Live data from Hacker News

YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

bbc.co.uk

381–390 of 556 posts

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. Youtube videos are a business to some people so anything that has _potential_ to harm revenue will go straight out of the window. "Is it worth to include this kid in my skit if it will reduce the revenue by 10%?" Combine this with 10s of other already existing hypotheticals and you have yourself a neutered vlog machine that is today's youtube.

> "Is it worth to include this kid in my skit if it will reduce the revenue by 10%?" Yeah, that answer is easy—it's not worth it. I'm more interested in what happens if it's accidental. You mention vlogs. If a "vlogger" is recording themselves walking down the street, and a kid passes into the frame, what do they do? Do they need to scrap the clip and start over? Do they attempt to edit out the kid? Do you just never…

My vlogger example was rather lazy. I'm not really sure how to define the current meta youtube content but "creative" is definitely not a word would be using for majority of it.

I mean every youtuber thinks about how to avoid being demotized or just in general reduced profits.

I think your point about public filming is very valid as well. Even if the risk that your video will get caught in the filter is I watch a lot of skating videos and un-surprisingly enough they feature kids, sometimes as main subjects but often in the background. Filming at skatepark is suddenly a considerable risk because a falling kid might evoke some sexual conotation in extreme minority.

This is a lazy solution that unfortunately just be adapted into the collosal folder of other lazy youtube solutions until this medium loses the last bits of creativity it had.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#382

Man people are depressing. I'm guessing the scum bags will have to post scummy things on other forums and link to videos. At least the consumers on youtube wont be subjected to such. Incoming new challenges for reddit. Maybe its an opportunity to get rid of some more scummy communities.

You are depressing. You are validating blanked "solutions" that harm the creative content and at what cost? This obsession with regulating and controlling everything that happens on the internet is just hysterical. Also "Think of the kids" is the most common of the "appeal to feelings" falacies that keeps on getting hammered and hammered and it's _depressing_ to see people fall for it.

It would actually be more optimal if they simply removed youtubes comments feature. Have you ever tried to interact with youtube comments?

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#383
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…

I think this says more about Google than anything. Google is the new "too big to fail" ... they can't seem to do anything right lately.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#384
post #279
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…

SlateStarCodex's recent post on a similar topic was illuminating [1] > It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they…

>The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile,

Can recognize a 4chaner here

/b/ is only cancer and for prdophilia so stay away

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#385
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that this is a problem with giant corporations. I think the problem lies in the public that demands blood on everything. There is no solution to the problem that youtube is being asked to solve other than simply banning all videos with kids in them.

"public that demands blood on everything" public = Small, vocal minority.

Not even the public, it's the small group of news outlets which are trying to discredit youtube as a source of news and entertainment. Youtube is a direct competitor to cable news and the networks that host them, so being able to say, "Look! There's bad stuff that they didn't know about!" is a great way to push that narrative and reclaim some advertising dollars.

This isn't even in retaliation to the Verge and the other news articles that originally covered the story, it's due to the advertisers that pulled out of Youtube. There's very little chance the advertisers decided to pull ads because they have the 'moral high ground' - big corps like ATT and Disney are simply doing this so that, after the issue has passed, they can negotiate lower ad rates with Youtube. If there were no ads whatsoever for "Avengers: End Game" on youtube, the movie would still be popular, but it wouldn't nearly generate the same amount of buzz or 'hype' as the first one did.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#386
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common theme in every discussion about moderation is that Google, Facebook et al have a division of literal wizards who can wave magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale. This just isn't in touch with reality, but public opinion and pressure has no incentive to be rational, so blunt, restrictive policies like this one are the only path left open to these companies.

In Google’s latest press release they admit they are pushing out a new classifier which flags 2x more comments, and that they are increasing efforts in this area. I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools. I don’t moderate a large YouTube channel, but I will go out on a limb and guess that the tools are rudimentary. Basic thing…

Yea, that's probably fair. I didn't mean to suggest there's no scope for improvement or investment. But I suspect that you and I differ on our estimates of the degree to which this is possible, particularly without fundamentally changing the platforms and drastically reducing their value for legitimate usage.

The existence of the gap also doesn't change the fact that my experience is that implicit in the majority of the mainstream conversation about these topics is is an imagining of tech giants as wielders of unlimited power over their billions of users, and I'm skeptical that they'd be satisfied with most/any of the points in the valley you describe.

Not to mention that the flipside of public opinion is that the caprices of an algorithm are even more hated than their cases of leniency! All of the suggestions you make are going to increase false positives, and the PR backlash I've seen from that is far worse than the backlash to unmoderated content.

