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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

#201
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.

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…

> Foucault and the Postmodern philosophers of the 70s started this

Nobody can know for sure, but I suspect if Foucault were still alive, he'd likely be rather critical of a lot of contemporary social justice activism.

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

#202
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 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.

You presuppose everyone views this group of people's "trust" as something worth having. It's just as easy to close the PR and move on.

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

#203
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#st…

> Getting banned from the other services is much harder, of course.

Is it? All it takes is someone at Google not liking what you're saying for Google to conveniently allow a bug to "accidentally" de-activate your account[1]. Google's slogan may as well be "self-censor or be censored".

[1] https://medium.com/@zacharyvorhies/open-letter-dear-attorney...

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

#204

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…

> When things do reach manual review I’ve yet to see a case of the hoi poloi get a manual review - you either are a well enough known YouTuber where they have humans dedicated to you, you know someone who works at YouTube and can intercede on your behalf, or you have to whip up a Twitter mob big enough that it hurts YouTube's image or stirs up people with contacts at YouTube. Even then, sometimes that doesn’t work -…

It's a genuinely hard problem, but they do have appeal systems that creators can use that go to human reviewer queues for things like video removals and demonetization even though the first pass is done via automation, but don't think humans aren't immune from mistakes either.

As of 2018 youtube had 10,000 manual reviewers (and I imagine it's significantly more than that today), but at their scale, that realistically won't go that far.

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

#205
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it. I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devote…

I don't mind thinking about nebulous things and fully considering their consequences, including societal ones. But that feeling of walking on eggshells is more related to a surveillance state coming from social media. More explanatory than I could be: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/social-cooling-are-yo...

Because of how policed the online world feels with what you say it often feels like it applies in public. However I have yet to work/interact with anyone who seems as far gone as the permanently offended Twitter users seem to be. I swear not a day goes by anymore where I don't here about Twitter going after another person trying to cancel them.

We see people losing their jobs simply for sharing a more conservative view on Twitter. I've seen cases of actors losing jobs for sharing an edgy conservative meme, but than someone sharing almost the identical meme but liberal sided being completely fine.

Nowadays it seems like even things like jobs can simply be determined by how outraged a group of random people feel. Actors lose jobs because people who probably don't even watch the show get upset by a single tweet they made.

The world is starting to not make sense to me and just seems so illogical lately. No matter how factual and objective something is that you say, if it doesn't align with the current politically correct fad people will try to cancel you. People who make perfectly valid and factual claims get shut down by people who just simply call them a "racist" and say "you just don't get it". Instead of trying to help them understand and trying to use facts to logically debate someone they react with emotion and outrage. And then they get dogpilled into submission.

I see why it's hard to find people opposing the current PC culture. As soon as anyone does they get called some "ism" and get cancelled.

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

#206
post #131
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…

It may not be intentionally racist, but that doesn’t make it not racist.

Consider why white moves first in chess. They literally did this two years ago: https://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-and-giri-campaign-for-...

Anyway, in many religions the light illuminates things while darkness is the absence of light. So it’s not just about people’s race...

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

#207
post #150
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.

In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it. I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devote…

These people (the genuine ones) lack context-awareness, so they could always find something racist, sexist, ableist, whateverist in anything you say.

I just named something "blacklist" a couple of days ago. It has nothing to do with races, nor slavery. The only thing they have is a person in-between who connects the two because s/he is a troll, or because lacks context-awareness or whatever.

I do not enable them.

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

#208
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually watching every YouTube video uploaded would take ~100,000 people which is possible, but quite expensive. Actually watching every video that’s flagged for banning might take ~100 people and seem like a reasonable effort. As such arguments about using automated systems are meaningless, they can pre-filter without having final decision making authority.

Over 500 hours of video are uploaded each minute so yeah... even 100,000 people might not be enough to just deal With flags...

> 100,000 people might not be enough to just deal With flags...

You’re off by orders of magnitude.

500 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 262800000 hours per year / 1.3x playback speed / 2,000 hours of work per person per year = ~101,077 people to watch every uploaded video.

Less if people are watching at higher playback speeds or working significantly more than a 40h week. I would personally be surprised if even 1 in 1,000 videos where flagged by ML at which point you’re talking ~100 people. Though that would be a truly terrible job.

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You would think so. I can construct many sets of sentences that could appear in an excited chess commentary discussion that would probably run afoul of various automated censorship systems. ...and black steals a pawn from white here. White springs his trap and white is now crushing black on the back row. .. and we can see black is completely dominating white's position. White is getting killed by black here... .. and…

..black queen takes white bishop ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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

#210
post #191
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibl…

> all I see is white people being shit on I figured that would be the feel of the objection. Maybe I should be grateful as a white person that that's not the world I find myself in. Happy to pick my variable names. I can't help but feel that the antagonism here is very similar to the antagonism I mentioned about Gendered language. The anger seemed mostly caused by being surprised by being asked to think about somethi…

The problem is that you're not thinking about the context of the word and instead are using it in a different context to be offended by it. I'd argue that you are the one who needs to think about it a bit more instead of blindly calling others names and trying to police the grammatically correct words someone uses.

Just because you think and associate something with a negative racial implication when you see a word doesn't mean others are. I personally am able to look at a word and understand the context surrounding the word. I'm able to think about that word and know that calling my git branch a "master" doesn't mean that I am a slave driver and or that I agree with it. I am able to think on my own.

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