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

Stop utilizing 3rd parties

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, just goto no ip dot com, setup your own website, point it at a tiny 35 dollar raspberry pi, then stream YOUR videos to YOUR hearts content.

If you guys want to stop being the butt rape fun time of corporations then just stop being it. It is not hard, it is not expensive, and it is not difficult.

You just want to show off your silly shit to the world in a way the other sheeple are doing so that your a special snowflake like the other 10 trillion special snowflakes, just stop for gods sakes. Have dignity ownership and responsibility.

It boggles the mind just how absurd all of this is, people are utilizing these services to the point where they imagine using these things isn't just a right but a necessity.

I cannot even....jesus wept...fucking hell...

Re:Stop utilizing 3rd parties

[ckatko]

Which is FUCKING HILARIOUS.

Because someone DID JUST THAT.

Voat.

And you know what happened? They got DDoS'd for weeks (if not months). And when THAT didn't stop it? They posted child porn, and then called their ISP and said "Look, you're hosting a child porn website."

Yeah. All of those people who say "Start your own" are straight up liars. They don't want you to move... they want to "deplatform" you. A literal term, coined by the left. Once the PLATFORM changes? _They go after the next platform._

They don't even hide it anymore. Look at this one. Where they want their readers to harass any company that supports the NRA, and keep a constant update of who is still holding out, and who has collapsed:

https://thinkprogress.org/corp...

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

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

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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

Who the Hell would apply for a job as a YouTube political correctness moderator anyway? Well, folks who can't argue their political standpoints, and must resort to censorship, when the intellectual backing of their own convictions fail, and silencing their opponent by force is their only option.

It's just not a real job.

If anything should be eliminated by AI and automation, it's this. Removing human bias from the system would silence critics on both sides of the political spectrum.

Re:Incompetence

[iamhassi]

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

Yes. While homocide is the 2nd leading cause of death for 15-24 yr olds, 3/4ths of that is gang violence, so they are partially responsible for their own homocide by choosing to become involved with a gang. And number of homocide deaths is almost tied with number of suicide deaths, which means teens and equality as likely to choose suicide as they are likely to be killed.

Either way we are talking about a few thousand a year compared to tens of millions of children so I can honestly say yes, firearms are not a problem.

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.

Re:Incompetence

[iamhassi]

Nah, whats 17 dead kids compared to your right to be a fucking moron with a gun.

You're right, what's 17 dead kids compared to our right to bear arms? Nothing. The right to bear arms is more important than a few lives.

Besides, if we ban guns it would just be easier to get them. Drugs are ban and I can get illegal drugs much easier than getting a doctor's prescription.

Re:Incompetence

[execthis]

My guess is the 10,000 people are in somewhere like India or the Philippines. (More great Silicon Valley goodness.)

It's unrealistic to expect people from many parts of the world to comprehend much less uphold basic freedoms which are implicitly understood and taken for granted in Western European countries.

It's one thing to have them attempt to handle your customer support call, another when they're entrusted with responsibility over something which is lacking in their own culture.

Re:Incompetence

[mentil]

Not everyone killed by a gangbanger is another gang member. Gang members tend to be poor shots, and kill innocent bystanders regularly. Bullets go through walls and hit people, etc., drive-bys hit everyone in the vicinity, so just being near a gang member (maybe a relative) is enough to get you killed. Wear the wrong color clothes and you can be mistaken for being a member of a gang that has those as their identifying colors. Gang initiations sometimes involve killing a stranger, or so the rumor goes at least.

Really?

[tsa]

Mistakenly?

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

[RightwingNutjob]

Of course it's censorship. It's not legally-mandated censorship, so one could consider it self-censorship on the part of YouTube, being that it owns the series of tubes here. But it's still censorship.

I find it odd how people will go to the argument that it's only censorship if the government does it. 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?

Governments exist to secure people's rights. Against attacks by other people. And other governments. And since someone has to watch the watcher, we specifically enumerate the rights the government cannot violate in pursuit of that purpose.

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. The government is there to make sure no one takes it from you. That includes other private actors to whom you have not ceded it. YouTube's community guidelines do not constitute an agreement to relinquish the right to make right-wing statements. If YouTube is treating it as such, that would be a breach of contract between customer and service provider.

I'll add one more thing. Again: if you don't want the government censoring you, then you've got to model respect for freedom of expression in the wider culture. Because government doesn't perpetuate itself. This is a democracy. The impressionable people watching you now (aka children) will be tomorrow's legislators and prosecutors. Not a good idea to give them the idea that free speech is not sacrosanct.

Re:They shut down channels

[AHuxley]

AC that really depends on the US state. Opening a forum for public and political discussion that anyone can walk into and join may not always keep enjoying that ToS "is not the government" cover.
The key in some states is what is private but still regularly held open to the public and what a state constitution says.
i.e. what sites could be seen as "common areas".

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 ;)

Re:Interesting that almost everytime

[AmiMoJo]

But in this case it was the left that was hit first. When it was just AI looking at videos a lot got de-monetized. Then the waves of false-flag attacks from 4chan started, and a lot of left leaning channels like Contrapoints and Kevin Logan got videos removed or even entire channels taken down.

So YouTube started hiring human beings to review videos instead, and of course mistakes were made.

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

Re:What a Day We're Havin'

[AmiMoJo]

we constantly curate the front page and trending vidlist to exclude viewpoints we don't like

Nope.

