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YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

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Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#111

Post by u801e »

js2 wrote: post #75
lwouis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Conse…

> Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good.

>

> The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad.

> So these aren’t the same.

Why did this line of reasoning not apply to the name of the default branch in git? master in that case could easily mean master copy.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#112

Post by extra_rice »

js2 wrote: post #75
lwouis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Conse…

A lot of words that we use are arbitrary anyway. I respect people's preferences for their style of communication, but let's stop pretending that things like blacklist and whitelist are difficult to understand.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#113

Post by 10000truths »

js2 wrote: post #75
lwouis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Conse…

I don’t see the association as particularly unnatural: black = dark = scary because we cannot see, and white = light = not scary because we can see. The use of the term ‘black’ as a negative modifier predates its use as a descriptor for race.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#114

Post by metiscus »

js2 wrote: post #75
lwouis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Conse…

I haven't read heavily into this debate so this comes from a position of ignorance of the arguments. Feel free to link me to a reference if this has been analyzed along these lines already, I would like to learn. The convention seem to me to follow several similar motifs from the sciences.

Black holes do not allow matter to escape and white holes are theoretical constructs that admit matter to the universe.

The color Black is the lack of visible light and white is considered to be the color of "all" light together.

In all cases discussed, black correlates to absence and white to admission or presence. Now I guess it could be asserted that these terms are also racially tinged but again I am not aware of any sources making those assertations. Feel free to link me.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#115

Post by mensetmanusman »

noobermin wrote: post #35

Their either needs to be competition for Youtube or they need to face regulation. You can't have it both ways. The system does not work without one or the other.

Their face regulation wouldn’t recognized certain faces.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#117

Post by jimmaswell »

andrewzah wrote: post #5

“ The researchers now suggest that social-media platforms should incorporate chess language in their algorithms to avoid future incidents like this.” Or maybe don’t automate banning YouTube channels via nebulous black boxes? Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?

There are way too many videos for manual review and the relatively rare false positive (one high profile case every few months vs how many videos uploaded every day?) is worth the gain in efficiency. But there should certainly be a better manual review process once the AI messes up.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#118

Post by tp3 »

js2 wrote: post #75
lwouis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Conse…

I use blacklist and whitelist. These ideas are a part of my consciousness. The definitions for these words as a result of this change are a conscious choice, not some accidental result of the nature of the words themselves.

I don't use it to mean "black" or "white." I use it to mean things that aren't black or white. Blocklist and allowlist don't exist because they are things. I don't think about the "Black" and "White" in these words. I think about what they mean to people. This is why you don't hear that many people complain that the use of these words in games has changed or changed. The people complaining, I think, are the people who have changed the way they think about these words.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#119

Post by CobrastanJorji »

metiscus wrote: post #114
js2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Conse…

I haven't read heavily into this debate so this comes from a position of ignorance of the arguments. Feel free to link me to a reference if this has been analyzed along these lines already, I would like to learn. The convention seem to me to follow several similar motifs from the sciences. Black holes do not allow matter to escape and white holes are theoretical constructs that admit matter to the universe. The color…

I disagree with you on the light metaphor. Black things admit photons. White things reject photons.

Here's some more extensive reading from an earlier article when Maven did this: https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/no-more-inf...

The key bit:

> It reminded me of an iconic BBC interview with Muhammad Ali in 1971 where he recalled that all the positive things he grew up with were white, from White Cloud tissue paper to the White House, while all the negative things, from the bad luck of a black cat to the term blackmail, were black. Nearly 50 years later, that linguistic measuring stick is alive and well.

He's right. Lots of English therms equate black with bad and white with good. Blacklist and whitelist fit into that pattern, and changing it takes a small step in the other direction.

Blacklist's etymology isn't racist, but if black folks prefer that we use something else, and something as similar as blocklist is there and easy to use, it seems like an easy fix.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#120

Post by ttt0 »

newacct583 wrote: post #96
lathiat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a distinct difference between trying to make things less accidentally discriminatory or exclusionary.. and banning an entire channel in an often un-appealable way (which can in many cases end up disabling peoples personal google accounts etc as well).

It wasn't un-appealable. They restored it within 24 hours per the article. Please don't hyperbolize about this stuff. If you want people to take you seriously about real censorship you need to not fly off the handle with accidents (which have ALWAYS been with us, c.f. buttbuttination).

I don't know the details of this particular case, but it's not a hyperbole.

Another commenter here pointed out the Markiplier case. They banned entire Google accounts for spamming emotes in YouTube chat and those bans were un-appealable. They unbanned the accounts only after the public outrage on Twitter.

Besides, people don't take it seriously anyway, because they actually agree with real censorship and they dismiss it with the "private company" argument.

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