YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Gets 'Freedom Expression' Award Sponsored by YouTube
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
This kind of thing happens all the time among Exec. level, but normally we'd expect it from Ford CEO, not Google types. It may be an odd sign of industry maturity.
That said, we shouldn't discount how often this kind of stuff actually does work. Watching the crowd at the Oracle conf. eat up Larry Ellison's huffery as through he was some kind of market visionary was the lesson at the other end of the spectrum, and it's that 'If you're rich and stand on stage and say something that 'sounds credible', a lot of people with just believe it'. Of course there's more to it than that.
But this one is Comedy Gold.
It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ... I would beg my boss in stark words to not do something so ridiculous to themselves.
1. YouTube bet on user generated content. One of Wojcicki's primary decisions was to focus on commercial high-end content by trying to cut deals with firms like Disney.
2. YouTube bet on Flash Video. Google Video used a VLC-based browser plugin that never worked as well and didn't have as much distribution. This was partly driven by the first decision, because Flash didn't support the video DRM that movie houses wanted, and was optimised for small low bandwidth, "postage stamp" sized video instead of high-def full screen that commercial content wanted. YouTube had no formal strategy around commercial content beyond turning a blind eye towards the piracy on their platform, that let them outsource their video tech to Macromedia, who were quite good at it.
3. YouTube bet on social. They had comments, thumbs up, thumbs down, channels and other social features when Google Video was still a search engine badly welded to a video store. Google didn't "get" social at that time and GV/Wojcicki saw it as a net negative anyway because does Disney really want their premium content to be shown next to a bunch of inane comments from anonymous trolls?
4. YouTube was implemented in Python. Google Video was implemented in C++. Python allowed the YT guys to iterate way faster and throw features out the door way faster, at a cost in performance and reliability. But a social website doesn't really need much reliability and whilst the performance costs were killing them, Google bailed them out after the purchase by rewriting and porting large parts of their stack to their in house tech.
I think those were the main problems identified in the post-mortems.
What's interesting is that of course the general themes here are identical to what is causing YouTube problems now. Wojcicki was obsessed with professional/authoritative content. It killed Google Video then because there was a competitor who bet on the little guy, but now she controls that competitor she's doing it all over again. YT is actively suppressing the little guys in favour of big media, they've added a video store, their recommendations aren't social anymore but rather just promoting whatever political elites are saying today, she's removing other social features like downvotes, etc etc. She never learned anything from her prior failure, and why would she? When Vic G failed at Google+ he was immediately fired, but Wojcicki cannot be penalised for failure. Whether that's due to her familial connections, her gender or what is hard to say, but the contrast between her and what happened to other execs that failed to beat their competition is hard not to notice.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/31/youtube-is-testing-removal-of-...
I've heard many people say similar things over the years... Why is that? Is it some kind of kin selection? Is this total lack of self-awareness a requirement for getting into positions of power?
It's so obvious, I even wonder if they're just pretending to be hypocrites? It seems so simple and obvious, how can they not see the logical contradiction?
Are most of our leaders complete nutjobs?
Maybe humanity is a hierarchy with all the nutjobs at the top, mirroring back their insanity inside their filter bubbles; not realizing that their lives have nothing to do with reality.
Analogize this to publicly praising a corrupt general for doing or planning something good that he hasn't actually been doing. It's difficult for him to turn down the praise ("No, I seriously haven't done anything to deserve this"), and meanwhile it focuses eyes on him and pressures him to actually do the thing. I read about the tactic in a fictional book once, I'm sure it works. :-)
Surprised he didn't win any champion of due process awards.
many still think he's one of the greatest Presidents of all time
man what is up with that tho
For me, he's the greatest President because of the ACA.
Obama sucked at his job. Like, nearly Carter-level blindness to political reality, but with more personal arrogance. Obama was better than Shrub. Shrub was a war criminal, so you'd have to hope Obama was better.
The ACA was emblematic of Obama's unwillingness to lift a finger to help build the Democratic grassroots. The Democrats in Congress allowed the ACA to be loaded with poison pills due to Obama's insistence on a bipartisan vote. The result: no votes from the Gops, but it did cause the Democrats to lose the House since -- due to the Gop amendments -- the good parts didn't kick in until well after the midterm elections and the bad parts started immediately.
