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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

#231

Post by mchusma »

dehrmann wrote: post #121
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?

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…

I think it's hard to be perfect but easy to be much better: 1) warn content providers before blocking whenever possible. It's rare something is so bad it requires immediate takedown. Allow people to reply to the warnings. 2) next step is to show a warning to content viewers and allow followers and searchers to find, but not autosuggest. 3) have a transparent appeals process at each step.

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

#232

Post by curlypaul924 »

Fogest wrote: post #164
10000truths wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the problem. People will choose to ignore context and other grammatical history because of their own personal incorrect views. It's not like the word "black" is just used with blacklist. We also use it in other places like black market, black hat, and black site. None of these are related to black people, but instead all relate to a shady dark/scary side of things like you mentioned. When someone pictures a b…

Of those, I've heard of white hats, but I've not heard of white markets or white sites.

If it had been black list and green list, I'm not sure anyone would have made a racial connection.

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

#233

Post by drak0n1c »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #132
waterhouse wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Nearly all the outrage over word use and six-figure tax bills for rewording city and federal documents is the result of ignorance of etymology, homonyms, and homophones.

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

#234

Post by johnisgood »

vvanders wrote: post #139
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 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.

> I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust.

That is why I just ignore or reject such PRs. I do not believe that enabling it is a good idea. It is not my job to improve their context-awareness either.

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

#235

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> Consequently, I changed the code I’m responsible for at my company to use block and allow.

"block" sounds too much like "black", your intrinsic racism is still showing...? This is probably what's coming next.

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

#236

Post by johncena33 »

johnisgood wrote: post #207
Fogest wrote: 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…

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.

> These people (the genuine ones) lack context-awareness

No, they are very much aware of the context. Most of these people are just bullies, who have found a new way to mask their toxic behavior in the name of a good cause.

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

#237

Post by mancerayder »

skissane wrote: post #201
mancerayder wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't claim to be a Foucault scholar but I've heard that claim. The postmodernists were, and to some extent I can sympathize, hostile to grand narratives. Especially given the end of religion and in the middle of the Cold War, who can blame them. Even the attack on Western Enlightenment ideals is at least interesting to discuss

But as you say the whole thing is a giant metanarrative times ten, and these language police types are running over everyone who gets in their way. It's making so many people nervous, I think it has a shelf life. What scares me more is the open embrace of postmodern social theory by corporate America. That will lead to a backlash that makes me even more nervous.

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

#238

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

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.

I'm not sure how true this is. I've had a Google Ads account killed dead, and yet my other accounts kept humming along.

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

#239

Post by Fogest »

johnisgood wrote: post #207
Fogest wrote: 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…

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.

Yeah I personally try and avoid the word police. If I am using a grammatically and contextually correct word I am not going to let someone tell me I can't use the word.

What's hilarious to me is that I think the people who find there to be a problem with these words are the racist ones themselves. They are taking a word out of context and being offended by it out of context. They are the ones looking at a word and thinking negative racist thoughts.

When I use the word "master" or "blacklist" it has nothing to do with any old historical context or usage of the word. I am quite clearly using the word in a technical context as per the dictionary definition of the word. Anyone who thinks that is offensive is the true problem in my opinion.

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

#240

Post by sytelus »

What is amazing is how there is no way to recover from all these algorithmic banning. I'm getting banned on Twitter every other day from following anyone because I follow a lot of academics. It's all legitimate but algos detected some pattern and I'm now toast. Twitter provides exactly zero ways to report this or fix this. They simply don't care if some monority users suffer. We see same things when Google disables account and you get locked out from your electronic life.

I used to think working with governments is very hard. Getting support in places like DMVs and passport renewals is super hard. But never thought so futuristic tech world will be so much more arcane and worse than even the governments.

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