A screenshot from "P.S. Gay Car," which was taken down by YouTube for suspected bot traffic.
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Fortress of Attitude denies the use of robots on their videos, writing in a recent blog post about their struggles that “our group policy is that robots are scary and will someday enslave us all, and therefore we do not engage in any activities involving robots—especially activities such as artificially inflating Youtube views.”What makes this even crazier, says Stango, is that every time his video was featured on a news site, you could see the traffic spike in the Google Analytics data provided to him by Google on his YouTube channel. By Google’s own data, all the views are all accounted for - “you could very easily trace where the views came from” said Stango - with no mysterious robot views from Argentina or Romania.Spalding thinks Stango’s video was “accidentally flagged” as having robot views during Google’s “clean-up of robo-generated traffic” that began in December 2012. During the sweep, hundreds of YouTubers who never used robots were affected. (Out of all the cases New Media Rights heard, they chose to represent Stango’s because his traffic sources were so clearly laid out.) One of three things happened in the December sweep, explained Spalding: Either “your account got banned, you got a form letter, or you got what Pat got, which is 'we’re taking down your video.'” This process was all automated, of course.Much of how YouTube handles its day-to-day business is actually automated, from responses to community flags on inappropriate content to copyright enforcement. Last year, when NASA landed its newest Mars Rover on the red planet, a video of the stream was mistakenly removed by a false copyright claim from Scripps News Service. Motherboard's Alex Pasternack spoke with Bob Jacobs, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Communications, at the time and he explained false copyright claims happen “once a month” for the space agency, because everything from imagery to music can be flagged.YouTube is a digital giant–72 hours of content uploaded every minute onto the video sharing site–so it makes sense that it would rely on robots to do some of its work. Stango, however, doesn’t think that’s an adequate excuse to having absolutely no humans in the process.There's an absurdist irony in bots answering queries about the actions of bots taking down videos whose view counts were allegedly inflated by a third party of bots, but that's the future we're in. Still, Stango says Google “owes its users some level of customer service,” especially when you consider that without a healthy community of video creators, YouTube would never have become the third-largest site on the web.