YouTube has apologized after “mistakenly” removing videos portraying war crimes and other facets of the Syrian civil war by activists and opposition groups.
Last week, a number of organizations – including Middle East Eye, open source investigations site Bellingcat, and monitoring group Airwars – said that a number of their videos had been removed by YouTube for violating the platform’s “community guidelines.”
The removals began days after Google, which owns YouTube, trumpeted the arrival of an artificial intelligence program that it said could spot and flag “extremist” videos without human involvement.
YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring “extremist” content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East.
(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — According to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to the Independent, a prominent U.K.-based news outlet, more than 40,000 civilians may have been killed in the nine-month long battle of Mosul.
Residents carry the body of several civilians killed in a US air strike in Mosul, Iraq on March 24, 2017. (AP/Felipe Dana)
The US-led coalition attacking the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria killed as many as 744 civilians in June, an independent monitor said Wednesday.
Airwars – a London-based collective of journalists and researchers that uses social media, eyewitness reports and other sources to compile its data – said the concurrent assaults on Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq were often “devastating.”
(ANTIMEDIA) — Earlier this week, the White House released a fresh warning that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was planning a chemical weapons attack and that he would pay a “heavy price” for doing so. The warning appeared to confuse a number of U.S. officials who had not been consulted before the warning was released.
(MEE) The number of civilians killed in air strikes by the US-led coalition in Syria over the past month was the highest monthly toll since it began its campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014, a monitoring organization said on Tuesday.
(ANTIMEDIA Op-Ed) The U.S. has long asserted itself as a peacemaker in the ongoing war in Syria, attempting to paint the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, as the root cause of the conflict. At the same time, the United States government maintains that peace would be impossible without American interference, which, of course, comes with the added aim of ousting Assad.
(ANTIWAR) Massive air wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan are just the beginning of the story for the United States military, with regular strikes in places like Somalia and Yemen, and constant risks of the US launching a massive war on North Korea at any moment. That’s a lot of bombs being dropped, and mostly in open-ended conflicts.
An employee of Doctors Without Borders, MSF, walks inside the charred remains of the organization’s hospital after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan. (AP/Najim Rahim)
