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United States Youtube Politics

YouTube Bans Videos Containing Hacked Information That Could Interfere With the Election (cnet.com) 238

As Democrats and Republicans prepare to hold their national conventions starting next week, YouTube on Thursday announced updates to its policies on deceptive videos and other content designed to interfere with the election. From a report: The world's largest video platform, with more than 2 billion users a month, will ban videos containing information that was obtained through hacking and could meddle with elections or censuses. That would include material like hacked campaign emails with details about a candidate. The update follows the announcement of a similar rule that Google, which owns YouTube, unveiled earlier this month banning ads that contain hacked information. Google will start enforcing that policy Sept. 1. YouTube also said it will take down videos that encourage people to interfere with voting and other democratic processes. For example, videos telling people to create long lines at polling places in order to stifle the vote won't be allowed.
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YouTube Bans Videos Containing Hacked Information That Could Interfere With the Election

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  • by mea_culpa ( 145339 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @09:58PM (#60399811)

    themselves. I'm sure Google will be fair in selecting which 'deceptive' videos to ban.

    • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @10:01PM (#60399829) Journal
      I favor freedom and democracy, but I think we should not assume people are thinking.
      • In order to function correctly, freedom and democracy requires an educated thinking population.

        Without that, you basically have a dictatorship where the powerful few control the masses by herding them to "vote" in a controlled way using the media rather than physically with the threat of force. Unlike the physical force method, this gives the masses the illusion that they have a say, making them less likely to revolt.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by BoogieChile ( 517082 )

          > In order to function correctly, freedom and democracy requires an educated thinking population

          Well, of course it does! Why else do you think Betsy Devos is in charge of the education department?

        • You are right, but people are not thinking. Too many are either treating politics as a team sport, or are outraged and don't think clearly.
        • by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Friday August 14, 2020 @08:59AM (#60400757)

          In order to function correctly, freedom and democracy requires an educated thinking population.

          "if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be. the functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. there is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe." -- Thomas Jefferson, January 6, 1816 [monticello.org]

      • I favor freedom and democracy, but I think we should not assume people are thinking.

        Exactly. Of course, that also applies to those choosing which videos to ban.

      • I think we should not assume people are thinking.

        I agree, but I do think that there is a problem with many people's thinking being slow to adapt to the new reality of the internet. The replacement of traditional broadcast media is still a relevantly recent phenomenon and I think a lot of people still tend to trust something they see reported in a video as being reasonably trustworthy because they think of it like TV instead of as potentially just the random ravings of some idiot on the internet.

        I've been amazed the number of times when I've questioned

      • I favor freedom and democracy, but I think we should not assume people are thinking.

        So you are against freedom and democracy here. Voters must be free, independent, informed and educated (hence free speech and free press, hence public education). If you think that they miss some of those features, then you think that there cannot (or must not) be democracy here, and, as a consequence, freedom.

        • Like communism - democracy is a theoretical ideal which seldom lives up to its promises in practice. American democracy is creaking at the seams these days and lays little claim to be more utilitarian at supporting its population than grim one party administrations like China. The current American administration even seems to believe that a one party state is the way forward. Maybe it is.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

            American democracy is mostly not democracy. When you have massive gerrymandering, when the president is selected and not elected, when large numbers of ballots are not counted (for example the majority of military absentee ballots) you don't have democracy. You have a farce.

      • I favor freedom and democracy, but I think we should not assume people are thinking.

        I know RIGHT?! Thank GOD we have our tech overlords to decide for us. By the shear virtue inherent in wealth Bezos and Pichai are BY FAR the best Humanity has to offer and the most fitting to decide everyone's fate. I mean fuck this whole "democracy" concept, it was just horrible and it's obscene to allow peasants to think for themselves.
        /s (if it wasn't fucking obvious)

    • of the Republican party [cnn.com]

      At some point it's time to say "enough". Not all ideas have value. And the market place of ideas isn't free. Not when you've got billionaires funding think tanks to "research" why their opinions are the right ones.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        of the Republican party [cnn.com]

        Yep, she's a crackpot all right. But labeling her as representative of the GOP in general is a little extreme to say the least.

        At some point it's time to say "enough". Not all ideas have value.

        And as you've posted before, you advocate thought control [slashdot.org] to take care of the "problem".

        Actions don't happen without thought. We need to start thinking about how to get those thoughts under control.

        So you go ahead and set up your "Ministry of Truth" when you get elected. I'm sure it'll do away with all these problematic ideas you don't like. Just set up something like this [wikipedia.org] to t

        • How many Republican congresspeeps are willing to publicly denounce Qanon? How many that are not named "Mitt Romney"? Can you see how that's a problem?
          • How many Republican congresspeeps are willing to publicly denounce Qanon?

