JemmyYouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations
BrikoXtheintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-isra…
The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups — a capitulation to Trump sanctions.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251104233119/https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-palestine-human-rights-censorship/
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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.
Nothing, no matter how bad, evil, terrible, treasonous, or ihumane, will destroy youtube. Except if they fail to honor a C&D from Disney.
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
DupaCyckiNewPipe is fantastic and I encourage everyone to use it if they can, but I can’t really see how it’s related to the topic.
M137The 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.
Until next year when “sideloading” dies, and we’re back to square one.
There will be workarounds. They are fucking stupid.
I’d rather be surprised by that then assume that will be a thing and then be disappointed.
I plan on mostly degoogling and getting lineage or Graphene anyway, but I’m juggling several timelines while I decide how and when to proceed.
DremorDoes anyone got those videos as a torrent so I can seed 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.
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.
When you realize that this is the way a majority of people (at least in america) live by default, its really not that crazy. Also why data archival is of utmost importance.
eletesThere’s a vast amount on TikTok I imagine will be scrubbed after the sale finalizes
The internet never forgets, but only for those things the internet wants to remember.
Forreal though, the internet isn’t so centralized that records could be purged like this. Made less easily publicly accessible? Sure. But I doubt rumble or bitleaks or the thousand other sites that popped up and mirrored LiveLeaks after it shut down are going to all cooperate with that idea.
This is what social networks do, the assholes at the top don’t mind erasing accounts and deleting comments when they are inconvenient for them. It is a more effective version of book burning.
aarch0x40Knowing why in these examples is important but it’d be nice to NOT see every big name just lean right this model of government we’re struggling with. STOP BEING COMPLICIT WITH ISRAEL. They are acting as terrorists. Anyone who commits those atrocities needs to be exposed, doesnt matter who. This is a humanitarian issue with our whole civilization.
DevolutionIs 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.
But for documentation of significantly newsworthy footage, it seems like the place to upload. Which might spread awareness of the site itself.
For content that needs censorship, I’m stumped on a suitable solution.
Wouldn’t just a peertube instance dedicated to a particular purpose (say for academic purposes or just for documentary archives) be sufficient, with allowances for the content within to be downloaded/cloned if need be, but the root instance having a dedicated admin(s) with rules on quality control and making sure appropriate content is updated? (Not in terms of political spectrum, but making sure uploaded content is not fabricated and relevant to the instance’s purpose)
Think of this like a Wikimedia-esque entity but just for a single peertube/Odyseey group (that would allow distributed cloning ala piratebay/annas archive)
I agree with what I can understand, but I don’t have much expertise in the tech specifics. I’m still working on configuring my Linux desktop, just got a little obsessive about keyboard shortcuts and eMacs orgmode and very busy with working outside of tech.
Gary GhostYouTube 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
i mean, albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, and ebaums world were things before and around the time of youtube; iirc the main thing youtube had was a clean design and a decent video player that handled buffering without stuttering. it made it easier for people to just upload a video and share it. ebaumsworld kind of had that i think, but the site layout was a mess and i’m pretty sure i remember them basically just stealing the content of other sites like albinoblacksheep
That’s kinda what I’m getting at. The waiting involved in watching one would kill me when they were popular. I was starting college in 04, and we upgraded to broadband shortly before I started, so I didn’t really go to them much at all before that. Watching a tiny gif was actual torture on dial up, video wasn’t even attempted unless it sounded REALLY cool.
Not an exact alternative, but a lot of Youtube creators are on Nebula. It does require a subscription, but every creator is part owner of the service so your money goes directly to them.
That work at such a scale, with “popular” content creator being able to actually share their content, for free? No, not really.
There are small scale initiatives, but you likely won’t find much of the mainstream people on them. And, depending on what you use, you won’t find much at all, because searching for content is a mess unless you are directly pointed to it from somewhere else.
There is a big issue with making up an alternative to youtube, at anything approaching the scale of youtube: it represents a lot of content, streamed from servers under strict time constraints, to many dozen/hundreds/thousands of people. With a centralized infrastructure that requires a lot of servers, spread over many places and many different networks. And these cost money. Using peer to peer at such a scale isn’t that great either, although with more popularity it could improve.
