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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

#171

Post by 0_gravitas »

awillen wrote: post #148
dehrmann wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting this case aside because it's sloppy reporting based on what another classifier found, this is a hard problem. Youtube gets too many videos and comments for humans to manually review them. Flagging helps, and Google likely uses ML more complex than just text and classifier (who is commenting, is the post trending, patterns in comments, etc.) When things do reach manual review, remember that humans make mistake…

People forget that they get these free services for free, and a big portion of that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating. You hear about things like this because they're so unusual, which is a testament to the amount of time they work correctly without being noticed. Granted, there have been some issues with people getting banned from Google services for what appear to be wrong r…

The service is not free.

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

#172

Post by __blockcipher__ »

grawprog wrote: post #141
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.

What I really have to wonder about specifically this instance of political correctness was, how many people were honestly and truly offended by the term 'blacklist' or 'whitelist' before some lignustics, sociology, whatever professer sat down and figured out it should be offensive and told people to be offended? I feel like this about many attempts to make language politically correct, but I really do wonder, was the…

> Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them?

My belief is absolutely not. It comes from an ideology that ascribes simple moralistic explanations to things. “This word has man in it so it must mean it excludes women”. “The word ‘master’ reminds people of slavery”, etc.

Good luck speaking out “publicly” about it in the modern corporate environment. You have to not just accept it as true but actively parrot its talking points. Everyone has to be a believer. That’s how the whole thing works.

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

#173

Post by cube00 »

andreynering wrote: post #10

I recently took some actions to reduce the damage if Google ever ban my account. I'm now using a custom email domain (although it's just redirecting to my Gmail for now), and doing regular backups of my emails (through Thurderbird) and Google Drive. With these news being more and more common, you never know when it'll happen to you.

This is a good reminder. Many people don't realise if any one of Google's services ban you it takes down your Google account at the same time (GMail, Drive, Docs etc), it doesn't just block that single service where the alleged violation occurred.

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

#174

Post by psyc »

sago wrote: post #131
ben509 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

Peach-pink people aren’t white, and brown people are not black in the first place. Why do self-styled anti-racists not seem to have any problem with that? Why not start there instead of changing the deep symbolism of the colors black and white?

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

#175

Post by aaron695 »

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…

Transcript here I think-

https://downsub.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwat...

Very little talk of black or white or covid.

I'd most likely guess "Suicide" from the skydiving talk but perhaps "Shooting" from the film talk. I guess you can make stuff up really.

"oh man like you look like you're so high you're just going to jump to your death but uh then then once you actually cross that across that that line you just jumped it's uh just exhilarating i i really enjoy it i do plan on doing it again in the future"

> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN.

Very strange comment.

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

#176

Post by a1369209993 »

epx wrote: post #159
tacitusarc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has mandated all of this. Change blacklist and whitelist, change the git master branch name, don't use master-slave, there's a list of "racially charged" terms and the replacements we're supposed to use. It's all a corporate virtue signal mask so they can lay people off and increase exec compensation and still claim to have some moral high ground.

Will the company operate in the red instead of in the black as well?

> Will the company operate in the red instead of in the black as well?

Pretty sure that'd just 'offend' (wannabe representatives of) Native Americans instead.

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

#177

Post by zests »

DixieDev wrote: post #15
andrewzah wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what else might it be? Agadmator is just a chess channel. He does breakdowns of chess games and that’s pretty much it.

There are plenty of other chess channels using the words "black" and "white" to describe each side that have yet to be automatically and mysteriously banned. If it were as simple as usage of the word "black" in the various circumstances that might arise during a discussion about chess, surely some of those would have met the same fate, no?

Chess commentators might use various phrases that sound $COLOR-supremacist at different rates like "$COLOR is better" or "I prefer $COLOR".

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

#178

Post by judge2020 »

cube00 wrote: post #173
andreynering wrote: post #10

I recently took some actions to reduce the damage if Google ever ban my account. I'm now using a custom email domain (although it's just redirecting to my Gmail for now), and doing regular backups of my emails (through Thurderbird) and Google Drive. With these news being more and more common, you never know when it'll happen to you.

This is a good reminder. Many people don't realise if any one of Google's services ban you it takes down your Google account at the same time (GMail, Drive, Docs etc), it doesn't just block that single service where the alleged violation occurred.

It depends, but generally yes. YouTube DMCA strikes, for example, are known to only nuke your YT channel(s) and the rest of Google still works[0] (although this page does say your entire account is subject to termination[1]). Getting banned from the other services is much harder, of course.

0: https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/respond-to-co...

1: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2814000?hl=en#stri...

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

#179

Post by CydeWeys »

Aerroon wrote: post #126
das4119 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly the whole thing stinks. On the whim of an unaccountable AI basically anything can happen. We need laws around this sooner rather than later. AIs are getting more powerful but less responsible. Just don't have an argument about a book or you could end up on death row. Gordon Dickson wrote a short story about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable that put this into production and/or produced it. People should be able to build bad AI, but if that causes poor real world outcomes, then the people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility. "An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel."

> "An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel.

What would curtail the leeway then? Other than losing public trust in the product for this happening repeatedly anyway?

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

#180

Post by mancerayder »

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.

Foucault and the Postmodern philosophers of the 70s started this, with a new epistemology that ties language use to our perceptions of reality, and also the idea of how marginalized people remain marginalized. You see, the power matrix operates daily and we are all involved. We perpetuate real world problems with problematic language, we are told.

Change the language, change the outcome, came the activists of the 90s and 2000's. This stuff somehow spilled out of literary theory in academia and started becoming a political force for understanding power dynamics. You can get a taste below, where the commenter is comparing black and white concepts, and how we view one as good and another as bad.

Do these folks (like the commenter below) have a point? Yes, sure. But submit your point to the marketplace of ideas instead of trying to force people's hands through censorship. Not everyone has to buy social constructivism. We're allowed to believe that racism has material and economic causes, and changing it has minimally to do with language. So no, don't make me change my git default branch or the way I talk.

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