Our ongoing work to tackle hate

https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/06/our-ongoing-work-to-tackle-hate.html

by dombili • 7 years ago

38 38 7 years ago

youtube.googleblog.com

ytNumbers3• 7 years ago

It's often a shame that network effects are nearly impossible to overcome. It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a challenge to YouTube. But, perhaps posts like these from Google will one day succeed in persuading people to start looking elsewhere for videos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services

onychomys• 7 years ago

I'm sure the Nazis and Sandy Hook Truthers will be happy to know there are so many other options. Look, we live in a world where, for better or worse, we don't force publishers to publish anything they don't want to. Youtube telling Nazis to go jump in a lake is no different than your local paper declining to run an editorial from one. It just seems different because the scope is so much bigger.

jonathankoren4• 7 years ago

Exactly. You have a freedom to speak. You don't have a freedom to use someone else's forum to gain an audience. No more than I have a right to walk into your house and do whatever I want.

JoshTriplett2• 7 years ago

It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a challenge to YouTube.

s/censorship/moderation/. And no, "we host everything" is a fast way to kill a potential competitor to YouTube. The first and fastest adopters of such a platform will be the people rejected from other platforms, which rapidly turns any "we host everything" platform into a cesspool that nobody else wants to use.

ytNumbers3• 7 years ago

YouTube could wind up with cesspool videos? The horror!! It's a good thing they've now got these new guidelines in place to remove all the garbage videos. I'm sure that all the remaining allowed videos won't hurt anyone's feelings. /s

I'm not advocating for zero censorship. I just think this reads like they're heading down a slippery slope.

beat2• 7 years ago

Nice to see they're banning the Flat Earthers.

Because the Flat Earthers need MORE evidence that the TRUTH!!! is being suppressed by Big Corporations.

ivl2• 7 years ago

It might see a few of the existing flat earthers harden their view, but I suspect they'll gain fewer followers overall when hidden from mainstream content. What's interesting is that fracturing hateful communities does decrease the spread of their message[0]. I have to think that we could see similar trends with fringe theories, like the earth being flat, or bleach being a cure for autism. Which would in turn prevent users who might fall into the rabbit-hole that is the cesspool like communities among hate based groups, and the more fringe theories (again, flat earthers, anti-vax luancy, etc.)

0: https://medium.com/acm-cscw/you-cant-stay-here-the-efficacy-...

whymauri• 7 years ago

This is basically what happened when Reddit banned racist subreddits. Everyone cried

"But my free speech!"

"Won't they just polarize even harder?"

"Won't they just operate in the ShAdOwS?"

Except that didn't happen. The people left for Voat, and then Voat died. Banning harmful communities works time-and-time again, and it would work for YouTube if they actually did anything. For every 'guideline update' or press release they do about content moderation, they do basically nothing. The one exception was the sketchy videos with children, but their solution has been pretty heavy-handed and reactionary. I think that's the problem: YouTube has never been pro-active in moderating its platform and it shows.

beat2• 7 years ago

I'm proof-reading a book that a friend of mine is writing about how normal right-wing/conservative populism becomes corrupted by fascist/hate stuff, and a big part of it is hate groups actively "normalizing" their content and spreading it via mainstream social media like twitter and youtube. That way, they show up alongside more mainstream political thought. If hate speech, even "polite" hate speech, is consigned to its own dedicated world rather than sharing ours, it doesn't spread the same way.

jakeogh• 7 years ago

Consider the possibility that it's not designed to convince you earth is flat.

challenger22• 7 years ago

I imagine there's boiler room full of guys somewhere tagging videos as "Borderline content", creating data which then feeds into a machine learning algorithm which decides which videos get promoted. All videos are metricized by the similarity to borderline content, and are increasingly likely to be promoted in proportion to increasing graph distance from the borderline content. Youtube management gets nice plausible deniability that they don't actively surpress political adversaries, because the whole process is stochastic, and who knows how machine learning works anyway?

cagenut• 7 years ago

the machines won't take over because someone puts them in charge, they'll take over because everyone's ass is covered avoiding decisions.

googlethrosdjn• 7 years ago

I have personal experience with working on recommendations at google and you are pretty off. It was based on increasing engagement, user satisfaction, quality and on reducing controversial news coverage of google(this meant removing the right-wing content which could lead to media outrage no more no less). In addition there were a lot of left leaning googlers who had a personal agenda to suppress all right-leaning content.

You are right that it was a room full of guys, but what you may not realize is a majority was Chinese or Indian.

infiniteseeker• 7 years ago

IOW, Google and its properties continue their slow suicide/slide into irrelevance.

timdorr• 7 years ago

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20105903

RobertRoberts2• 7 years ago

Some very hateful things have come out of Google. Who gets to define hate?

Edit: Changed to more reasonable assertion.

happytoexplain2• 7 years ago

That's a pretty dramatic assertion - in the field of hateful things, you'd have to be pretty extreme to qualify as "some of the most hateful". What do you have in mind?

RobertRoberts2• 7 years ago

That is fair. I edited my comment.

My question remains though, every power in the history of the world has oppressed others based on some logic. (hate?)

And in my limited understanding of human nature and history, the oppressors rarely (if ever) see themselves as evil.

All it takes is for Google to label questioning Google as hate, and they can do whatever they want.

sp3323• 7 years ago

Counterpoint: https://twitter.com/shaun_jen/status/1136068719262752769 (link to screenshotted thread https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136055959476817921 )

https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1136088138357493761 YouTube tried to explain this decision on background to us, but I made the call to ignore it because they won't go on the record. YouTube has a major harassment problem, but an even bigger problem with transparency and consistency of policy enforcement. It is not our job to paraphrase their explanations. It is their job to own their policy decisions.

Edit to update: as of half an hour ago, the channel's monetization has been suspended. https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136341801109843968

Update update: It's even dumber than it first looked. https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136356046887313408

Fellshard• 7 years ago

A series of articles in mainstream publications does tend to make you recalculate profit implications. Since their ToS and its enforcement are so consistently fuzzy, they can just follow where the wind is blowing.

sp3323• 7 years ago

3x update: They walked that last part back, so it's only kinda dumb now. https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136363701882064896

h2odragon2• 7 years ago

Now they're taking responsibility for editing content, we can assume they implicitly endorse anything they haven't banned, right?

happytoexplain2• 7 years ago

That doesn't follow, does it? I sense you're being sarcastic to some extent, but I'm not sure to what end, specifically.

h2odragon2• 7 years ago

Yes I'm being sarcastic and should make more effort to actually communicate. Thanks.

I'm just pissed off by how many people embrace this shit with no notion of the principles that whizzed past while they were having a 2 minute hate against Nazis. Sure they weren't well served and this is just a public embrace of the biases that have already been in place. They were important though.

The guy who runs a printing press should not take pride in refusing jobs for people he doesn't like, should he? Is his service, which has social impact beyond his neighborhood, supposed to be available to all or would it be a bad thing if he decides not to print newsletters for nazis, or blacks, or this or that church because their doctrine is wrong... None of these are new issues and we've thrashed this shit out before.

I indulge in sarcasm because its quicker. sorry.

sp3323• 7 years ago

They're only removing content that's "bad" along certain axes. They can still disagree with remaining content for other reasons.

clarkmoody• 7 years ago

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

bgravinz• 7 years ago

Many very popular religions are supremacist in nature.

And pretending otherwise to allow them to skirt the censors just makes the entire censor regime seem like a hollow power play by a company trying to keep from sinking in a turbulent political time.

Our ongoing work to tackle hate

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