Hello guys and gals, welcome back to another video.
Today’s topic is unfortunately not a good one and if you are looking for some more tank
history content you’ll have to wait till Friday for that.
Please don’t click off the video just yet though because the information I have to discuss
today is very important and could be disastrous for not just my channel but all history channels
on YouTube as well as the military history in general.
If you watched my last video on the 4005 and stayed till the end you would have heard me
mention someone by the name of Ed Francis.
He’s a fellow youtuber with a smaller channel who does content quite similar to mine.
I do recommend checking him out after this video and showing him some support but that's
not what I’m making this video for.
He was a huge help to that video though providing some additional information as well as ensuring
I didn’t make any glaring mistakes in the information I did provide.
By request of a few viewers I was also planning to work on a video with his help on the Yoh
tanks just announced for World of Tanks.
As of today Google, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that due to some of the images
he had on his Google Drive they should label it as terrorist activity.
This has locked not just the photos which caused the false flag but his entire drive
including personal family photos.
Not only is this absurd given what his content is but the vast majority of the photos including
the ones I will be showing you onscreen are available by searching on google itself.
So by their own logic Google themselves is partaking in terrorist activity.
Not only that but as of late Google along with a number of other companies have been
on campaigns to try and eliminate discrimination from their platforms.
I’m by no means against this but when their bots start to falsely flag things purely because
the tanks or other vehicles are from the middle east at what point can that be seen as discrimination?
Hundreds of thousands live in that region so just because a tank was used by a terrorist
group doesn't mean that the people in the photos are terrorists themselves.
I don’t want to get to ranty in this video but I just wanted to at least show how absurd
this takedown is.
Thankfully in the past when this happened to one of the members of Tank encyclopedia
the issue was resolved relatively quickly but I still feel that Google needs to have
some sort of backlash over this with it being the second time.
I sincerely hope this will be resolved easily but I use google drive myself and if this
becomes a pattern for the AI in charge of policing what's uploaded who knows what could
happen in the future.
There are some ways we can protect against this already such as keeping backups on personal
harddrives or on other cloud services but sometimes this isn't an option or could be
forgotten.
I don’t expect a company as big as Google to actually care about each and every user
but I do expect them to allow us to use their services without the fear of having it all
wiped away because of one image that a computer deems problematic.
As some of you may know I experienced this myself not too long ago with one of my old
videos earning my channel a community guidelines strike.
I won’t show the video here because I don’t want a second strike but the portion of the
video which was found to be hate speech by the bot was a few seconds of audio from a
halo cutscene that happened to sync with a portion of some old footage with Hitler in
it.
Rewatching it I can kind of see why out of context this could be taken the wrong way,
within the context of the video it made sense.
The original footage I had used in that video is still available in its entirety on YouTube
as well.
That about finishes my rant for today but I do have one final message which I’ll try
to keep brief.
Although I will continue to use Google's services as I imagine almost all of you watching the
video now will also continue to do, always remember that having a backup is still a good
practice.
I’ve done this myself over on Odysee where I have all my videos backed up and available
to watch for free.
I encourage any other content creators watching to do the same for their videos with whichever
other site works best for them.
Small side note here but I plan to start posting occasional videos to Odysee if I feel that
YouTube might not like them due to the subject matter so please follow me there if you haven't
already.
Enough self promotion though now it's time for my call to action.
I’m hopeful that this situation will resolve itself but I still want to encourage every
single one of you to go to Ed's support ticket, which I will link below and give it an upvote
so we make sure google will see it.
Not only that but please share either this video or the information it contains to other
creators or communities.
With just a few channels we can’t do much but if we can stir up enough people we could
potentially set a precedent that could help future issues like this be resolved much quicker
or hopefully prevent them altogether.
So go check out that link as well as Ed's channel Armoured Archives and show him your
support through some positive comments.
Thanks so much for your help and for watching this video.
I look forward to seeing you this Friday where we’ll be discussing 4 tanks that Wargaming
has announced for their supertest and seeing if they are real or not.
See you then.