So popular was the ACA, in the end, that it only survived the Trump years because McCain lost his temper on the day of the Senate vote to repeal it.
This is the very definition of uncritical, subjective thinking. :\
It's not a matter of opinion that you have to pay property taxes. It is a matter of opinion that you should have health insurance - as you may recall there isn't even a nominal financial penalty for not doing so any more.
But based on your comments so far, you see the situation as the opposite? I don't understand what you think you are being ordered to do.
To say nothing of the source of the prize itself.
What's most disgusting is that it was a political ploy based on the fact that President Obama was America's first black president. There's no other logical conclusion that any thinking person could arrive at, because at the time he received it, he had done, quite literally, almost nothing of substance.
None of this excuses the imperial adventures that followed. Libya's still in a civil war, by the way. (Although to be fair to Obama, Europe was chomping at the bit to go to war with it.)
This is a good theory, I don't think it reflects the situation though. She used her 'acceptance speech' for this absurd accolade to emphasise the importance of censorship in ensuring freedom, that war is peace, freedom is slavery, so on so on. If this was the aim, it clearly didn't work.
Given her speech, the irony is either totally lost on her, or she legitimately thinks that YouTube is such a monolithic entity that the truth is whatever she says it is.
So in the Puritan Village, the ministers give themselves freedom of religion awards for their contributions to freeing the True Religion from all impediments to its universal imposition.
Just look at the recent debacle with the proposed (and now thankfully failed) football SuperLeague in Europe, you have 12 billionaire owners thinking that they could go ahead with killing the spirit of the game that is ingrained in the social fabric of the continent just like that, almost by fiat.
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.
The quote has no truth. It’s a fantasy used as anti-intellectual propaganda. Anyone can say a clever platitude.
I'm sure that criticizing Q-anon is a red flag too for some people.
I assume you mean nobody can presently create fully functional organs for someone that wasn't born with them. I don't know who disputes this.
But when you make such a declaration, it sounds (to some) like you are denying biological reality yourself; claiming that there is no such thing as intersex, that chromosomes are always in alignment with physical characteristics, and so on. There are complex processes necessary for the emergence of typical characteristics, and just because it's strongly bimodal doesn't mean that's 100%. Anyone educated knows it isn't, completely apart from politics.
If one agrees that such things are well-known for a long time and not controversial, and that there appear to be gender related differences in the brain, then it's not reasonable to declare that "an X brain in a Y body" is impossible or delusional. You can't know, and it's particularly antisocial to go around telling people stuff about themselves when you can't possibly have rational grounds for it.
And yeah, I talked to people who were saying that biological sex doesn't exist and gender is all there is to it.
If male == can sire children and female == can bear children, then infertile people don't have a sex which is nonsense.
> It does not disprove the general notion
Yes, it does. Counterexamples do that.
> You could be born with six fingers and that doesn't invalidate the fact that human species have 5 fingers at each hand.
Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.
Your conclusion is nonsense, the premise is not. A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.
> Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.
It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.
My conclusion is derived from the premise. Since it's nonsense so is the premise.
> A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.
An infertile woman is broken then?
> It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.
Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them. Same for lots of other categories. If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?
I don't know if I would necessarily use this particular word as it's mostly associated with lifeless objects, but in a sense - yes. Similarly to how having a disability or being an amputee is, for the lack of a better term, being "broken", as your body fails to function is some manner. Life is more nuanced and it's not all about that of course, but you get the idea.
> Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them.
So a broken computer is no longer a computer? I'm too stupid to delve into a philosophical debate about what truly makes a thing a thing, but I just don't accept that.
Even still, there is always a chance that the computer will randomly malfunction and do something unexpected at any time. Unlikely, but possible. So you can never say for sure that an operation of 2 + 2 will result in 4.
> If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?
If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.
I wonder, how would you describe what a 'human' is?
Your point?
> If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.
If there is a counterexample to a scientific hypothesis, it's considered falsified. Not "useful for making predictions", but simply wrong.
I see what your issue is. I haven't noticed this previously, but I think you're just attacking a straw man at this point. Rarely you can say something with 100% certainty and science takes account for that. It's fine to make generalizations. If we didn't do that and only sought absolute truths, we wouldn't get too far and it'd invalidate entire fields of science.
And it's particularly not okay to make generalizations about people. That's how you get sexism, sexism and other bigotry.
