YouTube Update

Mark Honeychurch - 8 July 2024

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how we had one of our YouTube videos removed from YouTube, due to Google mistakenly deciding that it was promoting medical misinformation - a rookie mistake, given that it was critiquing medical misinformation. I expressed my doubt that an appeal would change the outcome, but I was pleasantly surprised just after we recorded our last podcast episode to receive an email from Google letting us know that they had reversed their decision:

Hi NZ Skeptics,

We have reviewed your appeal for the following:

Video: 01 Loretta Marron - Crazy Cruel Cancer Cures

After taking another look, we can confirm that your content does not violate our Community Guidelines.

Thanks for your patience while we reviewed this appeal. Our goal is to make sure content doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can be a safe place for all - and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it right. We’re sorry for any frustration our mistake caused you, and we appreciate you letting us know.

How does this impact your content

We’ve reinstated your content. If your appeal was for a warning, you’ll be allowed another warning in the future. If your appeal was for a strike, we’ve removed the strike against your channel.

You can find more information about warnings and strikes at the YouTube Help Center.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to us here.

Thanks,

The YouTube team

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If you want to see what all this hullabaloo was about, here’s the video in question:

Maybe I’d been too cynical in assuming that our video wasn’t going to be reinstated - it was actually nice to see a large tech company change their mind on something, especially given that I’ve had no luck recently getting Facebook to remove anything questionable, even when it’s content that’s obviously impersonating famous people in order to try to sell bullshit. The content I’m alluding to here was a video of Peter Jackson advertising a miraculous cure for hypertension, and Facebook’s response when I complained about it (and appealed their ruling) was:

“We use a combination of technology and human reviewers to process reports and identify content that goes against our Advertising Standards. In this case, we did not remove the ad that you reported.”

This is despite the fact that the advert is selling a fake cure for a serious disease, the link takes you to a fake YouTube clone that includes a lot of Russian text, and the video in the advert was obviously AI-manipulated, as well as using the likeness of someone famous in order to try to scam people.

Despite this, I will continue to bang my head against the brick wall of Facebook’s reporting feature, in the vain hope that, over time, I may see small cracks appear and they may one day start to take my reports seriously.