Meet the Censored: Status Coup
Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. The latest target: live
content
Matt Taibbi
Jan 27
On January 6th, Jon Farina, photographer and videographer for Jordan
Chariton's Status Coup outlet, captured horrifying images. At the Capitol, a
pro-Trump mob tried to burst into the building, and a police officer who
attempted to intercede was caught in a door. He cried out in pain, but the
crowd was indifferent, chanting, "Heave, ho!" as they tried to break in.
Farina, in the middle of the physical mayhem as photojournalists often are,
caught the scene up close while 30,000 people watched the live feed.
Farina's footage rocketed around the world, and major press outlets
celebrated his work as an example of hard-hitting reporting. CNN did a
laudatory story about the freelance photojournalist, with Pamela Brown
asking Farina to "bring us inside the mayhem." Other outlets like USA Today
quoted his recollections of that day, and the likes of Steven Colbert on
CBS, as well as ABC News, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, the Guardian, the Wall Street
Journal, CNN, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and others used it as
fodder for outraged coverage of the riot:
For a week or so, Status Coup was feted for service on the front lines of
responsible journalism. Nearly two weeks later, on January 18th, another
Farina live stream was shut down by YouTube, thanks to policies that will
make it very difficult for non-corporate media going forward to do live
reporting. In fact, it's not a stretch to say that if the incident from the
18th happened earlier, we may never have gotten the Capitol pictures.
On the 18th, Farina was in Richmond, Virginia, where a significant rally of
pro-gun protesters was expected. There had been widespread reports warning
of unrest. CBS relayed FBI fears of "credible threats of violence," while
the Washington Post said officials were "on edge" ahead of the Martin Luther
King Day protest, gearing up for a full-scale assault:
Members of the National Guard are on standby. Plywood covers the windows of
the State Capitol. Tall metal barricades surround Capitol Square, with
police vehicles idling on pathways just inside locked pedestrian gates.
Downtown streets will be closed; signs warning against carrying guns have
gone up around the city.
"The violent, lawless insurrection and assault on democracy and its
institutions that unfolded last week in Washington, D.C., will not be
tolerated in the city of Richmond," Mayor Levar Stoney warned on Thursday.
The threats may have been credible, but when Farina began live-streaming to
an audience of 6,000, the event turned out to be peaceful and unremarkable,
though not without interest from a news perspective.
"Frankly, there might have been more press than protesters," Status Coup's
Chariton said later. "And while it was live, it was pretty informative. Jon
talked to 4-5 people, and they pretty much all made it clear that they
weren't Trump supporters, that they didn't support what happened in the
Capitol. They were pretty relaxed compared to the propaganda ahead of time."
Despite the seeming unremarkableness of the event, it shut down abruptly
mid-feed. Chariton assumed something happened on Farina's end.
"Then I got an email from YouTube, telling me we'd violated their 'Firearms
Policy.' I wasn't aware they had a firearms policy."
Jordan @JordanChariton
OUTRAGEOUS... Now @YouTube @TeamYouTube just REMOVED @StatusCoup &
@JonFarina's Livestream reporting from PEACEFUL Virginia gun rights rally bc
"we think it violates our firearms policy." HOW ARE JOURNALISTS SUPPOSED TO
CHRONICLE HISTORY IF YOUTUBE-AND OTHERS-ARE OUTLAWING IT?
January 18th 2021
1,989 Retweets5,883 Likes
Chariton went onto Twitter to announce what happened, and after a few
well-known media figures like Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim complained, YouTube
restored the content. Other independents covering the rally, however, like
Andrew Kimmel, never had their content restored.
The serious consequence of the Virginia episode was not so much the lost
coverage of the rally, but what Chariton had to tell Farina after the event.
Well-known for covering labor issues, homelessness, and especially the Flint
water crisis, Status Coup had been growing, in large part because of live
stream content. Now, however, the possibility that YouTube might issue a
strike against his channel, or take it down altogether, forced him into a
difficult decision. "I had to tell [Farina] not to go live anymore," he
says.
One person at the same rally wasn't surprised by what happened. Videographer
and well-known protest shooter Ford Fischer of News2Share, the first profile
subject of "Meet the Censored," was also in Richmond to shoot the event. He
didn't get taken down by YouTube, but only because he didn't bother trying
to go live.
"I was there on January 18th and didn't stream it, because I knew it'd get
banned," Fischer says. "I filmed basically the same rally on January 17th
and it did get banned."
