YouTube Removes Legendary Meme Video After 14 Years for 'Violence' (vice.com) 92
An anonymous reader shares a report: You probably don't know Paul Weedon by name, but you've probably seen him get punched in the face. He is the man behind the "I can't believe you've done this" meme, an old, viral video in which he talks to the camera for a few seconds before someone off camera sucker-punches him mid-sentence. It's a canonical internet video that has spread far and wide since Weedon uploaded it to YouTube 14 years ago, and for reasons that he doesn't understand, yesterday YouTube decided to remove it, citing its violence policies. Weedon has tried appealing YouTube's decision, but the company denied his request.
"I got an email from YouTube late last night informing me that it had been taken down because it had violated their 'violent or graphic content' policy, which seemed a bit mad after all this time,â Weedon told Motherboard. "I'd maybe understand it if the video was new, but it's been on YouTube for over a decade. At that point you'd have thought they'd have flagged that there was an issue with it and dealt with it." Weedon said he has no idea why the video was removed now, but he's not worried about it disappearing from the internet.
"I got an email from YouTube late last night informing me that it had been taken down because it had violated their 'violent or graphic content' policy, which seemed a bit mad after all this time,â Weedon told Motherboard. "I'd maybe understand it if the video was new, but it's been on YouTube for over a decade. At that point you'd have thought they'd have flagged that there was an issue with it and dealt with it." Weedon said he has no idea why the video was removed now, but he's not worried about it disappearing from the internet.
Already been reinstated (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot...providing outdated news, as usual. The video was already reinstated yesterday
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I should also add...surprisingly I had never even heard about this before today. But I just watched it...he does NOT get punched in the face. Watch it in slow motion. It's an open hand that comes in from behind and pushes the back of his head. It's not a fist, and nothing ever touches the front or side of his head. Fake...just like pretty much every other meme video of this variety and everything on tik tok
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You might note that a punch/hit to the back of the head is actually worse than to the face or side of the head. There's a reason those punches are banned from most MMA fights.
You might note that he didn't hit him very hard.
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Shut up. The whole purpose, and the very meaning of this take is in the punching of some dude.
Nothing more. Pure violence, and speculation of that.
Good job, YouTube, we celebrate you!
Re: Already been reinstated (Score:1)
Canâ(TM)t tell if serious
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On the other hand the video of Buzz Aldrin punching moon landing denier Bart Sibrel is still up (as it should be.)
Re:Already been reinstated (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's still fairly newsworthy that YT is constantly changing the rules and perfectly willing to retcon what they formerly accepted based on whatever is the woke meme of the day.
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Agreed, YouTube has a set of draconian censorship policies in which normal users have no recourse.
It's only when it rises above middle management does action take place to correct a mistake on their YouTube's behalf.
It's also very similar to FaceBook jail where content is being reviewed and re-reviewed on a consistent basis. This ends up hilariously, in some cases, causing people to get "Facebook-jailed" for the same post, then appealed, and then "Facebook-jailed" again, over and over and over.
Re: Already been reinstated (Score:2)
Moving the goal posts..I've seen this kind of shit all the time in IRL, and eventually even the most 'faithful follower' stops respecting the rules.
People need to fuck off with the ever changing rules game, and I suspect what I had witnessed throughout tbe years was a combination of extreme narcassism and mental illness on the part of the rule makers.
What does this have to do with being woke? (Score:1)
Basically YouTube is worried about becoming jackass. And a certain extent they already
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For your protection. (Score:2)
For a kinder, gentler, internet where people throw feathers at each other.
Re: For your protection. (Score:2)
Life is risk. Safety is imprisonment.
Let me guess what's next, love is hate, war is peace?
And the funniest thing is that most people who speak against safety are the type of people who wouldn't last a week in the wilderness. In the end, what most people who speak like you really mean is: I am old, the standards have changed and I can't handle this, I am afraid of change.
Well guess what, life is change.
In classic Google fashion (Score:4, Insightful)
Per the usual policy of Google, they reversed it soon after. [theverge.com] The time honored tradition of not making their fucking minds up continues.
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The resulting publicity will doubtlessly result in tons of extra views, and Google wouldn't want to miss out on all those extra ad impressions.
If I believed that they were even remotely competent, I might accuse them of orchestrating the whole kerfuffle.
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I have read many stories about Google arbitrarily suspending people's email accounts, and other google services, without any warning. These users were left high-and-dry, and couldn't get through to any human beings at Google to even find out why.
Something similar happened to a company I worked for a while back. I cannot give details but Google's algorithms screwed up and victimized their business and caused damage, and it took a few days before the company managed to get through to anybody and clear thing
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Per the usual policy of Google, they reversed it soon after. [theverge.com] The time honored tradition of not making their fucking minds up continues.
At times like this it's important to remember that Google isn't some monolithic entity but a collection of individual employees (and AIs).
Most likely, a low level content reviewer saw the video, decided it violated the guidelines, and removed it. Enough people protested that a higher level reviewer re-checked the video, came to a different conclusion (possibly motivated by the backlash) and), and reversed the decision.
