It doesn't. LGBTQ is a category that gets special cased in order to block homophobic creators. But it mainly just blocks pro-LGBTQ creators because the homophobic creators are more likely to speak in dog whistles that the blocking algorithms don't understand, whereas the pro-LGBTQ creators speak frankly and quote homophobic speech in order to comment on it.
If this is the case, that's tragic in the dramatic sense -- LGBT groups fighting algorithms that are protecting them, because they can't appreciate the unseen danger prevented.
I also imagine the 'algorithms' are a moving target, which makes me think this should be settled quickly if not dismissed, as Google tries to correct this. But certainly a lawsuit should bump this up the engineering priority list.
> If this is the case, that's tragic in the dramatic sense -- LGBT groups fighting algorithms that are protecting them, because they can't appreciate the unseen danger prevented.
I don't think the article or GP are saying this. The algorithms, while ostensibly well-intentioned, are actually having the opposite effect — stifling the speech of the LGBTQ+ community while allowing their harassers to operate mostly unchecked.
You would have human review of a random sample to test effectiveness. In fact, this is usually how the ML algorithms are constructed in the first place, e.g. supervised learning. So yes I think they should have this.
Okay, but why do you think the numbers look anything like that? Conversely, if they block 5% of hate speech but are 40% false positives, then the algorithms are clearly not working. We have no reason to assume they're effective, and in fact this lawsuit contends that they're actually harmful.
A lot of these suers are just making videos of sex toys[1] and other stuff that is very well known to be sensitive stuff despite the irony of all pop culture being about sex. This lawsuit has nothing to stand on, even people making videos of electronics get striked, harassed, deplatformed. They just assume it's because of lgbt, but it's standard YouTube.
That is a rather disgusting accusation to make, and one that eimultaneously indicates a political bias and presumes that automated moderation decisions are always correct.
One of the big problems with machine learning algorithms at this time is that they have a hard time figuring out intent. A lot of the terms used by the LGBTQ community, have been used by homophobic people as slurs. Yes it is great that the community is reclaiming those words, but current ML tech has no way of distinguishing when those terms are being used by the community in a respectful manner from where they are used by homophobic people to promote hate.
The problem may be that we cannot depend on machine learning algorithms to do an acceptable job of moderation, and that a lot more humans need to be hired as moderates. However, doing that really changes the economics of the platform
What about crowdsourcing efforts? Why are user flags insufficient?
Why can't there be a balance between full automation and human review, such as an appeal system or 'whitelist' program? Are the economics really the obstacle, or is it more of a corporate stance towards not adjudicating subjective controversies to avoid liability under the Communications Decency Act Section 230?
The problem with crowd sourcing, especially in the LGBT space, is it's really vulnerable to brigading. Give particularly bored and hatful people a bat to shut down channels they don't like and things go south fast.
Yeah, it's a good thing those brigading actions never go the other way, though, right? That would be wrong and immature and just plain hypocritical...Sure glad it never happens!
Off topic, give that the tread is about an idea for protecting minority groups largely unserved by the algorithm.
I fail to see how a "but both sides" proclamation leads to any progress (other than maintaining the status quo which is awful good for a select group of people).
>What about crowdsourcing efforts? Why are user flags insufficient?
Because this will devolve into different groups flagging their opponents' videos. This will especially hurt the voices of minorities and other vulnerable populations.
What about attaching a 'reputation' score to the flagger? E.g. something like:
- if there are sufficient flags, trigger a moderator review
- flaggers who correctly flagged content get +1 score or -1 score if not
that would make it harder for people to consistently flag content maliciously. Like age-old moderation systems such as calling 911 or police. If you abuse calling 911, you can get fined.
I imagine this has been tried before, and am genuinely curious why this is worse than flawed ML.
Yep, I believe there is a way for sure. YouTube can evaluate users by how likely it is that their flag results in long term removal of a video. If a user cries wolf too many times or flags videos later marked as not controversial at all, then that user probably should not have flag powers.
Have a look at some of the organised voting/flagging campaigns originating from *chans. Those can range from just manual action to automated scripts + account takeovers. Also if you can both post comments and flag them from a different account - free karma.
This concept reminds me of the “meta-moderation” that happened/happens in SlashDot. It’s good to have a second order effect to damp down excessive fluctuations in your first order mechanisms.
They have far from tried everything. It's true, they have tried one variant of the "just anoint the power users and be done with it" model, which with a few variations is used on everything from reddit to wikipedia 4chan to stack overflow.
But it didn't work. YouTube is too diverse and too popular, it has no clear "naturally" anointable moderator types.
People were asking such questions since at least 1997. Slashdot had the (imo, great) idea of rotating various voting privileges randomly. Raph Levien's Advogato used a network of trusted users and certification which was designed to be resistant against attack. Kuro5hin also had some novel ideas about what was needed to create robust high quality discussion (which turned out to be an obvious failure, but potentially something one could learn from).
But at some point, sites decided that experimenting with stuff like that was unimportant compared to just bringing in more users. Letting everyone vote all the time obviously has huge issues, but it's emotionally satisfying to downvote, so it keeps users engaged.
The people most prone to dominate the site with voting on everything and coordinating efforts, are also the ones which will complain most loudly if they don't dominate the discussion. So just give them what they want.
It worked. Experimenting with self-moderation mechanisms went extremely out of fashion.
One thing I dislike about most current voting/moderation systems is they are one dimensional, you get up or down (or in the case of FB they only have a point dimension of upvote).
I'd love a system were you could get 2 vote choices per post and then have 8 or more vote options.
Like/dislike (or agree/disagree), off topic/on topic, factually correct/factually incorrect, funny/hateful, user is a prick/user is a swell guy, or whatever seems like a good option for the discussion forum.
I mean, something can be funny, but off topic at the same time. Or something can be factually correct but the person making the post can be a real jerk about it.
Valve added a "Funny" button to steam reviews, since many top reviews were great jokes but had little substantial in them. I feel like it helped at least somewhat.
I also have a hard time believing the GP that there is no experimentation anymore. Probably a lot more subtle, but you can do a lot of stuff behind the scene without giving feedback to the user. I'd be shocked if there is not at least some form of shadowbanning bad actors.
Read up on the term "brigading"... It's where a bunch of people usually try and sour a ml approval system for nefarious purposes or to enforce their opinions. Happens a lot with lbgtqia and gender issues in gaming. This is a difficult issues made harder because your going against intelligent opponents.
Require verified ID for every uploader. Charge a token amount say $1 for every upload. Only accept uploads from countries with law enforcement that handles bad content and make it clear that law enforcement will be knocking on your door if you upload anything bad. Extend this to commenters.
This is just not a difficult problem, YouTube just doesn’t want to solve it
So not accepting content from the United States then? Bad content != illegal.
If they started with that YouTube wouldn't have gotten off the ground as people wouldn't go with the "unilaterally acts like they are being controlled by the Chinese Government" service.
