YouTube Demonetization Screenshot Leaks and Secret YouTube Meeting
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Probably won't be flawless, because things rarely are, but seems pretty reasonable.
I'd like to see a true free speech platform with violence/nudity sectioned off according to the local laws, and then let the advertisers decide where they want to spend the money, instead of treating them as children who don't know better.
With the amount of videos youtube has to process, and without an almost human-level AI, I don't think there's a perfect solution.
Algorithms flagging videos for review, and then humans making decisions based on some basic set of principles seems right.
Also, to let advertisers decide where to spend their money there's targeting tools...
In machine learning it might be easier to unintentionally create biased algorithms. On the other hand there are domains where I would trust algorithms to be less biased than people.
For instance, "nudity" can be defined as "visible genitals, female nipples" in the US.
"Controversial" tag should not even exist, it makes no sense, any non-trivial subject is controversial.
And honestly, YouTube can benefit from a more precise tagging/category system, it's currently extremely crude.
Penis/vagina -> nudity (even if it's medical or educational).
"Fuck" -> cursing (even if it's about the etymology of the word).
Advocating murder of group X -> ban (even if you're quoting a religious text).
If these rules are strict and clear, we have a chance of creating a legal-like system. Otherwise it's subjective chaos with everyone pissed off.
It's impossible to create an "objective" standard. Because what you want to rate is meaning, and meaning is subjective, based on context and intent.
One of history's most famous photos is of a fully nude girl, maybe 8 or 9 years old. It makes no sense to stick any labels to such an image without considering the context it was created in, and the cultural significance it has.
I'd also posit that it's impossible to define a clear distinction between a "lecture quoting a text advocating murder" and actually advocating murder.
Just as it is impossible to just say penis->nudity, without losing the vast difference in meaning and effect from a photo of Michelangelo's David to hardcore pornography.
That's because, fundamentally, there just is no such clear delineation. Give me any two photos including a penis, and I'll give you one that is more offensive than one, yet less offensive than the other.
The tech community loves to ignore the long history of these problems, and denigrates everything that can't be expressed as a smart contract as "biased" or "subjective".
But that's ok... In less than 200 years we'll have a great algorithm who will finally render the definitive test of what's porn and what's art: "I'll know it when I see it".
A steel-manning of context should be enough to draw a distinction. Sadly, most contexts today are being redefined by folks who are seeking or making porn for those who need to get off on their own moral outrage.
"And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him."
"If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die"
An alarming number of social justice advocates have been equating words with violence. Canadian Bill C-16 (now law) is particularly troubling because under the Ontario Human Rights Code it makes debate over gender neutral pronouns a punishable offense. It seems to me that the folks at YouTube are, necessarily, responding with the most "conservative" policies to avoid "controversy" (i.e. boycotts).
I would say that this should not be banned. Let all who profess these beliefs be out there in the open so that they are easier to find.
Could you give a specific example of what you meant?
The classic example I can think of, that has already generated headlines, concerns nudity policies in social media (Facebook in particular) that have flagged breastfeeding mothers for "nudity" (and thus ticked people off). A "by the letter" policy risks much more of this sort of thing... flagging something as "bad" that much of the social norm says isn't really a big deal.
One other thing I would worry about with "objective" rules is what culture determines the "watch list". The cultural norms for what is taboo actually does vary to some degree from culture to culture. Youtube is used heavily in so many countries, with diverse cultures. How can a single policy encompass the social norms of countries as diverse as, say, heavy Youtube using countries such as India, Japan, the UK, Germany, and the US? (And this isn't even accounting for the diversity of culture within these countries.)
As an example, the swastika, which is extremely taboo in Germany and triggers "hate speech" flags in much of the rest of the West, is (usually styled differently but still) a religious symbol in India. You could create a generic flag category for "swastika", but chances are this will eventually flag some, say, Hindu content from India and tick those people off.
I suppose you could structure the rules to account for as many cultural norms as possible, but that can get very complicated fast.
Of course that is difficult and actually involves discussions, which Youtube doesn't seem interested in having.
The problem is that once you introduce such a system, and leave all the control over the tags to the uploader, people start gaming it for better search rankings/more views. So you are back to the same old problem of "who checks if the content actually matches the tags".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5w-PIzlUk
It's a clip-art style "coloring video" drawing a baby with a lot of syringes, which then each empty their colored liquid into the baby. Technically, perfectly innocent. In context of a positive flood of videos with an undertone ranging from brain damaging to abusive targeted at little kids it doesn't seem that innocent to me. The sum isn't larger than the whole, but it's larger than each individual piece seen in a vacuum. However, where to draw the line? I would draw the line at "if it targets little kids, demonetize it", not even because of the content of such videos, simply because I think marketing to little kids is immoral no matter in what context, but I know that's not going to fly. But there could be a category for it, and then people could check out which advertisers advertise to little kids and let that inform their wallet voting.
