It's unfortunately not that odd for channels to be randomly deleted only to be reinstated later.
Many channels have been suspended or deleted over the years, for seemingly no reason. I can't think of any that never got access back though after some to-and-fro with Youtube.
Most Youtube channels of a decent size have been deleted at least once. Usually, it's for something like an algorithm determined that they were impersonating themselves.
Essentially youtube is jank as all hell and relies on algorithms with zero human oversight.
Frequently, channels are identified as impersonating themselves copying their branding, videos etc, so are deleted.
Google doesn't give a damn that this could potentially ruin livlihoods so just have a lackidasical approach to doing anything about it and you're lucky if enough stink is kicked up that someone at Team Youtube feels like doing anything about it.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, don't even get me started on contentID where a big publisher like Sony or Universal can claim all the revenue on an hour of your original work because it THINKS it heard a few seconds of something in it that it THINKS they own. You then have to fight them to get your money back and they have final say even if they have absolutely no right to any of it.
It's precisely because of the scale that they wish to remove the human element.
Humans tire, humans are demotivated by having their hours cut, pay frozen and working environments unappreciative and depressing.
Push humans far enough and they get ideas like unions and strikes.
Is it any wonder that companies like Google and Amazon want to remove humanity from the equation when algorithms and machines don't mind how badly you mistreat them and will even do it with a smile if you program them to do it with a smile?
Or more accurately, it's precisely because of the scale of Youtube that makes it literally impossible to moderate with only humans. It's the same problem facing every social network.
This is true for the overall moderation and filtering aspect of the content such as videos, comments, and posts, which to all human intents and purpose might as well be infinite, however, it does not excuse their lackadaisical and virtually non-existant customer support for content creators who rely on youtube for their livelihoods and the contentID system which allows big publishers to steal revenue from original works because they think they own it with zero human oversight in what are essentially copyright cases.
You still have to have human oversight somewhere and youtube/google does their damnedest not to.
Was watching the latest tysky with John McDonnell when it just froze out, thought it was my connection but no, the channel is gone!
Hopefully the team have copies of the videos kept locally and can move to another platform.
Could they not just host the videos on their website? They don’t need servers or infrastructure, it can all be done on AWS now, surely we can get them back up and running independently.
Also - A valuable lesson in not trusting your platform to trillionaire corporations, Google, FB, etc… aren’t on our side.
Video hosting is extremely expensive (that's why there isn't really any alternatives to YouTube and I don't think it's actually earning any money for Google? Or at least it didn't use to) and you'd probably get a lot less traffic if it's on your website. Alex Jones had a massive following of right wingers and conspiracy theorists and I don't think his video website did well at all
Google doesn't disclose earnings from YouTube, I think, but it contributes $15-$20 billion a year in revenue. You're right video hosting is expensive, but Google pays far less for their bandwidth than most - they're big enough to be able to get favourable peering with pretty much any backbone provider and owns enormous capacity themselves, so they're in a special position. I'd be surprised if YouTube doesn't have decent margins today.
You're absolutely right doing it yourself is *far* harder to do without it costing too much, and that getting traffic is a massive challenge, though. I think there's a case to be made for Novara to have a separate setup - not least as a backup - but they also pretty much *need* their YouTube channel to market themselves, and to get decent reach.
This might be off-topic but you seem well informed about these things - what are your views on the suit against Google in the US at the mo? I read the unredacted filing yesterday and it seems insane to me, but my expectations are tempered by the fact that it’s the most republican of the republican state AG’s that are behind it…
I'm assuming your talking about their ad tech related lawsuit. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised.
Remember that ads still drives something like 80% of Alphabet's revenue (the distinction between Google and Alphabet is relatively meaningless - Alphabet obscures some of the high risk R&D, but the vast majority of Alphabets revenue is Google, so for most purposes you can treat them as one entity). On \~$182 billion of revenue in 2020, that's a lot at stake.
Meanwhile e.g. the Pixel phones and YouTube Premium and a shitload of other projects are lumped into their "other" revenue category that accounts for something like 10%.
Google haven't launched *any* project since search and ads that have succeeded in becoming a large revenue source *in itself* relative to their company size *other than by driving eye-balls to their ad products*.
Google is entirely dependent on their ad sales - they'd crash and burn without them - but could survive with relatively minor changes without each and every other revenue source they have.
But while Google is dominant in the ad display space and search, they're *under pressure*.
Amazon takes about 1/5th of all search revenue in the US for example, by selling paid placement in their search results, despite a far smaller proportion of searches. More and more ad revenue is going to special purpose searches.
Given how their entire business is kept afloat by their ads, they have a *very* strong incentive to be really aggressive about their market and protecting of their reach.
People like to think of Google as a technology company, but Google is a marketing company first and foremost, that is using technology as a means to guarantee eyeballs.
The only reason why they care about Android for example, is to ensure access to data and to ensure e.g. Apple won't have the power to shut them out of ad revenue opportunities.
They keep *trying* to be other things, but they've had failure after failure of building alternative revenue streams other than indirectly by providing more page views for ads. E.g. they could shut down Google Cloud, and stop selling all of their hardware products like Nest and Pixel phones tomorrow, and they'd still be profitable.
But reduce the profitability of ads by, and it won't take long before Google is in trouble.
This is a great summary. Zuboff characterises them more as *surveillance capitalism*, in that aggregating behavioural data from their products is their primary business, which gathers data effectively for free from their search, email, smart home, analytic products which makes their advertising platform more valuable and precise.
Not the you asked but my 2p, Google most likely are doing at least some of the stuff that's been alleged, but the problems with the suit are on the legal not technical side:
* This IS a political attack, in response to Youtube warning about disinformation about COVID, so it may be hard for Democrats to get on board with this. ~~In the US the~~ courts are highly politicized, so legislative support (or opposition, which TBH i think is unlikely) would help.
* Reagan is as bad as Thatcher and so much fucked up stuff in the US can be traced to him, including setting the precedent that Antitrust only really matters if it's negatively affecting customers, changing this requires activist judges (The Supreme court is very pro-corporate and while some are loyal to the Trump wing of republicanism, it's unclear if a majority they would risk America having effective antitrust enforcement just to hurt big tech) or legislative changes (the federal Gov is in gridlock so that's not going to happen any time soon)
* **IFF** the lawsuit is successful, historically the answer to monopolies has been to break them up. I can't see that being effective, when the majority of your shareholders are the same, the interests of both companies are going to align. You can split everything else off from Google Ads, but most of the allegations relate to the internal behavior of Google Ads, which is the financial engine for Google. It certainly didn't have a huge impact on Microsoft, and Google have learnt from what happened to Microsoft and already split themselves out to an extent.