            Apparently, Republican leaders have denounced the idiot in question. [politico.com]

            Can you see how that's a problem?

            The problem I see is people pointing at a nutjob who is part of a group and saying "look! that's how they all are!" I thought that was clear from my post.

            • You're pretending that Qanon nutjobs aren't a big enough chunk of their base that they're concerned about alienating them. Trump has a new birther conspiracy about Kamala Harris, how many R's in congress will call him out on that?
              • You're pretending that Qanon nutjobs aren't a big enough chunk of their base that they're concerned about alienating them.

                I'm not "pretending" anything. Over 80% of Rs say they've never heard of Qanon at all. [pewresearch.org] 15% say they've heard "a little", and my guess is that most of those that have heard of it dismiss it for what it is. So, no. I don't believe there's a big chunk of Republicans that will be alienated by some R leader dismissing Qanon.

                Trump has a new birther conspiracy about Kamala Harris, how many R's in congress will call him out on that?

                I made a big mistake by swallowing rsilvergun's off-topic political bait about a R Qanon conspiracy nut. You want to talk about Trump's stupidity? Well go right ahead. Just don't prete

            • not for being a nut job who believes Donald Trump was elected by God to save us from the Deep State (and no, I'm not misrepresenting Qannon's views for comedic effect, this is what they actually believe).
        • or in my case duckduckgo [duckduckgo.com]. There are dozens if not hundreds of GOP candidates who are either openly Qanon or are supportive of Qanon.
          • I'm not going to bother reading through a bunch of search engine results to try and figure out whether or not what you say is true. If you've got a source that says there are hundreds of GOP candidates who are either openly Qanon or are supportive of Qanon, then post it. This article says: [washingtonpost.com]

            Liberal research firm Media Matters has tracked 50 QAnon supporters running for Congress. Most of them have lost their primaries already. A handful automatically made it on the general election ballot in California because of election laws that send the top two on, but for now most don’t seem to have momentum to actually win.

            Go ahead and claim that Qanon has gone mainstream in the GOP. Don't let the fact that practically none are getting elected get in your way, or that over 80% of Republicans have never even heard of Qanon. [pewresearch.org]

            But you got me

        • Yep, she's a crackpot all right. But labeling her as representative of the GOP in general is a little extreme to say the least.

          Eh? She's officially running on the Republican ticked for congress in Georgia. how is she NOT a representative of the party?

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/wor... [bbc.co.uk]

    • by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @11:26PM (#60400009)

      True information coming from an unapproved place is bad, and false information coming from an approved place is good. This is the logic that many big tech companies have wholeheartedly embraced.

      • It's not quite that.
        What you get is that everything gets a stamp of reliability and only the content with a good stamp are allowed through. Influential organizations, including big tech, get to put their weight on the scale so they can control the stamps - to some extent.

        Not only does this introduce heavy bias in favor of power, even a heavy bias in favor of truth is not that good an idea. The idea that people with wrong ideas not only are told they are wrong, but a system also makes sure they cannot be hea

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        No, the problem is verification. Anyone can make a video claiming anything on the basis of "l33th4kr2002@mail.ru sent me these leaked files!" and YouTube has no way to know if that is true or not.

        If you have stuff to leak then the best thing to do is dump it in several news site's dropboxes. If you can safely release it without immediately endangering anyone then make it public too. To have any credibility journalists will have to look at it to verify it and it won't get coverage outside of conspiracy theor

        • Let's say some journo finds a second source to corroborate it ... that doesn't suddenly transform information from a politically motivated hack into a "conscientious" leak.

        • If you have stuff to leak then the best thing to do is dump it in several news site's dropboxes. If you can safely release it without immediately endangering anyone then make it public too. To have any credibility journalists will have to look at it to verify it and it won't get coverage outside of conspiracy theory Facebook groups until more mainstream sources start talking about it anyway.

          Usually I'll trust the journo over the internet mob. But sometimes this happens and we get Rathergate [wikipedia.org], where the internet mob thoroughly disgraced otherwise respectable journalists who let their biases cloud their better judgment.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      You can think all you want, but if you're proceeding from false premises it won't do you any good.

    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Whatever happened to the saying that "the internet interprets censorship as "damage" and routes around it"? I guess there is a requirement to realize that someone is censoring your information in the first place - something the majority of brain dead public are too lazy to check up on.
    • Yes I would like to think for myself. To do this I need factual information to help guide my decisions.

      Or are you arguing that the Republican Party Stance is so weak that they can only lie to get people to vote for them?

