Considering the streams are back up, this seems more like a failure of automation and reporting tools than a grand conspiracy.
Still broken for "kyle rittenhouse" however.
Like, say, a bunch of people searching for a single person's name, finding people named that, and harassing them.
Well there is; you don't put takedowns in the hands of an algorithm. Ideally you put them in the hands of a court of law.
Why?
Notice that this is different than what you promote. Search results are sorted by an algorithm; that's unavoidable and excessively simple algorithms like "alphabetical order" are useless. And then it's a hard problem, to which the best solution is probably multiple independent search engines with different algorithms.
But removing the thing whatsoever? Court order or GTFO.
Why should this be the standard by which YouTube can remove videos? Why shouldn't they be legally allowed to remove content via algorithms even if it creates a bad user experience?
Removing obscene, explicit, and even illegal content is only practical at YouTube's scale using algorithms, the idea that they should just abandon algorithmic removal of videos entirely is not a realistic suggestion.
Could you explain what you mean by "public space"?
> vital part of the public discourse
I don't agree. In my view, YouTube is one of the lowest forms of public discourse, its fundamental purpose is to generate ad revenue and the nature of the content hosted there reflects this pernicious incentive. Yes, YouTube does have some great things on it, but it's just one tiny facet of "the public discourse".
> Court-like processes are the appropriate standard for decisions about the use of something that affects so many people.
Can you quantify "affects" and "so many people"? YouTube is mostly an entertainment triviality, even (especially) in the realm of politics, I don't see how videos being removed from the site is important.
You could say the same for all media. Television is advertising-driven, radio is advertising-driven, even the most respectable of literary magazines is advertising-driven. Most content is pandering to someone or other.
> Can you quantify "affects" and "so many people"? YouTube is mostly an entertainment triviality, even (especially) in the realm of politics
Again, you could (and many would) say the same for television or what have you. It would still be corrosive to society if a single entity controlled the majority of television, or the majority of radio, or... - and that's much the situation that YouTube is in.
I don't necessarily disagree, but what's your point?
> It would still be corrosive to society if a single entity controlled the majority of television, or the majority of radio, or... - and that's much the situation that YouTube is in.
This is already the case. Additionally, I don't think you've demonstrated that YouTube's video moderation policy is "corrosive to society"
>Why?
So that the Rekieta folks can live stream it, of course!
Therein lies the problem.
Or, without having to put on a tinfoil hat, it's been trained to remove content that discusses shooting and killing people?
Or even more benignly, a lot of people reported the stream because users also have a vested interest in abusing censorship systems for political purposes, and it's not always easy to separate that kind of collective bad actorship from legitimate reports.
You don't have to attack the legitimacy of someone's position like this. Sure, it is possible that the reasons for it are what you're saying, but this personal dismissive attack is unwarranted, and frankly at this point tired and ineffective.