
YouTube demonetizing videos where LGBTQ keywords are said - pdkl95
https://boingboing.net/2019/10/02/youtube-demonetizing-videos-wh.html
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bArray
The worst thing Youtube ever did in this respect was to give in to the
original advertisers dropping out of their platform. As far as I know, they
introduced a bunch of changes that crippled the income of their creators and
their speech, without any monetary return for doing so.

In turn, creators have to be careful about what they say and viewers are
slightly less interested in tamed content.

With creators further restricted and not being paid as much, they reached out
for third party funding sources (bypassing Yotube) and started to seriously
consider other platforms as alternatives.

Worse still, once one media company had seen success at trying to "cancel"
Youtube, others strive to capitalize on the same opportunity.

Now Youtube is stuck trying to implement forever more complicated filtering
models, employing larger and larger numbers of humans for manual verification
and are trying to find an impossible balance of responsibility.

Dealing with news media is pretty much the same as dealing with bullies -
simply ignore them and they'll go away. The advertisers will eventually come
back when the heat is off and they see their competitors doing really well.

~~~
ijpoijpoihpiuoh
> _As far as I know_ , they introduced a bunch of changes that crippled the
> income of their creators and their speech, _without any monetary return for
> doing so._

Are you in a position to know about that, though? I mean, would you expect to
be made aware of whether these changes were financially efficient to YouTube?
Or are you just presuming they are not?

~~~
bArray
> Are you in a position to know about that, though?

I did proceed my statement with "As far as I know", meaning I'm willing to be
educated differently.

> I mean, would you expect to be made aware of whether these

> changes were financially efficient to YouTube? Or are you

> just presuming they are not?

Again, I'm willing to be told differently, but the big advertisers that I was
aware of were Disney, Coke and Car Manufacturers, none of which ever seemed to
return, despite Youtube bending the knee in trying to get them to return.

As another comment says, Youtube loses money delivering content without
adverts. As the number of demonetized videos increases, so do the losses from
those videos.

My point is essentially that they although they made these changes, it doesn't
appear to have benefited them. The number of "controversies" increases
regardless of what they do, but now all that happens is that they hurt the
communities they want to protect (such as LGBT) and annoy others.

~~~
ijpoijpoihpiuoh
> Again, I'm willing to be told differently

I guess my point is that you're not going to be told differently, because that
information is proprietary. It is not YouTube's habit to go around letting all
the curious people know the details of its financials or the inner workings of
its decision-making apparatus. You would not expect to be told all the factors
that weigh into the feature's development, nor how it's turning out. So the
fact that nobody has informed you or publicly announced that demonetization's
goals are being achieved is the expected outcome, whether or it is performing
as desired.

The only solid evidence you or I have access to is that they are still doing
it. That at least strongly suggests that it has some significant benefits from
YouTube's perspective, considering all the downsides you so rightly point out.

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octosphere
I loathe the way Youtube is this big gatekeeper and can make arbitrary
decisions on what is/isn't allowed. We need to build alternatives to Youtube
which are not subject to arbitrary interference.

~~~
beamatronic
You could almost think of say, reddit, as a crowdsourced index bolted onto the
front of YouTube. In other words don’t use YouTube itself for discovery, use
specific subreddits for initial discovery.

Edit: I left out the part where you could probably add monetizatuon outside of
YouTube

~~~
UserIsUnused
Reddit is not fully crowdsourced. Not every upvote is equal, and the algorithm
that rules those is closed.

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manfredo
Much of the coverage of YouTube's demonetization algorithm has it framed as
censoring or curbing LGBT speech, presumably because LGBT issues are
controversial. I think it's much more likely that hateful anti-lgbt videos
contain these terms much more frequently, which in turn causes these terms to
be more aggressively policed by YouTube's algorithm. Enough videos talking
about how the queers are ruining society or other hateful content, and it's
pretty much inevitable that these terms are likely to cause demonetization.

Ultimately, there's a trade-off to be made. YouTube could make their algorithm
less strict, but then more objectionable content would monetized. YouTube
doesn't want to go through another wringer of public criticism for it's
advertising. The lawsuit filed by content creators is going nowhere. YouTube
has blanket policies like not monetizing any videos with firearms, they are
under zero obligation to monetize LGBT content.

~~~
windsurfer
Have you ever tried to place an advertisement on YouTube? Advertisers can pick
and choose the kinds of videos and kinds of users they place their ads on
through the interface.

This is different. This is YouTube saying "Absolutely no one may place an ad
here under any circumstances." Advertisers have no say, and cannot place an ad
on these videos even if they wanted to.

~~~
manfredo
I think you misunderstood to point I'm making. It's very hard to train an
algorithm tell whether a video is referencing LGBT content in a negative or
positive light. The consequences of monetizing the former is much larger than
not monetizing the latter.

How advertisers select topics to advertise is not related to what I am writing
about at all.

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ehsankia
First off, the headline is misleading, the experiment in question didn't look
at the words "said", but rather words in the title.

Secondly, the experiment itself was contrived: They uploaded thousands of
videos (with no video or audio) to a single channel, and looked at the
monetization status. The issue is:

1\. Youtube's system is probably not stateless. It most likely looks at the
uploaders history and other channel data points.

2\. An upload with no video or audio content is an abnormal data point. It's
an outlier and doesn't represent real case scenario.

Therefore, you can't really extrapolate the results from this experiment and
reach any sort of conclusion.

