FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-status-coup

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/01/10/officer-crushed-capitol-riot-video-jon-farina-sot-vpx.cnn
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/01/13/capitol-riot-law-enforcement-failure-analysis/6601142002/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_94jF4y6LlU
https://twitter.com/JordanChariton/status/1351231373873446914
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-gun-rally-threats-of-violence-richmond-pro-second-amendment-demonstration-today-2020-01-20/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/gun-rally-virginia-lobby-day/2021/01/15/1a4b2486-55e4-11eb-a08b-f1381ef3d207_story.html
https://twitter.com/YouTube
https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube
https://twitter.com/StatusCoup
https://twitter.com/JonFarina
https://t.co/PzD5EmR4MU
https://twitter.com/JordanChariton/status/1351231373873446914
https://twitter.com/krystalball/status/1351277968350437377
https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1351277774640713730
https://twitter.com/andrewkimmel/status/1351295386888110086
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-ford-fischer
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/protesters-start-gathering-at-ohio-statehouse/
https://sports.yahoo.com/exclusive-fbi-warns-of-potential-boogaloo-violence-during-jan-17-rallies-170801569.html
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html
https://news2share.com/start/2020/07/04/armed-boogaloo-and-blm-activists-join-for-rally-against-police-violence-and-gun-control-in-richmond/
https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/ohio-statehouse-protests-1-17-21
https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1353722281135120385/photo/1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKDAp-4Hhs8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OXFmnTtO6s
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-conspiracy-theories-media-misinformation-social-media-b7bb0ace8a617af733357f6ee15aca03
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/technology/telegram-signal-apps-big-tech.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-rush-to-live-video-facebook-moved-fast-and-broke-things-1488821247
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18302187/google-youtube-anti-hate-live-stream-speech-house-judiciary-committee-hearing-congress-comments
https://statuscoup.com/laid-off-general-motors-worker-gm-couldnt-care-less-about-workers/
https://statuscoup.com/members-exclusive-seattle-homeless-epidemic-reporting-behind-the-scenes/


Meet The Censored: Status Coup

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

On January 6th, Jon Farina, photographer and videographer for Jordan
Chariton’s Status Coup outlet, captured horrifying images. At the
Capitol, a pro-Trump mob tried to burst into the building, and a
police officer who attempted to intercede was caught in a door. He
cried out in pain, but the crowd was indifferent, chanting, “Heave,
ho!” as they tried to break in. Farina, in the middle of the physical
mayhem as photojournalists often are, caught the scene up close while
30,000 people watched the live feed.

Farina’s footage rocketed around the world, and major press outlets
celebrated his work as an example of hard-hitting reporting. CNN did a
laudatory story about the freelance photojournalist, with Pamela Brown
asking Farina to “bring us inside the mayhem.” Other outlets like USA
Today quoted his recollections of that day, and the likes of Steven
Colbert on CBS, as well as ABC News, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, the Guardian,
the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and
others used it as fodder for outraged coverage of the riot:

For a week or so, Status Coup was feted for service on the front lines
of responsible journalism. Nearly two weeks later, on January 18th,
another Farina live stream was shut down by YouTube, thanks to
policies that will make it very difficult for non-corporate media
going forward to do live reporting. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say
that if the incident from the 18th happened earlier, we may never have
gotten the Capitol pictures.

On the 18th, Farina was in Richmond, Virginia, where a significant
rally of pro-gun protesters was expected. There had been widespread
reports warning of unrest. CBS relayed FBI fears of “credible threats
of violence,” while the Washington Post said officials were “on edge”
ahead of the Martin Luther King Day protest, gearing up for a
full-scale assault:

    Members of the National Guard are on standby. Plywood covers the
windows of the State Capitol. Tall metal barricades surround Capitol
Square, with police vehicles idling on pathways just inside locked
pedestrian gates. Downtown streets will be closed; signs warning
against carrying guns have gone up around the city.

    “The violent, lawless insurrection and assault on democracy and
its institutions that unfolded last week in Washington, D.C., will not
be tolerated in the city of Richmond,” Mayor Levar Stoney warned on
Thursday.

The threats may have been credible, but when Farina began
live-streaming to an audience of 6,000, the event turned out to be
peaceful and unremarkable, though not without interest from a news
perspective.

“Frankly, there might have been more press than protesters,” Status
Coup’s Chariton said later. “And while it was live, it was pretty
informative. Jon talked to 4-5 people, and they pretty much all made
it clear that they weren’t Trump supporters, that they didn’t support
what happened in the Capitol. They were pretty relaxed compared to the
propaganda ahead of time.”

Despite the seeming unremarkableness of the event, it shut down
abruptly mid-feed. Chariton assumed something happened on Farina’s
end.

“Then I got an email from YouTube, telling me we’d violated their
‘Firearms Policy.’ I wasn’t aware they had a firearms policy.”

    OUTRAGEOUS...

    Now @YouTube @TeamYouTube just REMOVED @StatusCoup & @JonFarina's
Livestream reporting from PEACEFUL Virginia gun rights rally bc
    "we think it violates our firearms policy."

