Youtubers CENSORED after Far Left Fake News Hit Piece?!
Youtubers CENSORED after Fake News Hit Piece From The Far Left?! After a group called Data and Society published fake news about several youtubers in an attempt to get them censored from the platform a new study has emerged claiming that is exactly what happened.But this might be the weirdest fake news in the story. The study tracking "alternative right" channels seems to have no public data and makes claims about several people who were smeared by the regressive left that just are not true. While leftists may be celebrating a victory lap I couldn't find anything to support the claims made by CNET who wrote about the "study"After a random sampling of channels it appears that many of the people who they claim were censored are in fact thriving. So what is this? They smeared Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and myself but all of our channels are doing well.
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Several months ago, a hit piece was dropped by an organization called Data & Society, which falsely connected me and many other people to fringe figures associated with the alt-right.
The purpose of this, in my opinion, was a smear piece, and the goal was to get us all censored, restricted, or banned.
Which is funny now that I'm hearing.
According to a researcher, they've actually restricted access to videos from this group of people.
But, as far as I can tell upon doing the research, no, they haven't.
So why then are some mainstream personalities pushing out this narrative that individuals on the Data and Society Report have been throttled in some way, when it appears they haven't?
This is one of the weirdest stories, because for one thing, it involves me.
It has to do with a strange attempt at censorship, but now it looks like people are claiming victory when literally nothing happened.
In fact, maybe this is just a story about how people don't actually do research, and journalists write complete and total crap.
And in fact, I have another story about news organizations pushing total crap and YouTube having to debunk it, but still, some journalists are debunking the story as well, so we'll get into that today.
Let's take a look at this weird victory lap being done about the alt-right getting throttled on YouTube when, first of all, most people on the list aren't alt-right, and no, they haven't been throttled.
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From CNET, this story which appears to be complete and total fake news, but I can't say I'm surprised, YouTube recommendations for, quote, alt-right videos have dropped dramatically, study shows.
But YouTube denies demoting content based on specific political perspectives.
They say Google has made major changes to its recommendation system on YouTube that have reduced the amount of, quote, alt-right, unquote, videos recommended to users, according to a study led by Nicholas Suzar, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology.
During the first two weeks of February, alt-right videos appeared in YouTube's Up Next recommendation sidebar 7.8% of the time, roughly 1 in 13.
From February 15th onward, that number dropped to 0.4%, roughly 1 in 250.
Souser's study took random samples of 3.6 million videos and used 81 channels listed on a recent study by Rebecca Lewis as a starting point.
That list includes voices like Richard Spencer, an American white supremacist, but also includes more mainstream voices like Joe Rogan, who does not self-identify as alt-right, but often plays host to more extremist voices on his podcast.
The drop appears significant, but it's difficult to figure precisely how that drop occurred.
We don't know if YouTube is targeting alt-right video specifically, or if the drop-off is part of a broader change to YouTube's recommendation system.
This is some of the most absurd fake news I've ever seen, and it's probably due to the fact that they're basing it off of fake news from the Queensland
University of Technology Associate Professor Nicholas Sousar, who didn't, apparently
didn't actually do any real research, or at least I can't find any data, and he's basing his
research off of Data & Society, who also didn't do any research. Welcome to 2019, where we
have the Data & Society report, which is factually inaccurate, which then produces a
derivative report, which is also factually inaccurate, and then news organizations write
about it, and it's just, there's no research whatsoever.
When I saw this story, I decided to look at some of the names associated with Data & Society to see if they've been impacted, because full disclosure, my views have increased substantially.
I am estimating right now around 27 million views for the month across my channels.
That is a dramatic increase over the past several months, so my videos are getting recommended substantially more.
Now, obviously, I'm not alt-right, and I actually am at odds with the alt-right, but for some reason, they are just trying to smear us.
So perhaps that's the real goal of the article, I guess.
Maybe just to continually push the narrative that people on this list are alt-right when they're not.
