#every time a jewish man grows out his beard i (a jewish person) gain a year of life

[newjerseydivas]

my god i need bearded quinn back so bad

[salixj]

(December 21, 2020 / JNS) It’s one of the few rap videos around that features a lead singer in frockcoat, tallis and shtreimel—paired with a cascade of gold chains (one bearing a Magen David) and leopard-skin scarf—dancing with guys from the ‘hood facing off against others in Chassidic garb.

As such, “Mothaland Bounce,” where our hero proudly calls himself “Hitler’s worst nightmare,” reveals much about the man behind it and what it means to be a passionate and deeply committed Jew of color.

Because for Nissim Black—successful rapper, father of six and Orthodox Jew—the video makes a strong statement about how Jews of color merge their very disparate identities into a (nearly) seamless whole.

(Fans may want to check out Black’s newest rap video “Hava”—a thoroughly Nissim spin on the traditional “Hava Nagila”—its release timed for the first night of Hanukkah).

Black is perhaps the most famous of today’s Jews of color. (Readers of a certain age will recall when singer Sammy Davis Jr. could claim that honor).

Though the term itself has gained traction in the last decade, there have always been Jews of different races. Scan the globe today, and you’ll find Ethiopian Jews and the African Lemba tribe whose men test positive for the Kohen gene, a marker of the Jewish priests.

What’s more, many Sephardic, Cuban, Mexican and Yemenite Jews consider themselves Jews of color. Not to mention the murky waters surrounding pockets of the Black Hebrews found in Israel (largely in Dimona and Arad in the Negev Desert) and around the Diaspora, many of whom claim descent from the ancient Israelites.

The numbers are equally murky. Estimates range from 6 percent to 12 percent—or even as much as 15 percent—of today’s Jewish population being Jews of color. But there is little in the way of standardized definition of who is a Jew; some studies count all the members of a household as Jewish household when only one member actually is. But when researchers Arnold Dashefsky and Ira M. Sheskin held the disparate estimates of Jews of color up to the light of demographic standards earlier this year, they concluded that the percentage of Jews of color “is almost certainly closer to 6 percent nationally [from the 2013 Pew study] than 12 to 15 percent. And this percentage has not increased significantly since 1990, although it is likely to do so in the future.”

It stands to reason that this year of painful racial tensions across North America could trigger an internal debate in African-American Jews, especially those who came to the faith not through birth or adoption, but who, like Black, embraced Judaism as adults.

And embrace it many of them do—with passion, perseverance and a deep appreciation—often overcoming raised eyebrows, insensitivity and even downright racism in the process. With a surprising number of them finding their spiritual home in Orthodox Judaism.

Nissim Black

Damian Jamohl Black, whom the world knows now as rapper Nissim Black, was born into a family of Seattle drug dealers in 1986. His childhood was pockmarked by FBI raids on his home, his dad was taken away in handcuffs, and he was accustomed to assorted incidents of street violence and crime. By 9, he was smoking marijuana, and plants were growing in his room. By 12, he’d joined the family business.

The only faith Black was exposed to back then was his grandfather’s Islam. His first religious service? A mosque, which he attended until his grandfather went to prison.

But at 13, Black was pulled into Christianity by missionaries. He now says it was the best thing that could have happened to him. “This was the first time I was around people who had normal healthy relationships. No one sold drugs, they had a heart for kids from the inner city, and their summer camp was the most fun I’d had in my life,” he recalls. “Becoming religious saved me from the world of street gangs.”

By high school, he was “the poster child of the missionary center.” That’s when he met the woman who would become his wife. As a Seventh-Day Adventist, Jamie (now Adina) went to church on Saturdays. They wed in 2008 but remarried in an Orthodox ceremony after their conversion five years later.

By 19, Black was making rap music professionally, and his mother died of an overdose. But by 20, Christianity was beginning to feel foreign to him, and he began wondering what the Jews walking in his neighborhood on Saturday mornings were up to. “I went to Rabbi Google and found Chabad.org. And it all began to make sense,” he says. “I told my wife [they were newlyweds] that I didn’t want to celebrate Christmas and Easter anymore. Pretty soon, she was doing her own digging into Judaism.”

