Yesterday, Youtube announced that it would shut down, demonetize and otherwise punish channels that promoted violent extremism, "supremacy" and other forms of hateful expression; predictably enough, this crackdown has caught some of the world's leading human rights campaigners, who publish Youtube channels full of examples of human rights abuses in order to document them and prompt the public and governments to take action. Read the rest

A mom in Brazil became concerned as she watched the viewing numbers on innocent backyard clip her daughter posted to YouTube suddenly climb hundreds of thousands of views. The child posted a video of herself and a friend playing in the family pool. YouTube's recommendation engine had been suggesting the video as recommended content to viewers who'd just watched other videos that contained sexually oriented video content. YouTube's AI sexualized her kid and pushed her image to pedophiles. This happens a lot, apparently. Read the rest

Ahead of this week's EU elections, the popular German Youtuber Rezo published a 55-minute video explaining the missteps of the ruling CDU party and other establishment parties in addressing climate change, inequality, rising militarism, and internet freedom (notably, the German support for the wildly unpopular Copyright Directive), a statement he backed up with hundreds of references. Read the rest

Oliver Brotherhood is a British vlogger with over 3 million subscribers who has produced a string of very popular Minecraft-related videos under the name Mumbo Jumbo; yesterday, in the space of two hours, a quarter of his videos were claimed by music publishing giant and notorious copyright fraudsters Warner Chappell, who will now get revenues from those videos, and can take them down at will. Read the rest

Juice Media's Honest Government Adverts are some of the best, most biting political satire being produced today -- they're so good at afflicting the comfortable that Australia basically banned their style of humour -- and now, on the eve of (yet another) critical Australian election, they've produced a "season finale" that recaps the parade of horrors that a succession of bumbling, oligarchic, racist, climate-denying, torturing, confiscatory, planet-destroying Australian governments have bequeathed to the nation and the world. I laughed, I cried, I laughed again. Now I'm crying. Read the rest

French singer Cecil L. Recchia's 2018 album The Gumbo is a tribute to New Orleans jazz; I found it while searching for an online stream of Tootie Ma is a Big Fine Thing, the track that Tom Waits and the Preservation Hall Band released in 2010 as a limited-edition 78RPM album that came with its own gramophone (!); and while Waits's rendition is amazing, Recchia's is spectacular, with just the most amazing vocals. I bought it yesterday and have listened to it at least 50 times since. Read the rest

Tom Scocca discovered that a blog post he'd written had been turned into a weird video in which the text of the post was superimposed "meme style" on a set of five rotating static graphics, set to music ("wordless vocals and a sort of jazzy guitar and beat"). Read the rest

[I've been in love with Negativland since their legendary copyright battle with U2 and they've been a part of Boing Boing since 2001; it's a pleasure beyond words to be able to debut More Data, their characteristically trenchant video about data privacy and surveillance; see below for notes from Negativland. -Cory] Read the rest

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada funded Screening Surveillance project: a trio of Creative Commons licensed short science fiction films about "everyday issues around big data and surveillance." The movies run about 10 minutes each, and come with classroom materials. Read the rest

Time 4 Machine is a Ukrainian design shop led by Denis Okhrimenko; their latest project is "The most beautiful construction set in the world", a set of thin steel parts that you bend together to make (yes) beautiful mechanical models: a business-card case, a tractor, a working clockwork timer, a vintage sportscar, a springpowered cabriolet, a sedan, a Hercules eight-motor aircraft and a dieselpunk steamliner engine. Read the rest

The epic battle inside YouTube over content moderation and recommendation algorithms is detailed brilliantly in a damning new report from Mark Bergen at Bloomberg News. Read the rest

Last week's NYC book launch for Radicalized took the form of a fantastic conversation with the journalist Julia Angwin; the Strand folks were kind enough to video it and they've posted it to Youtube. Julia is incredibly smart and a wonderful interviewer, and we had some great Q&A as well. Read the rest

Filmmaker Benjamin Lancaster spent four years secretly shooting a science fiction movie called "The Further Adventures of Walt's Frozen Head," working with actors Daniel Cooksley and Ron Schneider to make a movie about a WDW cast-member who discovers the (urban)-legendary frozen head of Walt Disney, kicking off a series of adventures around the park. The movie premieres online later today. This is (at least) the second time someone has secretly shot a movie at Walt Disney World. (Thanks, Hugh!) Read the rest

Months of student strikes have roiled the UK as pupils across the country have refused to go to class while demanding action on climate change, inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg's one-person strike at the Swedish Parliament. Read the rest

Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg are well known to readers of Boing Boing, as we had the honor of publishing Ed's epic comic history Hip Hop Family Tree and Jim's brilliant Street Angel. Now they've launched a YouTube channel, Cartoonist Kayfabe, which you should subscribe to right away.

Ed writes:

Jim Rugg and I created this channel as an avenue for us to add a little meaty and sincere comics talk out there on Youtube and it really seems to be catching on as each episode goes live. Lots of show-and-tell is peppered throughout the episodes too.

We've been doing a series of episodes using the 1990's speculator rag, Wizard Magazine, as a way to discuss the era that inspired us to become cartoonists in the first place.

...

More interviews are on the horizon as we get our skype recordings to work perfectly:

I enjoyed this deep-dive on Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo:

Cartoonist Kayfabe [YouTube] Read the rest