YouTube AI deletes war crimes evidence as 'extremist material' • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by Iv » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 1:38 AM UTC

During the Arab Springs I suspected many police violence video would be deleted from Youtube. I had downloaded them to my server and posted everywhere the links for people to mirror them. Not a single person did yet.

I have been amazed at the little importance people put on this kind of video. You have video evidence of crimes with faces appearing clearly. It can take 5 to 10 years for such events to calm down enough to reach a point where crimes can be prosecuted.

And it is hard to blame youtube for that. They are considered the channel for Lady Gaga and silly cats video. Hell, I know 3 years old toddler who browse youtube unsupervised.

In many places Youtube is criticized to promote violence and extremism by leaving these videos. I feel bad for them, they are between a hammer and a hard place.

I just hope that the censored video are not totally deleted from their servers. They should have someone reviewing criminal videos and keeping them at the disposal of judicial authorities but even that opens a whole can of worms: do you obey only to US authorities (who do not care about war crimes in other countries)? Do you obey all world authorities including Saudi and Chinese?

Anyway, that's youtube's problem, not ours. Simply, helping prosecute war crime is not part of Youtube's mission, so do not trust them for it. To anyone who feels this is important content, use youtube-dl and keep backups. Make torrents of it, share it around, make sure it does not disappear.

And when some NGO finally realize that this content is precious, pump up your upload bandwidth and fill their servers.

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

#222

Post by averagewall » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 1:58 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #183

vidarh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big challenge with this is to solve the problem that almost everyone has a "one step too far" when it comes to what type of content we are willing to tolerate and/or what type of content we may get in trouble for hosting even if it is not intentional. That makes it tricky to for solutions that "put people and free speech first" to succeed, because they've basically painted a giant target on themselves, and it eas…

I think the problem is the expectation of people that someone else do the filtering for them. I.e. "I don't want to see this kind of content" leads to "someone else should remove it from all the sites I visit". Which obviously leads to conflicting requirements once you have more than one person and those people disagree on what they want to see and don't want to see. The only reasonable solution is to host everything…

I don't think Youtube censors extremist content because "I" don't want to see it. It's because "I" don't want anyone else to see it! There's no use me filtering my own videos if my goal is to limit what other people see.

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

#223

Post by flamedoge » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 2:04 AM UTC

Iv wrote: post #221

During the Arab Springs I suspected many police violence video would be deleted from Youtube. I had downloaded them to my server and posted everywhere the links for people to mirror them. Not a single person did yet. I have been amazed at the little importance people put on this kind of video. You have video evidence of crimes with faces appearing clearly. It can take 5 to 10 years for such events to calm down enough…

Youtube isn't the only channel to upload videos. Check out webtorrent or bitchute for p2p based videos.

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

#224

Post by djrogers » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 2:13 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #183

vidarh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big challenge with this is to solve the problem that almost everyone has a "one step too far" when it comes to what type of content we are willing to tolerate and/or what type of content we may get in trouble for hosting even if it is not intentional. That makes it tricky to for solutions that "put people and free speech first" to succeed, because they've basically painted a giant target on themselves, and it eas…

I think the problem is the expectation of people that someone else do the filtering for them. I.e. "I don't want to see this kind of content" leads to "someone else should remove it from all the sites I visit". Which obviously leads to conflicting requirements once you have more than one person and those people disagree on what they want to see and don't want to see. The only reasonable solution is to host everything…

> I.e. "I don't want to see this kind of content" leads to "someone else should remove it from all the sites I visit".

I don’t think that’s always the mindset. Isn’t it reasonable for people to have the mindset of “I want to go to sites that don’t have content that I find objectionable”? This way websites can decide which group of people they want to cater to.

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

#225

Post by QAPereo » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

Hasknewbie wrote: post #9

Youtube's response regarding one of these videos documenting abuses (emphasis mine): > "we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding ." Can someone explain to me why corporations, when interacting with customers regarding complaints/appeals, seem to have "don't forget to add insult to injury" as one of their motto more o…

In the past it's the kind of tone that would inspire me to greatly escalate the issue, and I doubt that I'm alone.