The couple’s conversion followed in 2013 and aliyah to Israel three years later. The Blacks now make their home in Ramat Beit Shemesh with their six children, ages 1 to 12. “I wanted my kids to grow up here,” he says, “where they’d see Jews of different shades all praying the same prayers.”

“I’ve checked every box, right?” he says with a laugh. “One rabbi at my yeshivah told me, ‘You have a lot of strikes against you: You’re black, you’re a convert and you’re a Breslov Chassid. And in all these things is your greatness.”

Maayan Zik

Maayan Zik was 13 when her soul woke her up. Growing up in Washington, D.C., with her mom and sister—her parents divorced when she was in first grade, and she didn’t see her dad for another 10 years—she attended Catholic schools and was close with her maternal grandparents, Jamaican immigrants who took her to museums and taught her the value of hard work and education.

Accompanying her Jamaican-born grandmother to church every Sunday, by 13, Zik had “begun to wonder if what my family believes is right for me.” She explored a number of world religions, but when she saw a photo of her light-skinned Jamaican great-grandmother Lilla Abrams, whom family lore says was Jewish, “I realized I had to go way back to find out who I am.”

When she moved to an apartment in 2005 in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., she noticed the previous tenant had a left up a poster of a white-bearded man. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to find out who you are.’ The man turned out to be the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Two years later, after courses and a summer seminary program, she converted. Thirteen years later, now 36, Zik remains there—with her Israeli-born husband and four children. “This somewhat awkward coexistence that lives inside me” fades into the background when she begins to pray, she says. “Having a personal conversation with God as part of the Jewish people, it’s who I’ve always been; I just didn’t know it.”

Mordechai Ben Avraham

Black and Mordechai Ben Avraham are both African-Americans from the West Coast (Seattle and Los Angeles, respectively), and both found Judaism in their 20s. But their early environment could hardly have been more different.

Growing up in an affluent neighborhood with a successful businessman father and a professor mother, “my focus was on how someday I could make more money than my dad.”

Ben Avraham’s spiritual journey took him from Sufism to the Kabbalah until at 22 he experienced Shabbat in a Carlebach-style minyan. “It was like I was floating in outer space. This is what Jews do? This is amazing! The Torah, the prayers, this beautiful spiritual system God gave to the Jews for people to transform themselves—they literally grabbed my heart.” His conversion was complete in 2013 with his move to Israel three years later.

Now 39, the former TV producer is living in the heart of Jerusalem’s religious Mea Shearim neighborhood, working towards his rabbinical degree and publishing a book on the joys of Torah as a black Jew.

But why would anyone who’s already making a huge leap religiously and culturally choose to embrace Orthodoxy with its full menu of mitzvot, accepting the Torah as Divine and committing to living within halachah (Jewish law)?

“If someone is going to make this big of a change completely based on their need to go beyond, there’s a very real tendency to go what many would consider ‘all the way,’ ” says Henry Abramson, dean of Brooklyn’s Touro College and author of The Kabbalah of Forgiveness: The Thirteen Levels of Mercy in Rabbi Moshe Cordovero’s Date Palm of Devorah (2014), among other titles.

A shared history

Much of this tendency to search spiritually can be traced to African-Americans’ religious experience in America, adds Abramson. “Since the 1960s, we’ve seen the phenomenon of questioning the Christianity foisted on their slave ancestors.”

And though Islam has attracted many of these disenfranchised souls—in part, he says, because the black Muslim culture permeated prisons beginning in the 1960s—Judaism offers another option.

Ben Avraham maintains that, in a spiritual sense, Judaism may feel familiar to those raised in the black church. “Like Judaism, gospel Christianity is an intense personal relationship with God without any intermediaries,” he says.

This is a connection Ben Avraham experiences every day of his life. “Living in Mea Shearim, in a fundamental way, I’m around people who are just like me. I just connect with my Chassidic neighbors.”

