IN FEBRUARY 2024, without warning, YouTube deleted the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh.
His YouTube page featured dozens of videos, including numerous livestreams documenting Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. In a decade covering Palestine and Israel, he had captured video of Israeli authorities demolishing Palestinian homes, police harassing Palestinian drivers, and Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian civilians and journalists during protests in front of illegal Israeli settlements. In an instant, all of that footage was gone.
In July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh’s private backup account. And in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.
The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh’s account violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.
However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh’s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.
There is no youtube alternative. I’ve been begging Lemmy to find me one and nothing. Also, anyone constantly getting the Turning Point ads despite blocking them and reporting them?
PeerTube? Is that what it’s called? I’ve never used it.
A service like youtube is simply hard to pull of with bailing twine and string (like lemmy).
A core part of the service that youtube offers is re-encoding uploads. That requires some beefy hardware to serve even a moderate number of people.
Vimeo was supposed to be that alternative but instead it’s just art house stuff now.
If you’re seeing ads on YouTube, you’re doing it wrong.
I have an iPhone. I use ad guard. These are ads when I’m searching for videos.