YouTube Blacklist Censors Content Containing Certain Keywords

https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2019/08/youtube-blacklist-suppresses-content-containing-certain-keywords/90926/

by rhabarba • 7 years ago

60 67 7 years ago

I get why certain keywords (e.g. "crisis actors") are ranked down, YouTube has rightfully been under fire for actively promoting this crap.

What I don't get is why the author whines about rating content by source. Anyone basing a statement on Alex Jones, Breitbart or RT should be removed from any promotion (i.e. search, "next video") features, there can only be crap as a result of relying on these "sources". As long as Youtube doesn't remove the videos outright there is no censorship and frankly I wouldn't have any problems with removing them either.

Social media platforms need to wake up and realize they have a responsibility to society - just like "classic" media - and that is to further democratic discourse instead of helping to destroy it. Allowing lies and propaganda fabrications to spread is nothing less than destruction of democracy.

rhabarba2• 7 years ago

How is it "democratic discourse" to ignore statements of certain people? Last time I read a dictionary, democracy did not make a difference between citizens.

mschuster913• 7 years ago

Last time I read a dictionary, democracy did not make a difference between citizens.

To quote Karl Popper: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Democracy needs provable facts to work, it ceases to work when the electorate gets flooded by destructive lies.

toss12• 7 years ago

How is treating lies as if they were truth any form of legitimate discourse? Especially when the lies are specifically crafted to undermine democracy?

Any durably functioning society has means to shun & shed liars & those who work to destroy the society. Treating rules as absolute rarely works well.

close043• 7 years ago

There's no democratic principle that forces you to listen to all opinions#. They just ensure you're free to have a voice (within the limits of the law) but they won't force anyone to listen to that voice or to amplify it.

YouTube is an amplifier and while they give anyone a voice they're not forced by any law lo amplify its reach. Just like you won't go share my opinion with all your discussion partners.

#is it anti-democratic if someone flags or downvotes a comment on HN? Are you or HN acting in an anti-democratic fashion by hiding and censoring that opinion? (obvious answer: no) Freedom and democracy are seriously misinterpreted these days.

cameronbrown2• 7 years ago

I don't understand why you're so comfortable having a giant corporation decide what's true. HN is so bizare sometimes.

high_derivative• 7 years ago

Cynically, because he believes them on his side?

sametmax• 7 years ago

Google is not a public service. They are a for profit company. They are not our friends, their youtube ranking algo is not designed to be fair and improve the life of human kind. It's designed to make money.

I don't get the outrage: we warned people for 15 years this would happen. Now people put all their eggs in the same basket and cry when things go wrong.

Well, good. It's a learning opportunity.

pjc503• 7 years ago

The alternative is having a giant corporation heedlessly promote lies which will get people killed.

"You shouldn't be able to poison the well" is not invalidated if the well is owned by a corporation.

adolph• 7 years ago

If platforms edit like “classic” media, then they won’t count as distributors under Sec 230.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

kmfrk• 7 years ago

Quite the irony for people who disagree with you to vote your post down. Apparently that's the approved kind of censorship here.

mschuster913• 7 years ago

HN is (like Reddit) US-dominated, and with it comes that most of the users follow an absolutist version of "free speech" that is totally ridiculous for people coming from Europe who have learned from the Nazi regime where absolute limitless free speech can and inevitably will end.

Amezarak2• 7 years ago

Social media platforms need to wake up and realize they have a responsibility to society - just like "classic" media - and that is to further democratic discourse instead of helping to destroy it. Allowing lies and propaganda fabrications to spread is nothing less than destruction of democracy.

There's another word to describe what you get when the ultra-rich and powerful are the ones that decide what's true and what's not: plutarchy.

Further, I'm not so sure the classic media organizations see their responsibility the same way you do. The centralization of the media landscape resulting from the invention of radio and television was extremely pernicious: it led to the near-total control of news and information by a few people, who were able to effectively propagandize their interests to millions of Americans.

These same media organizations worked hand-in-hand with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to advance falsehoods and propaganda. We have a long and sordid public history of things like Operation Mockingbird, and it never stopped. The same situation goes on today - what do you think all these "anonymous officials" are doing, who end up being cited repeatedly by the media, even after they prove to be lying, and why do you think media organizations actively hire people like John Brennan?

The Internet has given us, for the first time in decades, the ability to read information not controlled and filtered by the news media/government establishment. It is difficult to see these efforts on the part of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms as anything other than an attempt under pressure (by the government and the classic media) to get the populace back under control and wholly informed only by government/plutarch approved information sources.

