This is not meant to rain on the cool shares about assange and stuff.  It just popped into my head.

"Look at all my great videos!" says YouTube to the hackers, prepared lighting glimmering off a winning videosequence on the state of modern cryptography.

A bunch of nerds receive a long stream of javascript and graphical ui elements and move on.

The nerds chat to each other,

"Another website that never works."

"Eh those websites are just ads anyway." 

YouTube inspects the User-Agent of one of the hackers and sees the hacker is sending a special message about a wild cat called a Lynx.

YouTube carefully renders videos of ascii lynxes and emails them to the hackers, with subject-line "Look at all my great videos!"

The nerds read their email,

"omg youtube is sending me ascii spam"

"Looks like they're using AI marketing.  Did you enable javascript somewhere?"

 A nerd sends a poorly-though out reply to the advertisement,

"Hello, frighteningly intelligent marketing algorithm.  We don't use javascript because it gets our systems quickly hacked by spy agencies, and we don't watch videos because it takes too long to learn from them.  Mozilla has a free speech-to-text library called DeepSpeech now, would you be interesting in sending or displaying just the plain text content of the videos when viewers don't have javascript enabled?  Otherwise _we will never visit your website ever_."

YouTube processed the email with videofeed algorithms designed to process the timing of clicks to get viewers to return.  Something about this email was very frightening.

YouTube replied with a video of a hacker transcribing a YouTube video using open source code, but it was never seen.

YouTube began looking for reliable viewers it had that had social relationships with members of the hacker group.  It sent one of them an ascii video of a Lynx, as a probe ...