In these cases, the tech giant has got some free content moderation, while perhaps not providing the journalist much or any context for their piece. This doesn’t happen in every case, and some companies are better than others, but, in our experience, the pattern is established.

At Motherboard, we’ve increasingly decided to withhold specific examples from tech companies when approaching them for an article. Of course, if they really need an example in order to have enough context to comment—if it’s a single specific video for instance—it would probably be best to provide a link to the clip. And we will give them enough context about what the videos are and the issue so they can write a statement explaining why they believe the content should or shouldn’t be removed. But for more general issues, or especially public material that can be found with a simple search, the companies don’t need hand holding to find the videos: indeed, the point is that they could have—and perhaps should have—come across them easily in the first place.