YouTube erased more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations

https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-palestine-human-rights-censorship/

by rzk • 9 months ago

453 110 9 months ago

It turns out that it's much easier than anyone thought to end freedom of speech in the United States. If no one cares about the Constitution, then it's just paper.

Trump sanctions the International Criminal Court and anyone who provides evidence to it, and now pro-Palestinian groups can't post videos of Israeli abuse on YouTube. The First Amendment is nowhere to be seen.

hobs• 9 months ago

Don't forget how this admin cried up and down about the censorship of the previous on Covid misinformation, and said that freedom of speech was paramount; no surprise a lie again.

gosub1002• 9 months ago

Both sides are heavily controlled by AIPAC. That's why you'll rarely hear democrat YouTubers calling out the genocide. For example, Brian Tyler Cohen has remained mute about it. It's true for many other partner channels.

Mountain_Skies• 9 months ago

Tech company censorship during the pandemic was one of the most widely celebrated actions on Hacker News. A few warned that giving tech companies this much control over discourse would have consequences, but the typical poster here didn't care, they just wanted anything that didn't conform with the blessed narrative to be suppressed.

StarGrit2• 9 months ago

Freedom of Speech has and will be suppressed by various governments, with various reasons being given. This has been going on for longer than any of us have been alive.

e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918

There is nothing unique about what is happening now.

rwmj• 9 months ago

A peculiar bit of whataboutism.

jackjeff2• 9 months ago

The irony is that JD Vance lectured the Europeans about their lack of freedom of speech in Europe while invited in Germany.

_heimdall4• 9 months ago

Did the government force YouTube to take down the videos?

Freedom of speech is meant to protect us from government censorship. Trump sanctions would fall into that category, but a social media site censoring what they don't want to host seems like fair game.

the_af2• 9 months ago

Did the government force YouTube to take down the videos?

The article answers this:

YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review.

latexr3• 9 months ago

Did the government force YouTube to take down the videos?

Yes, according to the article. That argument is made over and over in it, it’s hard to miss. “Forcing” doesn’t just mean directly requiring the action, it also means the threat of “this is not going to end up well for you if you don’t comply”. Of course, you can argue that Google could and should fight it, but that doesn’t change what the government is doing.

but a social media site censoring what they don't want to host seems like fair game.

Again, the article makes it really clear they are doing this as the direct result of government actions.

gosub1002• 9 months ago

If by "the government" you mean the Israeli government? Probably. They have unlimited control over the US, quite possibly due to a decades-long blackmail operation.

mpalmer• 9 months ago

The ICC is not a beneficiary of the Constitution, nor is YouTube bound by the Constitution. I'm unhappy for the same reasons as you, but this isn't how 1A works.

jackjeff2• 9 months ago

The problem is that these private companies have taken a disproportionate place in public discourse. You are absolutely right that freedom of speech does not guarantee the right to post anything on YouTube (someone else's website). In fact YouTube has the right (protected speech) to censor you and refuse to let you post long as they don't do in a discriminatory way (for instance, only "white people" can post would be discriminatory/illegal).

The problem is that in practice, if you can't do YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok, INsta, etc... your speech will not be heard by anyone. It's like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, the fact that it makes sound is irrelevant. So effectively, it amounts to censorship, even though the government potentially had no hand in it.

Now imagine someone in Trump administration pressured Google with a juicy contract, or the prospect of an expensive lawsuit, and the quid pro quo was dumping these videos that annoy "our Israeli friends". This kind of "pay to play" is at minimum corruption. It may also fall of short of constitutional guarantees for free speech. Ironically, it is exactly the same thing a lot of members of the Trump administration have accused Biden of doing (exhibit: the so called "Twitter Files" etc... ), although I don't believe this went anywhere in federal courts (am I wrong?)

I honestly don't know what the answer is. But I would not be surprised if in 50 years time, some of these large companies get regulated as "utilities" and are no longer able to yank "videos" from their platform just because they feel like it. And every time they "abuse" their powers, I feel like we get an inch closer to that onerous regulation.

davorak• 9 months ago

nor is YouTube bound by the Constitution.

nitpick - Youtube is bound by the US Constitution, it is the highest law of the land. 1A[1] is only about binding the government/congresses power though so youtube is not bound by 1A.

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/

DiogenesKynikos3• 9 months ago

The US government has effectively ordered YouTube to take down these pro-Palestinian YouTube channels.

When the government pressures companies to censor Constitutionally protected speech, that is a First Amendment violation. If it weren't, the First Amendment would have no practical meaning.