    HOW ARE JOURNALISTS SUPPOSED TO CHRONICLE HISTORY IF YOUTUBE-AND
OTHERS-ARE OUTLAWING IT? pic.twitter.com/PzD5EmR4MU
    — Jordan (@JordanChariton) January 18, 2021

Chariton went onto Twitter to announce what happened, and after a few
well-known media figures like Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim complained,
YouTube restored the content. Other independents covering the rally,
however, like Andrew Kimmel, never had their content restored.

The serious consequence of the Virginia episode was not so much the
lost coverage of the rally, but what Chariton had to tell Farina after
the event. Well-known for covering labor issues, homelessness, and
especially the Flint water crisis, Status Coup had been growing, in
large part because of live stream content. Now, however, the
possibility that YouTube might issue a strike against his channel, or
take it down altogether, forced him into a difficult decision. “I had
to tell [Farina] not to go live anymore,” he says.

One person at the same rally wasn’t surprised by what happened.
Videographer and well-known protest shooter Ford Fischer of
News2Share, the first profile subject of “Meet the Censored,” was also
in Richmond to shoot the event. He didn’t get taken down by YouTube,
but only because he didn’t bother trying to go live.

“I was there on January 18th and didn’t stream it, because I knew it’d
get banned,” Fischer says. “I filmed basically the same rally on
January 17th and it did get banned.”

The January 17th rally Fischer referenced was a pro-gun rally in
Columbus, Ohio, that in the wake of the Capitol riot garnered
significant advance media coverage. Once again, headlines like “FBI
warns of Potential Boogaloo Violence During January 17th Rallies”
primed audiences to expect the worst, and also to make a direct
connection with the January 6th events. In fact, Twitter cited the
coming Ohio rally in its post announcing the closure of Donald Trump’s
account, describing the Ohio event as a possible “secondary attack”:

    Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating
on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US
Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

According to Fischer, the Twitter announcement didn’t exactly make
sense, because the protesters in Ohio were more of a libertarian ilk,
and, as Farina and Chariton discovered in the Virginia crowd, not so
clearly aligned with Trump as Twitter and other media outlets may have
imagined. Fischer has frequently covered events involving the
gun-toting Boogaloos, whom he describes as anti-authoritarian and less
likely to be Trumpists than to profess a pox-on-both-houses attitude
to Trump and Joe Biden both (“You might hear something like, ‘Unless
you put Ron Paul on the ballot, I’m not voting,’” he says).

Although there’s significant national interest in the group, both
among supporters and detractors, Fischer says “I’ve basically stopped
trying to live stream rallies involving Boogaloos.” Back on July 4th,
2020, he shot a live stream of a joint armed rally of Boogaloos and
Black Lives Matter, protesting together against police violence — here
again, we see the significant political differences between Trump
supporters and some of these pro-gun groups — only to have the live
stream interrupted, on the same grounds that it violated Google’s
firearms policy.

Nonetheless, Fischer attempted to shoot the January 17th rally, among
other things because of the obvious public interest in the event,
which was heavily covered by the mainstream press. Local TV affiliates
associated with networks like ABC and CNN covered the January 17th
rallies in Columbus and in other locations, even broadcasting live.
However, when Fischer tried to live stream, he was cut off in short
order by a notice identical to the one received by Chariton. He was
reminded that YouTube “does not allow live streams showing someone
holding, handling, or transporting a firearm.”

The policy presents obvious head-scratching issues. For one, as
Fischer points out, virtually all police carry a firearm, so “there’s
obviously some subjectivity in what’s being enforced.” Furthermore,
the rule doesn’t seem to apply to major corporate outlets, a
double-standard problem that’s a constant in this universe.

In an even more bizarre recent incident, YouTube this past weekend
removed video Fischer shot on January 6th — not live footage, but
still — of the crowd listening to Donald Trump before the Capitol
riot. This time, the grounds were that the content advanced “false
claims that widespread fraud errors or glitches affected the outcome
of the 2020 presidential election.”

Fischer supposes the issue has to do with the fact that the unedited,
single-shot video — which is focused mainly on the crowd reaction —
caught Trump’s own words. This might make sense, except that Trump’s
speech that day is still on YouTube, as broadcast by several CBS
affiliates, among others. As with Farina, Fischer’s Capitol protest
footage was picked up by numerous major outlets, including CNN, NBC,
CBS, BBC, and others, but the system seems to incentivize independent
shooters to distribute footage through corporate outlets only, rather
than conveying directly to their own audiences.

“I absolutely think there’s a campaign against independent content
creators, especially live,” Fischer says. “Major outlets face no such
technical issues.”

This makes any attempt to build an alternative news outlet a steep
uphill climb, even when there’s a positive audience response, as
Chariton has found out. Formerly with The Young Turks, Chariton’s
niche is national news from a left/progressive perspective, with
special emphasis on the area where corporate outlets once had a
near-monopoly, e.g. on-location production of images and reporting.

Typically, alternative media outlets can’t afford to travel much and
often have to rely on wire services and commercial coverage for
primary source material, especially for expensive beats like the
presidential election. Chariton emphasizes going to hot spots like
Flint and to election campaign events to generate original images and
video interviews, an innovative alt-media take on national news
coverage. Live stream coverage had been a major part of their formula.

