
YouTube says that an error caused comments critical of China to auto-delete - TurkishPoptart
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/youtube-china-comments-wumao-dang/
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ipiz0618
The night before the proposal of the "National Security Law" in Hong Kong,
Google censored pro-democracy searches in Hong Kong and later used the same
excuse:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23256470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23256470)

~~~
hintymad
I'd rather give Youtube benefit of doubt here, given that Youtube can't profit
in China and that Google has had a long history of standing up against China.
A more plausible reason for this mishap is that, as I guess, Youtube's removal
system is automated and considers user complaints. The propaganda machine of
Chinese government, or even China's little pinks, may have figured out a way
to game the system by filing lots of complaints.

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yostrovs
It's disturbing that YouTube has the capability of mass banning a certain
point of view with just a few keystrokes, it sounds like. Wasn't built for
nothing.

~~~
jrockway
If there weren't spam filters, YouTube would be overrun with comments like the
ones you see on local newspapers and blogs. Then nobody could use the comments
section. (And despite the reputation YouTube comments have, there are some
good ones. People like commenting and creators like reading them.)

~~~
ta17711771
YouTube IS overrun, with low-signal, copied comments for upvotes, senseless
off-topic fighting, spam to go listen to someone's mixtape, etc.

It's disgusting - and beautiful. Let the votes and Report buttons decide, or
just get rid of them.

The work should be in policing the Report button - not automatically deleting
shit.

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ajhurliman
“A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.”
- JP Morgan

~~~
runawaybottle
'What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.' \- Friedrich Nietzsche

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ed25519FUUU
Is it xenophobic to be disturbed at influence the Chinese government seems to
have over international organizations and American companies? Let’s hope that
doesn’t extend to American politics as well.

~~~
throwaway9482
Narrator: it does

Edit: heck. It extends into education too. We’ve heard about a Harvard
microbiologist prof who was receiving $$$ from China

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cameldrv
I'm guessing it's because a lot of people (possibly being paid to do so)
flagged many comments with these words in them, and so the ML model learned to
predict that these words would lead to complaints and just deleted it right
away.

~~~
fungi
My understanding is that 共匪 (communist bandit) is a historical KMT slur
against the CCP and rarely used in contemporary speech. So i'm struggling to
see how there would be enough organic use of the phrase to be flagged
autmatically. But maybe the bots flagging it were also the bots posting it, or
posting porn/covid conspiracy content with it...

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stonogo
I always wonder how stuff like this squares with the nearly-unanimous praise
for Google's SRE book series. My colleagues in IT engineering all hold those
books up as the gold standard in site reliability, but then really stupid
mistakes like this surface in the news.

So, which is it? Is Google's SRE practice not all it's cracked up to be? Are
they ignoring their own well-publicized advice regarding the avoidance of
these blunders?

I do not want to entertain the idea that the system was working as designed
and calling it a mistake is some kind of coverup, as other people in this
thread have said, because the idea that a corporation the size and power of
YouTube is willing to reverse unethical decisions and throw their own
engineers under the bus as scapegoats is horrific.

~~~
joshuamorton
"abuse system deletes some comments" isn't a failure mode sre concerns itself
with. Buggy software can, and will get released despite whatever operational
principles you have.

Sre isn't about buglessness, but reliability.

~~~
stonogo
Isn't this utterly at odds with the concept of code ownership, and how SRE
doesn't take systems into production without owning them first?

~~~
joshuamorton
SRE doesn't own the code. They own the system reliability. Devs are still
responsible for writing the functional code.

Certain aspects of the release process may fall under SRE's purview, but what
the tool does is ultimately the responsibility of developers (and product).
The SRE book covers testing in one chapter (17), and most of that chapter is
about production testing.

The question you need to ask is "is the system still within in SLOs?" If so,
SRE is doing their job. If you think that resulted in a bad experience, change
the SLO. But I'd ask what the heck kind of SLO would have prevented this
issue?

