YouTube's New Moderators Mistakenly Pull Right-Wing Channels (bloomberg.com)

In December, said it would assign more than 10,000 people to moderate content in an attempt to curb its child exploitation problem. Today, Bloomberg reports that those new moderators mistakenly removed several videos and some channels from right-wing, pro-gun video producers and outlets in the midst of a nationwide debate on gun control. From the report: Some YouTube channels recently complained about their accounts being pulled entirely. On Wednesday, the Outline highlighted accounts, including Titus Frost, that were banned from the video site. Frost tweeted on Wednesday that a survivor of the shooting, David Hogg, is an actor. Jerome Corsi of right-wing conspiracy website Infowars said on Tuesday that YouTube had taken down one of his videos and disabled his live stream. Shutting entire channels would have marked a sweeping policy change for YouTube, which typically only removes channels in extreme circumstances and focuses most disciplinary action on specific videos. But YouTube said some content was taken down by mistake. The site didn't address specific cases and it's unclear if it meant to take action on the accounts of Frost and Corsi. "As we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals," a YouTube spokeswoman wrote in an email. "We're continuing to enforce our existing policies regarding harmful and dangerous content, they have not changed. We'll reinstate any videos that were removed in error."

Comments

Incompetence

[rossz]

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

However, this isn't the first time youtube has screwed up like this.

Why the hell are they allowing obviously untrained people the power to wipe out entire channels on a whim?

Re:Incompetence

[pots]

Why the hell are they allowing obviously untrained people the power to wipe out entire channels on a whim?

No one said "on a whim" but, from the summary, there are more than 10,000 people newly assigned to moderate. Are you seriously expecting them to all be experts who never make mistakes? Since the videos/channels were reinstated, it looks like they've implemented some sort of review or appeals process. This is an improvement over how things used to be.

It doesn't even sound like much of a mistake, the article says that the mentioned channels were pretty much all conspiracy theorist / fake news people. It's just a couple of videos that Youtube reinstated.

Re:Incompetence

[ScentCone]

Can you really say that firearms are not a problem for children in the US?

Not NEARLY as much of a problem (in terms of injuries and deaths) as, say, cars. So why do we have YouTube wiping out channels that demonstrate things like safe gun handling at the range, while leaving up channels that highlight reckless driving? Because the people doing it are doing it for political reasons, period.

Re:Incompetence

[eclectro]

Repeated instances of "incompetence" start to form a trend-line towards malice. The number of right wing/conservative demonetization, strikes, deletions, limited state, and channel termination is becoming vast. All the while ignoring channels on the left.

Currently, all the redpill/MGTOW channels have been hit hard with many channels being outright terminated and not returning evidently.

Youtube has brought forth a heavy hand, and it's not a question of how much incompetence there is, but a question of how much they can get away with at any one time.

Here's what Pat Condell had to say about the recent spat of censorship.

Really?

[tsa]

Mistakenly?

Re: The mistake was going after Alex Jones

[Anonymous Coward]

Private owned company, no such thing as free speech, but you should know that you snowflake.

They shut down channels

[rsilvergun]

promoting the conspiracy theory that the kids caught up in the last school shooting were "crisis actors" and that the shooting was a "false flag" (e.g. it never really happened).

Personally if I were Youtube I wouldn't want to be associated with those kind of nut jobs (if they believe it) or bastards (if they don't believe it and are just passing it around to get a rise out of the nut jobs). Remember kiddies, it's not censorship if the government didn't do it. You have a right to speak, you do not have a right to make google pay for your megaphone.

Meanwhile Youtube continue to de-rank left wing media in favor of corporate media (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc).

Re:They shut down channels

[serviscope_minor]

Is it also not illegal search and search and seizure if your neighbor or business partner, who is not the government, breaks in your door and rummages through your stuff to collect evidence?

No, it's not illegal search and seizure. It's theft, trespass and breaking and entering. Those are entirely different crimes.

Read your Declaration. The right to free speech isn't only the right against government censorship; it is a Natural Right that you have by virtue of sucking down oxygen.

Yeah, and you have that. See:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Nowhere does it say "Congress shall pass a law so that whiny RightWingNutJob can have a megaphone provided freely by someone else".

I mean for heaven's sake man, there are other video websites out there. You can even set up your own for free very easily and for little money. You know if you want to speak freely (and I mean actually speak), it's not censorship that Exxon won't pay your gas money when you get up off your lazy ass and drive to somewhere people can hear you.

Interesting that almost everytime

[oldgraybeard]

when Facebook, Twitter, etc creates a new policy to deal with troublesome speech. The first thing that happens is the Right is taken out big time ;)

Then there is the oops, and the just a coincidence responses and over time some are brought back.