> I'm a fairly open minded person
Open minded people don't need to say that.
But in many contexts biological sex is irrelevant. There's room to debate exactly what contexts -- e.g., in professional sports that are segregated by sex so that women can have competitions in which they aren't obliterated by men who are just stronger, you might want to keep people with Y chromosomes out of the women's events, or maybe you should do that by measuring testosterone levels or something. But by and large, if you aren't (1) providing medical care to someone or (2) having sex with them, you get better outcomes for everyone by paying attention to how they prefer to live than to their chromosomes when those diverge.
"But people are getting cancelled just for saying that biological sex is real!" Eh, no. But to whatever degree anything like that is happening, a key part of the reason is that it turns out that people who make a big deal about how biological sex is real almost always actually have a bigger agenda that goes way beyond affirming that biological sex is real. If e.g. you want to keep trans women out of women's public bathrooms, or make sure gender-dysphoric teenagers aren't put on puberty blockers, or not have to call someone "he" if they look more like a "she" to you -- none of those things follow from "biological sex is real".
https://archive.md/wWaat#selection-1333.275-1347.126
> The orders also reference "biological sex," a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students' original birth certificates.
> It's not possible to know a person's gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.
Proposition A: "Chromosomes, genitals, and sex hormones are real things. For the large majority of people, each of these falls into one of two fairly well separated classes, and they agree with one another. In some contexts -- e.g., providing someone with medical care, or having sex with them, or predicting how much weight they will be able to lift if they train hard -- these things provide useful information."
Proposition B: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, as in Proposition A."
Proposition C: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, and is the only thing we should care about when deciding whether to refer to someone as a man or a woman, or choosing what pronouns to use for them, or deciding what contests they can enter, what bathrooms they can use, etc."
Proposition A is uncontroversially true, and (I claim) essentially no one disagrees with it.
Proposition B is fairly uncontroversially false, because in fact there isn't a universally-agreed way to decide someone's "biological sex" in complicated cases such as when they have complete androgen insensitivity. But for many purposes it's approximately true.
The bit of Proposition C that goes beyond Proposition B is highly controversial.
I originally took your statements about "biological sex" to be expressing Proposition A. The author of the CNN article is denying Proposition B.
Perhaps you always meant Proposition B (or even Proposition C), in which case I retract my statement that no one disagrees with that, but instead point out the bit of Proposition B that's controversial is not expressing a "fundamental truth" about reproduction but a highly disputable claim about language, and that the further bits of Proposition C that are controversial are again not expressing "fundamental truths" about reproduction but controversial and essentially political claims about how we should relate to people for whom "biological sex" and "gender identity" don't tell a single simple coherent story.
But it's not the only way to do it, and if you do that you won't necessarily agree with other people about a person's "biological sex".
For instance, there is a condition called "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome". A person with CAIS has one X and one Y chromosome, just like a typical man, and they produce male sex hormones much like a typical man does. (Maybe exactly the same? I'm not sure whether there are feedback loops that might go wrong.) But the cells in their body that are meant to respond to those hormones don't, and as a result a person with CAIS looks pretty much exactly like a typical woman does. Breasts, mostly-normal-female genitalia, not much body hair, higher-pitched voice, etc. But^2 they don't have a uterus, they aren't fertile (either "as" male or female), and there are internal genital differences that may have adverse consequences for their sex life if nothing is done about them.
If you just go by chromosomes, you will classify people with CAIS as male. But these people are all assigned female at birth, and they usually have no idea until puberty that there is anything at all unusual about their sex or gender. Their gender identity is almost always F rather than M, and they are generally heterosexual in the sense of being attracted to men.
So, what is the "biological sex" of someone with CAIS? I think several answers are defensible, but none is clearly correct or universally agreed. So "biological sex" is not a term with a clear-cut meaning in every case, contrary to "Proposition B".
Edit: And come to think of it, that kind of intellectual soft flex is actually exactly the kind of thing the Lewis quote refers to, just presented in a different venue. It's my understanding Daesh recruitment propaganda has a similar tone.
Why? How do you see a distinction there?
Contrast Vs traditional traditional CEOs more likely to be hired on the basis of their network and charistma vs actual engineering chops?
Google = San Francisco = good people.
It's just SV patting itself on the back for being woke and more virtuous than you.