EdiX• 9 months ago

Where were you in the last 6 years? Ah, I see, people you didn't like were being censored so you didn't care.

woodpanel2• 9 months ago

Exactly, it's laughable that this is coming from the same people who cheered on auto de-monetization for even mentioning the word "Covid" in a YT-video or the countless de-platforming and de-banking of individuals. Is this still gaslighting or something else?

alwahi• 9 months ago

you must understand that your country is basically a uniparty that allows vigorous debate in a very zone of ideas (to paraphrase Chomsky), e.g Biden allowed the genocide to continue for as long as he was in office. Your country is basically subservient to Capital and the Israeli lobby.

The lesson to draw from Gaza is that if you become inconvenient to "the people in power" tomorrow, you would meet the exact same fate.

ta20240528• 9 months ago

"now pro-Palestinian groups can't post videos of Israeli abuse on YouTube."

Perhaps not, but they could courier the evidence on a DVD to the Hague.

Bender2• 9 months ago

Did anyone mirror the videos on their own servers?

hsbauauvhabzb4• 9 months ago

I looked into writing a script that wires yt-dlp to archive.org, iirc one already existed, but archive.org requested that people only upload videos that are at risk of deletion by YouTube.

I guess this would be a valid contender. I’d encourage anyone to begin mirroring videos for that reason.

9991• 9 months ago

Is that a joke? They're all 'at risk' of deletion.

isodev2• 9 months ago

That's why we have Peertube and your personal (not hosted by a corp) website. It's amazing how people forgot to use the internet in exchange for "easier" UX.

the_af2• 9 months ago

I don't think it's about UX at this point. It's more about critical mass. Unfortunately, YouTube is where the videos and audience are... yes, it's a Catch-22 situation.

gloxkiqcza• 9 months ago

In case of YouTube I wouldn’t be so sure. Yes, it’s the central hub for making your name but many YouTubers came up with their own platforms for exclusive content to have more control over their business once they got big. PeerTube is inline with that idea and because of that might be promoted by big creators soon.

Bender2• 9 months ago

Youtube is certainly useful for discovery and monetization but if the goal is to share a video that may be censored I would suggest everyone should upload to {n+2} locations at a minimum and link to both YT and the self hosted mirrors from a blog after linking to the blog from YT. It's easier than friends of YT would suggest.

konart3• 9 months ago

It's amazing how people forgot to use the internet in exchange for "easier" UX.

What's so amazing here? This a normal and expected human behaviour.

forgot to use the internet

What does this even mean in this context?

Aldipower• 9 months ago

What does this even mean in this context?

Look, you've forgotten it otherwise you wouldn't ask this question.

Jean-Philipe2• 9 months ago

From my experience, it used to be quite normal for a lot of my non-technical peers to have a personal webpage on the internet with frontpage express, wordpress or geocities. Nowadays, even a lot of businesses don't have a website, but instead an Instagram or Facebook entry. YMMV

The internet is still decentralized today.

hliyan2• 9 months ago

I wonder if the future should simply be a cloud version of a personal computer. Rather than subscribing to a lot of SaaS where your data distributed across various platforms, you "purchase" a cloud computer (could be a tiny SOC + disk, or a VM), install software on it (licensed, not subscription based), and store all your data on it, as good old-fashioned files only you and your programs can access. Including your video library, part of which you can choose to expose to the outside world through a public IP. When your cloud PC needs more memory or CPU, you upgrade, just like you do your physical device.

krige• 9 months ago

And then the company goes under, or decides your variant of the service is not worth maintaining, or that there is potential for enshittification. All your data, gone. And it WILL happen.

kakacik• 9 months ago

I certainly hope it shouldn't look like that, that sounds horrible on many, in fact all levels.

kiicia3• 9 months ago

You just described worst case scenario

tamimio2• 9 months ago

So you put all your eggs in one basket, what could go wrong?!

JohnFen• 9 months ago

Oh, hell no. That would mean having even less control over my "computer", and would expose me to even greater abuse by tech companies.

marcuskane2• 9 months ago

your personal (not hosted by a corp) website

I'm not sure that's enough. A few years ago there were some set of websites that wanted less censorship than the main corporate sites (or at least, a different set of censorship rules), I forget all their names now - voat, rumble, gab, parler, etc and people who didn't like the content they saw there just went upstream to cloud providers, app stores, registrars, payment processors, CDNs, ISPs and anywhere else in order to shut them down, cut them off or prevent access.

Tons of sites that failed to perfectly comply with American media conglomerate's interpretation of copyright have been forced offline, had their domain names seized, etc.

There was a period of time where the MPAA and RIAA were routinely suing random teenagers and grandparents for life-destroying sums of money because they used Napster to share a song they liked with a friend.

