to make this gender-neutral: if I were a woman then to do my experiment I could have Googled something like "how long can I trick her into having sex with me if I got a vasectomy and she is trying to get pregnant" or something, which obviously cannot be a genuine question by a woman.

johnchristopher2• 9 years ago

Have you tried without a profile and with another profile ?

I regularly search Google with questions I think another persona would ask (parents or project manager recently).

logicallee3• 9 years ago

no but it doesn't matter - none of the pages had my search terms, and they all had a different search term. It's obvious Google actively decided to return totally different pages.

for my example with the vasectomy, it's as though all the pages returned were about "sex by deception" or maybe even "rape by deception". I'm not going to do the male version so we'll never know :)

thinkloop• 9 years ago

It's hard to tell what "redirect to playlists" means - will the relevant videos be completely censored, or are they adding a playlist of opposing views to the same results? The latter seems like a nice compromise.

mgiannopoulos2• 9 years ago

> Once we have this content in place, we create targeted advertising campaigns that serve this content directly to people who are searching for information about ISIS and the caliphate, as well as people who are trying to view extremist content online. We serve these ads the same way that businesses have been doing for years—we serve advertising against certain keywords that people tend to use when they’re looking for jihadist content online << https://redirectmethod.org/qa/

gaius• 9 years ago

There is already suspicion that Google manipulated results for political ends: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/31/google_axes_eu_refe...

You might think "good, it was a stupid idea anyway" but what if next time it's something that you care about? It's a dangerous precedent to allow to be set.

avaer• 9 years ago

I'd even be fine with this if it were applied equally to US politicians calling for executions and sermons threatening people with damnation.

This isn't about actual extremism though; it's simply about getting off of YouTube the things that cannot be sold for advertising dollars.

alsadi• 9 years ago

This is very scary. They control what we see and only show us what they want us to see. Some party use terrorism execuse to have more control. Play on people fears to take their freedom and choice.

What they believe to be politically right is now what is right. This is drak ages church stoning witches and if you say something against it then you support black magic and get stoned

awkwarddaturtle5• 9 years ago

The precedence this sets is so scary and shortsighted.

So a gay man ( or even a straight person ) in saudi arabia wanting to find out more about homosexuality will be directed to anti-gay playlist which tells them how evil gays are?

In china, instead of blocking tiannamen square searches, they'll simply redirct it to showing what a great a idea it was?

What about religious countries? Will youtube simply redirect searches for atheism to "anti-atheism" site?

This is the worst form of censorship as it is sneaky and exploitive. As a liberal ( possibly former liberal ), it is shocking to me that the liberals are the ones leading the call for censorship online, in academia and business. It reminds me of Animal Farm/1984. Now that liberals have used the protections free speech to gain a lot of power/mindshare, we are trying to use it to censor everything we find offensive.

Not only is this a horrific form of censorship, it removes any credibility we ever had of criticizing others for their censorship.

hnbroseph5• 9 years ago

generally, 'liberal' politicians in the us are the same corporate sell-outs that 'conservative' politicians are.

they just work in a smidge of meaningless feel-good language in the rhetoric while doing largely nothing of consequence to actually help put food on the table.

they glory in war and economic imperialism and servicing the oligarchy just as much as any.

newscracker• 9 years ago

How will YouTube decide if my search (as an example) is to learn more about extremism? Maybe I'm a budding political and social thinker who's interested in understanding the deeper driving forces and would like to come up with approaches on how to deal with these threats in ways that are not just "let's just bomb the hell out of all these people and that will solve the problem once and for all." What about journalists who want to report on these propaganda videos in a concise yet coherent manner for the rest of the public to get a better grip of things? What about policy makers who'd like to understand and then take action? What about think tanks and policy research? What about economic and political researchers? What about "good" people who create similar videos for educational purposes (maybe a classroom assignment to analyze and come up with essays)?

I seem to be repeating stuff, but there are a lot of people who can truly help humankind (and non-humans) by accessing these videos. We have to get better at understanding things better before we can claim to have solutions. The dynamics of a year ago may not be the same as what exists now or what may happen a year from now. Censorship is a bad answer if we want to solve issues.

Would even the intelligence agencies be happy with such a move since it makes the wanted people disappear off their radars and use other modes of communication? I believe this is a self-defeating attitude and approach for anyone who desires to look beyond knee jerk reactions and instant conclusions.

The way to deal with damaging propaganda is to create more awareness and education material and put it in front of people, IMO.

williamle83002• 9 years ago

So how will people know just how vile ISIS is? Should be defer our judgement to main stream news media to tell us?

It's absurd that the Redirect company's mission statement is to "counter censorship" and their main job is to censor information.

mgiannopoulos2• 9 years ago

It should be noted that this not an actual redirect. As I understand it, no content is hidden. The "redirect" name is terribly chosen.

All they do is add ads for other videos

From the FAQ >> Once we have this content in place, we create targeted advertising campaigns that serve this content directly to people who are searching for information about ISIS and the caliphate, as well as people who are trying to view extremist content online. We serve these ads the same way that businesses have been doing for years—we serve advertising against certain keywords that people tend to use when they’re looking for jihadist content online << https://redirectmethod.org/qa/

mnm1• 9 years ago

This is simply censorship. YouTube has a right to censor its content so it can make more money. The service will be less useful for research and reporting of news stories, I suppose but the censorship is not any different than what TV and other media have been doing for decades. Frankly, I'm surprised it took them this long. They are a commercial entity after all and their only reason for being is to make money. Of course, now they are using the technology to censor terrorists. Tomorrow they'll censor more reasonable content, no doubt. That's how these things work.

YouTube Will Redirect Searches For Extremist Videos To Anti-Terrorist Playlists

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