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YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

bbc.co.uk

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Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#301

Post by anigbrowl »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #201
claudiawerner wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realise how silly this line of argument is? Why exactly should we (or Google for that matter) not recognise that there are differences in some actions? That some things are good, and some things are bad? In what world do you conceive it to be the same to advertise flat earth theories as legitimate unless you are yourself a flat earther? This idea that because nobody has a monopoly on the truth then we can't ma…

Of course, every authority since the beginning of civilization has carried this mantle in justification for censorship of all sorts. Having Google decide what information can and can't be shared on their platform (read: utility) is a dangerous state of affairs. What new social movement, or recognition of a current injustice will be stifled due a status-quo bias that is codified by such top down control over the media…

That's an argument for ignoring harms that take place in the present because it's possible to imagine worse ones in the future.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#302

Post by philwelch »

Barrin92 wrote: post #160
xfitm3 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the low quality youtube comments. Most people dismiss them as cancer but the reality is a lot of people think in patterns that drive these comments. I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden.

>It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden. deplatforming is an effective strategy to reduce the spread of malicious content for several reasons, in the case of youtube because it reduces the incentive to monetize and spread harmful content. To say that you'd rather be a exposed to pedophilia in youtube comments than to remove them is a little bit like saying you'd like to stay in contact with the marburg virus.

Ideally, I'd like a vaccine for the Marburg virus so being exposed isn't a big deal. I think the analogy is obvious enough from there.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#303

Post by badfrog »

pgrote wrote: post #283
Posibyte wrote: post #261

This seems like a ham-fisted solution does it not? Channels like ChadTronic play on the nostalgia of being a kid back in the '80s and '90s, yet AFAIK has been unable to enable comments on any of his videos. The weird, funny comments are a big part of the experience in those kinds of videos. Some tropes of the show itself have been built around the comment section. Would it make more sense to instead target the patter…

>Lastly, does forcing these comments off negatively impact the rankings of these creators? Comments have traditionally played into the engagement of any said video and had an (understood) impact on how a video ranks on release. Are these channels now just permanently stunted in their future growth? 1) Yes. 2) Yes. Youtube has taken this action without an overall plan. One of the Youtube creators was told as much in a…

> The program is working just like they planned.

Or like they didn't plan

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#304

Post by hackinthebochs »

claudiawerner wrote: post #281
hackinthebochs wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate isn't whether we can do any sort of "good" censoring, but whether we should do any censoring at all. (Just to be clear, I'm narrowing the scope under discussion to ideas. Of course things like child pornography should be censored due to the direct harm.) I reject the idea that society should welcome some authority having control over ideas such that ones deemed "bad" enough by a large enough majority shoul…

Your claim is that some form of censorship may be permissible if the harm is direct, but I think this carries with it a certain ideological slant - what harm is 'direct' and 'indirect' has vastly different consequences; for instance, prevention of direct harm may be sufficient to protect children, but it probably isn't enough to protect the proliferation of racist or sexist ideas which have historically led to widesp…

Your argument is unmoving. Child pornography isn't speech nor it is an idea. Images are records of events and the dissemination of such records can be directly harmful. There is no ambiguity about the harm principle to be mined from this example.

> In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too?

Ideas are by definition abstract and so they should be communicable through some other medium.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#306

Post by hackinthebochs »

anigbrowl wrote: post #301
hackinthebochs wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, every authority since the beginning of civilization has carried this mantle in justification for censorship of all sorts. Having Google decide what information can and can't be shared on their platform (read: utility) is a dangerous state of affairs. What new social movement, or recognition of a current injustice will be stifled due a status-quo bias that is codified by such top down control over the media…

That's an argument for ignoring harms that take place in the present because it's possible to imagine worse ones in the future.

