YouTube Says Computers Helped It Pull Down Millions of Objectionable Videos Last Quarter (recode.net)

YouTube says it has successfully trained computers to flag objectionable videos. In the last quarter of 2017, the company reportedly pulled down more than six million of these videos before any users saw them. The news comes from a brief aside in Google CEO Sundar Pichai's scripted remarks during parent company Alphabet's earnings call today. "He said YouTube had pulled down more than six million videos in the last quarter of 2017 after first being flagged by its 'machine systems,' and that 75 percent of those videos 'were removed before receiving a single view,'" reports Recode.

Comments

Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't censuring videos like that kinda of defeat the whole point of youtube? The idea that anybody could post whatever. Now Youtube is filled with commercial businesses. Wish there was a good alternative to post my cat videos on!

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

The recommended videos? It's all a bunch of trash. I assume you sign in or something to get anything good recommended based on history.

Re: Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

How could they offer you anything targeted if you don't sign in? Of course you need to sign in to get relevant suggestions.

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Chas]

So long as you're good with YouTube regurgitating mainstream media partners at you, it's all good.

Otherwise, the recommended section is utter crap.

And their umpty-quadrillion layers of "subscription" is an exercise in sisyphean bullshit.

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

This YouTube algorithm has a nasty habit of "flagging" conservatives. For example, recently it "flagged" a discussion between Dave Rubin and Thomas Sowell.

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[DrXym]

That depends on what the content was now doesn't it? If it is copyrighted materials, previously flagged, or if it was stuff like porn, child porn, snuff videos or other content that violates their T&Cs, then why shouldn't they remove that crap? It's their service and their rules.

I would be more interested in the false positives - where they took down videos that triggered the system because of a word, or a fair use clip or some other innocuous trigger and the amount of effort required for somebody to reinstate it without harm to their channel's standing.

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, they did it SO BADLY that one of their content creators came and shot up their campus. Complaints from content creators ranged from "why did you take down my video and not this other one" to "I got my channel banned because of a video I created two years or more ago".

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be more interested in the false positives

Apparently thunderf00ts video "see electrons with the naked eye" got flagged as being against community guidelines.

Re: Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[alvinrod]

I would assume they have your IP, a cookie, or some unique device identifier and that they've built a profile around it.

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have a funny cat video to post (not a domestic cat mind you), but i haven't found a service that i like. I was thinking of dailymotion, but i can't make an account without apparently enabling facebook and google scripts, so fuck that. Other services are basically located in China, Russia and USA, so options are pretty much non existant.

Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Rockoon]

This YouTube algorithm has a nasty habit of "flagging" conservatives. For example, recently it "flagged" a discussion between Dave Rubin and Thomas Sowell.

Only Sowell is a conservative. The channel operator, Rubin, is a liberal (in spite of being called alt-right because he dares to also interview conservatives.)

Re: Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

I set Youtube to autoplay, and went to sleep listening to a Christian sermon. Woke up to kiddie porn.

Re: Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

They definitely do. I had a separate firefox profile for youtube music playback so it remembered the music and wasn't polluted with my sexual or politics themed videos.

If you delete the cookie, the filter resets itself. Otherwise it seems to remember things for months.

AI

[110010001000]

This is AI and deep learning. It has destroyed the job market for video reviewers. I know: I used to be one.

Re: AI

[BitterOak]

If a computer can do your job then you are not doing a useful service. You need to value add and offer something a computer cannot do.

I don't disagree with you, but by this logic, in 20 or 30 years, no human will be doing a useful service. Not sure how the economy will work then.

Re:AI

[stephanruby]

You may have been downsized because of this, but don't believe all the hype. AI only helps partially. Youtube still needs human reviewers (even if they're unwilling to pay them).

Remember what prompted the advertiser pullouts last year, youtube was still incapable of filtering very obvious unambiguous swear and racist language from the text subject lines and the text descriptions of its hosted videos. To me, that just means that they didn't care, and/or that they were unwilling to pay for that kind of manual sifting by actual human beings.

Re: AI

[Frosty Piss]

A relative handful of inbred upper class twits will live in splendor and ease sufficient to make Nero envious. While the rest of us die in the street like dogs.

Soylent Green is made of PEEEEEEEEEEOPLE!

Re:AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you the guy that hates space and trolls slashdot?

Re: AI

[rtb61]

Easy, people will demand to interact with people. You want to keep a human employed refuse to interact with an AI, easy. Your choice, you set the rules.

Re:AI

[dromgodis]

From your posts in other threads, I thought you thought that AI was non-existent, never emerging, impossible and unfeasible. Now you say that it works as advertised.

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Objectively speaking this could be good. With 99% of the human population gone, mankind will become highly sustainable and the 1% is still geneticalky diverse enough to prevent inbreeding. It may well be that the endgame is this: paradise on Earth for the chosen few. And why not?

Re:AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Good riddance.

Re: AI

[scottrocket]

Objectively speaking this could be good. With 99% of the human population gone, mankind will become highly sustainable and the 1% is still geneticalky diverse enough to prevent inbreeding. It may well be that the endgame is this: paradise on Earth for the chosen few. And why not?

