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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

#431

Post by sascha_sl »

xfitm3 wrote: post #157
jawns wrote: post #9

Chris Ulmer, who runs the popular YouTube channel Special Books for Special Kids, said that comments were removed from his channel despite no evidence of unacceptable comments, and YouTube told him that if he turned comments back on, he risked his channel being deleted. [EDIT: Turns out, this is not actually the case. See child comments.] https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801 "Last night I realize…

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.

>but the reality is a lot of people think in patterns that drive these comments

and that's where you might be mislead by machine-learning optimized comment sorting, recommendations that drive more people that'll agree with any given videos point and vocal minorities in general.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#432

Post by groestl »

colechristensen wrote: post #345
disillusioned wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here. In addition to an overall significant lowering of the discourse around things by allowing garbage quality trolls and other horrible comments, and in addition to bullying, aggressive behavior, stalking, and other things that are broadly considered unpleasant, this kind of behavior breeds more of this behavior. Consider som…

This is one of the reasons I think anonymity on the Internet is a bad thing. Not that I am saying it should be banned, but it should not be the norm. Much of the toxicity simply would not happen, could be prosecuted, or could be filtered if a "real person" attribute was widely available.

I think it's the other way round. Anonymity (or rather: the right to present different personas to different audiences and to give up a burned persona when you see fit) makes the internet a bearable place. It also allows people to make up their mind without standing in their own way, and disregard hurtful comments as trolling (which they often are). Facebook painfully shows that real name policies do not necessarily lead to more civil discussions, instead they facilitate ad hominems, and expose vulnerable groups to hate everywhere, as aspects of their identity can not be selectively hidden anymore. This even extends to their real lifes, with their names being publicly known. Now speech needs to be controlled, because people lost control of their personas and need to fight everywhere, instead of just when they choose to.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#433

Post by themacguffinman »

eropple wrote: post #404
beering wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse for YouTube? That news articles continue to be written about how they're ignoring a pedophilia problem, or some channels getting caught up in the algorithm? It sucks to be negatively affected as a content creator, but YouTube is doing what everyone has been pressuring them to do.

People are pressuring YouTube to hire and train moderators to competently and soberly evaluate context and take intelligent action. Nobody is pressuring YouTube to blow channels away because one of their ML algorithms hit a probability threshold.

It's simply absurd for YouTube to manually moderate comments at the scale they currently operate. If you force them to do that, it won't be profitable, and you'll end up with YouTube blowing channels away because they can't afford to host them anyway.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#434

Post by cf141q5325 »

bloat wrote: post #427
busterarm wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, let's institute zones of allowed speech. While we're at it, if you'd like to protest the White House, let's make it so that you're allowed to do so but your protest must fit within a 9' by 9' space that must be a minimum of 500 feet from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. No carried signs may extend above 8' from the floor and your total volume must remain below 90dB. Make sure you optimize your protest space to have the…

To use reductio ad absurdum on your argument for a minute: Everyone in the world has an earpiece which they must wear at all times. Everyone has a microphone which automatically broadcasts everything they say to everyone's earpiece. You can't take your earpiece off, as that would reduce someone else's ability to speak freely to you. There are downsides to allowing everyone a global platform.

This assumes, that giving someone free speech forces you to listen to it. Do you have an example of where this happens to you?

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#435

Post by Dumble »

mixedbit wrote: post #424
joe_the_user wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it sounds as if YouTube content creators are now in the unenviable position where they need to actively moderate the comments section for videos featuring children, and if they don't do so to YouTube's satisfaction, they could have their entire channel nuked. Is that a problem? If a run a large forum and have moderators running subforum, they either moderate comments in their subforum to my satisfaction or I "nuke…

Popular forum software (discourse, phpbb) have good mechanism for comments moderation. For example a comment from every new user can require approval before it becomes public. YouTube doesn't seem to have such mechanism, so the moderator would need to continuously monitor the comment section.

Youtube has this functionality:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7284070?hl=en

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#436

Post by [deleted] »

Sargos wrote: post #25

What a ham fisted reaction to the controversy. Now all content creators have to ensure that no kids are ever in their videos, which includes background footage and movie clips. I think this is a major problem with our current centralized model of the internet where giant corporations make all the rules. Large corporations have no ability to rationally judge situations or inject nuance into discussions. They simply ta…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#437

Post by bloat »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #434
bloat wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To use reductio ad absurdum on your argument for a minute: Everyone in the world has an earpiece which they must wear at all times. Everyone has a microphone which automatically broadcasts everything they say to everyone's earpiece. You can't take your earpiece off, as that would reduce someone else's ability to speak freely to you. There are downsides to allowing everyone a global platform.

This assumes, that giving someone free speech forces you to listen to it. Do you have an example of where this happens to you?

Not, not forced, but then I did say it was an absurd example. Slightly different qualitatively from my hypothetical: there are plenty of examples of unwanted speech appearing in places, and while they are not forced to actually read it, the "owners" of those places are unable to stop it. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/27/facebook-...

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#438

Post by agent008t »

tfha wrote: post #86
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not behavior we want from the few major building blocks of our modern life. It's YouTube. It isn't that important. Also, it is their product, so, yeah, they get to make all the rules.

YouTube is incredibly important to the median young person in modern society. It's where probably a quarter of all my own personal STEM knowledge comes from. In high school it might have as much as half. Like it or not, products like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat have become keystones in the lives of the younger generations.

MySpace and Geocities were also incredibly important at the time. So what? There is nothing inherently special about Youtube.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#439

Post by theon144 »

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…

>Would it make more sense to instead target the patterns used by predatory commentators rather than shutting down the system completely?

Terrible, terrible idea.

Transfer this to the "real world", and see how it plays out - let's build a system that will analyze people's behavior and penalize them on whether it classifies them as pedophiles or not! This will surely protect the children.

Moderation is a notoriously tough problem even without the whole trouble of automating it through something as "ephemeral" as content analysis.

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