Isn't a more reasonable solution that the users select content that they are comfortable with, or just leave the platform altogether? YouTube is mine and hundreds of millions of people's favorite site on the internet. If I see content I don't like, I go to other content.
If you really don't like it, don't go on the site. I don't go on almost every site there is. Do you think it is a morally defensible position that your sensibilities be foisted upon other people in such an extreme fashion that you would deny them access to a platform altogether? Don't you think it's at least worth exploring something akin to subreddits, where communities can be moderated to the tastes of the specific tolerances that represent the group?
If you don't like YouTube demonetizing videos, don't upload your videos to the site then. Personally I don't have a problem with people discussing or making videos of whatever they want to.
I don't like the fact that YouTube with the recommender and Autoplay is stochastic mind control. It's programmed to make people watch loads of YouTube, and the mechanism that it has discovered to do that is to nudge people to obsess over fringe things, causing them to watch videos about these things for hours per day.
Did you mean to suggest that I have a problem with YouTube demonetizing? If it bothered me enough so as to make the content I like inaccessible, leaving the site is exactly what I would do. That doesn't mean I think they shouldn't exist, or be able to do what they'd like.
users do select content to watch even if some human trained algorithm recommends it and it's one click to disable autoplay. users have free choice and choice is not limited to what youtube recommends or even youtube.
don't fake act as if youtube is in total control and through that try to control what others get recommended.
Listen. I love YouTube, other people love YouTube. For some reason, the people who don't love YouTube insist on asking YouTube go go away. Just go post your videos on YetAnotherTube where you manually run video review and all that shit.
Yeah it seems the best solutions simply involve users flagging content themselves and being able to see what other people have reported regarding other content
No, Hacker News has a very different demographic than most other sites. I'm not saying flagging isn't a viable model, but it's also not reasonable to pretend it's going to work as well.
> it's time "Big Tech" starts accepting rule of law.
Which laws? I will acknowledge they are gaming the system somewhat by claiming to be an impartial platform (thereby gaining copyright protections) while removing what they find distasteful (but not illegal, so moderation based on opinion). However, it sounds like you believe removing videos that are not illegal in and of themselves is itself illegal. We don't have a law prohibiting that, so I'm not sure to what you are referring. Protecting speech also means protecting the right not to speak.
I'm not referring to "gaming the system", I'm referring to the refusal to hand over appeals to an independent third party, or in some cases flatly refusing appeals. The contentid, moderation and banning decisions should be subject to public scrutiny, they shouldn't be the unassailable result of a backroom process.
it sounds like you believe removing videos that are not illegal in and of themselves is itself illegal.
It's not even on my radar. I'm concerned with the transparency and consistency of the process, not the outcome of individual decisions.
That really isn't rule of law then. While a transparent system would be nice it has about as much to do with rule of law as people playing catch with a glove and baseball instead of a formal game does.
There's nothing in the rule of law that says platforms need to be places with arguments and rebuttals overseen by an arbiter. There's nothing against the law about having a platform filled with petulant children. For the most part, the only things against the law are illegal content (CSE, etc.) and credible and specific threats. Plus maybe some niche cases like providing aid to terrorist groups, distributing confidential documents, and the like.
Yes, tech companies should accept the rule of law. But people need to accept that the rule of law does not preclude running a site full of angry, bigoted idiots with no productive commentary.
You make a good point - even humans have problems with context.
Classic example being that in some areas of the UK, close friends will greet each other with a joking insult. If you don't know they're friends or you don't have the verbal clues to work from (the 'I'm joking' intonation), it looks a lot like the start of a bar fight.
If humans can't get 100% accuracy on this - how can we expect it from business rules, machine learning and so on?
To pinch a line from ST:TNG, "Life is an exercise in exceptions".
> However, doing that really changes the economics of the platform
Getting profit-loss data on Youtube is very difficult. If they are profitable, it can't be by a large amount.
So, if the plan is to have a LOT of real people just trying to monitor YT all day long it will really gut YT's economics, not just change it.
Destin of Smarter Every Day on YT went and talked to FB and their content mod team a few months back [0]. He talked with Rob Leathern of FB's Cyber Security Department. Rob mentiond that they now use ~30k real people to monitor FB. Soon thereafter, The Verge released a scoop on the horrific conditions these 30k people must endure [1] in that job.
YT would likely have to have a proportinate number of people in similar conditions as well, or likely scale up to make things less worse and then have to pay more people.
YT simply cannot possibly afford to have enough people moderate YT.
Likely, this version of YT will become something of a blip in history. All this investment will likely not pan out as the economics of video platforms like YT cannot work as they are today. The real question is what is the subscription amount that does make YT work the way we want it to work?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY_NtO7SIrY Also, watch Destin's body language with Nate Gleischer (~14:30 mark). It's so strange. Something wierd happened in that interview with Nate.
Arguing that there's a right to get ad revenue from your videos is a big stretch. Has that ever come up before in the history of free speech? Classic issues are more like "can we make the newspaper run our ad if we pay the regular rates?"
Google recently won a lawsuit which complained YouTube was putting conservative content in "restricted" mode.[1] Others complain Google is not doing enough to avoid shoving too many extreme videos at people.[2]
It's not just about "not getting ad revenue". It's about accounts getting suspended, homophobic ads running on pro-lgbt videos, and a total lack of enforcement on their harassment policies.
I don't think it's a good idea to quote this asshole when the fuss he's made with his (former) employer resulted in the de monetization of thousands of channels, not only Crowder.
The thing is that a lot of us saw this coming. Whenever people complain about how YouTube needs to remove X type of content, they also need to realize that if YouTube actually starts policing that type of content then there will be false positives. Since YouTube will do it algorithmically, the chance that there will be collateral damage is much higher and YouTube takes a long time to reverse decisions they've already made.
For example, YouTube doesn't want violent content. Just having the word "kill" in your title can get the content demonetized, even if the content is about a video game and properly categorized as such. It's been this way for years.
The point is that they shouldn't do it algorithmically. They need to have guidelines for what type of content is acceptable, and hire people to enforce them.
Then the costs of YouTube probably balloon so high that it doesn't matter for creators whether their videos are demonetized or not, because they aren't going to earn anything from them.
Indeed. Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits.
The rationale “we can’t make as much money as we’d like to if we followed the law” just won’t wash.
> Given the vast wealth Google etc have accumulated its clear that actually, they could afford to do it, and still make good, but not astounding, profits.
They need a citation to prove that Google is rich enough.
According to stats, they were getting 400 hours of new video every minute - and that was back in 2015, it's probably at least 600 nowadays, as more people have been getting online. How much would it cost, with all overheads, to review all that?
The platform economics change in that case. Right now, anybody can upload content for free and it'll appear very quickly on the channel. If you increase the cost per video by mandating human oversight on videos, then YouTube will probably remove the ability for (most) people to upload videos for free.
Imagine a YouTube that cost $10 to upload a video and $1 per comment. The quality of the content would be much higher and the hate speech would drop to zero. Wouldn’t that be preferable for society?
You can afford a camera, a laptop and a high speed connection, but not a token amount to cover moderating your upload? I don’t imagine this being a common scenario.
