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YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

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Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#81

Post by gumby »

m_a_g wrote: post #4

>Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong. Can't agree more.

> >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong.

> Can't agree more.

Simply replaced a prior system in which humans cannot interact with humans anymore and certain humans get to chose what is right and wrong.

The key problem is the inability to provide human feedback more than the mechanism for making the initial decision itself (which is a different problem). Not sure how to achieve that at scale.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#82

Post by danuker »

privatesgtrj wrote: post #61

Google is a private company. It's fully within their rights to remove any video they don't like, for whatever reason. It comes with the territory if we want Google to be able to censor hate speech and misinformation. You can always use a competing site, or build your own.

Except the sheer scale of Google is hair-raising. (Sleep tight dear FTC).

If Google loses a YouTube creator, it has almost no impact on their bottom line.

If a creator gets kicked out however, their livelihood is threatened.

I would argue this is the perfect scenario for a creator's union (of course, it should use some other platform to communicate).

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#83

Post by giansegato »

enriquto wrote: post #77

> I am a privacy and security researcher and content creator on YouTube and PeerTube. > I am no longer able to post content for a week. Honestly, they had it coming. While "regular people" can be understood to use overtly shitty platforms like youtube, somebody who is a security and privacy researcher has no excuse. They should just avoid platforms with such callously hostile policies. Moreso when there are plenty of…

If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like

It's obviously and evidently not about uploading videos, but rather to build and reach a community

Also, it's wrong to accept that these platforms have this kind of influence and we should just avoid them. They're part of the social fabric of our time, and it's our duty to make things better.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#84

Post by tinco »

adrianN wrote: post #73
izacus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually frame it this way - Mazda Motor Corporation, an order of magnitude smaller company can provide me with a several salons in my And Google, the mighty megacorporation, can't even clear a basic phone support bar, much less a local user support office in each region? Something normal for other corporations?

Mazda earns several hundred to several thousand dollars of profit from the sale of a car to you. Google earns an order of magnitude or two less per user.

Mazda spends several hours in pre- and after sales on each car. Google could automate 99.99% of moderation, and spend literal seconds on 90% of all further moderation per user. A magnitude or 3 less human attention than Mazda's sales pipeline spends on a user would be worlds better than what Google does now.

I've seen YouTube channels with thousands of dollars of monthly revenue be closed over issues that would've taken a trained human less than 10 minutes to resolve. YouTubers with that kind of revenue are literally one in a million users or so.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#85

Post by thu2111 »

kodablah wrote: post #38
b3kart wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced sc…

I think the argument is framed as wanting a human during take down dispute, not pre-approval. There's no need to treat this as an absolute. Why are human contact and reasonable expediency considered mutually exclusive? There is a lot of room in the middle. Can allow human dispute resolution for non-free accounts (i.e. paid or earning). Can limit upload frequency site wide while dispute/abuse queues are backed up (kno…

What's with the assumption here that there aren't humans involved in this decision? The linked post literally quotes Google saying:

"Hi Sun Knudsen, Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our harmful and dangerous policy."

Google has always had humans in the loop. Not for every decision but certainly the more impactful ones that affect user generated content. When I worked there, there were even humans reviewing requests for account un-suspensions (yes, really! they didn't do a great job though, needless to say).

Also, it's quite hard to understand what sort of algorithm could result in this sort of suspension. What training data would give it hundreds of thousands of examples of infosec discussions labelled as harmful? But it's very easy to see how a large army of low paid humans given vague advice like "don't allow harmful or dangerous content" could decide that linking to hacking information is harmful.

The problem here is not AI. The problem here is Google allowing vague and low quality thinking amongst the ranks of its management, who have decided to give in to political activists who are determined to describe anything they're ideologically opposed to as "harmful", "dangerous", "unsafe" etc. When management give in to those radicals and tell their human and AI moderators to suspend "harmful" content, they inevitably end up capturing all kinds of stuff that isn't political in nature, simply due to the doublespeak nature of the original rules.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#86

Post by indigochill »

gumby wrote: post #81
m_a_g wrote: post #4

>Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong. Can't agree more.

