Another Unfortunate Example Of Facebook Silencing Important Videos
from the where's-the-line dept
Another day, another case of Facebook disappearing a video that it should have left up. A politician in Hong Kong says that Facebook banned him from the site for 24 hours for a "terms of service violation" after he posted a video of him confronting men who had been following him around for weeks.The video uploaded by Leung on August 7 showed him approaching a black car which he claimed followed him for a month. When Leung asked the two men inside the car where they came from, they replied “grandpa” – a slang term used for the Chinese Communist Party.That seems like a valuable and important video in the public interest. But Facebook didn't think so:
“I don’t want to know about you. Someone wants to know about you – I don’t want to know,” said one of the men in the car.
Leung was informed on Tuesday night that his original video was removed for not complying with Facebook’s community standards. Shortly after, he uploaded it again and was banned from posting for 24 hours after the new post also got reportedOf course, once the story started getting press attention, suddenly Facebook restored the video. Funny how that works.
Either way, though, it's yet another reminder of how much power some of these platforms have over important speech, and how they become centralized attack vectors for those who wish to hide such information.
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Filed Under: censorship, edward leung, free speech, hong kong
Companies: facebook
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Is this really surprising?
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Which is another piece of evidence automated takedown systems are bound to fail.
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Vote with your feet
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Re:
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All of this sounds like a stupid automated system that can be abused to get someone banned without Facebook ever really getting a human involved.
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Why do it that way?
Why didn't the guy just put the video on YouTube and post a link?
Why does anybody post videos to FB in the first place?
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Re: Why do it that way?
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Re: Why do it that way?
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I must be gettin' old, I remember when "important speech" was reported by the MSM, fairly and in detail. Now water-cooler scuttlebutt is the purveyor of choice.
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Re:slang for police in China
China, unlike America, executes corrupt cops, but in HK there is still crosover btwn cop/gangter, hence the blurred terms.
Very interesting to see an American/western news source mention the tactics of organized stalking/gang stalking/ investigation, considering that such things are the new normal in America.
The Chinese and others, like America and Britain today, employed these Red Squads back in the great leap forward, and the Chinese-just like America and the "five eyes" nations employ entire platoons of internet harassers and online trolls that cause endless 'disruptions' of speakers.
In other words-dont look to China as if your own nations arent doing this and more ( JTRIG and online mind control for example).Also, most feminist and SJWs online in the west are funded by your governments, and the multiplicitos corporations and NGOs that they subdiize to destroy/redirect/censor the internet, twitter, etc.
As regards 'why dont they just post to Youtube'-its blocked on mainland.
Here's some more ways that Chnese nationals use language online to get around censors
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/29/these-are-the-secret-code-words- that-let-you-criticize-the-chinese-government/
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Re: Re:slang for police in China
Don't worry, nobody is.
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Yeah, it's kinda like when someone says something around here, and a certain someone (who runs the place) doesn't like it, so they "collapse" the comment so know one can see it, and then subsequently blames that censorship on "the community".
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The problem is this is exactly why free speech is either complete, or it does not exist.
If free speech is not totally free, then someone else if deciding what you can say, or not. What you can see, or not. What you can read, or not.
Free speech is the most important liberty. It must be complete, and without anyone, anything, controlling it.
And because good people are more numerous than morons, even with full free speech, the good people thoughts and ideas will get over crap we are able, as a species, to produce.
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What is the best tool for sucking down whaty is not on youtube?
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Re: What is the best tool for sucking down whaty is not on youtube?
ustream.tv (the only one you mentioned by name) appears to be one of those.
For example, here is a web page with videos of puppies and stuff:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/23951237
The video file locations are in the page source.
Search the page source for "media_urls". You're looking for something like this:
"media_urls":{"flv":"url-with-certain-characters-escaped-or-encoded"}
That tells you where to find some flash video file. You just need to un-escape/un-encode some characters in the url.
So, starting with something like this, …
http:\/\/tcdn.ustream.tv\/video\/23951237?preset_id=1&e=some-decimal-digits&h=som e-hex-digits&source=api
… you will transform it to something like this:
http://tcdn.ustream.tv/video/23951237?preset_id=1&e=some-decimal-digits&h=some-hex-digi ts&source=api
And that is where your video is.
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Re: What is the best tool for sucking down whaty is not on youtube?
You're saying "yeah, I know media file locations are on webpages, but where is a general tool for extracting it?"
Maybe Grilo is the kind of thing you want?
https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/Grilo
BTW, you ask for "the best" one, without offering any information about your needs, your platform, etc.
Wherever else you intend to ask about this, more specificity might get you better answers.
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