YouTube is the America’s second most popular search engine, right after Google. Which owns YouTube. We now learn that the “don’t be evil” mothership has directed YouTube to manipulate the video channel’s search results to suppress videos asserting that the Las Vegas spree killing is a false flag operation. According to the authoritative Wall Street Journal . . .
on Tuesday the fifth result searching YouTube for “Las Vegas shooting” yielded “Proof Las Vegas Attack Was a FALSE FLAG Operation — Shooter on the 4th Floor.” Not anymore.
Like other videos on the Mandalay Bay slaughter suggesting multiple shooters and Islamic or Antifa connections, it’s been shuffled off to [the YouTube equivalent of] Buffalo.
benton.org explains . . .
YouTube recently surfaced videos peddling misinformation, hateful messages and conspiracy theories to users searching about mainstream news events—problems that caused the site to change its search results to promote more authoritative sources.
In response to criticism of some search results on social media this week, YouTube is accelerating the rollout of planned changes to its search engine. On Oct 3 night, the company began promoting more authoritative sources in search results, especially for those about major news events. YouTube doesn’t disclose how it determines which sources are authoritative.
“Authoritative” eh? Does that mean that videos produced by left leaning, pro-gun control media conglomerates will get preferential listing over small, independent producers?
Check out the search results (above) after I entered “Las Vegas shooting conspiracy.” While scrolling down reveals Alex Jones and other Mandalay Bay conspiracy mongers, the top three results are from media big boys, which have nothing to do with conspiracy theories. And nothing of that ilk appears in a generic search like “Las Vegas shooting.”
They say you can’t stop the signal. But that doesn’t mean the pro-gun control media won’t try. Are trying.
ALL the principles of the bill of rights are intertwined. An encroachment on some principles of it will ultimately lead to an encroachment of all.
WTF does that have to do with the price of tea in China.
Youtube and Google are private companies and are free to sensor as much as they want, or don’t, its their platform, if you don’t like it pick another.
Which one? That’s a legitimate question.
Bing baby. yahoo, alta vista, lycos. Google it, I’m sure that’s the best way to find it.
Agreed. Also, I don’t care if the garbage from loons like infowar, loose change, etc. gets dumped. Stuff about sandy hook victims being paid actors, 9/11 towers being blown up by the gov’t,etc. is pure garbage. It’s not reasonable speculation, is lunatic fantasies. It makes it harder to find legit information when there is so much garbage out there.
I’m not in favor of censorship or anything else. But there are pieces, videos, etc that are 100% crazy that waste peoples time. They are not serious things, it’s just alex jones type crazy town stuff.
The lunatic fringe stuff on search engines are the canary in the coal mine. When those results are not there in the results, do we know what else is missing? No. No, we don’t. I am the only person I know to trust with censorship and I don’t trust myself.
“The government is listening in on your cell phone conversations” and ” The US Navy conducted experiments using the fog banks in San Francisco to disperse biological agents” both were written off as completely out there conspiracy theories until they were both proven to be true.
First of all, ‘CWT’, the NSA was not listening in on phone conversations. They were just observing who was talking with who, which is much simpler and a far more limited (but no less serious) intrusion. As for the biological agents being tested on San Francisco, Serratia marcescens is a near harmless bacterium best known as ‘that red slime that grows in the corner of your shower after a few weeks’.
VerendusAudeo And? Nothing you wrote invalidates what wrote.
Googles’ gonna be in charge of your taxes inside of ten years, assuming they aren’t already. The BOR was not put in place to limit government, but to protect liberty. Google has ballooned into something resembling a government by nearly every measure besides an issued currency and military, which they both have courtesy of Uncle Sam (and in return they help aspiring Hillarys run for president using your analytics info)
Youtube and Google are private companies and are free to sensor as much as they want, or don’t, its their platform, if you don’t like it pick another.
Tell that to the Christian baker, florist, and photographers that didn’t want to sponsor gay weddings.
You gotta make the Left play by the same rules imposed on the right.
It’s way past time for antitrust actions against Google and Fvckbokk.
Their power far exceed any other pevious monopoies that were broken up.
Umm, the Christian baker WON the supreme court case dummy.
There is an issue with getting rid of fake, made up, insane nonsense?
Depends on what you classify as fake, insane, made-up nonsense. Shooter on the fourth floor? Yes, that’s as fake, insane, and made-up as it gets. Pizzagate? Ditto. “Trump might win the 2016 election”? Most mainstreamers would have put that in the same category.
That’s not really comparable at all. People may have though it absurd, but it isn’t “fake”. It would have been an opinion.
People don’t even know what fake news means anymore, they just parrot the dolt in chief as he calls anything he doesn’t like “fake news”.
I mean it wouldn’t have been fake news to say Russia help Donald win the election, even if no one believed it.
hillary had the illegals and Donald had the Russians. Seems fair.
Up until 2012 everyone thought the NSA spying on everyone was a lunatic fake news conspiracy too….
Like your posts Jim? If there was only a Jim filter.
You’re obsessed with me, why is that? Do I keep you up at night or something because I’m always correct?
Mr woodcock is fake news. Ignore it.
