YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability
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>Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong.
Can't agree more.
Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result?
I don't know, but I have my doubts.
Yes, moderation/suspensions can be a pain, and pointing out embarrassing mistakes is important to add pressure on Google to put more resources into it. At the same time, YouTube is full of great content and content creators. Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions, instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this actually is.
"We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff."
"We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people."
"Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."
That's why they still use physical ballots in most elections: as soon as you're dealing with physical things the costs for a bad actor to do bad things at scale balloon up.
On the one hand, I think it's sort of unfortunate that so much of the Web has come to be about "free" access (though paying for access with attention and time) but that does come from the perspective of someone who would be able and happy to pay with money instead.
Ever buy strawberries?
"We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people."
Train conductors often check tickets after the train has started moving.
"Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."
Climate change. Dirty streets.
This happens in some public transport operators already.
For example comparing to HN, I can go on "New" and see "Places to Spray a Fragrance on for a Long Lasting Effect-Ajulu's Thoughts" - I know it's immediately flaggable, even if it could be a valid post on another website. (and require a full review there to check it doesn't break some specific rules)
YouTube represents 10% of Google's income BTW, so the other 90% of middle class incomes could do moderation for their other services.
Is that naieve?
And Google, the mighty megacorporation, can't even clear a basic phone support bar, much less a local user support office in each region? Something normal for other corporations?
I've seen YouTube channels with thousands of dollars of monthly revenue be closed over issues that would've taken a trained human less than 10 minutes to resolve. YouTubers with that kind of revenue are literally one in a million users or so.
Besides that they also provide 24 hour support for breakdowns and plenty of other services.
And at best, they made 10% (!!) gross margin on my car - which is of a range of 2500$. Meanwhile Google has 45-60% (!!) profit margins while not giving a crap.
VW, one of the two largest auto makers, makes around 300€ profit per vehicle sale (excluding luxury brands). For some models it's even less than 100€. You can calculate around 1% profit for a car sale, often less.
The actual money is in leasing and financing, which is why almost all automakers own a bank.
Seeing as it's absolutely trivial to negotiate 10% discount on any new VW car, I struggle to see how that's true? Unless you mean that VW makes 300 euro and the rest is the profit of the dealership?
Even if that's true, VW makes an absolute mountain of money through financial services. Yes, they will make very little profit selling you a £12k Polo, but VW Financial Services will make £2-3k just providing you with a financial agreement for it.
YouTube was fine before Google.
Stop centralising.
What if... the average viewer was willing to pay for video content instead of requiring a free, unprofitable service run as a "Free add-on" to an Ad Empire?
Youtube may finally be profitable in the past few years but the first 90% of its existence, the entire rise to power, it was unprofitable and run at a loss. There aren't other major providers because no one else wants to lose that much money
Services like Brilliant and others are attempting what you’re suggesting, though.
That would solve all of our problems, wouldn't it? Too bad there's likely always going to be someone willing to offer the same service for free + ads and/or selling users data. Unless people start valuing their privacy/data much more than they do at the moment (or regulation comes in), it's just wishful thinking.
If you don't like youtube's free service you can get your money back.
Don’t forget also that Alphabet is swimming in money. They can certainly afford the manpower to make it relatively seamless for the user. And I really doubt users can’t be trained to associate a few hours’ wait of a completely new, reputationless user, or a user who is using an unknown device or VPN, with a better quality of site experience because the videos are screened.
Things like timestamp of when in the video was reported might help for scanning "content" e.g. "50 people reported this 20 minute video in the 3-5 minute mark" or similar average.
Let's be clear, the lack of humans anywhere in the pipeline for uploaders is because they don't have to, not because it is impossible. Having said that, I really hope we do not see government intervention here.
"Hi Sun Knudsen, Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our harmful and dangerous policy."
Google has always had humans in the loop. Not for every decision but certainly the more impactful ones that affect user generated content. When I worked there, there were even humans reviewing requests for account un-suspensions (yes, really! they didn't do a great job though, needless to say).
Also, it's quite hard to understand what sort of algorithm could result in this sort of suspension. What training data would give it hundreds of thousands of examples of infosec discussions labelled as harmful? But it's very easy to see how a large army of low paid humans given vague advice like "don't allow harmful or dangerous content" could decide that linking to hacking information is harmful.
The problem here is not AI. The problem here is Google allowing vague and low quality thinking amongst the ranks of its management, who have decided to give in to political activists who are determined to describe anything they're ideologically opposed to as "harmful", "dangerous", "unsafe" etc. When management give in to those radicals and tell their human and AI moderators to suspend "harmful" content, they inevitably end up capturing all kinds of stuff that isn't political in nature, simply due to the doublespeak nature of the original rules.
That's why I turned this around. Why do you assume they're lying, without evidence?
The point is that involving more humans in the moderation decisions at YouTube does not guarantee nor is there any evidence to suggest, that it would result in better moderation.