That's easy enough for you to say now - but what if you were one of the 99% in the future? I'm sure that it would feel quite unfair to you (awww). Alternatively, future 99%ers may decide to pass "compassionate" laws that only allow for the reproduction of the glorious 1%ers, so the 99%ers children don't feel badly about themselves while all of the adults gets their nads snipped! Yeah that sounds realistic - sign me up*!

*snipsnip

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm already one of the 99% and will remain that way because social mobility died quite some time ago. It's way too late to try and climb one's way to the top - there is no more room even if they allowed anyone in, which is not going to happen - but all of this is academic. I'm OK, even supporting, with the downsizing of humanity. Not having to worry about millions starving, wars, crime and poverty will enable humanity to reach heights undreamed of. It's going to be a marvelous future, even if we'll never be a part of it.

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead we should all wallow in an overpopulated cesspool of poverty, disease, and starvation...

The earth cannot sustain infinite human growth. It can't even sustain what we have now. The inequality that you see is a direct result of this. The only solution is mass population control, and it's only logical that the best and brightest should reproduce.

Re: AI

[scottrocket]

So instead we should all wallow in an overpopulated cesspool of poverty, disease, and starvation...

The earth cannot sustain infinite human growth. It can't even sustain what we have now. The inequality that you see is a direct result of this. The only solution is mass population control, and it's only logical that the best and brightest should reproduce.

It's been my experience that those with the money - hence, influence (the 1%) - aren't always "the best and the brightest". So now how do we decide who is "the best and the brightest"? "Big gun, big man" usually ends up as the final decider during draconian times, and then we start the whole mess all over again, minus the smarter people (the "best and brightest" intellectually, if not physically) who are the keepers of accurate history. The others will simply "Soviet airbrush" into existence that which they wish to believe.

Re:AI

[Anonymous Coward]

creimer, I reported you to youtube and keep reporting every spam post you make so all these spam posts will do is bring your view count in negative territory for a given day since youtube barred your stupid click-bot and your spam posts. minus 53 views for yesterday!

MODDOWN! ; creimer youtube spam post again!

creimer wants you to click on his youtube channel, then click on his stupid amazon affiliate link spam on Youtube. There is nothing of value on creimer youtube channel. Only creimer click-bot goes there.

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully so then you won't have an internet connection and us twits won't have to share it with you anymore.

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Lmao, "they" did this to you?

My family was lower middle class. I now live in a fully paid multi million dollar house I bought with cash. I earned it. With hard work, smarts, positive attitude and education. Nothing was handed to me.

You are poor because you are lazy and/or stupid and definitely because you have a shitty gimme gimme gimme attitude. -Of course!- you won't climb with an attitude like that. And rightly so.

I am -glad- you got nowhere in life. It justifies my hard work.

Re:AI

[Anonymous Coward]

How is your mental health? suffering from PTSD?

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

I now live in a fully paid multi million dollar house I bought with cash.

Well, since you make this claim on the internet, it must be true!

Bullshit.

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

#MyMomIsAlsoMyAunt

Re: AI

[DickBreath]

Um, excuse me, but Soylent Green was intended as food for humans to eat.

There won't be any Soylent Green because the AI will use humans for its fuel. Humans are too valuable as fuel to be wasted as food for other pesky, inefficient, humans unable to perform even a single useful service that cannot be performed by AIs.

And yes, this will include even the rich upper class snobs who think that they are safe, because they avoided the first two die-off waves after AI.

Re: AI

[Anon-Admin]

The earth cannot sustain infinite human growth.

Well, it looks like you will not be one of the "best and brightest" that gets to reproduce. You are thinking too small, the earth cannot sustain infinite human growth but the fucking universe can.

Hell, disassemble the earth and use the raw materials to make large habitats orbiting the sun. Just the material in the earth is enough to make and support 100,000 x the existing population or we could get to the point where we have a Ecumenopolis first. We are nowhere near that level!

We could continue to expand after disassembling the earth and move on to the other planets. There is lots of raw material and hydrocarbons in the solar system. Add Star lifting to the mix and we are set.

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

I am poor because of a major health problem that is untreatable.
Not employable due to its side effects - the "reasonable accomodations" are, at best, somewhat unreasonable - nor elligible for any government run safety-net type of program.

Lazyness has nothing to do with it.

Re: AI

[Anonymous Coward]

So, given that africans and arabs have 7 kids per family compared to white people who have less than 2, you'd be okay with starting with the africans and arabs? I mean if anybody is serious about depopulation they'd have to.

I'm genuinely curious how a "think of the poor brown people" liberal on a depopulation bent would answer.

How many of them were false positives?

[Lordpidey]

I remember not too long ago that a LOT of people were wondering why the hell their videos were banned, with something as innocuous as just a TF2 match.

AI is not good enough for detecting hate speech yet.

Re:How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's likely not that much.

It's also fairly obvious that that number is inflated. If objectional videos were really being pulled down, ALL of Alex Jones infowars content would never show up.

Rather "objectionable" , includes reaction videos and uploads/re-uploads of television footage that was live not to long ago, before ContentID gets to it. If they have successfully trained AI to be able to tell the difference between a video game and live footage, that would be an amazing breakthrough. That said, most of what is "easy" to block objectionable content is by having the auto-subtitle system pick up violent language.

Re:How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hate speech".

