> Let's be clear, the lack of humans anywhere in the pipeline for uploaders is because they don't have to, not because it is impossible.
The real problem here is that people are envisioning human interaction as something that can produce better outcomes, but the cost of that may not be economical.
You can hire a generic human to look over a flagged video for 15 seconds and render a verdict, but the verdict is going to be bad. That's not enough time to make an accurate evaluation.
Suppose you have an epidemiologist on YouTube making a claim about virus propagation. It gets flagged because there is a CNN article reporting that the CDC said something contradictory. The epidemiologist argues that the CNN article is a misinterpretation and if you look at the original CDC publication, that's not really what they said.
At this point for YouTube to get it right they've basically got to hire their own M.D. to study the CDC publication in enough detail to understand the context. That is prohibitively expensive. But the alternative is often censoring an epidemiologist who is trying to correct misinformation being disseminated by CNN.
And science is a moving target. The infamous example was the CDC in 2020 telling people not to wear masks. But there was a point in time when scientists were publishing studies on the health benefits of tobacco consumption. Challenging the established orthodoxy is inherently necessary for progress.
The underlying problem here is that YouTube isn't competent to make these determinations. They're attempting to do something they have no capacity to succeed in.