There's always going to be border-line content and I'm not sure how any large site with us
Left is taken over by prudes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Left is taken over by prudes (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Left has the orgies. We just don't get off on (nonconsensual) violence.
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You pro-life assholes are not pro-life, you're anti-sex. If you could get away with demanding that STDs shouldn't get treated, you would. You pretend to give a shit about the parasite growing inside a woman because you want to punish her for fucking. That's all.
You know, your god considers jealousy a sin. Stop being jealous of those that can get laid just because nobody would fuck you with a stolen dick.
Re:Left is taken over by prudes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Both sides are prudes.
America starts with the Puritans.
Everyone thinks that outrage is power and reaches for as much power as possible.
I hate it.
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I do find it interesting that "The 'take offense at anything' culture" in the 80's and 90's was from the Right. Now it's from the Left.
In-between there were a lot of deaths at the hands of Law Enforcement. Still needs to be addressed.
Re: Left is taken over by prudes (Score:2)
https://gizmodo.com/most-polic... [gizmodo.com]
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>I do find it interesting that "The 'take offense at anything' culture" in the 80's and 90's was from the Right. Now it's from the Left.
I get the impression they're still at it just as much The right taking offense and the left complaining about it.
Maybe the difference today is the right has upped its complaining and the left has upped its taking offense.
Or is it all the same and today there's more people with a microphone and less inhibition.
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> The modern Left claims offense as a weapon to silence opposition to extremist demands. The Right is offended by extremist demands.
The modern left claims offense to stop the claimed offense, extremism, whatever, the modern right does too. They both also complain about it, a lot. Is it more than it was. I'm not sure it is. How many cases, their 'real' severity, how many reports, their intensity, their broadcast scope.
Maybe framing things with left and right tags makes it harder to see what's going on.
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And you know how you’re saying “tolerant”? That’s offensive to the Left now. Tolerance isn’t good enough anymore (though it was their favorite word in the 90s), you have to be actively accepting and inclusive of everything, no matter how extreme, obscene, or factually wrong.
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I do find it interesting that "The 'take offense at anything' culture" in the 80's and 90's was from the Right. Now it's from the Left.
I know, how strange. I think this has something to do with dominant culture. Reagan era was peak conservatism, now we have peak progressiveness.
Re: Left is taken over by prudes (Score:2)
Both extremes want to tell other people how to live their lives. It's no surprise that today's woke leftists are all for censorship, even though their predecessors were fighting *against* authority.
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And the right wing politicizes everything (Score:2)
And you know what, they're right. As a young dumb kid you see a video like this with millions of views and you think "maybe if I pop somebody on camera I can go viral too". That's what YouTube is concerned about. It's a valid concern, and rather tha
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Both are essentially the same kind of human garbage. Both are in it for the power to tell you what you can or cannot say, do or even think.
Extremes are always authoritarian. Left or right. By definition.
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Reinstated or not... (Score:2)
... it says a lot about the kind of bed wetting snowflakes they're hiring to populate their compliancy department. An AI may well have flagged it up but a human makes the final decision.
Perhaps its a company policy or perhaps just symptomatic of a rather wet, sheltered generation now reaching adulthood.
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An AI may well have flagged it up but a human makes the final decision.
That's not true. 99% of the time an AI is all that is involved. Most often because enough people clicked the report button.
Re: Reinstated or not... (Score:2)
I love how you yanks think everyone you disagree with is a trump voter :) newsflash mate, this is a world site.
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News flash mate; there are stupid people all over the world who would vote for Rump if they had a chance and wouldn't care if he was a citizen of their country or not.
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Well I hope you're happy with the senile old man in charge now. I feel sorry for the USA not being able to field any half decent candidates for president out of a 300m population. Pathetic.
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More likely an AI or report flagged it and some poor person in a 3rd world country viewed it and saw violence which fit their rough guidelines so they removed it
So Google 'sucker-punched' Weedon in mid appeal? (Score:2)
they never gO far enuf (Score:2)
0's will b banned because they remind u Of your state Of being. 1's will be banned because they r beyOnd your imaginatiOn.
Consistency (Score:2)
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As a kid I learned a lot of bad shit from 3 Stooges.
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Poked my sister in the eyes and found that rather than a huffy "Ow" it generated a spanking instead.
BoomerTube (Score:2)
Turns out Boomers and SJWs have a lot in common.
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So which group does the AI that banned the video belong to? Must be SJWs, since very few AIs are more than a decade old.
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"Everybody should be like me, think like me and share my opinion, then the world would be a much nicer place! Let's enforce this!"
Works for boomers, SJWs and other religious nuts.
Never seen it (Score:2)
But I'm sure 15 yo boys around the world are devastated.
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15 year olds aren't the ones who look at outdated-by-14-years meme videos.
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Well... yeah? This doesn't surprise you, does it?
