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YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

bbc.co.uk

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Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#231

Post by l33tbro »

proc0 wrote: post #129
l33tbro wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your last point is valid, not sure how that service can be truly open. However, they do have a responsibility in the same way a city has responsibilities around keeping crime low, streets clean, etc., so it's business friendly and local business can grow. What they just did is like police finding out about pedophiles and then proceeding to shut down all parks and playgrounds, along with a curfew for everyone to be ho…

> It's not a just a service provided by benevolent alphabet dictator.

Except it kind of is. As I mentioned elsewhere, Youtube has never reported a profit. That doesn’t mean there is not tremendous value they’ll get from it at some point, but for now it’s huge amount of effort for marginal reward.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#232

Post by zanny »

theNJR wrote: post #97
jumpman500 wrote: post #59

I think the time is ripe for a YouTube competitor to take chunk of its market share. YouTube has an impossible task of making a video hosting platform for everybody. Kids definitely need a particularly safe space to upload and to have supervision of some sort. Even adults don't necessarily want to be subject to the weirdness of the internet. Others really want a completely free, wild and weird platform. It doesn't ma…

My conclusion, after writing and thinking about this a lot lately, is that the three mega platforms are unwise, but unavoidable, due to network effects. We are going to have to make a concerted effort to somehow fix this. Hyper-niched communities, like Hacker News, work so well because we are united around shared passions and goals. Mega platforms contain many ideologies which are at odds with each other, constantly…

Facebook et al go out of their way to silo its users into small cliques of influence. On Youtube if you watch gaming videos you get ads for gaming, get recommended gaming, and aren't going to see ads for makeup or power tools.

Any open access community will attract hostile actors seeking to usurp it. The problem with Facebook / Youtube / et al is that these corporations are more interested in trying to find a technical way to automate moderation than to actually moderate and police their platforms to weed out of the bad actors.

It isn't something that is inevitable or even made worse by scale, its just these companies are operating to maximize profit, and needing human faces at screens to moderate public comments is a substantial expense.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#233

Post by [deleted] »

xfitm3 wrote: post #157
jawns wrote: post #9

Chris Ulmer, who runs the popular YouTube channel Special Books for Special Kids, said that comments were removed from his channel despite no evidence of unacceptable comments, and YouTube told him that if he turned comments back on, he risked his channel being deleted. [EDIT: Turns out, this is not actually the case. See child comments.] https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801 "Last night I realize…

I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the low quality youtube comments. Most people dismiss them as cancer but the reality is a lot of people think in patterns that drive these comments. I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#234

Post by Mirioron »

_wmd wrote: post #14
zaroth wrote: post #12

The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet…

The ramifications of this are profound, at least: - shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!) - they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate) - they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all This is the first time I can think of whe…

>- they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate)

No, they didn't. The problem that Youtube is dealing with is advertisers leaving, not the actual comments. Dealing with the problem of advertisers leaving is different from dealing with those comments. It's unclear whether dealing with those comments is even desirable, because Youtube would, in essence, become the censor of what is and is not okay to post in the comments sections, even if they don't break any codifiable rules or laws. Would you find it acceptable that what your freedom of expression is filtered by rules as unclear as that?

Laowhy86 got his comments disabled because his daughter appeared in some of his videos. If this standard were to be pushed across the board then it would effectively ban comments on any videos that have underage people appear in them. Is this desirable for our society?

>Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in.

But this is not true.

Firstly, kids on YouTube were NOT impacted by this. When a creep watches a video of a person then that person is not negatively impacted by it.

Secondly, all you've done is hide the problem. The videos of the kids still exist, the time stamps can still be created. All the creeps need to do is share that information somewhere else. That's it. And the only way to fight this one is to simply bar kids from appearing in any media content. Good luck posting a video of you walking around town or of an event where somebody underage might be.