Joe Rogan isn't alt-right, no matter what you want to say about him, nor is Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro.
That's completely absurd.
But it's a weird victory lap.
So here's what we should do.
I'm going to take a look at some of the channels associated with Data & Society to see how they've been doing.
And I want to point out first, they mention Richard Spencer.
Well, Spencer's alt-right.com YouTube channel hasn't even produced a video in about eight months.
So here we have alt-right.com.
The last video they made was seven months ago, and it has 16,000 views.
But now let's take a look at the conspiracy theory in question, where you can see Richard Spencer connected to all of these other personalities.
Now, I don't even want to say it's a network on YouTube.
This is also factually inaccurate, because James Damore isn't a YouTuber, and there are several people, my understanding on this, who aren't actually YouTubers.
But let's...
Let's grab a random name.
How about the infamous alt-right BuntyKing?
Okay, well, BuntyKing clearly isn't alt-right, and he makes videos such as Am I Fat?
Twitter AMA, or Gamers Are Mad About Apex Legends, Gamers Have Brain Damage, 5 Things The Community Needs In Apex Legends.
I'm not sure there's very much political content here on BuntyKing's channel, and BuntyKing is certainly not alt-right.
My understanding is that he is a Canadian Indian.
So, no, that's a weird way to frame it.
Well, on the list, Andy Warsky is one of the biggest nodes, so let's take a look at his channel.
He produced a video a week ago, it's got 40,000 views.
It actually looks like his videos from the past two weeks have done substantially better than his videos before this.
But now let's pull up the actual stats for some of the people on the list.
We have James Alsup.
Well, James Alsup's videos are kind of... it looks like his daily averages are rather fine.
They're down about 19%, but that doesn't really correlate with the data CNET's purporting to have.
Tommy Robinson, for instance, who, again, I wouldn't call alt-right, but of course they would, His views are dramatically up.
I mean, his whole channel is doing better than ever.
And then we have Faith Goldie with 83% increase on views and a 74% increase on subscribers.
If anyone on that list could actually be called alt-right, it's gonna be Richard Spencer for obvious reasons, but he hasn't produced a video in seven months anyway.
Or it's gonna be Faith Goldie, but her channel's doing really well.
So what is this?
I'm not surprised we're seeing more fake news from the media.
This is what they do.
They don't actually do research.
They don't fact-check anything.
They just pump out complete and total crap.
This is the Medium post from Nicholas Hussar.
It says, YouTube stops recommending alt-right channels.
In a long-awaited move, YouTube seems to have made major changes to its up-next recommendations.
He shows this graph where I have no idea what his sample is.
He has 3.7 million videos.
And we can see that at some point in the beginning of February, yes, there was some kind of drop-off.
But we don't have his data set, so I mean, we don't even know what he's talking about.
He immediately references the 80-plus YouTube channels from Rebecca Lewis's Data & Society network, but if that's the case, I just pulled a random sampling of the individuals.
They're all doing well.
Perhaps this has something to do with a story we heard recently that YouTube is going to demonetize anti-vax channels.
They also talked about how they're going to derank conspiracy theory videos or things they call borderline content.
But I think we might actually be seeing something dramatically different.
If this researcher from Queensland took Rebecca Lewis's list and then he's actually dug through alt-right channels and found that there is a dramatic reduction in alt-right recommendations, Well, perhaps his data is sound, and perhaps it proves that Rebecca Lewis was wrong, or lied, and the individuals on her list are not alt-right.
So by adding these channels to his dataset, he hasn't actually tracked the alt-right.
All he's really done is shown that the alt-right channels he was tracking have been reduced, and the rest of us who aren't alt-right are doing just fine.
Maybe he was duped by fake news from Data & Society, and thus, there's no reason to include any of our names in his search.
Sousar gave a statement to CNET.
They say, speaking to CNET, Nicholas Sousar is looking for more transparency from YouTube regarding how and why certain videos are recommended.
