May 30, 2007

The "Soft Censorship" of YouTube...

Fun Facts #1:

Today's #100 Most Viewed Video of the Day on YouTube has racked up a sum total of 13,931 views. It is a bootleg copy of a scene from the movie "Pirates of the Carribean.'
Fun Facts # 2:
Today's #50 Most Viewed Video of the Day on YouTube has racked up a sum total of 25,352 views. It features a schoolboy dropping his pants to show his naughy bits to his teacher.
Fun Facts #3:
Our video "Naughty at the Border" has racked up over 32,038 views, mostly between yesterday and today. The video is critical of our government's current and proposed immigration policies. Despite the fact that this video has received more views than the #50 Most Viewed and almost three times the number of views of the #100 Most Viewed video, "Naughty on the Border" is not included anywhere in YouTube's list of the Top 100 Most Viewed.
This has happened at least twice before--once to our video "Flight Club," and once to the video for Stuck Mojo's song "Open Season."

YouTube appears to be making a habit of this for any videos its censors don't like. I wonder how many other videos have received the same treatment.

Yes, YouTube is a private company, and they can generally do as they please with their own company. Even so, they're not free to commit fraud on their own customers. By presenting false rankings to the people that use their site, that's exactly what they're doing. Think about it this way: would anyone object if Nielsen or Arbitron was publishing bogus ratings numbers biased toward specific viewpoints? What if the cable news ratings folks came around next week and announced that Lou Dobbs' ratings had now dropped through the floor? What if it were later determined that Dobbs did, in fact, have the ratings but the numbers had been cooked to cost him his sponsors? Would that be a problem for anyone?

By Ragnar Danneskjold, Typical Bitter Gun-Clinger at 05:32 PM | |