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Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

"mistakenly"

To clarify, the problem here is Bloomberg automatically turning YouTube's PR statement into their headline. "Mistakenly" is how YouTube's PR copy wants to describe the actions to soften the impact. A neutral headline would have been "YouTube's New Moderators Mistakenly Pull Right-Wing Channels."

Then, in the body of the story, the reporter can report that YouTube's PR department assures us that this wasn't company policy. Instead, they chose to carry the PR department's water by incorporating their PR claims into the headline.

In all likelihood, the "moderators" ban channels they don't agree with on purpose. It may be against company policy for them to that, but that doesn't an honest mistake make. Clearly, company policy and procedures are not geared towards catching these kinds of "mistakes".

Now, actually do not follow these channels, and I am indifferent to their existence. I am more offended by the reduction of journalism to verbatim copying from PR responses.

What if such moderators had banned Bloomberg's YouTube channel? Would this story have assured us that it was just a simple mistake?

PS: For the record, YouTube has the right to decide what content they will host on their platform.

Eh. The explanation they offered that they were hiring a large mass of moderators and some of them made mistakes is more than plausible. When they add that many people it's really inevitable that someone would get over-eager or misread the message of a video.

It can hardly be called a mistake when the same doesn’t happen to people and channels that align themselves politically with Google’s internal policies and culture.

Google can do as they please, YouTube is theirs, but you can’t seriously accept statements like these at face value.

Of course it can. Taking this action against someone with a political stance opposite from yours may be a mistake you're more likely to make, but it's still a mistake.

Besides that, the point I was trying to make was less about whether it was a mistake, and more that it's plausible that this was something that was done by an individual against company policy rather than in accordance with it.

Regardless of whether the actions are against company policy, they were taken on purpose by the "moderators".

I don't dispute that. What I dispute is the implication that they had been instructed to do so by Google.

So similar to the Wells Fargo account creation fraud.

You know, this group is still active, collecting revenue on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsdGlryupg5aU1849rUzeHw ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change

Trying to trample opposing political views by force won't end well.

They may have hired remote workers from a firm called 'Vaco', which employs people from abroad and asked them to moderate.

Yup I have already seen threads with screenshots from linkedn pages of some of those people. I guess that just as in US, where Youtube is using partisan and highly controversial NGOs like ADL and SPLC; they are using equally ideologically driven people from other countries. You can call this mistakes if you want but we all know what happened. Dozens of channels that were deleted in past few weeks appealed youtubes decisions and got negative response. So this was not done by just one or two rouge moderators. Even people who oversee moderators are biased and think that censorship is good and will work.

Moderation needs to be controlled by third and politically/ideologically independent party.

You are right that "they are using equally ideologically driven people from other countries".

France is effectively censored by the norms and values of Algeria, which is evidently the low-cost place to find people who understand French.

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