YouTube's Crackdown on Violent Extremism Mistakenly Whacks Channels Fighting Violent Extremism

AmiMoJo shares an article by Cory Doctorow:

Wednesday, Youtube announced that it would shut down, demonetize and otherwise punish channels that promoted violent extremism, 'supremacy' and other forms of hateful expression; predictably enough, this crackdown has caught some of the world's leading human rights campaigners, who publish Youtube channels full of examples of human rights abuses in order to document them and prompt the public and governments to take action....

Some timely reading: Caught in the Net: The Impact of 'Extremist' Speech Regulations on Human Rights Content, a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jillian C York: 'The examples highlighted in this document show that casting a wide net into the Internet with faulty automated moderation technology not only captures content deemed extremist, but also inadvertently captures useful content like human rights documentation, thus shrinking the democratic sphere. No proponent of automated content moderation has provided a satisfactory solution to this problem.'

A British history teacher living in Romania complained Wednesday that his YouTube channel had been banned completely from YouTube, possibly over its documenting of propaganda speeches from World War II. He tweeted that he was frustrated that '15 years of materials for #HistoryTeacher community have ended so abruptly.'

Later that same day, his account was restored -- but he's still concerned about other YouTube accounts. 'It's absolutely vital that @YouTube work to undo the damage caused by their indiscriminate implementation as soon as possible,' he tweeted Wednesday. 'Access to important material is being denied wholesale as many other channels are left branded as promoting hate when they do nothing of the sort.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.