
Our ongoing work to tackle hate - dombili
https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/06/our-ongoing-work-to-tackle-hate.html
======
timdorr
Related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20105903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20105903)

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sp332
Counterpoint:
[https://twitter.com/shaun_jen/status/1136068719262752769](https://twitter.com/shaun_jen/status/1136068719262752769)
(link to screenshotted thread
[https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136055959476817921](https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136055959476817921)
)

[https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1136088138357493761](https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1136088138357493761)
_YouTube tried to explain this decision on background to us, but I made the
call to ignore it because they won 't go on the record. YouTube has a major
harassment problem, but an even bigger problem with transparency and
consistency of policy enforcement. It is not our job to paraphrase their
explanations. It is their job to own their policy decisions._

Edit to update: as of half an hour ago, the channel's monetization has been
suspended.
[https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136341801109843968](https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136341801109843968)

Update update: It's even dumber than it first looked.
[https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136356046887313408](https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136356046887313408)

~~~
Fellshard
A series of articles in mainstream publications does tend to make you
recalculate profit implications. Since their ToS and its enforcement are so
consistently fuzzy, they can just follow where the wind is blowing.

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challenger22
I imagine there's boiler room full of guys somewhere tagging videos as
"Borderline content", creating data which then feeds into a machine learning
algorithm which decides which videos get promoted. All videos are metricized
by the similarity to borderline content, and are increasingly likely to be
promoted in proportion to increasing graph distance from the borderline
content. Youtube management gets nice plausible deniability that they don't
actively surpress political adversaries, because the whole process is
stochastic, and who knows how machine learning works anyway?

~~~
cagenut
the machines won't take over because someone puts them in charge, they'll take
over because everyone's ass is covered avoiding decisions.

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bgravinz
Many very popular religions are supremacist in nature.

And pretending otherwise to allow them to skirt the censors just makes the
entire censor regime seem like a hollow power play by a company trying to keep
from sinking in a turbulent political time.

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ytNumbers
It's often a shame that network effects are nearly impossible to overcome. It
looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount a
challenge to YouTube. But, perhaps posts like these from Google will one day
succeed in persuading people to start looking elsewhere for videos.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services)

~~~
JoshTriplett
> It looks like the feature of "less censorship" will never be enough to mount
> a challenge to YouTube.

s/censorship/moderation/. And no, "we host everything" is a fast way to _kill_
a potential competitor to YouTube. The first and fastest adopters of such a
platform _will_ be the people rejected from other platforms, which rapidly
turns any "we host everything" platform into a cesspool that nobody _else_
wants to use.

~~~
ytNumbers
YouTube could wind up with cesspool videos? The horror!! It's a good thing
they've now got these new guidelines in place to remove all the garbage
videos. I'm sure that all the remaining allowed videos won't hurt anyone's
feelings. /s

I'm not advocating for zero censorship. I just think this reads like they're
heading down a slippery slope.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> I just think this reads like they're heading down a slippery slope.

Standing reminder: the "slippery slope" is a _fallacy_ , not an argument. You
can do one thing without doing every _possible_ further step past that thing.

~~~
ytNumbers
You might be right. I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about YouTube to argue
whether or not Google's new censorship policies are quickly getting out of
hand. But, someone like Tim Pool seems to be quite well informed on that
subject, and he makes a compelling case.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoN-
MZV7-7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoN-MZV7-7c)

------
beat
Nice to see they're banning the Flat Earthers.

Because the Flat Earthers need MORE evidence that the TRUTH!!! is being
suppressed by Big Corporations.

~~~
ivl
It might see a few of the existing flat earthers harden their view, but I
suspect they'll gain fewer followers overall when hidden from mainstream
content. What's interesting is that fracturing hateful communities does
decrease the spread of their message[0]. I have to think that we could see
similar trends with fringe theories, like the earth being flat, or bleach
being a cure for autism. Which would in turn prevent users who might fall into
the rabbit-hole that is the cesspool like communities among hate based groups,
and the more fringe theories (again, flat earthers, anti-vax luancy, etc.)

0: [https://medium.com/acm-cscw/you-cant-stay-here-the-
efficacy-...](https://medium.com/acm-cscw/you-cant-stay-here-the-efficacy-of-
reddit-s-2015-ban-examined-through-hate-speech-93f22b140f26)

~~~
whymauri
This is basically what happened when Reddit banned racist subreddits. Everyone
cried

"But my free speech!"

"Won't they just polarize even harder?"

"Won't they just operate in the ShAdOwS?"

Except that didn't happen. The people left for Voat, and then Voat died.
Banning harmful communities works time-and-time again, and it would work for
YouTube if they actually did anything. For every 'guideline update' or press
release they do about content moderation, they do basically nothing. The one
exception was the sketchy videos with children, but their solution has been
pretty heavy-handed and reactionary. I think that's the problem: YouTube has
never been pro-active in moderating its platform and it shows.

~~~
ivl
Even more interesting on that article I linked about exactly that: the people
who stayed stopped being as racist / hateful towards fat people. They didn't
drag their garbage ideas along to the new places they started posting (on
reddit). It wouldn't surprise me if some of them even evolved a little and
abandoned those views.

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clarkmoody
Relevant:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)

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RobertRoberts
Some very hateful things have come out of Google. Who gets to define hate?

Edit: Changed to more reasonable assertion.

~~~
happytoexplain
That's a pretty dramatic assertion - in the field of hateful things, you'd
have to be pretty extreme to qualify as "some of the most hateful". What do
you have in mind?

~~~
RobertRoberts
That is fair. I edited my comment.

My question remains though, every power in the history of the world has
oppressed others based on some logic. (hate?)

And in my limited understanding of human nature and history, the oppressors
rarely (if ever) see themselves as evil.

All it takes is for Google to label questioning Google as hate, and they can
do whatever they want.

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infiniteseeker
IOW, Google and its properties continue their slow suicide/slide into
irrelevance.

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h2odragon
Now they're taking responsibility for editing content, we can assume they
implicitly endorse anything they haven't banned, right?

~~~
happytoexplain
That doesn't follow, does it? I sense you're being sarcastic to some extent,
but I'm not sure to what end, specifically.

~~~
h2odragon
Yes I'm being sarcastic and should make more effort to actually communicate.
Thanks.

I'm just pissed off by how many people embrace this shit with no notion of the
principles that whizzed past while they were having a 2 minute hate against
Nazis. Sure they weren't well served and this is just a public embrace of the
biases that have already been in place. They were important though.

The guy who runs a printing press should not take pride in refusing jobs for
people he doesn't like, should he? Is his service, which has social impact
beyond his neighborhood, supposed to be available to all or would it be a bad
thing if he decides not to print newsletters for nazis, or blacks, or this or
that church because their doctrine is wrong... None of these are new issues
and we've thrashed this shit out before.

I indulge in sarcasm because its quicker. sorry.

