Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#1

Post by dombili » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

Our ongoing work to tackle hate
youtube.googleblog.com

Re: Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#2

Post by ytNumbers » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

It's often a shame that network effects are nearly impossible to overcome. It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a challenge to YouTube. But, perhaps posts like these from Google will one day succeed in persuading people to start looking elsewhere for videos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services

Re: Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#3

Post by saas_sam » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

"Today, we're taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status."

Oh good, I expect to see no more videos in my feed telling me what I am/am not allowed to say or do based on my race & gender as a non-minority. As I am sure this will be applied evenly across the board and certainly not unevenly according to the politics du jour of the engineering & moderating team at Google. Right?

Re: Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#4

Post by beat » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

Nice to see they're banning the Flat Earthers.

Because the Flat Earthers need MORE evidence that the TRUTH!!! is being suppressed by Big Corporations.

Re: Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#5

Post by onychomys » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

ytNumbers wrote: post #2

It's often a shame that network effects are nearly impossible to overcome. It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a challenge to YouTube. But, perhaps posts like these from Google will one day succeed in persuading people to start looking elsewhere for videos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services

I'm sure the Nazis and Sandy Hook Truthers will be happy to know there are so many other options. Look, we live in a world where, for better or worse, we don't force publishers to publish anything they don't want to. Youtube telling Nazis to go jump in a lake is no different than your local paper declining to run an editorial from one. It just seems different because the scope is so much bigger.

Re: Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#6

Post by JoshTriplett » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

ytNumbers wrote: post #2

It's often a shame that network effects are nearly impossible to overcome. It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a challenge to YouTube. But, perhaps posts like these from Google will one day succeed in persuading people to start looking elsewhere for videos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services

> It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a challenge to YouTube.

s/censorship/moderation/. And no, "we host everything" is a fast way to kill a potential competitor to YouTube. The first and fastest adopters of such a platform will be the people rejected from other platforms, which rapidly turns any "we host everything" platform into a cesspool that nobody else wants to use.

Re: Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#7

Post by challenger22 » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

I imagine there's boiler room full of guys somewhere tagging videos as "Borderline content", creating data which then feeds into a machine learning algorithm which decides which videos get promoted. All videos are metricized by the similarity to borderline content, and are increasingly likely to be promoted in proportion to increasing graph distance from the borderline content. Youtube management gets nice plausible deniability that they don't actively surpress political adversaries, because the whole process is stochastic, and who knows how machine learning works anyway?

Re: Our ongoing work to tackle hate

#8

Post by ivl » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #4

Nice to see they're banning the Flat Earthers. Because the Flat Earthers need MORE evidence that the TRUTH!!! is being suppressed by Big Corporations.

It might see a few of the existing flat earthers harden their view, but I suspect they'll gain fewer followers overall when hidden from mainstream content. What's interesting is that fracturing hateful communities does decrease the spread of their message[0]. I have to think that we could see similar trends with fringe theories, like the earth being flat, or bleach being a cure for autism. Which would in turn prevent users who might fall into the rabbit-hole that is the cesspool like communities among hate based groups, and the more fringe theories (again, flat earthers, anti-vax luancy, etc.)

0: https://medium.com/acm-cscw/you-cant-stay-here-the-efficacy-...