If addressing a current harm leads to worse harm in the future, then yes it is an argument against addressing the current harm. I see no reductio here if that was the intent.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#307

Post by claudiawerner »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #304
claudiawerner wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claim is that some form of censorship may be permissible if the harm is direct, but I think this carries with it a certain ideological slant - what harm is 'direct' and 'indirect' has vastly different consequences; for instance, prevention of direct harm may be sufficient to protect children, but it probably isn't enough to protect the proliferation of racist or sexist ideas which have historically led to widesp…

Your argument is unmoving. Child pornography isn't speech nor it is an idea. Images are records of events and the dissemination of such records can be directly harmful. There is no ambiguity about the harm principle to be mined from this example. > In censoring them, aren't we censoring ideas too? Ideas are by definition abstract and so they should be communicable through some other medium.

You've managed to circumvent my entire post and you're still wrong; my point was that ideas are communicated through a medium, and they can even be communicated through, for instance, threats and pornography. You have given no convincing reason to single out child-pornographic images for censorship while allowing others, such as regular pornography. What differentiates the free speech content of child pornography from other pornography, or even art which required harm in its creation?

Obviously I'm not defending child pornography here, but I think there's a logical flaw in your reasoning.

The fact that ideas can be communicated through other media is irrelevant, since it would mean that we can censor whatever ideas we like in any major category (e.g ideas conveyed in photography and film) but thereby only farcically allow them otherwise (e.g the expression of the idea is only allowed through physical speech).

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#308

Post by janitor61 »

zaroth wrote: post #12

The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet…

Google is really a former shell of itself... hell, search doesn't even function correctly for me in Gmail of all things. Google's hands-off algorithmic approach to moderation and support has repeatedly been shown to fail and be easily exploited by nefarious actors. I'd like to see them hire some actual people for once, I think they have the budget for it.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#309

Post by matz1 »

drak0n1c wrote: post #165
m23khan wrote: post #151

As a Father of very young kids, I think this is nothing short of emergency. Not only commenting on kids videos should be banned, also youtube should heavily vet and tag all their kids related videos -- these days kids are hooked on watching cartoons and poems on youtube and a lot of times, there are really garbage videos targeting kids just showing little girls buying and playing with make ups, cleaning houses and le…

People said the same about the chat rooms we used when we were kids. You could argue that those had much more potential than Youtube comments to lead to actual physical harm. In some cases, bad things really happened. Chris Hansen made a show about it, and police used chat rooms to find pedophiles. But were internet chat rooms ever an "emergency"? Where do we draw the line with bans? There are family-friendly content…

With this kind of issue, there are no one "right" line, everyone has their own line. What you can do is, you fight for you line, because if don't other will try to impose their line. That being said, I personally favor no ban whatsoever.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#310

Post by philwelch »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #188
xfitm3 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the low quality youtube comments. Most people dismiss them as cancer but the reality is a lot of people think in patterns that drive these comments. I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden.

> I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. YT comments do more than just represent ideas that are out there. Sometimes they can serve as a means of disseminating harmful ideas. Just yesterday I was looking at some YT videos about the history of the Balkan peoples and languages, where the speakers were internationally recognized historians and linguists (and who…

> I couldn’t help but feel that two decades ago, people similarly believed things that were baseless, but they had less capability to disseminate those ideas to other people.

Which people? Twenty years ago, people (by which I mean schoolteachers) baselessly believed that Columbus proved that the world was round rather than flat and disseminated that idea, and it was hard to disseminate the counter-idea of "no, actually, that's not true, the Ancient Greeks already knew the world was round, Columbus just thought the world was round and also much smaller, and he was wrong".

If you can stop people from disseminating "harmful" ideas, you have the power to decide which ideas are "harmful". You might think it's "harmful" to disseminate the idea that the American Civil War was motivated primarily by the issue of slavery, for instance. If you're just in charge of buying school textbooks for the state of Texas, you won't buy textbooks that disseminate this idea, and that's harmful enough. But if you're in charge of moderating user-generated content on a huge set of platforms like Google and Facebook are, it starts becoming more and more of a problem.

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