You can make videos on a computer that you can get for a few hundred dollars. That means you could make 20-30 videos for the same amount of money your equipment cost. That is a prohibitive scenario.
I create content for YouTube and if I had to pay $10 per video then I would never make another YouTube video again. It doesn't matter that there are thousands of people (and tends of thousands+ sometimes), because I simply couldn't afford to spend time and effort to make a video and then spend extra money to share it.
You could make the argument that perhaps society is better off if I don't create content, but there are at least some people that claim they enjoy it.
Why is the existence of YouTube specifically preferable to society? They're just a random company. No one has a right to their business model; if they can't figure out how to do make a video sharing site that doesn't harm people, they should go out of business to make space for someone who can. It's not like YouTube's particular implementation of video sharing is inherently better than Vimeo, PeerTube, or whatever else someone could come up with.
And how exactly is YouTube harming people? The topic at hand is about some people not having access to monetization on YouTube and your proposed solution is to shut down YouTube altogether?
More likely: YouTube will actually look for a way to achieve the same while offloading the costs to someone else. That should be very easy once two other parties are involved, as is the case with copyright stuff. I've never got a good argument against pushing both parties towards arbitration (selected by YT), with the looser picking up the tab.
Video classification by YT is a bit more tricky, since they themselves are one of the involved parties and thus any incentives put in place to improve the system would cost YT.
Google and company has no reason to not do the minimal acceptable amount. They aren't bound by morals, nor do they owe "society" anything. Shareholders also demand more and more profits, and so the result you see is the inevitable outcome, and it can't be any other way. Unless "society" wills it by voting in people who then make new laws to change the outcome.
That would depend on your perspective and your own experiences, I expect.
I found the moderated sci.* and comp.* groups more pleasant for asking questions and giving answers. The alt.* hierarchy had its moments, but mostly it was an exercise in tolerance. Some groups were largely self-moderating, others had such a poor SNR that there was no point putting the time in.
The RIAA/MPAA/BSA raids were only really relevant if you were into pirating copyrighted material.
Evidenced by what? Violence continues to be at or near the lowest point since the mind 20th century. Not just in the US but globally. Economic growth is persisting despite governments uncooperative with the global economy in key countries (like the US). And the internet itself is doing a way better job of policing content today than it was in the 2000s. So why is the internet all of a sudden a problem today, despite key indicators showing that society isn't worse off?
> For example, YouTube doesn't want violent content. Just having the word "kill" in your title can get the content demonetized, even if the content is about a video game and properly categorized as such. It's been this way for years.
I think that this actully is violent content - so this is actually an example where the algorithm worked fine (which does not contradict your argument that there exist false positives - they are just a lot more subtle).
This video [1] about how to do the Charleston dance got demonetized, and there only hypothesis is because it had "Charleston" in the title a mere year-and-a-bit after the Charleston church shooting.
That's not exactly subtle.
I understand there could be other reasons for being demonetised, but it's hard to see what it could be in a very very inoffensive video about how to do a vintage dance.
> Is it really violent content when you're dealing with space ships with no humans or animals on board?
If you are referring to the game example given some posts above: "Killing" means that the respective object was alive before - a property that a space ship with no living beings onboard does not have. So the respective author named and labelled the video improperly.
What if monetized videos can't be viewed without spending "ad bucks"?
To earn "ad bucks", you have to watch an ad. The ad watching takes place in a dedicated ads section of the site, completely independent of all videos.
The vast majority of monetized videos would cost 1 ad buck, so watch one ad. The ad watching is just a giant "watch ad" button. The algorithm goes through all all the info about me and shows me a relevant ad, just like it does already.
If you want to opt out of ad bucks, you can just subscribe to that channel and pay some money. YouTube takes some, the creator gets the rest.
Why not just use this model instead of this politically driven sham that currently exists?
I'm the viewer, I'm the product. My attention has value - so why not let me to worry about what videos I want to support and leave the corporations out of it? YouTube is nothing without the viewer.
If YouTube is a platform and not a publisher, then they should act like the phone company. If I want to call some psychic hotline, just connect the call and take your cut.
It seems to me that some of the most valuable information for an advertiser would be what kind of ads someone will voluntarily choose to watch. Saying they may not convert is like complaining that you can't eat free money.
It would be interesting to advertisers put out competing adds and users having the choice to watch them. Potentially some lesser known names could emerge, because larger companies already have recognition and would be less motivated to create voluntary ads.
Interesting idea. I think people would turn on ad mode and then go to the other room or switch to a different window. I definitely did this when Hulu (I think) offers the option to watch one long commercial instead of several short ones spread throughout the program.
That's probably fine. It drops the number of people who could idle ads from "approximately everyone" to "only people who know how to and want to set up an AHK script/other macro."
4chan famously did an about face post-Gamergate and started moderating heavily. The whole reason we're talking about 8chan now with respect to racial violence is that those folks were all effectively ejected from 4chan.
People generally can get along, it's just in certain countries there is this state pushed divide and conquer [1] that's been going on for way too long.
Have advertisers select on what kind of content they want to appear instead of baring all ads for some creators? I'm sure some advertisers don't mind being associated with mature audience.
1. Don't have "autoplay". Make the user choose. Autoplay is not good for society. "Tip your head back, turn your brain off, and let the algorithm feed you what will keep you here."
2. Give the advertisers more fine grained controls on what types of videos their ads show on. If a stink goes up because Dove doesn't want to be on a PewDiePie video, then that isn't Google's fault. It's Dove's. Let the advertiser add PDP to the blacklist, or make a more exclusive whitelist.
It's like Twitter. "Oh, oh no... how do we stop people seeing all this awful content?"
A) Stop deciding for the user (and therefore the entire website) what is awful
B) Give the user better blocking controls.
However, this won't happen, because Google and Twitter like being able to shape what the "algorithm" shows you, and keeping that control in their hands. This is why the chronological timeline isn't coming back.
Totally cool that it's easy for you! Except that youtube doesn't want to do 1, and for 2, you have to classify the videos to let the advertisers choose, which is exactly the same problem that youtube already has.
I hope after ditching war on drugs, war on sex/nudity will be next.
The censorship artist has to do on their creations just to pass FB moderation is ridiculous. Like they are literally blurring the nipples only. Whom does it help? It just destroys the art.
And I still cannot wrap my head around why nudity is so vilified and violence so glorified. It should be the other way around.
(Moderators will often, but not always, say if they've rescued a page. It's possible this got aggressively flagged off the front page and was rescued.)
Most likely a moderator intervened to stop it being algorithmically kicked off the front page - we're well over the threshold where the flame war detector normally kicks in and downranks submissions (roughly when it has more replies than upvotes).
This mess will only get worse as long as Google insists on trying to fix unsolved social conflicts unilaterally. Google made themselves the primary target when they started to make decisions with large social consequences by fiat. They de facto implemented rule of man[1].
