 As you might already know, we at Navarra Media had a serious falling out with YouTube on Tuesday. At 10.30am, they deleted our entire channel. We were told it would be permanent, but after a public backlash within three hours, we were reinstated. If you want to know more about the initial sequence of events, we go through it blow by blow on Tuesday night's show. What I want to do now though is fill you in on what has happened since then. We still don't know exactly what happened on Tuesday or why we were deleted, but today we did have a call with people at YouTube. They told us they were still trying to work out exactly what went on, but they could tell us two things. First, the decision to delete the channel wasn't made by an algorithm, it was a human error. Second, our deletion wasn't the result of just one mistake, but two, the first mistake was flagging us as an account that promoted scams or spam. You'll know we do neither of those things. And the second mistake was punishing us by deleting the account. In other words, even if we had been guilty of what we were being accused of, deleting the account should not have been the course of action they pursued. So two mistakes, one saying we were producing spam and the other saying because you're producing spam, you need your account to be deleted. As I say, still many unknowns. We don't know, we know it was a person now instead of being an algorithm, but we don't know who or why made these two errors will of course update you as we get more information. Darlia, I want to, I suppose instead of just speculation to talk about sort of your take on this, I've seen from Twitter, you also have lots of thoughts. What was your experience of Navarro getting deleted? What are your political takeaways? This whole incident really shone a light onto the problems of the fact that we live in a society where almost so much of our life is platformized, particularly our media and our communications infrastructure. And so the big five platforms, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet, which own Google and YouTube, I think they don't really operate like tech companies. I think it's a misnomer to call them technology companies. They're much more like giant, multi-layered infrastructures. In fact, providers of many different infrastructures, which is why I kind of alluded, sometimes think of them more as like a government, not in terms of their any time of kind of political participation or democratic process, but in terms of their kind of these overarching organizing forces that govern lots of different infrastructures within them. And they've taken on this very ubiquitous embedded role in our society, and they've done that in a really rapid way. And so if you really think about it, it's become impossible to communicate, to travel, to purchase things, to buy consumer goods without going through one of these platforms. And on top of being deeply unaccountable, they are often very glitchy. And when they glitch, it really shows us how fragile a lot of the systems that we rely on are. It sort of plunges people into uncertainty. There was a lot of news, for example, that came out of WhatsApp being down, and the implications that that actually had particularly in the global south for a lot of workers and a lot of the ways in which people communicate and stay together. And that kind of glitchiness is partly to do with scale. It's partly to do with the fact that they've gotten so big and so all-encompassing in such a quick way, so rapidly. And part of it is to do with a sort of shaky reliance on a combination of machine learning and outsourced human labor. There was a lot of speculation about was it an algorithm or was it a human? In reality, those two things are very intertwined. It's a person that designs an algorithm or it's a group of people that design an algorithm. And when an algorithm flags up content, that content is often then reviewed by underpaid, over exploited workers largely in the global south. And so this very muddled and geographically splintered way of building our infrastructure creates this kind of systemic glitchiness. And we got a little taste of that. But we were actually very, very lucky because when I'm not doing my PhD on platforms and when I'm not running my mouth on the internet, I do a lot of trade union support work for Uber drivers. And those few hours when we were locked out of what is essentially a key part of the livelihood of a lot of Navarra staff members really reminded me of what it's like when I'm trying to fight to get a deactivated driver reinstated on the platform. More often than not, a driver will be deactivated from Uber, they won't be told why they won't they'll be told it's permanent, it can't be reviewed, and they'll be left to fight with an automated messaging system for their livelihood. And it's only when we get external political pressure involved that we can get them reinstated. And even when they are reinstated, we don't get an answer. And to me, that was much more akin to what's happened with Navarra than, you know, the idea of Silicon Valley execs sort of censoring Navarra in the way that, for example, they removed Donald Trump off the Twitter platform. But that doesn't mean that it's any less sinister, or it's any less a commentary on how power is concentrated in society today, it shows us how fragile and unaccountable the platforms that increasingly run our lives are. And the fact that of course, these platforms don't conduct themselves as providers of essential services, they conduct themselves as private companies. And so for us, as a somewhat prominent media organization with a lot of political backing, we got off really easily. But for many workers who rely on these platforms to survive, to communicate, to live, including other content creators, this is actually really a really endemic problem. And so I think that it actually exposed a really, really interesting problem with how we are organizing our society that because it's infrastructural, it's in the background. We don't really think about it. It doesn't come into our purview until it messes up. And when it messes up, the consequences can be really dire. And I'm obviously going to have to use this as an excuse to plug Planet B, where we will be talking to guests like Kate Aronoff, like Yanis Varoufakis about what happens when you outsource essential services to unaccountable, lacking in private companies that aren't transparent and how we can reclaim infrastructure from the private sector in order to protect ourselves and create a more hospitable world in the wake of climate breakdown. So I'm glad that we're all back together, but the conversations shouldn't end, the thinking shouldn't end, because this is actually a lot more common on a sort of smaller scale than we might think. No, I think that's a really important point. I thought your tweet, Fred, yesterday was very astute. Even if it wasn't consciously censorship, I think the fact that we are a media platform and ultimately whether or not we can speak to our audience is dependent on the internal policies of a Silicon Valley owned company. I do think that means that it relates to censorship. Even if we were deleted because of some opaque mistake somewhere, the fact that we can get taken down by that and then we have to go begging to a tech giant. I do think it has quite severe implications when it comes to media freedom and censorship, but I absolutely take your point and think that association and that sort of commonality between that experience and the experience of an Uber driver and also how we were in a privileged position where we could use outside means and not just rely on this sort of anonymous chat bot and go outside those formal processes to get reinstated. I think that's all super important things to keep in mind. Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think that the thing about censorship, it's also about how it's so easy to get excluded from these essential platforms, because these platforms don't carry themselves with the scrutiny and the regulation that infrastructures that do provide these services should be. And that's because they are falsely classified as tech companies and understood as tech companies when they're actually much bigger and much more ubiquitous than that.