I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

https://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2020/05/26/I-Was-Blackmailed-Any-YouTuber-Could-Be-Next.aspx

by AlexeyBrin • 6 years ago

655 348 6 years ago

hysan• 6 years ago

Not surprising given what other creators have said about YouTube’s “moderation” system. I watch this channel regularly and am posting in hopes that this gets enough publicity that someone from Google steps in. It’s sadly the only way for these issues to get resolved.

Findeton• 6 years ago

I keep reading these horror stories about YouTube. It must really suck, as there are alternatives, but they just don't have the audience YouTube has. I guess there just isn't much we can do about this apart from hosting elsewhere when necessary?

probably_wrong• 6 years ago

My personal, non-Toutuber theory is that people should use YouTube as a promotion channel, but have your main presence elsewhere: make your own website your hub, use Patreon as your main income, and post copies to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitch, pretty much wherever you can.

That way, if you lose one channel you don't lose your followers, and you can take your time to deal with getting your channel back. And you still get the benefits of YouTube's reach.

dx87• 6 years ago

I've started to notice a lot of youtube channels I watch do that. They'll put 5-10 minute videos on youtube, and the full length version of those videos are on their personal websites, and more in-depth videos are exclusive to patreon subscribers.

LeifCarrotson• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, if you want to monetize your Youtube, Twitch, or other videos, the partner agreements on those platforms explicitly forbid uploading the same content to other video sites within certain time periods or posting videos on one platform to send users to your preferred platform. In particular, I know that you have to wait at least 24 hours after a Twitch stream to upload the VOD to Youtube, you can't co-stream simultaneously or upload immediately after streaming and retain your Twitch partnership, and Youtube has killed channels for posting 30-second "I'm going live on Twitch in 5 minutes" notifications (Twitch notifications are notoriously broken). If your income is through advertisements monetizing video views that won't work.

I agree, though, that a website with merchandise (depending on the channel) or a Patreon, distributing your video hosting across platforms, is probably the safest way to go.

StreamBright• 6 years ago

I guess it is changing after Joe Rogan is moving to Spotify. He has a point.

elicash4• 6 years ago

Weirdly enough, Spotify's goal is to scoop up all the money that's currently going directly to podcasters by making the advertising market more efficient.

They want to enjoy the type of monopoly that Facebook/Google/Amazon currently have online, except in the podcast space.

abledon• 6 years ago

well, it seemed like it was due to abuse w/ a botnet making a bunch of community guideline claims. I'm sure youtube will patch their codebase better.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

https://lbry.tv/ - they also recently launched paid videos, so you can get paid if you make premium content.

badsectoracula• 6 years ago

Why lbry instead of peertube?

int_19h3• 6 years ago

We could give teeth back to our anti-trust enforcement, for starters. That would ensure that there's more viable alternatives.

Notice that I'm saying "give back". That's because it was deliberately gutted: https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...

Imagine, instead, if we applied the same norms to establish "market dominance" as the court did in this case from 1961: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/#tab-opi...

scottlawson• 6 years ago

I think this is called extortion, not blackmail.

jaywalk• 6 years ago

You are correct. Blackmail would involve threatening to expose some sort of negative info about the YouTuber.

dificilis• 6 years ago

The official Hacker News headline-fixing person needs to fix this right now.

Freeboots• 6 years ago

Right?! This annoyed the hell out of me when i saw the vid on youtube. It sucks his videos are getting taken down, but to my mind he loses intergity by playing it up as blackmail. Extortion is bad enough, why not call it like it is?

catalogia2• 6 years ago

You perceive one to be dramatically worse than the other? I don't.. I don't think he's using incorrect terminology to play up the severity of what happened. It's more likely he simply made a mistake.

meowface• 6 years ago

Extortion is a worse crime than blackmail generally, in my opinion, ethically speaking. Extortion is using one's power and force to threaten harm to someone in some way if not paid, while blackmail is using knowledge of information to do the same. Extortion is the more "violent" and violating act. Either way, they're pretty similar, though

Your post is extremely confusing and bizarre to me.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

Yeah, our copyright laws are absurd but how do you change them when we spent the tariff wars forcing other countries to adopt US copyright laws? How could we go back now?

newacct583• 6 years ago

There's no copyright claim involved here. The complaint process being abused was an anticircumvention thing.

Now, you can argue that those anticircumvention laws exist in service to the existing copyright regime, sure. But those aren't the laws we forced other countries to adopt.

wmf• 6 years ago

Many of YouTube's policies aren't required by law.

gkoberger3• 6 years ago

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1]

It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up. YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong.

I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly. YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues, and is constantly doing its best to find a fair middle ground.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316660

macspoofing• 6 years ago

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

100% agree. Also true of Paypal, another common 'whipping boy' because enforcing various regulations around moving money while still providing good customer service is HARD.

elicash4• 6 years ago

I agree with this, except that the reason they receive so much criticism is because of their monopoly status.

If you're trying to make money from digital video, getting banned or even demonetized from YouTube is a death sentence on your vlogger career.

So sure, I don't blame YouTube. They're likely good folks doing their best to solve hard problems. At the same time, that this is such an impossible problem to deal with is probably a good reason to make sure Google doesn't have too much monopoly power over advertising (in this case video ads).

In short, the stakes are too high! They'd be lessened with more alternatives.

unreal372• 6 years ago

I think you're giving them too much credit for "monopoly status". I know a LOT of creators who make a lot of money with digital video (including myself) who don't have much to do with YouTube.

I know YouTube is called the "second most popular search engine", but it's not a monopoly when it comes to digital video.

kemonocode• 6 years ago

It's only ever resolved favorably if you have enough clout.