Somebody with the technical and industry knowledge to know that talking about security vulnerabilities like this shouldn't be removed can probably find a better job that YouTube video moderation.
I'll settle for "Google makes a well-informed decision and will communicate the weighted pros and cons that led to that decision."
There's a very wide chasm between "an AI decided" or "someone spent 20 seconds on it", and "we hired an expert in every possible field and they thoroughly research the facts at hand before making a decision".
The latter is obviously not feasible, but there are many options in between that will give markedly better outcomes than the status quo while not making YT moderation economically infeasible.
They are a massive monopoly and just the other day it was reported that they manipulated their own ad markets for their own profit. They constantly inaccurately accuse people of malicious intent and copyright infringement, often massively hindering peoples' careers and generally providing zero recourse. To not assume lying and at best self-serving intent given Alphabet/Google's position in the world would be foolish.
On top of that, is it really that different to use inaccurate AI or to use humans who are intentionally not given the time or tools to do human-quality work?
The problem is obviously with the overall quality of moderation, and the level of power exerted by platforms over users. Whether a non-skilled human reviewer or an AI is handling the broken process hardly matters given the results.
The post literally quotes Google as saying that for the _last_ time this happened. Then the post literally states they appealed and never heard back. There is nothing concerning a human for this instance, though I suspect once the uploader reaches out (were it not for the popularity this is gaining), one could expect similar dismissal. That there are barely humans involved, and in a poor way when they are, doesn't mean there are never humans involved, true. But for many, the bare minimum of assistance is indistiguishable from no assistance.
It shouldn't, and we need to hold Google and others to a much higher standard here. I'm not sure how we do that, but the status quo is garbage.
But I am skeptical it would be successful. It might be, but it would probably require a much larger percentage take of video revenues, which would discourage most YT content creators from going there because in fact, relative to overall YT volumes, these suspensions are rare. That's why we're discussing individual cases instead of studies with percentage figures in them.
It feels a bit weird to be playing the devil's advocate in this case because frankly the state of modern Google saddens me. It seems not much like the firm we built back in the day. They obviously shouldn't be doing this kind of thing and in the past they didn't, which is why I place the finger of blame not on AI (which may not even be at fault here, and is a general tool anyway) but rather on bad ideologies and ideas permeating the management classes in America.
In this case I blame favouritism and feminism. YouTube content moderation is run by Wojcicki, a woman who got in to Google by renting Larry and Sergey a garage, by being the sister of Sergey's wife. She's not an engineer. Thanks to the prevailing ideology an ambitious feminist woman in an executive position at a west coast tech firm is utterly untouchable, and must be given whatever she wants. So despite being the exec in charge of Google Video when it was utterly beaten by YouTube, she has ended up running YouTube. A clearer case of failing upwards can't be imagined. It's her personality that dictates the post-2016 swing towards promoting woke "authoritative content" on YT and the general culture of unaccountability for women that prevents anyone else pushing back, even as the bad PR racks up.
The real problem here is that people are envisioning human interaction as something that can produce better outcomes, but the cost of that may not be economical.
You can hire a generic human to look over a flagged video for 15 seconds and render a verdict, but the verdict is going to be bad. That's not enough time to make an accurate evaluation.
Suppose you have an epidemiologist on YouTube making a claim about virus propagation. It gets flagged because there is a CNN article reporting that the CDC said something contradictory. The epidemiologist argues that the CNN article is a misinterpretation and if you look at the original CDC publication, that's not really what they said.
At this point for YouTube to get it right they've basically got to hire their own M.D. to study the CDC publication in enough detail to understand the context. That is prohibitively expensive. But the alternative is often censoring an epidemiologist who is trying to correct misinformation being disseminated by CNN.
And science is a moving target. The infamous example was the CDC in 2020 telling people not to wear masks. But there was a point in time when scientists were publishing studies on the health benefits of tobacco consumption. Challenging the established orthodoxy is inherently necessary for progress.
The underlying problem here is that YouTube isn't competent to make these determinations. They're attempting to do something they have no capacity to succeed in.
When it comes to government agencies, they are contactable (usually with a simple email). You might not get an immediate response, but a few hours to a few days later you can expect to hear back.
Or they could just stop doing that and go back to how it used to be. Let people upload videos and review them only after it was flagged. Novel idea, I know.
Return copyright in the US back to the original constitutional limits
“Congress shall have power… to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
As I read it, the law should be formed to maximize progress, not to maximize value of an idea.
But, a large amorphous group of citizens will never overcome a small, highly-concentrated self interested group. I doubt you'll ever see the copyright-opening version of the NRA or SPCA.
The court clearly held that profitability alone should not be a factor.
Corrupt influence-peddling charlatans milking the rubes?
Or was there something else intended by this analogy?
I don't upload any videos, but if their AI for reviewing videos is as bad as their AI for reviewing comments then both should be completely scrapped. Because it's not a regex matching or whatnot, but AI, it's impossible to predict which comment or a livechat message will get through. In practice it's virtually random. And the worst part is that they don't even bother to mention that your comment was 'problematic' to them, you have to have two windows open, one for posting and one on private mode to verify which of your comments actually showed up.