It's like how the potatoes in discounters always say 'premium quality' or 'premium potatoes' but if they are, they wouldn't be so cheap or you couldn't buy them at the discounter. OTOH, if you go to a specialty goods shop, they don't write premium on their products. So if something has to be labeled on how good it is, it's probably not.
Physics PhD people are not people fallen from skies with a little extra brain. They just got the time, opportunity, and tips to be there. Same goes for other "smart" people. There are, of course, exceptions like von Neuman, Turing, Feynman, Einstein, etc. But these people are exceptions. Perceptions abourt other people in those fields should not be formed with the image of these guys.
Source: very first hand experiences.
IQ is not taken seriously as a measure of intelligence or success anymore. And people can be trained to score high on IQ tests.
On the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, I do not think that inherent intelligence viz. good genes do not play a role. But I tend to belive that nurture has a larger to play.
We have a word for that: Hubris
More people will hear about the first part of that sentence so I guess it's still somewhat advantageous to them?
Combine that observation with the Flynn effect and it explains why common sense is never as common as it used to be... Maybe Google's best bet at this point is to hire people with a wide diversity of IQ scores.
Someone can consider banning hateful speech as activity towards 'more' freedom of speech. I do not subscribe to this, but be aware that a lot of people are not willing to admit they are against freedom of speech, so they redefine the term.
I don't see anything to indicate that this award was created by YouTube or that YouTube decided to award this to her.
I suspect some people think the only possible reason YouTube could win this award is because of the sponsorship of the award ceremony. Because how else would you explain it?
[0] http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/as-freedom-forum-pos...
CNN, Fox News, Charles Koch Institute, Comcast, a bunch of VC firms, and Susan Wojcicki's _own mother_.
A vulgar display of power.
In the case this goes viral, they will post a copy from some previous non-apology, take a hit for a couple of weeks and do it all over again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Neuharth#Freedom_Forum
Giving the award to Susan, who fought valiantly to narrow the Overton window on YouTube to align better with that of mainstream news, makes perfect sense.
People share the optics of the event. The fact this institute got into this mess is kinda sad, but their impactfulness here is really 0. Despite all that it seems like shade scheme to nominate some rich ceo and beg for money to make some fakish award. But like I said nobody cares about them... there are worse scams to fight against.
When people ask, "Why hasn't someone disrupted YouTube?" I think the more boring answer that keeps getting overlooked is that it still meets the expectations of enough users, and the dissatisfied constitute a small percentage.
> Many have started seeking alternative revenue streams to mitigate platform risk.
What's wild about this is that the content creators doing this still use YouTube! Even after fully acknowledging the problems, and actively mitigating those negative consequences, they still return to the platform.
I just don't see how that'd happen if it were actually a "bad" service.
Youtube gets a sort of pass for the crap it's pulling since it's pretty much alone (Sorry - who's this Vimeo fellow you're talking about?) but any other major video service would be held up in comparison against Youtube, as is the way with society, the negative will shine through. If you start writing video suggestion algorithms today how long will it take you to be confident that "Pussy cat strolling across the back porch on a wet afternoon" isn't immediately followed up by WAP?
I think people often overstate just how locked into Youtube they are
I've seen a couple of attempts come and go. The ones that wrote a post-mortem after closing often emphasised how many resources—human, software, and hardware—video hosting websites consume. Not even because of the storage or the reencoding, but the sheer amount of bandwidth one needs to run such things globally. And it won't get profitable until a few years later, if ever. The goog is simply one of the few companies that can actually afford doing that.
I personally have been glad that alternatives like Nebula[1] are popping up still. Even if their model is different.
For the first time I think they've got a real competitor though - Nebula has managed to somehow eek out a year long survival and is now scooping up a lot of creators on the educational/informational side of things - and it looks like the platform is essentially a co-op structurally where everyone involved is getting a much larger share of the take home. I think the big question coming up for Nebula is what it will do about "The Algorithm" - will they try and create a suggested feed and invest into that sort of algorithmic video promotion or entrench harder into the "see what you subscribe" approach that will end up hurting small creator discoverability - oh also their platform needs some UX work but I don't think that will be a serious concern.
The interesting long term view for me is that I think subscription based services are going to win out over the freemium ones as those freemium ones continue to dig deeper and deeper into the dark magics of advertiser based revenue - freemium services aren't free, instead of demanding cash for your product they're devaluving their product to recoup their costs.