I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases, but the balance seems to be so heavily skewed towards automation (which still does a very piss poor job at it) that just feels like there's no human element vetting the final decision at all, and that's the approach which so many people have gripes about, rightfully so until Google strikes that balance.

gkoberger3• 6 years ago

Is that true? I mean, you can also argue it's only ever an issue in the first place if you have enough clout to be targeted. And I haven't seen any proof that people "without clout" aren't able to get it resolved, have you? Even this person isn't exactly a YouTube heavy-hitter, it's a relatively niche channel.

jimnotgym• 6 years ago

I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases

This has made me wonder,

1) how many people would this really take to review appeals manually?

2) should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?

prox• 6 years ago

Why is there no trust factor established? I mean if you have been posting without any hiccups for many years, you should be protected from trolls like this.

dathinab2• 6 years ago

I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases

IMHO it's less about man power then how to approach thinks.

Like for example in the given case the video was reviewed by people multiple times. So they could have just "locked" it into being a good video and on put higher bars on further complains.

I mean this video got taken down even through it had been manually reviewed. So not having enough manpower isn't quite the problem.

To problem is more on the line of:

- YouTube doesn't incur much cost on false take downs (both on copyright and community standards). Even false closure of whole google accounts often doesn't cost them much even through it can cause major damages.

- There is no good law to protect small content creators against false copyright claims, false "bad content" claims or discrimination through non advisability in most countries. Sure laws exist in some places but they are mostly in-effective.

rjmunro• 6 years ago

automation ... does a very piss poor job at it

I don't think this is true. I expect it gets it right 99.9% of the time, but in this case someone is against a determined blackmailer who can put a lot of effort into exploiting that 0.1%. The automation will win for a while, but then the attacks will evolve.

jay_kyburz2• 6 years ago

I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases

It's an unpopular opinion, but perhaps there doesn't need to be so many videos online for public viewing.

I don't think its much to ask for a real human to review every video before allowing it to be made public. The posting person could perhaps pay a small fee for the video to be reviewed.

We could have more relaxed rules for videos that are private and shared among a small group of other accounts.

Why do we feel entitled to post any video for public consumption for free?

Actually, now that I think about it, its kind of surprising that nations don't require a film and television style rating for every video.

bsder• 6 years ago

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

Of their own making. It's solvable. You throw humans at it.

If Google can't deal with this then they shouldn't be allowed to collect money by running ads. Problem solved.

And other sites will spring up that might actually be willing to deal with the problem correctly because now YouTube isn't a monopoly anymore.

Google (and others) are going to continue to be shit until we hit them with anti-trust actions and big fines. Until then, this is all just a cost of doing business and they will laugh all the way to the bank.

elicash4• 6 years ago

I favor splitting up tech companies (see my comment above).

The one counter-argument I do find interesting, however, is that YouTube BECAUSE of their monopoly status is able to throw far more resources into this than others sites do. We don't notice it on those other sites because (a) far fewer people are making a living there, and (b) they aren't targeted the way YouTube is targeted.

But that nevertheless, that monopoly is the only reason they are able to do as good a job as they do. And even if there was tons of competition and you lowered the stakes of getting booted, starting at zero followers on another site isn't exactly lowering the stakes to a point where it doesn't matter that you got the boot.

I still say split up tech companies. That said, so many industries have monopoly issues and rather than getting 90% of the attention tech companies should probably get more like 10%.

rrmm2• 6 years ago

The main innovation google has seemed to make is to create products that scale with nearly zero customer service overhead. They have half-assed algorithms that mostly do something approximating a thing that might sorta be kind of near almost the right thing. With no recourse. Their success is that they've gotten people to swallow this state of affairs because they're almost the only game in town.

monadic23• 6 years ago

I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough.

Do you have an example?

These seem like inherently contradictory values. You can either make a safe platform or one that treats its tenants well. Like many of its products, google has not made it clear which set of customers they’re trying to please, pissing off both parties.

gkoberger3• 6 years ago

Sure, here's one I just saw today: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-conspiracy-wuhan...

Here's a bunch more:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-not-doing-enough-...

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27/671285261/critics-say-youtube...

https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4889745&p...

https://coingeek.com/ripple-calls-out-youtube-for-not-doing-...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-internet-meeting/inter...

colinmhayes4• 6 years ago

You've got to be joking. Zuckerberg testified to congress about this. It's gotten huge national attention, especially after russia interfered with our elections by posting fake content on social media.

cbanek• 6 years ago

YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues, and is constantly doing its best to find a middle ground.

I agree with you that it's a really hard problem, but I don't see this as finding a middle ground. In reality, there are problems on both sides (people posting bad content, and bad actors taking on good content). What I expect from Google is a constantly improving process on making sure bad content is removed, and good content is not. It doesn't seem like Google's process is getting better - if anything it's just swinging back toward blocking content faster. I feel like there have been a few swings, such as back in 2011 when any background music or movie clip might mute or block your video, even when it's fair use, to a more open model a few years later, and now we're swinging back. What I would hope is that they improve over time. And yes, many times I think that involves actual people looking at things, which is expensive in terms of people as well as having to deal with tough content (mental health of those moderators being really tricky, just look at FB). But the amount of arbitrary and poorly worded emails about how you violated the TOS but won't say how. It's obvious that working with people is more expensive than not, and that seems to be what they are doing.

It's always a cat and mouse game, I guess. And Google has fought this type of thing before with trying to fight people gaming search ranking.

Now people arguing over what content should be allowed is obviously a more tricky, moral, problem. But between illegal content and people doing illegal acts like blackmail to valid creators seems pretty similar.

anakaine• 6 years ago

In this case the author shares your view. That is until the point where the third review found their video in violation. One might argue there is a corrupted element in the youtube moderation team that is either lazy, or on the take. I'd wager both.