This is similar to the discussion about whether you are allowed to let your 9 year old go outside unsupervised. It's a question of how much freedom do we allow people and kids in our society. It seems to be that public opinion is on the side of less freedom and more protection.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#236

Post by number_six »

Mirioron wrote: post #210
Barrin92 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden. deplatforming is an effective strategy to reduce the spread of malicious content for several reasons, in the case of youtube because it reduces the incentive to monetize and spread harmful content. To say that you'd rather be a exposed to pedophilia in youtube comments than to remove them is a little bit like saying you'd like to stay in contact with the marburg virus.

I agree! Since Hacker News could also potentially be such a way to disseminate bad information we should remove all comments here too. See the problem? That's basically what you're justifying.

IGNORE ME!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMNJuSl91qY

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#237

Post by bno1 »

zaroth wrote: post #12

The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet…

>In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.

Those solutions are not perfect and every time Google implemented them they caused collateral damage or even major changes to the whole platform (see the demonetization situation). I believe that they refrain from using them unless pressured to because fixing a problem that is not know to the general public isn't worth the negative PR, complaints, investigations and the damage to stability of the platform.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#238

Post by superkuh »

Sargos wrote: post #25

What a ham fisted reaction to the controversy. Now all content creators have to ensure that no kids are ever in their videos, which includes background footage and movie clips. I think this is a major problem with our current centralized model of the internet where giant corporations make all the rules. Large corporations have no ability to rationally judge situations or inject nuance into discussions. They simply ta…

Yup. Not only do corporations have no way to rationally judge these things they have innumberable perverse incentives to not even try to judge and just ban everything. Whatever hurts their bottom line will soon be censored as well as anything that even remotely looks like it.

Initially no one will leave because alternative don't allow you to rake in money or have the network effect like youtube does. But as the noose tightens and the money dries up people will act on their greed and move away to some new centralized service. Then it'll happen again in a handful years time.

The only way to cut this gordian knot and break the cycle is to use federated services, p2p, or self-host.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#239

Post by Mirioron »

ben_w wrote: post #192
mediocrejoker wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only think that's a good idea because you don't believe in flat earth. They could equally put a link to flat earth sites under NASA/SpaceX videos. Do you really want to decree that whatever they link is "true" just because you agree with them in this particular instance?

When I am objectively wrong, I want my mind to be changed. I expect this to be the case for around 10% of my ‘knowledge’, even on topics I care to educate myself about, and much worse on other issues. Putting a link under the videos isn’t likely to achieve that, but that’s a separate issue. The only problem I have with Google doing this, is that I trust corporations and government about the same — i.e. that both will…

You're missing the point. Most things in life aren't settled as easily as the flat Earth debate. Google could also do this on something that's far more controversial (eg political) and justify it in the same manner. Imagine if Google were against climate change and every video about climate change gets a link to some website that says it's not true. That wouldn't be acceptable, would it? But being okay with Google doing this for flat-earth also makes it more acceptable for Google to do it for climate change.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#240

Post by npunt »

xfitm3 wrote: post #157
jawns wrote: post #9

Chris Ulmer, who runs the popular YouTube channel Special Books for Special Kids, said that comments were removed from his channel despite no evidence of unacceptable comments, and YouTube told him that if he turned comments back on, he risked his channel being deleted. [EDIT: Turns out, this is not actually the case. See child comments.] https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801 "Last night I realize…

I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the low quality youtube comments. Most people dismiss them as cancer but the reality is a lot of people think in patterns that drive these comments. I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden.

I get where you're coming from with the academic curiosity of seeing how people think.

That said, it seems you're assuming comments are simply a one-way output of different people's thought patterns, rather than a two-way process that has an effect on others. It's obvious it has a two-way effect - the point of reading and listening is to learn, and we can learn in ways that make us worse off.

The idea that we should have a super low-friction way to be exposed to the internal thought process of anybody who is motivated to post those is an idea worth challenging, and we're starting to wake up to just how negative the repercussions of it are. That level of reach without any filtering steps (such as community standards, social feedback loops, etc) is fuel for extremism, harassment, and triggering/exacerbating mental illness. Lets not give everyone PTSD if we don't have to, cause thats effectively what your argument boils down to.

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