I bet you would have been the type to have called the Founding Fathers hate speeches for their anti-British stance back in the day. I understand Youtube is a private company with no reason to uphold anybody's free speech, and that I don't mind... but people like you would give it away that right wholesale without a fight everywhere and help barricade any companies who do want to provide it, and then wonder why in 20 years down the road the ruling political elites have no fear not representing any of your interests.

AI is certainly already good enough at replacing your shilling with their own.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DNS-and-BIND]

When you silence a man, you only show that you fear what he has to say.

Re:How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

AI is not good enough for detecting hate speech yet.

That would a feat. As far as I'm aware, humans can't do that reliably either.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[mukfe.com]

I Like Youtube i think every body love youtube URL="www.google.com"]google[/URL]

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

There are plenty of reasons to silence people without fearing them.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[houghi]

Shut up!

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong implication. Your statement is like saying "forcing people to get a drivers license is showing you fear letting them driving a car".

Well, guess what Einstein? Speech is far, far more powerful than driving a fucking car, and has to be exercised just as responsibly. Since there are people who just can't do that, or would even consciously, meticulously and deliberately spread lies, deceit and misunderstandings in order to tear up the society, we can't have absolutely free speech. It's just like we can't have noobs who are as unable to tell the difference between their handbrake and the accelerator as they are to read the traffic signs on the roads, or people who deliberately drive the wrong way in the traffic or try to deliberately ram or run over other people.

Arguing for unlimited, totally free speech is like arguing for your "right" to run over pedestrians with impunity. It's only something the incredibly naive or pure bred psychopath would want.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Fascism like yours must be resisted whenever possible, as strongly as possible. Go jump off a bridge, fascist.

Re:How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

As hate speech does not exist ... except for gaffot niberizing kydes ... good luck and may your teeth & face get smashed by a flying brick.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DRJlaw]

When you silence a man, you only show that you fear what he has to say.

When you tell a man to get off your lawn, you only exert control over your lawn, and the man is free to say his piece elsewhere.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron. No one ever said yelling fire in a crowded theatre was ok.

After that, in the US, anyway, speech is free. Or should be.

Whatever the fascist loving Europeans are up to is their own business. You can see that shit everywhere over there. Unless the speaker is Muslim in which case we apologize for being racist oppressors of Muslim peoples and welcome you to rape the local women en masse.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DNS-and-BIND]

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system. The Problem.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[fuzznutz]

Moron. No one ever said yelling fire in a crowded theatre was ok.

I said it and I'll say it again. If someone sees a fire in any theater where I am in attendance, I greatly appreciate them letting me know so I can exit quickly.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are you arguing with? Yourself? The grandparent post very clearly argued for unlimited "free speech", by implying that forbidding some variants of it would imply that you were afraid of what was being said. Which is utterly wrong, as your example of people yelling "Fire!" without there actually being any fire shows that you clearly understand. Speech has consequences, and those might be catastrophic in nature unless there is some sort of sanctions against malicious actors.

The parent statement leaves no such room, there are no consequences and if you try to shut someone up, clearly it means that can't counter the arguments and are afraid of "losing". A dangerous, naive attitude at best. At worst the attitude of someone malicious who would abuse the freedoms we have in order to abolish them.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[Marful]

But there are no good reasons.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why we intend to murder you faggot nazis, every last bitch one of you.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[nwaack]

There are plenty of reasons to silence people without fearing them.

Sure there are: fascism, bullying, stupidity, arrogance, you don't like what they have to say, etc.

People like you make the world a worse place and you suck.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[david_thornley]

Zuckerberg can prevent you from putting something on Facebook. He can't stop you from putting it elsewhere. Facebook is top dog now, but if it annoys too many people that can change. Twitter could lose top dog status even faster, since it doesn't have quite the same network effect.

Do you realize what you'd have to do to get your say in, say, the 1960s? News was controlled by relatively few organizations. You technically could start your own paper, but it would be expensive to get it out to people, and the distribution could be stopped relatively easily. Unless you had something satisfactory to the mainstream, you were mostly silenced.

Now you're bitching, not because you can't say what you want, but because you can't say what you want on somebody else's podium. Get your own. The Daily Stormer could do it, and so can you.

Re:How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more likely that the AI was fed a bunch of data about videos previously determined to be "problematic". The algorithm will see similarities including keywords in the comments, description or title of the video. Like to dislike to views ratio are likely also important.

If the AI wasn't working on this type of "metadata", it's likely that the re-ups of censored content would be instantly banned, but that only happens when the subject is deemed anti-google.

Re:How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW! It's like 1776 all over again, can I borrow your crystal ball and insistence the founders agree with what YOU think and hate who YOU hate?

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[eaglesrule]

Heretics and blasphemers should not only be silenced, they should fear us as well.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[eaglesrule]

Now you're bitching, not because you can't say what you want, but because you can't say what you want on somebody else's podium. Get your own. The Daily Stormer could do it, and so can you.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

Rules for thee, not for me. Such are the excuses of an authoritarian.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[david_thornley]

Any halfway competent campaign will check to see how the message is getting out, so shadow bans won't work. (If the campaign's incompetent enough to not do that, I don't want that candidate in office.) At that point, there are laws about political campaigns that come into play, and things get more complicated. (I don't know how complicated; I'm not a lawyer.)