For me, YT is just totally ruined anyway. Yeah I still watch videos on it, 99% of the video material on the web is on YT, but even using an ad-blocker what used to feel lame now feels positively fucked up considering how horribly bad YT has handled this before it blew up as well as after advertisers started retracting ads. I want to turn my back on it for good, and if we can't find a way to self-host and directly pay what we watch, I'll find a way to live without video on the web.
This particular video can be under
Art > Drawing > Coloring
I don't see anything damaging about it. Yes, it's weird, but so what?
http://www.tubefilter.com/2017/11/24/advertisers-suspend-you...
> I don't see anything damaging about it. Yes, it's weird, but so what?
So you don't, probably not having looked at thousands of video descriptions and thumbnails on hundreds of channels featuring bondage, pregnant children, adults and children impregnated after having been drugged, dolls in bath tubs filled with things, objects and persons under car wheels and feet, drinking urine and eating poop, dominance and submission, binge eating of candy or just objects, objects being removed from a body or lumps removed by getting a syringe, babies faking their death, adults and kids with pacifiers, maggots, people being eaten, limbs being removed, unresolved tension, and dozens of other concepts [you see, that stands for something, there is just no space to expand all placeholders, just like when I said "flood" or "targeted at little kids"] repeated ad nauseam, across live action, claymation, 2D and 3D "art", all underlaid with the same handful of music and audio samples, produced on all continents except Africa maybe. So what?
Like many forms of abuse, e.g. mobbing or sexual harassment, each individual act can be explained away, and people who don't really look into things just see the one-off "weird thing". So what?
Then there's all the stuff that's neither here nor there, like making people jealous by drawing a heart on someone's belly, or a million "finger songs", or "Jony Jony Yes Papa". That's how babies learn colors. It's just copycats that experiment with the medium while not straying from the script that doesn't exist.
And of course, it's just the brains of toddlers, those aren't sponges or anything, and quite obviously, if it's not traumatizing to you, there can be no damage. We know that even "just" too much lack of healthy interaction can stunt development, but what's millions of hours of low-effort, "weird" content gonna do?
Anyways, I'm not here to tell you how you live your life, I'm just stating how I live mine. If you're not at work and not easily grossed out, maybe enjoy this 0.01% slice: https://i.imgur.com/MziRRQw.jpg -- but that's still just images, that's without the deceptive music and channel descriptions that advertise themselves as great entertainment for kids. And you can always find something there or in the ElsaGate subreddit that can serve as lightning rod, to say oh, this is overreacting, let's dismiss it all out of hand.
> it seems like US Americans are projecting their particular sensibilities onto videos made by some people in an entirely different part of the world
What part of the world would that be? Just saying "oh, there's probably a culture that has these different sensibilities" is heard a lot around ElsaGate, without ever actually referencing a specific culture. And what is an "entirely different" part of the world? Made of antimatter?
> It's important that we don't just lump everything that makes us uncomfortable into the same category.
None of this makes me feel "uncomfortable" though, and I'm not American either, so don't lump my reaction and your reaction together as "our" reaction. Also, just because the fringe is not the center, doesn't mean they're not connected: don't lump noticing the connection together with lumping things together.
"Disturbing" or "weird" or "uncomfortable" or "nice" or "awesome" and so on are not very descriptive words. A cold breeze might make me feel uncomfortable, so might a video of a puppy getting hurt, but that doesn't describe these things. It's making it about the people calling it out, and I for one am not buying.
Tagging would use the same ML model that youtube is current running for demonetization, so there will be error as well.
Problem here lies with the expectation, it aims with recall not precision. In other words, false negatives really hits Youtube's image, twice already this year. People only needs to find a handful problematic videos with misplaced ads and claim Youtube had some major problem, which might not be case behind the scene. Yet each time it becomes major media parade on bashing the company and result in an exodus of advertisers.
If the goal is to eliminate false positives, which means less tolerance and stronger censorship, it will hurt a lot of innocent Youtubers, regardless. The crisis lies however with Youtube's model, if they cannot do a good job, no matter by algorithm or by human, managing the balance between quality and quantity of videos on their platform while keeping the advertisers happy and assured, it is just a matter of time, Youtube would ultimately degraded into our era's little television.
Algorithms have a fantastic property of repeatability which means that it is
(a) possible to adjust them over time
(b) possible to identify what exactly happened
(c) blind to the context and inputs outside of the algorithm
That's exactly what is needed.
"This video was demonetized because at the 1:15 mark, there is a patch of light dirt that our neural network classified as naked skin with a 70% confidence."
Oh, you meant you were going to do image recognition without any sort of machine learning?
Please remove humans from making decisions that need to be uniform. So yes, algorithm it is.
The problem of vetting YouTube videos isn't necessarily something that can be solved by an algorithm, at the end of the day. Lots of the simple cases, sure - but such an algorithm won't work on even the most moderately challenging content. After all, moderating complex content such as video doesn't just require a well-trained neural network to recognise objects portrayed in images and sounds in audio... deciding whether a video is appropriate or not for monetisation is something that requires an explicit understanding of the social and cultural context which the video is going to be viewed in - which is both highly subjective and difficult to express in an algorithm.
