Google Is Using Its Immense Power To Censor Content That Doesn’t Fit Its Political Goals. Everyone In America Should Be Concerned About That.
Harlem Shook: Google Is Using Its Immense Power To Censor
Content That Doesn’t Fit Its Political Goals. Everyone In America Should Be
Concerned About That
By Neil Patel Co-Founder and Publisher, The Daily Caller 2:15
PM 12/15/2017
The Daily Caller released a funny video Tuesday of FCC
Chairman Ajit Pai defending the commission’s upcoming net-neutrality rollback.
Through Wednesday and Thursday, liberals and others who dislike Pai’s political
position lost their minds. And by Friday morning, Google, one of the most
powerful companies on the planet, had censored the video based on a bogus claim
from a politically motivated man.
It took seven crucial hours and the full force of our
news site to push Google and YouTube to reverse this political censorship. We
were able to prevail because of the sizable contacts and resources of TheDC. An
average citizen showcasing a political viewpoint Google and the left disagreed
with would almost certainly have had a far more difficult — and fruitless —
time fighting back.
At TheDC, we knew that releasing a video of Pai
fidget-spinning in a Santa suit, swinging lightsabers and playing with a puppy
a day before the FCC’s net neutrality vote would ruffle some feathers. We were
prepared for the hyperventilating over the video to reach a fever pitch as the
Obama-era internet regulations were rolled back Thursday afternoon. Indeed, the
video was viewed millions of times over a 24-hour period, was featured in a
broad spectrum of news mediums, and spawned an avalanche of memes on Reddit.
In producing the video, we never advocated for Pai or the
new net neutrality regulations, and you should check out our in-depth interview
with him here on race and the internet. The video was meant to tell Pai’s
version of the net neutrality battle in a non-traditional, non-linear way.
Any honest viewer of this video would see that.
Unfortunately, the seething outrage over the net
neutrality issue poisoned the well far beyond critics’ ability to appreciate
parody. The video, and those featured in it, were viciously attacked. The
“likes” to “dislikes” were comically ratioed, 5,000 to 144,000 at last count.
Then, as the left often does with content that offends
them, they started a campaign to strip the video from the internet.
That happened to us, without warning, on YouTube Friday
morning.
Our Pai video was removed because of a copyright claim
for … wait for it … “The Harlem Shake.”
“The Harlem Shake” is an embarrassingly outdated internet
trope that peaked in popularity approximately four years ago. Like much of the
content in the video, it was there to make a point in a funny way. A simple
search on Youtube shows over 7,000,000 videos using long segments of the song
with billions upon billions of total views. Our video used only a few seconds
of the song and was not monetized — we were not making profit from this silly
rendition of the FCC chairman dancing to a few seconds of a song uploaded to
the internet multi-millions of times.
Because it featured a Republican against net neutrality,
however, the triggering began.
The song is owned and licensed by artist Mad Decent, who
demanded the platform remove the video, not because anyone was making profit
off their work, but because they openly disagreed with the political worldview
of the man dancing to it.
Baauer, the DJ who created the song, openly admitted on
Twitter that he was targeting our video because he doesn’t like its political
message. He called Pai a “loser” and said “I support net neutrality like the
vast majority of this country and am appalled to be associated with its repeal
in anyway (SIC).” His sudden concern for copyright law is even more laughable,
considering he created “Harlem Shake” by sampling another artist’s vocals
without permission, which is itself a fair use.
YouTube, a Google-owned company who supports net
neutrality, willingly complied with Mad Decent’s request. This is not in any
way standard practice for the platform, which thrives because its creators
liberally flex fair-use content.
Fair use, defined by Stanford Law, is the use of
copyright material “to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.”
Fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for
a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or
parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the
copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of
copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not
be considered an infringement.
The FCC chairman dancing with a lightsaber to “The Harlem
Shake” is an obvious parody. What’s more, the entire video and the very short
clip of the song were there as a commentary on the whole network-neutrality
debate. This is as open-and-shut a case of fair use as has ever existed.
As soon as we discovered that The Daily Caller’s video
had been removed, our chief operations officer reached out to Google for
answers. The video was restored after approximately seven important hours down.
Getting Google to treat content fairly shouldn’t require
being a company with the size and influence of The Daily Caller.
The network-neutrality debate over whether the large
internet providers will discriminate based on their commercial or political
interests is raging in America. It’s a good debate to have.
While we are debating, however, Google is quietly and
arbitrarily using its massive power to censor the internet.
YouTube’s targeting of Daily Caller content and its
willingness to remove our video for political purposes while millions of other
uses are allowed to remain on the platform should stand as a terrifying
prospect for every American.
It follows a disturbing trend of platforms and networks
devaluing and restricting content based on political viewpoints.
This is an important moment, for us and for all
publishers who supposedly value “neutrality” on the internet.
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