I also don't see what you mean by "rules for thee, not for me", since I've been consistent on this subject and haven't mentioned particular groups or political movements. You are assuming something false about me, possibly through projection.

Re:How many of them were false positives?

[Anonymous Coward]

What TF2 match doesn't contain hate speech?

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DRJlaw]

When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

They very fact that you could post this drivel here shows that we do not have such a system.

No meaningful space between corporate power and government power? Is Zuckerberg preventing you from posting everywhere? Can Zuckerberg jail you?

Not even close.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DRJlaw]

Rules for thee, not for me. Such are the excuses of an authoritarian.

Yet that is exactly what you advocate. You want to force privately held businesses to host and distribute messages that they do not want to carry.

Will you host and distribute messages that you do not want to carry? Because I guarantee that I can come up with a bunch of them and make you suffer for the offer.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[eaglesrule]

If privately held businesses are going to operate under the assumption of acting as a common carrier, then that is exactly how they shall operate. First amendment rights shall not be abdicated to the whims of silicon valley executives under the pretense of hosting an impartial platform. Arbitrary enforcement of 'community standards', algorithm changes to suppress certain individuals but promote the approved messages of others, and squashing 'harmful' ideas is just another form of authoritarianism.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DRJlaw]

If privately held businesses are going to operate under the assumption of acting as a common carrier, then that is exactly how they shall operate.

And if they don't (because they don't)? Edge services operate under a Communications Decency Act immunity -- not as a common carrier, which is a status that only applies to telecommunications providers under the Communications Act of 1934. Therefore they can operate precisely how they wish.

47 U.S.C. 230(c)
Civil liability - No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.

First amendment rights shall not be abdicated to the whims of silicon valley executives under the pretense of hosting an impartial platform.

You do realize that the First Amendment only states that Congress (and by extension through the 14th amendment, the States) shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Edge providers are not the government.

Arbitrary enforcement of 'community standards', algorithm changes to suppress certain individuals but promote the approved messages of others, and squashing 'harmful' ideas is just another form of authoritarianism

Again, edge providers are not the government. Under your apparent definition, you are equally authoritarian -- you want to force privately held businesses to host and distribute messages that they do not want to carry because you, an authority, dictate so to them.

Sorry, you're not even close to right on this.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DNS-and-BIND]

It just shows that Slashdot is too small and meaningless to bother with shadowbans. Like it or not, Facebook/Twitter/Youtube are today's public square. Instead of being publicly owned, they are privately owned, and their owners are banning conservatives all over. This is why they need to be nationalized, for the protection of our country. We can't have a discussion when one side is silenced.

When Right wingers do not like how the community is managed, they build the alternative one. When Left wingers do not like how the community is managed, they expel everybody who disagrees with them and take measures to shut them up (1st amendment is a huge obstacle in this, but where it doesn't work - e.g. big private platforms like Facebook and Twitter - the Left routinely works the moderation mechanisms to silence conservatives and eject them from the platform completely, even though there are easy mechanisms to avoid reading offensive posts forever, and they are routinely successful). Surely, the correct conclusion from this is that the Right is the group that has authoritarian tendencies.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DRJlaw]

It just shows that Slashdot is too small and meaningless to bother with shadowbans. Like it or not, Facebook/Twitter/Youtube are today's public square. Instead of being publicly owned, they are privately owned, and their owners are banning conservatives all over. This is why they need to be nationalized, for the protection of our country. We can't have a discussion when one side is silenced.

How very conservative of you... by which I mean how painfully plainly you seek to utterly overturn conservative principles in an attempt to advance conservatism. Slashdot is "too small" -- meaning that you want to nationalize an audience, not a unique and critical facility. They are "public squares," despite the fact that they are private entities that have always imposed rules of entry, and only a few states such as California have ever bought into the quasi-public square theory. They must be nationalized "for the protection of our country," from allegedly one-sided points of view (yet, oddly, that does not apply to Fox News or Sinclair Broadcasting).

One side has not been silenced -- it has it's own nationwide media outlets, broadcast stations, internet fora, and everything else. You're simply butthurt that people that you apparently sympathize with cannot push a message through every attractive outlet because some of those messages violate generally applicable rules. Fairness doctrine redux for YouTube and Facebook, but hell no for Fox News and 200+ television stations.

When Right wingers do not like how the community is managed, they build the alternative one. When Left wingers do not like how the community is managed, they expel everybody who disagrees with them and take measures to shut them up (1st amendment is a huge obstacle in this, but where it doesn't work - e.g. big private platforms like Facebook and Twitter - the Left routinely works the moderation mechanisms to silence conservatives and eject them from the platform completely, even though there are easy mechanisms to avoid reading offensive posts forever, and they are routinely successful).

Ah yes, "Right" wing sites are well known for being tolerant bastions of free speech for all comers... I mean, you never saw that behavior on /The_Donald and /pol.

Surely, the correct conclusion from this is that the Right is the group that has authoritarian tendencies.

You're the one talking about forced association, forced speech, and nationalization. So if you count yourself as an example fo the Right, the conclusion is pretty obvious. Yes.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[eaglesrule]

Again, edge providers are not the government. Under your apparent definition, you are equally authoritarian -- you want to force privately held businesses to host and distribute messages that they do not want to carry because you, an authority, dictate so to them.