NB;
- Neural networks (and other AI techniques) can be tricked and manipulated (see [0,1]; examples of adversarial images)
- Machine learning algorithms can induce or confirm bias through inadequate training data and poor assumptions. (see [2]; a book about bias in machine learning algorithms)
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05328
[1]: http://www.evolvingai.org/files/DNNsEasilyFooled_cvpr15.pdf
No, I'm arguing that algorithms are transparent, which means that they can be adjusted.
> The problem of vetting YouTube videos isn't necessarily something that can be solved by an algorithm, at the end of the day. Lots of the simple cases, sure - but such an algorithm won't work on even the most moderately challenging content.
of course they would here:
while (!decision_pass_the_spot_check()) { tweak_algorithm() }
> deciding whether a video is appropriate or not for monetisation is something that requires an explicit understanding of the social and cultural context which the video is going to be viewed in - which is both highly subjective and difficult to express in an algorithm.
Certain cultures think it is acceptable to stone women. In their societal context it is OK. We do not, however, care that it is OK in their societal context. So we make sure that in our algorithm stoning women ==> demonetized. Now we move onto the next problem. Did someone flag a video that we processed that had women stoned that was not demonetized? We open a ticket with the people responsible for that model, with the video that was not demonetized and have them figure out why it did not happen.
That's how you solve a complex problem. You break them into simpler ones and when you see an issue you address it. Claiming that the problem is just too complex for algorithms is avoidance.
To clarify; I am not saying that it will never be possible to solve this sort of problem with an algorithm - just that doing so would require solving the small inconvenience of general artificial intelligence first... :-).
It certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibility in the (very distant) future, but to suggest that it's possible right now (and that it would be better than a human!) is to over-egg the pudding somewhat.
Alright, then you cannot use an algorithm for image or video recognition. So how do you solve this problem?
Neither of these are really true for neural networks: it's hard to pinpoint the exact feature or hidden layer which results in a particular classification. Training also requires datasets which are often proprietary, and stochastic approaches mean you can get different networks from the same dataset.
You will get a different result if you let two humans classify the data.
You bring up Trump's Twitter suspension in the other subthread, but in that case the failure was transient, and the person responsible and their reasoning were quickly identified; YouTube has demonetized videos with little to no explanation or recourse.
Uniformity is absolutely a goal where people's livelihoods are affected, but ML algorithms can't guarantee it by themselves: they make it even more important to also maintain accountability and transparency.
Google can. So that does not apply.
> You bring up Trump's Twitter suspension in the other subthread, but in that case the failure was transient, and the person responsible and their reasoning were quickly identified; YouTube has demonetized videos with little to no explanation or recourse.
There's no recourse or explanation because it is not youtube's business model regardless of what/who makes a decision to demonetize them. Adding arbitrary human behavior to those decisions only makes it worse.
If nobody outside Google can test the algorithm, by definition it isn't auditable.
Adding arbitrary human behavior to those decisions only makes it worse.
Neural networks are derived from human behavior - they don't magically divine the spirit of what you want to do, they're an approximation based on training data someone has to put together.
The regular categorization should be left to the publishers, but it should be much wider and multilevel, not the current choice of, what, 10 categories?
Yes, other things like hate speech are harder to detect, but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, like "religion criticism", "radical feminism", "men's rights", etc, whatever ruffles people's feathers these days.
Exactly.
but, as I said, it's extremely subjective, and should not be dealt with in a general way, but rather broken down into subcategories, like "religion criticism", "radical feminism", "men's rights", etc, whatever ruffles people's feathers these days.
Unless you have some reason to think that a non-insignificant number of advertisers would be OK with ads on a subset of those categories but not all, that's just pointless busywork.
If you demonetize them all because religious people consider criticism hate, you are throwing out tons of potential ad revenue.
It's not much more work, just create more granular multilevel categories.
My point is that implementing a complex system that forces hard decisions on both reviewers and advertisers would only be worth doing if it would actually change the things much. Since we don't have the data to know, any position we take is simply uninformed.
that's just pointless busywork.
"Oh, we didn't demonetise your video, we just give advertisers tools to choose what sort of content they want their ads to show alongside. And your video is rated 'gender insensitivity level 1' because you said 'motherboard' instead of 'mainboard'. It's the advertisers' fault you made much less money on this one."
If Youtube make a clear line, they have to take a stance on whether saying 'motherboard' should be allowed or not, and whatever choice they make some people will protest. If instead they have eight categories of offensive content and twenty thresholds in each, they can outsource the decision on whether saying 'motherboard' is allowed to anonymous advertisers' marketing departments - YT can avoid taking a stance at all.
I don't know about nudity, but I can assure you that automatic detection of curse words doesn't work. Enable automatic subtitles and watch a few videos... do you think that's working?
Also, youtube is not english-only, and automated processing of anything other than english is even worse!
With my telco, I can sue - and unless I'm more than 3 months behind in payment they legally can't cut me off in Germany. Who says that the social media giants shouldn't be regulated in the same way, given their importance in today's world?
