Is YouTube Shooting A Symptom Of The Silent Great Depression Caused By Social Media Censorship?

in news •  7 years ago  (edited)


Photo: Youtube Screenshot

With that YouTube shooting the other day, IF we take the story at face value, there are some interesting points that it highlights.

Woman was driven to a total rage because youtube essentially ruined her life.

This may sound extreme, but stay with me for a minute.

Many people don't realize it, but social media censorship is creating a silent great depression which I think is costing more people their jobs than the economic crash of 2008 did.

If you think about it, after the crash of 2008, there were wall street workers jumping off of buildings because they invested years of their lives building a career that was swept out from under them, and then they found themselves in a position where they had no clue how they were going to put food on the table.

Think about how many people had jobs that were affected by the 2008 crash, a lot, enough to cause a serious problem in many industries, but most average people didn't notice much of a change. Most of those affected were wall street and banking types, and of course that created somewhat of a ripple effect in other industries.

Fast forward ten years, the economy has now changed and millions of people are now making their living online. Whether it is through e-stores or online publishing, everyone who works online is dependant on social media to reach their customers.

Those of us who have taken this path have invested years of skill-building in this world, and now we are faced with the same situation that many experienced in 2008, our careers are being stripped away from us, not through natural market forces, but due to the decisions of a few control freak executives.

Of course, I am not justifying this woman's act of violence, but I am breaking down the situation to show that the attack is blowback from the silent great depression that is being caused by social media censorship.


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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:

My name is John Vibes and I am an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. I write for numerous alternative media websites, including The Free Thought Project @tftproject and The Mind Unleashed. In addition to my first book, Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance, I have also co-authored three books with Derrick Broze @dbroze : The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality, Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion and Manifesto of the Free Humans

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This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. If you don't like how youtube is treating you, use DailyMotion, don't like DailyMotion then use DTube, don't like that then choose another service, start a torrent, set up your own webserver, or choose from a myriad of other options. Youtube is a private company and can choose what content to allow or disallow. Don't like it, go somewhere else. The same thing applies to any other social network or service you find on the internet. You are not censored just because a privately owned social media organization does not want to publish your content any more than you are censored if a book publisher doesn't want to publish your book. It is a business and it is a business decision.

If youtube is capable of ruining your life then something is wrong with your life. I was a little ticked off when youtube changed its partner policies because it affected me but it isn't something to kill or be killed over. Not even remotely close. It's just a lousy way to treat customers and will ultimately be to their own detriment. But get some perspective and choose one of your many other options and move on.

Even if you treat this like losing your job, people get laid off or fired all the time. I've been laid off before. It really, really sucks but I didn't kill people because of it. People who rely on a particular social media outlet are not immune. Youtube can "fire" you at any time. Besides, youtube will not be around forever as something better will come along (and maybe already has).

Taken at face value, this woman clearly had some mental issues that had not been dealt with and Youtube was just the straw that broke the camel's back. It could have just as easily been a long line at the post office.

I looked at her web page via the wayback machine and she has been complaining about youtube since at least October 2016. Shouldn't she have moved on to a different service? She complains about her videos being age restricted but she apparently posted graphic videos and videos about the "health risks of anal sex". Doesn't it seem reasonable that Youtube might do such a thing given their public guidelines? It also does not sound like she was making much money via youtube so I'm not sure the whole being fired thing really applies anyway.

Her youtube page displays the following message currently:

"This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations."

I have no way of knowing if this is actually true but given her behavior it does not seem unlikely.

This brings up another issue. People are way too trusting of 3rd party services to keep their stuff. It's quite possible that this woman lost access to all of her videos (I don't know if she did or not). Normally, google provides you a way to download everything via Google takeout (I recently downloaded 100+ gigabytes of videos I've published at youtube over the years) but I don't know if they still allow you to access it when your account has been banned. If not, that might go a long way towards explaining what she was angry about. However, people really need to learn to always, always, always keep backups of all of their own stuff. Multiple backups preferably. Hard drives fail, accidents or disasters happen, and 3rd party services cannot be relied upon.