What a bogus hoot ;)

just my 2 cents ;)

What a Day We're Havin'

[Kunedog]

"We fired an engineer for being aware of basic biology and psychology, and we constantly curate the front page and trending vidlist to exclude viewpoints we don't like. Oh, and we also hired 10,000 thought police. How could this happen???" -Youtube

Funny

[burtosis]

Where do you draw the line when we also value freedom of speech? People like Alex jones are nucking futs but pulling down a channel like that only makes it worse by lending credibility and showing its worthy of attention. I completely disagree with nearly anything out of that mans mouth but banning him from YouTube is something I would not be ok with. If people can't tell reality from fiction then the problem is worse than the internet police can address.

Pretty accurate mistake

[quantaman]

FTA:
YouTube’s new moderators, brought in to spot fake, misleading and extreme videos, stumbled in one of their first major tests, mistakenly removing some clips and channels in the midst of a nationwide debate on gun control.

[..]

On Wednesday, the Outline highlighted accounts, including Titus Frost, that were banned from the video site. Frost tweeted on Wednesday that a survivor of the shooting, David Hogg, is an actor. Jerome Corsi of right-wing conspiracy website Infowars said on Tuesday that YouTube had taken down one of his videos and disabled his live stream.

If Frost and Corsi don't qualify as fake, misleading, and extreme then those words have lost meaning.

ps. Has anyone else noticed /. being slow and intermittent the last few days? I wonder if they're on the receiving of a DDOS or something.

Because car were not constructed to kill

[aepervius]

And you need a permit to operate a car. Look there are many many reason all those car/cooking knife (or heck swimming pool) comparison to gun death are utterly stupid. For one we have accepted that some objects have a primary useful activity which the general public enjoy making our capitalist societies better : transportation (car) cooking/preparing/cutting (knife) and entertainment (swimming pool). When accident do happen we try as a society to make up new law enforcing certain protection or minimum standard to help increase security lower death count, e.g. seat belt, e.g. baby seat placement instruction on car seat. Killing is at best a bar far secondary objective of such items (combat knife) or even never the objective (car, pool). But with gun it is different. The primary reason of the guns, is that they were invented to kill more efficiently. Forget the BS about sport , that did not happen in the 18th century for your average person in the US, at the time of the framing of the second amendment. And yet contrary to car, you don't have anywhere near the regulation for an instrument made up primary to kill. You don't even have nearly the same training, and you have not even the same follow up on ownership.

Every attempt at having a minimum , heck like car tracking ownership or having non discriminatory permit/training is met by a "they want to get uuuuur guuuunns" lobby of the NRA which says "no" to EVERYTHING. As long as you let those fuckers block everything with a "no", even something as simple as allowing : 1) tracking ownership electronically 2) enforce having a real training with permit like a car (that does not infringe the general population right of ownership IMO if it stops you getting one because you are too fucked up to pass the permit, as long as the exams is not the stupid 4h training the NRA offer anybody can pass with the finger in the nose) 3) allow again the CDC to study gun violence and/or solution , then the situation will get fucked up. Look up the statistics : while gun violence dropped in the last 3 decades, mass shooting actually rose. Sharply. That should tell you something right there.

Re:Because car were not constructed to kill

[andydread]

Driving a car is a privilege not a right and certainly not a constitutional right. Constitutional rights should not be infringed...Period. If you want to infringe on someone's constitutional right whether it's the 1st or 2nd amendment or any other right enshrined by the constitution then change the constitution. Also cooking or using a swimming pool are not constitutional rights.

Why should the Center for Disease Control study violence That is not an infectious disease. and why specifically "gun violence" and not all violence.

Re:Because car were not constructed to kill

[Solandri]

The primary reason of the guns, is that they were invented to kill more efficiently.

Actually, NATO standardized on the smaller 5.56 mm round because in testing they discovered it would tumble, imparting more energy to the flesh and causing larger woulds. The M1 Garand (standard issue U.S. rifle in WWII) used .30-'06 rounds (7.62mm) which were so powerful they would punch right through a person. Good for a kill shot, but it tended to be all-or-nothing. Either you killed the target, or you just created a straight hole which could be bandaged up.

The 5.56 mm rounds were better at creating injuries - lower kill rate but higher rate of incapacitating the target. And strategically it's better to wound enemy soldiers than to kill them. If you kill them, the enemy just ignores the bodies. If they're wounded, the enemy has to tie up resources recovering and evacuating the wounded, and additional resources for hospitalization and medical care.