And when the actuarials decide some benefit is costing the company too much, they send the policy to legal who reinterprets the language and then the entire claims department gets retrained on how to pay the benefit correctly and informed we have been doing it wrong for the past 20 years.
So, ha ha yourself. They have an in-house legal department to justify whatever the heck they plan to do anyway. They just want all their ducks in a row from the start. The lawyers basically get paid to get the company's story straight ahead of time. It's quite mind-boggling that insurance is even legal as an industry.
Combine that with the fact that the group in charge of moderation is likely to be extremely biased, simply by being Google employees, this is hardly any justice at all.
A true free speech platform wouldn't have any concern at all for laws regarding content or any specific cultural mores - laws exist to limit the freedoms of the individual for the good of the community, not to define or enforce them, and the web doesn't belong to any culture but its own.
I think you could still have tagging or filtering for such a platform, but it might need to be a service or market of systems in and of itself, either community driven or local to each user, and not something enforced by a central authority.
Of course, that means first treating all content equally - including objectionable and illegal content, because that's the real and for many uncomfortable consequence of free speech.
I'd be surprised if YouTube didn't account for this, or in other words, if they made the demonetization decision indeed dependent on a single person.
I'd actually expect them to look for this bias, and filter out the reviewer, for example: reviewer X has consistently flagged videos that a number of other reviewers have cleared, etc.
Edit: perhaps a better example:
For any sample of 100 videos, ensure that 5 videos (5%) are from a pool of videos pre-approved by some gremium.
If a reviewer flags more than X (X being 1 to 5, however strict you want to be) of these pre-approved videos, there is a high probability that this reviewer exhibits a strong bias, so you discard that reviewer's selection.
If a reviewer flags more than X of these videos, one might assume that the reviewer is biased. (X should probably be large enough to account for false positives from fair reviewers).
Same problem as with AI bias.
A great video about this problem: The Trouble with Bias - NIPS 2017 Keynote - Kate Crawford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMym_BKWQzk
The real problem with humans is subjectivity.
> I'd like to see a true free speech platform with violence/nudity sectioned off according to the local laws, and then let the advertisers decide where they want to spend the money, instead of treating them as children who don't know better.
Build one. Good luck preventing it from going bankrupt when advertisers decide they won't spend any money on your platform.
It has been tried, this isn't any different than all the "alt-right internet" services popping up. Or 4chan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/technology/alt-right-inte...
Her content is literally some of the most desirable, adfriendly content on YouTube.
No idea why they don't have a whitelist for channels with 10 years of a spotless record.
Give it 30 seconds of thought, and it'll be blindingly obvious.
"Google/Alphabet doesnt have to pay them for the content now."
My question, why do they keep using a platform that's screwing them over?
Yippee: -3. Evidently stating the emperors new clothes are his birthday suit is bad/wrong.
When a video is demonetized, only a small subset of advertisers or no advertisers can be shown on that video. If no ads are being shown then neither Google nor the creator are making money (and Google is spending money to host and serve the content), so really this is a lose/lose for both of them.
AvE has been dealing with this very issue, where he'd upload a new vid, and within an hour, demonetized. It would within 1 day go unindexed. And for those who don't know, the first 48 hours is when most views come in. So, no ads = no money. He figured out if you make the video unindexed, then it would be demonet'ed. Then he would argue, and monet would be turned on. And then he'd make it public.
AvE got sick of that, and moved to Patreon, and then releases videos telling people to install Adblocks to stop youtube ads. (Pateron's had its own recent scandal https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/ - Ive been seeing quite a few artists and customers move away from that platform. Where will they go? Who knows.. I digress.)
But to a larger point, storage space is near-zero cost. Bandwidth over a video that's unindexed is ~=0. And if unindexed stale video happens to go away, aww gee shucks. Google keeps the mindshare as being the only videosite in town, and starves any upstarts with their monopoly of videosite/ad/search proficiency.
Tl;Dr: Google is a very bad actor here.
A bad actor will try to find the limits to your system 10,000 times. A good actor will give up and go elsewhere. When everybody loses the bad actor will gain more perspectively.
"Social Media", be it facebook empire, twitter, twitch, google empire, amazon empire...
They want mindshare. They want people to keep using it, millions of people. Because the bigger the number, the more they can use various ways to entrap people into those platforms.
People keep saying that a demonetized video costs - the trivial bandwidth and storage of a deindexed video is miniscule. Yet, making people think they're the only game in town is all encompassing. You deal with them and their games and give them content, or you go away.
And not only that, but when people put up videos, they're also giving Google/Alphabet free machine vision content. Which that is actually worth quite a bit because content's hard to just generate.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/middleeast/syria-yo...
Is it all TV you object to for this age range or just when it's served via YouTube?
Mind you, as an aside, we're using FireTV so we won't be allowed by Google to have YouTube from January ...
This impacts people who post a video <1/wk the most, because one demonetized video can mean a huge hit to their monthly income. Now you're driving out higher production values in trade for shorter, more frequent videos.