I am just saying, a lot of people are losing their jobs right now, and some of those people are going to be crazy enough to do drastic things in response

Yep, I almost lost my art business. Still barely making ends meet these days, where a couple of years ago I had a hard time keeping my art merch in stock and a waiting list for custom art almost a year long...

But this isn't the fault of Youtube per say. They aren't obligated to pay people at all, much less forever and that isn't a realistic expectation. Her mental instability is not the fault of some imagined social networking "censorship".

I never said it was youtubes fault. And the social media censorship is very real, and many people are losing their jobs because of it.

You are blaming youtube for people losing their jobs. Youtube not wishing to publish your videos is not censorship. You still have every right to publish your videos elsewhere and no one is going to stop you or put you in jail. No one is entitled to publication by a 3rd party. If a publisher doesn't wish to publish a book I write then it is not censorship. Why is it different with youtube and videos?

I think it is different because content creators were lured onto these platforms to help them build it up, under the pretense that we would be able to build our businesses there, now they sweep the rug out from under us, and cut us off from the following that we built...I think that is a pretty shitty deal

And there arent any alternatives...sure we have steemit, but only 1% the people who follow my work on facebook can even figure out how to get an account on here.

When facebook, youtube and google essentially have a cartel in online publishing, it is effectively censorship when they prevent messages from reaching people. It is different than someone getting thrown in a cage for saying something sure, but these platforms can control the diologue with the information they allow people to see and that is a form of censorship

Mentally unstable people have often gone back to their places of employment and killed people, remember when "going postal" was a term?

I don’t want anyone to be hurt and wish all violence stopped in my fallacy of a world, but karma is real. The ying and yang of the Lucifer effect. These people need to learn unity, flower of life. Then they would see how dehumanizing it is to be censored like a robot that can be controlled. If you attempt to bottle chaos, you’ll create an explosion with many broken pieces to pick up.

If this isn't just that (an angry censored YouTube user), then I strongly suspect a psy op, although I've yet to conclude to what end. Sympathy for YouTube perhaps? Looking back at this girls screenshots from her channel, things initially look normal- then, is it me, or is there a turning point where she just starts to get weird? Suspicious indeed.

What's the story with youtube the other day? Link?

this woman with a very obscure vegan channel was mad about being censored and demonitized that she drove across mutliple states and attempted a shooting at the youtube headquarters. No one was killed but a few people were injured, it was a very strange situation all around.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/04/nasim-najafi-aghdam-youtube-shooting-demonetisation-payments-father

100%, social media censorship made me extremely depressed, angry and made me feel hopeless and at times suicidal. Steemit and Minds may very well have saved lives..

I looked at your title and that's exactly what it is. You gotta try to figure out the alterior motives always, when you do you start to see the corruption. There's been alot of whistleblowing in the past year about Facebook etc. There's actual proof how likes affect the brain, so if a like affects the brain, IMAGINE WHAT AN UPVOTE CAN DO!!! This is why people on STEEM should be more empathetic to people, or you would think thats the case here but its totally the opposite!! There are people begging for upvotes the same way people beg for likes, its the same thing except now its stronger because an upvote actually pays you!!! That has to be a stronger dosage than just a regular like on a page. To complete my sentence, is that when you take these type of things away from people that have been emotionally depending on it. THESE ARE THE TYPE OF SITUATIONS THAT MAY OCCUR!!! LETS BE MORE COMPASSIONATE!!! Lets not try to be dictators or authoritarians with the upvotes!!!! if you like it Upvote it!! or even upvote just to show some love!!!! if youre thinking twice about whether you should upvote or not, then in my eyes you are contributing to these type of situations!!! point blank!!!!

who hasn't been kicked out of some forum or banned and gotten pissed off about it? Not anyone with strong opinions. These corporate entities don't have any obligation to treat anyone with fairness or dignity.

I was also pondering this thought earlier

Freedom of speech is more than threatened and with it a lot of jobs, lifes and dreams. I hope there is something we all who are affected by it can do to make this situation less worse.
But I guess the more they try to censor us, the more alternative projects will be born to find new ways to do what we feel is our path in life!
Together we are stronger than censorship I hope! :)

Very important post!

Best wishes to you! :)