A WWII documentary series is being demonetized by YouTube [video] | Hacker News Reader

A WWII documentary series is being demonetized by YouTube [video]

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74 pointscomeonbro17 comments

'World War Two' is an enormous documentary project that's been following WWII week-by-week in ~real-time for the past 5 years.

Its content is increasingly being age-restricted and demonetized by YouTube.

The D-day hour-by-hour 24 hour coverage was great, even if it took me a few weeks to watch all of it. Still need to watch the Pearl Harbor videos.

The "War Against Humanity" subseries is chilling. This is such an important project.

For anyone interested in WW2 history, the "World War Two" channel is a must watch. I actually look forward to a new release each week. They do a fantastic job of covering the war in a detailed way and do a very good job of digging into the historical record to cover it accurately.

If I were an educator covering WW2, it would be an amazing free resource.

this guy covers wars "in real time". Really cool videos

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Those who censor history are trying to repeat it.

What’s the background behind this?

Their video says the EU passed a new law restricting some content to mature audiences only, so Youtube is calling their WW2 series "mature content" and restricting it on Youtube (it you need to verify you are old enough) which means that viewership goes down (as the videos aren't recommended) and sponsorship revenue goes way down since advertisers don't want to put ads on restricted content.

The video mentions an exception for educational content. Fine, but who decides what is educational? What about some of the truly horrific WW2 content. Is that educational? Hard to blame YouTube for being very cautious here.

Isn’t learning history educational? And yes, some history is horrific but I don’t see the problem with that.

I was in elementary school when we took a field trip to see a ww2 concentration camp.

Was that appropriate for our age? Hard to say. Did I still remember it all these years later? Yes. Was it educational? Also yes.

(US) I think every year in public school for me included a WWII/Holocaust remembrance period. I think across both literature/English and history classes.

Seems like public education doesn’t do that anymore. And society is much worse off.

I’m in northern Italy. Traces of those wars are literally everywhere. One of the largest war memorials is near here [0]

Learning history is important. And it’s educational. And if to learn it you have to see something gruesome, so be it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redipuglia_War_Memorial

And of course we must avoid presentism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histo...

History is many things including terrible and gruesome. But ignorance of history is no answer.

I like your example because its a specific, physical place. Probably part of a syllabus for your class. And hard to argue that, in this context, a profound and educational experience.

Now contrast that with online 'educational' content. That's way to vague. One could argue that really just about _anything_ is educational. But that same thing in the eyes of another person is pornography, extreme violence, or a hate crime.

Take executions. There's footage of illegal executions in Word War 2, and recently with ISIS. Are both of those educational? Maybe with the right context and in a curriculum, sure. But gosh, sure seems it should at least be age restricted on Youtube.

I think we have two choices to fix this: First, if the regulators want an educational carve out they need to get incredibly clear what is and is not educational.

Or, barring that, then lets create an "educational" platform that can host this sort of content. You know, like OnlyFans, but for "educational" topics.

Google finds itself in a postion of largely unchecked power over many users of its platform, that rely on it for primary income. These people work in an environment without any of the typical legal protections around their livelyhood, so I think we should be cautious to side against the worker, if only in the spirit of labor day weekend.

I like this, and wonder if employee style protections for Youtube content creators isn't warranted.

   > The video mentions an exception for educational content. Fine, but who decides what is educational? What about some of the truly horrific WW2 content. Is that educational? Hard to blame YouTube for being very cautious here.

Educational? Absolutely.

I'm a parent of teenagers and to be clear, when they were younger, I was careful about "truly horrific WW2 content." The goal is to educate, not present a child who is incapable of understanding/rationalizing those atrocities with the graphic reality of what took place in a manner that they're not going to understand but -- instead -- will likely cause psychological issues and irrational fear at a time when they're not capable of integrating that into their view of the world.

That said, I can't find a word strong enough for how I feel about censoring "the true nature of the evil that took place" or restricting access to this information in any way. I remember when Schindler's List was played -- completely uncensored -- on broadcast network television in the US (I believe it was NBC at the time). I can't think of another drama or content of any kind that received an MPAA "R" rating ever being aired to the general public without editing and little more than a regular warning about the sensitivity of the content. It's a tough movie to watch and certainly not meant for all ages but I think the broadcaster and the regulatory bodies rightly recognized that there were two choices: don't do it at all - or - do it completely.

My experience in this area is not one of "a child of Jewish parents who survived/were victims of the holocaust" but as "the kid who saw some truly horrific WW2 content" in middle school. My eighth-grade English teacher was Jewish. There is a Holocaust Memorial Center/Museum about an hour from our school. Our teacher set up transportation and granted students a few extra credit points for joining in on an after-school trip.

That experience changed my life and looking back on it, today, I'm so glad I had this teacher. She did this every year. It was not without controversy among the parents of students.

For the men[0] who attended public middle school in America, think back to 8th grade. Outside of a serious injury, an 8th grade boy does not cry ... EVER ... in front of classmates as doing so would basically destroy your life[1]. Now, imagine any experience that could cause every boy to not just "openly cry" but outright sob in a parking lot and then on and off for an hours-long drive home in a yellow school bus[2]. And then the stories throughout the school the next day none of us could help talking about the holocaust, the experience we had, and not one of us left out the bus-ride home.

By the way ... the kids who took advantage of the extra credit? A few good students and all of the bullies (some needed the points to avoid the dreaded "summer school"); including the one white redneck who called the only black kid in our school the "N-Word." Sobbing. I had a history class with the redneck in 11th grade. He talked about his experience, about how is parents are racist and about how that experience changed him.

It breaks you.

It's necessary.

[0] Maybe things are different, now, but where I attended middle school ... the girls were basically all crying at one point or another during any given week. It wasn't a pleasant place most of the time.

[1] We had a kid in school who cried in class. This poor kid was then beaten up weekly -- it would have been more frequently if both parties to any fight weren't "suspended for a week" regardless of who started the fight. He attended a private school the following year.

[2] The drive there was the typical 8th grade "herding cats", random "F-Bombs" and general misbehavior.

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