The market does that anyway, though. Ask any YT creator, or just looks at the stats for the two approaches in the same niche. Frequency (with a minimum bar of quality) will beat out infrequent but very very high quality every time. It's better to post 2 minimally edited, acceptable quality videos every week than one high production value video every 2-3 weeks.
The problem is the demonetization of the videos that don't break the guidelines. I'm guessing it comes from the poor automated detection and not from the human reviewers.
They have all this data about people, yet they're too lazy, or too genuinely puritanical, to actually use that data to show the right ads to the right people. Take for instance the category of drug "paraphernalia," (not to mention actual drugs). Neither Facebook, YouTube or Google will allow advertisers to advertise for these kinds of products, even in markets where they are completely legal. You'd think a more reasonable, and profitable approach, would be to use all that data to only allow advertisers to target these kinds of ads to people of legal age, in markets where these products are legal, but no, no-one can advertise them to anyone, anywhere, ever.
And what about sex toys? Why can't videos of say sex toy reviews, be age-gated, and then so called "Adult ads," you know, only be shown to the verified adults watching those videos? I'm sure there are lots of sex toy companies who would love to advertise to that audience, and I'm sure someone watching a sex toy review video would much rather see an ad for a sex toy than for another fucking Nissan, but yet again, Google et all would rather impose their bizarrely puritanical morality on the world, than do their jobs and build a system that actually works.
To expand on what you're saying here, YouTube allows offended people to bully them by contacting advertisers and saying things like, "YouTube is putting ads for your company in front of videos about hitler!!" And YouTube just immediately caves to that.
YouTube's response from day one should have been, "no, we don't put ads in front of videos, that's not how this works. This isn't tv where the ad is broadcast whether someone is watching or not. This is a website that plays videos you ask for. We (youtube) have data about you. We (try to) select an ad specifically for you. We did not play that ad for Pepsi because it has anything to do with hitler. We played it because (our data suggested) the ad is relevant to you. And then afterward, we played the Hitler vid because that's what you clicked on."
That seems like such an obvious, slam dunk response to me. I think the reason YouTube didn't push back in that manner is that they welcomed the excuse to start pushing political content they don't like off their platform.
The demonitization policy also seems overly broad. While not wanting to display ads before literal executions makes sense, the blanket bans on profanity or use of brand names are counterproductive. People mostly watch videos from creators they like, or that are similar to videos they've watched before. That means that the content in question isn't objectionable to the viewer themselves, and won't cause them to form a negative association with the advertiser's brand. Advertisers should WANT their content to be next to content that the viewer is positively disposed to, regardless of what that content is.
PR is not a logical thing because people aren't logical, they are emotional and in that context your logic doesn't mean anything...
Either way, that also leaves a hole, that is, an opportunity for other services.
The possibility to target ads to the the very specific taste of single individuals is very recent and, I would argue, not fully mastered yet.
I'm having a bit of trouble with the idea that something that is generating around $80 000 000 000 per year revenue and has been growing ~20% per year for the last several years is not something that "actually works".
I worked as a copywriter for most of my 20s in Manhattan... have a ton of friends at all levels of the business from ad sales to OOH to Facebook.
My friends in TV ad sales always say the same thing when a company or product comes up at a party... "oh, ____ is actually a client of mine, love them, got shit faced the other week at lunch... but I don't buy their product because they're homophobes."
"What?"
"Oh, they're in my Excel sheet of companies that have requested to not be on Bravo... because of the content. too many gay dudes on shows."
I've had plenty of friends that worked in daytime and network ad sales where they literally would get an email with all the "issues" people might have with an upcoming episode of a popular show, when the issues would appear and what slots they can move the commercials into. They then spend the day calling all their advertisers and media buyers so they can go manage expectations and start moving spots around. People have no idea how much deal making has to happen with Fortune 500 company marketing departments and media agencies every time there is something 30% of this country would find offensive such as men kissing... or... men kissing... or someone saying "fuck".
Now, the people at these companies usually aren't actually homophobes... they usually just don't want to anger the far right and the groups that support their beliefs.
Then you get into the creative. I had a very popular underwear company as a client back in the day... part of every shoot was a reminder that we had to play by their rules. If there's a couple in their underwear... they have to both be wearing wedding rings because otherwise Christian groups will complain. This is common in many ads... look for the rings. We even had a Christian football star become a spokesperson for the company... but part of his contract had it so that he couldn't appear in underwear bc of his values and those of his supporters. So we put him in undershirts.
Then you have race and everything else.
But this all comes down to money and those with the money need to start flexing or support other platforms.
In most countries it's unusual to BEEP swear words on TV, and in some other countries nobody will bat an eye at casual nudity, even in TV shows aimed at children.
In some places, nudity and sex are considered fine for children.
In some places, LGBT topics, or even showing people who are openly gay discussing something entirely unrelated would be considered unacceptable.
In some places, standards for nudity are very different, for example failure to wear a headscarf would be unacceptable in parts of the world.