Just as a disclaimer, I haven't tried it in a while, so maybe it's somewhat better now, I don't know.
having it DMCA'd down is a problem for youtube. content id is how most of the material can stay up, the riaa can stay happy, and google can sell ads.
Why should they have to? Youtube makes BILLIONS of dollars, and they can afford to employs 10s of thousands of people to be human moderators, they just don't want to because that would eat into profits. If the video has X views or the publisher has X followers, it should be reviewed within hours by a real human.
>Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced scale as a result?
Nobody is saying there should be 0 AI moderation, just that there should be a human that reviews a clip if AI flags it and the end-user clicks a button saying "this shouldn't have been flagged".
The entire premise of google is kind of broken and both technical and non-technical people feel that way from what I've heard. The fact it's nearly impossible to get to a real human on anything, and if you do happen to get to a real human, half the time they aren't even empowered to undo whatever decision their AI has made... it's just not a good way to do business. There's a balance to technology and human interaction and Google (again IMO) has gone too far in the technology direction. Heck, humanity as a whole might need to find someplace in the middle if the studies about the current generation of 20-somethings struggling with stunted social interactions due to social media is to be believed.
Want to upload fast and not having your content taken down - deal with the legal issues yourself.
Want anonymous uploading and/or some protection - deal with automatic systems as employing enough people is just too expensive.
Maybe we could have the uploader host their own content, and do away with hosting platforms and their gatekeeping altogether?
I can see little reason today that well-established technologies and individual hosting arrangements couldn't offer similar value to whatever YouTube or some other centralised hosting service offers.
We are talking about the World Wide Web. Linking to other people's content is literally the central feature of the real platform here. For a long time, we did just fine with community-operated facilities and everyone linking to other sources of interesting content to help discoverability. We still do, really, but now the links and other community engagement tend to be locked up in places like different YouTube tabs for each channel, not the sidebar of someone's personal website. Of course, these days we also have entire sites (HN among them) built around sharing links to content that might be interesting to like-minded people. So I don't buy the usual arguments about centralised content hosting being the only way interesting content can gain exposure.
Numerous individual content creators make demos or livestream games or present tutorials with decent-to-excellent presentation values. They often use specialist software to do it. I therefore don't buy arguments about the technical difficulty of self-hosting either. There could be hosting packages offered by ISPs or other hosting services on a common carrier basis if individuals didn't want to set up all the infrastructure themselves, and those who were good/popular enough to make it more of a regular income would still have the ability to do so but now on their own terms.
Even at today's prices, you could serve tens of thousands of videos directly for less than a lot of people are paying for their ISP or mobile/cell phone plan each month. And of course, we know lots about how to efficiently serve interesting content via P2P networks that could be a big amplifier for popular content producers who were happy to share without wanting to monetise or otherwise collect large numbers of viewers on their own site for some reason. The available capacity and prices are surely only going to improve as the technology improves. So that's cost taken care of in most or all cases too.
So, if individuals hosting their own content is technically and economically feasible, and if individual creators and community groups facilitating content discovery is a viable culture along with all the other interactions they tend to have anyway, I struggle to see why the likes of YouTube are so valuable or irreplaceable in our society today. Obviously if YT disappeared overnight there would be a gap tomorrow, but we've been adapting and filling gaps and finding better ways to do things on the Internet since some time in the last millennium, and I see no reason to think we wouldn't do so again.
That's a pretty big if, and from my limited perspective, the most important problem content creators have and the most useful service Youtube provides.
I am curious about the cost of a process that establishes human reviews for conflict scenarios, i.e. situations like this. Is that still the planet-scale numbers?
It's the discovery piece that cannot be replicated. If hosting happened outside moderation can move to automatic with a user/ml flag with manual approve process that follows.
(And of course there is Hacker News for another example, combining some automatic stuff with manual control.)
To get this at scale, though, it seems like you need a larger social network to be divided into many smaller ones in some logical way that’s understood by by everyone involved.
It seems like the inherent hierarchy (authors versus subscribers) and subdivision of Substack is likely to work out well for them.
The answer is to simply not rely on YouTube for anything besides lifestyle and self-help vlogs, marketing, instructions on how to put together your IKEA bookshelf, and of course cat videos. There are plenty of other video hosting sites that won't ruin your day as a creator because you accidentally used the word "doodie" or because the AI thinks your video on writing "hello world" in Rust is teaching people to hack computers.
Well presumably Google being one of the worlds wealthiest corporations could hire and pay people a living wage to match the demand of users looking to upload videos to YouTube. It is in YouTube’s interest as it only exists and makes money on this very user generated content.
Yeah it’s great YouTube exists and can market to content creators about its market capture audience, but maybe it would be a better system without the middleman as anyone can upload a video anywhere on the internet making it instantly viewable by billions
If we made the case for operating "at human scale" Youtube would be amongst first casualties.
to your last point :
> Anyone can upload a video and make it viewable by billions, instantly. I think we shouldn't forget how amazing this actually is.