That isn't to say that there isn't room for reasonable complaint, but most people are really, really stupid, and even worse, entirely unconcerned with the consistency of their objections (a problem exacerbated by the fact that different vocal subgroups complain about different problems, and our various media will happily signal-boost all of them). Again, I don't see a solution that threads the needle effectively other than blunt restrictions, leaving everyone worse off but neutering the worst of the PR damage.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#387
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common theme in every discussion about moderation is that Google, Facebook et al have a division of literal wizards who can wave magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale. This just isn't in touch with reality, but public opinion and pressure has no incentive to be rational, so blunt, restrictive policies like this one are the only path left open to these companies.

I feel like this cart before the horse vision is the problem. If you are going to suck up as much data about the world and monetize it, you have an obligation to spend some of that dough on a coven of wizards who can make the place you have created safe for people. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, et al have proven to be a disease vector over the past decade and if they want to be rich, they have a responsibility to bleac…

Do you similarly feel that the telephone shouldn't have been rolled out until we could ensure that people couldn't speak about objectionable things, paved roads should have waited on ensuring that getaway cars wouldn't work on them, and the printing press should've been gated on technology that ensured it couldn't print falsehoods? As you can imagine, there are a trillion and one other examples I could bring up: you could ask the same about pretty much every sufficiently big advance in technology and the new structures enabled by it.

This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one: the responsibility line is unclear to me, but it seems to me that there's a level of Ludditic absolutism around the topic of Internet platforms that I don't see anywhere else, and it's possible that I'm missing the variable that makes it relevant here where it wasn't elsewhere.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I agree! Since Hacker News could also potentially be such a way to disseminate bad information we should remove all comments here too. See the problem? That's basically what you're justifying.

I think HN is actually a poster child of strong moderation on social media, because it remains relevant by being one of the most regulated platforms. There is a reason this place hasn’t devolved into complete and utter uselessness as well as why you rarely see any form of political debate, and it’s exactly because this places isn’t liberatarian in its approach to free speech.

Free speech comes with responsibility, and part of that responsibility is to make sure people aren’t legally monetising videos of children for pedofiles.

I know it’s not always a popular opinion, but I think social media has been hiding from its responsibility for far too long, and I’m personally happy the EU is stepping in to regulate it.

Big tech companies shouldn’t be able to get away with things no one else could simply by being big. Especially not when it’s used to undermine the foundation of our society. If someone uses your platform for a network of pedos, or to commit genocide then you are also responsible for enabling it in my opinion.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#389
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…

[flagged]

>It's ironic, because the left, not the right, has spent nearly the last 50 years promoting pedophilia.

... What? Your evidence is that Salon.com had one article about people who specifically avoid acting on their urges?

>But what is kind of shocking is how anti-free-speech so many on this site are. I'm old enough to remember the idealistic - although rather fatuous in hindsight - early days of the "internet culture" which promoted John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" [0] and John Gilmore's sentiment that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." [1]

The difference is that many of us have seen how bad groups have benefited from the current state of affairs since then. It was easy to be idealistic about free speech on the internet back when it was almost solely populated by academic types. But the world changed, and we don't have to be dogmatic about old ideals.

https://shift.newco.co/2017/12/26/My-Internet-Mea-Culpa/

https://medium.com/@hondanhon/no-ones-coming-it-s-up-to-us-d...

>>When Barlow said “the fact remains that there is not much one can do about bad behavior online except to take faith that the vast majority of what goes on there is not bad behavior,” his position was that we should accept the current state of affairs because there is literally no room for improvement. [...] In my opinion, Barlow’s opinions on online behavior, given his standing and influence were irresponsible. [...] Saying “we can do nothing” is like saying it’s not worth having laws or standards because we can’t achieve perfection.

>and "racist" sentiments, are quite popular in America, Europe, and in all countries among all human populations on earth.

Just because it might be natural or common doesn't make it acceptable and worth spreading.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#390
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limited Monitization Video that include minors and are at risk of predatory comments may receive limited or no ads (yellow icon). If you think we made a mistake please appeal [link]. We will continue to refine our approach in the coming weeks and months. Is misstaken as deletion? English is not my first language, but I have a hard time reading this as "we may delete your channel".

Removing monitization is as good as deletion for the content creators. Furthermore, their "appeals" process tends to be a black hole, as is basically everything at google that would require human intervention.

Not if you are a hobbyist.
Post reply on HN