Tag Archives: disciplined by bots

complaints, controversies, social media, videos, YouTube

I didn’t know I was a producer of dirty content…

This morning has gotten off to a very interesting start. I woke up at about 6:00 AM, because Bill decided to take today off work. He has to go on a TDY next week, starting Monday night. Since Monday is Labor Day, he decided he’d enjoy today at home with me.

I was a little hesitant to check my iPad because I was afraid of waking up to a shitstorm on Facebook. Yesterday, I shared a somewhat controversial post that appeared on George Takei’s Facebook page. A minor argument ensued, with no final resolution. I wasn’t wanting to continue arguing about it today, and I was a little worried that other people might have chimed in on that controversial post while I was sleeping. It was a relief to see that there was only one other comment on that post, and it wasn’t contentious.

Then I went to my notifications and saw that I had one from YouTube. There was also an email from them. Behold:

There’s more, but you get the gist.

Mind you… this is not the first time I’ve had content age-restricted. For some reason, the bots seem to go wild in August and September, as that is the time of year when I tend to get these notices. Two years ago, YouTube dinged a video I had posted in 2015 called “Big Pink Dildo”. It was a parody of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” that I did in response to a bunch of uptight military spouses who were upset because someone on a Facebook yard sale page had posted a joke listing for her used pink sex toy. It looked like maybe the thing had been co-opted by the family dog, though.

I thought it was crazy that YouTube age-restricted the parody, since there was no swearing in it, and only one photo of the toy, placed at the very end of the video. Most of the video is black, with my singing over it. Also, the video has been up for years and only has a few hundred hits on it. I appealed, but they declined to remove the restriction. I got over it and moved on with my life. 😉

None of the other videos I’ve posted have ever come close to being “adult content” of any kind. Most of my videos consist of vacation pictures or of me singing a song. When I saw the title of the video that was tagged, I had forgotten what it was about. I clicked the link to check it out, and was flabbergasted to see that it was a video I made in mid August 2016, when Bill and I visited a “Barefoot Park” in Dornstetten, a Black Forest hamlet in Germany.

Barefoot Parks are where people take off their shoes to experience nature and feel different things with their feet. There are a number of them in Germany. They are health promoting, fun, and absolutely kid friendly! But furthermore, I don’t think there were really any kids featured in my video. It’s not even three minutes long, and consists of four clips– Bill cranking a machine; Bill bouncing on a trampoline; Bill walking on a balance beam like log; and Bill walking through mud until he falls on his ass.

We didn’t even curse in the video, although doing so would have been perfectly understandable. So I was puzzled as to why YouTube’s bots decided to age restrict the video, especially since it has about 166 views as of today. It’s hardly a high profile performer that presents a danger to anyone. In fact, it shows what can happen at the Barefoot Park if you aren’t careful when you walk in the mud… You can end up literally hitting mud!

The only potential infraction I could come up with was “child safety”. Below is what YouTube says about that…

But this is a big stretch… Also, I never tag my videos as “made for kids”.

I clicked the child safety link, and then realized that my video is not at all like their description of one that would be dangerous to children.

Hmmm… again, there’s more, but my video isn’t at all like what they’re describing.

I thought about just ignoring the restriction and going on with my life, since no one watches it, anyway. But it’s one of my rare uploads that doesn’t have a copyright restriction, and besides, the bots just plain got it wrong this time. So I asked for an appeal. Happily, within a few minutes, I got one, and the restriction was removed.

I’m glad the appeal was quick and painless, but I’d love to know why it was hit by bots in the first place!

The stuff I put on YouTube is nothing like what I write in this blog. Likewise, my travel blog is mostly not the same kind of content this blog is. I’d say this blog is more “mature themed” and potentially R rated. My YouTube channel is mostly PG rated, at most. And certainly, aside from my “Big Pink Dildo” parody, there’s nothing there there that would make anyone blush.

Ironically, the other day I considered doing a cover of Red Peters’ “The Spelling Song”, which is a bit profane. But I decided not to do that, precisely because I didn’t want to get an email like the one above. If you don’t know the magic of “The Spelling Song”, here’s a link. I warn you, though… it’s kind of raunchy, especially if you know how to spell.

I see it’s not age-restricted here…

Anyway… I do try to be a good YouTube citizen. If you’re curious, below is the now non age-restricted video that prompted today’s blog post… It’s really dirty stuff, alright… LITERALLY!

Me and my “dirty” content! It’s a danger to children, only if their parents are cleanliness obsessed.

