Google needs an appeal process. They have too much of a responsability, they can't do this to people. If they don't want to do it, the law must force them to set one up.
Some things don't scale well and guess what that is cost of business. Imagine a company suddenly removing seats from cars just to increase their profit margin. People would think they are crazy. So why are we accepting this when tech companies do it with customer service?
I promise you that the man on the street doesn't consider this acceptable. That so many in tech believe it is fills me with despair. Our industry isn't alone in having scalability problems, but we do stand alone in the belief that it's then fine to ignore the customer.
In a way I sympathize with Google, Youtube, Facebook and all the other companies operating as mass scale. On the one hand their algorithms suck for moderation, but on the other hand they are the most advanced created yet and there is simply no alternative. I would imagine in the next 10-15 years the players will get moderation under control and be able to model AI to moderate fairly. But that's going to be a slow process because there isn't any alternative to AI in this case, at least how I see it.
That's not the problem that needs solving. A manual review of the videos that are flagged by the AI snitch is all that's needed. Google can very easily afford this level of manual oversight.
Doesn't his means they've scaled beyond sustainable? As I read it, it's a good argument for them being broken up.
I think a 'bond' system where you put up money to get human appeal, and get half back if the appeal is successful. Maybe with increasing bond as you lose more appeals. Is a much better system.
I don't. There's another alternative.
If you're growing too big to moderate, stop growing. Turn off signups. It's irresponsible to do anything else but, and "but we'll make less money" isn't a valid argument to this.
When Google provides dogshit services, you expect people to pay for them to be reminded to fix it ?
Having to refund people in cases where Google’s AI fails would create an incentive for them to improve the AI and set higher thresholds for content to get flagged.
I think my idea would make the system work better overall without making it worse for anyone.
Here's how it would actually go:
* AI flags your video
* You pay 5 dollars to have it reviewed by a human
* Either immediately as it's conceived, or a few months down later the line when some manager figured out they could lower costs this way, an AI reviews your video again, and never finds Google at fault.
Never underestimate Google's absolute disdain for its users.
Uploaders form associations where if one uploader gets flagged, the union decides to agree with the moderation, possibly kicking the user for repeat violations, but if the union disagrees with the moderation they can threaten to disable all their videos until the decision is reversed.
google will have to listen to suitabaly large uploaders unions, and its mutually beneficial: moderation gets decentralized
[x] Child pornography
[x] Violence
Yep, this would work wonderfully!
Nonsense.
They "have" one, it's mostly useless if you are small channel, akin to a fake panic button. They have that responsibility because they have a huge audience. Only laws could coerce them into having a real appeal process but then it might not be economically viable at their scale either.
This is a complex issue, a significant amount of people have their livelihood tied to some google service, in subtle ways, but Google also provides these services mostly at no direct cost for them. I don't think that internet paradigm with last though.
Google has a net income of well over 20% of revenue in their last quarterly earnings, even over 30% last March. This is ridiculously profitable. So I don't buy that argument at all.
And even if it's not economically viable to have customer support (or just a proper and timely process for appeals of AI decisions), then their business model probably shouldn't exist in its current form to begin with.
In this case they won't lose much income from a small channel and people will continue to use their service so purely financially it's a sound decision.
It's also a dick move to their users but big corporations don't have morals. Just shareholders.
Remember both the content creators and consumers aren't their customers. We're just assets for the real customers, the advertisers. Google is the farmer and we're the cattle.
However in practice big tech companies either respond saying it doesn’t apply, or that it already has been reviewed by a human - which of course there’s no way to disprove from the outside.
What happens then? If they don't have enough legal representatives and they can't show up they lose by default in many jurisdictions, right?
Eventually nobody who would take them to court is their customer anymore.
Amazon do this. You can only enforce your consumer rights once.
Youtube appeals are either a non-local phenomenon or not decided by humans.
The other option is a boneheaded chatbot that's so scripted it doesn't understand the real issue.
Which law currently on the books would force them to do this? If there is such a law on the books, don't you think it would be applied to every company?
I often see the "what law says that is ok" argument in response to "we should force <industry> to reform".
People who say the latter are arguing for new laws most of the time.