      There has been a method of selecting what is deceptive and not. It is called "research". Is is a lot like a simple search, but for every fact the search result finds we go back and re-search for more information. If we find that after we do this research we find the proposed facts do not

      • by mi ( 197448 )

        Or are you arguing that the Republican Party Stance is so weak that they can only lie to get people to vote for them?

        We're arguing:

        Google, Facebook, Twittter are known to be biased against Conservatives
        they were heavily in Hillary Clinton's tank [campaignfo...bility.org], for example; that they keep Nazis may be commendable(*), but that they leave (nay, encourage) other racists (like BLM) and outright Communists, reveals their far-Left leanings.
        Truth is not always easy to discern even for a non-biased moderator.
        For example, compare
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • That would include material like hacked campaign emails with details about a candidate.

    That could be some crucial information, but I expect this campaign to be a lot lighter on the personal attacks all around. People are tired of them, and ignore them by now.

    • Harris has been named Biden's VP for like three days and Trump has already pulled out the birther playbook. Expecting this campaign to be "a lot lighter on the personal attacks" looks like wishful thinking.
  • by random_nb ( 2453280 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @10:07PM (#60399843)
    In the last American election, Wikileaks published cryptographically verified emails (DKIM) obtained through Gmail account compromise. Should such a thing happen again where truthful information is stolen and released, would permitting discussion about it be interfering in an election, or would suppressing discussion be interfering? Can't have it both ways.

    Just to muddy the waters further, remember that either side could potentially be hacked, and the attack could be either foreign or domestic. Somehow I think this policy is going to see some further revision.

    Also, a link to the policy since TFA doesn't have one: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801973 [google.com]
    • by poity ( 465672 )

      According to the post [google.com], discussion and commentary on the hacked material are allowed, provided that you do not "provide or facilitate direct access to those materials".

      • What do you think that means? You can talk about it but are not allowed to quote anything? Pretty hard but it might be possible to jump through those loops.
        Or , if you talk about it you will also be removed, just for other reasons. Disinformation , inauthentic behavior, sowing discontent, any of the others. Or made less visible(deranked) and demonetized, for reasons they don't have to explain.

        Also note, they say hacked but if you take the Wikileaks DNC case as a precedent , there this was only a claim that

    • Last American election? Do you know something we don't?
    • by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Friday August 14, 2020 @02:22AM (#60400227)

      If the side they favor is hacked, and the information seems likely to affect votes, the policy will be vigorously enforced.

      If the side they don't favor is hacked, they will realize their 'mistake,' or find they can't enforce it because it's 'already out there,' or it doesn't meet the criteria for a 'hack', or, if youtube users share their bias, they will only ban the videos that have the most reports, or they won't bother to give a reason.

      And of course the afflicted will attempt to claim the information was disclosed via 'hack' no matter what, so all information could potentially (but selectively) qualify.

      Which is why every restriction on free speech is a mistake - it always favors someone, and you can bet that someone is powerful.

      The obvious solution is to run squeaky clean candidates. Which we should be doing anyway. If it seems like someone could blackmail you, you're not getting a security clearances to work with nuclear weapons - but it's okay to put you in charge of deciding if they get used? I want to know every fact which could affect a politician's performance of their duties.

      • by arbiter1 ( 1204146 ) on Friday August 14, 2020 @03:22AM (#60400295)
        Exactly it all depends on who the info releases effects. I doubt they will be quick to ban it if it hurts say Trump. We all know Leftist control YT and they have been increasing getting more and more ban happy against people that even udder view points that go against their bubble views.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Note that making videos about reporting of hacked information is allowed, it's just using YouTube as the initial release vector that isn't.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      To further muddy the waters, it is possible to mislead -- with the truth. You just have to be selective.

      This is how trial by jury works. Both the prosecution and defense are forbidden to tell the jury falsehoods, but they both routinely lie by omission. You can't trust either of them. You're not supposed to.

      The difference is the rules of the court enforce a level playing field. Both sides have access to the evidence from which the other side selects its arguments. This doesn't happen in political hac

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • In Soviet valley... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google censors YOU!

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Only if you allow it, Censor Google first. Block all Gmail addresses from your inbox mark them as spam, silence their email service. Do not spend any money with Google what so ever, they will use it to censor and control you.

      You generate Google's wealth, cut if the fuck out if you do not want to suffer their abuse. You fund Googles evil, bloody stop doing it.

  • by poity ( 465672 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @10:22PM (#60399877)

    Could an organization that has had a whistleblower leak internal information just claim that it had been hacked in order to suppress the leak? How could Google/YouTube ever verify this? If an organization doesn't allow Google/YouTube to inspect their servers (and why would they?) there's no way to tell the difference between "hacked" and "leaked".