A growing fissure

But after the 1960s and ’70s, when Jews fought alongside blacks for civil rights in the United States and in South Africa, “there’s been a growing fissure between blacks and Jews,” says Rabbi Maury Kelman who, as director of Route 613, a New York City conversion program, has welcomed many students of different races into his classes.

And, with last summer’s rise in violence between the African-American community and the religious Jewish community, primarily in New York,” says Black, “lately, it’s gotten uglier.”

‘I cried all the way home’

Not everyone in the Jewish community rolls out the proverbial red carpet for someone of color.

After working up the courage to walk into synagogue on Shabbat, Zik couldn’t miss the two women glaring at her, eventually yelling at her to get out and threatening to call the police before giving chase.

“I cried all the way home, but my friends would not let me give up,” she says. “I also knew from everything I’d read about the Rebbe, with his emphasis on love and kindness, that eventually this would be the right place for me.”

“Unfortunately, like in all communities, you’ll find the occasional ignorant Jew or racist,” allows Kelman, who offers programs on the importance of accepting the convert.

A time of racial tensions

With this year’s heated racial debates and demonstrations following the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, where does that put Jews of color, with feet in both the African-American and Jewish worlds?

Zik, for one, helped lead a rally in Crown Heights this summer where black neighbors shared their experiences with racism. “It was a reminder,” she says, “that the Torah teaches us to protect the rights of all God’s children.”

And the learning goes both ways, she adds. “When black friends ask me if now that I’m Jewish, do I have money? I tell them about the Jews I know who struggle to pay for rent, food and their kids’ yeshivah tuitions. I tell them that, when I’ve had my babies, neighbors bring us meals and help furnish the nursery. People here always want to do another mitzvah.”

Ben Avraham also says he better appreciates African-American history because he is a Jew. “We can see our own story reflected in the Torah,” he says. “Our two peoples had so many struggles just to survive.”

Adds Black: “Just knowing there are black religious Jews can help the two communities see they aren’t completely separate after all—not to judge each other so quickly.”

Kelman agrees. “Black Jews can be a terrific bridge chiefly because they have credibility on both sides. It’s increasingly important to teach our fellow Jews that we’re a family that comes in different colors, that Judaism is colorblind,” he says. “Once they convert, they’re just as Jewish as any of us—and our diversity only strengthens us.”

‘Something bigger than myself’

By the end of “Mothaland Bounce,” the guys from the ’hood and the Chassids are dancing together with Black as ringmaster.

But it may be “A Million Years” that’s Black’s love letter to Judaism.

In this 2016 music video (with singer Yisroel Laub), Black takes a journey proudly carrying a Torah throughout Israel—archeological digs, mountain caves, a busy shuk (marketplace) and Jerusalem’s Old City—turning heads as he goes. (Don’t miss the moment when Black stops to let some haredi kids lovingly kiss the Torah), finally nestling it inside a synagogue’s ark.

“Since I was a kid, I was looking to be part of something bigger than myself,” says Black. “I prayed and prayed, and finally, I knew who I needed to be, a Jew, and where I needed to be, the Holy Land. It took time but now God’s answered my prayers. And one thing I know is that to God there is no such thing as color. He sees us for who we are inside.”

As he raps:

“I came from a distance Where everything was different �� I called out to You And You showed me that You listened … I gave my all to You And You showed me who I am.”

[ascendingdevillived456-blog]

Am I pessimistic or just real?

