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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

In this case, an entire channel was shut down (with no opportunity for appeal) on account of a single instance of someone zoom-bombing a live stream with pornography. Presumably the decision was entirely automated and there was no human in the loop.

It doesn't matter how many users you have. This "solution" seems like swatting a fly with a nuclear weapon. Why not just take down the offending video until the user takes corrective action? YouTube can clearly identify the offending video out of the non-offending ones, so that's not a technical problem. And it can be done entirely with automation, so it wouldn't need humans. Further, they obviously can tell that the user does not have a history or track record of this kind of activity. Why do these tech companies always go straight to the "no recourse ban hammer"?

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> Why not just take down the offending video until the user takes corrective action?

I believe this is how Twitter handles / handled rule breaking content, you got an infraction / suspension until you acknowledge and deleted the offending tweet.

Of course, I believe videos are a lot harder because it's video content which takes more effort to analyse than relatively short plain ish text messages, especially automated.

One of the biggest things for events like this are: - Regulatory Restrictions, many jurisdictions have limit on how to treat accounts like this - Repeat behavior from others that have breached this segment of the ToS.

A good automation would be integrating something like what they already have for Music Copyright, where you can automatically trim the segments around the conflicting content.

You keep alluding to these regulatory restrictions which supposedly force this kind of behavior from Google - please go ahead and tell us what those are.

Yeah it feels like there should be an escalating series of consequences for infractions..

It should have been pretty straightforward to establish a pattern (or lack of) around whether this was an intentionally abusive channel or a first-time offence.

But of course this costs money and takes time to build.

They sorta have this already for copyright strikes, but I guess porn was judged to be a more impactful offense?

Yes; they cannot take any risks with that, laws around showing porn to people / minors (accidentally or not) are stricter than copyright violations. I'm not a legal expert and honestly I'm pulling this out of my ass, but, porn is a legal matter, but copyright violations is a civil matter.

There's also the advertisers and payment processors to consider, most of them will have nothing to do with porn. This triggered some major pruning of various websites too, Tumblr and Reddit on the one side, but huge chunks of Pornhub and co as well for any porn that didn't come with the right paperwork, including identification and consent forms from the participants.

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