I should be so thankful that an internet lawyer showed up to put me in my rightful place for daring to even question my corporate better's ability to decide and influence the nature of political discourse in modern society.

How silly to think that when such 'private businesses' handle, process and regulate the speech between hundreds of millions of individuals in a country, and become the authority of who will be allowed to participate, that the line between it and government could become blurred.

Since you appear to prefer legal terms, then you should understand what de facto means and how it applies in these situations. Expecting equal protection is not an authoritarian position.

Re: How many of them were false positives?

[DRJlaw]

I should be so thankful that an internet lawyer showed up to put me in my rightful place for daring to even question my corporate better's ability to decide and influence the nature of political discourse in modern society.

Actual internet lawyer. And you should be.

How silly to think that when such 'private businesses' handle, process and regulate the speech between hundreds of millions of individuals in a country, and become the authority of who will be allowed to participate, that the line between it and government could become blurred.

As if it was any different with TV, with radio, or with newspapers, going all the way back to when the first amendment was adopted, besides absolute numbers of individuals (up) versus proportion of population (same).

How are you being prevented from speaking to those individuals? Actual conversation, email, and your own website can't cut it? They're suppressing your ability to communicate because you might have to develop your own audience instead of hijacking theirs?

Since you appear to prefer legal terms, then you should understand what de facto means and how it applies in these situations. Expecting equal protection is not an authoritarian position.

There's no "de facto" exception to the first amendment -- the government shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech; or of the press." But please, explain how individuals and "the press" held equal influence in the 18th century, and how it was not authoritarian for the news press to decide what viewpoints they would and would not publish.

Demanding that private interests provide "equal protection" for your speech under penalty of law, or that those private interests be nationalized for that purpose, is pretty much the definition of an authoritarian position - "Favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom." Yep. It is.

Only read the title.

[Anonymous Coward]

I needed a computer to upload a video, so it makes sense that computers would also be used to remove that video too.

They do stupid shit so you don't have to.

[technosaurus]

Many of the real world science shows get shut down by this crap: King of Random, Cody's Lab, Demolition Ranch to name a few. One of Cody's takedowns was how to make (low quality) gunpowder over the course of a year using your urine. Who can keep up with their terms of use anyhow. Too bad Youtube doesn't spend as much effort on the UI (try and search the comments sometime).

Re: They do stupid shit so you don't have to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Liability. YouTube doesn't want to be responsible for activity of what amounts to a vlogging of the Anarchist Cookbook

Re: They do stupid shit so you don't have to.

[Anonymous Coward]

How would they be liable? Is the author of a book liable for anything that the reader may do with the information contained within the tome? Why is everyone so concerned with 'liability' with the sharing of ideas? You aren't liable for what a recipient does with any idea you share with them.

Re: They do stupid shit so you don't have to.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can be sued for anything; doesn't mean you'll win. But if you're a big enough target, you will catch the attention of a whole lot of lawyers looking for an early retirement payout. In most cases, they settle out of court for a lesser fee

Re:They do stupid shit so you don't have to.

[dpidcoe]

And don't forget The Slingshot Channel, ZNA productions, and basically all of the popular gun channels. (Though KoR deserves every bit of punishment he gets imo)

Re: They do stupid shit so you don't have to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Soldier of Fortune won the criminal case but lost the civil case related to the alleged hit-man who advertised in it.

U haters, hos and bots

[harvey the nerd]

Mostly this means Youtube is a Conservative-Libertarian-TeaParty-Trump hater and an RIAA/MPAA ho and bot network.

Re:U haters, hos and bots

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet, fuck those nazi faggots until they die of bleeding out their punk assholes, they deserve the very worst that any American can do to their punk traitor faggot asses. Spiked bats up the ass, roasted alive, the whole deal.

Re:U haters, hos and bots

[Anonymous Coward]

Your leftist hippie paradise will last about six months. They you will start to question the loyalty of some of the people who helped to kill all of the "nazi faggots", maybe they weren't quite as enthusiastic as they should have been. So there will be a new purge for the new "nazi faggots", and then another and another. Uh oh, it seems some real Nazis have appeared, but you have killed all of your closest allies.

Re:U haters, hos and bots

[Anonymous Coward]

And your much vaunted "1000 year Reich" lasted 12 years, before decent people managed to put an end to it, and not before it had killed millions of people. Surprisingly, their first effort was to kill off all the Nazi faggots they could find and prove indeed was a Nazi-faggot, their efforts still celebrated to this day.

BTW, do you know why there practically has been no discernible "conservatives" in Europe akin to the American RWNJ like yourself the last 70 years or so? Because they ALL aligned themselves with the Nazi-faggots because they figured the differences weren't worth arguing about (authoritarian society as authoritarian society, militarism and hero worshipping, Führer, Kaiser, same thing if you squint a bit).

Re:U haters, hos and bots

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost always that way with revolutions. The anarchists types that get the revolution started are eliminated once the new crowd (same as the old crowd) get enough control. Its useful to the new crowd when the old crowd still has power to have anarchist troublemakers. Since the new crowd is mainly just the same type of opportunists as the old crowd they soon see this type of activist as a threat to their power.