By the same reasoning, COVID-19 is similarly amazing.
Opinions move on : Youtube is 15 years old now. It's a practical monopoly, being the worlds 2nd most visited website. I wont deny it's utility - but it's a gross centralisation who's modus operandi present significant questions - chiefly, Is it right that it has for years circumvented nearly all regulation applied to other media, and should it remains largely unaccountable to any elected power ?
So the challenge it seems is thus : how do preserve the good things that self published video content has done for us, but prevent or limit the consequences and attendant injustice caused by a service so infeasibly large. it's impossible to administer ?
1. Limit who can post content
You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push content, you're taking the voice away from the masses.
2. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live with the rare false-positives or false-negatives.
This is the current approach, and while not perfect, I personally much prefer it to the former.
> You'll end up with only the powerful being able to push content, you're taking the voice away from the masses.
i think the algorithms already do that. the channels with the most followers have the loudest voice
>. Try to gradually improve content moderation and live with the rare false-positives or false-negatives.
its better than it was, and will likely improve but it's still drowing in shills and scammers. i think this would be rooted out by more community centric model. exactly how that looks, i dont know - but i think self policing would play a part.
Sure, but I don't people people are entitled to have their videos promoted for them. The fact that you can have your video hosted for free, and share it to anyone in the world is already great enough. While on average louder voices get the most attention, plenty of smaller creators have managed to get important messages out.
> drowing in shills and scammers
That seems like a hyperbole? Do you honestly feel this way browsing Youtube or Twitter? I'm not saying they don't exist but they're fairly rare in my experience.
> more community centric model
I agree, reddit's model works kinda well. Youtube has tried that in the past (though I guess they got rid of it?), and Twitter is experimenting with it now (Birdwatch). I also like the Facebook supreme court model for handling edge cases.
People will eventually be fine with however the system works. If that's how it works, they assume that's how it has to be. Most of users have no idea how this stuff functions. We're in it now because the expectation has been set for instant uploads, so there would be outrage, but eventually it becomes "the way things are." As an example see any change users hate - users complain, TPTB either concede completely (rare) and revert, make minor concessions but change little, or apologize for the inconvenience and do nothing. Eventually nobody cares anymore and forgets they were angry.
Most of this stuff barely matters. Frankly it might be good if my nephews had to wait longer between any number of irritating youtube videos they binge and parrot.
First, I think most of us would just like a relatively transparent method of escalating issues that will eventually get to a qualified human. Put some time delays and recaptchas to stop spammers from abusing it but if someone is willing to put in the time and effort to fight for a video, they should get a clear response as to why it was taken down and who made that determination.
Then there is the immense potential for crowdsourcing moderation. You can both get data by polling users (again with basic checks to prevent exploits) and promote certain users to a moderator role such that they can keep the community in which they participate reasonable. Especially for disinformation, how hard would it be to find volunteers to tell other people they're wrong on the internet?
And finally, if erroneous moderation has the potential to cause many problems, it is worth re-evaluating how much is actually necessary. For legal reasons there is some content that you really need an AI to quickly scan for, such as child porn, but in a lot of cases the harm in leaving up a video is insignificant.
There are a lot of sites on a similar scale to youtube that have substantially better (even if not necessarily perfect) content moderation despite working with substantially lower resources. If they can do it, so can Google.
There is no "rollback" for the existence of algorithms.
Instead of whining (problems without solutions) spend some time contemplating what a sufficient algorithmic solution looks like.
To be clear, that would be an algorithmic solution that "fights back" against issues like these (and not simply improving a failing solution).
That may not be a competing product. Maybe it's an algorithmic whistleblower?
Otherwise it seems like an enormous waste of talent and resources playing cat and mouse, when we can just give them guidelines and fairly often they'll be followed.
Of course bad actors can exist, but that's not a reason to give up on social solution to problems.
Everything is a trade-off.
Sure humans can be used for moderating spam.
I'd prefer if they performed real social work, instead.
Machines are assholes with nefarious agendas given to them either intentionally or unintentionally.
> Can't agree more.
Simply replaced a prior system in which humans cannot interact with humans anymore and certain humans get to chose what is right and wrong.
The key problem is the inability to provide human feedback more than the mechanism for making the initial decision itself (which is a different problem). Not sure how to achieve that at scale.
You need dictatorship for effective moderation. But you also want those dictatorships small, uniform, and interchangeable so that the "citizens" of those dictatorships can easily pick the one that suits them best. Those dictatorships link up (federate) with like-minded dictatorships to benefit from network effects of sharing their content among themselves.
If your content doesn't suit a certain dictatorship, it will suit another one.
PeerTube does federated video already. No, it's not as polished as YouTube. But it is the answer to human-level moderation at scale.
But how about adult porn? Acceptable to some, not to others (also depends on the context - even advocates of adult videos are generally not arguing that YouTube should host them). And there are shades of that.
