"Cronin’s YouTube channel was up to about 22,000 subscribers when he received a notice from YouTube about one of his videos, “Relax and Improve Your Sleep with Natural Calm Magnesium.” The notice said the video had been removed for violating YouTube’s community guidelines, but didn’t specify further."
Magnesium isn't even a nootropic. That is, while it may have some ability to boost cognition, it isn't a substance primarily ingested for that reason. It is a substance primarily ingested so that the person ingesting it will stay alive.
A quick cruise around Duck Duck Go suggests that while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea in desperate need of being censored. Certainly the idea that magnesium is generally deficient is widespread, with estimates around 50% not meeting the US RDA for magnesium in the US, and while magnesium may not be a good solution for insomnia qua insomnia, it can be a good solution for many things that may be causing you to be "unable to sleep"[1], whether or not that is "insomnia".
Problem is medical claims are highly regulated in the West. So there is a likely legal liability for youtube in the US and in the UK. In fact, they might have already had pressure from regulators.
>while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea
taking nutritional supplements without any evidence that they accomplish anything useful and without a physician's advice is generally a bad idea (the default mode is not 'take until suggested otherwise' but 'only take if necessary'), and trying to make money off it by marketing them on youtube is even more miserable.
I'm very much in favour of youtube taking a proactive stance here. As a related note on nootropics, most of the products advertised under that label don't actually do anything at all. There's two very well known nootropics, caffeine and nicotine. So the next time someone tries to sell you weird nutrition supplements, just get a good old cup of coffee.
First result: The effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in elderly: A double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial.
CONCLUSION:
Supplementation of magnesium appears to improve subjective measures of insomnia such as ISI score, sleep efficiency, sleep time and sleep onset latency, early morning awakening, and likewise, insomnia objective measures such as concentration of serum renin, melatonin, and serum cortisol, in elderly people.
btw I was a fan of Steve Cronin's channel and of reddit's nootropics subreddit. Steve's stuff was hardly experimental. Lots of this stuff is heavily researched. Youtube probably has input from Big Pharma. What's next, eliminating smoothy and juicing videos? Vegan recipes? Will they let themselves become a perfect shady of the corporate lifestyle?
It’s not censoring of ideas. It’s removing video ads for quackery that is probably illegal under strict reading of US law.
YouTube is on borrowed time (as is all social media) in skirting regulations that normally were enforced on TV and radio. It will catch up with YouTube, Instagram, etc and they are realizing it and trying to prepare.
Heck, my mother and I both independently were recommended to supplement with extra magnesium. Most people are also deficient. It’s also useful for cognitive and GI function.
Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website. Nobody's stopping makers of these videos from hosting the videos themselves.
This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It's the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.
If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)
My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.
In the mean time, I'll shout "i told you so" from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.
The "my preferred definition of censorship specifies that it can only be done by governments, and [company] is not a government" rhetoric that always appears with these sort of stories is truly tiring and pedantic. Nobody here thinks that youtube is a government. The problem isn't people thinking that youtube is a government; the problem is people thinking that censorship is something only a government can do, or thinking that because censorship is legal (when done by corporations) people shouldn't complain when it happens. Many things that are legal are worth complaining about.
With regard to the rest of your comment, I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem. If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn't it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space? How would you actually solve that? Split youtube itself into several "Baby Youtubes"? How would that work, which one would get the domain name?
There should be a social network for lonely, security-obsessed linux people who refuse to partake in social media. Maybe we should start raising homing pigeons and send little notes to each other.
IANAL, but my non-expert understanding is that exercising editorial control (as opposed to just having site standards and censoring content that violates them) makes websites liable for content infringement.
If you derive a significant portion of your income from streaming video content, you should probably be using hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo only to mirror your self-hosted content and drive traffic back to servers you control if you can.
You never know when companies like Alphabet or Facebook or Amazon or Apple will pull the rug out from beneath you and yank away that source of income, so don't stand on their rugs. If you let someone stand between you and your money, there will be someone standing between you and your money.
And as there is no way they could possibly review all uploaded videos with actual humans, much of this enforcement is done by machine detection and automated processing, and you will never get any explanation from a human, unless you are in the top 1000 accounts ranked by how much money they make for YouTube.
Not that this sort of content needs to be in video form, anyway. If I feel the need to learn about new, unregulated, or misregulated drugs, I'd prefer reading text, with as few still images as is possible to convey the needed information.