> >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong. > Can't agree more. Simply replaced a prior system in which humans cannot interact with humans anymore and certain humans get to chose what is right and wrong. The key problem is the inability to provide human feedback more than the mechanism for making the init…

Federation is the answer at scale.

You need dictatorship for effective moderation. But you also want those dictatorships small, uniform, and interchangeable so that the "citizens" of those dictatorships can easily pick the one that suits them best. Those dictatorships link up (federate) with like-minded dictatorships to benefit from network effects of sharing their content among themselves.

If your content doesn't suit a certain dictatorship, it will suit another one.

PeerTube does federated video already. No, it's not as polished as YouTube. But it is the answer to human-level moderation at scale.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#87

Post by sgift »

b3kart wrote: post #28
foepys wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech is very special in a way where they can get away with claiming that quite a lot is not possible at their scale. Imagine this for other industries. "We cannot do quality control before sending products out. We make too much stuff." "We don't check all tickets for the venue. Too many people." "Cleaning the entire building is not possible. It's too much space."

All the examples you provide have to do with tangible, physical things. Tech is in some sense special because we're dealing with intangibles. It costs a bad actor next to nothing to upload the same video with harmful content to YouTube a thousand times, a million times even. And YouTube has to deal with all of this. That's why they still use physical ballots in most elections: as soon as you're dealing with physical…

But Tech also enjoys the benefits of this. You make a product once, sell it thousands of times. Or allow thousands/millions of people access without much overhead. I'm simplifying here of course, but compared to e.g. a machine which you have to produce new for each customer I think we are in a very good situation. And with that advantage comes a price tech should be forced to pay.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#88

Post by ghaff »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #80
ghaff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those things are paid for. It would be perfectly reasonable if you had to pay per minute for uploading video and people had to pay for a subscription to watch it. That's just not what is expected for a mass platform today.

Vimeo has an “uploader pays” system (of sorts), and, while it prevents garbage on the platform, it stops creators from wanting to use it when YouTube is free.

Yes. It's of course a perfectly valid (and widely-used) model to pay for hosting. But, by and large, only "serious" users who probably otherwise have a business model will do so. And there will inevitably be far less content on the platform.

On the one hand, I think it's sort of unfortunate that so much of the Web has come to be about "free" access (though paying for access with attention and time) but that does come from the perspective of someone who would be able and happy to pay with money instead.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#89

Post by izacus »

adrianN wrote: post #73
izacus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually frame it this way - Mazda Motor Corporation, an order of magnitude smaller company can provide me with a several salons in my And Google, the mighty megacorporation, can't even clear a basic phone support bar, much less a local user support office in each region? Something normal for other corporations?

Mazda earns several hundred to several thousand dollars of profit from the sale of a car to you. Google earns an order of magnitude or two less per user.

They also had to source parts, manufacture it, transport it via boat and train, then pay someone to show me through all the buttons, clean it and then offer service at least once every year.

Besides that they also provide 24 hour support for breakdowns and plenty of other services.

And at best, they made 10% (!!) gross margin on my car - which is of a range of 2500$. Meanwhile Google has 45-60% (!!) profit margins while not giving a crap.

Re: YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

#90

Post by harpiaharpyja »

b3kart wrote: post #16
m_a_g wrote: post #4

>Anyhow, I truly believe humanity has to rollback to operating at a human scale. >Using algorithms to flag content is totally fine… problem is when humans cannot interact with humans anymore and AI gets to chose what is right and wrong. Can't agree more.

The thing is, we have to make sure we're OK with the consequences of going this way. Would people be happy to wait for days, maybe weeks, for their video to be approved for upload to YouTube? Would that work with the current society's attention span? Is YouTube as we know it actually feasible without AI-based moderation? Can it be a sustainable business with an army of human moderators and/or a drastically reduced sc…

I think it would be great. There would be huge incentives to find other solutions, and a lot of what goes into YouTube would find other outlets. Especially since we've already tasted what's possible. It could be the end of the YouTube monopoly.
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