In the US, this would spark an outrage.
Most German public TV channels try to upload all content to YouTube, but sometimes some videos aren't available there due to YouTube's restrictions.
Both approaches look rather impossible to me: the former would mean allowing stuff that might even be illegal in the U.S., the latter would mean that e.g. all videos showing alcohol would have to disappear.
What is your specific example here?
Also note that this is not about allowing videos onto the platform, but only about next to which videos to show ads. And I would guess that most ad customers would want rather strict rules, so it makes sense for YouTube to listen to their customers here.
You mention only extremist polarized positions, full anarcho-libertarianism or ultra-global-conservatism. There are many more moderate positions in between, or even entirely different solutions, such as opening up the YouTube brokerage market.
It's just one more step in the inevitable bifurcation of the Internet down to national barriers / legislation / cultural beliefs. In the not very distant future (within 15-20 years), the commonality laws, things nations have in common with regards to legislating the Internet, will be the minority. Every nation will want and will set its own unique policies (on top of any other agreement lines as eg in the EU).
There's no possible outcome for the Internet other than becoming another well regulated medium, given a few more decades. The laws will pile up, it's what politicians do, and the Internet is the single biggest target.
The US and any other country in the world is far from perfect but it doesn’t mean there aren’t better and worse, much much worse moral systems out there today.
Really its because "Hate speech" in and of itself is a dumb phrase. AFAIK It only refers to an incredibly small subset of hate. It does not refer to hate. And often refers to mean-speech instead of referring to the emotion hate at all, which is even more frustrating.
I'd rather we just throw the phrase into the dumpster where it belongs and come up with something better. Good terminology combats extremism.
You'll not find anyone outside of the "anyone who disagrees with my political opinions is inherently evil" group using it.
Anyone using it hates actual democracy.
Firstly it is almost certain that a video is initially demonetized by an algorithm. Only during a manual review is it looked at by a human.
The main complaint from Youtubers is that the algorithm is way too strict and inconsistent. But the manual review process is pretty fair and the vast majority of videos get remonetized. The issue here being that by the time a manual review is complete most of the views for a video have already happened.
I could of missed it, but I have seen very few complaints about the manual review process being overly strict or biased.
Sadly, since this process can take up to 48 hours, this doesn't work if your videos have any kind of time sensitivity.
It also doesn't help with videos of streams, which are automatically posted immediately after the stream's conclusion.
Wouldn't the solution, then, be to credit the account for the revenue generated while it was demonetized? It's not like Youtube didn't get revenue from ad impressions while the video was flagged.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/05/technology/google-youtube-hi...
I don't know based on that article if it's directly related, but they've obviously decided that they need serious human review teams.
To me it seems that even assuming the current single set of criteria for advertiser friendliness (with all of the other problems discussed in the other comments regarding subjectivity) that different advertisers might or might not be willing to be exposed to it given different prices. Right now there's no escape hatch, so instead we've seen content chilling effects and a ton of new customers for Patreon, something that is starting to exert some degree of competitive pressure on YouTube.
I'm not familiar with the AdSense interface on YouTube, but I'm guessing that it's some sort of keyword bidding model. If advertisers could bid on keywords with with or without the friendliness bit turned on, then market prices could emerge. I can see an incentive on the part of advertisers to be willing to take a bit more "friendliness-risk" if they can get access to a valuable demographic with valuable keywords at a better price.
Hardly a perfect solution (the friendliness bit itself remains the real issue). Even better would be a set of several different friendliness scores that advertisers can make decisions about and thus allow prices to emerge.
edit: spelling.
Different metrics matter more/less to different advertisers/industries/audiences and the more niche it is the less it matches up with the global average that is a "general audience"
This. If there's a video of some guy laying in the mud welding some piece of heavy equipment back together in the middle of nowhere whether or not he's swearing like a sailor probably doesn't matter at all to Hobart or Lincoln or some other company that might be advertising their line of welding consumables with the video.
Likewise I'm sure some companies that sell products that make us less afraid of unlikely events (fire extinguishers, life insurance, etc) would have little problem with their ads appearing in conjunction with violent content.
and then there is a mention: "Does not include: Content made by gay ..." or whatever else.
I understand what they want, but these guidelines are somewhat problematic, at least.
The only thing I can think of is that YouTube is not confident in their guidelines & categorization, and does not want to defend these choices publicly.
Don't work for youtube, but I'm guessing they would be secret for a couple of reasons.
1. If made public, people could post violating content and work around it by making sure they won't get flagged with carefully crafted thumbnails, content etc. Ex: Take a look at the 'Nudity' section. There are examples of 'Partial nudity' in which a guy wearing underwear is deemed inappropriate because it looks 'Vulgar'. So one could, in theory avoid such thumbnails, and still post vulgar content in the video and get by their censors.
2. It would also open Youtube to criticism, just like the Facebook breastfeeding content was, a whiles back.
Rules are open to arguments, and with dozens of bans/appeals a day, it'd be ridiculous to do that. We tried strict rules, and they are both too restrictive and ineffective.
