
YouTube Knows How to Stop Serving Toxic Videos - charlesism
https://hmmdaily.com/2018/12/12/youtube-already-knows-how-to-stop-serving-toxic-videos/
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strictnein
The algorithms aren't complex: People who watched video A and also watched
video B and were very likely to comment and interact with it, therefore people
watching video A should be presented with video B.

It is not making a judgement on video A or B, just that it has noticed the
relation. Of course, we now all understand that the most engaging type of
content on the internet is the most offensive, negative, and aggressive
content. This is no different than much of what is shown on TV, where vast
quantities of it are pure garbage, including much of what is shown on the
"serious" news channels.

Too frequently, the people writing about this and the politicians talking
about it really just want to be the ones to set the line on what is "toxic"
and "offensive" and have a very strong desire to influence what Google and
these other companies should censor. There's also a very strong contingent of
the old guard media that wishes to be restored as gatekeeper and view this as
their opportunity.

~~~
mythrwy
Why does YouTube think I want to watch "Student Shuts Down Social Justice
Warrior College Professor"?

I'm conservative(ish) in a fiscal sense, but don't read conservative news
(because it sucks), don't search for conservative topics (nor really any
political topics), and am not interested in any alt-right or political
conflict type videos. Yet a smattering of this kind of thing often winds up in
sidebar suggestions.

I can't help but feel it's a bit of a fishing expedition to determine
political alignment. Probably paranoid though and it's more like conflict gets
eyeballs to serve ads to. Which is a statement on human nature more than
Google. Who knows, but it is annoying.

~~~
zeroname
Recommendations are not based on political alignment, they're based on how
interests cluster. If watching a video on Austrian economics is correlated
with watching "Louder With Crowder", that's what they'll recommend to you.
There's no intent behind it.

------
yllus
I don't think the logic here holds up, and the issue is the author's ignorance
of the technology and dataset involved. It's very easy for Google.com to show
non-toxic results in its Video tab; it basically limits itself to retrieving
results from sites humans have whitelisted for inclusion in Google News. They
don't whitelist QAnon crackpot sites, so naturally you'll never see those
results come up.

YouTube, however, is a completely different paradigm - no human pre-filtering
happens before content goes online, and its _point_ is to search a catalog of
millions of amateur-produced videos. That's very different from searching a
few thousand media orgs and their indexed results. Hell, if you only got the
results of the media orgs (from their YouTube channels) you could reasonably
conclude that YouTube search is broken.

My conclusion is that there's no technology solution being held back from
YouTube; it's just that Google Video tab just has a completely different point
to it.

~~~
wtracy
Do you have any basis for claiming that Google Video Search only shows
whitelisted videos? I thought only Google News was limited that way.

I did a few quick searchs on the video tab, and pulled up a lot of videos from
YouTube and at least one from Know Your Meme and another from Giphy. None of
them seem like obvious whitelist candidates.

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xg15
Sorry, I'm surprised how complacent everyone here is. Yes, the internet (and
social networks in particular) have been able to democratize publishing and
journalism like nothing comparable before - this is a good thing. _BUT_ this
advantage is being turned into a horrible disadvantage when that same
publishing is causing people to lose touch with reality.

If the end result is that we'll get flooded with information, but most of it
is meaningless noise then we will have _less_ freedom than before because we
cannot be sure the _any_ information we perceive is trustworthy. You cannot
seriously want this.

~~~
azangru
> but most of it is meaningless noise then we will have less freedom than
> before

What does this mean? In concrete, practical, down-to-earth sense?

> we cannot be sure the any information we perceive is trustworthy

This point was already made ages ago. Most famously, by ancient Greek
skeptics, and by Descates’ cogito. We live in a world where anything may turn
out to be untrustworthy. But we somehow cope, and chug along just fine.

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charlesism
Minor point of irritation here. Apparently, there's no C-Level execs, just...

    
    
        The humans who run YouTube 
    

and

    
    
        The people who run YouTube
    

and

    
    
        the people in charge of YouTube
    
    

I always search the page for "Susan Wojcicki" when there's a new article
critical of Youtube. No dice.

Is there any mention of "Wojcicki" in the Vox article behind this? Nope.

How about the NYT article from March that they link to? Nope. No "Wojcicki"
there either.

Youtube remains a CEO-less company.

~~~
monksy
A few theories. (From the simpliest to the more complicated)

1\. The person who wrote this article is very uneducated about this and
they're showing their insecurity.

2\. They're trying to defer blame of the problem to a pseudo-anonymous group

3\. They're trying to avoid putting blame on Mrs. Wojciki due to personal
views on identity (identity is a relevant point as that they have a massive
bias on what identity and content they want others to find successful)

I'm going to go with #1 because they're pretty preachy.

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tengbretson
I have a question for anyone who reads this and thinks that YouTube needs to
police it's own content:

How many flat-earther videos would you have to watch before you started to
believe that the earth was flat?

If your answer is "No amount of flat-earther videos would convince me the
earth is flat":

1\. Thank goodness

2\. Why do you care that they (or any other weird conspiratorial videos) exist
at all?

~~~
Dylan16807
Flat earth is so obviously wrong that I'm safe from it.

I'm not arrogant enough to think that I'm immune to misreporting of facts, or
that I and millions of others couldn't be damaged by people arguing in bad
faith.

And "arguing in bad faith" covers a _lot_ of the most objectionable content.

~~~
commandlinefan
Even if I agreed with you that all of the thoughts/propaganda/ideas that a
plurality of the current population thinks should be suppressed are
objectively harmful and absolutely should be suppressed (which, incidentally,
I don't), even you ought to be able to agree with me that, at some point in
the future, an important idea or viewpoint could find itself in the censorship
list that this line of thinking lays the groundwork for.

~~~
Dylan16807
> Even if I agreed with you that

You are reading _way_ too far into my post, which is only about whether some
videos are harmful, not what to do about it, and not how you determine which
ones.

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mindslight
Responding to the title which, while not the entire article, does set the
tone:

And most everybody knows how to burn books. Lack of knowing how to perform the
mechanics is not the reason we refrain.

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webwanderings
This is nothing compared to what they serve to kids. I long for the TV days
when it was safe for kids to watch public TV or PBS. Google is single handedly
responsible for fast evolving humans to a time when kids are no longer safe
(and there's no oversight assurance by any entity except for the parents
themselves).

~~~
favorited
Isn't PBS still available, and free?

