
Google: YouTube is so overloaded staff cannot filter content - tshtf
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_EUROPE_INTERNET_TERROR?SITE=AP
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cortesoft
"Despite the serious threat posed by extreme and violent videos"

Wait... what exactly is the THREAT of violent videos? The videos themselves
aren't dangerous, and removing them won't stop the violence... what is
portrayed in the video is the danger, not the fact that it was videoed.

~~~
stinkytaco
>The videos themselves aren't dangerous, and removing them won't stop the
violence

I actually take some issue with that. I think publicizing violence can be a
cause of violence (the same critique could be applied to 24/7 media coverage
of a shooting tragedy, which is possibly just what the shooter wanted). That's
really not a point worth having an argument about, I just thought I'd throw it
out.

I think what that sentence actually means is "it's a threat to the edifice of
safety we've created and potentially to the usability of our service", i.e.
"People want to pretend this kind of stuff doesn't exist and certainly don't
want to see it when they are watching cat videos." Honestly, I somewhat agree.
If I thought I would stumble across a beheading video when watching YouTube,
I'd probably skip it entirely.

~~~
cortesoft
Yeah, I might have been a little bit flippant in my dismissal any danger at
all, I just found it a bit melodramatic to act like the video is some huge
danger.

I agree, I don't want to stumble on a violent video while browsing youtube. I
just don't think it is actually a threat to our safety.

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noir_lord
Was curious so worked it out.

Assuming filter people work 40 hour week 50 weeks a year with near perfect
efficiency.

(300 _(60_ 24 * 365))/2000 = 78840 people.

Of course it's nowhere near that intractable as a simple reputation/time based
filter (is this account more than a month old, skip, does this user have a
good reputation, skip) would bring that down hugely (and this assumes they
watch 100% of each video).

In any case you are still at a good number of people.

~~~
anon4
So why don't Google just hire 100 000 people to do it? Assuming a generous
30k/yr salary, that is only 3mln/yr.

~~~
matt4077
Because they're better at math than that.

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douncks
When you're systemically banning speech because it's a "threat"... isn't that
literally, exactly, the same argument that every censorship regime in history
has used in order to manipulate the public to support things it wouldn't
otherwise?

Isn't China, Russia, Singpore, and everyone else pushing that same line? Are
we going to tolerate it here?

~~~
sp332
It's illegal to incite people to violence and make death threats in the USA,
even on YouTube.

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undersuit
Hitler's speeches did an amazing job of inciting people to violence, guess we
should ban any videos of that, you know just in case.

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jbob2000
When does a video do harm? How can you be harmed by watching a video? If you
don't like it, close your browser. If you don't want your kids seeing it,
using parental controls or watch them when they use the computer.

This just reeks of governments trying to impose censorship by using recent
terror events as leverage.

~~~
voidz
I saw an animal torture video once. It went very fast and because I was in
both a state of shock/fear/sadness/whatever, I couldn't even get myself to
stop, pause or close it in time. The torture just happened too fast.

I own and care a great deal for my own pets. So what happened to the same
animals in the video.. it haunted me for weeks and was a really depressing
experience.

Sure, I'm more careful _now_.. heck, I'm even outright censoring a lot of
stuff from myself, because of this experience.

But it sounds like you are saying "videos can never do harm" and I just really
disagree with this, because of how I was affected by this particular one.

~~~
lugg
I'd rather people were able to post animal cruelty videos. That shit needs to
be stopped and people need to be aware that this stuff happens.

How are you meant to expose animal cruelty if youtube censors it?

I doubt what you were watching was an exposure video but the content you want
filtered is the same.

~~~
eridius
Why are you trying to "expose" animal cruelty? That's a crime. Give your video
to the police. Uploading it to YouTube so the general public can see it not
helpful.

~~~
Crito
And if the police decide to do nothing?

And what of states where creating that video in the first place is itself a
crime?

What if the abuse is not criminal, but you wish to convince the public that it
should be?

~~~
eridius
> _And if the police decide to do nothing?_

What is uploading it to YouTube going to do? The only motive I can think of
there is to try and shame someone for something, but that's rarely applicable.
Besides, nobody is saying "the police did nothing, therefore I uploaded it to
YouTube".

The best reason I can think of for sharing an animal cruelty video with the
public (or at least doing so before exhausting any _effective_ strategy) is
when you need help identifying the culprit, so you can properly report it. But
YouTube isn't the right community for that sort of thing.