Aside the snark, its time to regulate how our data is used, what decisions are made upon it, and a proper grievance for companies that do that. The GDPR is a good start, to be honest.
yep, but the tide is changing. my last comment on the slippery slope and youtube didn't go minus fifteen as usual, so at least the tech community around here is coming to term with the issue being real.
The question I have about this, gun related content and anything else that is "A violation of our T&C" is this: when does YouTube/FB/whatever stop being a safe harbor according to the DMCA? Which special interest group (NRA?) is going to bankroll the law suit against Google for hosting copyrighted content without permission and that they are entirely liable because they're exercising editorial control? Or is the safe harbor provision toothless because Google is a giant?
YouTube will probably remove fitness videos soon, since some people invariably are stupid and will hurt themselves with the exercises on display, a completely analogous situation.
Without having watched any of this stuff, my assumption is these videos are not clear enough in disclaiming any confirmed medicinal or FDA-approved effects. If the content is tantamount to advertising on the level the supplement manufacturers are prohibited from (and careful to avoid) doing themselves, it's probably appropriate for YouTube to close down the channels. Especially if these YouTubers are somehow generating income from the "product reviews".
I remember when I was in high school, I got onto Something Awful and saw some posting about nootropics and was interested in the possible effects, like improved memory and sharper concentration, so I got some (I think piracetam). In the instructions it said it would take some time to work, like a week or two, and after a few days of feeling the same and seemingly having no effects I stopped taking them and the only benefit I got afterwards was selling the remaining pills to my friend since they apparently make the high from pot more intense.
Beyond the anecdote I don't think this is censorship from Youtube, it's likely the creators were either venturing into advertising/selling products as the primary purpose of their videos, or giving some kind of medical advice about how they can improve your life/body, or both, both of which I think are against Youtube ToS. Given that it's a story from Motherboard we're probably just getting a partial part of the story and the article is just making it seem like Youtube is censoring something they shouldn't, rather than putting the creators at fault.
New Ask HN thread: where are creators migrating to in lieu of YouTube?
Vimeo? Twitch? Facebook? Metacafe or Dailymotion? There are also also already dozens of dapps for streaming like dtube, lbry, viewly, lino, flixxo....(etc, just see https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+youtube), but I don't see any particular venue rising above the rest, as a lot of creators seem to choose "all of the above" as an answer, syndicating content across as many domains as possible.
AFAIK nothing. From what I've seen nearly everybody is remaining on youtube and is counting on using alternative monetization platforms such as patreon or selling merchandise. This gives them a security net if youtube decides to demonetize their videos (or simply if their youtube revenue drops off), but doesn't help them if youtube just starts deleting their videos or bans them from the platform.
For instance Cody's Lab has a patreon page which doubtlessly helps with falling revenue from youtube, but it doesn't prevent youtube from giving him various community guideline strikes and locking his channel for videos that were considered acceptable years ago when they were uploaded but are now retroactively in violation.
(Some specific 'genres' of content creators have alternative platforms. For instance gamers have twitch, and gun channels have full30. But I've not seen any alternative platform becoming popular that targets the full range of youtube content)
(Incidentally the ubiquity of patreon makes me wonder if it too will shape up to be considered a harmful monopoly one day in the not so distant future.)
There is nowhere to go, no platform wants to host polarizing videos, which will alternatively be attacked by both the far left and the far right (mostly by the left today since tech companies employees mostly sympathize with them thus they get more favorable outcomes)
YouTube has a monopoly on free online video and this is what monopoly looks like.
When Google bought out YouTube, as those that were online back then can attest, there were dozens of not hundreds of competing sites. None of those could hold a candle to the resources Google’s cash could buy, and they quickly dropped out of the running. The only site still around is probably vimeo, and only because they were smart enough to not target the masses and instead pick a niche to serve.
The few video sites that have managed to compete with YouTube all have interesting angles. There is DailyMotion, which is popular in France and seems to play fast and loose with IP laws. Tudou for when you're behind the great Chinese Firewall. Facebook videos, which compete in view counts with YouTube by force of their own monopoly on social media. And Twitch which carved out a niche in video game streaming. Maybe we should consider Twitter videos too. RIP Vine.
Add their lobbying, that is participating and influencing a limited, largely invitation-only discussion of what video distribution is and will be on the Web.
(I say largely invitation-only, because 10's and 100's of thousands of us can mount campaigns "of the masses" without moving the needle, or generating only a temporary reaction until the powers that be can slip their changes through another avenue or after simply wearing us out.)