The best part about the above video was the round of German laughter when Bill hit the mud with a resounding splat. Maybe that could be considered a form of bullying… I don’t know. Fortunately, we all had the fortitude to recover from that incident without any lasting psychological ill effects.

By the way, after I got my video unrestricted, I visited YouTube, where I was immediately confronted by a video about a 17 year old girl, one month from turning 18, being arrested for running away from a group home. There’s a lot of swearing, screaming, and manhandling into handcuffs and police cars. As of today, that video is not age-restricted. I wonder if it ever will be. Surely that content is more frightening to children than Bill’s spill in German mud…

Or how about the scary news content about Donald Trump, wanting to get rid of the Constitution so he can run the United States his way? I watched a news video about a Georgia legislator who warns of another “Civil War” this morning. He literally speaks of getting out his rifle to “defend” the country from Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, who is a threat to our country, as he sees it. But that video was unrestricted, as far as I can tell. My seven year old video, on the other hand… much too dirty for kids to see. 😉

Ah well… all’s well that ends well. I’ll try to clean up my act, going forward.

Standard
social media, Twitter

I just quit Twitter… and it feels so good!

I wasn’t planning to write another post today, but I decided it was necessary to share the news that I quit Twitter. This is mainly because I have a regular reader who communicates with me via Twitter’s DM system, and she may want to know what happened. I’m sure most of the rest of you don’t give a shit that I shitcanned Twitter, and that’s fine. I never had much of a following there, and found it to be mostly a toxic waste dump, anyway. And although I got an account in 2009 or so, I almost never used it until this year, when I was tweeting at USAA… another outfit I’d like to ditch at some point soon.

So what happened?

I recently loosened up my Twitter settings, because after some rather unpleasant sessions a few months ago, I found having Twitter so “locked down” was boring. But I didn’t like it wide open, either, because the platform is truly full of people who are apparently completely vile and uncivilized. So, I was marginally happier with a less restricted Twitter, but I was still seeing tweets from unhinged MAGA folks. Frankly, I was appalled at what was allowed to be posted on Twitter, and Elon Musk just bought it, vowing to bring back “free speech”. Meanwhile, he’s also talking about charging a subscription fee for some users, which will probably become all users at some point. He says he wants the company to be less reliant on advertising revenue.

Well, given that there’s so much vitriol and nastiness there already, I can’t imagine wanting to pay for the privilege of reading someone’s MAGA bullshit. Besides, I didn’t find the platform to be very engaging. When I had it wide open, I mostly interacted with people who were rude, insulting, and abusive. When I used privacy settings, it became boring. I mean, yes, I could read tweets and laugh at some of the witticisms and memes. But I didn’t feel connected or engaged, and save for a few “stars” who were regularly entertaining, I mostly found people on Twitter to be obnoxious… even worse so than they are on Facebook.

And then, it happened. Today, I got “disciplined” by Twitter’s bots. If you’ve read some of my recent rants about Facebook’s annoying bot overlords, you know that this is a feature that I find extremely irritating and useless. Bots tend to crack the moderation whip with a lack of context… not unlike KFC’s bots who invited Germans to celebrate “Kristallnacht” with some fried chicken. Kristallnacht, as you probably know, isn’t a day that is to be celebrated by anyone. But it is a noted day in Germany, and the bots were programmed to push out notifications on noted days in Germany… and apparently, no one notified the AI system that it’s not appropriate to invite Germans to eat fried chicken on a notoriously tragic day in history. Kristallnacht is the day in November 1938 when massacres against Jewish people in Germany and Austria were initiated. Many people consider Kristallnacht the beginning of the Holocaust. So… this is a pretty terrible public relations SNAFU for KFC.

What got me “disciplined”?

Some guy posted a tweet along the lines of “I’m voting for Trump and there’s nothing you can do about it.” My initial thought was to tell him I don’t care who he votes for… but then it occurred to me that by responding to him, I was indicating that I do care. So I posted that he might as well pour sulfuric acid on his genitals, too. Note, I didn’t invite him to do it. I didn’t write that I wanted him to do it. The phrase “might as well”, according to the dictionary, means “to suggest doing something, often when there is nothing better to do”. Like, for instance, when my second grade teacher used to moan, “I might as well be talking to the moon,” when she was annoyed by our class’s lack of attention and talkativeness. She didn’t mean she was actually going to talk to the moon. She meant that talking to the moon would be just as ineffective as trying to talk to us. Likewise, I didn’t mean to imply that the guy should actually pour sulfuric acid on his genitals. I meant to say that it would be just as effective to do that as it is to vote for Donald Trump, who is definitely not the future of Republican politics anymore. In my opinion, obviously. I was being facetious.

