wings over scotland | The engines of censorship – News Block

It is our solemn duty to inform readers that a deranged, shovel-handed member of the Scottish Greens and a known associate of rapists and pedophiles Scott “Heather” Herbert has taken the hump in a Wings article from yesterday in which he satirically introduced himself.

He filed a malicious false copyright claim on YouTube which resulted in a silent video clip of the article showing his comically gigantic man hands scheduled for removal, despite the fact that Herbert does not own the copyright to the video (it is property of TalkTV, which has not raised any objections to it) and not having active standing to file any complaint.

But YouTube’s abysmal automated structures work on the assumption that all complaints are inherently valid and do not allow Wings to appeal this decision at all.

If you are subject to a copyright claim, YouTube will remove your video immediately, without performing any checks on the validity of the claim, and assign you the responsibility to dispute it. To do this, you must provide the complainant, whoever they are and however unfounded their complaint may be, their full name and address.

This isn’t a huge problem for Wings, the details of which are already fairly easy to find, but the dangers for other users are obvious: feminists who use the platform under a pseudonym to document harassment or abuse, for example, would be forced to provide your name. and their home address to anyone who wanted to harass them.

Even in the case of a “delayed delete” complaint like the one Herbert has made here, there is no mechanism to dispute the complaint in any way before the video is removed. He “Send counter notification” The option does not appear on the video’s YouTube Studio page; the only options offered are “Learn more” (which leads to the info page shown above) or “Delete video forever”.

Nor can you challenge the misidentification of the content, for the same reasons: the “Dispute” The option mentioned in the site’s documentation is simply not available.

Naturally, there is no way to interact with a human being on YouTube. Like most big tech companies, it employs as few people as possible to deal with customer service, and its tongue-in-cheek “Contact Us” page is just a list of frequently asked questions and a physical address in California that it would obviously take weeks to get an answer.

(They once had a Twitter support account where I could, with varying chances of success, attempt to address such issues, but it no longer exists.)

As it stands, YouTube is a means by which malicious actors with a small amount of free time can not only censor people, but also force them, on pain of being completely silenced, to disclose information that could lead to their being physically harassed and harmed

It seems extraordinary that this state of affairs is allowed to persist, but sadly it seems to be the clear direction of travel for Western society, with humans discarded in the name of profit margins (have you been to a supermarket recently?) algorithms whose sole purpose real is revenue maximization and that they are clearly not fit for any other task.

Regardless, we’ll have to remove Scott Herbert’s mute video in the next few days or risk a copyright strike that could bring down Wings’ entire YouTube account, so we’re replacing it in the article with this one:

To be fair, we think it’s an improvement.