The solution is to not be the sole entity with the power to make decisions about unsolved social issues. Relinquish the power to make decisions about what kind of content is "acceptable" by implementing a rule of law managed by some kind of publicly accountable, transparent governance,
Google (and anybody else that controls something the public relies upon as infrastructure) has a ch9oice: keep the power to make socially-important decisio9ns and accept the blame and responsibility for those decisions, or abandon that power to make the whole mess someone else's problem.
> The solution is to not be the sole entity with the power to make decisions about unsolved social issues. Relinquish the power to make decisions about what kind of content is "acceptable" by implementing a rule of law managed by some kind of publicly accountable, transparent governance
They started making these decisions, because Capitalism.
They're publicly traded. Shareholders demand more profits. Advertising is the vast majority of their Youtube profits. Advertisers are risk averse. No fortune 500 company wants their ad running on white supremacist/violent/sexually explicit content. There is collateral damage, but caring about that only marginally increases profit.
All countries already have laws regulating speech to various degrees of freedom.
Google's need to comply with these laws is part of the genesis for the moderation (e.g. copyright protection, child pornography).
In fact, aggressive government laws for censorship are why Google chooses not to operate in China.
The topic at hand is about monetization of ads -- the "acceptability" of the content is determined by the ad buyers. Not some idea of social good -- it's just the market.
The problem here is about execution not policy. The plaintiffs argue Google's algorithms are not working as intended, not that their intentions are misguided.
Are you suggesting that Google should create additional authority to regulate itself beyond what is legally required and needed for their business? E.g. create some expert panel that can compel Google to censor certain content? That would create more problems than it would solve.
Google was operating in China just fine even with censorship, they left because China started hacking gmail accounts. Some countries have much more rule of law than others.
I think that's an oversimplification of the history. After the email hacking, Google decided to stop censoring in retaliation, and redirected traffic to HK. Eventually, they were blocked, and a few years layer, practically all Google services were blocked. It's not like Gmail was "pulled" from China, the GFW blocks it.
Sooner or later, even if Search was still being censored, the other services would probably be blocked, or have unacceptable conditions imposed on them. The amount of effort to make YouTube and Gmail bend to PRC desires I think would have been a bridge too far. Once Xi Jinping took office especially.
I mean, I've seen super mild videos on Bilibili, where say a Mainland athlete or contestant loses to a Taiwanese one get removed. YouTube would be overloaded quite quickly by 50 cent army takedown requests.
YouTube was already blocked when google left China (to say, it was never in China), gmail was never hosted in China and the hacking occurred on servers in Hong Kong.
There is some pretty crazy stuff on Chinese video sharing platforms, censorship in China is arbitrary and selective. That alone would make it very difficult for a western company to operate a media company in china.
> All countries already have laws regulating speech to various degrees of freedom.
This is mostly unrelated to what I'm talking about.
> The topic at hand is about monetization of ads
That's one (important) aspect of "YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem", but it is not the only issue. As others have mentioned, some of Google's attempts to "fix" the problem have, for example, been used as a weapon by various hate groups to get LGBTQ channels deleted (not just demonetized), or by fascists to remove anti-fascist reporting.
> the "acceptability" of the content is determined by the ad buyers
A big part of the problem is that this isn't actually true in practice. The "acceptability" of content is determined by Google's algorithm. They chose to use an opaque algorithm that they hope implements a very good approximation of what ad buyers consider "acceptable". As we've seen many times over the last few years, this has resulted in problems on all sides, including ad buyers.
> it's just the market
"just" a market ignores that markets are created in an legal environment that can be modified (e.g. adding, modifying, or removing regulations or policies)
> The problem here is about execution not policy.
The problem for Google is that they are choosing to have any policy at all. They are implementing opaque policies and thus are the only party that can be responsible for the resulting mess.
> The plaintiffs argue
Not relevant to my point;' I'm addressing the fundamental problem with Google's management of youtube (or similar platforms), not any particular case.
> Are you suggesting that Google should create additional authority to regulate itself beyond what is legally required and needed for their business?
More or less, yes. If decisions about monetization, video censorship, channel deletion, etc are going to be made, they need to happen through some kind of well-defined due process (aka being "ruled by laws"). Google could define that process unilaterally - which would be a major improvement from the current opaque and arbitrary status quo - but the best option would be to start some type of open/public entity/process for creating and managing what is meant by "due process on youtube".
> create some expert panel that can compel Google to censor certain content?
That already exists! That panel is whatever group inside Google chose the algorithm(s) that has been demonetizing and/or censoring videos over the last few years. I'm suggesting that transparent, publicly accountable panel is better than a hidden panel of unknown Google employees. Yes, both types will have problems, but at least we can see and attempt to fix the panel when it is public.
The problem is that it's basically untenable for Google not to unilaterally try and solve these social problems; activists and the press have been putting pressure on them to do so by leaning on advertisers to pull out, with enough success that the continued existence of YouTube is imperilled if they don't. The other problem is that the activists keep demanding things which will inevitably backfire. For example, lately there's been this campaign for tech companies to eradicate far-right content the same way they did ISIS[1], often accompanied by claims that they avoided this because it'd take out a bunch of right wingers who'd get pissed off. In reality, that sweep ended up banning a bunch of respected analysts who were monitoring and reporting on ISIS's activity[2], and if they did the same to the far right it would result in a lot of anti-fascist campaigners getting banned.
I guess basically what I'm saying is that Google's content moderation problem is really a problem with our society, our politics, and our press.
> I guess basically what I'm saying is that Google's content moderation problem is really a problem with our society, our politics, and our press.
Were those activists you mentioned campaigning to explicitly get respected analysts removed? Not from what I remember.
Lets compare this with a hypothetical: Lets say activists successfully got gov to newly introduce a speed limit. Some time later, a huge chunk of the emergency service personnel is in prison for breaking this new law. Would you actually blame this on activist's? Or maybe a retarded court system, probably combined with incompetent legislators.
Back to Youtube. They are either incompetent at making rules or incompetent at reasonably enforcing them, probably cause they entirely offload the latter on some shitty algorithm. Don't get me wrong, algorithms are great as first heuristic to save work. But there has to be a way to get to higher court levels, even if there is some form of cost.
The activists were explicitly campaigning for Google and all the other tech companies to take the exact same agressive, false positives be damned approach that they did to ISIS. They specifically pointed to the ISIS purge as proof that Google etc could do this and were wickedly refusing to do so. In order to justify their narrative that Google was evil for not doing this, they argued that the only reason not to do this was because Google was worried about it affecting right-wingers - even though in reality we know that it would be much more likely to catch reporters and analysts.
A better analogy would be if campaigners demanded the police be forced to arrest anyone who broke the speed limit with no exemptions, called anyone who opposed them supporters of dangerous speeding, and then were shocked whem most of the emergency services ended up in jail.
I don't think there's even any way around this problem. The activists want anyone who reports on the far right in ways they consider excessively sympathetic to be banned too, and you can't implement "how activists feel" as the policy dictating what's allowed on something the size of YouTube. It just doesn't scale.