Are we there yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

See, this robot controlled our life, we were not sure whether it worked 100% correctly, but seemed fine, until that day!

Who Judges??

[moehoward]

So, if Google/YouTube had some point of view, or points of view, that they wished to either promote or demote... how do we know if they are protecting us or harming us? I do data science sorts of things as part of my job. I know that very, very minor tweaks to algorithms provide quite different results.

Well, as long as they haven't nuked my '80s retro videos, then I'm good. Ah, Leah!

Re:Who Judges??

[BlueStrat]

So, if Google/YouTube had some point of view, or points of view, that they wished to either promote or demote... how do we know if they are protecting us or harming us? I do data science sorts of things as part of my job. I know that very, very minor tweaks to algorithms provide quite different results.

Well, as long as they haven't nuked my '80s retro videos, then I'm good. Ah, Leah!

It's quite possible now to place individuals and groups into internet "algorithm ghettos". Like the Nazis did to Jews in Poland by crowding them into a section of the city and erecting tall walls both to prevent escape and so the people outside the walls didn't see what went on inside, companies like Google, Facebook, and others can place individuals and groups into a digital algorithm ghetto where what they can access is controlled & filtered and what they publish/post/send can be filtered or blocked such that you'd have no way to tell nobody could actually see what you uploaded even to your own website, especially with a well-trained AI tasked with the job. If you call a friend to ask them to verify it the AI will know who you know and listen/monitor the call/message and make it visible to him so you remain unaware that the greater web doesn't know you exist.

This is an extremely dangerous time where how we react or don't right now to control these technologies and the governments and corporations that use them will have very serious and long-lasting consequences for many generations to come around the world.

Strat

Re: Who Judges??

[Reverend Green]

The answer is obvious: Big Brother Google loves us all. If Google wants to enserf us, it's *for our own good*.

Re:Who Judges??

[Actually, I do RTFA]

That's crazy paranoid. Especially them somehow overhearing your call (I guess if you send a message through FB/Google, it's possible, but still seems unlikely). I don't know why you don't just use a phone. if you're worried about FB/Google as opposed to their messengers. Many phones exist that have no connection to FB/Google.

What is true is that FB/Google put you in bubbles and try to show you what they think you want to see. But that's been happening for a while.

Re:Who Judges??

[BlueStrat]

That's crazy paranoid.

Just as crazy paranoid as the idea that US TLAs were slurping up and storing every bit of phone & web traffic they could get their paws on was not too long ago. So was the idea of local police mass-spying on cellphone conversations and using what they learn to perform "parallel construction" to " legally find" evidence of a crime. That used to be tinfoil-hat territory as well.

Strat

Re:Who Judges??

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Huh, the US (and other) intelligence services slurping up data has been known for at least a decade. The local police mass-spying on cellphones is still a technical possibility that hasn't yet been demonstrated. And there's no technical way that Google/FB have your phone tapped unless you install their apps.

The bubbles are a real think. Shadowbans are a real thing (but mostly on twitter/reddit, I don't think FB/Google does it). But the idea that they can overhear your phone calls is not.

Re:Who Judges??

[david_thornley]

Not as long as we've still got some semblance of Net Neutrality, and a reasonable DNS system, that can't happen. If you can go to an arbitrary web address, nobody can control what you can see. If the Daily Stormer can get a host, you can. Google and Facebook can control only what you do on their sites.

Re: Who Judges??

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook uses both shadow-banning and digital-ghettoization.
Google uses digital-ghettoization.

Re:Who Judges??

[BlueStrat]

Huh, the US (and other) intelligence services slurping up data has been known for at least a decade.

Nope, it was known since the revelations regarding the "secret" locked rooms at the major backbone provider facilities.

That's when people were called conspiracy-nutcases for trying to tell people what the TLAs were up to. It wasn't until Snowden that they stopped calling such people paranoid. Ten years is not long unless you are very young.

The local police mass-spying on cellphones is still a technical possibility that hasn't yet been demonstrated.

Well, except for all those court cases where "Stingray" evidence was dropped from the case when defense lawyers attempted through the discovery process to learn exactly how police were using this technology and what it's capabilities were. A Google search brings up plenty of examples.

And there's no technical way that Google/FB have your phone tapped unless you install their apps.

That's not been proven. Even if true that's only true for now. It may not be true in 5 or 10 years, especially if people don't start taking action to halt the destruction of privacy now and AI is employed to help in the destruction of personal privacy.

Strat

Re:Who Judges??

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Please, since the Patriot act it was clear that mass surveillance was happening. There were public records. I'm not responsible for what people refuse to accept. (See also, FB wasn't secretly invading people's privacy, they were willing to accept it)

Stingrays are in use, but it's not clear they are used dragnet style vs. as a wiretap (without the fuss of a court order that would make it legal.)

Umm... FB/Google aren't buying access to your phone calls. That's crazy. Now, if you install their spyware^W apps, they'll be able to. But just don't do that. You are right that if we're not careful now, Google, FB, and MS might just buy Verizon, AT&T and Sprint/T-mobile and start spying. They have the cash on hand. Hell, Google already has some phone service or another. Yeah, that could be bad.

Not As Interesting

[Bing Tsher E]

If YouTube wants to be less interesting, it's their perogative to do so. My seven year old nephew watches a lot of it. It's safer for him to do so now. Also, YouTube is becoming something he will outgrow in a few years. Much the same way Facebook is where your aunt can keep up with what you're doing.