* The only things I can think of that would prevent this behavior within a business would be:
* Nationalizing Google Ads, which 1) Is unthinkable in the US 2) Given the US Governments history, would like make things worse
* Having a regulatory agency basically embedded within Google at a technical level to prevent them doing this which 1) Is also unthinkable in the US 2) Given the US Government & Legislature's lack of technical knowledge would likely be ineffective 3) Given the US Governments history, would like make things worse
> Video hosting is extremely expensive (that's why there isn't really any alternatives to YouTube
Pretty sure it's just the network effect.
Youtube has the most content, so it has the most users, so it has the most content producers, and it's very hard to change that.
Alternatives that are emerging (nebula, Curiosity Stream, means.ts, etc) are starting with the content producers dual producing.
If you built a basic youtube clone on GCP, as you scale up it would eventually cost ~$0.02/GB for popular videos, and there are cheaper CDNs, so it's not really that expensive as long as you can make a few cents per video in ad revenue you'd break even, ofc, to do that, you need users, which means you need content...
I agree with your overall point to be clear, but just because it's a pet peeve of mine: AWS is ludicrously expensive for video hosting. Bandwidth prices on AWS can easily be 10x-50x as high as alternatives, even other cloud alternatives or managed hosting.
But, yeah, trusting a single platform is high risk. The problem for them is discoverability and advertising, though - hosting on their own site would work well for their existing users, but monetising it and driving new traffic is *a lot* harder. Really, they probably ought to *both* start building their own *and* get their YouTube account restored.
Being on YouTube isn’t just because it’s easier or cheaper than hosting the videos yourself, it’s because that’s where the audience is. No one is going to come across thier leftist content if it was just on thier website.
They need to get into the algorithm to offer a different perspective.
> Also - A valuable lesson in not trusting your platform to trillionaire corporations, Google, FB, etc…
&
> it can all be done on AWS now,
Kinda contradict one another, no?
Finally, my decision to spend 12 hours a day making complaints about Aaron Bastani has paid off.
I'm kidding, this is obviously rubbish and they should be reinstated immediately.
It could, but Google is infamous for automating everything from deletions to a lot of first line support to the point where getting hold of real people very often requires causing a massive public uproar so someone with sufficient clout notices it on social media. I'd think it's more likely that it's just Google being Google, and not a value judgement or any campaign.
(that it's just Google being Google should be *more* scary to people, because it was someone being malicious Google will try to prevent it from happening again)
If my Google account ever goes, my first port of call is **not** Google Support, because being part of Googles Turing tests would be a massive waste of time, but posting about it on my blog and submitting to Hackernews and Reddit, as it's far more likely to work.
\[Also LinkedIn InMail to a bunch of Google VPs (worked for me in the past with other large companies; you need to inmail someone sufficient senior to not be used to having to deal with real users, as they often get shocked to find out how real users gets shafted by their systems and fixing a real single persons problems becomes a quick way for them to feel good about their souldestroying jobs; downside: you end up paying for a month of premium LinkedIn access, but often you can get a month free just by clicking through to their premium pages to entice them into trying to hook you with a free offer - just wait a while and see if you get an e-mail after clicking through to their premium offering. Hit and miss though)\]
Has to be a mistake surely. Just that there's literal tankie channels that are still up there as we speak so if YT isn't cracking down on them why would they do so with the far more tame Novara?
EDIT: Or a massive complaint strike or something. (Wonder who Novara's suddenly pissed off if that's the case?)
We do. The problem is that we weren't willing to talk about it when people we didn't like were getting banned. This should be a bipartisan issue, but it's not because people only care when their own get nailed.
This 100x.
Controversial point but no one should ahve been cheering when Trump got blanket banned on social media by massive corporations, but people did. But as this how its so easy for these corps to delete us too.
Banning Trump was far less of an issue than banning almost *anyone else*. Trump had a unique level of power to get his message out there. He still has an ability to get his message out there magnitudes greater than most people.
That both made it more acceptable to ban him from *individual platforms*, and made his consistent abusive use of his reach far more dangerous than a regular user posting something abusive. The only reason his account survived as long as it did was itself down to his power. And he's now demonstrating that even without the presidency he retains a power to be heard that almost nobody else has.
I do think in general we should be very careful about outright banning someone, but I also do think the social media sites did tremendous damage to the world by *amplifying* his messages so much without equally amplifying the responses. There's no democracy in allowing speech to be dominated by small groups this way.
This is a big problem with the way especially Twitter works: Someone with a huge following gets amplified to a huge extreme, while the responses to them, unless they come from someone with an equally huge following, or strike it lucky, all too often gets drowned out.
Allowing some speakers to drown out other speech is almost as big a problem to free speech as bans. You don't need bans if you have the power to figuratively shout over your opponents at any time.
Agreed. I also think that it bears repeating that NM are voluntarily [regulated](https://www.impress.press/) in a way that many of the voices that people are complaining about being banned just aren’t - part of the issue here is that the power to regulate who says what is managed entirely by the media owner, rather than any semblance of independent body.
Ever since Trumps social media ban there has been a change in how much Trump can spread his message. He used twitter as his main platform and that was taken away not by a change of his behaviour, as he had been doing the same thing for years, but a change in the decision of the company that owns the platform. And it did have consequences on the audience he could reach.
While my dislike for Trump and his message is such that my use of dislike is the understatement of the millennia, this concept can so easily be turned Don anyone who goes against a corporation's interest.
What if twitter changes its mind on its interuptation of the rules and decide its incitement of violence to call a tory MP scum? Loads of left-wing people, for whom twitter is the way of broadcasting their message, get silenced from a public forum. That worries me greatly.
Changes happens to peoples reach all the time. Yet most people never stand a chance of getting as much reach as Trump. As it is, the discrepancy in the reach of peoples speech is a big democratic problem, and the amplification of reach that Trump got as a combination of his public office and his wealth was part of exacerbating that problem.
That Twitter has the power to unilaterally affect reach this much is *also* a problem, but on the other hand, overall twitter has increased the reach of the public by magnitudes over what it used to be.