Most of the time I feel like I'm accidentally surviving my own life. Not to sound like I'm bitching, but I don't have any idea why I'm alive. I've been trying to keep my life simple, but found out that is a very complicated and arduous task. I, physically, am 30some years old, and deeply know my spirit or soul or life force or whatever you want to label it as is old as fuck. I'm a little odd, I've been told, but when you realize early in life that nobody anywhere knows what in the bluest bowels of Hell they are doing, you start making decisions that TRULY matter on a high, VERY HIGH, level of deep understanding. Not to sound like a preachy zealous god-freak, but preeeeetty fucking sure we live in and on the garden of eden as mentioned in that book written 2000ish years ago. You know the one, oh... it has that bearded guy in the middle east who was the Christian God's son, but was a Jewish king, a rabbi, a carpenter, and who led a gang of misfit trouble making hooligans that wanted to make life better for everyone and ended up dead and martyred for it and is currently the nearly-nude mascot for countless kitchens and bedrooms in thousands of American homes. Jesus, what is that guy's name.... anyways... that book. I'm not great with names, nor hiding sarcastic remarks or, OR blatant disregard for that which really does not matter.... uh, uh, uh, oh well. Back on topic now. Ready? On this "bestowed paradise" of Ours, there are a few shitty things that I just WILL NOT turn a blind eye to. I got this list, you see, that has the WORST possible inventions on it that the world could have done without. Number 1 is people... People are needy, greedy, dumb, panicky, self-centered, talking alien-ape hybrids that ruin and destroy almost every thing they put their grubby little peter-beaters on. We kill for thrill and pleasure alone or in packs and have this problem understanding what compassion and sharing equally are. I did two years of kindergarten, consecutively I will add, I know you are supposed to share and be nice or something like, oh I don't know, your behavior is checked, and you learn to play with others. And now number 2 (insert low-brow sophomoric butt-mud poop-shit-fart he he he coment here. I did, but think up your own.) my list. Borders. "We look different in skin color or you talk funny, uh oh, I no longer have trust other human being, stay away from my personal comfort zone. We'll be fair though and draw a line in the dirt in case you get the same vibe from me. Ok?" "Ok, good idea. Me and my family will kill you otherwise maybe, yeah, no, yeah. Stay away. Good job." Are you shitting literally me out of your dumb asses? Where is the logic and practicality in that. We let famine happen daily because, what? Noone knows what to do? Help your fucking human brothers and sisters, and the little ones if your heart has room, you apathy ridden bag of severed dicks. This is everyone's home right now, teach people who have no knowledge. There is no such thing as unteachable. Read between the lines here guys and dolls. Break time. Let me tell you that I'm not being a rude loud obnoxious Internet troll here, some of my rants and tangent ramblings have a twisted sense of humor and are meant to make you take a minute and chuckle at its finest absurdities. Oh my, but we can also be multitasking manimals and take some inventory of ourselves and the other manimals in our lives and have conversations with each other like we're meant to. Anyone over 27 will remember a time before everyone had a fucking idiot screen in their face at all times. (Heh, jokes to come.) What separated us from beasts is our ability to develope and utilize language. To any younger folks reading this: we used to sit at the same parties you all do now, and used our minds and speaking abilities to have a blast. I'm talking some wicked-awesome fucking ideas and fun times were had before the wedding of man and technology. Put the phone down, and step away from the screens. Please. Number thwee, sorry had, food in my...nevermind. money is next on my little list of things I see as wrong. If a person has a lot of money, they generally have a lot of stuff to make sure they're happy beyond worry. On the other end of the spectrum you have... anybody? Class! goddamn kids pay a-fucking-tention! You have a person with little to no money. I will spell this out for you and you know who: that person can't be happy beyond worry because, huh? Some people have been going ape shit on their own happy. Hmmm. Opposite of happy? Right, thanks Julien, smart guy you are, UNhappy. I hope I just made a Julien's mind blow apart. Lol. Now, monetary wealth is referred to as worth. If you gots like soooooo much worth like it's bananas and stuff, then your like totally worthwhile or