I think the best solution would be a wide, distributed network of automated takedowns targeting every nth video, but avoiding the high profile accounts. Ramp this up to a large enough issue and they will be forced to respond with a better process, otherwise their content network dies by their own process.

I'm not actually advocating that the above should happen, just suggesting it would turn the tables. Fight bots with bots.

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content

This is so sneaky. Why link "false" and "immoral" and "illegal" together? I can agree that social media should take down illegal content, but "false" and "immoral" content should be left up. People who whine about "false" content really mean facts and truths they disagree with. As for immoral, do we really want to play this game? Immoral from which perspective?

I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.

Only if you are a big youtuber.

autokad• 6 years ago

I dont feel sorry for them at all.

"I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough"

I dont want these companies touching false/immoral take downs. who are they to decide? sorry, I dont want these people in charge of the moral police. illegal stuff, like revenge porn makes sense.

"YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong"

I feel like they usually get it wrong, they are closer to being a blind man swinging a chain saw than a surgeon with a knife. HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.

" feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly."

Tell that to people who have been shadow banned or demonized. most of the time, there never is resolution, their channel and all the hard work they have put together is ruined forever.

ssss11• 6 years ago

They should hire more humans to do a proper job and provide actual customer service, using their excessive profits. The AI/automation stuff is just cost cutting and its lowering the quality of service.

code_duck2• 6 years ago

HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.

Agreed. That's something that's frequently said about Google and Facebook... That their volume is so large, they couldn't possibly do a better job with customer service. Given that they each make billions in profit every quarter, I find it hard to believe that improving customer service is unfeasible or too expensive.

movedx9• 6 years ago

HIRE SOME PEOPLE

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317390

deadmutex• 6 years ago

HIRE SOME PEOPLE

See: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-ag...

TL;Dr - YouTube announced they were going to have over 10,000 people to help.

Disclosure: Work at Google, but views are my own.

phreemarki7• 6 years ago

They are the ones who own the systems and services that make YouTube a thing?

Your problem is with the ownership model. Good luck.

So long as more people provide a market to have their agency bought for an ever lower price... you’ll have that.

To their models we’re replaceable cogs, so long as the correct stats are up wtf do they care?

Don’t bother rethinking how we compute or anything. It’s not like people weren’t predicting just this as the cloud took off (oh wait they were!, Google it!)

UncleMeat4• 6 years ago

HIRE SOME PEOPLE. they have huge margins, it would take very little for these companies to hire some people to review content.

How many people? Youtube is probably the biggest nexus of complaints, but apps on Play and the Chrome Extension store are also up there.

Consider what it would cost to manually vet all apps on Play against even the most uncontroversial malware and data abuse policy. Malicious authors are clever and apps are big. It'd take a trained reverse engineer days to truly vet a single app. How many millions of apps are on the app store? How many different versions of those apps are there? You are looking at an army of people being paid six figures to figure out if apps are doing nasty things.

Now consider how pissed people get that things like domestic abuse apps (often hiding as child monitoring apps) exist on the app store. Or plenty of other objectionable crap. If you want to tackle any of this (you don't but lots of people do) then now you've got a whole set of complex contextual problems for enforcement.

It would take a lot more than "very little" to review content.

sneak• 6 years ago

There is no reason for them to be censoring how-to videos, even if those how-to videos are for illegal things.

This isn’t “cut them some slack” xor “revenge porn”.

This is the automated (mis)application of a rule against educational videos, a rule that should not exist in the first place.

Censorship platforms are inherently dangerous.

everfree• 6 years ago

The solution is really very easy, add more human moderators like other companies do. But that would cut into their profit, so they don't.

tekkk• 6 years ago

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel.

Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service, to me it feels that they treat it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust.

Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers, but then it would be nice for Youtube to be upfront about it that there is maybe a human in the process, but most likely not. I guess honesty is not anymore a valuable commodity in this world, yet it would feel nice sometimes to hear the truth, not some lawyer jargon to avoid all responsibility.

movedx9• 6 years ago

Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service

I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them.

I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise grade Linux clusters at Rackspace (UK). I've spanned a pretty large spectrum of industries from a customer services perspective. I've even done customer services in the food industry.

It's HARD. Not just for you as an operator, but as a company trying to offer the service to begin with. of all of the companies I worked for, O2 (a mobile phone provider and network operator) had tens of millions of customers. We had several call centers that spanned close to ten thousand agents doing everything from calls to tickets, emails to Tweets. The call queue for that company never dropped below a constant 200-300 on hold and emails took days to even get to.

Google has approx' one BILLION customers.

What is your suggestion here?

they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this

Damn straight automation, to a larger degree, is the answer. People don't scale at all. They can do one job at a time, for a limited amount of time, and are subject to all kinds of problems.

Yeah I know it's terribly expensive to keep a horde of content reviewers

It cost O2 about $5/6 to answer a single call. That's the cost of the agent's time and JUST answering the call, not the cost of listening, understanding, resolving and ending the call. Humans are expensive.

I'm not saying don't use people. I'm saying automation at Google's scale is one of the few solutions available to them when it comes to dealing with the simply insane amounts of complaints they'll receive just via their YouTube platform alone.

EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.

colechristensen11• 6 years ago

If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product.

If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the sole source of your income.

When you are as big as Google, very improbable failures happen all the time, pointing them out doesn't tell the story of how well they're doing unless your expectation is constant perfection. Go find rates, not anecdotes, then you might have something.

Also, if you're being blackmailed and harassed, it would seem to be a matter for the police and the courts, not Google, to fix.

rezonant2• 6 years ago

I completely agree with your sentiment here, and having read the other sibling comments to mine, I'd like to note that I have dealt with high volume customer support, I work closely with YouTube so I know their reps/support/processes pretty well and I'm also a software engineer who thinks about these challenges quite a lot.

