I wasn’t surprised that YouTube censored my recent video as “Hate Speech.” It’s happened before.
Talking about antisemitism, violence, and even the Holocaust is part of my work as a historian, and the algorithms are obviously set to look for key words and images related to these noxious topic. So my lectures have been flagged before. This time, however, was a little different: I lost my appeal to have the video reinstated, which seems rather silly: I’m a tenured full Professor speaking about antisemitism, not speaking antisemitically, and I’m surprised that they didn’t catch the difference. But that’s okay.
On the whole I appreciate the efforts of the YouTube Creator Team, as they have made it much easier to remove the intellectual vandalism that frequently sullies the comment boxes, not to mention the mental pollution that some people spew onto the web. I’ve noticed that the filters have gotten stricter in recent months, and in general I have been very pleased with these changes.
If YouTube flags my videos by accident, I’m fine with that (at least for now). The nasty stuff is just so awful that I would rather they err on the side of caution. I can always post my lectures here, on my personal website.
I hope you find this lecture on the history of antisemitism worthwhile.
Appeal again and ask for a higher authority. If it fails again, will you so kind to YouTube and their censors? I hope not. Because we know how appeasement goes…
You tube is failing along two dimensions: 1) they are using a lot of “articifial intelligence” to automatically make decisions and remove some content. The AI is not that intelligent yet, so many mistakes are made.
2) They “tune” the AI algorithms to block anyhting the left-leaning politicinas do not like. This is a massive attack on free speech. Personally, I think that any content that is not illegal (e.g. child pornography) should be allowed. We reject bad ideas and malicious statements not by blocking them but by providing evidence that they are false and harmful. Let better ideas destroy the bad ones, not Artificial Intelligene.
Prof Abramson,
Thanks for sharing with us these content.
Throughout the Jewish history in Middle and Modern Age there have been occasions when the censorship was carried out by others jews assuming that this would not arouse antisemitism … I had the opportunity to see in the Moseo Ebraico di Venezia a few years ago a censored Shulchan Aruch (is it the Yorah zdeah in the pictures ?) similarly censured.
The same happened in the writings of Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, Maimonides em (1402, Hilchot Melachim). The below suggests that it was carry by Christians censorship at that time.
https://ots.org.il/meeting-maimonides-and-his-censor-in-venice/
Which of two do you attribute these censorship?
All the best and BeHatzlacha
Outrageous! Unfortunately, this censorship by the powerful elite has now become acceptable by those sanctimonious hypocritical progressives…
Your best choice is to automatically desiminate a video to multiple sources. Thesse can be Odysee, 3speak, rumble, bitchute and others. Youtube and google are becoming quite leftie lately, and the best answer is to provide alternate channels and deny them viewers. Also there is Telegram, which is quite good, and does not really censor. People must subscribe to your channel to receive it… so some publicity is necessary.
Well, I hope you do pursue this a bit further with another appeal. Waiting a bit is a good idea to make sure your appeal is well worded and calmly addresses the issue. Your work is as far from hate speech as I can imagine, and should tend to reduce it by dispelling falsehoods