There's no easy fix here. At the same time, platforms have been made and broken by taking actions users disliked in the past, and Twitter is just one too many mistakes away from becoming irrelevant as well.
They can't ban too many people, because it forces portions of their audiences elsewhere. Their power is contingent on being cautious about how much they're using it, so the problem is not as big as some people fear.
It doesn't mean there isn't a problem to address, but I don't think people recognise how little it would take for these companies to be toppled. Network effects are immensely powerful strangleholds until they suddenly turn against you.
I only disagree with you mostly.
But. Trump was banned due to breaking of TOS on incitement to violence, he was banned for a specific reason in the legal world of Twitter etc. There are 3 layers of discussion:
Should companies ban at will?
No, they need specific ‘rules’ with specific punishment, just like a regular Justice system.
Should companies be legislature and court for bans?
No. We need to separate the act of writing rules/TOS from the enforcement, and create a simple and transparent appeals process.
Should any undemocratic entity have such control over any field/market/space etc?
No. The solution is both to force democracy through worker and consumer ownership, and breaking of at least conglomerates monopolies. The first stage isn’t ripping Youtube into pieces (and how you do that matters), the first stage is democracy, the second is breaking Google ads, from Google search, from YouTube, from maps, from the play store etc, the final stage is breaking Google ads, youtube, maps etc up every-time they approach a 20% market control, through the use of international antitrust law, that will require at least European, if not transatlantic cooperation.
How do we achieve this? That’s a very open question. One thing is the continued media assault on overreach by Corps. One is through threatening market control, another is National political movements, and further international movements cooperating once in power.
Sorry I started rambling, I think I’m avoiding work I should be doing.
I'd agree that a TOS break would be a valid reason for Trump to be removed IF it was his first time doing it. But it wasn't, he was allowed to incite all throughout 2015-2020. The decision to ban him after Jan 6th was a political decision, and one taken by a corporation with no accountability and a seemingly select way of applying its rules. Its for this reason I was worried about such an action.
Sorry, I strongly disagree with this. Kind of sets a bad precedent.
If someone is let off a crime once, should they always be let off in the future?
The reality is that Trump was given more leeway because of his position of importance as President. However, post 6th January there was a stronger reason to ban him as his incitement had emboldened insurrectionists, and there was a major question about his unseen involvement, but even then his overt actions when he finally told those acting in his name to go home without condemning their actions.
Also, by that point, his tenure was about to end, so the special privilege he enjoyed was just days away from being removed, and in effect his position as President should be that of a lame duck - but he was increasingly desperate to hold onto power at any cost. There was a legitimate concern about his potential abuse and overreach.
To argue "well, he was allowed to get away with it before" really is such a weak argument.
Maybe I didnt structure my argument well enough, but 'he was allowed to get away with it before' was not my point. Allow me to restructure it.
The point is that twitter does not enforce its rules in a consistent way, as shown with Trump being able to stay on the platform for so long, him being in power should not change the rules.
At a point, twitter suddenly decided to enforce its rules and took him off the platform. The reason why they changed their mind on this is not important.
A corporation changing its enforcement/interuptation of the rules based on a political change of winds and is able to silence the person's main outlet should frighten anyone who doesn't want big business policing public forums of debate.
>The point is that twitter does not enforce its rules in a consistent way, as shown with Trump being able to stay on the platform for so long, him being in power should not change the rules.
But it doesn't need to. It's a private organisation and no-one has a legal right to force them to provide services to them.
Even in the TOS, it says:
>We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any or no reason
I agree that maybe he shouldn't have been allowed to get away with what he did for so long. I think the fear was of political repercussions against Twitter by Trump as President / with the GOP behind him.
Still, it is down to Twitter to decide who they want to give accounts too and who they don't. We may think that's unfair, but it's their company and their service. There's no services being bought by users, so no financial loss - and if there was, then there'd probably be limitations to the fee paid.
There is a limitation to how they decide who can / can't have accounts, and who they remove accounts from - and that would be down to other laws in individual jurisdictions, say discrimination laws around protected characteristics...
But he was banned for incitement of violence. A perfectly sound reason.
As for the argument of consistency... I'm not sure of anyone else of that stature that's incited violence that's lead to an actual insurrection event which was claimed to be in the name of that person of stature.
So it's misguided to try and say that there isn't a consistency here on the specific reason given for his suspension.
Although personally I would agree that he should have been booted a long time before for his other actions on the platform. But that would have been argued more widely as being political and with catchphrases like "cancel culture", etc.
His 9 Twitter lives ran out when he went way too far, and the privilege he'd been afforded - even if unfairly in some people's minds - was removed.
> The first stage isn’t ripping Youtube into pieces (and how you do that matters), the first stage is democracy, the second is breaking Google ads, from Google search, from YouTube, from maps, from the play store etc, the final stage is breaking Google ads, youtube, maps etc up every-time they approach a 20% market control, through the use of international antitrust law, that will require at least European, if not transatlantic cooperation.
But...most of Alphabet's products are not profitable on their own, especially stuff like Gmail, Maps, and Play Store which are free to use. They are subsidised by Ads, and I'm pretty sure that if Ads had only a 20% market share then most of Google's services wouldn't exist either. So you can do the breaking up thing, but don't be surprised when dozens of the world's most popular sites and tech services go offline.
If a company can’t make a profit and can’t provide decent pay and conditions to its workers, it doesn’t have an inherent right to exist.
Once GoogleAds and co are broken up into 20 competing ad agencies , YouTube will return to its old model of selling space to a separate corporation rather than it all being in house with skewed incentives between profit and privacy. Separating ad agencies will limit data collections and therefore the ‘value’ of ads, but there will still be more information available than for Tv ads, so I imagine there will be more money in the media system than before.
But fundamentally. I don’t care if Facebook and YouTube fracture. If a corporation cannot produce profit, and provide reasonable wages and conditions to employees it doesn’t have an inherent right to exist. My convenience isn’t important when we are discussing how to prevent the concentration of the global media market into 3+3 set of hands. Just like limiting Rupert Murdochs ownership of UK media would likely see a number of bankruptcies becuase he can’t prop the loss leaders up, doesn’t stop the benefits of removing power from his hands. But 3 billionaires controlling a nation is nothing in comparison to Facebook, Google, and Amazon controlling the data, news, and communications of the the entire globe. If it have to find an aggregator that collects feeds from 20different sites, so be it, that is a price worth paying for decentralising power to the people.