~~~
wesammikhail
> 1\. Youtube's system is probably not stateless. It most likely looks at the
> uploaders history and other channel data points.

We dont know how Youtube´s system operates which is actually part of the
problem as the lack of transparency makes it hard for anyone to make any
reasonable assessment.

> 2\. An upload with no video or audio content is an abnormal data point. It's
> an outlier and doesn't represent real case scenario.

Not really as titles (combined with other meta-data) have for a long time
impacted the state of monetization, suppression and view count for any given
video regardless of its content.

~~~
ehsankia
> We dont know how Youtube´s system operates

Sure, which is why this isn't "conclusive proof Youtube is blocking LGBTQ
content". As I stated above, it's a contrived experiments and the results most
likely can't be extrapolated, and you can't reach any definitive conclusions
from it.

> Not really as titles (combined with other meta-data) have for a long time
> impacted the state of monetization

I'm not saying they don't play a role, most likely all of these data points
are fed into the model. What I'm saying is that Youtube is primarily a
video/audio site, so running an experiment with no audio/video isn't testing
the model the way it runs in practice.

The model wasn't made to classify only titles, this is an abnormal input and
therefore the output can't be used to reach any conclusions.

~~~
wesammikhail
Your criticism of the testing methodology is fair and valid. However, I see
this as a test controlling for a single variable to the best of the ability of
whoever made it. I am not sure what a better testing methodology would look
like. Which is why I see this at least as an indication of what is
systematically going on.

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S_A_P
I wonder if folks recognize that all of this is internet only drama. I live in
a diverse city of 5 million people, and I rarely to never come across someone
who is so charged up over identity or race or political affiliations. Those
.00001% of the time that I do, its usually related to something from the
internet spilling into real life. I can drive 10 minutes from downtown and be
in the heart of multiple ethnic groups, affiliations, and cultures, and in
fact I often do to go eat or hang out with friends. When I interact with
people in these areas I don't see the same behaviors that I see online. It
really just makes me want to spend less time online which is a shame. As I
entered college in the early 90s and the internet was coming to the masses it
seemed a much more hopeful place.

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raxxorrax
Activists who are not LGBT but advocated in their names against values like
free speech are probably responsible for this again.

~~~
whenchamenia
Bingo. Identity politics is so dangerous because the power of such movements
is actually mostly outside the hands of the minorities it claims to represent.
Now we all just feel pandered to at best, and painted with a gross and broad
brush in general.

------
Igelau
Whenever something seems wrong with social media, ask yourself "what is the
real product here?" and check if what your seeing aligns with that.

I didn't want to spend a half hour watching those goofballs in the video
explain that their spreadsheets really mean something, so I took my own dumb
stab at it.

    
    
      Pre: Advertising partners hand YouTube money and say "We would like to target the following list of keywords..."
      Event: a new video title appears!
      1. Parse title for keywords
      2. If there's a match from keywords to advertisers, mark as monetized, and serve up the ads.
      3. Else, there is no one left to monetize this video. Mark as demonitized.
    

No idea if it works this way. But even this naive algorithm could have a
similar effect to the one being seen. So on one hand, it seems like a Won't
Fix, because this is the product, and it's functioning as designed. On the
other hand, this might be a nasty enough side effect that they should consider
not doing it this way.

This is like a soft preview of the AI Alignment Problem.

~~~
plorkyeran
That isn't how it works. Monetized vs. demonitized determines whether or not
it is even _offered_ to any advertisers. A monetized video may still not have
any ads if it manages to match anything that any advertisers are looking for,
and a demonitized video will not have ads even if an advertiser would like to
buy an ad there.

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AlchemistCamp
It's nice to be focused on programming screencasts

In one sense, the YT algorithm punishes me for not maximizing watch time, but
I'll never fall afoul of this kind of concern and best of all I don't monetize
through advertisers.

I make tutorials and if people like them so much they want more, they pay me
on a subscription basis. No advertisers needed!

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rpmisms
To those who support the demonetization of conservative content: it's truly a
slippery slope. Wait until minecraft is declared a white supremacist game, and
let's watch Youtube torch themselves even harder.

~~~
gruez
>Wait until minecraft is declared a white supremacist game

what?

~~~
flyingfences
A lot of people are angry that Notch (the guy who made the game) isn't just
another SV "progressive" and so use him as a scapegoat for everything that's
"wrong" with gamers.

~~~
WilliamEdward
This is not happening.

What is happening, is notch tweeting reactionary opinion pieces on twitter and
people are irritated by it. No one thinks he represents all gamers or their
perceived 'wrongness', and no one expects him to fit into some imaginary SV
mould.

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rhacker
Why don't they just flip this on the head and let advertisers bid on videos
that reach 100k views? Then there are no decisions being made by youtube at
all. And it creates jobs at the agency to monitor and get their ads in front
of people. Pre-bidding could happen on any content estimated to reach 100k..

Downvoters please explain - we have tons of threads about homeless and
joblessness and how tech is concerned with eliminating jobs instead of
creating them.

~~~
Mirioron
Because advertisers don't actually want responsibility. They want to show
their ads to as many people as effectively as possible. Advertisers go along
with controversies to not get demonized by the media and activists for
"supporting the evil people" and to score bonus points by doing what the media
wants (so that the media talks about them).

If you give this responsibility directly to advertisers then the advertisers
are responsible for every single misplaced ad. They have no scapegoat if
somebody comes knocking and asks why they support Mr Very Evil by giving them
money.

