Resurrecting YouTube's Banned Videos and Channels
by Ron Unz | The Unz Review
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast month I’d announced that I was adding a new Video section to this website, with a central motivation being the increasingly harsh ideological censorship that YouTube was beginning to impose upon its content, as had been originally announced last Fall.
During the last few weeks, this regime of YouTube censorship has indeed intensified. A few days ago we ran an article by Sayed Hasan recounting YouTube’s sudden termination of his five-year-old video channel that had contained hundreds of videos served many millions of views. His content had sharply criticized Zionism and imperialism and strongly defended the rights of the Palestinians, presumably leading the ADL to demand its liquidation:
http://www.unz.com/article/kaf
Not long afterward, Colin Flaherty’s YouTube channel focused on black crime issues was also summarily vaporized, casting into limbo the 1100-odd videos that had attracted nearly 25 million views. This was actually the second time that his channel had been eliminated by YouTube.
Since I only chanced to learn of these particular bannings, I’m sure that many, many other channels have also fallen to the censors, not to mention numerous individual videos of channels not yet completely banned. For example, RamZPaul’s video on Donald Trump’s controversial Haiti remarks was temporarily blocked by YouTube for allegedly having “misleading tags” (his tags being “Trump” and “Haiti”):
Fortunately, I’m now pleased to announce that I’ve completed and released the remaining components of my new video system aimed at helping to circumvent such YouTube censorship.
It is important to realize that YouTube’s near-monopoly on the distribution of video content is actually far less secure than might seem to be the case. A crucial fact is that the technology for hosting and serving videos has become a simple commodity these days, and although YouTube stands as the overwhelmingly dominant player, the same video files can be uploaded to any one of a number of different YouTube competitors including Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Bitchute, or even merely hosted on an individual server as simple .mp4 files. Aside from its gigantic scale and established dominance, YouTube’s main competitive advantage seems to be the convenient and attractive interface it provides for displaying the hundreds or thousands of videos that constitute a sizeable channel.
However, I have now built a video display interface that I believe is at least as nice as YouTube’s, and currently provides convenient access access to over 250,000 videos.
Although the overwhelmingly majority of these videos are drawn from a couple of dozen popular YouTube channels, this system can equally well handle videos from those various YouTube competitors, or additional hosting platform as the need arises. Therefore, whenever YouTube bans or censors a particular video, that video may easily be uploaded to a different host, with almost no noticeable changes to users.
Furthermore, under this system a flag will be set indicating that the particular video was banned or censored by YouTube, generating a red warning header to that effect. Such a label will help users avert their eyes from informational content that YouTube and the ADL do not wish them to see, or perhaps contrariwise draw them to the juiciest videos on a channel.
During the middle decades of the 20th century, it is said that authors were often very pleased when they could announce that their books had been “banned in Boston,” and perhaps the label “Banned by YouTube” may soon begin serving a similar purpose today.
As an example of how this works, Jared Taylor’s 2014 video entitled “Race Differences in Intelligence” has been blocked on his own YouTube channel, but the Bitchute version is fully available here:
http://www.unz.com/video/ameri
Moreover, when an entire channel has been deleted by YouTube, all the videos can easily be uploaded elsewhere, and the channel fully resurrected. Hasan has now begun uploading his hundreds of vanished YouTube videos to a different hosting site, allowing the full resurrection of his channel here:
http://www.unz.com/video/chann
Banned channels are so labeled, and I’ve also now added a separate section listing all the individually censored or banned videos in my system:
http://www.unz.com/video/censo
Although I’ve actually been far too busy with my software work to actually watch almost any of these 250,000 videos I’m providing, whether censored or not, users are encouraged to do so themselves, and then decide whether the ones censored are actually so much criminal and offensive in their content than the tens of millions of videos that YouTube would never consider blocking, let alone what regularly appears on network television.
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Otherwise, I should mention that I’ve now added a couple of new features partly related to helping users organize this enormous volume of videos and channels.
The main video page displays the the dozens of current channels in the system, as well as the most recent video of each, as ordered by the date of that latest video. However, given the large and growing number of these channels, users are now provided the ability to permanently “pin” their favorite channels to the top. If they move their mouse over the channel heading, a golden “Pin” button appears, and clicking it pins that channel to the top of the list, with a “Pinned” marker. Clicking that marker unpins the channel.
Similarly, on any other video page, moving your mouse over the control bar near the top and holding it there for a second or two, the same golden “Pin” button appears, allowing a channel to be pinned from these locations as well. All these pinned channels are saved in a permanent cookie.
This same technology has also been applied to allowing the convenient customization of the large number of columnists on the Home page, given that individual users surely find some of them more interesting than others. If users position their mouse over a columnist header and holds it there for a second or two, the same sort of golden “Pin” button appears, and clicking it permanently pins that columnist to the top of the columnist listing. Multiple different columnists may be pinned in this same manner, and among pinned columnist, their positions may be set by using the mouse to drag-and-drop them. Although this rearrangement of columnist ordering must be performed on the Home page, the results carry forward to the sidebars of every other website page as well.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
