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.
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.
[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 ...