BoyCott YouTube On Dec 19 2008

Say NO To YouTube Censorship!
Please take part in A YOUTUBE BLACKOUT from Dec 19th - 21st!

The purpose of this topic is to raise awareness of the new policies that YouTube has implemented - such as algorithmic demotion of videos that contain profanities. These policies will no doubt remove our freedom speech on YouTube because the policies are so vague that they could be used to demote any video that YouTube personally doesn't like. What is profanity? What is sexually suggestive? Just about anything could fall into those categories depending on the person doing the judging. YouTube is now admitting that they will fiddle the view counters on such videos in order to keep them out of the most-viewed lists, regardless of how popular the videos actually are. However, I know for a fact that they've been fiddling the view counters ever since Google took over YouTube. The only difference now is that they're admitting it while trying to justify it. A video that I uploaded two weeks ago received 55 honors within the first few hours of it being uploaded. Then, in one fell swoop, YouTube removed every single honor - even though the video had only been up on YouTube for 18 hours. The removal of these honors meant that the video no longer appeared in any of the lists. The video contained no profanity and no sexually suggestive content, yet Google took it upon themselves to remove it from all of the lists.

It is clear that Google is turning YouTube into nothing more than an extention of daytime mainstream television. Google wants a YouTube that is completely sanitized of true human expression. They want a YouTube that suits their advertisers - not you and me - the users. This shows where Google priorities lie. And it is laughable that they're trying to con us into believing that they are making all these changes in order to make YouTube better for us. They dont listen to us at all. In YouTube's recent blogs that detail the changes they've made, they have received over 10,000 negative comments from people complaining about all the mad changes they've made. These changes include removing the bulletin boards from our channels, stopping us from sending videos to more than one person at a time, and demoting videos that YouTube considers to be profane. Anything can be considered profane if you choose to see it as profane. Let's face it, the whole thing is nonsensical and Google knows it! But they don't want to back down because they don't have the guts to admit they're wrong. And of course, their allegance is to their advertisers and not their users. YouTube has removed a lot of the negative blog comments and now they've set the comments to "Approval Only". Total Cowards!

So what can we do when Google doesn't even respond to our complaints? Well we have to send a huge message to Google by boycotting every product they provide - this includes their search engine, gmail, maps, etc, etc. Oh, and whatever you do, please don't click on those annoying "Goooogle Ads". We should also stop using YouTube from December 19th to 21st. I will personally not use YouTube for at least a week from Dec 19th.

If you value your freedom of speech and expression, and you want a fair and democratic YouTube, as it was before Google took it over, then please join us in the YouTube Blackout this Friday Dec 19th.

Please take action! Boycott YouTube from Dec 19th to 21st, and boycott all other Google products COMPLETELY!