In the end, no matter how mature and accepting you are, unless you allow literally everything, you will need moderators who are empowered to be the final authority on that decision, which is what I mean by "dictatorship".
However, PeerTube's secret sauce is putting the hosting power into the hands of the users, so for content creators with their own audience already in place who get whacked by YouTube's moderation algorithm, this can outweigh the benefits of the search/recommendation algorithm.
And this isn't just controversial pundits. Even the Blender Foundation got their videos blocked through a perfect storm of poor UX/support which spurred them to host their videos on PeerTube: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
The network layer of the web is federated, but the application layer usually isn't. That is, if you care just about who you send TCP traffic to, then yes, the internet alone is sufficient, but if you want to think about federation at the content level, the internet alone enables that but doesn't make it very easy. Something like PeerTube makes it easy. And you need to pull it up to the content/application level if you want to do things like implement content searching/filtering across a federated network of hosts.
> Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything
Disagree. Nobody can host their own YouTube server. That's the point of federated video hosting: (a) anyone can spin up their own host (or join a host they agree with if they don't have the tech skills) and (b) these hosts can network with like-minded hosts to build a YouTube-sized content library without any single entity owning the entire library. A world without PeerTube would not give typical users this option.
> in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node.
We are starting to see this problem a bit on Mastodon because people are piling into the most popular node and having their opinions about how it should run instead of understanding that the point is if they disagree with how a node is run, it's (relatively) easy to run one of their own (or bribe a technical friend into running one). But I'd argue this is a problem in the domain of user understanding/education rather than a problem built into the nature of Mastodon whereas centralized global-scale moderation is a problem baked into YouTube.
Youtube is in the same economic vice as Walmart. It's hard to be cheap and provide a human touch, especially as labor costs rise. Automation only takes you so far in a free economy.
the problem with youtube is that you are not youtube's customer, so the dont care about you. Only advertisers are customers and youtube cares about them only. I bet there is a big customer support department staffed with real people and serves only advertisers
This is a company in the business of shaping political opinion and manufacturing narratives, not providing a neutral platform. Unless that fundamental issue is addressed, symptoms (like bad AI flagging) will continue to persist.
Advertising is the problem.
https://archive.org/details/bestofcreativeco00ahld/page/133/...
Bring on the disagreement. It was a few short years ago the idea of this would have seemed a really, really bad idea. Just like autonomous weapons do now. And, hey, it doesn't even have to be us (Americans). I'm not going to name the potential baddie. There are many, including us. FOMO will drive so many terrible things in our future. Inch by inch, march closer to the reality many say will never happen. FSM save us.
This is the kind of edge case that even after escalation to higher tier human contractors will often still get wrong. I don't really see how it's actually much less dystopian just to have humans in the loop with the same outcomes.
I guess this is what happens when advertisers are the main priority and the moderators have all been replaced with robots. Content that may actually harm the development of children is considered fine, while someone posting a slightly edgey political take or a research paper about something which triggers a bot is removed.
It’s the inevitable result of moderation based only on who’s paying you.
I see no reason why the search feature within YouTube couldn't return videos that people were hosting on their personal sites or on competitors to YouTube (including Twitch VODs and livestreams). Even subscriptions and recommendations could work across platforms.
YouTube could still run adverts in/on the videos, and the revenue from that would be split with the site where the video was actually published. For a greater share of the ad revenue, YouTube could also offer to stream (a copy of) the video from their own servers.
Even if sites (or Multi-Channel Networks) had to pay a $1000 fee to be included in this system, and YouTube kept its rules about moderation and demonetisation, it would still greatly improve discoverability and hopefully competition generally.
A quick google search shows the platform has 2 billion monthly active users[1]. A number that has only been growing. Why do you claim people are leaving? Is it because of a handful of high-profile cases, or maybe you live in a hackernews/techie thought bubble where everyone is annoyed at youtube? The claim that people are leaving, or will leave is just completely baseless imo. This reminds me of the saying "there are 2 types of programming languages: those that people complain about, and those that no one uses".
You're not wrong, but that logic doesn't hold forever.
People are leaving, and if YouTube doesn't fix its moderation, it'll only get worse. There are alternatives, just none that have done anywhere close to as well as YouTube does. It's a good product, it literally just needs to not be moderated into the ground.
And soon after that it will be a torrential exodus. Myspace died within the space of a few months during my time in high school. YouTube could easily face a similar downfall.
I'm not saying "YouTube will die in a year!" I'm saying if they don't fix their moderation problems, their auto-bans, etc... they will start to lose bigger and bigger customers more frequently.
I claim people are leaving _because they are_. Just because people are joining faster than they're leaving doesn't invalidate the point that people are leaving the platform for a place where their channels won't get completely demonetized for background music that an AI flagged. Youtube has a serious moderation problem, and it will be their bullet wound when another competitor comes along.
If that specific video exists and if it's common, this conversation could be had; but, it's relatively uncommon, making it a surprise.
