Ask HN: Are there algorithms down ranking YouTube videos by words said in them? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there algorithms down ranking YouTube videos by words said in them?

17 pointssigmaprimus13 comments

I have been hearing a lot of content creators speak in a sort of code when it comes to the pandemic and vaccines in an effort to evade the "Algorithms" from catching them. First is there any truth to this concept and second wouldn't saying the word algorithm be at the top of any such keyword lists?

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I created a YouTube ad to promote home battery storage systems. In the ad was approx 3 seconds of a screenshot of a BBC news article about rising energy prices.

On the sidebar of BBC news in fairly small text was the word ‘coronavirus’.

Google banned my ad because of this.

Are you discussing the current public health emergency?

YouTube auto-generates transcripts, and is owned by an organization well versed in search... it would be quite surprising if they didn't weight things based on words spoken during the videos.

"Our systems don't always get it right, but you can request human review of decisions made by our automated systems." https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=6...

Given that something like Content ID existing and the fact that YouTube's parent company has developed the capability of detecting and recognising 'speech', 'music' and 'sounds' on an automated and mass scale and both YouTube and Google being very secretive about algorithm changes, I would not be surprised to see an algorithm change that detects several keywords spoken in a video which automatically flags / down-ranks or removes the offending video.

After all, the moderation in YouTube is automated: [0]

> Our systems don't always get it right, but you can request human review of decisions made by our automated systems.

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=6...

Probably. Mr. Beast is a fairly popular YouTube channel and he transitioned from cursing to not cursing in the past few years. Since he’s dedicated to getting more views and likes perhaps more so than any other human in history, if it helped at all, he would be dropping curse words every other minute.

That's called knowing your target demographics. I'm sure tons of kids watch him and he knows it, and not cursing probably gets more parents to not lose their shit when their kids play his videos on their iPads.

But Youtube also requires you to announce if the video is intended for kids and treats those videos differently for advertising to meet certain regulations (don't really remember how, I always just say mine aren't, even though I don't really curse in mine either), so that might be a factor also.

When I was at Google in 2013, they were most certainly using the transcriptions (Mostly human at the time, though autotranscription was available) as a content signal. I would be terribly surprised if they are not doing so today.

They are. Those results appear after the title, description and similiar matches.

As an example

https://youtu.be/A0e0AQFizdg

The guy just sound like a nut job, but maybe he is justified in sounding this way?

I think it’s not downrankng so much as monetisation in most cases. Advertisers don’t want their ads shown alongside videos covering certain sensitive topics so YouTube “demonetises” these videos and the creators don’t get any revenue from them. It seems generally understood that demonetisation is based on automatic transcription of the video and then searching for certain keywords.

I don’t have any inside info, this is just from listening to a few youtubers talk about it

Could demonetisation also affect how your video is featured/promoted on the platform (because YouTube wants to serve users videos that have ads)?

I would assume if certain content is viewed as ‘non advertiser friendly’ then they would also prefer not to actively promote that content on the trending tab for instance.

In a recent Breaking Points segment they said that there are certain topics they know ahead of time Youtube will flag to demonetize, but if they didn't cover it they wouldn't be doing their job covering the news appropriately, so they take the hit and let those videos get marked for demonetization.

I think the word "rape" might be a trigger word for these, like when they covered the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who accused a senior official of the CCP of it, and I think several of their Jeffrey Epstein videos got marked for demonetization for the same reason.

But they also said before they had a subscription service they were a bit more careful about covering those topics, and they wouldn't be surprised if other Youtube creators censor themselves or avoid certain topics entirely because they have to rely on their videos making money and can't afford to take the hit.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/20/youtube-penalizes-break...

Google uses both OCR and automatic subtitles when returning YT search results, so most likely they also use it for censoring.

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