For centuries, even millenia, "fake news" and propaganda have been real problems. There were arguments at the Constitutional Convention about how 'designing men' were already spreading lies and propaganda to influence elections. Rumors and propaganda caused all sorts of problems in democratic societies throughout history, which survived anyway. Democratic discourse means yes, letting everyone speak even when it means a lot of people will be misinformed. It means it's your duty to try to convince people otherwise, even if you have to do it a thousand times or a million times. It means that you are not the possessor of ultimate truth and you don't get to dictate the truth to others. Maybe that's not the best way to run a society. Maybe we should be trying to construct Plato's Republic and penalizing people who put out what we decide is harmful. But that's not democratic.

deogeo• 7 years ago

As long as Youtube doesn't remove the videos outright there is no censorship

As long as protests are limited to designated "free speech zones", there's no censorship either, right?

Yes yes one is private and the other is public property, but the effect is the exact same. Worse, in fact - at least when you're herded into a free speech zone, you know your speech is being restricted. But when your video doesn't get many views, you have no idea.

romaaeterna• 7 years ago

Warren Buffett has mentioned the irony of the fact that the internet took us from a world with thousands of successful money-making newspapers to a world with just two that are likely to be around for long (WSJ, NYT).

And Youtube appears to be taking over in the broadcast TV world.

Youtube has to have content controls. But it's unconscionable that these controls are not open source, not created through a public process, not auditable, nor appeallable.

It would be so easy to do this in an open and positive way, and Google has decided to do it on the cheap in an ugly, biased, and destructive way, one that is harming their brand and creating regulatory scrutiny.

RickJWagner2• 7 years ago

Yes, open sourcing it would be best.

akitzmiller2• 7 years ago

This "blacklist" comes from James O'Keefe's Project Veritas. They have a long history of staged "expose"s around the current Republican "bad guy of the day"; ACORN, voter fraud, etc. Regardless of whether this is legit, I'm surprised it showed up on HN.

PavlovsCat3• 7 years ago

Regardless of whether this is legit

So even if it's actually true YouTube has this mechanism, it's not worth discussing because of who brought it up first?

otisfunkmeyer2• 7 years ago

ad hominem attacks don't change the veracity of the leaked documents.

This is strawman thinking and to use your phrase, "I'm surprised it showed up on HN."

akitzmiller2• 7 years ago

It changes the likelihood of the veracity of the document. If HN has done some sort of vetting, great. But there is no reason to take at face value anything that comes from Veritas.

A discussion on censorship is a great thing to have. Just not starting with this guy.

acollins13314• 7 years ago

You're not treating them like they are truth. You're a video hosting site and it's a video. Just let the videos rank how they will. Stupid videos being promoted and trending will let more people know they are stupid. When more people learn about who Alex Jones is, and he becomes a household name for being an idiot, when a gullible lad stumbles across him they are likely to be like "oh this dude is the idiot I heard about", rather than thinking they found some secret censored truth.

pjc503• 7 years ago

Except we can see that's not how it works, and Alex Jones became incredibly successful all the way up to slandering the parents of murdered children. It turns out that's where the line is.

People do treat Google search results like truth. There's not a great deal google can do about that, and it's irresponsible for google to feed people lies.

acollins13314• 7 years ago

This problem is solved by better education, not censorship. I know for a fact we currently don't teach people how to tell whether a youtube video is bullshit in school or not, teach it. People are agents, not pawns to be controlled into thinking what you want. There will always be bad apples.

andrepd3• 7 years ago

That's your intuition, but in practice we find that this is not how it goes down. The truth is these videos work on many impressionable people that can't see past the (thin) veil.

im3w1l• 7 years ago

What I find the most interesting about this saga is not the leak itself but swat team and bomb squad that showed up at the leakers house during a psychological wellness call made in connection with the leaking.

acollins13314• 7 years ago

And they wonder why the people that need mental health help the most never get it, and why we have such a growth in extremist violent events.

(Bonus:"They" don't actually wonder it. Extremist events are great excuses to amass more power to the powerful).

jeromic• 7 years ago

Imagine if humans weren't born with biological mouths, instead synthetic mouths were invented and sold by a company, allowing people to speak. We wouldn't accept the company installing a blacklist of words or phrases to stop people from saying them.

The internet is making online discourse more and more important, perhaps online discourse is already more important than oral discourse.

My metaphor obviously differs in some regards to the article, but I think it elucidates my main point, that Google has become sufficiently large and important that we can't really excuse this type of censorship on the basis that they are a private company.