Now, they are no longer "just" a commercial provider, free to choose what they wish to host.
They are defining the very nature of Web video (and, more broadly, content) distribution -- to suit their own purposes.
THAT's why you worry when big players start doing stuff. Because it tends to become "the law".
Look, I know there are plenty of people here who will sing the praises of their chosen Nootropic stack, but quite honestly, the majority of the videos I have seen on the subject online tout over-the-counter supplements as miracle pills with limitless-esque possibilities.
9/10 pieces of advice I see on Nootropic use amount to dangerous and misinformed medical advice.
I can understand why YouTube would want to avoid looking complicit in all of this, especially with more than one popular Nootropic supplement sending users to the hospital in recent months.
Big pharma are untouchable on TV (the silence around mass shooters and prescription meds is deafening) so my guess is you will soon see more pharma ads on YouTube etc. Can't upset the sponsors now.
TL;DR
It is suggested they improve cognitive function (memory, focus, etc.). They are not fully regulated and you can find examples for sale on Amazon. As such, no idea if short or long-term usage is safe but it's interesting product if you simply read what the labels claim.
Nootropics aren't really products in and of themselves. Caffeine is a nootropic for example. There's a pretty broad range from herbals all the way to perscriotion and illicit drugs.
This type of comment should really be somehow differentiated from the rest. It's about defining a common idea (within large subsets of society), that if you don't know, you can't really talk about intelligently.
[+] [-] jerf|7 years ago|reply
Magnesium isn't even a nootropic. That is, while it may have some ability to boost cognition, it isn't a substance primarily ingested for that reason. It is a substance primarily ingested so that the person ingesting it will stay alive.
A quick cruise around Duck Duck Go suggests that while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea in desperate need of being censored. Certainly the idea that magnesium is generally deficient is widespread, with estimates around 50% not meeting the US RDA for magnesium in the US, and while magnesium may not be a good solution for insomnia qua insomnia, it can be a good solution for many things that may be causing you to be "unable to sleep"[1], whether or not that is "insomnia".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_deficiency_(medicine...
[+] [-] jrhurst|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|7 years ago|reply
taking nutritional supplements without any evidence that they accomplish anything useful and without a physician's advice is generally a bad idea (the default mode is not 'take until suggested otherwise' but 'only take if necessary'), and trying to make money off it by marketing them on youtube is even more miserable.
I'm very much in favour of youtube taking a proactive stance here. As a related note on nootropics, most of the products advertised under that label don't actually do anything at all. There's two very well known nootropics, caffeine and nicotine. So the next time someone tries to sell you weird nutrition supplements, just get a good old cup of coffee.
[+] [-] chillingeffect|7 years ago|reply
First result: The effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in elderly: A double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial.
CONCLUSION:
Supplementation of magnesium appears to improve subjective measures of insomnia such as ISI score, sleep efficiency, sleep time and sleep onset latency, early morning awakening, and likewise, insomnia objective measures such as concentration of serum renin, melatonin, and serum cortisol, in elderly people.
btw I was a fan of Steve Cronin's channel and of reddit's nootropics subreddit. Steve's stuff was hardly experimental. Lots of this stuff is heavily researched. Youtube probably has input from Big Pharma. What's next, eliminating smoothy and juicing videos? Vegan recipes? Will they let themselves become a perfect shady of the corporate lifestyle?
[+] [-] ebbv|7 years ago|reply
YouTube is on borrowed time (as is all social media) in skirting regulations that normally were enforced on TV and radio. It will catch up with YouTube, Instagram, etc and they are realizing it and trying to prepare.
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
In the fitness community ZMA is widely considered a sleep aid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMA_(supplement)
[+] [-] himom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevecronin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joew42k|7 years ago|reply
This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It's the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.
If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)
My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.
In the mean time, I'll shout "i told you so" from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.
[+] [-] JackCh|7 years ago|reply
With regard to the rest of your comment, I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem. If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn't it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space? How would you actually solve that? Split youtube itself into several "Baby Youtubes"? How would that work, which one would get the domain name?
[+] [-] vertexFarm|7 years ago|reply
I need to get my ham license one of these days.
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
A big chunk of our culture is hosted by that company. Not sure if that makes a difference, but imho, it should.
[+] [-] samlevine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway84742|7 years ago|reply
The oft overlooked caveat to this line of thought is: we don’t have to like it.