Because every post you make is terrible and people want you to go away. Listen to the videos and tell me you don’t hear more than one gun. But of course, we should never ever question anything the media and government say because the gov’t and media never ever make up lies ever. Stupid.
Every post I make is correct, and you can question the government but when you posit theories with no evidence, you’re just a moron.
Now because you don’t like my posts, I will just make sure to post more! Did that work out like you thought it would?
“Every post I make is correct.”
Fake news.
Yes there is.
When the left hides it, it’s onto something, until actually really absofuckinglutely proven wrong. Liberals lying is news to you?
You have framed the question incorrectly. The issue is: WHO gets to determine what is: fake, made up, and insane nonsense?
You? Me? Obama, Trump, Hillary? Google stockholders? Who exactly?
Let’s not jump on the Alex Jones style conspiracy bandwagon. It does nothing but harm for our cause. We don’t need to be perceived as crazy tin foil hat extremists. We want to be the “law abiding normal dude next door- with guns” in order to show that normal people possessing firearms are a positive element of American society.
^this^
I’ve not been to Full30 yet to look things over but I’d be very disappointed if I see a bunch of tinfoil hat conspiracy vids posted there. We the POTG should be light years better than that.
I have watched a few dozen videos (mostly InRange, Forgotten Weapons, Mr. Guns’n’Gear, and Valor Ridge on Full30 and haven’t noticed anything but gun videos. Well Mr. Hendricks does speak stridently about the second amendment sometimes, but I don’t recall him presenting any conspiracy theories. So far it seems like a good place to watch videos without patronizing YouTube.
Yes, let’s not question anything. Let us take everything the government and media serious because they have been shown time and time again to be good, honest people. /sarcasm
You people seriously need to have your heads excavated from your rectums.
There’s a difference between being a critical thinker and blatantly ignoring evidence and making stuff up. Alex Jones and conspiracy theorists of his ilk crossed that line long ago
Of course, the Alex Jones scapegoats. Is he the only one doing this? No. Other people are asking legitimate questions and YouTube is censoring them. Question like why did he kill him self when he still had buttloads of rounds left? Why do you here two guns in the videos of the shooting? Why does the gun that he supposedly killed himself with have a blood trail from the gun to his body? There are multiple things here that are sketchy and simply don’t add up.
The word is hear, not here.
You don’t hear two guns, you hear muzzle report, and supersonic crack, plus you’re in an artificial canyon with massive echo. It sounds exactly like what it is, one douchebag with a slide fire stock pointed at the microphone from 400 yards away.
You ever read the comments section on this blog, or the blog itself, or this post? It’s a little late to go imploring this lot to not act like a bunch of conspiracy theory gibberish spouting buffoons.
I agree with you, but if you’re looking for people to not act like kooks, you’re looking in the wrong place.
And yet its no ‘theory’ that this video is gone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNiRr763gJA
Just click the link for yourself and see.
Here it is under a different name than “video from the mandalay bay”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O_3RQlKJb0
Once again, the burst from 2:17 to 2:28 is clearly not a bumpfire AR, but from a belt fed weapon. Some of the other bursts do sound like bumpfire, but NOT 2:17-2:28.
Having fired an M249, that doesn’t sound anything at all like one, ROF is too slow. Sounds like a bump fire AR with a Surefire 60/100 or a Magpul D60.
All search engines curate results. It’s completely understandable that YT would want to reduce the incedence of hateful or misleading information. It doesn’t surprise me that Jones doesn’t show up when you search for the shooting for the same reason I’m not surprised when I see university web pages and not Christian blogs when I search evolution.
Unfortunately this often means that finding these conspiracies is more difficult, but it’s a tradeoff all search algorithms are faced with.
Also, do you REALLY want to identify the pro gun crowd with conspiracy nuts who attack family members of shootings? We’re better than that.
“It’s completely understandable that YT would want to reduce the incedence of hateful or misleading information.”
First gun owners are OK with bump-stocks being “regulated” (aka banned) and now they’re giving the thumbs up to censoring people. All these years I’ve been in the gun community and only now am I seeing it’s full of RATS!
It’s not censorship. It’s a search engine trying to meet the consumer demand for reliable information. Most people, when searching “holocaust” for instance are looking for encyclopedia or documentary results- not denier videos, so search engines prioritize those results. If this is censorship it’s benign and necessary for the functioning of a search engine.
Now this could be used as a pernicious form of censorship, but I see no evidence of that here. YTs algorithm looks to be programmed to provide news sources as the top result for any search related to the vegas shooting. The conspiracy videos are still there, UT has just prioritized the videos it thinks will fit the consumer’s request the best.
This is something ALL search engines MUST do in order to successfully return relevant and useful results.
Yeah, a search engine that has been proven TIME AND TIME AGAIN to be biased against conservatives and the truth in general. Your cognitive dissonance is so pronounced you’ve actually believe Google is capable of being an arbiter rather than the SJW lefty sausagefest it’s been proven to be.
