It is fascinating to witness tech giants and the academy move towards a singular focus on melanin and gonads in the name of wokeness.
YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
271–280 of 584 posts
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertisers, youtubers, users, brands - everyone was happy prior to the era of demonetization. What killed the golden goose was an extremely small set of activists and journalists (specifically Media Matters and Vox) methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of their "support" for controversial niche videos. And just enough brand marketing and YouTube employees were cowed, or at least ideologica…
I know, everything was fine when the YouTube recommendation engine accidentally radicalized half English-speaking world and created a profitable fascist political movement.
Surely there's some space between "Recommend" and "Ban"?
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#273Earlier 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.
So why bother screening any of it? So what if some nefarious content makes it through. Don’t like it, don’t watch it. Not sure why everything has to be sanitized.
Their actual customers, aka advertisers, want to avoid being associated with some things. It’s the same reason you don’t see Pepsi etc advertised on porn websites.
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#274Earlier 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.
Personally I'm pretty glad that most projects don't break backwards compatibility in config files across the globe for flavour-of-the-month American politics, but hey, you do you.
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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'? No. That's how it's always been in European culture and it doesn't have much to do with race. It's probably true of many other cultures as well, although I can't say for sure.
I think there are two slightly different approaches.
Your point is completely correct. As is the other comment here at about night and day. The lists are frequent. And not unique to European cultures.
But it's also not reasonable to say that in our particular culture, meaning as a political and social context.
Because I'm trying to make a bigger point than just race, I could imagine reading a similar things to what you're writing back in the late-C20 saying that 'Man' has been nongendered for centuries and in many cultures and in all kinds of language. Hi wouldn't disagree.
But then the next step: so women shouldn't have been worried about companies wanting to hire businessmen. That just doesn't seem ok.
So I definitely think that 'Black equals bad, white equals good' Has all kinds of historical significance, non racist links, and would not have been considered weird until very recently. But in our context I'm not offended that it would be something we find alternatives for.
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
> 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. Please be a bit more careful. Please don't assume you know what or how much I'm thinking. I think the situation isn't as binary as you seem to be presenting it. The context of the word is a metaphor. The metaphor is commonly used for 'good versus bad'. This being a common metap…
No but that is the problem. It's not really a metaphor if it's a dictionary word that has had it's meaning for centuries. It's a word used to describe something.
What you are doing is using an old historical definition for a word that was used in a different context.
A word I use is meaningless if you exclude the other words around it. You exclude the context in order to feel offended by the word.
And you're using your subconscious racial prejudice to look at a word and feel offended by it. When I look at blacklist I think of the colour black and how the colour is darker. Darkness is commonly a negative thing. Thus if I don't want something I put it on a blacklist. Where as the colour white is the brightest option and is something normally associated with positive.
Do you complain when a movie uses darkness to create a scary atmosphere? Would a Slenderman that is white be as scary as a Slenderman that is black to you? No. Because colour is used to trigger different emotional and psychological responses. But this has nothing to do with race. Nowhere did I need to mention or think about race here.
You're choosing to associate a word with a negative when others who don't have these kinds of racial prejudices are able to look at the words context and instantly understand what it means without ever thinking about a race.
Trust me, your word policing is not going to fix a problem with racism. All it does is reveal how you feel when you see a word.
When I see blacklist I'm not thinking about race. When you see blacklist you are. To me that indicates a racist ideology.
Do you feel using the phrase "black market" is wrong? If so then what about "grey market"? "White market" isn't a word that is used so there is no opposing "positive" colour to "black market". So is the phrase still bad to you?
If somehow black market is okay with you then your logic against blacklist makes no sense. And if black market is not okay with you then it also makes no sense logically because grey market is not based on a race.
Interesting how you associate these words with race yet their origins don't relate to race at all but instead a colour.
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#277It should be a criminal act to ban someone from your platform without pointing exactly to why they were banned. "Oh but we can't expose details of our ban process for people to game" Bullshit. They just don't want to have to answer to anyone for cutting them off.
Why? YouTube has no obligation to host anyone's videos. If these chess channels don't like it they can make their own YouTube.
If YouTube doesn't like (still hypothetical) laws that regulate it, it can always look to other markets
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#278Not 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…
> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN. Honestly, and anecdotally, I think there's been a large influx of people recently on the right wing spectrum and/or the more outrage driven spectrum. I've noticed a considerable shift in the number of outraged comments and right wing view points in the last few months. I believe this ties in to the deplatforming of Parler. I can only surmis…
Maybe the median person just doesn’t hold extremely intricate positions in these issues but they are being forced to choose a position. You really need to break these claims down a lot to get any sensible discussion. All in or all out are not the options.
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN. Honestly, and anecdotally, I think there's been a large influx of people recently on the right wing spectrum and/or the more outrage driven spectrum. I've noticed a considerable shift in the number of outraged comments and right wing view points in the last few months. I believe this ties in to the deplatforming of Parler. I can only surmis…
The tech world, while seen as largely as being left wing, has had a strong right-wing libertarian streak. This streak seems to have followed the same right-ward march and increase in rhetoric as your standard conservatism.
Oh definitely agreed. Even in silicon valley, which is perceived as a liberal tech Mecca, I'd say I run into a significant number of right wing libertarians.
I read a really good post somewhere that it's because libertarianism is highly based in absolute logical theory. This correlates really well with software engineering. There's a sense that the world can be reduced to an ideal localized function. But it ignores why we need designers to accommodate the human element or architecture that considers error handling.
Furthermore as a result of it being based in logical absolutism, it's really easy to corrupt by introducing polarizing concepts under the guise of "rational thought experiments" and the like.
Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
#280Earlier 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…
> Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter.
At this point, I view YouTube like I viewed bars that allowed smoking--it was sufficiently popular that nobody could compete against it even though it was harmful. So, we needed legislation to move us to a different local minimum.
And, I find this very painful because I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music. But I also understand that nobody was ever going to do the right thing while doing the bad one was so profitable.