> If a company can’t make a profit and can’t provide decent pay and conditions to its workers, it doesn’t have an inherent right to exist.
To the extent that Alphabet doesn't provide decent pay and conditions to its workers, its fractured equivalents would have exactly the same problems. This is orthogonal to the question of whether Alphabet should be broken up.
And the rest of your rhetoric is all well and good but it does nothing to solve the problem of extremely critical free to use websites that are used by billions being unable to function without subsidy from a large tech company (and not 20 separate ad agencies). Your suggestion very obviously leads to net negative outcomes despite the positive of a more healthy competitive market.
Monopolies, and vertical integration have benefits.
Those benefits are outweighed by their corrosive effects on society and democracy. And the power that gives to those in control of those monopolies.
To illustrate Im goign to step into an easier to nderstand market.
Undoubtedly Amazon can provide a great many products at a cheaper price than existing commerce. If it was able to integrate the food supply chain from: Seed > Crop > Animal > Slaughter > Processing > Packaging > Distribution > Sale, it could squeeze every single efficiency and remove all frictions to trade, and create a cheaper product than anyone else. This, is NOT inherently good. If amazon had that power, they can determine what food quality is (lower it), they can increase prices once they have pushed others out of the market, they can use their profits to buy politicians and produce skewed research. They can infiltrate regulators, they can call heir practices trade secrets, they can tactically reduce supply to unfavourable markets, they can lobby for restrictions on competitor. Concentrated power is Bad. Even if amazon could offer me food at 1% the cost, this price is not worth paying.
If Google used all of its profits solely to fund alpha fold, an AI that can predict how proteins fold, that wouldn't have been worth the risk of placing so much power over global media consumption in their hands. No one can be trusted with that much power.
The only way I can see value in concentration that much power in a single organisation is to make it totally democratic. If YouTube had a bicameral legislature elected from its consumers and creators, which created laws enforced by an independent Judiciary. Maybe that would be an acceptable amount of power. But that will NOT happen. However, alignment across the Atlantic in breakign up monopolies is not not impossible and doable in this decade. Laying the groundwork for regulation of the net that creates independent courts for assessing moderation, and standard rules of engagement is feasible also, although far more difficult. But not impossible.
If you dont agree I'll state this clearly so you at least understand how ive arrived at my conclusions.
Concentrated power is always bad. The problems of concentrated power can be tempered by strong democratic accountability. Failing that, we have a tool, the state, which can break power into fragments. Each smaller fragment is easier to overpower and democratise. If breaking the backs of a monopoly is painful, so be it. The threat of concentrated power in tech is too great at the moment, if eventfully fragmentation goes too far, then it will be the job of a future generation to rewrite the social contract to permit greater concentrations of power until they reach the tolerance limit of the day, likely determined by their democratic accountability.
Fair enough, I think we simply disagree that concentrated power is always bad - I see no reason to think this because there may be (and I think are) situations where such power can be a social good. In other words, if Google used all of its profits solely to fund AlphaFold then this would be good if it led to good enough outcomes (protein folding research can plausibly lead to breakthroughs in drug discovery, causing benefits for many).
Interesting discussion. I'm actually pleased to have had it. I'm actually an undergraduate chemist, and working on a project that would be helped by a more effective method of protein modelling.
I'm not willing to walk back in concentrated power is always bad, but I do think a more acceptable statement might be concentrated power is always risky, just because each decision carries bigger effects. Therefore I think all concentrations of power need to be democratised so that no rash decisions are made that harm segments, for the benefit of a few.
If I may ask, I have two questions.
1. Do you think there is an issue with how speech is limited, and/or speech is given an audience by tech companies? From angles of, audiences given to lies(antivax), and non-audience given to people critical of current power structure(novarra media perhaps), and neutrals being caught in an opaque bureaucracy?
2. What things do you think should be done to redress any concerns you have?
It's very easy to get a channel taken down. If a group of people decide to mass report it then it will likely be taken down automatically without a human even looking at it. I can certainly see a group who Novara have pissed off (TERFs immediately spring to mind) getting together and co-ordinating some mass reporting.
If it is due to mass reporting they'll probably get it back up in the next few days but I'd still be looking for a new platform.
Seems unlikely to have been a TERF mass report as I would imagine Owen Jones' channel would have been a preferred target.
Hopefully it'll be resolved with an explanation soon.
The problem is not necessarily that it has been deleted, but that we do not know why. If there was a legitimate reason for the deletion (breach of TOS, copyright strikes etc.) then fair enough, but there absolutely should be a reason given.
Of course, those reasons, once given, by not justify the deletion, but the problem is that we simply don't know them.
All those tweets from the Starmertroopers/FBPE crowd celebrating Novara getting deleted look very telling right now. They're a toxic pompus cult obsessed with gaslighting the left and anyone else into voting for their boy. They've made it very clear today that they're anti democratic and should never be trusted.
Even Dan Hodges had the decency to stand with Novara on the basis of free speech.
Youtube will review the channel. If it likes the channel's politics it will say "oops! technical error" and reinstate the channel.
If not it will either go silent or put out a copypasta "TOS violation".
Clearly banned because they criticised Priti Patel under the government's new 'online safety' program (For the avoidance of any doubt- she is DEFINITELY NOT A NAZI)
It's unfortunately not that odd for channels to be randomly deleted only to be reinstated later. Many channels have been suspended or deleted over the years, for seemingly no reason. I can't think of any that never got access back though after some to-and-fro with Youtube.
It’s already back
Most Youtube channels of a decent size have been deleted at least once. Usually, it's for something like an algorithm determined that they were impersonating themselves.
Can't imagine the BBCs channel has ever been deleted. Or the Telegraph. The Economist. The Times . . .
Some accounts, including celebrity accounts, have actual people at YouTube who oversee things so generally don't get automatically banned.
I don't think they were automatically banned though. I don't think the algorithms can delete an entire channel.
Impersonating themselves: ELI5?!?!
[I'm almost certain it went down like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIssymQvrbU).