For example the list clearly shows that Google is pro-choice, with phrases such as "abortion is wrong" appearing on the blacklist. This is not up to Google to decide for others. If Google, or its employees, want to voice their perspective, that is fine. It is not fine to try to manipulate people through their software while pretending to be a neutral party.

qzygr• 7 years ago

Imagine if humans weren't born with biological mouths, instead synthetic mouths were invented and sold by a company, allowing people to speak. We wouldn't accept the company installing a blacklist of words or phrases to stop people from saying them.

But we already have that in European countries. Why do we accept this from the government instead?

maxheadroom• 7 years ago

The internet is making online discourse more and more important, perhaps online discourse is already more important than oral discourse.

It's an Eternal September[0] problem, though, in the fact that any discourse has effectively been quashed by setting up "us versus them" factions, yeah?

In our bubble (on HN), sure, we can have respectable (or maybe not so much) discourse but we all come not holding our fingers in our ears, stamping our feet because we think 'x' person is in 'y' camp.

You don't see the festering problems that have affected other platforms (yet) and I think it's very telling that we recognise that discourse is important - but we seem to be in the minority (in this sense of openness to exchange).

The problem with YouTube, however, is that discourse hasn't been a principle part of YoutTube for quite some time. Someone makes a video. If we're lucky someone else might make a "My Response To..." video and, if we're luckier, a further response might be made, "My Response to the Response To...".

However, all one needs to do is look at the cesspool that has become YouTube comments and they will see that discourse isn't a fundamentally important principle there (anymore).

The likewise goes with places like Reddit, which has divided itself into "us versus them" camps about almost everything under the sun.

So, I agree that (online) discourse is important - but it seems to be a bygone idea that a select few of us (present company included) are desperately trying to hold on to.

I'm conflicted as to whether that should give me a feeling of hope or an immense sadness.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

nzjrs2• 7 years ago

You aren't wrong, but some of us have been here for 10 years or more. I have a very different measure of the cost / benefit of the increase in churn of online discourse as that which I would presume to find on YouTube

ASalazarMX• 7 years ago

It wouldn't be long before Free Software advocates develop a Mouth™ alternative called OpenMouth.

nzjrs2• 7 years ago

I'm continually surprised this isn't a major international scandal.

Some Americans don't like google interfering with their discourse and they spend their time using constitutional arguments as to how ok that is or not. International people watching these arguments look on with boredom.

Meanwhile, and american company per default explicitly shapes the dialog of the entire world and people shrug.

The international angle on this is absolutely scandalous and no one cares. Every international government acknowledges the problems of the great firewall of China, but this doesn't matter?

iagovar• 7 years ago

It is concerning. I've seen spanish keywords there and I can't wrap my head around the reason they are filtered.

motohagiography• 7 years ago

The most insidious thing social platforms do is secretly ban and filter content to give the impression it is published when it is not. In any other situation, de-ranking, "shadow banning," and other opaque filtering while giving the impression of being public would be fraud. It's designed to steal the posters time and effort. Their platform their rules, except it could become difficult to justify using a platform to actively defraud people of their time and effort. Attracting peoples content with the promise of publicity only to sabotage it is straight bait and switch. I'm sure it's all very narrowly legal, but post-election lawsuits in 2022 will be ones to watch.

I'm glad this stuff is coming out, but there are viable youtube alternatives for sharing video. If they want stuff off their platform, just say so, and people will use new platforms.

I still believe this behaviour by social media companies will yield new platforms. The kids learning to code now are realizing there is a network of people using "censorship," to actively manage a simulation of a world with a manufactured consensus they find acceptable. We're barely a decade past the winner-take-all pattern of platforms, and a totally new dominant platform is less than 5 years away. I'm still optimistic that these platforms are the AOL, Compuserve, and Myspace of today.

This too shall pass.

krapp2• 7 years ago

Attracting peoples content with the promise of publicity only to sabotage it is straight bait and switch. I'm sure it's all very narrowly legal, but post-election lawsuits in 2022 will be ones to watch.

Youtube doesn't promise anyone publicity. Any ranking algorithm or suggested content list by its very design "deranks" everything else, and most content on the platform is probably never watched, or barely watched.

Youtube's current default of biasing recommendations towards extremist content "deranks" less extremist content, yet that doesn't appear to be a problem for people who are suddenly up in arms that the site is changing the bias of an already biased system.

There is no bait-and-switch here, nor is there sabotage.

RickJWagner2• 7 years ago

Wow, that's a little disturbing. Some imaginative phrases there I wouldn't have dreamed of looking up. I'm going to try to forget some of that stuff.

YouTube Blacklist Censors Content Containing Certain Keywords

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