The real answer, as someone else has alluded to, is that YouTube is something that parents should watch or be aware of with their children.
There is a great deal of valuable information on YouTube and cancelling it wholesale is absolutely the wrong approach.
It is common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
Youtube is not something kids can use without supervision.
The author seems to consider the latter more likely.
Likewise, Spiderman dry humping Elsa staying up can mean either that the policy allows it, or, much more likely, that they just didn't manage to identify and take it down yet.
?
And, how long are they refused earnings during that time?
It's similar to the copyright infringement stuff, where real livelihoods can be put in jeopardy from these sorts of decisions.
Let us suppose we have a program which checks for orthodoxy according to the YouTube Terms of Service against each video submitted.
Nothing but a lack of having done the work prevents YouTube from adding to its "rejected" flag the following:
1) A list of timestarts and durations of the portions of the video violating the ToS. 2) For each item in that list, make it a tuple and add a reason -- which clause was violated?
Then outputting that to the owner of the rejected video.
Nothing stops them from doing this. Some set of words or images happened somewhere in the timestream -- the orthodoxy program has that timestamp as it churns through the video. And a specific clause was violated -- a particular word in a wordlist as an example, because there's no simple, non-composite function that just says "good or not good."
This is really not a particularly high bar as an ask.
If you tell the user exactly what they did wrong, they will keep trying by changing very little in the original video until it gets past bots, but still keeps the illegal or "forbidden" message.
I think youtube should not be allowed to remove videos for their content unless for legal reasons. Meaning it's a violation of the law, in which case they have to send the information to the police as well. And that, of course, should require a human stamp of approval. Of course, Youtube should be allowed to remove videos if they are too long, wrong format etc., but NOT for their content.
I think there's a possibility to implement that handles the issue you describe.
It's trivial to detect an user trying to circumvent content controls if he's trying that from the same account. When that is detected the user account can be put into manual mode review or automatically block new uploads for a while.
If circumvent is tried with different accounts the current system already doesn't prevent that so nothing is lost.
Another big area is political content and how much of it to allow. A lot of people complain on hyperpartisan news content and fake news. How to moderate it is very platform dependent with some wanting to restrict a lot of it and others leaning to allow almost anything.
Also I’d be extremely surprised if youtube has no human moderation. My experience has always been a mix of human and ai moderation. Facebook has like tens of thousands of contractors paid for moderation. They still use a lot of ai on top of that.
As to political speeches, I find it completely unacceptable that a private company gets to decide what stays on and what not. For example just the other day Youtube threatened to shut down the Senate channel in Romania because of the speeches of one of the senators. She is a wacko, true, but she is a Senator in the Romanian senate and didn't violate any law, it's unacceptable that private companies get to decide what is free speech nowadays. The Romanian MPs have special protections in the law, and the most important one is the free speech. They have even more free speech that any citizen of Romania. But hey, youtube is above the Romanian Constitution.
Who is going to hold Youtube employees accountable? What democratic or judicial process is there to have checks and balances on that? Just saying: move to another platform is not good enough. You can't cut off the phones of your political adversaries and just say: buy a cell phone with another carrier.
If the platform is becoming overwhelmed with extremist content, then it's on to the platform to find ways to better show the most relevant content to each user (e.g. burying it), but outright banning non-illegal content should be illegal.
Reddit is one of the very lax content platforms but has occasionally banned subreddits including political ones (Donald trump subreddit). Your phone example I don’t agree with as content platforms are fundamentally about curating a certain group of content. I think of them as closer to news media in terms of what they show. You would not expect New York Times to have much very conservative articles and opposite for Fox News. While content platforms have user generated content mostly that defines the available content pool not what they want to recommend. Actual percent of banned things is pretty low so they do mostly allow any content but there are certainly categories of content they spend a lot of effort on. As for another motivation for political banning one complaint tiktok often receives is as a Chinese related company it should not influence American politics. If it wants to be safe there then it having extreme content becomes legal risky itself. Not so much in the it is directly illegal sense but in the increasing chances of the platform getting banned which felt like a serious risk a few months ago. I think in general a lot of the political content restriction motivation is legal in origin in the sense of wanting to avoid issues that cause congress to do stuff to the platform. Similarly Facebook and all the Anti trust talks one way of being careful is trying to restrict extreme political content that otherwise senators may complain about.
There’s also related should political advertisements be allowed.
I don't think google agrees.
0. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/6273409?hl=en
1. https://support.google.com/youtube/forum/AAAAiuErobU70d28s1N...
Wow, that’s um, wild
You see what you want to see, but YouTube hosts an overwhelming abundance of evidence that contradicts your claim.
Well we did just have a case with Twitter and IIRC Youtube where they redefined their "hacked material" policies to bend to the political will after the whole Hunter Biden laptop fiasco. So this may just be collateral damage due to those policy changes and the AI behind enforcing them.
Society gives PR departments far too much power. We should be electing governments that enforce reasonable standards, not relying on what is essentially DDoS to achieve social mores.