I will admit my tweet was vulgar and crass. It was not nearly as awful as some of the tweets I’ve seen posted by others, or even directed at me, personally, before I blocked a bunch of people. It didn’t sit well with me to immediately get an email from Twitter letting me know that they had locked my account for twelve hours (it was the first time it ever happened). I was even less impressed that the email directed me to “proceed to Twitter” to fix the “issues” with my account. I was invited to appeal if I wanted to, but they wouldn’t unlock my account while the tweet was examined. What really annoyed me, though, was that in order to start the clock on the ban, I had to give them my “real” phone number so they could send me a code and verify my identity.

Um… how ’bout you fuck off, Twitter? I am not your ass monkey.

Just to get into my account to deactivate it, I had to give them my phone number. And then they wanted me to delete the tweet, so I could start the process of “learning my lesson” with a twelve hour ban on posting. I don’t post very much, anyway, so it’s not like the ban is much of a hardship. That wasn’t the point of why I quit.

Like I said, I’ve about had it with bot style discipline, especially when I read reports of Elon Musk totally fucking up the company the day after he buys it, firing a bunch of people and then asking some to, temporarily, come back, indicating to the world that the rules won’t apply to him, and wanting to charge a subscription fee. I figure Twitter is going to go down in flames soon, anyway. So I’m proud to join the ranks of Sara Bareilles and Whoopi Goldberg and the rest of the woke celebrities who are fed up with Twitter. I suppose I could have just not bothered to log in again, but I figured that would just prompt Twitter to send me emails. I suspect that if enough people do what I did, they won’t survive for long. Elon Musk has already said the company is in a death spiral from a financial standpoint. Pissing off casual users is one way for Twitter to hasten its extinction.

Leaving Twitter might make it harder to watch Ex, but you know what? That may not be a bad thing, either. I’m always going to be getting updates about her, regardless, whether or not I want them. As long as younger daughter is talking to us and her mother, we’ll continue to hear about her antics. And most of what she posts just makes me cringe and causes anxiety.

So here’s to one less social media platform to keep up with… I’m down with being a troglodyte. Why not? Alexis, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry to bail… Maybe we can find another way to chat. I’m sure there are options aplenty. And the bonus is, I don’t have to be there when Donald Trump is allowed to tweet again, with all the other losers. 😉

Standard
controversies, Police, true crime, Twitter

The art of “being real”…

Happy Tuesday, everybody. Bill got online last night and told me that, happily, he expects to be back in Wiesbaden at around noon on Thursday. He won’t be HOME at that time, of course. He has to turn in his rental car and check in at the office. But it does look like he won’t be stuck hanging out in Bavaria all day. I, of course, will be at the vet’s office on Thursday morning, sitting with Arran as he gets chemo infusion number two. Hopefully, it will continue to cause very minimal side effects for him. The difference in him between this week and last week is incredible. Too bad human chemo isn’t like this. He’s getting enough drugs to make him feel better, rather than trying to eradicate the lymphoma. This will make his glide to the Rainbow Bridge much easier, I hope…

Other than doing my usual chores and taking care of the dogs, life continues to plod along for me, here in Germany. I spent yesterday watching some disturbing raw body cam footage taken during arrests. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by the cop videos. I think it’s because they offer a look at real life in America… stuff we don’t usually see ourselves every day, but have seen dramatized on TV. Body cams are a game changer in law enforcement. Watching the videos allows me to see the frailties of people– not just the people being arrested, but the cops as well.

I was raised to respect the police, even though I grew up in a place where the cops weren’t necessarily much better than the people they were arresting. Now that we have technology, though, cops are somewhat more accountable for their behavior than they used to be. And it’s kind of disturbing to see and read about cops who do bad things and get busted because they were on video. Case in point, yesterday I watched a video out of Jacksonville, Florida involving Brittany Williams Moore, a young Black woman who got very angry at a cop who had parked his cruiser in her driveway to check emails. She threw a spoon at him. It had a green substance on it, later determined to be face cream.

This incident went a lot further than it needed to go.

The cop then proceeded to arrest her for assault. The whole thing blew up to the point at which the woman, who weighed maybe 95 pounds soaking wet, was manhandled into handcuffs. Somehow, in the violence of her arrest, she got hit in the mouth and broke some teeth. The May 2020 incident happened during daylight hours, and it was nightfall before she was finally taken to jail. The poor woman was cuffed the whole time. The charges against her were eventually dropped; and now she’s suing the police department. Alejandro Carmona, the cop she originally had the altercation with turned out to be a pretty bad dude, too. He was later arrested for selling sexually explicit pictures of a minor.

