Green Tech!
Even social media giant and verified celebrity Lady Gaga tangles with occasional social media and index bans?
[Jul. 15]
Going green by using social networking as your primary from of branding and marketing in lieu of killing trees with print advertising ain’t always easy. At least that is the moral of the green news story that Lady Gaga and her recent ban from YouTube is teaching. The famously LGBT friendly humanitarian Mother Monster was likely surprised to see her video account was suspended on Thursday July 14. The suspension notice read that the ban on her account was allegedly over “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s copyright policy.” Um, in what universe is it that an originator of content gets banned from a social media site or even a search engine for producing original content that people love to copy regularly?
By late in the day on Thursday, the Gaga video account had been restored on the social network, much to the overwhelming delight and cheers from Gaga’s Little Monsters fan following.
So why the mixup? In a standard move, YouTube staffers declined to comment. According to the website, one that is owned and controlled by Google, it is standard YouTube policy to remove user accounts entirely after 3 (yes, only three) copyright infringement violations [intentional, unintentional, or internet troll reported verifiable claims or not]. There is just one problem… Lady Gaga writes her own music, sings her own songs, stars in her own videos, and unless there is some unknown celebrity secret behind the scenes stories about her video producers or music company backers not wanting her to self promote, she IS the copyright owner of the content.
Now, regarding that claim, there are some very real ways a company could claim they own the right to her videos. Industry rumor reports are intimating that so-called last straw” infringing video that got her account popped by the bots video clip of Gaga’s live perfromance on the Asian company Fuji TV. Her publicist and record label Interscope have neither confirmed or denied the celeb gossip reports that the star is mixed up in a mess involved with the social media promotion of her appearance there — but Gaga, as the wise Mother Monster she is, has been very cautions to keep control of her approved photo released and press. As such, it is likely if the other company was trying to claim rights to share her content exclusively, her lawyers will snuff the claim in such a way that is expedient. Moreover, Google’s YouTube company was right to reactivate her account — both because she is the subject and because without her there would BE NO ORIGINAL CONTENT. It is the symbiosis between website or user accounts that provide content to the sites to crawl and the sites being there to index content and the ads placed in between that make the Internet work well.
If you want to follow the verified YouTube account, “ladygagaofficial,” is one of two for Lady Gaga. However, despite it’s growing popularity, the social media platfrom itself — unlike Gaga, is not the only game in town. The Hollywood star celeb singer also has a Vevo account, which has more than 1.6 billion views. Nothing to scoff at in terms of popularity. What’s more, she generally debuts her music videos on that platfrom. It is co-owned by the company Universal Music Group and industry giant Sony Entertainment, and while Vevo is a stand alone music video platfrom, it also distributes videos on YouTube.
That is part of the new weakness in the Google and social media search findings. Because the computers are not yet able to tie together who original content providers are and if multiple websites are sharing similar infromation but in a variety of ways that all appeal to specific niche audiences or visual learners affected by the aesthetic layout of platfroms, the spiders and bots are struggling to identify which sites or site accounts stay on top, who sinks in results findings, and what companies or individuals find themselves banned from the search ranks entirely. Like Lady Gaga.
To resolve the issue, Google could easily implement an automated reconsideration request that allowed banned users to quickly appeal if they found themselves penalized by having the automated feature include a laundry list of items that triggered the ban or penalty. Obviously, if and account was suspended and left uncorrected for X amount of time without contact from a webmaster, banning the site entirely and forcing it to begin from scratch would be prudent. However, no such notification that includes a checklist for a user or webmaster like Gaga’s team has been created by the minds of Google or YouTube (or Twitter and Facebook for that matter) yet. Hopefully, such a re-inclusion request process that directly points to where users can improve is coming soon to the Internet giants, one that can constantly be tweaked as the net grows to help keep daily business and a paperless economy flowing.
[Internet advertising on websites that produce intellectual property helps keep people from turning to the promotion of junk mail, newsprint papers, or toxic glossy hand-out literature and hard copy magazines. Such paper based products not only kill trees, their production grossly pollutes the environment, so their use should be avoided as much as possible in the 21st century if one believes in green tech advocacy.]
As such, applause goes to the Gaga little monsters for causing the powers that be to reconsider the inclusion of Lady Gaga’s video channel in a matter of hours rather than forcing her off grid for an extended period of time. Applause also goes to the team for fixing the likely spambot error with a manual override quickly. By fixing the celebrity oops, they also kept their own opportunity open to continue to derive adsense revenue from the user-generated content while providing quality search results to those interested in the music mogul’s niche.
SOURCE: Celebrity banned from YouTube Monster mistake?