> _And what of states where creating that video in the first place is itself a
> crime?_

How does that excuse uploading the video to YouTube? If making the video
itself is a crime, then sharing it with the public seems like a great way to
get yourself in trouble.

If your intention was to try and distribute the video anonymously, surely
there's ways to anonymously submit complaints + evidence to the police.

> _What if the abuse is not criminal, but you wish to convince the public that
> it should be?_

Good question, perhaps that situation does warrant uploading to YouTube and
spreading publicly. Although you'd need to be careful of exposing yourself to
a defamation lawsuit there depending on whether the perpetrator in the video
is identifiable. Although even in this case I'm skeptical as to the efficacy
of this action.

Related to this, I'd say that the best justification for uploading such a
video would be if the video is considered to be in the public interest. This
would cover situations such as a government-funded institution engaging in
unethical/criminal behavior (I'm thinking here of things like Abu Ghraib). But
in such a situation I still think uploading to YouTube is probably the wrong
approach; I would expect you could find journalists that would be interested
in a story like that and would be much better-positioned to bring attention to
the unethical/criminal behavior.

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briandear
However, if you were to post a clip from a copyright infringing song -- it
gets removed immediately.

~~~
logicalman
It's much easier for a computer to recognize audio than video content. I'm
sure in a couple of years, YouTube will automatically flag violent terrorist
propaganda.

~~~
hatu
Not just any audio but known audio. Finding known video is something they can
do already too. That's why some people upload clips from their favorite shows
and flip them horizontally to avoid automatic detection. Think of it like a
hash for the audio/video portion. Pretty easy to check if it's in the
database.

~~~
tedunangst
I'm surprised whatever feature detection they use isn't robust against trivial
changes like that. Rotation, flipping, and scaling/cropping should all result
in the same hash.

~~~
viewer5
We only brushed over how hashes work in college, so I may be totally ignorant,
but-- wouldn't rearranging the order of the data (rotate, flip, etc)
necessarily change the resulting hash?

~~~
icebraining
They don't use those hashes, they use content fingerprinting:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting)

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kleiba
And why would they? Is this because they are (legally) obliged to filter
content? If this is an actual problem then I suppose one way to deal with it
is to either hire more staff or restrain the number of videos users can upload
-- except the first one doesn't scale and the second one will not be popular
with YouTube users. And given that Google is all about doing everything they
do at a massive scale, neither of the two suggestions fit their
weltanschauung.

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frandroid
> But when individuals flag up problems only a third of it is taken down.

Because they don't give enough importance to these requests, or because many
of the requests are invalid? If it's the former, that's something that content
hosts should be held accountable for. If people flag stuff for you for free,
you better use that information...

~~~
mynewwork
Flagging as a means of shutting down opinions people disagree with or to
target groups they don't like is unfortunately very common. Sometimes even in
organized fashion, where a group will urge its members to flag content from
someone they oppose. There have also been instances where a group tried to
invoke copyright infringement because someone said their name in a video.

~~~
stinkytaco
It's assumed this is just an issue of manpower, but it's a much thornier
problem. There's a point where a video isn't obviously in violation of
community standards and at that point, you're asking one of 100,000 different
people to make a judgement call. You're bound to get some wrong and the
someone will create a whole other post on HN about it.

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VOYD
"Can't", I think they meant "won't". Google could hire a few more people
easily.

~~~
frankchn
According to calculations, they need approximately 70k people to screen every
minute of video uploaded onto Youtube.

Even if ML could cut this down by 85%, that is still 10k people. Not a
brilliant idea when Google only employs 50k people worldwide.

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pc2g4d
This is an effort to fight ideas by suppression. My preference would be to
fight ideas using other ideas.

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raldi
Would s/filter/pre-filter/ make for a more accurate headline?

~~~
sp332
No, they wait for viewers to flag content before they review it. But even
reviewing only flagged content is still overwhelming, because the flag
function gets abused so much. The new idea is to have a separate channel for
known-good agencies to have a priority-flag function that gets reviewed first.
Since that feature will hopefully be abused less, it will have less traffic.

~~~
raldi
I'm not sure the article is saying that; see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961944)

~~~
sp332
Google is not pre-filtering videos. But it is already "tough to catch all
terror related content".

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tomphoolery
lol they're "overloaded" yet they still find time to screw over musicians?
stop being so evil google.

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abandonliberty
Wow, censorship is hard and has many related risks and costs to society.

I wonder if it's worth it.

