I agree there's a good chance that's true, but probably not because somebody at YouTube flagged the word 'transgender'. But instead by some convoluted second-order effects of whatever algorithm they're using to automatically flag stuff.
IMHO, that doesn't matter much. Algorithms shouldn't be above the law. If a company creates an algorithm, it needs to make sure it follows the law. Companies use this excuse on ML we don't know why it is doing what it is doing is BS. Machine Learning, despite what the popular media might like to say, is not sentient AI. It does not have free will. It does what it is trained to do. It is predictable. It is testable. I understand that AI allows companies to chew through quantities of data that would cost thousands of human operators' salaries otherwise. But if the company gets to reap the profits of the AI, then it needs to take responsibility for it too.
You can justify any shitty thing by saying "It's just business."
I think we all know it's a business move. Doesn't make it right. When Milton Friedman said "the business of business is business" or something to that effect, he was wrong.
You can. It is their business to satisfy their customers (advertisers) and the advertisers don't want to be seen in a political light or near hateful comments and trolls. It is totally understandable why they would do it.
Totally understandable. If you have no sense of social responsibility.
Edit: On second thought, you may have a point, and this is more nuanced than I thought. There are a lot of topics advertisers don't want to be associated with (violence or terrorism) and we expect youtube to filter these out. We don't expect the advertiser to filter these on their own.
If you ask me, transgenderism is not anything like violence or terrorism, in terms of its controversy. But I realize some people disagree.
I think it's impossible for youtube to accomplish this without having some kind of political stance. That would piss people off. But considering Google has already stated they are pro LGBT, you'd think they would avoid penalizing the transgender videos this way. Let advertisers filter out transgender videos on their own.
There is no substitute for judgement, however. Youtube can't be impartial.
> We use machine learning to evaluate content against our advertiser guidelines. Sometimes our systems get it wrong, which is why we’ve encouraged creators to appeal. Successful appeals ensure that our systems get better and better
There's been bad press about this for months now. People with conservative viewpoints claimed to be facing similar issues
The cost of a false positive seems extremely high. Why would they depend on ML for high influencers?
As Facebook learned recently, people aren't willing to give much benefit of the doubt to solutions involving human review. Can you imagine a creator saying "I don’t think YouTube is doing this on purpose", as they did in this article, if some actual Youtube employee had clicked a button to demonetize?
I love how they try to shift blame onto an algorithm as if they didn't write that algorithm themselves and don't have 100% control over the algorithm.
"Guys we're not bigoted, it's just the algorithm that we created and currently control that's bigoted! Blame the algorithm not us! It's not like we created it and can change it any time to be less racist or anything!"
Ya, under 100k subs or some sort of viewer metric should be a completely different system. Perhaps a similar system to twitter, who uses hybrid components for different scale users.
The ones that stay monetized are getting targeted by anti-lgbt group advertisements. Which of course spawns "let's react" videos, which are hilarious in a life gives you lemons kind of way.
> We use machine learning to evaluate content against our advertiser guidelines.
This means Google violates civil rights law by maintaining a list of phrenological behavior based on racial, sexual, and demographic data.
Advertisers choosing videos to show up in also means selecting which videos to filter out. This means Google has a list of acceptable behavior for blacks, gays, and women to perform such filtering.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe sexual orientation is a protected class. Are there other statuses which would make this behavior illegal? Obviously IANAL and don't really know what I'm talking about here.
Perhaps, though they are lumping in "sexual [orientation]" with race and gender. I also unaware of any cases of potential violations against a protected class.
Could it be that other parties are flagging the content on a mass level? I would say this is the same for Conservative stuff too. Offended parties sending in complaints by the bucketload?
The only reasonable thing would be to only restrict things that are actively breaking the law. Of course, that runs into breaking whose law, but I don't want to digress.
Maybe filter your advertising platform better, if your advertisors have oppinions. That's not maybe the easiest thing, but YouTube has hundreds of people to throw at forced requirements, and I'm a single person at a small company that gets these requests daily, and my give-a-damn is busted
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] threadI think we all know it's a business move. Doesn't make it right. When Milton Friedman said "the business of business is business" or something to that effect, he was wrong.
Edit: On second thought, you may have a point, and this is more nuanced than I thought. There are a lot of topics advertisers don't want to be associated with (violence or terrorism) and we expect youtube to filter these out. We don't expect the advertiser to filter these on their own.
If you ask me, transgenderism is not anything like violence or terrorism, in terms of its controversy. But I realize some people disagree.
I think it's impossible for youtube to accomplish this without having some kind of political stance. That would piss people off. But considering Google has already stated they are pro LGBT, you'd think they would avoid penalizing the transgender videos this way. Let advertisers filter out transgender videos on their own.
There is no substitute for judgement, however. Youtube can't be impartial.
There's been bad press about this for months now. People with conservative viewpoints claimed to be facing similar issues
The cost of a false positive seems extremely high. Why would they depend on ML for high influencers?
Well, YT, you do.
It’s just in your ML model. You let a pattern recognition algorithm create the list for you.
(Yes it’s not quite just a list, but still.)
"Guys we're not bigoted, it's just the algorithm that we created and currently control that's bigoted! Blame the algorithm not us! It's not like we created it and can change it any time to be less racist or anything!"
Lmfao
This means Google violates civil rights law by maintaining a list of phrenological behavior based on racial, sexual, and demographic data.
Advertisers choosing videos to show up in also means selecting which videos to filter out. This means Google has a list of acceptable behavior for blacks, gays, and women to perform such filtering.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe sexual orientation is a protected class. Are there other statuses which would make this behavior illegal? Obviously IANAL and don't really know what I'm talking about here.
Sorry but you're the one running the ML algo. And if it fucks up, you're responsible.
Maybe filter your advertising platform better, if your advertisors have oppinions. That's not maybe the easiest thing, but YouTube has hundreds of people to throw at forced requirements, and I'm a single person at a small company that gets these requests daily, and my give-a-damn is busted