worthy. Julien, let someone else try now, get your tongue out of my ass you brown-noser. If you ever want to be heart broken ask the poor kid at an elementary school how he feels after the first recess after Christmas break. I bet the word worthless crosses both your minds and you purse your lips and them real big empathy tears well up in your eyes. That kid is programed to think money and worth are the same thing, and will do what he or she can to make sure they ALWAYS HAVE money when they grow up otherwise everyone else will know they are worthless. Made myself cry a little bit there. Guns guns guns are 4 on this list which may make you laugh or at best pissed. In case you missed I'd be remissed if I didn't say you need to come up with your own rhymes and eloquence. Guns though are made for one thing; ending lives. Plain and simple, keep reading you left wingers and right wingers both. The eagle that is the U.S. of A needs you both to work together in order to soar. I have really upset myself with saying that, but it's out there now, ain't it? I feel everyone should have gun training and own a minimum of three guns open carry on a daily basis (we've already got them and they've seemed to dug their heels in so we might as well adapt with the fucking things.) A semi-auto rifle for hunting food, a shotgun for food/eminent defenses, and a pistol for protection of family and home. Common knowledge for everyone should be stated from an early age: IF YOU DRAW A FIREARM ON A FELLOW HUMAN BEING, BE SURE THAT YOU CAN MAKE THE CONCESSION THAT YOUR LIFE HOLDS MORE VALUE THAN THEIR'S THEIR POSSIBLE DEPENDENTS. DO NOT SHOOT TO MAIM. IF YOU DRAW, SHOOT, AND SHOOT TO KILL. REMEMBER THAT THEY ARE AWARE OF THIS TOO, AND IF YOU KILL THEM. YOU MUST LIVE WITH THE MEMORY OF YOU NEEDLESSLY TAKING A HUMAN LIFE BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT YOUR LIFE IS MORE IMPORTANT THEN THEIR'S. guns huh? 5. Prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are not your friends. Especially in the world of psychological medication and pain management. I take aspirin on occasion, in my younger days I was always told I "needed something to help me." Help me do what? From the age of 11 until I was into my mid twenties I've been on damn near everything besides Haledol and Geodon. Thanks for being good dealers...I mean doctors and pharmacists. If you want to ask my diagnosis I will share, but let me say that I haven't taken nor would I recommend any person to give a child DRUGS. They are not safe because they are prescribed. Ritalin is molecularly identical to cocaine. No bullshit. They are training kids to be druggies later in life and parents and insurance companies pay for it. Act now and for $799.00 a month you won't k ow who you are, have bleeding of the teeth, lazy finger syndrome, backward stools, brain bleeding episodes, coma and death, but wait there's more. If that pill doesn't work simply tell us and we will give you some other stuff that will make sure your little boy grows tits like a woman and may have a compulsive gambling and or masturbatory addiction with possible suicidal ideation. At least he'll do better on his homework. Fast forward to early adulthood... "oh mummsy? Daddykins? Whatever do you mean I'm no longer on your insurance plans? I simply must have all these pills to be completely the best I can be." "Gee you can just acquisition the local the scumbags who clandestinely make and distribute the bad version of the same drug you've been on for your whole life, my golden child." And don't forget the ssri's. Google this shit kids: ssri's long-term effects on the mind and body. And finally number 6. Social networking. I've never had a Facebook, MySpace, twitter, or anything else. This site I found accidentally while bored and this is my first time posting anything anywhere. The negatively charged part of social media is shit like; omg I 8 a waffle cone with chokl8 chip cookie dough ice cream scoops. Kill yourself you fat cow. Oh boo hoo sad face.... So long cruelty of this place, I have been wearing my life inappropriately I've been informed. Good bye 14 years. Wrapping up at this point as I've said enough for now. I'll be that eccentric and hilariously unfiltered buddy of you get my styles here. Just need to vent sometimes. Help me with Tumblr if you're interested in that... I guess. Looking forward to seeing responses. It should be noted that I have the utmost respect for any religion but abhor the use of faith as a means to control and not gain a better relationship with divinity. I'm not a doctor or political ass hat. I'm a song writing free-spirited music loving real deal motherfucker. "And I didn't even graduate FROM fucking highschool." I.Q. is up a bit above above average. No, that is not a typo.