[+] [-] CivilEngineer|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] logfromblammo|7 years ago|reply
You never know when companies like Alphabet or Facebook or Amazon or Apple will pull the rug out from beneath you and yank away that source of income, so don't stand on their rugs. If you let someone stand between you and your money, there will be someone standing between you and your money.
And as there is no way they could possibly review all uploaded videos with actual humans, much of this enforcement is done by machine detection and automated processing, and you will never get any explanation from a human, unless you are in the top 1000 accounts ranked by how much money they make for YouTube.
Not that this sort of content needs to be in video form, anyway. If I feel the need to learn about new, unregulated, or misregulated drugs, I'd prefer reading text, with as few still images as is possible to convey the needed information.
[+] [-] crankylinuxuser|7 years ago|reply
Pardon me, while I go watch "Peppa Pig Goes to the dentist crying Elsa". It's been on YT since Feb 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVx4hA0Tcdo
Aside the snark, its time to regulate how our data is used, what decisions are made upon it, and a proper grievance for companies that do that. The GDPR is a good start, to be honest.
[+] [-] kristofferR|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pboutros|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] akvadrako|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wagecuck|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] codepig|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wcunning|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristofferR|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newnewpdro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awakeasleep|7 years ago|reply
Anyone know whether he disclosed that he was being compensated by the companies?
[+] [-] yladiz|7 years ago|reply
Beyond the anecdote I don't think this is censorship from Youtube, it's likely the creators were either venturing into advertising/selling products as the primary purpose of their videos, or giving some kind of medical advice about how they can improve your life/body, or both, both of which I think are against Youtube ToS. Given that it's a story from Motherboard we're probably just getting a partial part of the story and the article is just making it seem like Youtube is censoring something they shouldn't, rather than putting the creators at fault.
[+] [-] kawfey|7 years ago|reply
Vimeo? Twitch? Facebook? Metacafe or Dailymotion? There are also also already dozens of dapps for streaming like dtube, lbry, viewly, lino, flixxo....(etc, just see https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+youtube), but I don't see any particular venue rising above the rest, as a lot of creators seem to choose "all of the above" as an answer, syndicating content across as many domains as possible.
[+] [-] JackCh|7 years ago|reply
For instance Cody's Lab has a patreon page which doubtlessly helps with falling revenue from youtube, but it doesn't prevent youtube from giving him various community guideline strikes and locking his channel for videos that were considered acceptable years ago when they were uploaded but are now retroactively in violation.
(Some specific 'genres' of content creators have alternative platforms. For instance gamers have twitch, and gun channels have full30. But I've not seen any alternative platform becoming popular that targets the full range of youtube content)
(Incidentally the ubiquity of patreon makes me wonder if it too will shape up to be considered a harmful monopoly one day in the not so distant future.)
[+] [-] 21|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanilama|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|7 years ago|reply
When Google bought out YouTube, as those that were online back then can attest, there were dozens of not hundreds of competing sites. None of those could hold a candle to the resources Google’s cash could buy, and they quickly dropped out of the running. The only site still around is probably vimeo, and only because they were smart enough to not target the masses and instead pick a niche to serve.
[+] [-] mike00632|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasbesoin|7 years ago|reply
Take YouTube, a large commercial interest.
Add their lobbying, that is participating and influencing a limited, largely invitation-only discussion of what video distribution is and will be on the Web.
(I say largely invitation-only, because 10's and 100's of thousands of us can mount campaigns "of the masses" without moving the needle, or generating only a temporary reaction until the powers that be can slip their changes through another avenue or after simply wearing us out.)
Now, they are no longer "just" a commercial provider, free to choose what they wish to host.
They are defining the very nature of Web video (and, more broadly, content) distribution -- to suit their own purposes.
THAT's why you worry when big players start doing stuff. Because it tends to become "the law".
[+] [-] RIMR|7 years ago|reply
9/10 pieces of advice I see on Nootropic use amount to dangerous and misinformed medical advice.
I can understand why YouTube would want to avoid looking complicit in all of this, especially with more than one popular Nootropic supplement sending users to the hospital in recent months.
[+] [-] nyrulez|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dawhizkid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalneal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erickhill|7 years ago|reply
TL;DR It is suggested they improve cognitive function (memory, focus, etc.). They are not fully regulated and you can find examples for sale on Amazon. As such, no idea if short or long-term usage is safe but it's interesting product if you simply read what the labels claim.
[+] [-] deelowe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akvadrako|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseldo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eulers__number|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ungzd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avoutthere|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jstandard|7 years ago|reply