YouTube's changes to monetization didn't come out of nowhere - they were a response to the adpocalypse of 2017, when as much as 40% of advertisers stopped using the platform. These advertisers (perfectly reasonably) feared a backlash if their ads appeared next to the wrong sort of videos, so they just pulled their money. There was an outcry by YouTube content creators, so YouTube took sensible and proportionate steps to make the platform more attractive to advertisers without stifling free speech.
Savvy YouTubers (especially those who produce content that could be perceived as controversial) have taken control of their own revenues through sponsorship and patronage. YouTube doesn't have a business model problem - YouTubers do. You can't expect a platform to sell such vast amounts of ad inventory while also judging each piece of content in a nuanced fashion. That's the devil's bargain of algorithmic advertising and it isn't going away. If you don't like that bargain, sell your own damned inventory, or cut advertisers out of the loop completely and ask your viewers to make a direct contribution.
You can argue about the sincerity of the statement, but Facebook / Zuckerberg appear to be firmly in the latter "someone else's problem" / "we don't want to make these decisions ourselves" camp: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-the...
>Google insists on trying to fix unsolved social conflicts unilaterally
I wonder what all this paternalism will do to society long term.
In the short term we mostly see the people who are agitated by being on the wrong side of popular opinion (or are just caught by hamfisted enforcement), or others who expect levels of protection they're still not getting. But that's just the exceedingly obvious parts.
Every social intervention risks unintended consequences, no matter how well intentioned and angelic the goals are.
Censorship in TV and movies have irreparably damaged our collective psyche for generations (e.g.: the most obvious and uncontroversial area to say it's warped us are in attitudes around sex).
Where does social media censorship go from here? And what effects will it have on the population at large over time?
> Specifically, the lawsuit accuses YouTube of filtering, demonetizing, and otherwise limiting videos that deal with LGBTQ identities, making it hard for their creators to reach a wide audience and make money. The suit alleges violations of free-speech protections and civil rights, among other statutes, and seeks class-action status.
But the youtube isn't a public institution - it's a private platform - does that apply as well even if they would put e.g. banned topics/words in their terms and conditions document? (I'm just curious)
The root cause of this is a mismatch between capitalism and a well functioning, fair society. Again. The earth is dying, the population polarised and our social systems are failing to do their job. Something has to change. There must be another model out there that doesn't devolve into horror, as both capitalism and communism seem destined to do. We need to revisit the 60's only this time we need an actionable plan and the will to follow through or our children's children aren't going to make it. Don't balk at this, our structural problems are existential.
There's an assumption if you use human raters, you won't have false negatives or positives, but even human beings disagree over how to categorize speech, what's homophobic, what's legitimate sarcasm or irony, what is violent content.
In fact, on top of human raters exhibiting classification problems in the face of ambiguity, there is also the issue of bias. Radiolab on NPR had a great series on Facebook's human censors that shows it just opens up a different pandora's box.
There is no clear, non-messy way to do censorship that doesn't end up with a sizable number of people mad, and with some subset of people hit by accidental or deliberate false positives.
I'm afraid there's no easy answer and it will inherently be constant battle and fight between sides.
The extreme/disgusting outliers (about which we reasonably can agree on) can be caught by an computer. That way, human beings can assess the (arguably) many gray areas.
I know LGBTQ people who are free-speech absolutist and others who believe that anything that may offend or otherwise may be used negatively should be censored. I know LGB people who think that the TQ+ should be peeled off and needs to be its own thing. There is no uniformity among LGBTQ, the only commonality is the lack of being hetero.
Isn't this the whole business model of media organizations? Humans classifying, censoring information that is harmful based on the media's definition? Youtube has proven unable to manage their algorithmic censorship many times.
Is it a joke? In Poland, for example, Youtube, in wholesale, blocks channels which are criticize on LGBTQUERTY. The question is why the are able to censor content. I don't expect that my supplier turn off gas for me, if he thinks, that I use it to kill people; it's not his business, ot's the matter of law enforcement, the police, etc.
> In Poland, for example, Youtube, in wholesale, blocks channels which are criticize on LGBTQUERTY.
YouTube is US based and hate speech is looked down upon in the US. Don't like it? Find a service not based in the US.
> The question is why the are able to censor content.
It's a private website, they can do whatever they want. Again, find another site if you want hate content.
> I don't expect that my supplier turn off gas for me, if he thinks, that I use it to kill people; it's not his business, ot's the matter of law enforcement, the police, etc.
???
A) if they know you're using it to kill people they would be an accomplice in the eyes of the law
Your gas vendor does (I hope) discriminate on the kind of gas that gets piped to you. It doesn't allow all gasses -- only certain gas. They are, in fact, in business to sell that certain gas and not all gasses. They go to a great deal of effort to ensure that you get the special gas, not on some random gas that a producer decided you might like to try.
Vendors always discriminate on what they ship to customers. It is never an open platform. I know it's very confusing, but Youtube literally says that you can only distribute certain kinds of things using their service and that they will block other things. I suppose they don't put it in 40 point font on their front page, but it's also not hard to find: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms (incidentally this came up in Japanese for me, so I suppose it might come up in Polish for you).
When people talk about freedom of speech and censorship, what they are talking about is society's role in gagging you. Generally speaking, usually countries don't force you to carry specific content (ha ha! Unless you are Canadian.... Canadian inside joke...), but likewise nobody is forced to carry all content, or accept all trade that might come their way. You are allowed as a business to choose what you want to do and who you want to do business with -- unless it's with a protected segment of society. That's a pretty basic freedom and someone who clearly values freedom as you do can surely see why it is important.
You might argue (to greater or lesser success) that Youtube is a pubic carrier and should be forced to carry everything for free... I suppose... But I'm betting you'll be in the "lesser success" category there. You might argue that your particular subgroup of people who criticise minority gender issues are worthy of special protection and therefore should have a protected ability to spread your message... I suppose... But seriously, I don't think you'll get very far with any of it.
From my perspective, I just think Youtube is within their rights to do what they want on this kind of issue. We may like it or dislike it, but it's the only sane way to handle it.
This is an example of how censorship can boomerang back into the face of those it tries or claims to protect. I think policing words and topics will have a negative impact in the long run for most situations. Simple AI (or even human censorship) reacts to words and not intent, and ends up actually suppressing the minority.
It’s not a business model problem it’s a “too many busybodies” problem.
YouTube ought to be able to manage their platform any way they want.
It doesn’t make sense that someone can sue another person or entity because of the way they manage their own, private property.
And such lawsuits are especially hypocritical when they’re initiated by supposedly tolerant people like this particular (I am not generalizing) LGBTQ organization.
None of this has anything to do with YouTube or LGBTQ, it’s a simple matter of property rights.
Truth is ad buyers don’t want to be associated with any controversial content and a majority of Americans still feel uncomfortable about Gay and lesbian issues and even more uncomfortable about transgender issues. It’s smart for advertisers to exclude lgbt content from their ads if they don’t think that’s a target demographic
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI also imagine the 'algorithms' are a moving target, which makes me think this should be settled quickly if not dismissed, as Google tries to correct this. But certainly a lawsuit should bump this up the engineering priority list.