    And the flip side of that: Could a bad actor (disgruntled employee) claim to have leaked information in the aftermath of a genuine hack? How could Google/YouTube pick a side? Will existing business relationships between Google and a company make that company's claims of having been hacked more believable/actionable in the eyes of YouTube? Will the politics of the claimants (where an organization claims it was hacked, while an individual claims to be the leaker) become a factor?

    • by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @10:30PM (#60399895)

      If it's harmful to Biden it's a hack. If it's harmful to Trump, it's a leak.

      It's interesting, the election is not a court of law. True information obtained through scurrilous means (against either side) is still useful information for the electorate. What happens if a phishing expedition leads to an account compromise which reveals that one candidate is a Manchurian candidate?

      • True information

        This is the biggest part of the problem, isn't it? If all the information out there was just true...

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          >> True information

          > This is the biggest part of the problem, isn't it? If all the information out there was just true...

          Last time it was DKIM verified emails and someone even posted the DKIM key pulled from Hillary's own DNS server to verify it with.

          And yet CNN still tried to claim it was fake via Donna Brazille and Cuomo told people it was illegal to access which is completely false--even liberal lawyers like Popehat told him he was a moron for claiming that. Cuomo has a law degree, so he can't

        • True information

          If all the information out there was just true...

          If you only believe hard enough, then it is. Just because a hack "stole and published some data" doesn't mean they didn't place some there to START with. Doesn't mean that they DID, either.

          It's just like Miss Cleo or her husband, Nostradamus. All you have to do it acknowledge and tweak any possible "hits" and just completely ignore any "misses." Then it's all exactly, perfectly true or just somehow misinterpreted along the way.

          All hackers are honest people striving for The Truth. They're out to get

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by onyxruby ( 118189 )

        We know Biden is the Democrat Manchurian candidate. The only question is who he's playing the shill for. He's gone from the anti-Bernie in February to literally copying large portions of his platform word for word six months later. He's taken stances he's opposed his entire professional career. He had to have a word for typed speech just to tell his VP pick what he was going to say. Biden is senile and incapable of independent though, I don't blame him since he's being taken advantage. It's a case of elder

        • Can a sock puppet be a shill? Don't you need at least the appearance of independent thought before you can be said to have sold that purported independence to a third party?

      • Trump has bought the entire YouTube front page for election night, spending millions to do it, and I get pro-Trump ads at a rate of a about 3 to 1

        Google, like all corporations, is non partisan. They just wanna make gobs and gobs of money. Unless Trump is a threat to that they're not gonna care. Ditto for Biden. And I assure you neither of those men are.
        • Uh huh. And are those ads all RNC or Trump campaign ads, or are they ads by various pac's et al showing their enthusiasm for Trump. Because there is a very large enthusiasm gap between Biden, sorry Harris since she's going to be president less than 6 months into his first term if he wins, and Trump.

        • Google is partisan , but not extremely so. It's right they are largely a business which follows business logic. Also, eventually the conservatives will get their foot in so that they get their say in the control over the internet. In the end it is only those with not enough power who will be muzzled.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        A hack is when information is stolen, a leak is when someone with legitimate access to it releases it.

        In either case the main problem is verification. The current system for handling verification is journalists.

      • > What happens if a phishing expedition leads to an account compromise which reveals that one candidate is a Manchurian candidate?

        Come on - do you really think one of Trump's sons would be found to have taken a $1.5 billion investment from China's Communist Party and subsequently misplaced it?

        That level of corruption doesn't happen in America.

  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @10:29PM (#60399893)

    Just last week, I watched "Elon Musk" videos appear every day, under different accounts, saying that Elon Musk would double your Bitcoin "investment." These videos are produced by pulling multiple other Elon Musk Videos and playing them in the background while then adding a template to say its a fund-raiser. There is never less than 20k people watching them, maybe half bots?

    When you report the videos, your account doesn't get them recommended anymore. When I checked with other accounts, they were still widely available, just censored from my feed as I guess I complained about them.

    I have about zero faith that they can actually stop "fake election" material based on their current system of moderating AI bots. It may be removed eventually, but given they use the same game plan that the Elon Musk fakers use, hundreds of thousands of people will see it before its removed each day. Is that actually worth something in a world where everything is viral and immediate?

    --
    One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.- Plato

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      Yeah, those are a mystery to me too. They're like the new robocalls, parasites of the new ecosystem. We may be witnessing an epic battle of AIs, with a new AI gaming the YouTube bots in a war to see which evolves faster.

