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Ask HN: Are there algorithms down ranking YouTube videos by words said in them?

17 points by sigmaprimus ↗ HN
I have been hearing a lot of content creators speak in a sort of code when it comes to the pandemic and vaccines in an effort to evade the "Algorithms" from catching them. First is there any truth to this concept and second wouldn't saying the word algorithm be at the top of any such keyword lists?

15 comments

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rvz
Given that something like Content ID existing and the fact that YouTube's parent company has developed the capability of detecting and recognising 'speech', 'music' and 'sounds' on an automated and mass scale and both YouTube and Google being very secretive about algorithm changes, I would not be surprised to see an algorithm change that detects several keywords spoken in a video which automatically flags / down-ranks or removes the offending video.

After all, the moderation in YouTube is automated: [0]

> Our systems don't always get it right, but you can request human review of decisions made by our automated systems.

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=6...

GauntletWizard
When I was at Google in 2013, they were most certainly using the transcriptions (Mostly human at the time, though autotranscription was available) as a content signal. I would be terribly surprised if they are not doing so today.
ipaddr
They are. Those results appear after the title, description and similiar matches.
mikewarot
Are you discussing the current public health emergency?

YouTube auto-generates transcripts, and is owned by an organization well versed in search... it would be quite surprising if they didn't weight things based on words spoken during the videos.

DantesKite
Probably. Mr. Beast is a fairly popular YouTube channel and he transitioned from cursing to not cursing in the past few years. Since he’s dedicated to getting more views and likes perhaps more so than any other human in history, if it helped at all, he would be dropping curse words every other minute.
cableshaft
That's called knowing your target demographics. I'm sure tons of kids watch him and he knows it, and not cursing probably gets more parents to not lose their shit when their kids play his videos on their iPads.

But Youtube also requires you to announce if the video is intended for kids and treats those videos differently for advertising to meet certain regulations (don't really remember how, I always just say mine aren't, even though I don't really curse in mine either), so that might be a factor also.

cillian64
I think it’s not downrankng so much as monetisation in most cases. Advertisers don’t want their ads shown alongside videos covering certain sensitive topics so YouTube “demonetises” these videos and the creators don’t get any revenue from them. It seems generally understood that demonetisation is based on automatic transcription of the video and then searching for certain keywords.

I don’t have any inside info, this is just from listening to a few youtubers talk about it

Closi
Could demonetisation also affect how your video is featured/promoted on the platform (because YouTube wants to serve users videos that have ads)?

I would assume if certain content is viewed as ‘non advertiser friendly’ then they would also prefer not to actively promote that content on the trending tab for instance.

cableshaft
In a recent Breaking Points segment they said that there are certain topics they know ahead of time Youtube will flag to demonetize, but if they didn't cover it they wouldn't be doing their job covering the news appropriately, so they take the hit and let those videos get marked for demonetization.

I think the word "rape" might be a trigger word for these, like when they covered the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who accused a senior official of the CCP of it, and I think several of their Jeffrey Epstein videos got marked for demonetization for the same reason.

But they also said before they had a subscription service they were a bit more careful about covering those topics, and they wouldn't be surprised if other Youtube creators censor themselves or avoid certain topics entirely because they have to rely on their videos making money and can't afford to take the hit.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/20/youtube-penalizes-break...

35mm
I created a YouTube ad to promote home battery storage systems. In the ad was approx 3 seconds of a screenshot of a BBC news article about rising energy prices.

On the sidebar of BBC news in fairly small text was the word ‘coronavirus’.

Google banned my ad because of this.

[dead] aaron695
> content creators speak in a sort of code

They are not worried about down ranking, they are worried about being demonetized or worse.

Youtube has also propped up videos from what they consider better sources around Covid when you search specifically for Covid terms.

> Are there algorithms down ranking YouTube videos by words said in them?

Algorithms certainly rank them, ie. I just searched from a video transcript and YouTube (but not Google Search...strange) found it.

Does saying cunt unnecessarily specifically down rank it?

I think the evidence is yes, YouTube clearly doesn't have the neutrality Google Search has. An example from within the industry, don't forget there are different concepts. SEO, ranking, monetisation, this is about monetisation, but it mentions age rating which will effect ranking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exkT826z-3U&t=175s

Coded words also become part of that sub cultures lingo after a while. They help with cohesion in that group. People use them to signal. But youtube is demonetisation.

rasz
Google uses both OCR and automatic subtitles when returning YT search results, so most likely they also use it for censoring.