None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders.

All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.

marcyb5st2• 6 years ago

(Disclaimer: I work on YouTube, but all the opinions are strictly my own).

We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...

jpalomaki• 6 years ago

If you have large amount of people for these tasks, you need to give clear guidelines for them to get consistent results.

Also you can’t expect people to put their heart and soul to this kind if grunt work - reviewing content and complaints all day long.

In the end it might be that humans just become robots on task like this.

7leafer• 6 years ago

Here is how YouTube is dong their best about this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiderman+elsa

And this, by far, is not the worst case of what's proliferating there.

Mirioron• 6 years ago

What baffles me is that the Games From Scratch YouTube channel has likely generated over $15,000 in revenue for YouTube. Is it really so difficult for them to have a human that the youtuber could turn to?

ajhurliman• 6 years ago

The videos were flagged and reviewed as acceptable several times, then subsequently flagged and reviewed as unacceptable. The inability to prevent scripted attacks like this where an attacker brute forces takedown requests doesn't strike me as "doing their best".

They can defend against DDoS attacks, why can't they do better against fraudulent takedown requests? I think the answer lies in their monopoly status and the fact that creators don't have many other options for getting real traffic outside of YouTube.

extropy• 6 years ago

IMHO if you came up with a workable solution, Google would buy you out in an instant.

Scalable reliable content moderation is one of the next major breakthroughs waiting to be solved. And it's not just Google it's everyone.

SergeAx• 6 years ago

Sanity check in my head telling me that once content is reinstated by human operator - it shouldn't be taken down by algorithm, but flagged for secondary human examination instead.

tripletao• 6 years ago

I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.

Isn't that exactly the complaint? There's no sane human review until an issue gets embarrassingly publicized--so if the victim can generate that publicity then the system "works", and if they can't then you never see the post.

mmcru• 6 years ago

In my view, if platforms like YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are going to exercise editorial control over the content they host, they should be held fully responsible for all of the content that isn't taken down.

If these organizations don't want to be responsible for the content on their platforms, then they shouldn't censor content unless ordered to by a judge.

They want it both ways - full editorial control, but no responsibility.

denkmoon• 6 years ago

This is a money problem. Google don't want to spend money on human curation. The cost of that is that legitimate channels lose income.

I feel bad for authors that use the platform because they must to reach a sizeable audience, yet the platform does not care about them because they are not Vevo.

AlexandrB• 6 years ago

I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.

This is because the only time a post like this rises to the top on HN is because it's affecting someone notable in the tech/startup circle or someone with a lot of tech followers. If you don't have this kind of leverage to get Google's attention you're usually SOL. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrMvyVEQO6M

Edit: follow up to the above video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIK0yafnbGM

From the transcript:

long story short it only went back up I got a message this morning from someone who is a fan of mine who is a Google employee who kind of reached out internally about it after finding out what happened and that basically immediately solved it after three months of me trying everything that I you know basically everything that I knew to try

So yeah. Unless you have a fan at Google, you can go pound sand if you run into a problem.

soraminazuki• 6 years ago

Censorship is not a solution to your problems. It's never going to scale due to the sheer volume of the contents. In addition to being ineffective, it would also cause active harm because there never will be sufficient checks and balances in place.

That being said, there arguably are some contents that should be taken down. But content takedowns should always be done with care, and be used as a last resort. It certainly should not be taking down harmless gaming videos.

It's also disingenuous to bring up revenge porn to strike down criticism. No one could possibly mistake the video in question for revenge porn. Even their automated system didn't. It has nothing to do with this issue at all.

donw• 6 years ago

It seems that part of the solution here is to require meatspace authentication.

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine you are a global platform which needs to deal with inappropriate behavior (posting of copyrighted materials, etc.)

Flagging content requires a verified account, where you must authenticate your meatspace identity: a small monthly payment via a traceable payment mechanism; a text to your phone number; a postal address verified by sending you a postcard; a photo of your government-issued ID; and webcam photo of yourself.

None of this information is for public exposure! It merely ties your account to you, as a person, as tightly as possible. Nor is it required to use the service -- only to engage with the moderation system.

All of these can be automated from the side of the service provider.

For companies:

If you are working on behalf of a company, your company membership requires similar verification. You are also limited to flagging only IP-related issues raised by your organization (copyright infringement, etc.)

For individuals:

You must be endorsed by three other verified users.

False flags beyond a certain threshold will erode the weight of your flags, up to the point where your the moderation system will outright ignore you, with a periodic (automated) review to see whether or not your flagging behavior has improved.

Endorsing a certain number of false-flaggers will also cause your account to silently lose the ability to flag.

This mimics real-world behavioral modification for groups of people.

Thoughts? Where does this go wrong?

electro_blah• 6 years ago

LOL maybe they should actually look into it before replying with their canned response.

fogetti• 6 years ago

Another unpopular opinion:

And that's the exact reason why Youtube should be considered a platform, that Youtube is so viciously fighting now and all the Youtube believers are blindly accepting.

Not that I believe PragerU's videos are factful or informative, but I think the argument by the court that Youtube is not a state actor is completely missing the point, and it only shows how outdated the legal system is in the US, but it doesn't actually reflect on the actual situation, i.e. how much power Youtube is wielding, and how it is censoring and actively blocking free speech.

These kind of decisions shouldn't be granted to any private firms with such user and content size without public, democratic and transparent influence on the decision making.

BTW, all your arguments seems anecdotal to me. Sentences like "I see", "I feel", etc. don't really convince me and should not anyone else either.

imron• 6 years ago

I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough.