YouTube can absolutely be widely disliked and keep chugging along for the foreseeable future. All it needs to do is not be so bad that people would rather spend their time on something completely different. There is no BingTube with a robust ecosystem that users can easily jump to.
Are you familiar with cable television?
The reason YouTube has no competitor yet is because you'd need $10 billion just to get the platform off the ground - that's servers, developers, datacenters, peering agreements, etc.
Very few people have $10 billion lying around, and no one is interested in tackling Google on their home turf.
Don't worry, Youtube has already proposed to hide dislikes numbers. That would be a good place to start.
Edit: wow, 3 comments saying the exact same thing and all 3 starting with "don't worry". Interesting.
(Note clicking a vid shows more detail, eg: https://81m.org/videos/juH2Mfre_oM/ )
I mean, even if you deserve it, it is an obvious conflict of interest and makes the award worthless.
I mean, if say, Tesla sponsors an electric car award and a Tesla car wins, it will sound like a farce. Even though it would be expected for a Tesla car to win an electric car award in an independent contest.
Sadly, child-me didn't realize that it was a tad fishy that the coach's son won the draw two years running. What fantastic luck!
My cynical hope though is that Youtube pressured the award committee to give them one for hosting it - please someone in Youtube leak a memo about putting pressure on the committee it would be so absolutely delicious.
It made me complacent and less likely to go above and beyond at work, possibly because I have the feeling that I've already "reached it", whatever that means.
The smartest PhDs I've ever met in Silicon Valley NEVER TOLD ANYONE they had PhDs. The dumbest ones ALWAYS led with "I'm a PhD" or "call me doctor"!
One is very often compared to one's prædecessors.
But I believe OP meant other warmongers that got the prize too.
What is the argument for this?
You know among the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have been Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yassir Arafat, Jimmy Carter, FW de Klerk...?
There is a reason Lê Đức Thọ refused his prize.
Obama got his before or just as he was sitting in the Oval Office the first time.
How is that not a farce? Because he was the first black president? Give the Nobel prize to the voters then.
Rabin and Arafat earned their prize AFTER their achievement of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
"We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. And we are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do," noting that he hoped the award would assist Obama's foreign policy efforts. Jagland said the committee was influenced by a speech Obama gave about Islam in Cairo in June 2009, the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals.[11] The New York Times reported that Jagland shrugged off the question of whether "the committee feared being labeled naïve for accepting a young politician's promises at face value", stating that "no one could deny that 'the international climate' had suddenly improved, and that Mr. Obama was the main reason... We want to embrace the message that he stands for."
The piece price is awarded by a committee selected by the political parties of Norways Parlament - for Americans, you can think of this as the Democratic Party in an (almost) mono-ethnic white small 5mil country.
Alfred Nobel set it up such because he thought Norwegians would be more peaceful than Swedes. The science and literature prices are given by the (nonpolitical) Swedish royal academy. This is the reason why the peace price is so different from the other prices.
We live in a clown world.
Even if people thought that what she did was a good thing (which is debatable), it's a ridiculous idea to reward someone for enabling 'free speech' when in fact they've been suppressing it.
That makes no sense at all. It's cringeworthy that anyone would not realize that this award is a prank.
I wonder if the people who issued this award and the person receiving it know that it's a prank...
This has also crippled any kind of political conversation on the website that isn't full of people saying codewords and secret phrases to avoid the ban hammer.
I have no idea how this self-stroking "award" can be taken seriously by those who actually monitor freedom of speech (excluding porn, which I don't consider 'speech').
What's surprising is they haven't disabled comments for that video. Kudos to them I guess.
Under a more expansive concept of free speech, where we include things like monopoly market power or illegal use of force as government action; then you could argue that YouTube does censor things due to their large size. It's genuinely difficult to start your own video site and speak without being buried in hosting fees; so I think it's useful to talk about them censoring things in some contexts. However, we've also strayed far away from the First Amendment.
Outside of those concepts; however, I don't think the word "censorship" is very useful. If Hacker News decides to ban me, I can go to many thousands of other private forae in order to speak. Perhaps we should use the term "para-censorship" to refer to these situations in which third parties decide to refuse to do business with you.
The moment they do and it seems to be helping the opponents of Youtube's preferred candidates (which they have made clear that they have), those foreign dissenters will get flushed down the algorithmic memory hole too.