The January 17th rally Fischer referenced was a pro-gun rally in Columbus,
Ohio, that in the wake of the Capitol riot garnered significant advance
media coverage. Once again, headlines like "FBI warns of Potential Boogaloo
Violence During January 17th Rallies" primed audiences to expect the worst,
and also to make a direct connection with the January 6th events. In fact,
Twitter cited the coming Ohio rally in its post announcing the closure of
Donald Trump's account, describing the Ohio event as a possible "secondary
attack":
Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and
off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and
state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.
According to Fischer, the Twitter announcement didn't exactly make sense,
because the protesters in Ohio were more of a libertarian ilk, and, as
Farina and Chariton discovered in the Virginia crowd, not so clearly aligned
with Trump as Twitter and other media outlets may have imagined. Fischer has
frequently covered events involving the gun-toting Boogaloos, whom he
describes as anti-authoritarian and less likely to be Trumpists than to
profess a pox-on-both-houses attitude to Trump and Joe Biden both ("You
might hear something like, 'Unless you put Ron Paul on the ballot, I'm not
voting,'" he says).
Although there's significant national interest in the group, both among
supporters and detractors, Fischer says "I've basically stopped trying to
live stream rallies involving Boogaloos." Back on July 4th, 2020, he shot a
live stream of a joint armed rally of Boogaloos and Black Lives Matter,
protesting together against police violence - here again, we see the
significant political differences between Trump supporters and some of these
pro-gun groups - only to have the live stream interrupted, on the same
grounds that it violated Google's firearms policy.
Nonetheless, Fischer attempted to shoot the January 17th rally, among other
things because of the obvious public interest in the event, which was
heavily covered by the mainstream press. Local TV affiliates associated with
networks like ABC and CNN covered the January 17th rallies in Columbus and
in other locations, even broadcasting live. However, when Fischer tried to
live stream, he was cut off in short order by a notice identical to the one
received by Chariton. He was reminded that YouTube "does not allow live
streams showing someone holding, handling, or transporting a firearm."
The policy presents obvious head-scratching issues. For one, as Fischer
points out, virtually all police carry a firearm, so "there's obviously some
subjectivity in what's being enforced." Furthermore, the rule doesn't seem
to apply to major corporate outlets, a double-standard problem that's a
constant in this universe.
In an even more bizarre recent incident, YouTube this past weekend removed
video Fischer shot on January 6th - not live footage, but still - of the
crowd listening to Donald Trump before the Capitol riot. This time, the
grounds were that the content advanced "false claims that widespread fraud
errors or glitches affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election."
Fischer supposes the issue has to do with the fact that the unedited,
single-shot video - which is focused mainly on the crowd reaction - caught
Trump's own words. This might make sense, except that Trump's speech that
day is still on YouTube, as broadcast by several CBS affiliates, among
others. As with Farina, Fischer's Capitol protest footage was picked up by
numerous major outlets, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, and others, but the
system seems to incentivize independent shooters to distribute footage
through corporate outlets only, rather than conveying directly to their own
audiences.
"I absolutely think there's a campaign against independent content creators,
especially live," Fischer says. "Major outlets face no such technical
issues."
This makes any attempt to build an alternative news outlet a steep uphill
climb, even when there's a positive audience response, as Chariton has found
out. Formerly with The Young Turks, Chariton's niche is national news from a
left/progressive perspective, with special emphasis on the area where
corporate outlets once had a near-monopoly, e.g. on-location production of
images and reporting.
Typically, alternative media outlets can't afford to travel much and often
have to rely on wire services and commercial coverage for primary source
material, especially for expensive beats like the presidential election.
Chariton emphasizes going to hot spots like Flint and to election campaign
events to generate original images and video interviews, an innovative
alt-media take on national news coverage. Live stream coverage had been a
major part of their formula.
The Ohio and Virginia incidents underscore two developments involving
platforms like YouTube/Google, Facebook, and Twitter in recent years. The
first is the campaign to stress what Google calls "authoritative content,"
which up-ranks articles and videos issued by major corporate news outlets
like CNN or CBS, while decreasing traffic for independent sites on the left,
the right, and in between.
The second has been an effort to close loopholes in the platforms' content
moderation regimes. In the wake of the Capitol riot, this trend intensified.
After the "insurrection," a series of trial-balloon stories appeared in the
press, suggesting that Internet nooks and crannies where conspiracy theory
and misinformation proliferate might need more aggressive cleaning.
