Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

At this point the "intelligent" content filtering algos at fb and yt are a caricature of what they were meant to be.

Not so long ago a popular chess Youtuber had a few of his videos taken down simply because of some phrases including words like "black" and "white" alongside "strong" and "weak"[0]. This was of course deemed racist by YT's clever algos. It's insane.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729156

View on HN

Nowhere in that citation is there concrete support for your claim that these words led to the video being taken down.

> 4:15 But if that's the case, then I'm pretty sure all of my 1800 videos will be taken down, as it's pretty much black against white to the death every video, and I don't think it's supposed to work like that.

He has only chess content on channel. He reviews chess games. One of the biggest chess youtuber outside of the grand masters.

He mentioned some current event keywords which might be the cause. Also, he has more subscribers than any grandmaster's channel as far as I'm aware.

Yea, he rarely talks about anything other than chess..

Whoops, you used the word master ...

Please note that it is actually unclear why his video was taken down. It's extremely common for chess videos to Feature the words "white", "black", "weak" and "strong".

Maybe chess grandmains can evolve too with the time and use more inclusive words like pink and blue for example

Until you realize that in some counties “blue” is a euphemism for “gay” and you’re right back where you started.

In the Irish language, dark skinned people are referred to as 'Blue', supposedly as Black Man was already in use referring to Satan.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2qje9o/til_t...

There's an old Nordic word for Africans that can be translated as blueman.

Should we 'evolve with the times' and change the colour of tires, unpowered display pixels, or space while we're at it?

> grandmains

Gave me a good laugh

"what they were meant to be." is probably not a correct characterization, it's likely that the algorithms are intended to prevent "bad" content at all costs, a high false positive rate is likely, if not intended, an accepted consequence.

It's likely better to remove a chess master's video than to let an offensive one stay online

Likely how?

I think from Facebook's perspective, they will get more public anger and nasty articles written about them for hosting racist content than for taking down some chess video.

Suppose, if I think it's better that your comments be removed. Is it better to remove them rather than have them up?

Obviously then there should be an appeal process possible, but I'd rather have my content removed than some really bad stuff hanging around.

I suppose your comment should also be removed algorithmically. It contains a word deemed offensive in modern vernacular...

Maybe we need less automatic moderation and more humans in the loop. Or just accept that sometimes content is just visible.

> Maybe we need less automatic moderation and more humans in the loop

As if humans are never wrong or have no biases.

I'm fairly convinced that 99% of all content filtering are poorly written RegEx rules, just like 99% of all ad targeting is showing people more of what they've already bought.

Maybe chess masters should do like github and rename their tools to not include those words?

I for one am totally looking forward to a match between green and pink! Pink goes first.

Careful not to allude to any gender stereotypes. Let’s go grey and off grey.

Grey still sounds a bit too dangerous. Might be taken for an age thing. I'd go with A and B. X and Y might allude to sex.

Can't do A and B because that's just shorthand for "Aryan" and "Black/Brown".

Yes, we should all resort to playing chess in our heads. Though it's troublesome as we'd have to communicate the pieces names. Kings have opressed people through history do that wouldn't work, since at some point in history a far distant relative of mine was killed in a war initiated by kings orders.

Letting bishops "capture" the child-like pawns is also in poor taste.

This reminds me of this xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/959/

You can't name it alphabets, It offends the 'reading challenged'

I have a better idea, let's just ban English itself. After that we can ban any language that gets English level of popularity.

We could call it the "Tower of Babel policy".

Doubleplusbueno.

Still racist because white people are actually often pink.

Yeah we should probably just remove everything that is either black or white from the world. Yellow too while we're at it. And of course brown. Maybe red as well?

Goodbye Zebras!

They're just racist horses anyway.

>chess masters

Chess mains

Reply on news.ycombinator.com