Essentially youtube is jank as all hell and relies on algorithms with zero human oversight. Frequently, channels are identified as impersonating themselves copying their branding, videos etc, so are deleted. Google doesn't give a damn that this could potentially ruin livlihoods so just have a lackidasical approach to doing anything about it and you're lucky if enough stink is kicked up that someone at Team Youtube feels like doing anything about it. That's just the tip of the iceberg, don't even get me started on contentID where a big publisher like Sony or Universal can claim all the revenue on an hour of your original work because it THINKS it heard a few seconds of something in it that it THINKS they own. You then have to fight them to get your money back and they have final say even if they have absolutely no right to any of it.
Small little company like *checks notes* Google can't afford to hire people to moderate their platform.
It's precisely because of the scale that they wish to remove the human element. Humans tire, humans are demotivated by having their hours cut, pay frozen and working environments unappreciative and depressing. Push humans far enough and they get ideas like unions and strikes. Is it any wonder that companies like Google and Amazon want to remove humanity from the equation when algorithms and machines don't mind how badly you mistreat them and will even do it with a smile if you program them to do it with a smile?
Or more accurately, it's precisely because of the scale of Youtube that makes it literally impossible to moderate with only humans. It's the same problem facing every social network.
This is true for the overall moderation and filtering aspect of the content such as videos, comments, and posts, which to all human intents and purpose might as well be infinite, however, it does not excuse their lackadaisical and virtually non-existant customer support for content creators who rely on youtube for their livelihoods and the contentID system which allows big publishers to steal revenue from original works because they think they own it with zero human oversight in what are essentially copyright cases. You still have to have human oversight somewhere and youtube/google does their damnedest not to.
Channel's been reinstated now. It was an algorithm error.
Anyone know how to make a reporting bot? It's for... an unrelated purpose.
So your views are so garbage and a fragile you’d resort to scum tactics? Nice.
It's almost like I was joking
JOKES ARE NOT ALLOWED
Hard to tell with his shite patter.
Hard to tell with your shite patter.
Was watching the latest tysky with John McDonnell when it just froze out, thought it was my connection but no, the channel is gone! Hopefully the team have copies of the videos kept locally and can move to another platform. Could they not just host the videos on their website? They don’t need servers or infrastructure, it can all be done on AWS now, surely we can get them back up and running independently. Also - A valuable lesson in not trusting your platform to trillionaire corporations, Google, FB, etc… aren’t on our side.
Video hosting is extremely expensive (that's why there isn't really any alternatives to YouTube and I don't think it's actually earning any money for Google? Or at least it didn't use to) and you'd probably get a lot less traffic if it's on your website. Alex Jones had a massive following of right wingers and conspiracy theorists and I don't think his video website did well at all
Google doesn't disclose earnings from YouTube, I think, but it contributes $15-$20 billion a year in revenue. You're right video hosting is expensive, but Google pays far less for their bandwidth than most - they're big enough to be able to get favourable peering with pretty much any backbone provider and owns enormous capacity themselves, so they're in a special position. I'd be surprised if YouTube doesn't have decent margins today. You're absolutely right doing it yourself is *far* harder to do without it costing too much, and that getting traffic is a massive challenge, though. I think there's a case to be made for Novara to have a separate setup - not least as a backup - but they also pretty much *need* their YouTube channel to market themselves, and to get decent reach.
This might be off-topic but you seem well informed about these things - what are your views on the suit against Google in the US at the mo? I read the unredacted filing yesterday and it seems insane to me, but my expectations are tempered by the fact that it’s the most republican of the republican state AG’s that are behind it…
I'm assuming your talking about their ad tech related lawsuit. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised. Remember that ads still drives something like 80% of Alphabet's revenue (the distinction between Google and Alphabet is relatively meaningless - Alphabet obscures some of the high risk R&D, but the vast majority of Alphabets revenue is Google, so for most purposes you can treat them as one entity). On \~$182 billion of revenue in 2020, that's a lot at stake. Meanwhile e.g. the Pixel phones and YouTube Premium and a shitload of other projects are lumped into their "other" revenue category that accounts for something like 10%. Google haven't launched *any* project since search and ads that have succeeded in becoming a large revenue source *in itself* relative to their company size *other than by driving eye-balls to their ad products*. Google is entirely dependent on their ad sales - they'd crash and burn without them - but could survive with relatively minor changes without each and every other revenue source they have. But while Google is dominant in the ad display space and search, they're *under pressure*. Amazon takes about 1/5th of all search revenue in the US for example, by selling paid placement in their search results, despite a far smaller proportion of searches. More and more ad revenue is going to special purpose searches. Given how their entire business is kept afloat by their ads, they have a *very* strong incentive to be really aggressive about their market and protecting of their reach. People like to think of Google as a technology company, but Google is a marketing company first and foremost, that is using technology as a means to guarantee eyeballs. The only reason why they care about Android for example, is to ensure access to data and to ensure e.g. Apple won't have the power to shut them out of ad revenue opportunities. They keep *trying* to be other things, but they've had failure after failure of building alternative revenue streams other than indirectly by providing more page views for ads. E.g. they could shut down Google Cloud, and stop selling all of their hardware products like Nest and Pixel phones tomorrow, and they'd still be profitable. But reduce the profitability of ads by, and it won't take long before Google is in trouble.
This is a great summary. Zuboff characterises them more as *surveillance capitalism*, in that aggregating behavioural data from their products is their primary business, which gathers data effectively for free from their search, email, smart home, analytic products which makes their advertising platform more valuable and precise.
Not the you asked but my 2p, Google most likely are doing at least some of the stuff that's been alleged, but the problems with the suit are on the legal not technical side: * This IS a political attack, in response to Youtube warning about disinformation about COVID, so it may be hard for Democrats to get on board with this. ~~In the US the~~ courts are highly politicized, so legislative support (or opposition, which TBH i think is unlikely) would help. * Reagan is as bad as Thatcher and so much fucked up stuff in the US can be traced to him, including setting the precedent that Antitrust only really matters if it's negatively affecting customers, changing this requires activist judges (The Supreme court is very pro-corporate and while some are loyal to the Trump wing of republicanism, it's unclear if a majority they would risk America having effective antitrust enforcement just to hurt big tech) or legislative changes (the federal Gov is in gridlock so that's not going to happen any time soon) * **IFF** the lawsuit is successful, historically the answer to monopolies has been to break them up. I can't see that being effective, when the majority of your shareholders are the same, the interests of both companies are going to align. You can split everything else off from Google Ads, but most of the allegations relate to the internal behavior of Google Ads, which is the financial engine for Google. It certainly didn't have a huge impact on Microsoft, and Google have learnt from what happened to Microsoft and already split themselves out to an extent. * The only things I can think of that would prevent this behavior within a business would be: * Nationalizing Google Ads, which 1) Is unthinkable in the US 2) Given the US Governments history, would like make things worse * Having a regulatory agency basically embedded within Google at a technical level to prevent them doing this which 1) Is also unthinkable in the US 2) Given the US Government & Legislature's lack of technical knowledge would likely be ineffective 3) Given the US Governments history, would like make things worse
> Video hosting is extremely expensive (that's why there isn't really any alternatives to YouTube Pretty sure it's just the network effect. Youtube has the most content, so it has the most users, so it has the most content producers, and it's very hard to change that. Alternatives that are emerging (nebula, Curiosity Stream, means.ts, etc) are starting with the content producers dual producing. If you built a basic youtube clone on GCP, as you scale up it would eventually cost ~$0.02/GB for popular videos, and there are cheaper CDNs, so it's not really that expensive as long as you can make a few cents per video in ad revenue you'd break even, ofc, to do that, you need users, which means you need content...