The AP warned that "Apple and Google, among others, have left open a major
loophole for this material: Podcasts." The New York Times meanwhile reported
on an exodus of millions of users who, fearing a Big Tech crackdown, jumped
to encyrpted sites like Signal and Telegram.
The Times quoted the head of the Association of State Criminal Investigative
Agencies, Louis Grever, as saying such sites allow "groups that have an ill
intent to plan behind the curtain." Noting the situation "worried U.S.
authorities," the piece suggested the migration might "inflame the debate"
over encryption.
Podcasts, encrypted apps: how about live programming? Pundits had long
worried that live stream capability was allowing the broadcast of violence
and hate speech. In the hands of alternative media, however, the tool posed
another problem, in the form of simply showing offensive reality.
In the cases of people like Fischer and Chariton, however, it's unclear how
platforms like YouTube understand the documentation of political
demonstrations. If you film a neo-Nazi running his mouth, should you be
banned for covering his hate speech? If you show a gun-rights activist
carrying a gun, are you yourself engaging in pro-gun activism?
For independent outlets like Status Coup, these questions pose a serious
problem. Because they're dependent financially on platforms like YouTube to
reach subscribers, they can't afford to take the risk of being shut down.
But how can alternative media operate if it doesn't know exactly where the
lines are? Also, how can such outlets add value when its one advantage over
corporate media - flexibility, and willingness to cover topics outside the
mainstream - is limited by the fear of consequences from making
independent-minded editorial decisions?
"It's pretty horrible," Chariton said, "if we have to consider not doing our
jobs, out of fear that YouTube is going to remove our content, or remove our
channel without warning (like they've begun doing to other, smaller
channels)."
The standard response to complaints about incidents like this is that
YouTube and Google are private companies, and no one has a right to a
platform on a private space. Chariton acknowledges this and concedes there
are alternative platforms, like Rokfin, a video-sharing alternative to
YouTube.
For the foreseeable future anyway, however, it would be nearly impossible to
build a successful alternative video-based channel without the assent of the
small handful of major tech platforms that dominate media. "People live on
YouTube and Facebook," is how Chariton puts it.
I asked him a few more questions about the future of live content, and what
happened on January 18th:
TK: How has the ability to produce live content affected your business?
JC: Status Coup was up 20,000 subscribers since November, in large part
because we were covering stories like the "Stop the Steal" movement and
other issues related to the election. I'd say 95% of that content was live
content. We've done a lot of stuff, from coverage of GM's decision to lay
off 15,000 workers to the epidemic of homelessness in Seattle, to repeated
reporting trips in Flint covering the ongoing water crisis. It's a major
part of the business. It costs two to three grand for us to take a trip
somewhere, and it's already tight, but if we're restricted in any way from
doing live, that's a blow because it brings in a significant amount of our
revenue (which we need to then fund future in-the-field reporting trips).
TK: What happened in Virginia to affect your decision-making about live
content going forward?
JC: I had to tell my cameraman not to go live. They've already shown they're
willing to take down some outlets entirely, without warning. The email
YouTube sent me, I felt they could consider that a warning, and the next
time, they could either give us a copyright strike, or remove us. I just
can't afford to take that risk.
TK: Do you see this as part of a wider effort to close informational
loopholes at these platforms?
JC: It's already documented that YouTube has been hiding independent
channels in a cave, while elevating "authoritative" channels like -
according to YouTube - CNN and Fox News. That's Silicon Valley basically
just saying outright, "We're elevating some sources at the expense of
others." Unless you're a major outlet that has a line to YouTube, you don't
have any way of clearing up these episodes. It's easier to talk to someone
at the CIA than it is to actually reach a human being at YouTube.
TK: What are the implications of an incident like this for alternative
media?
JC: First of all, it's worth pointing out, the only reason my content was
restored is that I threw a shit-fit on Twitter, and people like Krystal Ball
and Ryan Grim complained. But people like Andrew Kimmel did not have their
content restored, proving there's basically no rhyme or reason to this. It's
arbitrary. We've come to a place where you'd almost have to clear your
decisions with YouTube ahead of time to feel completely safe.
I understand, there must be some limits. If someone like Alex Jones is
saying, "Go get your guns, get out there," that's really dangerous.
But this, this is beyond a slippery slope. It's a cliff. If they start
pulling live streams or issuing strikes like this, it's basically a death
sentence for outlets like ours.