      YouTube is great at banning stuff based on text: in the title, description, tags, comments, text on screen, or the like. Keywords are easy. But beyond that it's all guesswork how it works, beyond content ID being well understood. From the extreme takedown war over TLOU2 leaks, we know a

    • User action can help; reply with irony, sarcasm and facts demolishing posts/tweets of that sort. Indeed when I do it I too get on their blacklist and see them no more -- which in itself I like, it cleans up my timeline. If many others do it as well the overall effectiveness of bots and parrots will be diminished.
    • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:40AM (#60400867) Homepage Journal

      You're assuming they were actually trying to stop the spread of these faked videos. You were clearly using an engagement-tweaking mechanism masquerading as an abuse reporting system.

      The traditional reason to care about misinformation -- maintaining a reputation for credibility -- doesn't apply to social media, because social works by slotting users into like-minded silos. A site can actually *increase* its credibility with you by showing you lies precisely tailored to your weaknesses.

      Right now there are many people facing financial crisis that are experiencing a moment of weakness. Scammers are eager to exploit that, and Google is happy to take its cut.

  • ... sure are afraid of free speech.

    Well, some people, anyway.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lactose99 ( 71132 )

      speech and a platform are two very different things

  • Will hacked information that is also 100% true be banned? I would like to have access to all info about both sides hacked or not, good or bad.
  • by petronyista ( 6295228 ) on Thursday August 13, 2020 @11:18PM (#60399991)
    Big Tech owes their very existence to an open internet. I'd guess that over 90% of the Silicon Valley employee group consumes porn, some of it quite objectionable. And now they feel they have to define themselves by banning political content they find objectionable. They think they're helping out, and that is quite not the case. This decision of theirs might destroy their economic viability them in the end. They would deserve such financial demise. Politics has been filled with lie-filled propaganda since human power structures have existed. A core definition of U.S. values is that the people get to decide from sifting through a free press what is in fact true, not government or large corporations. And these big tech idiots think they're going to help by becoming functional censors. You can be the nicest most courteous open minded political censor you could possibly be gosh darn it, you're still making Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot very proud of your actions. Big tech's leaders have to find a different way than banning or demonetizing other people's content, otherwise they will in fact find themselves demonetized, and quite assertively at that. Their hypocrisy of valuation and dismissal of American Free Speech values is truly appalling and nauseating.
  • by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Friday August 14, 2020 @02:32AM (#60400243)

    as the "victory" over the "fake news" that was won a few years ago.

    That is, nothing will change.

  • Someday. (Score:4, Funny)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Friday August 14, 2020 @05:51AM (#60400475)
    Isn't it nice that YouTube does our thinking for us? Deciding what is appropriate and what is not. Someday when I become an adult I will be able to make those decision for myself...
    • by fenrif ( 991024 )

      Sadly the ministry of Youspeak has decided to change the definition of the word "adult" to mean "someone who votes for Biden."

      If you submit proof of your electoral choices you can be awarded "adult" status and the tech conglomerate oligarchy will allow you to, in certain controlled situations, hold your own opinions. As long as they are selected from a party-approved list of options. I'm looking forward to holding the opinion of "bad things are bad" when I'm deemed adult enough to engage in this dangerous a

    • The problem is: most people can't think. All they can do is parrot (mis)-information. I see it all the time. You probably do as well.

      If people could think, they would know that the rich on both sides of the aisle are about the same. They just want to keep what they have and let those of us who aspire for more fight against each other. Make us think that we are different from each other, rather than look above at them.

  • Banning such information being a pretext to censor the web so as people can go back to getting their information out of CNN and the like.
  • If someone managed to dig up irrefutable evidence that someone I planned to vote for committed rape and murder as a 12 year old, I wouldn't vote for him and would support anyone who tries to remove him from office. I don't care where information comes from, if someone's career gets destroyed by the truth coming out then it's a career that shouldn't ended long ago.

  • Here it is:

    "Did you ban videos accusing Trump of collusion with Russia and/or Putin over the past four years?"

    The collusion narrative was created by a British spy named Christopher Steele using his Russian spy friends while being paid by [house.gov] both the Hillary Clinton campaign and Barack Obama's DNC (Presidents are considered the head of their party and get to pick the chairperson of their party; they often have nearly direct control of their party this way). We now have declassified docs that prove the FBI and

  • YouTube has never needed a reason to ban stuff before, this is 100% PR.
  • By selectively enforcing this ban, even just a little bit, Youtube can potentially throw the election.

    Same with FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

    Since all of the above lean far-far-left, it remains to be seen whether the U.S. will survive.

    Whatever replaces it will hopefully learn from the lessons of the next few years or decades, and try not to repeat them.

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