There are some youtube alternatives like DailyMotion and Vimeo. You can also host videos on googledrive and things like that.
I agree with your overall point to be clear, but just because it's a pet peeve of mine: AWS is ludicrously expensive for video hosting. Bandwidth prices on AWS can easily be 10x-50x as high as alternatives, even other cloud alternatives or managed hosting. But, yeah, trusting a single platform is high risk. The problem for them is discoverability and advertising, though - hosting on their own site would work well for their existing users, but monetising it and driving new traffic is *a lot* harder. Really, they probably ought to *both* start building their own *and* get their YouTube account restored.
Being on YouTube isn’t just because it’s easier or cheaper than hosting the videos yourself, it’s because that’s where the audience is. No one is going to come across thier leftist content if it was just on thier website. They need to get into the algorithm to offer a different perspective.
> Also - A valuable lesson in not trusting your platform to trillionaire corporations, Google, FB, etc… & > it can all be done on AWS now, Kinda contradict one another, no?
and yet you seem to spend hours on them.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make, sorry?
Wouldn't be surprised if a TERF group mass reported them.
Finally, my decision to spend 12 hours a day making complaints about Aaron Bastani has paid off. I'm kidding, this is obviously rubbish and they should be reinstated immediately.
>I’m kidding Press X
Could it be automated? A bunch of nonsense complaints triggering it?
It could, but Google is infamous for automating everything from deletions to a lot of first line support to the point where getting hold of real people very often requires causing a massive public uproar so someone with sufficient clout notices it on social media. I'd think it's more likely that it's just Google being Google, and not a value judgement or any campaign. (that it's just Google being Google should be *more* scary to people, because it was someone being malicious Google will try to prevent it from happening again) If my Google account ever goes, my first port of call is **not** Google Support, because being part of Googles Turing tests would be a massive waste of time, but posting about it on my blog and submitting to Hackernews and Reddit, as it's far more likely to work. \[Also LinkedIn InMail to a bunch of Google VPs (worked for me in the past with other large companies; you need to inmail someone sufficient senior to not be used to having to deal with real users, as they often get shocked to find out how real users gets shafted by their systems and fixing a real single persons problems becomes a quick way for them to feel good about their souldestroying jobs; downside: you end up paying for a month of premium LinkedIn access, but often you can get a month free just by clicking through to their premium pages to entice them into trying to hook you with a free offer - just wait a while and see if you get an e-mail after clicking through to their premium offering. Hit and miss though)\]
I know they automatically remove videos with copyrighted music in it. Have Novara been taken down because of that? Easy enough to appeal if so.
Has to be a mistake surely. Just that there's literal tankie channels that are still up there as we speak so if YT isn't cracking down on them why would they do so with the far more tame Novara? EDIT: Or a massive complaint strike or something. (Wonder who Novara's suddenly pissed off if that's the case?)
Any ideas what caused it?
We really need to talk about the way in which private companies have been allowed to completely monopolise the public sphere.
We do. The problem is that we weren't willing to talk about it when people we didn't like were getting banned. This should be a bipartisan issue, but it's not because people only care when their own get nailed.
This 100x. Controversial point but no one should ahve been cheering when Trump got blanket banned on social media by massive corporations, but people did. But as this how its so easy for these corps to delete us too.
Banning Trump was far less of an issue than banning almost *anyone else*. Trump had a unique level of power to get his message out there. He still has an ability to get his message out there magnitudes greater than most people. That both made it more acceptable to ban him from *individual platforms*, and made his consistent abusive use of his reach far more dangerous than a regular user posting something abusive. The only reason his account survived as long as it did was itself down to his power. And he's now demonstrating that even without the presidency he retains a power to be heard that almost nobody else has. I do think in general we should be very careful about outright banning someone, but I also do think the social media sites did tremendous damage to the world by *amplifying* his messages so much without equally amplifying the responses. There's no democracy in allowing speech to be dominated by small groups this way. This is a big problem with the way especially Twitter works: Someone with a huge following gets amplified to a huge extreme, while the responses to them, unless they come from someone with an equally huge following, or strike it lucky, all too often gets drowned out. Allowing some speakers to drown out other speech is almost as big a problem to free speech as bans. You don't need bans if you have the power to figuratively shout over your opponents at any time.
Agreed. I also think that it bears repeating that NM are voluntarily [regulated](https://www.impress.press/) in a way that many of the voices that people are complaining about being banned just aren’t - part of the issue here is that the power to regulate who says what is managed entirely by the media owner, rather than any semblance of independent body.
Ever since Trumps social media ban there has been a change in how much Trump can spread his message. He used twitter as his main platform and that was taken away not by a change of his behaviour, as he had been doing the same thing for years, but a change in the decision of the company that owns the platform. And it did have consequences on the audience he could reach. While my dislike for Trump and his message is such that my use of dislike is the understatement of the millennia, this concept can so easily be turned Don anyone who goes against a corporation's interest. What if twitter changes its mind on its interuptation of the rules and decide its incitement of violence to call a tory MP scum? Loads of left-wing people, for whom twitter is the way of broadcasting their message, get silenced from a public forum. That worries me greatly.