The Ohio and Virginia incidents underscore two developments involving
platforms like YouTube/Google, Facebook, and Twitter in recent years.
The first is the campaign to stress what Google calls “authoritative
content,” which up-ranks articles and videos issued by major corporate
news outlets like CNN or CBS, while decreasing traffic for independent
sites on the left, the right, and in between.

The second has been an effort to close loopholes in the platforms’
content moderation regimes. In the wake of the Capitol riot, this
trend intensified. After the “insurrection,” a series of trial-balloon
stories appeared in the press, suggesting that Internet nooks and
crannies where conspiracy theory and misinformation proliferate might
need more aggressive cleaning.

The AP warned that “Apple and Google, among others, have left open a
major loophole for this material: Podcasts.” The New York Times
meanwhile reported on an exodus of millions of users who, fearing a
Big Tech crackdown, jumped to encyrpted sites like Signal and
Telegram.

The Times quoted the head of the Association of State Criminal
Investigative Agencies, Louis Grever, as saying such sites allow
“groups that have an ill intent to plan behind the curtain.” Noting
the situation “worried U.S. authorities,” the piece suggested the
migration might “inflame the debate” over encryption.

Podcasts, encrypted apps: how about live programming? Pundits had long
worried that live stream capability was allowing the broadcast of
violence and hate speech. In the hands of alternative media, however,
the tool posed another problem, in the form of simply showing
offensive reality.

In the cases of people like Fischer and Chariton, however, it’s
unclear how platforms like YouTube understand the documentation of
political demonstrations. If you film a neo-Nazi running his mouth,
should you be banned for covering his hate speech? If you show a
gun-rights activist carrying a gun, are you yourself engaging in
pro-gun activism?

For independent outlets like Status Coup, these questions pose a
serious problem. Because they’re dependent financially on platforms
like YouTube to reach subscribers, they can’t afford to take the risk
of being shut down. But how can alternative media operate if it
doesn’t know exactly where the lines are? Also, how can such outlets
add value when its one advantage over corporate media — flexibility,
and willingness to cover topics outside the mainstream — is limited by
the fear of consequences from making independent-minded editorial
decisions?

“It’s pretty horrible,” Chariton said, “if we have to consider not
doing our jobs, out of fear that YouTube is going to remove our
content, or remove our channel without warning (like they’ve begun
doing to other, smaller channels)."

The standard response to complaints about incidents like this is that
YouTube and Google are private companies, and no one has a right to a
platform on a private space. Chariton acknowledges this and concedes
there are alternative platforms, like Rokfin, a video-sharing
alternative to YouTube.

For the foreseeable future anyway, however, it would be nearly
impossible to build a successful alternative video-based channel
without the assent of the small handful of major tech platforms that
dominate media. “People live on YouTube and Facebook,” is how Chariton
puts it.

I asked him a few more questions about the future of live content, and
what happened on January 18th:

TK: How has the ability to produce live content affected your business?

JC: Status Coup was up 20,000 subscribers since November, in large
part because we were covering stories like the “Stop the Steal”
movement and other issues related to the election. I’d say 95% of that
content was live content. We’ve done a lot of stuff, from coverage of
GM’s decision to lay off 15,000 workers to the epidemic of
homelessness in Seattle, to repeated reporting trips in Flint covering
the ongoing water crisis. It’s a major part of the business. It costs
two to three grand for us to take a trip somewhere, and it’s already
tight, but if we’re restricted in any way from doing live, that’s a
blow because it brings in a significant amount of our revenue (which
we need to then fund future in-the-field reporting trips).

TK: What happened in Virginia to affect your decision-making about
live content going forward?

JC: I had to tell my cameraman not to go live… They’ve already shown
they’re willing to take down some outlets entirely, without warning.
The email YouTube sent me, I felt they could consider that a warning,
and the next time, they could either give us a copyright strike, or
remove us. I just can’t afford to take that risk.

TK: Do you see this as part of a wider effort to close informational
loopholes at these platforms?

JC: It’s already documented that YouTube has been hiding independent
channels in a cave, while elevating “authoritative” channels like —
according to YouTube — CNN and Fox News. That’s Silicon Valley
basically just saying outright, “We’re elevating some sources at the
expense of others…” Unless you’re a major outlet that has a line to
YouTube, you don’t have any way of clearing up these episodes. It’s
easier to talk to someone at the CIA than it is to actually reach a
human being at YouTube.

TK: What are the implications of an incident like this for alternative media?

JC: First of all, it’s worth pointing out, the only reason my content
was restored is that I threw a shit-fit on Twitter, and people like
Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim complained. But people like Andrew Kimmel
did not have their content restored, proving there’s basically no
rhyme or reason to this. It’s arbitrary. We’ve come to a place where
you’d almost have to clear your decisions with YouTube ahead of time
to feel completely safe.

I understand, there must be some limits. If someone like Alex Jones is
saying, “Go get your guns, get out there,” that’s really dangerous.

But this, this is beyond a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. If they start
pulling live streams or issuing strikes like this, it’s basically a
death sentence for outlets like ours.