I don't think the article or GP are saying this. The algorithms, while ostensibly well-intentioned, are actually having the opposite effect — stifling the speech of the LGBTQ+ community while allowing their harassers to operate mostly unchecked.
I have no way to know the real numbers but I am assuming Google monitors overall effectiveness of algorithms and only use what works.
https://youtu.be/0rjrA2GJ1lo
The entire premise of the article is that the opposite is true.
This is also the case with African Americans, and there is a similar problem of machine learning flagging African American content as hate speech. https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/15/20806384/social-media-h...
The problem may be that we cannot depend on machine learning algorithms to do an acceptable job of moderation, and that a lot more humans need to be hired as moderates. However, doing that really changes the economics of the platform
Why can't there be a balance between full automation and human review, such as an appeal system or 'whitelist' program? Are the economics really the obstacle, or is it more of a corporate stance towards not adjudicating subjective controversies to avoid liability under the Communications Decency Act Section 230?
I fail to see how a "but both sides" proclamation leads to any progress (other than maintaining the status quo which is awful good for a select group of people).
Because this will devolve into different groups flagging their opponents' videos. This will especially hurt the voices of minorities and other vulnerable populations.
- if there are sufficient flags, trigger a moderator review
- flaggers who correctly flagged content get +1 score or -1 score if not
that would make it harder for people to consistently flag content maliciously. Like age-old moderation systems such as calling 911 or police. If you abuse calling 911, you can get fined.
I imagine this has been tried before, and am genuinely curious why this is worse than flawed ML.
https://www.adweek.com/digital/youtube-heroes-will-let-users...
But it didn't work. YouTube is too diverse and too popular, it has no clear "naturally" anointable moderator types.
But at some point, sites decided that experimenting with stuff like that was unimportant compared to just bringing in more users. Letting everyone vote all the time obviously has huge issues, but it's emotionally satisfying to downvote, so it keeps users engaged.
The people most prone to dominate the site with voting on everything and coordinating efforts, are also the ones which will complain most loudly if they don't dominate the discussion. So just give them what they want.
It worked. Experimenting with self-moderation mechanisms went extremely out of fashion.
I'd love a system were you could get 2 vote choices per post and then have 8 or more vote options.
Like/dislike (or agree/disagree), off topic/on topic, factually correct/factually incorrect, funny/hateful, user is a prick/user is a swell guy, or whatever seems like a good option for the discussion forum.
I mean, something can be funny, but off topic at the same time. Or something can be factually correct but the person making the post can be a real jerk about it.
I also have a hard time believing the GP that there is no experimentation anymore. Probably a lot more subtle, but you can do a lot of stuff behind the scene without giving feedback to the user. I'd be shocked if there is not at least some form of shadowbanning bad actors.
Not to mention that moderating this kind of stuff can seriously mess you up: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat...
You end up looking at not just mean words but CP, seriously gory stuff, fringe sexual deviancy, and more. Do we really want to do this to moderators?
I don't know specifically, but there must be something.
This is just not a difficult problem, YouTube just doesn’t want to solve it
If they started with that YouTube wouldn't have gotten off the ground as people wouldn't go with the "unilaterally acts like they are being controlled by the Chinese Government" service.
I don't like the fact that YouTube with the recommender and Autoplay is stochastic mind control. It's programmed to make people watch loads of YouTube, and the mechanism that it has discovered to do that is to nudge people to obsess over fringe things, causing them to watch videos about these things for hours per day.
What if the filters intended to prevent hate speech end up harming the targets of that hate speech instead?
What if YouTube's algorithms push conspiracy theories and manifestos of domestic terrorists into people's feeds?
These are not "deal with it or leave" issues; these are existential crises that we must hold platforms accountable to solving.
Also, you'd be surprised how smart kids are if you give them the chance, have the right UI, etc.
I'm actually surprised the HN community seems to look down on crowdsourcing these efforts, kinda humorous.
This is why civilized countries have developed rule of law, including arguments and rebuttals, overseen by an impartial arbiter.
Yes, that is costly. But it is the accepted solution we have as a society, and it's time "Big Tech" starts accepting rule of law.
Which laws? I will acknowledge they are gaming the system somewhat by claiming to be an impartial platform (thereby gaining copyright protections) while removing what they find distasteful (but not illegal, so moderation based on opinion). However, it sounds like you believe removing videos that are not illegal in and of themselves is itself illegal. We don't have a law prohibiting that, so I'm not sure to what you are referring. Protecting speech also means protecting the right not to speak.
it sounds like you believe removing videos that are not illegal in and of themselves is itself illegal.
It's not even on my radar. I'm concerned with the transparency and consistency of the process, not the outcome of individual decisions.
Yes, tech companies should accept the rule of law. But people need to accept that the rule of law does not preclude running a site full of angry, bigoted idiots with no productive commentary.
Classic example being that in some areas of the UK, close friends will greet each other with a joking insult. If you don't know they're friends or you don't have the verbal clues to work from (the 'I'm joking' intonation), it looks a lot like the start of a bar fight.
If humans can't get 100% accuracy on this - how can we expect it from business rules, machine learning and so on?
To pinch a line from ST:TNG, "Life is an exercise in exceptions".
Getting profit-loss data on Youtube is very difficult. If they are profitable, it can't be by a large amount.
So, if the plan is to have a LOT of real people just trying to monitor YT all day long it will really gut YT's economics, not just change it.
Destin of Smarter Every Day on YT went and talked to FB and their content mod team a few months back [0]. He talked with Rob Leathern of FB's Cyber Security Department. Rob mentiond that they now use ~30k real people to monitor FB. Soon thereafter, The Verge released a scoop on the horrific conditions these 30k people must endure [1] in that job.
YT would likely have to have a proportinate number of people in similar conditions as well, or likely scale up to make things less worse and then have to pay more people.
YT simply cannot possibly afford to have enough people moderate YT.
Likely, this version of YT will become something of a blip in history. All this investment will likely not pan out as the economics of video platforms like YT cannot work as they are today. The real question is what is the subscription amount that does make YT work the way we want it to work?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY_NtO7SIrY Also, watch Destin's body language with Nate Gleischer (~14:30 mark). It's so strange. Something wierd happened in that interview with Nate.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat...
Google recently won a lawsuit which complained YouTube was putting conservative content in "restricted" mode.[1] Others complain Google is not doing enough to avoid shoving too many extreme videos at people.[2]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-youtube-c...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-br...
https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1134264395717103617?lang=...
There are homophobic ads on YT? What does that even look like? Can you link to an example?
For example, YouTube doesn't want violent content. Just having the word "kill" in your title can get the content demonetized, even if the content is about a video game and properly categorized as such. It's been this way for years.
The rationale “we can’t make as much money as we’d like to if we followed the law” just won’t wash.
Citation very much needed.
They also need to not censor so much that it's a publisher and maintain themselves as a platform legally.