I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed and can't result in people getting arrested, losing their jobs, their visas or their funding for saying things that the people in power don't want said.

fluoridation4• 9 months ago

I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed

That already exists. They're called onion sites. What we really need is something that performs about as well as the current Internet, but is stronger against deplatforming: decentralized DNS. It doesn't even need to give memorable names like DNS does, it just needs to be a second, stable addressing layer on top of IP so clients can always find the server.

pas• 9 months ago

someone is hosting kiwifarms and stormfront (for 29 years and counting)

gab, voat and the others simply gave up when the convenient providers did not want to deal with their bullshit

YT is not the hosting provider of record, even if it looks like it sometimes (I guess no one is)

atomic128• 9 months ago

Allow me to introduce you to the Tor hidden service ecosystem: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/

bjourne• 9 months ago

Does having your personal website even matter when the agents of censorship can just request that search engines delist your urls? Or pay for tons of ads so that your site's ranking drops to the second or third page for whatever keywords it happens to match on. And if they still get sizeable traffic, they can just ask your hosting provider to cancel your account. No need to burn the books when you can just remove them.

tamimio2• 9 months ago

And you think it will stop here? Nope, next AWS or whatever cloud where you host your clone will terminate your service, then you go and rent a bare-metal, same thing later, then you go and host it on your own hardware, the CDN will terminate it! Oh you managed to find a mediocre CDN? The ISP next! As long as there's no regulation protecting your rights, whoever has the biggest share in xyz will be in charge.

johnnyanmac2• 9 months ago

We're in an attention economy. You don't post on Youtube for preservation, you post there to reach an audience so people know what's going on. If you're not the POTUS you don't have the luxury to use an alternative site and not be utterly ignored.

notorandit2• 9 months ago

If all this is true, then it's another step towards freedom.

Freedom to delete and rewrite history.

dncornholio• 9 months ago

We shouldn't rely on YouTube to write our history. It's just an American entertainment website that makes money of ads. It has no other obligations. It can do whatever it wants, or what the US government wants. This is not news.

FridayoLeary• 9 months ago

I'm sure it's technically true, with absolutely no nuance. You can say "BBC pull documentary of life inside gaza" which is completely accurate. What is also true is that the boy who was the main focus of the documentary was the son of a Hamas official which throws the whole thing into question.

YT normally takes down any video depicting violence.

metalman• 9 months ago

more than 700 genocide video's ,confirmed to have been removed, with countless others, errased, along with the person who took the video too quickly to be noticed. the strong implication is that utube has dedicated resources and staff working 24/7 to do this, or has allowed "outside" entities privlages to do so. though given the demographics in the NYC race, real support for the genocide is weak.

neonate• 9 months ago

https://archive.li/sGz40

manyaoman• 9 months ago

Not gonna lie, Boot Bullwinkle is an awesome name.

CommanderData• 9 months ago

Facebook have a Zionist censorship team.

YouTube probably has far worse.

All US social media are bound to US foreign policy which enables Israel to continue it's invasion and systematic cleansing of Palestinians.

sciencesama• 9 months ago

With even a small percent of population they can do so much !!

eldgfipo• 9 months ago

Neocons/Zionist is a huge percentage of people in power (including the ones appointed or who ruthlessly climbed up the corporate ladder)

kiicia3• 9 months ago

For months now word „zionist” is officially banned on Facebook and hasbara bots are ready to tell you that you are antisemite

xyzal• 9 months ago

Fed up by status quo? Consider donating.

https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org/donate

nujabe• 9 months ago

Done

bjoli• 9 months ago

For those not clicking random links: this foundation tries to find evidence of atrocities by people with dual citizenship so that they can be prosecuted in their other home country.

boxed3• 9 months ago

Youtube takes down snuff. News at 11.

It doesn't matter if the snuff is an Israeli shooting a Palestinian, or a jihadi beheading a cartoonist. It's all removed because YouTube doesn't accept snuff on its platform.

teddyh3• 9 months ago

Technically, “snuff” is usually defined as at least being made for entertainment (I say “usually”, since commonly other requirements are added as well). But beheading videos and the like are meant to scare their enemies, not to entertain weirdos on the internet. So these are not “snuff” videos.

fluoridation4• 9 months ago

If you want to get technical, then

A film or video clip which involves a real non-acted murder.

It seems like any video depicting a real murder would count as snuff. In any case, has YouTube ever allowed either kind?

boxed3• 9 months ago

I would think the "for entertainment" is in the eye of the beholder, and the production part is irrelevant. In either case, YouTube has never allowed this stuff.

lern_too_spel2• 9 months ago

These videos were removed because of sanctions against the companies who run the YouTube channels, not because of ToU violations.

elihu• 9 months ago

Another form of tech industry Gaza atrocity denialism and gaslighting is satellite maps of Gaza.

Bing maps seems to be entirely pre-war as far as I can tell. In a way, that's kind of useful, as it can serve as a reference for what Gaza used to look like in A/B comparisons.