What the consumers demand is TRUTH. When people search about the holocaust, they don’t want a black-and-white puppet show. They want history through an objective lens. Nobody is denying the holocaust, but you’d be a fool to think there couldn’t be some things we were told wrong. Victors rewrite history, and even if they were right, they still get to write it, warts and all.
Why is it so wrong to just have a logarithm that simply shows what the results are and let the grown adults sift through the bullshit and make their own conclusion? This idea that you need to hold their hand to find the “truth” literally sounds like lowkey nanny-statism.
Kyle, you’re funny! A proven liberal progressive controlled platform that is self directed by political correctness and “social justice” that has already demonitized conservative bloggers, and blocked YouTube postings that criticise Islam is supposed to be trusted to decide what is “real” news and what is “fake” news.
Yeah, you’re right out of “1984” and the bureau of Truth with “slavery is freedom” and lies are truth.
ALL ships are full of rats. The trick is to separate them from the human beings.
But rats are not necessary for the functioning of ships, so it appears you missed my meaning…
FWIW, they changed their motto from “don’t be evil” to “do the right thing”. The latter is of course much less rigid and compatible with leftist ideology where the “right thing” might actually be evil. You know, the whole ends justifies the means thing.
Yup, like covertly giving Hillary analytics info from company assets to ensure her historic win. Evil, but ‘right.’ Might makes right, which makes sense giving big G’s utter dominance.
WHY?
Why wouldn’t youtube do this?
Youtube is not a news website, but it does handle an absolute metric f*ton of news media. You think youtube is going to give the top search results to a 3 upload channel that has one 2 million view video, or would youtube give the top search results to the official channels for The Guardian, CBC (because I’m in Canada), CNN, and Fox? Youtube doesn’t give a crap about individual views on a one-off conspiracy theorists channel (and they *usually* only get thousands of views at the most), they care about CPM, ad revenue, and continuous viewership via channel subscriptions, of course they’re going to pump search results with the most popular news channels.
“Why wouldn’t youtube do this?”
There’s an amendment in our Constitution that comes right before the 2nd that actually answers this question.
And that amendment specifically says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
It doesn’t mention anything about private companies being prohibited from moving videos around on their own platform.
Lol the government can’t prevent speech therefore a private company can’t curate search results? How does that follow?
Yeah, a private company that has a monoploy on information and takes money from our government (aka our tax dollars). Google has become such an expansive mechanism for us to attain information that “Google it” is now a part of our common lingo. I don’t like seeing these hipster idiots always pissing and moaning about the big mean ol’ corporations but considering how much our society relies on it for information, you have to wonder if it is even a “private” company anymore.
Either way, the point is moot. Censoring/undermining people just because you don’t think they fit your idea of “truth” is morally unjustifiable.
What’s a monoploy? is that like one ploy, like a one trick pony?
Asking questions and listening to other view points is the key to developing informed opinions. But I guess that’s the point, we’re supposed to develop the opinions the msm wants us to have.
I think 99.99% of all conspiracy theories are insane ramblings, but that doesn’t mean they should be censored. Google might think this is good business, but when I’m searching for something, I want to be able to find it. If Google makes that hard to do, then they have left a big hole for competition to enter. I use Google and Youtube because they are better at finding what I’m looking for than other search engines. As soon as that is not true, the other search engine becomes my new default. Why would I be loyal to Google? They’ve never done anything to earn loyalty from me.
I wonder what Google will do when they realize that certain searches for Grimous, the creature from McDonald’s ad fame, turn up “suggested searches” like “Purple nigga from McDonald’s”.
True story. I found it the other day. The top three suggested alternative search strings were “Grimace”, “Purple nigga from McDonald’s” and “Purple nigga”, in that order.
An odd window into the American subconscious, one I’m sure they’ll “fix” when they find it.
I always thought Hamburglar had more depth as a character…
You clearly need to watch The Legend of Grimous Island.
Also look up the Google “Black” scandal. If you can Google it that is.
There are other search engines:
duckduckgo.com
goodgopher.com
just to name two.
i have never before seen that creatures name spelled out. how odd.
and i grew up with sid and marty croft shows. of course, he was just a purjered facsimile. easy to assume.
quite a lawsuit. i’m glad ‘doodles lost.
Using Google to fuck with Google is it’s own reward.
“It’s Rainbows, and Unicorns from now on …I guess…You sure this ISN’T part ALL part of the Deep State ?!”
…Some people would say the same about TTAG…With all it’s junk malware ads about “Toe Fungus, or This Hollywood star died and no one cares…Or, look what this person looks like today…Try some of this disgusting whatever it is and be cured of major diseases—snake oil…” So, Who’s really fake news……
You have no adblocker? You must be on an iThing. Ha!
…DJ @, Just a making a point….Some folks making comments appear to be just Liberal trolls, or SJWs….Others, maybe members ready to take that walk down to the “Office of Civil Disarmament….” And , Then Head straight over to the “Ministry of Love and Hugs ! ” Good luck, I hope they at least warmed up the oven till its toasty warm on a cold winter day…..
….When everyone here is done “doing the right thing for society” and disarming…Will TTAG be renamed to the “Truth About Kntting and Crocheting…” Just like how things are in the UK…?