At large enough scale (e.g. Youtube scale) there will always be people complaining about almost everything.

You can't please everybody, but it's in Youtube's long-term self interest to please the people that produce the content that keeps people coming back to Youtube, otherwise the creators will look towards other platforms (and we're already starting to see this).

It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up....YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues

Except here, a third factor is in play - the extortion which caused a legitimate video to be taken down. Youtube's going to need to fix that problem fast.

bryanrasmussen2• 6 years ago

I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably

a cynic might assume that is because you (and thus lots of other people) are seeing the post.

CamperBob2• 6 years ago

I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

(Shrug) They have an almost-infinite amount of money and resources to tackle those problems. It's not unreasonable to expect better results.

lazyjones• 6 years ago

I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1]

It looks more like YT is busy censoring content for political/ideological reasons and doesn't care too much about porn, complaints about censorship and attacks such as reported by the OP.

If some fanatics still don't get their way of censoring content they don't like quickly enough, that's not really an excuse for YT's bad service.

JSavageOne• 6 years ago

There are relatively way more people complaining about their videos being erroneously taken down then people complaining about "immoral" content. In fact, I've never seen anyone claim that "immoral" content should be taken down, most people tend to favor freedom of speech outside of obviously the obviously wrong (eg. torture, doxxing).

I've never seen a revenge porn video on Youtube, where are you coming up with this?

Just look at the robotic tone of their emails, they don't care. I've had a channel taken down and all my old videos deleted due to some nonsense. There is no appeals process.

redml• 6 years ago

The problem is they aren't giving benefit of the doubt in channels that are in good standing for a long time with high subscriber/viewership/video counts. The guy has 100k subscribers and fairly active videos that don't get reported, you'd think that would count for something. Someone doesn't go from uploading regular content to "revenge porn" overnight.

If it doesnt work on large channels then there's no blackmailing possible. If it works on smaller channels then you can't be a "bad actor" as easily.

beshrkayali• 6 years ago

Google support in general (and YouTube specifically) is one of the most incompetent, entitled, and utterly useless systems that exist. Your feeling of YT doing their best doesn't match the reality of how incapable, slow and unhelpful they are. There are many stories of YouTube channels being taken down, receiving strikes for false copyright claims, or just demonetized based on the whims of some virtue signaling employee.

Automating thins is fine, and even getting things wrong is okay. YouTube is nothing without the content that's on it, so it goes without saying that any money-making channel deserves expedited support, especially in cases like this one.

101404• 6 years ago

It's pretty disturbing how you put "immoral" in between "false" and "illegal", as if it was just as bad.

spicyramen• 6 years ago

They are not doing their best. Google is well known for not hiring support people. They automate things, they use ML and also some people in India...but not enough

gerland• 6 years ago

They try their best to keep their business as profitable as possible. This often means they just don't want to analyse content in a sufficient way, although it should be possible to do it in an automated way. It's better to take down 10 videos with the word pedophilia, even if 9 of them talk about how to make your kid safe, than to spend computing power on a more detailed analysis. Why bother, those videos won't sell ads anyway. It's one of the reason that the whole "I'm a private company na na na na na na ha ha ha ha ha ha, you can't regulate me!" argument is so weak.

Not every problem can be solved with automation, because content adapts. If there will be people involved, there will be biases and scandals. Not that I trust people designing algorithms to be some kind of saints.

We know now that people are more likely to discriminate basing on political orientation than race. Basically all the people that would be racists 100 years ago now took a different angle to be able to behave in the same manner. I do not trust moderators and overlords, because they seem to be all from one political orientation. Being a black person 100 years ago, would you trust an all-white private company to handle all your information in an equal way, even knowing that some of the data exposes illegal practices of the said company? It's absurd to think that anyone under those circumstances would be 100% clean and it's just plain insane to thinnk we can hold hundrets of thousands of people at the same time to thius standard.

loup-vaillant• 6 years ago

I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem

Two aspects of the problems are very easy: first, the automated parts of the review system can be marked as such. Automated emails can trivially be signed "You Tube Bot" or something (such signalling should perhaps be mandated by law). Second, when a video has been reviewed and found "not guilty" once, it can be marked as such, and past reviews recorded. Preventing automated takedowns for the same reason, or requiring stronger reviews, is trivial (though more costly for the videos that do end up being re-reviewed).

They may have other reasons not to pluck those two low hanging fruits, but difficulty is probably not one of them.

drukenemo• 6 years ago

The question for me is, why censor/remove false information? Who is the judge? And even if something is blatantly false, we cannot allow it to be manifested?

mcv2• 6 years ago

Part of the problem is also internet anonymity. I know there are cases where this anonymity is important, but there are also clearly cases where it hurts, and this is one.

Addressing this problem would be a lot easier if Youtube could identify the people who make these false claims and upload the illegal content. But because they can always create a new account, they stay anonymous.

Maybe an alternative would be to take long-existing, well-established accounts more seriously. That way troll accounts have a harder time taking advantage of legitimate users. It would still suck if you're a new user who gets faced with this kind of abuse, though.

cyborgx7• 6 years ago

They are doing their best under a particular, self-imposed, restriction. To use as little human work as possible to solve the problem. What we are learning is that you need people in the process that can look at the situation and make decisions.

panpanna• 6 years ago

I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

No, they are not! They are treating this as another big data problem, ignoring the harm it causes.

What they SHOULD do is to held the accuser responsible. To make complaints you should have a verified account and if you make wrongful claims you should foot the bill.

Not rocket science really.

fenwick67• 6 years ago

I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.