Re: Not As Interesting

[Reverend Green]

Interesting theory. Infantalize the content, and you end up with only infants as your audience. Sure hope you're right!

Re:Not As Interesting

[rtb61]

Typical major tech firm failure. That market dominance, rushes to their genitals and they have delusions of total power and promptly start pissing off their customers, only to build up hate and dissension and then wham, they start loosing customers in droves and simply can not get them back. Alta Vista, MYspace, MSN, Yahoo, Lotus Software, all the same end, market dominance, engorged genitals, no blood to the brain, ego dominates over common sense and customer resistance builds whilst arrogance and ego demands it be ignored, until it is too late.

It looks like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22s... (two for one, heh heh) are the new upcomers, that will dethrone the arrogant egoists. Maps will be the next target, as will Android or oddly enough Android might well fork in an odd way as Google try to force their own proprietary core.

Re:Not As Interesting

[houghi]

The thing with Android is that it is pre-installed. The few geeks that use something else is minimal.
This is why Android even exists. Because it is pre-installed. The majority of the people do not bother to install a different OS. They do not bother to install a different radioin their car. They buy something and if it works well enough, they use it, regardless.

So no, Android will go away if it wil not be pre-installed anymore. At least not in any meaningfull way.

This is also the reason why the Linux Desktop is still not a thing. It is also a reason why it does so well on severs, because that is done by the few people who actually look at the OS as a separate tool, not as something that comes with the machine.

Re:Not As Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

duckduckgo is basically just a bing proxy.

That magic number... 6 million

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, censorship something to be real proud of.

Whatever...as long as youtube doesn't become a monopoly, why should I care if they want to ruin Times Square? We still got Harlem... I mean, who's running the place? Giuliani?

Define 'Objectionable'

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube Bans Firearms Demo Videos, Entering the Gun Control Debate

and how many of those..

[Anonymous Coward]

were false positives? and many receive human review to ensure the machines are doing their job *properly*?

Yet..

[jamesjw]

Yet Friday by Rebecca Black still exists..

Not that smart

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then, earlier this week, I was invited to a YouTube 'Hangout on air' seminar about monetization, where they basically told us: Just no more 'controversial' content. No more such videos, no more tags, even the title of a video should not contain any word that may look suspicious, because 'the bots are not that smart,'" Sprave told me. "That was enough. I decided to do something."

Quote from Jorg sprave, relating to the issues youtube has had removing arbitrary videos. Basically they have no idea what to do, but advertisers are complaining about various content so they're just aiming in the dark and hoping to hit something.
Quote taken from motherboard
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

Re:Not that smart

[Rockoon]

What I dont understand, is that the solution is obvious. Do what every other advertising platform does.

On every other advertising platform, such as a network TV station, the advertisers choose exactly what shows and time-slots their ads are placed on.

This can of course be fully automated. Put the channel address in one field, times of day in another....

Computers, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds high tech! Very space age.

googliness

[Reverend Green]

Capitalist stooges sure are proud of mass censorship.

Re:googliness

[cascadingstylesheet]

Capitalist stooges sure are proud of mass censorship.

SJW run tech corps doing SJW powered censorship are "capitalist stooges"?

Re:googliness

[DNS-and-BIND]

It would be nice if Google were a capitalist company. But no, they don't practice capitalism, they practice corporatism. Moreover they are super left wing, you can't even say that men and women are different without getting fired and blacklisted throughout the entire IT industry. They keep their own blacklists internally and continually police their workers for signs of thoughtcrime.

Re:googliness

[Anonymous Coward]

Communist stooges. The people behind the victimhood / censorship push are communist stooges.

Re: googliness

[Reverend Green]

Then why don't they EVER talk about class domination, alienation of labor, property as theft, or communist revolution? Oh wait - it's because they *are* the face of capitalism/financialism.

Re:googliness

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, to be fair their ideology is far more controlled by capitalism than they'd like to admit. It's all about getting you to buy what is woke.

Re:googliness

[david_thornley]

Do you have the slightest evidence that Google examines thoughtcrime and gets rid of the offenders, let alone can enforce industry-wide blacklists? If you're going to throw James Damore at me, read the proceedings of the Labor Board that heard his case. He wasn't fired for having unpopular views. He was fired for being obnoxious and disruptive about them.

Re:googliness

[DNS-and-BIND]

Industry-wide blacklists, cash bonuses for condemning wrongthink, calls to summarily fire white men accused of bad behavior, calls for âunfair' (the exact word used) treatment of white men, openly booing the presence of white men, employees using company mailing lists to plot violent antifa actions" etc.

Re: googliness

[Reverend Green]

Ah, my dear Doctor Pangloss! So nice to see you again in this, the best of all possible worlds.

Re: googliness

[david_thornley]

I'm not pessimistic enough to think this is the best of all possible worlds. Spinoza was a brilliant philosopher, but I don't actually agree with him on a lot of things.

I'm also not quite cynical enough (give it time) to accuse companies of things without reasonable evidence, and my experience is that a lot of claims just don't hold up under scrutiny. To switch sides of the political spectrum, I've seen no good evidence that Monsanto will sue over wind drift of seeds.