Imagine you're a writer. Would you agree to these terms: You can write whatever story you want and I'll print it in my paper. I will not pay you for the story, but depending on how many of my readers say that they bought my paper because of your story, you'll get a cut of the ad revenue I make. No, you're not going to talk to my readers, I am going to tell you how many bought the paper because of you and you can believe me or fuck off. Also, I decide who adve
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Except for the payment you can easily replace "my paper" with what ever major newspaper takes your fancy.
But this is what you all wanted (Score:1)
No point complaining about it now.
YouTube will decide what's appropriate for you to see, thank you very much. If they say that something is "violence", then too bad. Doesn't matter if you think otherwise.
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Book burning, 21st century style (Score:5, Interesting)
YouTube burns a lot of books, whether by intent or incompetence.
By this I mean that a lot of content and even whole channels get deleted as a result of its lunatic systems and policies. By doing this, YouTube actually tries to shape perception which is the very thing they claim they're trying to avoid (by cancelling anti-vaxers and flat-earthers).
I seem to recall that a few hundred years ago, a guy called Gallileo was canceled by the Roman Catholic Church for daring to suggest that the sun (and not the earth) was at the center of the solar system. Such "fake news" could not be allowed so his work was banned.
Now while I'm not an anti-vaxer, flat earther or any other kind of "fly in the face of contemporary science" kind of guy, I do believe that *everyone* should have a right to their opinions and we ought not be burning books simply because we do not agree with their content.
Google has gone from "don't be evil" to "we are evil incarnate".
So sad how mone/power corrupts.
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The difference is maybe that the RCC had governments backing its monopoly claim. Care to point to the country that tries to ensure YouTube is the only place where you can publish your videos?
Praise the Greek gods (Score:2)
I have no fucking idea what this video is or what's going on here, hmm cocaine. My gods imagine a world wide hysteria of a video being taken down.
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It's not a matter of bad, it's a matter of being something you can actually do something about.
If it's a government that is censoring, first of all, it may well be something that is against the fundamental rules of the country the government has to comply with (e.g. the consttitution of a country). In a lot of countries, a government is not allowed to censor opinions, with good reason. And even if, at least in democratic governments you can replace that government with a different one if enough people think
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YouTube going the way of cable (Score:5, Insightful)
The ancient ones here will remember a time before the years started with 20, when cable TV was new. And it was exciting. They dared to do stuff that we've never before seen on the old, dusty, established channels. New shows. Exciting, daring attempts at new entertainment. Not snorefest "sitcoms" llike the Cosby Show that was a perfect family with perfect kids, Fox gave us The Simpsons with a misfit child and a dumbass dad.
Yes, kids, back then this was really something. You don't even want to know what ruckus South Park caused.
But given time, they stopped to dare. Because now that they got the viewers, they realized that they want to make money. And that meant that they have to appease the advertisers. And advertisers don't want to advertise with "controversial" content. They don't want their brands to be associated with social commentary and violence. Or anything else that people actually find interesting.
So cable became the same snorefest that the established OTA channels were.
But that didn't matter much to us. We got YouTube. Now, take that text up there, replace "cable" with YouTube and established channels with cable, and you get exactly the same. Just about 2 decades later.
In other words. Thank you YouTube for being there when cable became boring. But it's time to replace you with something that dares to be intersting.
In other words: NEXT!
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If it looks like violence ... (Score:2)
If it looks like violence, and acts like violence then it probably is violence. It sure looks like it to me and apparently that is against the rules, presumable if it was fake (acting) it wouldn't be.
Rules are rules, should it matter that it has been around for years and he is apparently internet famous? That sounds like creeping celebrity diva-ism to me.
Why did somebody punch him in the first place?
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Being a victim on-camera now qualifies as 'violent', good to know.
I despise this need to pretend that adults aren't tribal, xenophobic, moralizing hypocrites. No surprise that teenagers rarely respect their elders.
A good question that your pro-censorship attitude will ensure is never asked.
Legendary Meme? (Score:2)
Legendary undeserving exceptionalism.
At least Monty Python fish slap is still available (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/T8XeDvKqI4E [youtu.be]
old standards not necessarily safe ones (Score:2)
Even old road-runner+ coyote cartoons were considered too violent by modern standards for kids. Old ways of doing things doesn't justify continued use when morays and sensibilities changes. Think of how colorful names of various ethnicities and races are now considered poor taste, derogatory, racist or sexist.
Old standards of acceptability have to change or society cannot progress.
Remember various societies have thought slavery, selling females and paying for education with homosexuality were fine "in th
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They're just pissed that they got caricatured by the show as looking like disfigured creatures with bad teeth and huge ears.
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censors gonna censor. (Score:1)
youtube can't be obsoleted fast enough.
days behind, dude. (Score:1)
"On September 29th, The Verge[8] reported on the removal of the video, with Weedon providing additional comments in an interview with the publication. Users online also reacted with backlash after the video's removal, citing that it was a ludicrous decision. One such example was tweeted by Twitter[10] user @tristandross, who said "this is like if someone at the louvre decided on a whim to throw the mona lisa in a skip."
Late in the day on September 29th, YouTube ultimately restored the video, stating that re