
On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles - vaultcool
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/americas/youtube-pedophiles.html
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psychometry
What keeps getting lost in this discussion is the fact that young kids are
uploading videos to Youtube. That should not be allowed, both de facto and de
jure. It's up to both parents and technology providers to make this all but
impossible.

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neaden
"Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The
platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations.

So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who
become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in
children’s clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of
girls as young as 5 or 6 wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a
split."

Holy shit, just burn it down at this point. This is what happens when you just
mindlessly optimize.

~~~
JorgeGT
This reminds me of the day I disabled Youtube history, suggestions, etc: I
sometimes listen in Youtube to old civil war-era songs from my country, Spain
(my great uncle was a partisan who fought against the fascists). Once I left
the autoplay engaged and returned to my Youtube feed filled with current
neonazi/extreme-right/conspiracy recommendations.

Retracing the browser history, it went something like: historic recordings of
civil war/partisan songs -> later recordings by popular musicians of the most
vanilla/famous ones -> current renditions of the old songs by extremist groups
-> crazy political propaganda from those extremist groups.

As you say, it was a first hand experience of what unsupervised, mindless
optimization looks like. Ethics are not factored in the merit function, so
they just don't exist for the machine.

