Blackmailers use false copyright claims to shut down victims' Youtube accounts, offer to lift them in exchange for Bitcoin

[doctorow]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/30/moderation-at-scale.html

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[Gutierrez]

[jerwin]

do not reply to this message, as this in an automated system. Instead, deposit the money to this account, and another automated system will unlock your account.

[Keith_McClary]

@doctorow

Under the proposal, anyone could add anything to the databases of blocked content, and get anyone else’s work censored

So, there will be an army of bots submitting billions of entries to this database. If I was a teenager in my parents basement, that’s what I would do.

[anon50609448]

@Keith_McClary

So, there will be an army of bots submitting billions of entries to this database. If I was a teenager in my parents basement, that’s what I would do.

Given that this guy is being blackmailed for $75 to $150, it seems like it must be being done by bots. That amount of money isn’t exactly worth launching a criminal enterprise over unless you are requesting it from a lot of people.

[sgtcrispy]

Youtuber SidAlpha put up a video discussing this very thing.

[Bernel]

What about major youtube celebrities organize a boycott until google get their act together? No new contents should put a dent in the number of viewers.

[Pensketch]

@doctorow

This phenomenon is familiar to anyone who’s had a complaint against one of the big platforms: unless your story makes the news, you’re likely to get stuck in an email loop where your complaint keeps getting sent back with irrelevant, semi-automated responses that make it seem like no one has even paid enough attention to understand what’s going on.

Yep. I went through that thanks to an automated Viacom complaint many years ago about a video of mine that had nothing to do with their IP, except that it was named “Help”. Coincidentally the same as The Beatles song (unless the song was also about a speed drawing of a carnivorous plant eating an explorer, and I missed that subtext).

It never got resolved in my favor.

Nice to see that criminals have figured out how best to game that particular shitty system.

The good thing about blackmailers, though, is that they are always true to their word. Pay them once, and you’ll never hear from them again… Never, ever, ever.

[Boundegar]

YouTube is very broken and I want to see if they can fix their system so this doesn’t happen to other content creators,” he says.

No.

[Quinquennial]

Jim Sterling occasionally takes a break from his video game reviews to point out the ongoing, inherent flaws of YouTube’s ContentID system. It may be new bad actors this time around, but the problem of taking down content consequence free has been ongoing for years while content providers are held to strict standards, most of which they don’t even know the precise details of.

[Chris_Nelson]

They are specifically targeting smaller content creators with an amount they can afford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrPNeFUUZUE here is the Quartering talking about this very case.

*update ObbyRaidz has had the strikes removed because of the stir created