[repwincoml4a0a5]

How YouTube Serves As The Content Engine Of The Internet's Dark Side

YouTube

David Seaman is the Pizzagate King of the Internet.

On Twitter, Seaman posts dozens of messages a day to his 66,000 followers, often about the secret cabal — including Rothschilds, Satanists, and the other nabobs of the New World Order — behind the nation’s best-known, super-duper-secret child sex ring under a DC pizza parlor.

But it’s on YouTube where he really goes to work. Since Nov. 4, four days before the election, Seaman has uploaded 136 videos, more than one a day. Of those, at least 42 are about Pizzagate. The videos, which tend to run about eight to fifteen minutes, typically consist of Seaman, a young, brown-haired man with glasses and a short beard, speaking directly into a camera in front of a white wall. He doesn’t equivocate: Recent videos are titled “Pizzagate Will Dominate 2017, Because It Is Real” and “#PizzaGate New Info 12/6/16: Link To Pagan God of Pedophilia/Rape.”

Seaman has more than 150,000 subscribers. His videos, usually preceded by preroll ads for major brands like Quaker Oats and Uber, have been watched almost 18 million times, which is roughly the number of people who tuned in to last year’s season finale of NCIS, the most popular show on television.

His biography reads, in part, “I report the truth.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the major social platforms, most notably Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, have been forced to undergo painful, often public reckonings with the role they play in spreading bad information. How do services that have become windows onto the world for hundreds of millions of people square their desire to grow with the damage that viral false information, “alternative facts,” and filter bubbles do to a democracy?

And yet there is a mammoth social platform, a cornerstone of the modern internet with more than a billion active users every month, which hosts and even pays for a fathomless stock of bad information, including viral fake news, conspiracy theories, and hate speech of every kind — and it’s been held up to virtually no scrutiny: YouTube.

The entire contemporary conspiracy-industrial complex of internet investigation and social media promulgation, which has become a defining feature of media and politics in the Trump era, would be a very small fraction of itself without YouTube. Yes, the site most people associate with “Gangnam Style,” pirated music, and compilations of dachshunds sneezing is also the central content engine of the unruliest segments of the ascendant right-wing internet, and sometimes its enabler.

To wit, the conspiracy-news internet’s biggest stars, some of whom now enjoy New Yorker profiles and presidential influence, largely live on YouTube. Infowars — whose founder and host, Alex Jones, claims Sandy Hook didn’t happen, Michelle Obama is a man, and 9/11 was an inside job — broadcasts to 2 million subscribers on YouTube. So does Michael “Gorilla Mindset” Cernovich. So too do a whole genre of lesser-known but still wildly popular YouTubers, people like Seaman and Stefan Molyneux (an Irishman closely associated with the popular “Truth About” format). As do a related breed of prolific political-correctness watchdogs like Paul Joseph Watson and Sargon of Akkad (real name: Carl Benjamin), whose videos focus on the supposed hypocrisies of modern liberal culture and the ways they leave Western democracy open to a hostile Islamic takeover. As do a related group of conspiratorial white-identity vloggers like Red Ice TV, which regularly hosts neo-Nazis in its videos.

“The internet provides people with access to more points of view than ever before,” YouTube wrote in a statement. “We're always taking feedback so we can continue to improve and present as many perspectives at a given moment in time as possible.”

YouTube

All this is a far cry from the platform’s halcyon days of 2006 and George Allen’s infamous “Macaca” gaffe. Back then, it felt reasonable to hope the site would change politics by bypassing a rose-tinted broadcast media filter to hold politicians accountable. As recently as 2012, Mother Jones posted to YouTube hidden footage of Mitt Romney discussing the “47%” of the electorate who would never vote for him, a video that may have swung the election. But by the time the 2016 campaign hit its stride, and a series of widely broadcast, ugly comments by then-candidate Trump didn’t keep him out of office, YouTube’s relationship to politics had changed.

Today, it fills the enormous trough of right-leaning conspiracy and revisionist historical content into which the vast, ravening right-wing social internet lowers its jaws to drink. Shared widely everywhere from white supremacist message boards to chans to Facebook groups, these videos constitute a kind of crowdsourced, predigested ideological education, offering the “Truth” about everything from Michelle Obama’s real biological sex (760,000 views!) to why medieval Islamic civilization wasn’t actually advanced.