Thats the excuse, but in reality, google still runs ads on demonetized channels. And there are companies that want to advertise on these other channels. Google is actually doing a disservice to stock holders by excluding profits, but many suspect that they want to be a cable network in the long run, siding with media corps.
There are tiers of advertisers, lower tier companies will gladly pay to advertise on lower quality channels.
I can't prove it myself, but I can offer a plethora of inductive evidence that builds up the probability that I am right to a high enough probability range to be correct.
More than just a pattern on youtube itself, but just read the kind of doublespeak Susan Wojcicki puts on on the topic.
The world of Fahrenheit 451 didn't arrive that way in a day, it probably took decades.
KRACK Attacks: Breaking WPA2 https://www.krackattacks.com/
KRACK - Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOgJswt7nAc
It doesn't give you the ability to "crack" a WPA2 network without the password.
You can’t have it both ways and as someone who works in this space I’m pretty upset by this ham fisted approach to censoring content.
I look forward to google becoming the next AOL.
Forcing them to state that in a specific forum as some sort of power play isn't going to help.
> Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale.
It's impossible to operate a complaints-platform on a global scale if it's run by humans. According to GMI [0], 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute.
Given an average video duration of about 12 minutes [1], that would be 2500 videos per hour. That's just too much to manually review and handle complaints.
[0] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-ca...
Yes, it is - because it's actually 2500 videos per MINUTE, not per hour, mea culpa. So your 30,000 reviewers would actually have to be at least 1.8 MILLION.
The misconception is that it's the review process that's the problem - it isn't. That can be automated just fine.
The problem arises as soon as there are complaints or issues with the content and that depends on the number of videos, not the duration.
So if there's a problem with a video it can get flagged, de-monetised or even taken down automatically by software (as is the case now). This is a non-issue. It gets complicated as soon as one party has a dispute over this and that scales with the number of videos, not their length.
That seems pausible, but if so, the entire calculation would have to be redone from scratch, with qualitatively (not quantitatively; different units, not just different values) different numbers, so bringing "1.6 million" into it is still a misleading non sequitor.
Just look at all the reaction channels and compilations that simply reuse the same content over and over again. You have one funny or shocking clip (often from 3rd party sources such as TikTok) and you'll find the same video snippet in at least 10,000 remix/compilation/reaction videos. Not to mention reuploads and straight up copies.
Algorithms have a hard time catching up with this and cropping, mirroring, tinting, etc. are often used to confuse ContentID. Asymmetry is the problem. Bots and software can both spam and flag content at superhuman rates.
The inverse - e.g. deciding whether a complaint is legit, fair use applies, whether monetisation is possible, etc. - is actually a really hard problem and therein lies the dilemma.
Certain parties are gaming the system and the scale is just too much to handle manually.
Was good for spam for a long time.
The problem isn't the automated review process, the problem is complaints and disputes.
Even if only 1% of all videos had any issues of this sort at all, that'd still be 25 complaints per minute about the most complex topic in media no less - copyright law and fair use.
The problem lies in the asymmetry - bots and automated flagging campaigns can scan, mark and take down thousands of videos per minute no problem.
But it's impossible for creators to get their issue reviewed in time by a human, because we just don't have AI capable of handling such decisions yet. And even then it's often still not as clear-cut as one might think and both sides need to be heard, etc.
I dunno, where's the evidence this case was even done by AI? People just say Google does everything with computers when they actually use armies of contractors.
The ultimate ironic censorship on the part of Youtube:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce...
And the discussion thread:
Now, once they reach a certain scale, why are they allowed to operate like a "normal small company"?
There was and is a push to make them behave more like a utility (i.e. a platform). Mainstream media, along with a major political party, are on a crusade to make these tech platform be more and more of an editor because they like that currently their competition (in case of media) and political rivals (in case of Democrats) are bearing the brunt of the censorship.
And you can see this push even here on HN with constant references to how evil Facebook and Twitter is because memes on those platforms caused Hillary to lose in 2016, and therefore how misinformation is such a big problem that more censorship is needed. I don't know how you fix that. These platforms didn't want to do this. They got bullied into it.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_32...
It's funny that I really appreciated Google when I first signed up for Gmail. Now that I've had it for 16 years, I resent the fact that I can get deplatformed for any reason, and there's really nothing I can do to prevent that.
This is the dilemma for me.
The thing is, I connect all my accounts to a single mail application and handle everything from there, including their automated backups for ~15 years or so.
The jury is still out for me, we'll see.
What if instead of locking him for a week they'd canceled his account (and related accounts e.g. Gmail, plus linked accounts because 'bypassing ban')?
And you don't have to be doing something like discussing security - maybe you're talking about Pokémon Go and they ban you for "CP videos" or you posted a bunch of red or green emoji in livestream comments for a gamer. Goodbye email, sites logged into with a Google account, Android phones (because they KNOW that phone number is linked to your identity), etc.