It's not good enough that we have to guess about how well these systems are working, he said.
And our research can only observe from the outside.
YouTube has done a lot to improve transparency about its terms of service enforcement on a high level over the last year, but they still need to do more to help people understand how their algorithms are operating.
In a statement to CNET, they said, We announced in January that we are reducing recommendations of borderline content or videos that could misinform users in harmful ways.
We have not had a chance to thoroughly review this study.
However, our recommendation systems are not designed to favor or demote specific misinformation based on specific political perspectives.
So this is what it looks like we have.
Some guy wrote a Medium post, presented no data, CNET has written it as if it's true.
It's not, as far as I can tell.
The people on the list from Data & Society, as far as I can see, some of the most egregious actors that you could actually call alt-right are doing fine, or just not making videos anyway.
Why, then, do they write this fake news?
I honestly have no idea.
Maybe they just want to continue to write articles that include alt-right and associate that phrase with people like me and others?
Or perhaps this is just the state of media.
They lie, they produce nonsense, and they don't fact-check.
In fact, YouTube actually had to debunk complete and total BS with this tweet.
They said, We want to clear something up regarding the Momo Challenge.
We've seen no recent evidence of videos promoting the Momo Challenge on YouTube.
Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges are against our policies.
If you see videos including harmful or dangerous challenges on YouTube, we encourage you to flag them to us immediately.
These challenges are clearly against our community guidelines.
Why, then, Has this narrative been pushed to the point where YouTube had to issue an official statement?
Well, Count Dankula responded saying, it's because the whole thing has been made up for clicks.
This tweet from a woman who calls herself Wanda Maximoff says, warning, please read, and she talks about the Momo challenge, which apparently is completely fake, and she's got 24,325 retweets.
Taylor Lorenz, who is a writer from the Atlantic, tweeted this.
This lady's tweet about the hoax has been retweeted more than 8,000 times.
And this story is making the content rounds again.
I promise it's not even remotely true.
There's no Momo Suicide Challenge kids are doing.
It's not a thing.
This is a hoax.
Gone viral so many times, it's a meme.
And surprise, surprise, we can see KWCH, KVLY, The Rolling Stone, BBC, CBS, Kitguru, whatever that is.
And I guess it just feels to me like everything is falling apart.
So, what do we have?
Well, the whole thing from Data & Society was fake news, which then got written by tons of outlets, and I will say this, to the Atlantic's credit, my understanding is they didn't write about, actually refused to because it was an unsourced conspiracy theory, but CNET, get this, CNET is now writing an article About a study with no data that was written in response to another study with no data.
This is 2019.
Everything is fake news.
What is journalism anymore?
Is the person who wrote that article a journalist?
I'm gonna have to say no, he did no research.
I saw the article I dug in and no, it's just presumably not true.
I haven't found any evidence to suggest it is.
Nor did the researcher publish any data to prove his point.
Now we have YouTube officially debunking more fake news that the BBC and even CBS News put out.
I'm getting tired of the complete and total fake news.
And thankfully, YouTube didn't react in the wrong way.
And thankfully, advertisers didn't pull out because of complete and total nonsense.
But if we don't get some real journalism going at these companies, man, we're in trouble.
Because CBS, the BBC, and all these other local outlets pumping out this fake news story, they didn't do any research.
Am I surprised?
Am I surprised at all?
No, I'm not.
Well, let me know what you think in the comments below and we will keep the conversation going.
I get so frustrated by this because it feels like everything's just falling apart.
And no matter how many times I or others try to be, you know, reasonable and rational, and actually try and seek out information to verify these claims, How many times does this have to happen?
And I'm particularly frustrated because they roped me into it.
The Dayton Society report has my name smack dab in the middle and it's all fake news.
Those red lines connecting people, it's not real.
It's just not.
And now we have the third derivative story of a game of telephone of fake news.
Shame on these people.
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Let me know what you think.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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