Frequently, the videos consist of little more than screenshots of a Reddit “investigation” laid out chronologically, set to ominous music. Other times, they’re very simple, featuring a man in a sparse room speaking directly into his webcam, or a very fast monotone narration over a series of photographs with effects straight out of iMovie. There’s a financial incentive for vloggers to make as many videos as cheaply they can; the more videos you make, the more likely one is to go viral. David Seaman’s videos typically garner more than 50,000 views and often exceed 100,000. Many of Seaman’s videos adjoin ads for major brands. A preroll ad for Asana, the productivity software, precedes a video entitled “WIKILEAKS: Illuminati Rothschild Influence & Simulation Theory”; before “Pizzagate: Do We Know the Full Scope Yet?!” it’s an ad for Uber, and before “HILLARY CLINTON'S HORROR SHOW,” one for a new Fox comedy. (Most YouTubers have no direct control over which brands' ads run next to their videos, and vice versa.)

This trough isn’t just wide, it’s deep. A YouTube search for the term “The Truth About the Holocaust” returns half a million results. The top 10 are all Holocaust-denying or Holocaust-skeptical. (Sample titles: “The Greatest Lie Ever Told,” which has 500,000 views; “The Great Jewish Lie”; “The Sick Lies of a Holocaust™ 'Survivor.'”) Say the half million videos average about 10 minutes. That works out to 5 million minutes, or about 10 years, of “Truth About the Holocaust.”

Meanwhile, “The Truth About Pizzagate” returns a quarter of a million results, including “PizzaGate Definitive Factcheck: Oh My God” (620,000 views and counting) and “The Men Who Knew Too Much About PizzaGate” (who, per a teaser image, include retired Gen. Michael Flynn and Andrew Breitbart).

Sometimes, these videos go hugely viral. “With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations” — an alarming 20-minute video about Muslim immigration to Europe featuring deceptive editing and debunked footage — received some 4 million views in late 2015 before being taken down by YouTube over a copyright claim. (Infowars: “YouTube Scrambles to Censor Viral Video Exposing Migrant Invasion.”) That’s roughly as many people as watched the Game of Thrones Season 3 premiere. It’s since been scrubbed of the copyrighted music and reuploaded dozens of times.

First circulated by white supremacist blogs and chans, “With Gates Wide Open” gained social steam until it was picked up by Breitbart, at which point it exploded, blazing the viral trail by which conspiracy-right “Truth” videos now travel. Last week, President Trump incensed the nation of Sweden by falsely implying that it had recently suffered a terrorist attack. Later, he clarified in a tweet that he was referring to a Fox News segment. That segment featured footage from a viral YouTube documentary, Stockholm Syndrome, about the dangers of Muslim immigration into Europe. Sources featured in the documentary have since accused its director, Ami Horowitz, of “bad journalism” for taking their answers out of context.

So what responsibility, if any, does YouTube bear for the universe of often conspiratorial, sometimes bigoted, frequently incorrect information that it pays its creators to host, and that is now being filtered up to the most powerful person in the world? Legally, per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which absolves service providers of liability for content they host, none. But morally and ethically, shouldn’t YouTube be asking itself the same hard questions as Facebook and Twitter about the role it plays in a representative democracy? How do those questions change because YouTube is literally paying people to upload bad information?

And practically, if YouTube decided to crack down, could it really do anything?

YouTube does “demonitize” videos that it deems “not advertiser-friendly,” and last week, following a report in the Wall Street Journal that Disney had nixed a sponsorship deal with the YouTube superstar PewDiePie over anti-Semitic content in his videos, YouTube pulled his channel from its premium ad network. But such steps have tended to follow public pressure and have only affected extremely famous YouTubers. And it’s not like PewDiePie will go hungry; he can still run ads on his videos, which regularly do millions of views.

Ultimately, the platform may be so huge as to be ungovernable: Users upload 400 hours of video to YouTube every minute. One possibility is drawing a firmer line between content the company officially designates as news and everything else; YouTube has a dedicated News vertical that pulls in videos from publishers approved by Google News.

Even there, though, YouTube has its work cut out for it. On a recent evening, the first result I saw under the “Live Now - News” subsection of youtube.com/news was the Infowars “Defense of Liberty 13 Hour Special Broadcast.” Alex Jones was staring into the camera.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mnzVve