And what are you going to do about it? Call customer service? snrk
I know it's not perfect but I feel much better knowing I pay for my email service, online storage and password management, knowing I'll be a paying customer in someone's system deserving of at least some degree of customer service.
https://peertube.sunknudsen.com/videos/watch/182e7a03-729c-4...
Looking back, the evolution of social media/youtube was pretty obvious. Back then, not so much.
1) Begin with anything goes including illegal. Run at a loss, Grow baby!
2) Ads
3) Bitching from some important people causes some removal of the more flagrantly illegal stuff.
4) Employees and PR departments apply a POV to what is now close to a monopoly. Large scale censorship.
What makes the modern era interesting is the POV angle. I can't imagine Rockefeller's Standard Oil restricting sales to people with conflicting politics. Of course, there are people spending a lot of time each day on r/politics and what used to be r/thedonald shouting joyous insanity at each other...that's the modern pool of workers.
I tend to avoid it and support other platforms to encourage content creators to migrate.
People still can't figure out that not watching YouTube solves all moderation problems?
Google doesn't care about those posting on YouTube. They care about advertisers pulling their money if whatever content infringes on THEIR priorities.
I think Odysee is a good alternative. PeerTube doesn't really seem to be a great option here as it seems to have been down during this time.
> Google doesn't care about [...]
Mostly true, but also kind of not relevant. Google isn't doing anything here besides making poorly trained AI models that try to solve this problem for them. It's more negligence than it is malice, IMO.
They definitely should also block Gmail... because it has become incredibly slow to load.
I bet the CEO is laughing a lot when he sees all of this interacting together.
BYOReligion.. and Google believes that they need to increase 'engagement', increase profit, and decrease headcount.. so.. there you have it dear Sun Knudsen.
Edit: I don't care for the 'virtual currency' of 'karma'. I wonder though; the sky is blue, I point at the sky, I say "the sky is blue", and people frown (?) upon me for stating the obvious fact of life.. Or is it just Google-trolls/fanboys/fangirls that don't like the true being called out? My above comment is also applicable to any entity that automates "as much as possible" and maintains a small team to manage operations. Something tells me that their internal Finance team has "enough" staff to monitor the General Ledger. Because General Ledger is critical to their $$$$$. A 'content creator' though, is not as critical, thus gets far less attention, and <insert FAANG> will only be bothered to fix this, if said person yells loud enough. How is this fact of life being downvoted? (not me.. I don't grow taller/shorter based on the karma points) :)
Yes; exactly this. If you were out in a crowd and called everyone's attention to you - thousands of people quietened to pay attention to what you were going to say for a moment, and you announced the thing you yourself say is an "obvious fact", that the sky is blue, the crowd would be annoyed at you for wasting their time with obvious low-quality trivia.
"company seeks profit" is the same low-value annoying thing to say. You're not being downvoted because it's untrue, you're being downvoted because it's like a toddler going "hey, hey, hey, hey, look, look at this, watch this" "okay?" "throws ball at ground". Great, thanks for that, good contribution.
All this "I am a private company and do as I please" when it comes to a very big companies is baloney. They have way too much power and should be held responsible for how this power being used. Preventing them from being able to lobby governments should be of first priority as well.
Since the companies of that type are international it is of course up to the individual governments to implement whatever if any measures they would see fit.
It comes with the territory if we want Google to be able to censor hate speech and misinformation.
You can always use a competing site, or build your own.
If Google loses a YouTube creator, it has almost no impact on their bottom line.
If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened.
I would argue this is the perfect scenario for a creator's union (of course, it should use some other platform to communicate).
No. There are numerous providers that can host your videos. For a small fee. This mentality is what gives Google such pseudo-power.
Do the alternatives hold up in terms of things like market reach, $ performance, and not banning the same users?
This is myth I want to dispell.
Now to answer your question. Yes, it will be tough and disruptive should you start distributing your content through other alternatives if you were using youtube as your only vehicle. But similar issues were faced by other content creators such as musicians, journalists when the streaming era started disrupting their vehicles. They adapted. Don't see why video content creators shouldn't be able to find the same flexibility and continue to thrive. Youtube by itself with no content does not have anything to sell.
Infact, relying only on a single platform can be dangerous for creators since we've seen some of them being booted off by AI. No human explanations.
Audience, traffic, monetization, reach are all market problems. They will exist whether Youtube is there or not.
Such a desire to shield mega-corporations from any moral culpability since they think it serves their personal sensibilities. Very naive.
What many do not realize is the 'build your own' is going on (I can name at least 4 YT replacements, some better than others). But they are dismissing them with the same reasons they are kicking the creators off the 'mainstream' sites. So you see a lot of YT refugees and many existing YT creators 'splitting the difference' basically they upload it to both YT and several other sites. There is almost zero downside in doing so really.
Eventually someone will click it all together in the right way and create a decentralized uncensorable thing. At that point the internet will become a lot more like 4chan.
The old adage is 'the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it'. It just does not happen overnight though.