Sadly the situation is only resolved because the person gets traction on Twitter etc. You shouldn't have to kick and scream and demand action on Twitter to get baseline levels of support from a human.

bonestamp2• 6 years ago

There's another easy fix here too. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it makes the problem less chronic. This shouldn't happen more than once... once a human does review it, it should be nearly impossible for the automated system to override that decision in the future. Then if someone really thinks the content needs to come down then it should be reviewed by a human before it comes down.

whiddershins• 6 years ago

Is it very hard to have a policy that once a video has been taken down, and then successfully appealed, that it becomes harder to take down?

tripzilch2• 6 years ago

But it's YouTube controlling and profiting off the platform that they created and continue to actively put out there.

If it turns out to be "a really hard problem" to control, that they just can't quite manage, then it's not okay to say "well at least you tried your best" (but you still get to profit off it).

What if we had our current state of self-driving cars on the road already, with all the problems that would entail, and people would say "well, to be fair, it is a really hard problem".

The point is, we don't care whether it's "their best" or if they're even barely trying, what matters is that it's good enough.

jandrese• 6 years ago

It seems like the extortionists can keep sending claims until they stumble across a YouTube moderator who guesses wrong and clicks the "this claim was legit" button. Even if 90% of the moderators would get it right eventually your video is going to be down for good. Even humans make mistakes sometimes, so human-in-the-loop isn't a perfect solution.

The thing that really doesn't make sense to me is that when a moderator marks a claim as invalid it doesn't switch the automod system to requiring the moderator to review the claim before taking the video down. Ideally you'd like that to be the case for all videos, but presumably that would anger the media cartels that dictated the requirements for the system and just want a way to do mass takedowns that doesn't cost them lawyer hours or have the potential of consequences for them.

the_af2• 6 years ago

It seems like the extortionists can keep sending claims until they stumble across a YouTube moderator who guesses wrong and clicks the "this claim was legit" button.

This is exactly what happens. At least, with Facebook. It's not that pranksters or trolls can flag your post/account/page and have it automatically blocked or banned; it's that eventually one of the human reviewers will make a mistake. I've seen it happen more than once and the only way to appeal was through back channels (i.e. via a friend working for Facebook).

pxtail• 6 years ago

Would be pretty interesting if some moderators (who are probably residents of low wage countries) not just simply "guess wrong" but are part of the scheme and mark some videos on purpose.

donkeyd2• 6 years ago

I feel like this is too deep into the conspiracy domain. There are so many videos and moderators, that, of course, there's assholes in there. But the chance that this one specific video ends up on the task queue of the fraudulent moderator just seems too low to be a feasible strategy.

bcoates• 6 years ago

If Google created systems to defend against a single actor spamming their reporting system, it would be an admission that they're aware that they aren't capable of identifying and filtering that out automatically.

"We don't pay for fraud traffic, we don't bill our advertisers for fraud traffic, and youtube analytics represent real users not bots" is pretty much Google's whole business model.

They can survive being caught being mistaken, but it's much worse for them to be caught lying.

So they have to pretend to believe that reporting spam represents large numbers of real humans filing mistaken or dishonest reports that they have to manually review.

This doesn't have anything to do with the media cartels though -- they have access to ContentID and can take down YT videos without filing reports or involving Google employees at all. Media companies wouldn't care if YT removed the report feature entirely.

If you're looking for a corporation to blame for this it's the advertisers, they don't want to see their ads next to brand-unsafe videos. YT has outsourced the hard work of actually watching and classifying videos for appropriateness to the report system. They assume that once they take down anything that catches a lot of reports, whatever is left will be anodyne enough to be brand-safe.

dhimes• 6 years ago

Agree. This will have to be fixed at the legislative level.

CryoLogic• 6 years ago

DevFactor (https://youtube.com/devfactor) was shut down several years ago due to a similar issue with automated copyright trolling that took YouTube about 3 months to fix per time it happened.

panzagl4• 6 years ago

Is there a legitimate, distinct, unique use case for cryptocurrency to weigh against it's use as an enabler for extortion??

ericflo• 6 years ago

It's in the post - the author was able to put the taken-down video back up on lbry.tv, which is a cryptocurrency-based decentralized media platform.

panzagl4• 6 years ago

But he could have put it on Vimeo as well.

nikanj2• 6 years ago

How does that even work? I think just the payment system on that media platform is crypto based. I've never heard of content-hosting on the block chain?

vageli3• 6 years ago

The ability to transact anonymously online shouldn't be understated.

panzagl4• 6 years ago

Transact for what? What am I more likely to need bitcoin for than to pay off some script kiddie?

unreal372• 6 years ago

Also, Bitcoin is not anonymous.

https://www.elliptic.co/our-thinking/bitcoin-transactions-mo...

shiohime• 6 years ago

It's very useful for international money exchange. Really wished I knew about the technology when I was living overseas and needed to send money to my family. Took more than a week IIRC plus having to have 2 to 3 different banks take their cut for a simple wire transfer overseas via Western Union. Sent via blockchain they could have had it within a few minutes with a negligible fee.

There's a bunch of valid use cases for easily being able to send and receive money rather than relying on banks for everything when there are viable alternatives.

127• 6 years ago

A bulwark against fiat debasement and the government basically draining the people dry of any wealth.

identity0• 6 years ago

Is there a legitimate, distinct, unique use case for physical cash to weight against its use as an enabler for virtually all crimes?

Just because something enables crimes doesn't mean it needs to be stopped. Even though many don't use bitcoin, the ideas that bitcoin (and physical cash) represent outweigh their capabilities for committing crimes.

whotheffknows• 6 years ago

Hi so this is illegal. Call the FBI. Extortion and coercion are felonies in all 50 states.

WantonQuantum• 6 years ago

Can the FBI do anything if the culprit is not in the US?