I don't think that that's preferable for society.
Imagine a YouTube that cost $10 to upload a video and $1 per comment. The quality of the content would be much higher and the hate speech would drop to zero. Wouldn’t that be preferable for society?
You're effectively restricting speech to the rich, and the poor just have to sit there and listen. That would be sad and unnecessary.
I create content for YouTube and if I had to pay $10 per video then I would never make another YouTube video again. It doesn't matter that there are thousands of people (and tends of thousands+ sometimes), because I simply couldn't afford to spend time and effort to make a video and then spend extra money to share it.
You could make the argument that perhaps society is better off if I don't create content, but there are at least some people that claim they enjoy it.
Isn't that basically Vimeo's business model?
Video classification by YT is a bit more tricky, since they themselves are one of the involved parties and thus any incentives put in place to improve the system would cost YT.
Google and company has no reason to not do the minimal acceptable amount. They aren't bound by morals, nor do they owe "society" anything. Shareholders also demand more and more profits, and so the result you see is the inevitable outcome, and it can't be any other way. Unless "society" wills it by voting in people who then make new laws to change the outcome.
To use a historical example, it's easier to moderate an IRC channel of 100 people than an IRC network of 10,000.
Usenet only fell apart because of the spam, and legal attacks by the RIAA and MPAA and BSA.
I found the moderated sci.* and comp.* groups more pleasant for asking questions and giving answers. The alt.* hierarchy had its moments, but mostly it was an exercise in tolerance. Some groups were largely self-moderating, others had such a poor SNR that there was no point putting the time in.
The RIAA/MPAA/BSA raids were only really relevant if you were into pirating copyrighted material.
I think that this actully is violent content - so this is actually an example where the algorithm worked fine (which does not contradict your argument that there exist false positives - they are just a lot more subtle).
That's not exactly subtle.
I understand there could be other reasons for being demonetised, but it's hard to see what it could be in a very very inoffensive video about how to do a vintage dance.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdgCq1IGmsY
If you are referring to the game example given some posts above: "Killing" means that the respective object was alive before - a property that a space ship with no living beings onboard does not have. So the respective author named and labelled the video improperly.
To earn "ad bucks", you have to watch an ad. The ad watching takes place in a dedicated ads section of the site, completely independent of all videos.
The vast majority of monetized videos would cost 1 ad buck, so watch one ad. The ad watching is just a giant "watch ad" button. The algorithm goes through all all the info about me and shows me a relevant ad, just like it does already.
If you want to opt out of ad bucks, you can just subscribe to that channel and pay some money. YouTube takes some, the creator gets the rest.
Why not just use this model instead of this politically driven sham that currently exists?
I'm the viewer, I'm the product. My attention has value - so why not let me to worry about what videos I want to support and leave the corporations out of it? YouTube is nothing without the viewer.
If YouTube is a platform and not a publisher, then they should act like the phone company. If I want to call some psychic hotline, just connect the call and take your cut.
Advertisers don't care about what ads people want to watch. They care about what ads convert.
In my view this should eliminate the ad blocking group entirely.
I guess the solution is to use some technology to ensure that the viewer is watching the ads, like in Black Mirror S01E02.
Maximum ad balance = 3 ad bucks
Watching an ad requires clicking the watch button, so you can't queue them up.
People can walk away, minimize or block the ad even now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule
How do you propose making advertisers happy?
Easy to cry censorship; hard to address real business issues.
1. Don't have "autoplay". Make the user choose. Autoplay is not good for society. "Tip your head back, turn your brain off, and let the algorithm feed you what will keep you here."
2. Give the advertisers more fine grained controls on what types of videos their ads show on. If a stink goes up because Dove doesn't want to be on a PewDiePie video, then that isn't Google's fault. It's Dove's. Let the advertiser add PDP to the blacklist, or make a more exclusive whitelist.
It's like Twitter. "Oh, oh no... how do we stop people seeing all this awful content?"
A) Stop deciding for the user (and therefore the entire website) what is awful
B) Give the user better blocking controls.
However, this won't happen, because Google and Twitter like being able to shape what the "algorithm" shows you, and keeping that control in their hands. This is why the chronological timeline isn't coming back.
(Moderators will often, but not always, say if they've rescued a page. It's possible this got aggressively flagged off the front page and was rescued.)
The solution is to not be the sole entity with the power to make decisions about unsolved social issues. Relinquish the power to make decisions about what kind of content is "acceptable" by implementing a rule of law managed by some kind of publicly accountable, transparent governance,
Google (and anybody else that controls something the public relies upon as infrastructure) has a ch9oice: keep the power to make socially-important decisio9ns and accept the blame and responsibility for those decisions, or abandon that power to make the whole mess someone else's problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_man
They started making these decisions, because Capitalism.
They're publicly traded. Shareholders demand more profits. Advertising is the vast majority of their Youtube profits. Advertisers are risk averse. No fortune 500 company wants their ad running on white supremacist/violent/sexually explicit content. There is collateral damage, but caring about that only marginally increases profit.
Google's need to comply with these laws is part of the genesis for the moderation (e.g. copyright protection, child pornography).
In fact, aggressive government laws for censorship are why Google chooses not to operate in China.
The topic at hand is about monetization of ads -- the "acceptability" of the content is determined by the ad buyers. Not some idea of social good -- it's just the market.
The problem here is about execution not policy. The plaintiffs argue Google's algorithms are not working as intended, not that their intentions are misguided.
Are you suggesting that Google should create additional authority to regulate itself beyond what is legally required and needed for their business? E.g. create some expert panel that can compel Google to censor certain content? That would create more problems than it would solve.
Sooner or later, even if Search was still being censored, the other services would probably be blocked, or have unacceptable conditions imposed on them. The amount of effort to make YouTube and Gmail bend to PRC desires I think would have been a bridge too far. Once Xi Jinping took office especially.
I mean, I've seen super mild videos on Bilibili, where say a Mainland athlete or contestant loses to a Taiwanese one get removed. YouTube would be overloaded quite quickly by 50 cent army takedown requests.
There is some pretty crazy stuff on Chinese video sharing platforms, censorship in China is arbitrary and selective. That alone would make it very difficult for a western company to operate a media company in china.
The article is very long, but definetely worth a read. Section III and VII specifically detail some of the things going on with their China business.
The Tldr is that a big reason for google to stop their censored search in China was due to internal resistance as well as animosity from Congress.
This is mostly unrelated to what I'm talking about.
> The topic at hand is about monetization of ads
That's one (important) aspect of "YouTube’s LGBTQ Problem", but it is not the only issue. As others have mentioned, some of Google's attempts to "fix" the problem have, for example, been used as a weapon by various hate groups to get LGBTQ channels deleted (not just demonetized), or by fascists to remove anti-fascist reporting.
> the "acceptability" of the content is determined by the ad buyers
A big part of the problem is that this isn't actually true in practice. The "acceptability" of content is determined by Google's algorithm. They chose to use an opaque algorithm that they hope implements a very good approximation of what ad buyers consider "acceptable". As we've seen many times over the last few years, this has resulted in problems on all sides, including ad buyers.
