Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

news18.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 584 posts

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

#131

Post by sago »

ben509 wrote: post #50
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.

A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This particular bullshit is awful since it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association. There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.

I'm disagreeing with this thread. So I guess prepping for the down votes.

> it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association

I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else. It can be horribly overstated but changing small fry can help provide momentum to change something more significant.

> It's complete bullshit,

It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Given changing a metaphor 'black' into a meaning 'block' doesn't seem to me a generally bad idea.

I understand the logic of 'that's just what languages is.' But language changes when people use it differently. It seems to me very reasonable to say let's use this language a little bit less unfortunately.

I'm not suggesting this is 100% the same but re: language change. I remember that time not too many years ago when people would argue that referring to a 'man' or 'him' at work was non-gendered. And those women complaining that we only talked about business men were just being unreasonable. I'm sure there are still places like that but I'm very glad that my co's & clients changed.

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

#132

Post by FartyMcFarter »

waterhouse wrote: post #30
haunter wrote: post #21

inb4 someone will suggest that FIDE should change the color names to be more inclusive + why does white have the first move advantage, why can't black be the first. Perfect breeding soil for just another day of pointless race drama on Twitter

You joke (I think), but given what happened to the "master" branch on GitHub, it seems likely that some people will try to push the point, and, if they make enough noise, it's likely that the organizations involved will eventually cave (not the chess grandmasters (!), but the administrator types). I googled a bit and turned up a couple of news articles: https://apnews.com/article/184386cc09be6c69535919402a13fa3f and…

If someone thinks chess colors are racist, they should get educated on their history first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_and_Black_in_chess#Histo...

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

10000truths wrote: post #113
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 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.

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by jandrese »

jimmaswell wrote: post #117
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.

There are way more than one rare false positive per month. These cases are so frequent they usually aren’t even considered news anymore. A few months ago some creators tried to organize but I’ve not heard anything from that effort recently. Google isn’t a government, there isn’t much you can demand from them. They aren’t accountable to you.

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

#135

Post by Minor49er »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #95
nanagojo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See if any of them have attainted a Masters degree ;)

That's my favorite example of how silly it is! Lets give all the people with a master degree a change to "main degree". "main of arts", "main of engineering", "main of science" lol

I used to work in the real estate space. When these "master-to-main" changes were being discussed for git branch names, a lot of real estate companies announced that they were no longer going to refer to a home's largest bedroom as the "master bedroom", citing that term as "racist", "sexist", and "outdated":

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/realestate/master-bedroom...

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

#136

Post by aksss »

u801e wrote: post #111
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…

> 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.

Git avoids race conditions

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

#137

Post by newacct583 »

ttt0 wrote: post #120
newacct583 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

The details of this particular case were in the linked article. And they show that this wasn't unfixable or unappealable or otherwise beyond relief. It was a fuckup and they fixed it.

Characterizing it "un-appealable" is hyperbolic by definition. It's not helpful. And it happens almost every time something like this comes up, and people like you end up redirecting to something else, like that emote spam thing. And per your text it seems like that was resolved via appeal too!

It's just very tiresome to see everyone screaming so loud about something that doesn't seem like a big deal. I mean, if they really wanted to be censoring you, don't you think they'd come after threads like this first?

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

#138

Post by ttt0 »

lwouis wrote: post #47
throwawayboise wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment has been moderated for racist language ("black boxes").

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.

Maybe using lowercase "whitelist" and capitalized "Blacklist" would be enough to appease them?

https://apnews.com/article/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f

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

#139

Post by vvanders »

ben509 wrote: post #50
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.

A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This particular bullshit is awful since it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association. There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.

I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust. We did this in a codebase of ours recently, it really wasn't a big deal to make the change and I don't understand why everyone throws up a big stink about it.

If I'm going to spend my energy on something it seems like there's bigger things to tackle than pushing back against branch renames.

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

#140

Post by jandrese »

afavour wrote: post #3

Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN. There’s really very little evidence that this has anything to do with racial slurs. From a quick read: last June, the channel was banned for “harmful and dangerous” content. The ban was removed in under 24 hours. YouTube has not confirmed the reason. And yet: > Experts suspect that it was the usage of words like "black" and "white" that confu…

> Well, if experts said it, it just be true! The experiment they ran is speculative as best and the article just ran with it as absolute fact.

It’s not like Google is going to explain why they were blocked. All the creators can do is guess.

Post reply on HN