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YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

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Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#71

Post by AnthonyMouse »

brigandish wrote: post #60
jcranmer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is refreshing to see someone who diagnoses the issue here correctly. The root problem people are complaining about is the moderation policies, and the truth is that services like Facebook et al are simply too large to be effectively moderated. Appealing to (US ideas of) free speech would propose that the solution to bad moderation is no moderation whatsoever (speech restrictions must be content-neutral, and modera…

That's one route - that I also favour - but my favourite idea would be to give everyone access to the tools that FB et al use for moderation. If I don't want to see porn/politics/bots/cussing/sport/K-pop… then I want to be able to choose that, not the platform. They have all this data and the ability to shape the feed, give me that power. No need to stomp on free speech, no need to clumsily moderate. Of course, peopl…

> If I don't want to see porn/politics/bots/cussing/sport/K-pop… then I want to be able to choose that, not the platform.

This would certainly be a welcome feature, but it doesn't really solve the problem.

Suppose you want to see adult content, politics and cussing but you don't want to see bots. Nobody wants to see bots. Then their broken algorithm calls someone a bot who is not. Well, they're blocked from everyone, because nobody wants to see bots. That's the same as the status quo.

The problem is that there is a trade off between false positives and false negatives. If they tune the thing to get rid of 100% of actual bots, it's going to false positive 98% of real humans. But if they do anything less than this, there will be actual bots and people will give them a hard time about it.

And not just people, the government. The current government has explicitly stated that they want them to censor more stuff. And the current government is pursuing an antitrust case against them. So their incentive is to turn up the false positives and screw over whoever that happens to screw over in order to appease them.

The argument has been made that this is actually a First Amendment violation because of the state action: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1363175977531150338

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#72

Post by Ironlikebike »

judge2020 wrote: post #68
politician wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on figuring out how to keep your son’s data out of the hands of Google at such a young age. What a blessing that will be! Many of the folks here have tried Degoogling with less success.

These bans affect the YouTube Brand account / Channel only, Google accounts haven't been affected by regular YT ToS violations for a while.

Right, he still has access to his Google account, but he can't use YouTube from that account. In fact, he can't create a new account and login to YouTube from any of his devices. His only access to YouTube at this point seems to be through non-logged in access.

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#73

Post by fallingknife »

smcl wrote: post #67
fallingknife wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit and Twitter very much touted free speech 10 years ago and didn't have this issue (unless you want looking for it). And Google and FB effectively allowed whatever but didn't talk about it, until 2015 or so. 1. Tout free speech to great success and become a dominant platform 2. Get advertiser and political blowback 3. Ban unpopular speech 4. Now "free speech" platforms only have unpopular content As a tangent, p…

Did that strategy ever work with conspiracy nuts? In my experience that argument was always met with a response that wove an even more elaborate conspiracy. Like the government/corporations/illuminati deliberately allow just enough people to talk about it unless they get too close, or something similar. Unfortunately I think this strategy is doomed, it relies on people who have rejected reality to use basic common se…

You're not arguing with them, but with everyone else in the room. Now the conspiracy nut would just say "but they do try to silence us" and he would be right.

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#74

Post by Ironlikebike »

usbqk wrote: post #59
Ironlikebike wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son (a curious juvenile) found his own YouTube account banned in a similar manner for disclosing a security issue in Google wifi products. There was no first or second warning (despite what the Terms of Service say). Google would not give him a justification for the banning other than "terms of service violation". The appeals fell on deaf ears. Now their automated system keeps banning every YouTube account he crea…

I think they recently changed the tos to blacklist all videos regarding hacking and similar stuff

We did quite extensive digging into the ToS and there was nothing explicitly forbidden about what he had done and they refused to point to any rule he had violated in particular. If they've updated it, it must have been in the last 4-5 months.

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#75

Post by AnthonyMouse »

denton-scratch wrote: post #66
raxxorrax wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that not a free speech issue? It is not a legal issue of course, but removal of critical opinions very much qualifies to be a violation of the principle.

The (US) constitutional protections on speech constrain the actions of US governments; those constraints don't extend to private companies and individuals. And "principles" are things you can adopt and agree with as you see fit. They are not law. Not everyone takes an absolutist position that "free speech" is a principle we should all be defending to the last ditch.

It's still fair to call this a violation of free speech -- even if the company has no legal obligation not to do it -- and therefore give them shit about it. As a customer. Who can take their business elsewhere.

And if the customer can't take their business elsewhere, it appears we have arrived at the underlying problem.

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#76

Post by usbqk »

Ironlikebike wrote: post #72
judge2020 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These bans affect the YouTube Brand account / Channel only, Google accounts haven't been affected by regular YT ToS violations for a while.

Right, he still has access to his Google account, but he can't use YouTube from that account. In fact, he can't create a new account and login to YouTube from any of his devices. His only access to YouTube at this point seems to be through non-logged in access.

You mean that he can’t open YouTube at all, not even to watch videos?!

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#77

Post by AnthonyMouse »

contravariant wrote: post #65
bavell wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is an economic system that works best in a free market without monopolies. I believe the word you're looking for is corporatism, where huge companies have subsumed the role of government (e.g. controlling speech).

The fact that it doesn't work in practice doesn't mean the notion of allowing companies to do whatever they want isn't capitalist.

The things propping up these companies are laws.

The way you break a network effect is adversarial interoperability. You build a new (ideally open) network by bootstrapping from the old one. But companies use the DMCA and CFAA and other laws to stop competitors from doing that, so it doesn't happen.

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#78

Post by fsflover »

waymon wrote: post #48

Why does everyone think youtube owes them something? Yall gotta stop using that service.

At this point it's effectively the only public space to share videos. If you stop using it, you stop participating in the society.

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#79

Post by rovr138 »

usbqk wrote: post #76
Ironlikebike wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, he still has access to his Google account, but he can't use YouTube from that account. In fact, he can't create a new account and login to YouTube from any of his devices. His only access to YouTube at this point seems to be through non-logged in access.

You mean that he can’t open YouTube at all, not even to watch videos?!

>Now their automated system keeps banning every YouTube account he creates within days of creation.

Re: YouTube suspended my channel for a video with disclosed issue in Grammarly

#80

Post by joelbondurant1 »

megumax wrote: post #15

After Grammarly spent millions of dollars on Google ads, I expect them not to accept valid criticism on Google platforms. But it's unfair to block a guy that talked about a real flaw in Grammarly's plagiarism checker, at least pretend that you allow free speech and take down that video for a random reason specified in your ToS.

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