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YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

middleeasteye.net

11–20 of 334 posts

Re: YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

#11

To be fair, YouTube is under no obligation to some greater good; it's just a video hosting service. Expecting it to "preserve footage" and any footage at that, is a strange expectation.

Not an obligation, but their mission statement is "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Guess they need to change to "information that we and our advertisers agree with."

Yes, I know they are different companies under Alphabet but it doesn't matter. Google has become a monster and too big, powerful.

Re: YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

#12
Once again, the only hope for customer service seems to be a (social) media shitstorm.

Seriously, Google, Twitter and FB massively need to ramp up their customer service and not externalize the costs of a lack of support onto society any more. And there are many "costs": people being actively harrassed and intimidated, sometimes so far they are afraid leaving their house, due to hate speech or doxxing, a loss of historically relevant information as in this case, people locked out of vital emails or their businesses (e.g. when their Gmail account gets closed due to copyright violations on Youtube)...

Re: YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

#13

To be fair, YouTube is under no obligation to some greater good; it's just a video hosting service. Expecting it to "preserve footage" and any footage at that, is a strange expectation.

You are of course right in theory, but it's not good enough to let that justify evidence of war crimes getting lost.

If you film people getting shot at in a demonstration and want to get the word out, chances are you use a popular social network. You might not have any further knowledge, or not be able to (imprisoned, fleeing, dead, like the majority of Syrians) put the video elsewhere.

Re: YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

#16
post #11

To be fair, YouTube is under no obligation to some greater good; it's just a video hosting service. Expecting it to "preserve footage" and any footage at that, is a strange expectation.

Not an obligation, but their mission statement is "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." Guess they need to change to "information that we and our advertisers agree with." Yes, I know they are different companies under Alphabet but it doesn't matter. Google has become a monster and too big, powerful.

Agreed. Google just grosses me out these days.

Re: YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

#17
post #11

To be fair, YouTube is under no obligation to some greater good; it's just a video hosting service. Expecting it to "preserve footage" and any footage at that, is a strange expectation.

Not an obligation, but their mission statement is "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." Guess they need to change to "information that we and our advertisers agree with." Yes, I know they are different companies under Alphabet but it doesn't matter. Google has become a monster and too big, powerful.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

#19

It was folly to think that YouTube would be a safe place to document war crimes. YouTube is a distribution channel, not a preservation channel. Its ease of use certainly makes it an attractive option to upload things quickly, but anything of historical significance should have the video raws immediately turned over to a human rights organization for preservation.

I doubt they're grieving lost footage. It's loss of access to that distribution channel.

Documentation is pointless if it can't be distributed and used to effect change.

Re: YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material'

#20

If you use YouTube, you are subject to the whims of that private corporation, regardless of whether it's right or wrong. They should find a way to host the content somewhere else.

Well almost everything we use these days belongs to a private organization. And we're fully subject to their whims.

Something is wrong about that.

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