Re:googliness

[Anonymous Coward]

like it or not that is what the advertisers want. They do not want their brand advertised on a video about a topic counter to their values (we can argue the merits of a brands values later). So if YouTube cannot continue to acquire new and constant AD revenue then the service will no longer be self-sustaining. Eventually Free will either become Freemium or in a more Google-esque fashion I'd expect them to just simply kill it.

So Ultimately Google needs to shout that they can remove offensive content at will from their platform. Ultimately it will bring in more revenue and like it or not they are a business.

Re:googliness

[Anonymous Coward]

SJW run tech corps doing SJW powered censorship are "capitalist stooges"?

Yes, the paid operatives of billionaires who incite moral panics against their potential competitors so they can keep their monopoly and make more money are capitalist stooges.

It's about the money

[Anonymous Coward]

Proud of the money they make giving the mob what it wants.

Re: It's about the money

[Reverend Green]

It's not what the masses want - it's what their masters want them to see (or not see).

No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

And computers helped people upload the objectionable content.

"We're spinning censorship as a feature!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're spinning censorship as a feature!"

this is double-plus good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Those videos were full of wrongthink. We give thanks to YouTube for protecting us.

Did you hear that choco rations are being doubled next week?

Wow man

[oakgrove]

I realize blockchain is a meme and everybody hates bitcoin cuz it's killing all the whales or some shit but, fuck man, we need something. This shit is getting out of hand. Maybe I'm getting older (I am) and when you get older, you get more conservative (I haven't but everybody born after me thinks I have), but we're headed toward some fucked up techno-authoritarian-autocratic bullshit that a whole lot of blood is eventually going to have to be spilled to get us out of.

Now tell me how Alphabet is private and they can do anything they want and blah blah. I know. Doesn't change a damn thing.

yup

[Anonymous Coward]

High speed censorship.

Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove them.

Typical false comparisons.

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook isn't going to be replaced by shitty open sores crap - even Google couldn't put a dent in Facebook. Facebook is not fucking MySpace.

YouTube isn't going to be replaced by some dumbass with a Linode VPS. YouTube makes no money, and schmuck number fifty two doesn't have Google's bankroll to eat that loss.

Re:Yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not called an anti SJW, it's called a "Person with a job, education, and responsibilities, who spends so much time working to pay the bills, contributing to society via economy and infrastructure which are tangible realistic routes, and on their family, that they don't have infantile ideas or energy to be keyboard warriors on Twitter and other platforms."

And what are the training rules

[Ulfilas2000]

And what do you suppose the training rules were that Youtube used to train its AI 'reviewers' with? I am going to bet there was more than a little politics in the mix

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Six Million

[Anonymous Coward]

Republican/Pro-Trump videos in one quarter! Wow!

Town Square

[forkfail]

The problem is that YouTube has become the town square for video.

Sure, anyone is free to build their own. The problem is, though, that metaphorically speaking, the only land available is out near the town dump.

When YouTube was assuming this role, they were far more benign to viewpoints that differed from their own. But now that they have a lock on internet video, they know they can control the content. They wrap it up in removing "objectionable" video - but they keep changing the standards of "objectionable". With disturbing increading frequency, "objectionable" is defined to include religious views held by people for thousands of years, exercise of constitutional rights, and advocacy for political positions and candidates that do not meet with the approval of the Alphabet ownership.

Re:Town Square

[david_thornley]

YouTube became the town square. It doesn't have to remain the town square. Land near the dump doesn't have to stay there.

If YouTube becomes objectionable, people will establish other forums. If there isn't a GunTube or something whose site is being circulated among NRA members, there will be soon. That's a few million people at least partly disengaging from YouTube. If YouTube drives enough people to other venues, it will lose dominant position, and it's possible to crash real fast at that point.

Re:Town Square

[forkfail]

Although we'd like to think that all real estate on the 'net is equal, it isn't.

Sure, one could start up guntube, or foodtube, or whatever. But right now, YouTube the one-stop-shopping for all tubes. They are at the center of the proverbial town. Your guntube and foodtube have to be placed on the outskirts. Which means at best, there will be a delay of months/years before the audience of speaking in the town square can be acquired, and at worst, it never will.

Again, remember: YouTube only started being fair once they had the real estate locked down. Or to put it another way, they played nice until they effectively became a monopoly.

Re:Town Square

[david_thornley]

Like all free market solutions, it's imperfect. The question is whether specific government regulation is worse than letting the free market solve things. I tend to think government regulation is better more often than some on this site, but in this case some sort of "fairness doctrine" seems untenable. The "fairness doctrine" was imposed as a condition of using the EM spectrum, which was and is considered public property administered by the government.

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Objectionable to Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Nuf said

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Fascinating!

[cascadingstylesheet]

Fascinating! Tell me more about these ... "computers". When did you start using them at YouTube?

Time to find alternatives.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't we just swarming this stuff ourselves?

Wrongthink

[Citizen of Earth]

Totally true, if "Objectionable Videos" = "Mainstream conservative political opinion".

COMPUTERS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how computers taking down millions of videos from a video posting website is "helping"... If computers ate twinkies could they help the twinkie factory?

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yay

[Anonymous Coward]

yay for censorship! good job, team!