Google maps on the other hand has had at least some updates. Southern Gaza appears basically unscathed, but the Northern part shows some wide swathes where there's very little left but dust and rubble. I think Google did that update a couple months ago. Before that it was kind of hard to find any serious damage at all. (Jabalia refugee camp has shown as a ruin before that update.)

To some extent it's understandable that neither company wants to be updating all of their satellite images all the time. Still, the war has been going on for years and this is a place that a huge number of people really want to know what's going on. Updating slowly (Google) or not at all (Microsoft) at this point seem like deliberate policies, and I'd imagine they're probably highly contentious within those companies.

alsetmusic• 9 months ago

There was an article yesterday about Jimmy Wales commenting on edit wars on the Wikipedia entry for Genocide in Gaza (or similar title). The article didn't indicate his taking one side or the other, but I'd prefer if people didn't use name-recognition to influence such things (yes, even if they take the same side as me because others will do the same in the other direction).

Fwiw, I downloaded a torrent of footage documenting the genocide last year. I don't think it would be considered appropriate for me to link to it here on HN, but I wanted to raise awareness that torrents such as this exist.

I'm also on a torrent full of CDC data that was taken down by the current admin plus a couple of other public-service torrents. You can find stuff like this too. I got mine from a certain federated clone of the R site.

underdeserver• 9 months ago

He's not trying to influence anything - he's trying to safeguard Wikipedia's stated neutral point-of-view policy.

His statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

Whatever your point of view is, he explains clearly why the article is biased:

At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested. This is a violation of WP:NPOV and WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV that requires immediate correction.
A neutral approach would begin with a formulation such as: “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.”

dlubarov• 9 months ago

The position Wales was taking was that Wikipedia shouldn't be calling it a genocide in its own voice ("wikivoice"), which means taking a side rather than neutrally documenting the controversy.

Larry Sanger also made a similar statement. The two Wikipedia founders had a falling out back in the day, and it's the first time in a long time that they've publicly agreed on anything.

Neither has any special power on the wiki though. One might hope that both founders pointing out NPOV issues could be a wake-up call to stop interpreting the NPOV policy "creatively" to push an agenda,[3] but realistically nothing seems likely to change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

[3] As an example of "creative workarounds" to Wikipedia's neutrality policy, one of the justifications for renaming "Allegations ..." to "Gaza genocide" was a rather bizarre idea that neutrality doesn't apply to titles since they're "topics", not statements. The statement implied by the new title was then predictably used as one of the justifications for changing the article body to use "genocide" in wikivoice.

johnnyanmac2• 9 months ago

but I'd prefer if people didn't use name-recognition to influence such things

You describe a laradox. If Jimmy Wales didn't say it, you never would have ended up making this comment. And thus attention to the matter that there are even edit wars on Gaza would be suppressed.

We're a social species, so attaching a familiar name or face will always get more attention. You can even observe this on Reddit in how including a person holding the artwork (male or female) instead of the art alone results in more upvotes. so the face doesn't even need a reputation behind it.

queenkjuul2• 9 months ago

Isn't that the point? The "controversy" could (and maybe should) exist amongst Wikipedia editors

AraceliHarker• 9 months ago

The deleted videos did, in fact, violate YouTube's rules, but it's questionable whether YouTube would have taken them down if they hadn't shown an Israeli soldier carrying out a lynching.

thisislife2• 9 months ago

You are not spouting any fringe consipracy theory. Videos commenting on Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza ( see https://genocide.live/locations ) on TikTok played a huge role in publicising the genocide to the world. And it is also the primary reason why the western backers of Israel were so hell bent on acquiring TikTok - an IDF soldier, who is a "proud American Jew" and Zionist, already oversees "hate speech" and "antisemitism" policies on TikTok ( see https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/tiktok-hires-former-idf-reservi... ). And Netanyahu also publicly affirmed that social media was Israel’s new ‘weapon’ after the TikTok acquisition ( see https://www.newarab.com/news/netanyahu-says-social-media-isr... ).

raxxorraxor• 9 months ago

Most of these were probably one-sided propaganda videos. Ironically these are mostly policies against "fake news" that were pushed by a political faction that now complains about censorship.

People that are mad about the death of their revolution, developed an inferiority complex, looked at propaganda on TikTok and are now disliking Jews. You can argue the position to be more sophisticated, but sometimes it is not and it wouldn't be the first time.

And of course there is ample and valid criticism of policies of Israel but I heavily doubt that these videos were informative. Granted, this is entirely based on some assumptions.

aristofun• 9 months ago

Afaik they also remove hamas atrocities and genocide videos. So it's a fair game at least.

YouTube erased more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations

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