> it's just the market
"just" a market ignores that markets are created in an legal environment that can be modified (e.g. adding, modifying, or removing regulations or policies)
> The problem here is about execution not policy.
The problem for Google is that they are choosing to have any policy at all. They are implementing opaque policies and thus are the only party that can be responsible for the resulting mess.
> The plaintiffs argue
Not relevant to my point;' I'm addressing the fundamental problem with Google's management of youtube (or similar platforms), not any particular case.
> Are you suggesting that Google should create additional authority to regulate itself beyond what is legally required and needed for their business?
More or less, yes. If decisions about monetization, video censorship, channel deletion, etc are going to be made, they need to happen through some kind of well-defined due process (aka being "ruled by laws"). Google could define that process unilaterally - which would be a major improvement from the current opaque and arbitrary status quo - but the best option would be to start some type of open/public entity/process for creating and managing what is meant by "due process on youtube".
> create some expert panel that can compel Google to censor certain content?
That already exists! That panel is whatever group inside Google chose the algorithm(s) that has been demonetizing and/or censoring videos over the last few years. I'm suggesting that transparent, publicly accountable panel is better than a hidden panel of unknown Google employees. Yes, both types will have problems, but at least we can see and attempt to fix the panel when it is public.
I guess basically what I'm saying is that Google's content moderation problem is really a problem with our society, our politics, and our press.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/will-sili...
[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mitchprothero/isis-rese...
Were those activists you mentioned campaigning to explicitly get respected analysts removed? Not from what I remember.
Lets compare this with a hypothetical: Lets say activists successfully got gov to newly introduce a speed limit. Some time later, a huge chunk of the emergency service personnel is in prison for breaking this new law. Would you actually blame this on activist's? Or maybe a retarded court system, probably combined with incompetent legislators.
Back to Youtube. They are either incompetent at making rules or incompetent at reasonably enforcing them, probably cause they entirely offload the latter on some shitty algorithm. Don't get me wrong, algorithms are great as first heuristic to save work. But there has to be a way to get to higher court levels, even if there is some form of cost.
A better analogy would be if campaigners demanded the police be forced to arrest anyone who broke the speed limit with no exemptions, called anyone who opposed them supporters of dangerous speeding, and then were shocked whem most of the emergency services ended up in jail.
I don't think there's even any way around this problem. The activists want anyone who reports on the far right in ways they consider excessively sympathetic to be banned too, and you can't implement "how activists feel" as the policy dictating what's allowed on something the size of YouTube. It just doesn't scale.
Savvy YouTubers (especially those who produce content that could be perceived as controversial) have taken control of their own revenues through sponsorship and patronage. YouTube doesn't have a business model problem - YouTubers do. You can't expect a platform to sell such vast amounts of ad inventory while also judging each piece of content in a nuanced fashion. That's the devil's bargain of algorithmic advertising and it isn't going away. If you don't like that bargain, sell your own damned inventory, or cut advertisers out of the loop completely and ask your viewers to make a direct contribution.
I have not yet observed much progress towards these rules. The few "ministry of truth" style steps that have occurred don't exactly look promising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz
I wonder what all this paternalism will do to society long term.
In the short term we mostly see the people who are agitated by being on the wrong side of popular opinion (or are just caught by hamfisted enforcement), or others who expect levels of protection they're still not getting. But that's just the exceedingly obvious parts.
Every social intervention risks unintended consequences, no matter how well intentioned and angelic the goals are.
Censorship in TV and movies have irreparably damaged our collective psyche for generations (e.g.: the most obvious and uncontroversial area to say it's warped us are in attitudes around sex).
Where does social media censorship go from here? And what effects will it have on the population at large over time?
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/08/15/2058257/advertisers...
But the youtube isn't a public institution - it's a private platform - does that apply as well even if they would put e.g. banned topics/words in their terms and conditions document? (I'm just curious)
In fact, on top of human raters exhibiting classification problems in the face of ambiguity, there is also the issue of bias. Radiolab on NPR had a great series on Facebook's human censors that shows it just opens up a different pandora's box.
There is no clear, non-messy way to do censorship that doesn't end up with a sizable number of people mad, and with some subset of people hit by accidental or deliberate false positives.
I'm afraid there's no easy answer and it will inherently be constant battle and fight between sides.
No?
> In Poland, for example, Youtube, in wholesale, blocks channels which are criticize on LGBTQUERTY.
YouTube is US based and hate speech is looked down upon in the US. Don't like it? Find a service not based in the US.
> The question is why the are able to censor content.
It's a private website, they can do whatever they want. Again, find another site if you want hate content.
> I don't expect that my supplier turn off gas for me, if he thinks, that I use it to kill people; it's not his business, ot's the matter of law enforcement, the police, etc.
???
A) if they know you're using it to kill people they would be an accomplice in the eyes of the law
B) they would have every right to refuse service
A month ago LGBT people were being punched and kicked in the head and had bricks thrown at them while walking down the street for a parade:
https://streamable.com/hflsx
"Fuck off, we will kill you, there is no place for you in society"
https://streamable.com/f1c7c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlXWhSE9kAM
You should be ashamed of your country for the way LGBT people get treated.
Vendors always discriminate on what they ship to customers. It is never an open platform. I know it's very confusing, but Youtube literally says that you can only distribute certain kinds of things using their service and that they will block other things. I suppose they don't put it in 40 point font on their front page, but it's also not hard to find: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms (incidentally this came up in Japanese for me, so I suppose it might come up in Polish for you).
When people talk about freedom of speech and censorship, what they are talking about is society's role in gagging you. Generally speaking, usually countries don't force you to carry specific content (ha ha! Unless you are Canadian.... Canadian inside joke...), but likewise nobody is forced to carry all content, or accept all trade that might come their way. You are allowed as a business to choose what you want to do and who you want to do business with -- unless it's with a protected segment of society. That's a pretty basic freedom and someone who clearly values freedom as you do can surely see why it is important.
You might argue (to greater or lesser success) that Youtube is a pubic carrier and should be forced to carry everything for free... I suppose... But I'm betting you'll be in the "lesser success" category there. You might argue that your particular subgroup of people who criticise minority gender issues are worthy of special protection and therefore should have a protected ability to spread your message... I suppose... But seriously, I don't think you'll get very far with any of it.
From my perspective, I just think Youtube is within their rights to do what they want on this kind of issue. We may like it or dislike it, but it's the only sane way to handle it.
https://gizmodo.com/youtube-no-we-wont-remove-these-videos-o...
(And no, they're not blocked in Poland.)
YouTube ought to be able to manage their platform any way they want.
It doesn’t make sense that someone can sue another person or entity because of the way they manage their own, private property.
And such lawsuits are especially hypocritical when they’re initiated by supposedly tolerant people like this particular (I am not generalizing) LGBTQ organization.
None of this has anything to do with YouTube or LGBTQ, it’s a simple matter of property rights.