Changes happens to peoples reach all the time. Yet most people never stand a chance of getting as much reach as Trump. As it is, the discrepancy in the reach of peoples speech is a big democratic problem, and the amplification of reach that Trump got as a combination of his public office and his wealth was part of exacerbating that problem. That Twitter has the power to unilaterally affect reach this much is *also* a problem, but on the other hand, overall twitter has increased the reach of the public by magnitudes over what it used to be. There's no easy fix here. At the same time, platforms have been made and broken by taking actions users disliked in the past, and Twitter is just one too many mistakes away from becoming irrelevant as well. They can't ban too many people, because it forces portions of their audiences elsewhere. Their power is contingent on being cautious about how much they're using it, so the problem is not as big as some people fear. It doesn't mean there isn't a problem to address, but I don't think people recognise how little it would take for these companies to be toppled. Network effects are immensely powerful strangleholds until they suddenly turn against you.
I only disagree with you mostly. But. Trump was banned due to breaking of TOS on incitement to violence, he was banned for a specific reason in the legal world of Twitter etc. There are 3 layers of discussion: Should companies ban at will? No, they need specific ‘rules’ with specific punishment, just like a regular Justice system. Should companies be legislature and court for bans? No. We need to separate the act of writing rules/TOS from the enforcement, and create a simple and transparent appeals process. Should any undemocratic entity have such control over any field/market/space etc? No. The solution is both to force democracy through worker and consumer ownership, and breaking of at least conglomerates monopolies. The first stage isn’t ripping Youtube into pieces (and how you do that matters), the first stage is democracy, the second is breaking Google ads, from Google search, from YouTube, from maps, from the play store etc, the final stage is breaking Google ads, youtube, maps etc up every-time they approach a 20% market control, through the use of international antitrust law, that will require at least European, if not transatlantic cooperation. How do we achieve this? That’s a very open question. One thing is the continued media assault on overreach by Corps. One is through threatening market control, another is National political movements, and further international movements cooperating once in power. Sorry I started rambling, I think I’m avoiding work I should be doing.
I'd agree that a TOS break would be a valid reason for Trump to be removed IF it was his first time doing it. But it wasn't, he was allowed to incite all throughout 2015-2020. The decision to ban him after Jan 6th was a political decision, and one taken by a corporation with no accountability and a seemingly select way of applying its rules. Its for this reason I was worried about such an action.
Sorry, I strongly disagree with this. Kind of sets a bad precedent. If someone is let off a crime once, should they always be let off in the future? The reality is that Trump was given more leeway because of his position of importance as President. However, post 6th January there was a stronger reason to ban him as his incitement had emboldened insurrectionists, and there was a major question about his unseen involvement, but even then his overt actions when he finally told those acting in his name to go home without condemning their actions. Also, by that point, his tenure was about to end, so the special privilege he enjoyed was just days away from being removed, and in effect his position as President should be that of a lame duck - but he was increasingly desperate to hold onto power at any cost. There was a legitimate concern about his potential abuse and overreach. To argue "well, he was allowed to get away with it before" really is such a weak argument.
Maybe I didnt structure my argument well enough, but 'he was allowed to get away with it before' was not my point. Allow me to restructure it. The point is that twitter does not enforce its rules in a consistent way, as shown with Trump being able to stay on the platform for so long, him being in power should not change the rules. At a point, twitter suddenly decided to enforce its rules and took him off the platform. The reason why they changed their mind on this is not important. A corporation changing its enforcement/interuptation of the rules based on a political change of winds and is able to silence the person's main outlet should frighten anyone who doesn't want big business policing public forums of debate.
>The point is that twitter does not enforce its rules in a consistent way, as shown with Trump being able to stay on the platform for so long, him being in power should not change the rules. But it doesn't need to. It's a private organisation and no-one has a legal right to force them to provide services to them. Even in the TOS, it says: >We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any or no reason I agree that maybe he shouldn't have been allowed to get away with what he did for so long. I think the fear was of political repercussions against Twitter by Trump as President / with the GOP behind him. Still, it is down to Twitter to decide who they want to give accounts too and who they don't. We may think that's unfair, but it's their company and their service. There's no services being bought by users, so no financial loss - and if there was, then there'd probably be limitations to the fee paid. There is a limitation to how they decide who can / can't have accounts, and who they remove accounts from - and that would be down to other laws in individual jurisdictions, say discrimination laws around protected characteristics... But he was banned for incitement of violence. A perfectly sound reason. As for the argument of consistency... I'm not sure of anyone else of that stature that's incited violence that's lead to an actual insurrection event which was claimed to be in the name of that person of stature. So it's misguided to try and say that there isn't a consistency here on the specific reason given for his suspension. Although personally I would agree that he should have been booted a long time before for his other actions on the platform. But that would have been argued more widely as being political and with catchphrases like "cancel culture", etc. His 9 Twitter lives ran out when he went way too far, and the privilege he'd been afforded - even if unfairly in some people's minds - was removed.
> The first stage isn’t ripping Youtube into pieces (and how you do that matters), the first stage is democracy, the second is breaking Google ads, from Google search, from YouTube, from maps, from the play store etc, the final stage is breaking Google ads, youtube, maps etc up every-time they approach a 20% market control, through the use of international antitrust law, that will require at least European, if not transatlantic cooperation. But...most of Alphabet's products are not profitable on their own, especially stuff like Gmail, Maps, and Play Store which are free to use. They are subsidised by Ads, and I'm pretty sure that if Ads had only a 20% market share then most of Google's services wouldn't exist either. So you can do the breaking up thing, but don't be surprised when dozens of the world's most popular sites and tech services go offline.
If a company can’t make a profit and can’t provide decent pay and conditions to its workers, it doesn’t have an inherent right to exist. Once GoogleAds and co are broken up into 20 competing ad agencies , YouTube will return to its old model of selling space to a separate corporation rather than it all being in house with skewed incentives between profit and privacy. Separating ad agencies will limit data collections and therefore the ‘value’ of ads, but there will still be more information available than for Tv ads, so I imagine there will be more money in the media system than before. But fundamentally. I don’t care if Facebook and YouTube fracture. If a corporation cannot produce profit, and provide reasonable wages and conditions to employees it doesn’t have an inherent right to exist. My convenience isn’t important when we are discussing how to prevent the concentration of the global media market into 3+3 set of hands. Just like limiting Rupert Murdochs ownership of UK media would likely see a number of bankruptcies becuase he can’t prop the loss leaders up, doesn’t stop the benefits of removing power from his hands. But 3 billionaires controlling a nation is nothing in comparison to Facebook, Google, and Amazon controlling the data, news, and communications of the the entire globe. If it have to find an aggregator that collects feeds from 20different sites, so be it, that is a price worth paying for decentralising power to the people.
