from Hacker News

Our ongoing work to tackle hate

by dombili on 6/5/19, 4:08 PM with 38 comments

  • by timdorr on 6/5/19, 6:12 PM

  • by sp332 on 6/5/19, 6:14 PM

    Counterpoint: https://twitter.com/shaun_jen/status/1136068719262752769 (link to screenshotted thread https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136055959476817921 )

    https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1136088138357493761 YouTube tried to explain this decision on background to us, but I made the call to ignore it because they won't go on the record. YouTube has a major harassment problem, but an even bigger problem with transparency and consistency of policy enforcement. It is not our job to paraphrase their explanations. It is their job to own their policy decisions.

    Edit to update: as of half an hour ago, the channel's monetization has been suspended. https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136341801109843968

    Update update: It's even dumber than it first looked. https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136356046887313408

  • by challenger22 on 6/5/19, 6:08 PM

    I imagine there's boiler room full of guys somewhere tagging videos as "Borderline content", creating data which then feeds into a machine learning algorithm which decides which videos get promoted. All videos are metricized by the similarity to borderline content, and are increasingly likely to be promoted in proportion to increasing graph distance from the borderline content. Youtube management gets nice plausible deniability that they don't actively surpress political adversaries, because the whole process is stochastic, and who knows how machine learning works anyway?

  • by bgravinz on 6/5/19, 6:37 PM

    Many very popular religions are supremacist in nature.

    And pretending otherwise to allow them to skirt the censors just makes the entire censor regime seem like a hollow power play by a company trying to keep from sinking in a turbulent political time.

  • by ytNumbers on 6/5/19, 4:23 PM

    It's often a shame that network effects are nearly impossible to overcome. It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a challenge to YouTube. But, perhaps posts like these from Google will one day succeed in persuading people to start looking elsewhere for videos.

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

  • by beat on 6/5/19, 6:02 PM

    Nice to see they're banning the Flat Earthers.

    Because the Flat Earthers need MORE evidence that the TRUTH!!! is being suppressed by Big Corporations.

  • by clarkmoody on 6/5/19, 6:20 PM

  • by RobertRoberts on 6/5/19, 6:13 PM

    Some very hateful things have come out of Google. Who gets to define hate?

    Edit: Changed to more reasonable assertion.

  • by infiniteseeker on 6/5/19, 6:12 PM

    IOW, Google and its properties continue their slow suicide/slide into irrelevance.

  • by h2odragon on 6/5/19, 6:15 PM

    Now they're taking responsibility for editing content, we can assume they implicitly endorse anything they haven't banned, right?