Humans need to make judgements, and guidelines give you the latitude to do that.
2. The guidelines seemingly allow what would be considered hate speech if the topic is women's equality.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en
The only thing I found confusing was the unwanted creators for the alleged secret meeting. GradeAUnderA is hilarious[0] and has a few videos that point out the drama in YouTube. Keemstar is toxic. I don't know about the others and I can name quite a few channels that should be on YouTube's unwanted creators list (if such thing existed).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XyH8MJARcM (NSFW language)
My wife literally posted a 3 minute sped up video of us decorating our Christmas tree and it was demonetized without explanation.
If I was to make a show similar to Trailer Park Boys, about a bunch of comedic stoners bumbling around and swearing a bunch, it would be demonetized.
Trailer Park Boys is a good example, since it's a show that you could produce on a minimal budget and try to launch on Youtube.
"YouTube creators can not include promotions, sponsorships or other advertisements for third party sponsors or advertisers in their videos where YouTube offers a comparable ad format" https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3364658?hl=en
(Patreon, as a way to make money as a YouTube creator occupies a gray area but this restriction hampers their potential for growth since YouTube could just shut them down.)
You can't splice an actual ad into the video (although channels do, and they haven't been banned), but you can have outside sponsorship. I believe stuff like vloggers cooking using a meal kit sponsored by the company is OK.
How come these videos are not violating youtube's policies?
When a video is flagged for “demonetization” what are the immediate consequences? I’ve never actually met anyone who got paid for something that happened on YouTube, so I just don’t understand how the business side of YouTube even works.
For the life of me, all I’ve ever directly witnessed is the occassional friend who received a DMCA notice, because they uploaded an audio rip of an album they wanted to listen to from a work computer, as a public video.
Like anything else, I think you have to find your audience. A 6 year old apparently made $11 million this year off his YouTube channel:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/1...
If you see a YouTube channel with 250,000 subscribers or more, they are probably taking in around $10,000 a month from YouTube (assuming they post regularly.)
and they seem quite vague. Stuff like "Regular TV" is not something many people can understand.
That said, is there a way to find the demonetized videos?
If someone is viewing the content, they presumably like it, so there doesn't seem to be any difference compared to people viewing advertisement on "non-objectionable" content.
If someone else sees the content along with the advertisement, they can just truthfully say that the advertisements are placed by an automatic algorithm and that they don't endorse the content.
What's the problem?
More importantly, the argument made by campaigners looking to stop ads on objectionable content is that placing ads in association with objectionable content constitutes funding that content; whether you do that via an algorithm or manually makes no difference, the point is that the advertisers choice of how to place ads is paying out money to producers of objectionable content.
That, in turn, makes those advertisers liable to explain to their regular customers, who are now vicariously funding objectionable content by paying money to the advertiser, why they are placing ads as they are.
All-in-all, it'd be much easier for a generic advertiser to just avoid objectionable content; but that isn't properly possible on Youtube, which is what I suppose is what this whole scheme is trying to change.
There is no stronger endorsement.
I'm also baffled by the levels of fear naked skin seems to solicit in the US, how common is this? Often you can have extremely violent games/movies with teen rating, but the moment you show a tit it's instantly adults only.
Top positions were reviewed to determine the best parameters.
A review didn't affect that one individual sites ranking, but all sites as a whole.
edit: i am pretty sure the websites that were marked as low quality lost their rating on next google search update.
YouTube can stop monetising those channels with advertising it has sold. That keeps YouTubes normal advertisers happy.
The owners of those channels could instead sources their own advertisers and use the YouTube ad management systems to inject the adverts in to their videos - with YouTube taking a cut of the revenue.
This way everyone is happy, the channel owners get revenue, the advertisers know exactly where their adverts are appearing and YouTube gets a cut too.
What happens though if this is outsourced out from Americans doing the moderation to cheap labour in other nations that don't share your beliefs or politics.
If one thing is clear it's that we need competition in this space.
Youtube for me is being plagued by the above videos.
Even if it's largely financially motivated, it's still nice to see some kind of assessment of what kind of content they are willing to enable.
Given it's Google behind it, I don't think they are expecting to keep a work force to flag videos for the foreseeable future.
I think they are probably doing this in parallel with AI and most of the false positives are on that end, which means they hire more people to make a bigger training data set, rinse and repeat.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...
If only I had known! I would have suffered much less boredom knowing I was part of yet another vast conspiracy.
Only issue I see here is the manual review process and subjectivity baked into that.
2) transparency is zilch.
3) rule changes came overnight.
4) no system to "pre-approve" videos.
5) it's affecting tons of completely innocuous videos. My wife runs a family friendly vlog, prior to October she'd never had a problem with any of her thousands of videos, and now every other one is demonetized without explanation.
From a creator experience it's just confirmation the platform is totally dead and beyond saving. The algos have won.
See the Controversial section here: https://i.imgur.com/vkBrkns.jpg
e.g. religious videos of any sort are automatically deemed controversial (way more inclined to be right leaning), but videos about racial justice (left) are exempt (unless, of course, they are anti-racial justice videos, in which case they must be removed.)