The front page is by default full of popular but bland videos, determined by things like the ratio of up/down votes. If you create an account it starts to customize it for you. For example, I get both left leaning and some really extreme far right stuff recommended to me, because it knows I'm interested in politics and recommends both videos similar to the ones I've liked and counter-arguments/responses to those videos.

If you have evidence of a conspiracy then post it, but since YouTube has also killed left leaning channels and de-monetized videos about things like make-up for trans folks it's hard to argue that there is any systemic bias.

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.

Re:Funny

[thegarbz]

but pulling down a channel like that only makes it worse by lending credibility and showing its worthy of attention.

Just because I clean up a dogshit from my front yard doesn't mean that everyone suddenly feels like they wanted to have a sniff of it first. Alex Jones gets no more credibility by being removed from a platform that doesn't want him than he had before.

What he does get is media attention, but certainly not credibility or any other "worth".

They should have checked her resume.

[ScentCone]

Google should have given a quick glance at Lois Lerner's resume before hiring her to run their Department Of Capricious Silencing. Or, maybe they did!

Re:Meanwhile, on Facebook

[kamapuaa]

From looking, Sanders started at about 800K and ended up at about 300, about the same proportion as Trump.

There's really no comparison, because Trump's numbers were so much higher to begin with. Maybe Trump just acquired more casual onlookers than the other candidates.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not understanding that your beliefs are bases on emotion not logic. You say cars have a useful purpose. So do guns. However, just as You could eliminate guns and have a functioning society, you could also eliminate all cars and have a perfectly functioning society through the use of bicycles. That society would be much healthier and happier. You could keep the roads open and have lanes dedicated towards ambulances and semi trucks. If you give up your car, I will give up my gun. Guns serve a function in society, mainly hunting and shooting people you do not like. If we got rid of guns it would in some ways be befificial because it would force people to pay attention to woefully neglected sword fighting skills. It would be really cool to see people fighting each other with swords everyday. So I really think you have something there. If you really feel strongly about stopping gun violence I will support you but only if you give up your car. I want to see thousands of people riding to work everyday with swords strapped to their backs. If you refuse to give up your car I will keep my gun and we can engage in gun play on Americas highways.

Evolution is a process whereby, through natural selection and predation, nature creates better and better killing machines. Some people are just not happy living in the modern world and want to return to a more innocent time when we rode bicycles and killed each other with swords or big rocks. I am saying you are not wrong. I share a bit of your nostalgia, and would be will to try living in your quaint little world for a while. E.g a world without guns

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:Because car were not constructed to kill

[blindseer]

Guns were designed to kill, cars were designed to carry people safely. Cars are registered. Drivers are licensed. Yet cars kill far more people every year than guns.

Then there is this:

"they want to get uuuuur guuuunns"

You just went into a rant mocking people that think someone might want to take their guns away and then explain in detail on how you want to do exactly that. You can claim that you did not in fact say you want to take my guns, only that I'd need a permit, have all my guns tracked electronically, and strict enforcement. Well, what happens to the guns I have that do not have electronic tracking? My guess is you would have them taken from me.

Re:Because car were not constructed to kill

[serviscope_minor]

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.

What you're basically saying above is that the primary purpose of guns is to maim more efficiently. That's not really much better you know. It's also massively ignorant, and you're referring to one particular 20th century invention as "all guns".

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.

No, that's not why, because often the police can defuse a situation without ever bringing guns into it at all.

Part of the reason the U.S. won the Revolutionary War was because a significant fraction of the milita

The other part was the French. And the Spanish.

Re:Because car were not constructed to kill

[ScentCone]

So, where's your well regulated militia?

Oh, look. Another person who can't read.

Here, let's use some modern conversational English so you can't pretend you don't understand what the framers were saying (which they also explained to you in numerous other documents, transcripts, letters and the like, which you're also pretending you don't know about):

"It looks like we can't have a nice new country without having at least some sort of standing professional military. Nobody in government is allowed to use the existence of that military as a reason to deny individuals their right to keep and bear their own arms."

Of course you already knew that's what the second amendment means, and you're just pretending to be dumb about it so you can attempt to prop up a long-standing lie from the nanny state types.

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.

Re: The mistake was going after Alex Jones

[JaredOfEuropa]

Well, you say that, but when Google controls the narrative and buys congresscritters, the difference between Google's censorship and federal censorship becomes meaningless.

That works both ways. Congresscritters (and governments in Europe) are increasingly leaning on social media behemoths to curb hate speech and "fake news". Which is more than a little bit scary. What is "fake"? Recently some EU task force accused a couple of newspapers and websites of spreading fake news. In a few cases they retracted the accusation, but not until the websites themselves pointed out the articles in question were wholly factual, and threatened legal action. I really don't want that sort of stuff going on behind the scenes, where websites might not even know they were cut from the news feeds and penalized in page rankings.

There's much talk these days about the influence of large social media companies. But if these companies can be called upon to fight "fake news", by the same token they can be called upon to uphold principles of free speech. I am in favour of applying some additional "common carrier"-like rules to the larger social media sites, not to enforce censorship but to prevent it. When these companies grow to a certain size, they should be considered a "public space" and forced to offer their services indiscriminately... just like many other services are. And to be clear, in my country "indiscriminately" by law doesn't just mean race or gender or religion, it also applies to political conviction.