So no, the primary purpose of guns is not to kill more efficiently. That's a fantasy concocted by people trying to think of the worst possible rationale for something they dislike. The purpose of guns is to intimidate - make people fear the consequences of noncompliance with the person holding the gun. That's why sometimes police with guns can defuse a situation without ever firing a shot. If you believe the killing theory, then such a resolution should be impossible because the gun was never fired and thus had no opportunity to kill anyone.

Intimidation is actually the main purpose of most weapons. Have you ever wondered why "decimate" is a synonym for utterly destroying, but it actually means killing just 1 in 10? Because killing isn't actually the purpose of weapons and war. It's intimidation. And killing 1 in 10 people in an opposing army was usually sufficient to cause the remaining 9 to rout and flee. Nukes are a good example - they worked to keep the U.S. from meddling with the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, and vice versa, even though they were never used. Ukraine lacking them (they disarmed after assurances from the West that we'd protect them from invasion) is what allowed Russia to waltz in and grab Crimea.

Forget the BS about sport , that did not happen in the 18th century for your average person in the US, at the time of the framing of the second amendment.

Oh my. If you lived any reasonable distance outside of a city in the 18th century and didn't have a rifle, your family starved. It was the primary means of putting meat on the table. Part of the reason the U.S. won the Revolutionary War was because a significant fraction of the milita were sharpshooters skilled with using rifles (muskets with rifling to spin-stabilize the bullet increasing accuracy) for hunting. The British still followed the "line everyone up and fire a volley at once" strategy, which works great against an enemy doing the same thing back at you. Not so well against sharpshooters hiding in the woods picking you off one by one from a distance.

(And if you're curious, no I don't own a gun. I don't even like them, and have never shot one aside from a BB gun. I just took the time to educate myself about the issue before drawing conclusions.)

Re: The mistake was going after Alex Jones

[eclectro]

Google et al that owns youtube is a public corporation. While it may set the rules for how its site is used, that does not place it beyond long overdue anti-trust examination.

Cars are used far more than guns

[aepervius]

I am ranting with "uuur guuuns" because people spout excuse for the gun lobby without thinking twice and I am an old coger enough that those issue were clarified again and again and again but the same BS keep cropping up (see same thing with global warming). Looking at *absolute* number of death is one of those tactic. Yes cars kill more people in absolute. But this is a wrong number to compare, you have to compare per hour of driving usage, to per hour of gun usage or a similar statistic. Cars are used far far more per capita than guns are carried. Thus what appears in absolute a bigger number, is actually factually per capita/per hours usage a much lower number. So the 12 fatality per 100K for car comapred to the suicide+murder of In 2013 the United States' firearm-related death rate was 10.7 deaths for every 100K inhabitants , or murder solely 3.5K per 100K you quickly see that due to the huge usage per hours of day of cars, or even their *predominant* presence in every corner city or rural, that gun are far far far more dangerous than cars by order of magnitude.

Facit : compare what is comparable. If you start comparing absolute number, then chance is that you are trying to push an agenda. You gotta make sure numbers are on a valid scale. Nuff said. Feel free to rant about me.

Re:Stop utilizing 3rd parties

[Hal_Porter]

Or look at Daily Stormer. They had their own website and it was pulled. They got another website and that was pulled. Their domain name has been seized.

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

Now I don't like Andrew Anglin one bit but the argument 'if you don't like how Google run their platform, get your own' is dishonest. If all the tech companies discriminate in the same way what you've got is something much more analogous to the pre civil rights era were all businesses in an area refused to serve black people than a normal free market where you can always get service somewhere.

Now historically there's certain amount of irony here. Andrew Anglin is a white supremacist who'd have supported the right of all businesses in an area to discriminate against a race to the point that race could not get service. However he opposes that happening to him. Meanwhile the left now claims to have always opposed discrimination on the grounds of race. That's not quite accurate though - the KKK was a Democrat organisation opposed by the Republicans.

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

Although there was little organizational structure above the local level, similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods. Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement promoting resistance and white supremacy during the Reconstruction Era. For example, Confederate veteran John W. Morton founded a chapter in Nashville, Tennessee. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes.

The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the black political establishment through its use of assassinations and threats of violence; it drove some people out of politics. On the other hand, it caused a sharp backlash, with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling blacks to exercise their rights as citizens". Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic leaders of the South. He says:

the Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective -- the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South.

After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office: the White League, which started in Louisiana in 1874; and the Red Shirts, which started in Mississippi and developed chapters in the Carolinas. For instance, the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina. They were described as acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South. In addition, there were thousands of Confederate veterans in what were called rifle clubs.

Jim Crow laws were a response to the Republican imposed reconstruction era regime.

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

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. Enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legisl