Natsu• 6 years ago

Sort of... sometimes they will lure them to the USA or catch them while they're here if the victim has enough clout. Some here may remember when the FBI arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

philpem• 6 years ago

"Hello, FBI? This random guy on the Internet is extorting me."

FBI: 'Go away and come back when you have a name and address, and can prove the guy is under our jurisdiction.'

sircastor• 6 years ago

Fortunately the FBI doesn't dismiss illegal activities of you lack this kind of information. They will investigate and can arrest individuals on US soil as well as consenting countries. Additionally a country's own law enforcement may cooperate and the perpetrators can be extradited for trial.

damm• 6 years ago

YouTube isn't even trying to protect the creators here. You could make excuses about how they have to review each claim to ensure it's valid bases on the DMCA or some interpretation of the DMCA. Having said this I have watched prominent channels get hacked and spread Binance (bitcoin) videos all their content deleted. After 90 days YouTube finally stepped in and stopped the hacker and very slowly restored some of the content.

Kind of super thankful I am not a YouTube Creator because having my channel hacked and my content deleted would be very hard to deal with.

causality03• 6 years ago

Google has an absolute fetish for making the ratio of profit to employees as large as possible. They will do it at any cost. There is no Google service without horrific customer support. Youtube, Google Fiber, Google Fi, doesn't matter. They refuse to accept that having 2x as many customers requires 2x as many support personnel.

op00to• 6 years ago

Support scales linearly only if you don’t do anything to work smarter. Maybe your product sucks so much that every customer needs to interact with support to get things to work. Maybe you don’t have the right resources for customers to self solve. Hiring your way out of a support problem rarely ends well.

causality03• 6 years ago

Funny thing is, support scales nonlinearly only while you're fixing those problems. At both ends of the spectrum it goes linear again. If you've done nothing it's linear, and after you've done everything possible it's also linear. Google is convinced the number of required personnel is zero and in any situation it isn't zero it isn't their problem.

downerending• 6 years ago

Hard to convince a company to provide good service when they can make more money by not doing so.

xmprt• 6 years ago

I'm not sure about that. It's pretty common knowledge that YouTube isn't the endgame for a lot of content creators. If instead, YouTube supported their users more (especially the larger ones) they would have potential to be in the loop for other services like livestreaming, merch, and donations instead of having creators resort to using services like Twitch, Squarespace, and Patreon.

wayoutthere2• 6 years ago

I’m a big fan of looking at annual reports to understand a company.

Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote.

Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue from from ad sales. “Other bets” (inclusive of consumer product things like Fiber, Fi, etc) is less than $1B — a rounding error in the scope of their overall business.

I know it’s flippant to say “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but it’s particularly true in the case of Google. They are a B2B advertising company, not a B2C products company. It’s just not part of their business model to provide support to anyone who isn’t an ad buyer. It honestly ends up thwarting their ambitions in the product space because the kind of customer support required to succeed just isn’t in their DNA.

RandomTisk• 6 years ago

Does this mean that Google is basically using all their services like Stadia or Fiber to keep people's minds aware of their presence, essentially using these services as their own advertisement outreach while hoping they also return a profit on their own advertisement?

antpls• 6 years ago

Aren't YouTube's customers the advertisers paying to have their ads displayed? YouTubers are not customers. At best, I believe they are "partners" (like with Twitch)

Lev1a• 6 years ago

They are the people making the content ad companies can plaster their drivel on.

Essentially YT is a middleman between billboard manufacturers (content creators) and advertisers (drivel manufacturers).

causality03• 6 years ago

Youtube Premium subscribers are customers.

gowthamgts12• 6 years ago

also applies to android developers as well. they have been struggling for a very long time due to app takedowns without human intervention.

tiborsaas2• 6 years ago

As an exercise, please do a back of an envelope calculation and estimate costs and features of a good (feel free to use your own definition) customer service for a mainstream video streaming platform with users ranging from 3 to 99.

You have:

- 2 billion monthly active users

- 73% of US adults

- The most-downloaded iOS app in 2018

- As of December 2018, installed on 5 billion Android devices

- One billion hours of content viewed per day

- 500 hours of content uploaded every minute

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

FeepingCreature2• 6 years ago

None of those stats matter at all.

The only one that matters is "how many complaint-review-hours do I get?"

For instance, you might lower complaint-review-hours by letting complainants submit timestamps and prioritizing complaints with timestamps.

unexaminedlife• 6 years ago

It seems an obvious solution would be to incorporate historical data into future decisions on whether to take down immediately vs take down after manual verification.

If someone has been hit with these takedown requests over and over where the resolution was always to put it back up, what likelihood is there that future resolutions will be different? By standing by your content creators with a history of improper takedown requests you'll build brand loyalty. By making it just as difficult on content creators the 100th time as the first time makes me think YouTube isn't going to be the "platform of the future" for content creators.

Andrex• 6 years ago

This is how I naively assumed it worked back in the day and was constantly perplexed by how much trouble TeamFourStar would get into with seemingly every new upload.

peter_d_sherman• 6 years ago

Some comments/ideas/takeaways:

1) According to this video, it is very easy for some troll living in another country, who has a bot network, to extort money from YouTube creators by gaming YouTube's takedown request system:

"I'll get your video taken down unless you pay me" (Sounds a whole lot like patent trolls -- but applied to videos).

2) YouTube (or any other video sharing site, present or future), should conduct a thorough investigation as to how their system for user requested takedowns -- could be gamed by bot networks / multiple phony user accounts requesting takedowns -- and what could be done about it, using what happened here as a baseline for that investigation.

Note that this also applies to non-video sharing sites where user takedowns can be requested, i.e., craigslist -- if that process is automated in any way, it should be thought about from the perspective of "how do we protect against swarms of automated bots / fake user accounts, requesting takedowns?"

