Aaron Dykes

Infowars.com

September 1, 2011

UPDATE: As of 8:30 PM Central, You Tube has restored the view count on The Alex Jones Channel from a paltry 47,000 to 28 million where it previously stood, all within hours of posting this story alerting to the scrubbed numbers. As the bottom portion of the article documents, You Tube has constantly been playing games. Despite consistently high view counts on individual videos, You Tube routinely fails to list Alex Jones material with its appropriate “honors,” enabling it to be listed under the various categories liked most viewed, favorites, and more where millions of people find material by browsing. Either there are routine tricks, or glitches have become so frequent that You Tube is severely degenerating. Only a few weeks ago, You Tube admitted to a failure to update its view counters over a period of nearly two weeks. We will remain vigilant in keeping this important platform accountable.

Google subsidiary You Tube has once again engaged in soft censorship of The Alex Jones Channel, subtly resetting its “channel views” to a mere 47,900 despite more than 134 million total upload views. The previous channel view number was much, much higher. The true statistics, earned steadily over time, influence You Tube rankings and help The Alex Jones Channel to reach even more viewers through prominence in browsing and search engine listings. Such a demotion in ranking amounts to discrimination.

We only hope that the total upload view numbers are not scrubbed next. You Tube has been downplaying view count in favor of sponsor-driven promoted videos for some time. Meanwhile, its parent Google has engaged in blacklisting and demoting both PrisonPlanet.com and Infowars.com from search engine rankings for some time.

Censorship on You Tube is a long and nuanced saga, with many previous attempts to block outright or obscure work posted on The Alex Jones Channel, as well as countless other channels– including wide purges of 9/11 truth, patriot and Ron Paul videos, among other works stifled for political speech content.

In 2009, The Alex Jones Channel was temporarily suspended after multiple frivolous DMCA copyright claims. The ban derived in part from the prior flagging a video from Alex Jones’ live radio program where he dared to show on screen an article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette which had attacked him by name and attempted to link him to a cop killer then in the news.

You Tube has also previously suspended THElNFOWARRlOR, a channel closely associated with The Alex Jones Channel, then later, after restoring it, revoking its privilege to post full-length documentaries.

Back in July 2010, numerous documentaries by Alex Jones, including most prominently The Obama Deception, were suddenly deleted from ChangeDaChannel, after receiving millions and millions of views each. The videos were eventually restored by You Tube after public attention again placed pressure. That version of The Obama Deception, then with 6.5 million views just on that channel, and now with 9 million views, was particularly annoying to the system because it ranked in the very top of “Obama” Google searches.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

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Further, prior to this removal, “honors” for ChangeDaChannel version of The Obama Deception were stripped, again detrimental to the search rankings that allow it to get even more views. The same video was also removed on another occasion after being fraudulently challenged on copyright grounds.

More recently, in June 2011 You Tube blocked the “honors” for a viral video of Google chief Eric Schmidt attending Bilderberg 2011 in effort to limit its exposure and ranking. You Tube revealed its hand in actively altering such stats when it rapidly restored the video’s status following Alex Jones using the airwaves to put them on notice.

In late 2010, You Tube shutdown video posted on The Alex Jones Channel of the Wikileaks-released Apache helicopter video mirrored on literally hundreds of channels based on vague and subjective “community guideline standards”, eventually restoring it after a storm of criticism. But prior to blocking this video, You Tube already worked to restrict its viewcounts, putting it behind a log-in wall designed to keep out viewers under 18.

Similarly, the video titled “Obama JOKER $1000 Video Contest: The establishment will go nuts!!!” was blocked in August 2009 under “community guideline standards,” set up to essentially allow anyone who disagrees to shut down someone else’s speech. Indeed, Obamanoids were caught griping on the video’s comments:

barackobamaexpress: For anyone who reads this; if you want to do your part today – something patriotic today, report this video to Youtube administration. Alex Jones promotes racism, and fearmongering. He’s a known liar.

Further encouraging users to flag and then block videos, You Tube has even added new criteria to report on, such as “promotes terrorism,” a label sure to be easily abused.

While these are some of the most egregious abuses delivered to The Alex Jones Channel and allied accounts, it is by no means exhaustive. Moves to de-rank channels tends to be much more subtle than outright deletions and the suspension of channels, but the sophisticated maneuver is no less an act of censorship. Read more on how Google censorship works.

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