> How do you make sure that everybody has a voice but also feels safe?
That question was never directly answered and, frankly, I don't think there it's possible to strike that balance. Even now there are simultaneously people who complain that their voice is denied or concealed on the platform while others who complain that the platform doesn't do enough to block or steer viewers away from problematic content.
> We've always since the beginning of YouTube had community guidelines because we've realized that there's certain types of content... like some from the very beginning... we wouldn't allow adult content, hate content, dangerous content... all of those types of content could really make it that YouTube was no longer a platform that was viable for all these other voices out there.
The terms she uses to describe content ("adult", "hate", and "dangerous") are all extremely vague - purposely so that YouTube can ban or allow content seemingly however it pleases them.
And what does she even mean by those types of content could really make YouTube no longer viable for other voices? YouTube is just part of the web - a much larger platform which very much allows those types of content. That hasn't made other voices any less viable. Whether or not it should be YouTube's responsibility to silence those voices, their existence clearly does not inherently reduce the viability of other voices.
> We're always updating our policies and when content is violative of any of the policies unfortunately we need to remove it. And so we removed 9 million videos last quarter and almost all of them - over 90% - we removed with machines, which is good because it means if there's content that's violative we find that really quickly.
...
This is a "Free Expression" award, right? Am I playing the wrong video?
> We also want to protect creators like you who have built businesses with really really valuable content and make sure that we don't have a situation where advertisers pull their spend because there's some content on it that they're not comfortable with. So we want to make sure that we're protecting all the valuable creators like you.
Sure. You're protecting the creators. By demonetizing their businesses. Right.
'Freedom Expression' isn't so cool without money, right, Google?
Someone should get an irony award for that!
In your analogy, it would be like Shell awarding Shell for its environmental work, while not doing any.
not surprised in the slightest. not sure why anyone here is..
Hate, lies, propaganda are all fine as long as they are in Russian and support Moscow point of view. I heard that even the disputes in Russian are rerouted to Moscow office!
Unfortunately Ukrainians do not have such freedoms, many comments are deleted, accounts are banned and many attempts to deliver the truth are prosecuted or overwhelmed by Moscow bots but since Moscow doesn't consider Ukrainians as people or humans with rights anyway I think it's ok in the eyes of Youtube's CEO (judging by the actions)? Or she simply doesn't know?
I mean who would dare to censor Moscow point of view , it would be a censorship! Even if they already attacked Ukraine and gather huge army near the border to kill milllions. Who cares ... right?
PS: Since I prognose downvoting desires I want you to pay attention, that Russian Bots is a huge problem. I've seen them acting in Russian, now they are using this technique in English speaking communities. Do not underestimate the threat. It's not a joke, they literally bully and shut up anyone who dare to oppose them. They work 24h so at some point you have no power to resist in your spare time to that machine. If you downvote this comment that tries to rise awareness of this huge problem because it's not entertaining, conser yourself helping to this propaganda machine and be sure soon it will come to you together with war, like it came to Ukraine in 2014. No one thought it would happen, just like this week many underestimate the real danger of a huge war to destroy young democracy in Ukraine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
You can see russian bots at action here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec5oiJJqflQ&lc=UgwOALXptmHuS...
I can spot them easily. Can you? (hint: they send predefined messages in diff. forms)
Susan: un-ban every political dissenter you've removed in the last 2 years and then we can talk.
So typify your entire company’s selectivity of content.
/snark
At some point they implemented what they called a 'Limited state', which stripped almost every functionality, like comments, likes, embedding or sharing on videos that did not violate their ToS, but were simply disliked by YouTube. They removed it after a while, I assume because of Streisand effect, but I'm not sure.
Then they changed their ToS that they could ban you for literally no reason whatsoever. They retracted that since as well, but are still doing basically just that, it just gives them plausible deniability I guess.
I had already curated my feed to two specific science topics, and the top rec was a blaring million IQ evil AI punching me in the gut with an Iron Fist. I've never been the same since. Florence Nightingale effect.
People such as Wojcicki have poor moral compasses, or they aren't accountable.
It appeared as though google/youtube algos used the data point about my friend's suicide to perform a psychological experiment on me. At the least, this was amoral, but appeared malicious to me. I fail to see how it is ever appropriate to customize content based on the suicide of a friend.