3) Any ML/AI algorithm that is used in the takedown determination process should consider the reputation of the user whose videos are being requested to be taken down.

This includes such things as 'how long has the user been a user', how many other videos have they uploaded, how many likes they've received over the years, how many video views, and how many real legitimate complaints, verified by an actual YouTube human staffer -- have occurred on that account over the years (feeding that data in only after human YouTube staffer review, etc.)

4) It wouldn't be a bad idea (if YouTube is short of staff), to create another tier of users, "review users", that is, these users would be / could be called upon to review content that was flagged for removal/deletion for one reason or another. If enough "review users" (randomly selected) collectively vote that the content should be removed, THEN and only then it gets queued for a human being staffer at YouTube for final review... otherwise it's not banned, and sticks around... but this would hopefully save a lot of work for human YouTube staffers -- much in the same way automated voice assistants do for human telephone operators or receptionists... any AI/ML algorithms could be the gatekeeper for this tier of users; if the AI/ML has a problem with the content -- escalate it to this tier of users for further review...

5) To implement #4, User accounts, agreements, and YouTube's suggestion algorithm -- would have to be modified (basically you're adding another user account type and another agreement type) to support the functionality.

6) No matter how great YouTube is, it's a human created system like all others, and as such, subject to failure. As the old expression, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket" goes, similarly:

Don't host all of your videos on one and only one video hosting site.

Just like you wouldn't store your important files in one location only, without making/having backups...

nineparts• 6 years ago

With every new "takedown" please refer back to past reinstatements by Youtube. That's all I can contribute from my experience. Good luck!

Animats2• 6 years ago

This is extortion. Did Google disclose to you the identity of the party who sent the takedown notice. If not, a lawyer might be able to help here. You have a good case against the other party for extortion, and a weak case against Google for assisting them. There's a strong legal incentive here for Google to disclose the name of the other party, if they are being difficult about doing so. DMCA notices can't be anonymous.

bencollier494• 6 years ago

Is a circumvention of technology claim part of the DMCA?

Animats2• 6 years ago

Yes. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A).

FDSGSG• 6 years ago

You have a good case against the other party for extortion

Doesn't really help when the other party is clearly a child with no money.

madsbuch• 6 years ago

It seems like we are seeing the limit of "infinitely scaling business models". It is definitely going to be interesting to see what the future of content distribution / monetization brings!

qqj• 6 years ago

It used to be that everyone on the internet were a Dog, nowadays it seems like the internet became a cesspool of stagnant hyper centralized services catering to the lowest common denominator (twitter, youtube, linkedin, facebook) with morally bankrupt somali-pirate types circling around them like vultures.

In the old days griefing was done for the lulz. Today it's done out of malice, or worse, out of greed.

Tepix2• 6 years ago

Perhaps takedown requests should be accompanied by a fee: If the request is successfully appealed, the fee is kept. If not, it is returned.

unnouinceput• 6 years ago

Same problem only this time you'll leverage rich vs. poor while Internet is suppose to be the great equalizer.

trianx• 6 years ago

Just want to stress, that the root of the problem is the evil extortionist, not Google.

Google can and will try to do a better job, but as long as such people are around (i.e. forever) those problems will persist.

Simon_says• 6 years ago

I'm sorry. I didn't really understand what was happening. What's the mechanism by which the attacker convinces Youtube to take down this guy's video?

jschuur2• 6 years ago

I'm not discounting that this was an annoying ordeal for this channel to go through, but if this is so easy, why don't professional criminals go after huge channels and take them down as easily?

There might be some subscriber count threshold or partner status that, once crossed, flags extra steps that mean a new violation is escalated for a closer look first?

slightwinder2• 6 years ago

How do you know they are not doing that already?

jschuur2• 6 years ago

Because MKBHD isn’t tweeting about this all the time.

Communitivity• 6 years ago

You can also mirror on PeerTube, https://joinpeertube.org/.

PeerTube is a more distributed clone of YouTube, and this site explains what it is well: https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-a....

Technology used includes a HLS video player, and WebTorrent. Like Mastodon it also uses the ActivityPub protocol.

XCSme2• 6 years ago

PeerTube sounds interesting, but going to their website I am lost. Why all those promotional videos and descriptions and confusing links? I expected to just see the videos in their directory and be able to search for videos, something like the YouTube interface. And I'm a technical user, I imagine the average user would close the page instantly.

LockAndLol2• 6 years ago

Think of it as email:

Peertube = email software

In order to have an email account you don't go to "email.com", you have to go to an email service provider. Peertube works in the same way so they have a list of providers: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances

If you can understand email, you can understand peertube.

chamakits• 6 years ago

More incredible is that they don’t seem to have a system for “this account is being actively targeted” because even after this somewhat public attack and “fix”, the same creator just got attacked again with the same thing on another video.

Tweet 4 hours ago from that creator: https://mobile.twitter.com/gamefromscratch/status/1265579494...

kelvin0• 6 years ago

In case of a popular channel: maybe the subscribers to a channel could be 'polled' in order to vet a channel's content?

If the majority of subscriber's vote confirms the content then the channel owner could be given a 2nd chance?

Just an idea off the top of my bald head.

savingGrace• 6 years ago

What are the reasons the creator could not just re-upload the video as a new video?

I don't use Youtube as a creator, so I can only guess.

Links to it from outside of Youtube? 'Millions of views' type of stuff? Ad revenue? Getting their account perma-banned?

unethical_ban• 6 years ago

After a video has been reviewed by a moderator on appeal, why isn't a block on new reports put on it? If, say, they can tell that a video hasn't been altered since the last time it was looked at, why aren't things disabled after initial flagging and review?

"Malicious actors reports, and Youtube bots autoremoved, my video four times" should not be possible.

I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

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