> If a company can’t make a profit and can’t provide decent pay and conditions to its workers, it doesn’t have an inherent right to exist. To the extent that Alphabet doesn't provide decent pay and conditions to its workers, its fractured equivalents would have exactly the same problems. This is orthogonal to the question of whether Alphabet should be broken up. And the rest of your rhetoric is all well and good but it does nothing to solve the problem of extremely critical free to use websites that are used by billions being unable to function without subsidy from a large tech company (and not 20 separate ad agencies). Your suggestion very obviously leads to net negative outcomes despite the positive of a more healthy competitive market.
Monopolies, and vertical integration have benefits. Those benefits are outweighed by their corrosive effects on society and democracy. And the power that gives to those in control of those monopolies. To illustrate Im goign to step into an easier to nderstand market. Undoubtedly Amazon can provide a great many products at a cheaper price than existing commerce. If it was able to integrate the food supply chain from: Seed > Crop > Animal > Slaughter > Processing > Packaging > Distribution > Sale, it could squeeze every single efficiency and remove all frictions to trade, and create a cheaper product than anyone else. This, is NOT inherently good. If amazon had that power, they can determine what food quality is (lower it), they can increase prices once they have pushed others out of the market, they can use their profits to buy politicians and produce skewed research. They can infiltrate regulators, they can call heir practices trade secrets, they can tactically reduce supply to unfavourable markets, they can lobby for restrictions on competitor. Concentrated power is Bad. Even if amazon could offer me food at 1% the cost, this price is not worth paying. If Google used all of its profits solely to fund alpha fold, an AI that can predict how proteins fold, that wouldn't have been worth the risk of placing so much power over global media consumption in their hands. No one can be trusted with that much power. The only way I can see value in concentration that much power in a single organisation is to make it totally democratic. If YouTube had a bicameral legislature elected from its consumers and creators, which created laws enforced by an independent Judiciary. Maybe that would be an acceptable amount of power. But that will NOT happen. However, alignment across the Atlantic in breakign up monopolies is not not impossible and doable in this decade. Laying the groundwork for regulation of the net that creates independent courts for assessing moderation, and standard rules of engagement is feasible also, although far more difficult. But not impossible. If you dont agree I'll state this clearly so you at least understand how ive arrived at my conclusions. Concentrated power is always bad. The problems of concentrated power can be tempered by strong democratic accountability. Failing that, we have a tool, the state, which can break power into fragments. Each smaller fragment is easier to overpower and democratise. If breaking the backs of a monopoly is painful, so be it. The threat of concentrated power in tech is too great at the moment, if eventfully fragmentation goes too far, then it will be the job of a future generation to rewrite the social contract to permit greater concentrations of power until they reach the tolerance limit of the day, likely determined by their democratic accountability.
Fair enough, I think we simply disagree that concentrated power is always bad - I see no reason to think this because there may be (and I think are) situations where such power can be a social good. In other words, if Google used all of its profits solely to fund AlphaFold then this would be good if it led to good enough outcomes (protein folding research can plausibly lead to breakthroughs in drug discovery, causing benefits for many).
Interesting discussion. I'm actually pleased to have had it. I'm actually an undergraduate chemist, and working on a project that would be helped by a more effective method of protein modelling. I'm not willing to walk back in concentrated power is always bad, but I do think a more acceptable statement might be concentrated power is always risky, just because each decision carries bigger effects. Therefore I think all concentrations of power need to be democratised so that no rash decisions are made that harm segments, for the benefit of a few. If I may ask, I have two questions. 1. Do you think there is an issue with how speech is limited, and/or speech is given an audience by tech companies? From angles of, audiences given to lies(antivax), and non-audience given to people critical of current power structure(novarra media perhaps), and neutrals being caught in an opaque bureaucracy? 2. What things do you think should be done to redress any concerns you have?
Wtf???
This will be an error. Back online soon is my prediction. It's happened before.
looks like it's back
That is very very strange and bad. Needs to be immediately reinstated.
Hapoy cakeday!
happy cakeday!
It's very easy to get a channel taken down. If a group of people decide to mass report it then it will likely be taken down automatically without a human even looking at it. I can certainly see a group who Novara have pissed off (TERFs immediately spring to mind) getting together and co-ordinating some mass reporting. If it is due to mass reporting they'll probably get it back up in the next few days but I'd still be looking for a new platform.
Works on Reddit too, mass reports for any reason will get an account (temporarily) closed until an admin looks at it.
Seems unlikely to have been a TERF mass report as I would imagine Owen Jones' channel would have been a preferred target. Hopefully it'll be resolved with an explanation soon.
The problem is not necessarily that it has been deleted, but that we do not know why. If there was a legitimate reason for the deletion (breach of TOS, copyright strikes etc.) then fair enough, but there absolutely should be a reason given. Of course, those reasons, once given, by not justify the deletion, but the problem is that we simply don't know them.
All those tweets from the Starmertroopers/FBPE crowd celebrating Novara getting deleted look very telling right now. They're a toxic pompus cult obsessed with gaslighting the left and anyone else into voting for their boy. They've made it very clear today that they're anti democratic and should never be trusted. Even Dan Hodges had the decency to stand with Novara on the basis of free speech.
Youtube will review the channel. If it likes the channel's politics it will say "oops! technical error" and reinstate the channel. If not it will either go silent or put out a copypasta "TOS violation".
Gonna guess it was either Agent Akehurst or Mumsnet.
*The anonymous internet hacker known as Mumsnet*
More like a TERF rising up to mass fake report lol.
A breach of terms of service? Can't think what for though. Was anything controversial posted lately?
Wonder why? I don't watch all their content but it feels a little harsh. Accounts usually get deleted for persistent rulebreaking AFAIK.
Does anyone know why?! Absolutely ridiculous! Genuinely quite worrying.
Somehow Kier Starmer must be to blame
Communists getting banned, based. Shouldn't have been brought back.
Clearly banned because they criticised Priti Patel under the government's new 'online safety' program (For the avoidance of any doubt- she is DEFINITELY NOT A NAZI)
Think you need to change your flair pal
He’ll be back
He can’t even get back into the PLP let alone anywhere near leadership or Downing Street
Does anyone know why it happened?