Now… I don’t necessarily approve of the way Moore behaved. Instead of speaking calmly to the cops, she screamed at them, threw a spoon, and at one point, kicked one of the officers. However, I can understand why she was frightened, given what happened to George Floyd in 2020, and Ahmaud Arbery, which I believe Carmona even made reference to as he was explaining himself to Brittany’s relatives. I heard the cops call Moore misogynistic names like “bitch”. I get that the cops have stressful jobs, but that kind of language is not acceptable, professional, or necessary.

In another video, I watched a much more professional police officer deal with a young woman who was not very cooperative at all, as she was stopped for riding her bike the wrong way down a road. She was similarly arrested, but as far as I know, she wasn’t injured. I didn’t hear the cop use filthy language, and her teeth survived the situation intact. That situation happened in Oregon, though, and I think there’s a lot less stupidity in the Pacific Northwest than in the Deep South. Not that I don’t love my southern heritage, mind you. I just think a lot of people down there are still living in the early 20th century.

Again… this went way further than it needed to go.

Watching these videos shows me how easy it is to get arrested in the United States, the so-called land of the free. Also, it reminds me that the longer I stay in Europe, the more insufferable Americans seem to me. It just seems like so many people are uncooperative, unpleasant, and just flat out uncivilized. You can see it in any comment section, particularly when they involve politics. It seems like there are two sides of America that hate each other. It’s sad to me, because it wasn’t always like that. Or… maybe I just didn’t notice it because I lived there.

I think the body cams show “real” America, and it ain’t a flattering picture to me. But then, I’m sure that only the most extreme videos wind up on YouTube. On the other hand, there are a whole lot of body cam channels, meaning there are a lot of videos. And they show people at their worst. I don’t envy what cops have to deal with on a daily basis, but I also think that cops can turn into Olympic class assholes after too much time on the job. Check out this dude from Arkansas. Actually, Bill and I had a good laugh at this guy, even though he called the guy he was chasing a “motherfucker”.

This one is straight out of a Police Academy movie. “I’m gonna Tase you, motherfucker!”

I did have a laugh. I admit it. He’s not very professional, but damn, he’s funny! I don’t think I’d feel that way if he was arresting me, though. Another thing these videos do is remind me that the United States is lacking charm in a lot of areas.

Moving on…

I know I vented about Ex yesterday, but she keeps giving me more material to work with, to include today’s featured photo, which she retweeted (and by the way, she ain’t it). I mentioned yesterday that she presents a “false self” to the world, right? And I come to that conclusion, because the shit she puts on Twitter is so opposite to what people who have actually had to deal with her in person have experienced and reported. But she’s always smoothing the edges of her facade with fake bullshit, and today is no exception. Behold:

Bwahahaha… Ex doesn’t like being around “fake people”. She should stay away from mirrors.
I’ve seen this reaction before… it was when a certain “narcissistic type” from Epinions first met my husband in person. Her tongue came out and she started panting, probably because she could smell the empath pheromones. I think Ex is much the same. This dude better stay far away.

Here’s the funny thing. Maybe I’m unusual, but I don’t have crushes anymore. I don’t want to be with anyone but my husband. I’m not comparing other men to Bill. He gives me all I need and then some. I mean, yes, I notice when someone is attractive, but I’m not interested in them sexually… not even for a hug and a dance. But, that’s just me… I may just be very lucky. Again, as much as I despise Ex, I am glad she dumped Bill. He’s just the right guy for me. She did me a huge favor. I think “real people” should stay away from Ex. She damages them with her lies.

And finally…

Last night, I was about to post a comment on Facebook, when I got an automated message from a bot warning me that my comment looked like ones that had been removed for violating their community standards. It was a comment directed at Marjorie Taylor (Greene), who is a highly divisive, obnoxious, and polarizing political candidate and public figure who would never deign to read the comments about her on Facebook. Meanwhile, they have no problem allowing people to offend the rank and file with all manner of insults. Once again, I am shocked that I’m at a point in my life at which I allow myself to be “disciplined by bots”. I really do need to find another outlet for my angst. But that’s why I blog, right?

Well, it’s time to strip the bed and do another household chore. Have a nice Tuesday. I’ll probably see y’all tomorrow.

Standard