I would like to ask anyone here on hn who has the appropriate authority at Google to briefly investigate this incident: Why did google/youtube use the suicide of a childhood friend as a data point for personalizing content, what was the intention, and whether this has changed. Or, perhaps it would help to have an explanation as to why my understanding of this incident is incorrect.
I'm willing to accept the innocent explanation but not on conjecture. This was blatant and fucking hurt me badly and I haven't recovered since. It was the worst possible gaslighting.
Recently: tweeting about my suicidal ideations and having twitter respond with personalized trends such as "He's dead" and "Rope" while shadowbanning me doesn't look good.
Also recently: Facebook showing me a long string of county sheriffs as "people you may know" when a guy i knew long ago was scheduled to be released from a long term federal stint, doesnt look good either. Makes it clear that I've been on a "associate of bad guy" list since Season 6 Ep 12. Is it possible that some kind of social credit algos have been deployed by American tech companies, in a limited fashion? I suspect the architectural arrangements at big tech companies offers compartments for performing limited use-case experiments totally out of view of the rank and file engineers. By design, those ouside that clearance zone won't even know it exists. "CIA middleware" might be appropriate
It seems unlikely to me that the google incident was just a random fluke based on my "interest" in learning of the suicide of a childhood friend. However, only google has the logs, data, and algorithms. I find it unlikely that Google will ever give a straight answer but to me its evidence that Google's data and algos need to be turned over to the justice dept. A big part of Google's power is their impunity to perform such experiments with total deniability. They are worth a trillion dollars yet any damage, incidental or intentional, inflicted on a user goes totally unchecked.
Google is loyal to google/shareholders. They dont give a fsk about me, and I fully expect that no response is forthcoming. There's no accountability, and these services start to look more like public utilities. If it isnt transparent then any such malice can easily be played off with statements claiming that some kind of intelligence is needed for an algo to be malicious
An algo doesn't have to be "smart" to gaslight a person. All you need is their personal data, especially intimate data such as:
* Childhood bully's name
* Subsequent taken name of your ex wife who you were heartbroken to lose
* Suicide of a childhood friend
* Other personals such as siblings' names
Worse yet is rumors. An algo can use info related to rumors to gaslight a person. Just use keywords from the rumors for personalized content. None of this requires any complex algos. Just incompetence and/or malice.
I also had a similar experience after a friend was killed in a home burglary, and my news feed started pushing all the latest updates on the case as well as similarly tragic news stories. For a long time, these recommendations were a painful and unwanted reminder of my friend's murder. Even worse was that the algorithm was definitely trying to push increasingly extreme and fear-mongering content about home invasions, all to try to get my clicks, and perhaps unintentionally radicalize me in the process.
As for why this type of thing happens, I think this part from your last point is pretty much right on the mark, "none of this requires any complex algos". All it takes is data of your browsing habits, the webpages you visit, the keywords you search, the webpages your friends and contacts visit, etc. There don't need to be any database fields explicitly encoding this information, which is why it's so worrying, such a system can push personalized traumatic content a global scale with precision, all from keywords and algorithms intended to maximize click revenue.
The other side of the equation is the content that gets recommended. I'm not sure who created the YouTube video that mocked your friend's death, but in my experience I was pushed content from typical local news outlets, then less reputable outrage content farms, and finally even more despicable sources, like white supremacist sites. That's something about this experience that really disturbed me. I've seen uncannily accurate product predictions before, but usually the 3rd party was relatively reasonable. I hadn't really ever been recommended radicalizing propaganda before, not to this degree. I've read articles about some of the operators of such sites, and they often don't even believe the content that they're pushing. They know that it triggers something in people who are vulnerable, and they exploit that for profit. That whole ecosystem just seems pure evil to me. At least the recommender systems work most of the time, usually just showing me stuff related to my hobbies, cute cats, etc.
Anyway, the combination of incomprehensible recommender systems and toxic content on the web is definitely not good for anyone's mental health. Hope you feel better in the future.
youtube, along with most social media, doesn't know how to handle the dead.
it always pains me to see videos of dead youtubers show up in my feed. i highly doubt that the "monetization" money goes to the families. and i can't bring myself to unsubscribe to their channels either.
it's a weird and sad conundrum.
Seems incredible naive and maybe oblivious to the actions that are being taken by YouTube (correctly or not)..