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Truthiness is scarce at Viacom and YouTube this week
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Surprisingly, most of the mainstream reporters who interviewed me about breaking the story Friday, October 27th that Comedy Central had issued copyright takedown notices to YouTube wanted me to verify that any videos were actually taken down at all. More recently, some media blogs are asking whether I started an unsubstantiated rumor based only on the two takedown notices that I received directly.
Tonight, using the Google Search API, I wrote a short PHP script to tabulate content from YouTube that is present or missing based on top search hits from Google’s search engine. I’ve posted my results at Idealog .
While not entirely scientific or entirely representative, my top line results show that 349 of 764 or 46 percent of the top Daily Show clips in Google search results are missing and broken, 190 of 537 or 35 percent of the Colbert Report results and 138 of 594 or 23 percent of South Park results. So, while you can still find 2,723 videos at YouTube.com of the Daily Show, 881 videos of the Colbert Report and 6,660 of South Park, the percentage of broken links from Google’s top results show that there either has been an ongoing take down or a large recent takedown effort at YouTube.