YouTube’s Misinformation Miss

The latest attempt to censor us, especially on-line, is the campaign against something called misinformation, the punchline being who decides what is misinformation? Not YouTube, evidently, because two days ago while surfing, I happened upon the video screengrabbed below. It had been uploaded earlier the same day, was titled Russia Just Launched Airstrikes On Israeli Capital! and the comments were turned off, obviously to prevent people identifying it as a tissue of lies.  

I say tissue of lies because it is accompanied by eleven paragraphs of explanation. A quick flick through the Google News page convinced me that Russia had not launched any sort of attack on Israel, and, opposed as I am to censorship, I felt it irresponsible to allow these sort of lies to be perpetuated at this time, so reported the video. Guess what, it is still there and has run up over twenty-six thousand views.

Filing the report generated an automatic e-mail response from Google. Three videos I reported previously appear to have been removed, but one I reported on July 1 last year is still there. This one is on a channel called Deceased Actors Hollywood, and the deceased actor in this case is Steven Seagal, who at 71 is still very much alive. This channel has over 50k subscribers, and the video in question has run up 350k views.

These channels are pushing disinformation, for whatever reason. One would have thought though they would have been covered by Google’s misinformation policy.