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This article does contain very little information.

But this channel is one I watch a lot of. It is dedicated to in depth chess commentary with some bits of chess history and I highly recommend it if you play. This it not the first time this has happened to Antonio. He even discussed it a bit the first time, 7 months ago. In that instance it was a single video that was removed. In that video he says “white will always be better” while analyzing a specific position (interesting to note that in the starting position of chess this is also always true). YouTube said it was removed for “harmful and dangerous content”. Without anything else to go on I’d say it’s a fair assessment the it was banned for racial content. I’m not sure what else could be “dangerous” about chess analysis.

https://extra.ie/2020/07/02/news/world-news/chess-youtube-vi...

> this is not the first time

This article is actually about that time seven months ago. Quite why it’s been written today is unclear.

SEO...

It's old news, and it was discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729156

Ah, thank you! Some interesting info in that piece: the channel owner didn’t think it had anything to do with race and instead because he mentioned COVID.

This is actually the second time it has happened to the same person. For the same reason presumably.

Indeed, hate speech is just a guess. It is just as likely it was taken down because it was a Pawn Site.

Well, what else might it be? Agadmator is just a chess channel. He does breakdowns of chess games and that’s pretty much it.

The block was for “harmful and dangerous” content. That’s incredibly vague. Even describing a game using aggressive language could fall foul of such a broad filter.

How many times do non-chess channels get caught in this filter? That’s the first question I’d be asking. I have to assume more than zero times. How many chess channels have not been banned by this filter? Again, presumably more than zero. And yet the article makes conclusions with a dataset of 1.

Have you watched adagmator? He doesn’t really use aggressive language

It was just an example. Another example: “bishop attacks king” could be interpreted as dangerous or harmful content. It’s so vague we have no idea.

There are plenty of other chess channels using the words "black" and "white" to describe each side that have yet to be automatically and mysteriously banned. If it were as simple as usage of the word "black" in the various circumstances that might arise during a discussion about chess, surely some of those would have met the same fate, no?

You would think so. I can construct many sets of sentences that could appear in an excited chess commentary discussion that would probably run afoul of various automated censorship systems.

...and black steals a pawn from white here.

White springs his trap and white is now crushing black on the back row.

.. and we can see black is completely dominating white's position.

White is getting killed by black here...

.. and black now has white in a complete stranglehold.

..black queen takes white bishop ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The real problem, IMO, is that we're all left guessing what the reason is. YouTube has a gargantuan task moderating its content, and I don't expect them to be error-free in this: false positives will happen, and that's okay.

But it's the complete lack of transparency, as well as some YouTubers having difficulty getting their accounts restored that's the real issue.

Maybe he used some specific phrase that triggered something? Or maybe he used some words just a tad too often? Or maybe something else? No one seems to know...

Chess commentators might use various phrases that sound $COLOR-supremacist at different rates like "$COLOR is better" or "I prefer $COLOR".

> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN.

Honestly, and anecdotally, I think there's been a large influx of people recently on the right wing spectrum and/or the more outrage driven spectrum. I've noticed a considerable shift in the number of outraged comments and right wing view points in the last few months.

I believe this ties in to the deplatforming of Parler. I can only surmise that it either led to a lot of lurkers becoming more active, or an influx of new members joining to share their outrage and sticking around. Or maybe it did shift existing members over to being more sensitive about what they perceive as internet policing.

The tech world, while seen as largely as being left wing, has had a strong right-wing libertarian streak. This streak seems to have followed the same right-ward march and increase in rhetoric as your standard conservatism.

Oh definitely agreed. Even in silicon valley, which is perceived as a liberal tech Mecca, I'd say I run into a significant number of right wing libertarians.

I read a really good post somewhere that it's because libertarianism is highly based in absolute logical theory. This correlates really well with software engineering. There's a sense that the world can be reduced to an ideal localized function. But it ignores why we need designers to accommodate the human element or architecture that considers error handling.

Furthermore as a result of it being based in logical absolutism, it's really easy to corrupt by introducing polarizing concepts under the guise of "rational thought experiments" and the like.

Maybe the median person just doesn’t hold extremely intricate positions in these issues but they are being forced to choose a position. You really need to break these claims down a lot to get any sensible discussion. All in or all out are not the options.

I think part of the issue is how a lot of people who may not hold intricate views have a hard time separating well formed, nuanced views from their emotional world view stances. I feel like there's an inherent desire in tech, where knowledge is seen as strength, to always speak up even to show understanding via having an opinion. I know I fall prey to it myself too.

So people in the median often either stay out of discussions they don't have a stake in, or they espouse the most easily digestible view. Unfortunately those happen to usually be more reactionary and simplified views, since nuanced views require greater subject onboarding. Either way, it results in a large skew towards reactionary comments on social media sites.

This original submission being a great example, where many comments are about thought policing, without substance.

I think the problem is that you're taking people who disagree with you on a single issue and lumping them into a general "my enemy" group. (It can be inferred that you see yourself as left wing). I hate "deplatforming" with a passion, but wouldn't mind public healthcare and more corporate regulations.

We were here all along, and yes the current trajectory of the World is starting to rattle things.

We might have been too polite and kept things to ourselves, not that the "Left" understands Social and Philosophical equilibrium.

Maybe we should talk more about things that separate us to bridge them, rather than pointing ever angrier fingers.

agadmator doesn’t do anything hateful or dangerous at all, so we can see here his name is being tarnished as well

> Well, if experts said it, it just be true! The experiment they ran is speculative as best and the article just ran with it as absolute fact.

It’s not like Google is going to explain why they were blocked. All the creators can do is guess.

It’s so high because it fits general HN narrative of evil big tech.

I posted it because it was an example of automation yielding an unwanted result.

You're not sure why this has so many upvotes on HN? The title is anti-google and most people on the internet only read titles. It makes sense that this community would heavily upvote this post. I did not read the article either, mostly because IDGAF anymore. Big tech companies banning whoever they want is the new normal unfortunately.

If YouTube won't give any explanation for these decisions then assuming the worst is entirely fair.

It's because it hits on the widely held position of right-wing ideologies and white supremacists being "censored" by big tech

And what do you do to force them to confirm the reason? That's right, get it to be so high up on HN.

Or get someone big enough that they can ask YouTube on Twitter WTF is going on. Like Markiplier in November 2019. He asked his fans to spam emojis in a livestream. So they did and were banned for spam. Their appeals - which YouTube says are reviewed by actual humans - were denied. It wasn’t until he went to Twitter that the problem was fixed.

https://twitter.com/markiplier/status/1193218509804695552

If I remember correctly, it wasn't just YouTube. Because of that people lost their entire Google accounts, including e-mail, drive and whatever else people trust Google with nowadays

That in particular made me go from just not using Google personally and occasionally bitching about their practices to actively discouraging everyone from using anything related to that company

This is why I like my accounts unbundled. One account per service thanks. Far too many horror stories of Rift users getting their facebook account banned without the option to have it reviewed and then losing access to all the games they had purchased.

Transcript here I think-

https://downsub.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwat...

Very little talk of black or white or covid.

I'd most likely guess "Suicide" from the skydiving talk but perhaps "Shooting" from the film talk. I guess you can make stuff up really.

"oh man like you look like you're so high you're just going to jump to your death but uh then then once you actually cross that across that that line you just jumped it's uh just exhilarating i i really enjoy it i do plan on doing it again in the future"

> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN.

Very strange comment.