Existing large providers such as youtube can handle this because they have such a vast CDN available, which allows sending one copy of a video into a region once, then spreading it across multiple diffusers, who then have a reasonable load on them.
Nebula is the only thing remotely comparable.
I’m loving it. But its not a “search what you want and you’ll find it” like YouTube is. You can’t search for a video to DIY your bathroom tile.
That alternative simply doesn’t exist.
If you treat it like podcasts i.e. follow creators you like (just about all of them are also YouTubers) theres some excellent content there. And the creators are all stakeholders so no daddy capitalist screwing with algorithms.
PeerTube is the open source federated one. But discovery is next to impossible on it.
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
Anything that allows distributed hosting without any central accountability will inevitably have right-wing content uploaded - we have this problem in the fediverse as well. I think the best solution is to create an instance within these platforms that can stick within a certain niche to build trustworthyness (ie: an instance solely dedicated to news footage/documentaries).
isn’t right wing censorship worse than right wing propaganda?
There’s nuance for sure (guess I should have worded the root comment better), but I’m referring to activities involving fake/generated content, conspiracy theories, or things like dismissing science or verified historical events.
I think fediverse shows that the model works. Fringe ideas stay fringe because you can’t amplify it with bots.
It does make me think twice about ever purchasing a google pixel. What another android phone that has good spam call protection or app?
Android in general is on its way out because google decided to remove sideloading programs that don’t have their approval.
I’m not sure my pixel has that good of protection against spam
It seems to work pretty well in my opinion.
I still catch a stray every now and then, but if I had to ball park it off the top of my head I’d say less than once a month.
But they come in spurts, so maybe they all change numbers and get through once, then back to the shadow realm for months in a row.
SugarCatDestroyerWell, YouTube obeys its BIG BROTHER like a slave, what did you expect?
mycodesucksThat can’t be. Every time I point out that youtube is a HORRIBLE place for people to make the source of record for movements, history, and general archival, and that blogging and text are more durable and necessary for these exact reasons, I get downvoted into oblivion. It must be a problem with reality because video good and video is the future.
I just want to say, I share your specific species of frustration here and understand it well. Ughhh.
Skimmed the article (yay for reader view) but it doesn’t really say WHY the channel was deleted?
I am not in the slightest bit shocked by google bending over backwards to pleasure trump and netanyahu. But this also doesn’t seem like their MO. They are usually “good” about explaining what new rule they invented and why that suddenly gave a channel 40 strikes retroactively and I am not seeing that here?
Whereas there are a few mid-size channels that have allegedly been flagged “by AI” as being other bad channels? Which… actually seems more likely since it is less youtube taking an actual stand on anything and more just deciding the ai slop channels that stole footage are the originators and to ban everyone involved.
YouTube has also quietly deleted all the videos of 9/11 first responders who said they heard explosions.
1985MustangCobra
KissakiAlternative title: Trump administration forces YouTube to delete more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations
Forces implies an unwillingness and resistance. Knowing YouTube, they were probably more than happy to help in the covering up of war crimes.
All social media has been since before the final solution for the gaza ghetto.
Including reddit, facebook, twitter, instagram, tik tok now.
In private companies courts decided we have no rights, but the government can lean on them in secret, creating a de facto government censorship of speech.
Same as warrantless surveillance, the government buys private data broker info without cause or warrant on everyone, does another end run around the bill of rights.
We need clear rules we can challenge enforcrment actiond on, I would say if not settled by an appeal to be decided by a jury of users, but I am an english common law partisan like that.
State laws could work but courts would cancel them the first time israel was criticized. And feds would pre empt.
I’m not a big YouTuber but I do follow a few accounts. I’m going to contact them and let them know about the possibility of Peertube.tv.
Hopefully they won’t see it as much more effort to upload their content to two places, but we’ll see!
What would the legal consequences be if YouTube did not comply with the sanctions and refused to delete the videos / accounts? Are they caving because they don’t give a damn, or because they have no choice?
The lawmakers would jamn them and parent corporation in a thousand ways not related to this. No evidence why they are jamning them to challenge in court. That is how it is done now.
Ie background checks for someone that would pass the check but has detractors, background check never comes through, they have no idea just wait they say. That way you have no right to get a copy of the information used against you as prescribed by law, no legal challenges, etc.