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

#226

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

Hasknewbie wrote: post #9

Youtube's response regarding one of these videos documenting abuses (emphasis mine): > "we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding ." Can someone explain to me why corporations, when interacting with customers regarding complaints/appeals, seem to have "don't forget to add insult to injury" as one of their motto more o…

[deleted]

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

#227

Post by thaumasiotes » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 2:35 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #219

thaumasiotes wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's naive to think that any one form of human organization, be it governmental or corporate, is somehow less corruptible than another. You don't think any organizations have ever been any more corruptible than any other organizations?

Not once they reach a certain size, no. It turns into a pointless exercise in moral relativism. Joe brings up the Soviets, Jane counters with the East India Company. Bob rants about Trump, Betsy pulls up the Wikipedia article on Union Carbide. Sally complains about police brutality, Sam lectures her on the history of the Pinkerton Agency. Hank sticks up for the UAW, Mary criticizes the Teamsters. None of these organi…

We could save a lot of money and time by replacing the Supreme Court and Congress with one person each. Do you think there might be any disadvantages?

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

#228

Post by ubernostrum » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 2:40 AM UTC

cvsh wrote: post #32

viridian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, the exact same message was delivered to Jordan Peterson a couple of weeks ago or so, before he sat down with the google memo guy. He was in the middle of a bible lecture series, and Google banned his account, and sent the exact same "we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding." message. It seem…

The worst part of the information age is arbitration by unreasonable and impenetrable algorithms rather than humans with the capacity to make a judgement call when the rules clearly don't account for the situation at hand. A transparent appeals process staffed by humans who can at least deliver a rationale, including what rule you broke, should be required by law. There's irreparable reputational damage associated wi…

The worst part of the information age is arbitration by unreasonable and impenetrable algorithms rather than humans

The thing is, people only tend to notice it when it affects them personally (either they are the victim of the algorithm, or someone they know/like/support is). The world has long worked on irrational biases, which now are being used as the training data for decision-making systems which are subsequently declared to be "objective" because people believe an algorithm can't be biased. And increasingly, the mark of privilege is having access to a system -- applications, interviews, customer service, even courts -- which will use human judgment instead of an unreviewable algorithm.

For more on the topic I suggest the book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.

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

#229

Post by erikpukinskis » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 2:55 AM UTC

cvsh wrote: post #32

viridian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, the exact same message was delivered to Jordan Peterson a couple of weeks ago or so, before he sat down with the google memo guy. He was in the middle of a bible lecture series, and Google banned his account, and sent the exact same "we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding." message. It seem…

The worst part of the information age is arbitration by unreasonable and impenetrable algorithms rather than humans with the capacity to make a judgement call when the rules clearly don't account for the situation at hand. A transparent appeals process staffed by humans who can at least deliver a rationale, including what rule you broke, should be required by law. There's irreparable reputational damage associated wi…

This seems like a false dichotomy. There is nothing preventing a human staff from declining to provide an explanation, nor is there any reason a machine learning algorithm couldn't summarize its reasons.

The issue isn't AI vs human, it's transparent vs opaque.

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

#230

Post by rdtsc » Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 3:27 AM UTC

Hasknewbie wrote: post #9

Youtube's response regarding one of these videos documenting abuses (emphasis mine): > "we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding ." Can someone explain to me why corporations, when interacting with customers regarding complaints/appeals, seem to have "don't forget to add insult to injury" as one of their motto more o…

I think a passive agressive "fuck you" is an important element because it provides enjoyment and some satisfaction to the corporate drones who you are interacting with.

I think allowing low level minions with saddistic tendencies to express that saddism via a kthxbye-but-actually-fu here and there is used to reward them for an otherwise boring and unfulfilling task. In this case it is a bit indirect because it is the developer who wrote the code not necessarily a clerk at the counter or a customer service representative in a call center.

Don't remember the incident, I think it was when someone was fired after some public incident at one of the tech conferences (Pycon I believe) where the HR commenting on the firing said something ridiculous like "we reached out to the developer and told them we'd be letting them go". Which I remembered because it sounded like such a massive and rude passive agressive "fuck you"