Since nobody has noticed or documented a Google policy of banning YouTube videos that are too funny, let’s go with “too on-target” as the reason that Google deleted a popular YouTube channel, the RutersXiaoFanQi channel, devoted to satirically slapping China autocrat Xi Jinping.
Some of RutersXiaoFanQi’s videos survive in lesser-known YouTube channels. (Here is one. Here is another.) The approach of the videos seems to be to keep throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Apparently, the ratio of sticking to falling flat was too high for Xi and Google.
Unfair to Google? Maybe. We don’t know what happened behind the scenes.
Did Google just automatically delete the channel after having received a certain number of complaints about copyright violations from Xi’s offices? Or did Google honchos sit around an oak conference table, mull all the variables, and solemnly conclude “We simply must appease the Xi regime!”?
YouTube did not respond to an inquiry from Radio Free Asia about the matter. But RutersXiaoFanQi had received a notice stating that “Your YouTube account has been shut down following repeated copyright warnings,” presumably pertaining to music used in the videos.
It is unlikely, though, that various owners of whatever tunes the channel used bothered to lodge any complaints. It is much more likely that, as RFA speculates, the censors of Xi’s regime are exploiting YouTube’s system for reporting copyright infringements.
And that Google’s YouTube is taking the easy way out.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on “Too Funny or Too On-Target?”
YouTube has long been deficient in acknowledging those uses which are not prohibitted by law of material that is otherwise protected by copyright.
Because of a clustering effect, the largest audiences are to be found by posting on YouTube; but other sites exist, including Rumble, BitChute, and Brighteon.
Everyone who posts video to YouTube should mirror at an alternate site, and RutersXiaoFanQi should now decamp to one or more of those alternate sites.
Those who embed videos posted to another site (as here and as occasionally at my ‘blog) do their visitors a double service by using one of those other sites and avoiding YouTube altogether. First, the clustering effect is somewhat countered. Second, visitors are spared tracking by Alphabet (the parent company of Google).
I want to explain that second point. Embedded content is fetched from the site that provides it. Even if the visitor doesn’t play the video, or click on the Facebook reaction (“Like”) button, or otherwise interact with the embedded content, the supplier of the embedded whoozit is sent information about the visitor, including often a cookie that identifies the visitor by his or her account with that supplier (Google, Facebook, or whatever).
Embedding YouTube videos informs Alphabet when and where users going, even when those visitors don’t watch the videos.
Yes, Soundcloud and Rumble and BitChute and Brighteon can likewise do such tracking, but these are not the dire octopodes that Alphabet and Meta have become.