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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."

12 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Incompetence by rossz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

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    1. Re:Incompetence by pots · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Incompetence by ScentCone · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    3. Re:Incompetence by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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  2. Really? by tsa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mistakenly?

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  3. Interesting that almost everytime by oldgraybeard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 ;)

  4. Funny by burtosis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:They shut down channels by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Because car were not constructed to kill by aepervius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Because car were not constructed to kill by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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  7. Re:Stop utilizing 3rd parties by ckatko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  8. Re:Stop utilizing 3rd parties by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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