~~~
londons_explore
"99.9 % of spammers get to see their spam posted within 300ms"

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sarcasmatwork
>“an error in our enforcement systems”

 _cough_ bs _cough_

~~~
ori_b
"We didn't mean to turn it on _YET_ "

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soraminazuki
What a poor excuse. Things like this doesn't happen by mistake, it requires
considerable effort on the contrary.

~~~
Google234
I take it that you’ve never worked on a complex system that probably uses
machine learning.

~~~
soraminazuki
A complex blacklist of CCP-critical keywords? No.

~~~
Google234
One cpp critical keyword. You can go write a screed against the cpp in the
comments if you want.

Anyway, complex systems can have unexpected behavior. Who would have thought?
It’s a good thing there aren’t any examples of a some visual object
recognition software classifying a dog as a cat, right?

~~~
soraminazuki
It's multiple, actually. But that aside, if you want people to compliment on
the complex machine learning beast that tech companies has built, you're
missing the point. What people are upset about is the excess censorship put in
place at various social media platforms. Content takedowns should always be
used as a last resort.

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masonic
"We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been
sacked."

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proc0
Shields exist because flesh is weak against sharp steel, like censorship
exists because authorities are weak against sharp facts.

~~~
ta17711771
The error here was Google burning their remaining goodwill by trying to play
nice with their next biggest market, for after USA is tapped.

~~~
ge96
Hate to be that guy like "why can't we get along". I can understand when I'm
the one in some camp that would be pretty "in my face"/relatable. I'm trying
to see aside from IP what the US provides/would provide to China. Food maybe.
Vise versa in a manner where does China need the US. If they were to somehow
"strike the mainland" whether by lack of supply, etc... what would they do
when US is out of the picture, use other countries? It's hard to see the
"good" with regard to my initial comment I guess I am just naive... sure I
have running water/access to knowledge but do other people have that, there
are always bad people... it'll be interesting to see what happens. Also more
on topic, seems they seal everything on their end anyway why YouTube. And with
"truly" decentralized technology not biased by nationality that would be
interesting. Not sure how, data pipelines, machines, etc... nothing is
guaranteed to be "secure"/not tampered, encryption maybe, even that "do you
personally know every single line of code" sounds conspiratorial ha.

~~~
perl4ever
The US has exported over a trillion dollars worth of stuff to China in the
last ten years. Here is a list of the top 20 things:

    
    
        +--------------------------+-------------------+
        |       End-Use Code       |     2010-2020     |
        +--------------------------+-------------------+
        | TOTAL                    | 1,139,993,265,000 |
        | Civilian aircraft, engin | 121,975,706,000   |
        | Soybeans                 | 112,099,797,000   |
        | Passenger cars, new and  | 76,122,032,000    |
        | Semiconductors           | 59,399,078,000    |
        | Industrial machines, oth | 47,711,057,000    |
        | Plastic materials        | 37,017,622,000    |
        | Pulpwood and woodpulp    | 33,259,673,000    |
        | Medicinal equipment      | 28,111,315,000    |
        | Copper                   | 27,571,309,000    |
        | Chemicals-other          | 26,578,759,000    |
        | Measuring, testing, cont | 26,034,463,000    |
        | Chemicals-organic        | 24,673,699,000    |
        | Logs and lumber          | 21,519,618,000    |
        | Electric apparatus       | 20,903,317,000    |
        | Pharmaceutical preparati | 20,354,316,000    |
        | Other parts and accessor | 18,093,999,000    |
        | Other industrial supplie | 17,993,747,000    |
        | Aluminum and alumina     | 17,823,603,000    |
        | Industrial engines       | 17,539,761,000    |
        +--------------------------+-------------------+

~~~
ge96
So that right there, that to me seems like you want US not for just "raw
materials" but their expertise in building that stuff. I'm really ignorant to
the whole war/oppression thing. I get dividing people by race/controlling
media and all that is bad. Are "we" just in the way from what they want. Our
freedom ideals goes against their wish, etc... Go Google haha(to me).