Lawyers working for super rich fucktwats run the west, and it is more of a shitshow everyday.
I wouldn’t put it past Google to help censor for Israel, but there’s a very real chance that these videos may have just violated whatever obtuse terms they have, maybe something with gore/violence? I don’t know.
DeebsterThe article shows that that’s not what’s going on:
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. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes.
“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.
Did you read the article or just the headline?
On Lemmy web you don’t even have to open the article. This info/content is in the content teaser.
Who reads any article these days? Only total losers and bozos read anything more than the headline.
(I read a different article that was much shorter from reddit, then saw this headline)
edit: also that’s terrible then, because it’s direct state interference.
jeffwThis was my immediate guess. Not even obtuse terms, just not wanting kids to stumble on torture porn and snuff films
https://web.archive.org/web/20250108193449/http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjVDKILC3s
Doesn’t seem like they violate the polices.
You are giving youtube the benefit of the doubt, on israel, and 36 people agreed? Jesus christ.
Sunshine (she/her)
DyskolosStop whining about censorship, stop using media that is controlled by so few people.
It’s that simple.
It’s like putting my hand in a crocs mouth and trusting it to not bite.
So glad I stopped supporting Youtube with ad revenue
you can do that with adblock, i have been using ublock origin for a decade+now.
Honest question, what are y’all doing on YouTube most days?
I go on about once or twice a month when I need to repair a thing and I can’t find a good written description of how to repair it.
Also I visited the other day to make sure my bluetooth headphones were connected before a call (I watched a video of goats doing goat things for 4s).
I’m curious what content is drawing in folks on Lemmy who probably skew towards my demographic.
video essays, news, comedy and podcasts related to the above
I don’t use the official site because I care about what data I put into the world, but I have about 150 subscriptions tailored over the last 15-ish years. Every morning I have 2-4 hours of new content on my subscriptions tab. Don’t even interact with the ragebait algorithm
I mainly just use it to watch content of few YouTubers that play timberborn and oxygen not included(Echoridgegaming) and then some vtuber stuff and daily dose of internet. Using ublock and sponsor block. Looked a bit into peertube but think I had harder time finding stuff but that was few years back so stuff might have changed. Are there any good alternatives? Sadly YouTube is kinda the go to place for content and streaming.
I follow people talk about life, improving themselves, learning things.
You cant go by the most watched or recommended content, that stuff is pure garbage.
I wonder this all the fucking time.
YouTube has been a huge contributor to the lack of useful written knowledge online.
Which would be cool if any of googles search functionality worked anywhere and video wasn’t a god awful fucking medium for learning everything.
Pause. Try a thing. Get behind. Pause. Rewind.. play. Pause. Play. Pause.
Even typing this out pisses me the fuck off.
honestly i hate podcasts and most peoples personalities are too irritating for me to stick with one source of news, philosophy, educational content etc for more than a week before I have to shut their annoying faces up. YouTube does make it really easy for me to be exposed to new people to hear from and new topics for me to dive into better than reddit or lemmy or other boards which hyperfocuses usually on specific subjects
The Linux experiment (news), Technology connections (deep dive tech), real civil engineer (video games), Göran Winblad (running), House of hypertrophy (bodybuilding science), Just have a think (climate news) and the occasional garbage.
I mostly listen to YouTube thanks to revanced, it’s pretty good for chores.
I had trouble getting it going but once I got SmartTubeNext up and running on my android tv I began watching “YouTube” more than anything. It’s almost got anything you want on it except new movies and TV shows. I watch news, gaming stuff, put music on in the background, comedy. It’s got it all. I highly recommend SmartTubeNext as it skips all ads and even cuts out the sponsored segments of videos. A truly wonderful way to get YouTube content without having to sit through ads.
Video essays, Deltarune, Minecraft and Movie discussions and theories. And music to drown out my surroundings while I read a book because my mother watches TV with sensationalised drama all the time and my house is not big enough to escape from it
some niche videos, videos of shows i never watched but have interest in, clips are satisfactory enough.
Paywalled.
https://archive.is/20251104233119/https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-palestine-human-rights-censorship/
Shouldn’t have used YouTube as your only outlet then, you damn idiots. What the hell possessed you to think America is your friend.
I knew them getting people back in the office for “collaboration” they meant collaboration with a genocide!