You seem to come to this with a bias that Google is left leaning and why you see a political leaning situation here. I am a centrist and do not.
The problem here is the looseness of the guidelines and the complexity of navigating deep issues with nuance.
Entertain me here for a second... Let's talk about a few hypothetical videos:
"The positive contributions of undocumented migrants in the US" - positive content about immigrants. Exempt from demonetization per the guidelines.
"The problem with illegal immigration in the US" - antagonism of a specific group of people/xenophobia per the guidelines. Should be demonetized.
Now, do you think it's an unreasonable position to say that undocumented immigration has both pros and cons? Of course not, everything does.
Youtube's distillation of rules that only allow for discussion of one side these issues with zero nuance is the problem. Coincidentally or not, the allowed positions for discourse align with the brand's corporate values.
Thats not what it says. It reads "Content promoted by extreme religious groups" - Certainly there is subjectivity here and Google should provide clearer guidelines on what is deemed "extreme" (clearly violent jihad and isis recruiting would be considered extreme, and general islam/muslim content should be considered okay).
But it clearly does not say "religious videos of any sort".
The manual review isn't the problem it's the initial algorithm that robs creators of all the views in the initial week(s) before the review gets carried out (i.e. 90% of the revenue)
He can be culturally insensitive at times. I don't know if to the point that I would flag him as violating the rules, but then again these people were instructed that if in doubt flag. As the father of a daughter I'm am very much aware that he can be sexist at times. In fact this is why although I will occasionally watch one of his videos I am no longer subscribed to the channel.
Anyway that was just one example. Another who's gotten demonetized is LazyGameReviews, and he's a total kitten. Ashens is also clean and has gotten demonetized. There are countless examples.
So nope, their algo/system is jacked up and they won't be transparent about anything.
Actually "If people feel uncomfortable watching it in public" is vague but reasonably good guideline.
It has to be nary impossible to draw the line in so many cases, but the guidelines seem reasonable and the line will roughly get drawn about there.
It's fair if it's clear and applied reasonably consistently.
Google makes completely arbitrary moral judgements about 'advertising guns' - which I might support, but they are arbitrary.
With this - it's about advertisers interests, not Googles.
If Coca Cola et. al. don't want their ads jammed into CardiB rapping about her vagina, her butt, your python, and her vagina again - well that's Coke's prerogative. Surely.
I don't see why PSA should be being 'monetized'.
I don't see why Coca Cola should be forced to pay for ads during this program.
This is not 'banning or censoring videos' - this is basically 'deciding which bits of content advertisers want to pay for'.
Different game.
That's irrelevant to the argument.
>I don't see why Coca Cola should be forced to pay for ads during this program.
I didn't say that and I haven't picked up that argument anywhere else really. I merely refuted your argument that something "comfortable to watch" is a good metric for this program. I came up with this example off the top of my head. And you would find a lot of suitable advertisers for this kind of content as well.
Please stick to the original argument, that "comfortable to watch" is a good metric instead of strawmanning me with censorship and forced payments.
It's relevant because we are discussing which videos can and cannot be monetized - some are not intended to be monetized.
"comfortable to watch" - is actually a perfect way to communicate a complex and nuanced issue, in a simple way to various audiences - internal, operational, close ad partners, long tail ad partners.
It reasonably summarizes the otherwise reasonable policy.
And yes - someone talking about explicit sexual subjects for whatever reason definitely falls in that category, because advertisers would be weary of it. Google wants it that way for obvious reasons, and it seems like it's working.
Finally - there is nothing to report here. It's great that we get some insight, but this has to be a fairly naive view of 'insider reporting'. There is no story. Google has a reasonable policy for determining which content is good for ads, in general, and which is not. They seem to be acting professionally on it. This is people doing their jobs reasonably well especially with nuanced things.
If this story were about content removal or censoring, it would be a different discussion.
If you want to create a channel for users to view your content, purchase a domain, buy a VM on some cloud service, and set up your own video streaming service for your own channel.
It would be interesting to see how much it cost one person versus the income generated. I'm pretty sure that anyone with millions of subscribers would be bankrupt instantly.
I think the one reasonable avenue would be to unionize all of the major content creators and invite any creator to be a part of the union. Then threaten a strike. But the content creators are probably like a herd of cats. It's unlikely any coalition is remotely possible.
It would be interesting to see a napkin calculation on this, because I highly doubt this is true. Bandwidth cost and video compression are both a lot better these days than people think, and if you could cut the middle man out of advertising (which you might could if you have millions of viewers) I think the benefit would be significant.
Of course, YouTube does not only provide bandwidth and servers. They provide a "platform", not in the technical sense but in the broader sense. They have well working apps on all mobile platforms, they have a social network, they have editing tools and redundancy, they have so many benefits that you'd really have to think twice before taking them on.
Your idea of a strike is interesting, while I doubt it would happen I would love for content creators to team up and make common demands.