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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I think fixing popular "mistakes" like this is problematic in its own way. Google/YouTube approach the problem of moderation by using unreliable systems and correcting mistakes when there is enough of a popular outrage. The problem is, people who can't generate the outrage are subject to Google's poor moderation.

If Google did not fix mistakes that generated a lot of outrage, then competitors could differentiate themselves by providing better moderation policies and whenever some popular account got banned from YouTube that would generate a lot of traffic for alternatives. As is, if something popular gets banned, YouTube will "correct" their error while they ignore things below this threshold. This simultaneously subjects everyone to their poor moderation and stifles an advantage that competitors might enjoy.

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I just assumed it was common knowledge that Google doesn’t even try to implement human support resources. From what I can tell, literally 100% of YouTube support tickets go to what is essentially a spam inbox with auto-reply and the only way to have your concerns be dealt with is to have a personal connection to someone in upper management.

I mean, it's pretty obvious why they don't do that. The only people that would benefit by such a policy are not stakeholders in the decision. All actual stakeholders (Google, the banned channel, and YouTube users who want to watch the content) benefit from a policy that use social and manual signals as one layer of defense against incorrect bans.

The problem with this logic is that most definitely "popularity" is already proxied by some data that they are collecting and thus could be acted upon by the machines. So either Google are poor coders or this is something different than popularity.

Would it be better if google/youtube didn't correct its mistakes?

I believe that was the point being made in the comment:

"...competitors could differentiate themselves by providing better moderation policies and whenever some popular account got banned from YouTube that would generate a lot of traffic for alternatives"

the problem is its mostly the dregs that get banned, and having a platform full of dregs is its own serious issue.

Yea and also having it as your initial content off puts a lot of viewers, and similar to people making and creating stuff.

While it might boost you initial user-base its gonna make growth slow to a crawl long term unless you have some clever way if dealing with it.

I think your solution is to have people pay you to put up that content.

A standard, uniformly applied, is more likely to be removed (when its seen to be bad) than one inconsistently applied on the basis of ideology or public outcry.

And this is why public protests are good for governments. They channel a lot of energy into a few precise issues, away from broad structural changes.

Are you sure? Like the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer were about broad structural issues in policing. Unless you meant even bigger structural issues such as systemic racism which they were only tangentially about but definitely increased the awareness of.

So that's why Russia or Myanmar shoot or arrest protesters. Tiananmen Square was also just the government's attempt to help the protester's cause?

Is it possible to have a uniformly applied standard for content as diverse as YouTube's? We can't even find a consistent standard to identify pornography, much less all of the other content YouTube wants off its platform

False dichotomy. Would be best if they didn't make them in the first place through employing naive censorship heuristics.

Yes, because right now it is effectively Google having a pretext to remove whatever they want, by only selectively overriding moderation.

Just yesterday, a group posting Xinjiang videos was censored from YouTube.[1]

Are their videos going to be reinstated? Unlikely. They will have to try their luck on some obscure platform

Imagine if you had video evidence of human rights abuses (lots of people do), just hope that you can raise enough outrage quickly enough before it gets flagged and removed.

I know that Google and Facebook are private platforms, but that should not excuse them covering for genocidal maniacs.[2]

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-youtube-takes-d...

[2]: https://www.propublica.org/article/sheryl-sandberg-and-top-f...

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