
YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam - bluefreeze
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_suspends_google_accounts_of_markipliers/
======
DaiPlusPlus
The real issue here is that (reportedly) the people who spammed got their
GMail accounts shut down.

That's outrageous.

That's your real-life, not just your online-life. Your GMail account isn't
even related at all to your YouTube identity.

Remember: if you aren't _at least_ paying for your e-mail service you don't
own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail
account? What contingency plan do you have in-place if Google ever
accidentally, unintentionally, or in this case, intentionally, shuts it down?

(Disclaimer: I pay $20/mo for an Office 365 E3 account for my personal
mailbox)

~~~
m-p-3
Google should be able to disable access to a specific service, not shutting
down the whole account.

They want to be _the_ identity of the online world, they need the
responsibilities that comes with it.

~~~
whamlastxmas
When I was a kid I had a Yahoo site with some images hotlinked to another
domain. The domain owner changed the images to porn, reported my Yahoo
account, and it got my account entirely deleted. Emails and groups and chat
and all. Really dumb

------
chr1
I wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws,
spent more time on things like this.

Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner
throwing you out because he thought your hair are red.

People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without
explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to
sue the company for a large sum of money, so that company knows that breaching
contracts is not a good thing.

The job of government is to help people establish contracts between
themselves, and to help keeping the explicit and implicit terms of the
contract. The random suspension of account is likely a more serious breach of
contract than selling private data to third parties.

~~~
wdr1
> Behavior like this is completely unacceptable

This comment gives a lot more context:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_suspends_google_accounts_of_markipliers/f70lbtq/)

IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.

~~~
whymauri
No, it's not reasonable.

>The emote spam in question was not "minor", the accounts affected averaged
well over 100 messages each, within a short timeframe.

This is a crazy bad take. 100 messages in a few minutes is totally normal for
live-streams. Just hold the ctrl-V button and... oops, your G-Mail is locked.

That. Is. Crazy. I worked at Twitch and the idea of disabling someones Amazon
account for spamming emotes (even temporarily) is completely insane.

~~~
kpU8efre7r
Nuts. Why not just have a cooldown for emote spam? It's ridiculous it's that
easy to have your shit banned.

------
bluejellybean
Just absurd, the damage of having my entire google account being banned is
seriously non-trivial and would easily cost thousands of Dollars worth of time
and energy to deal with. I remember having the fear of what's happening here
when Google originally purchased YouTube but after years of non-issue I forgot
about the possibility. For me, this is the last straw with Google, the risk of
being banned for such an arbitrary reason is simply too high for me and I'm
going to start moving documents and accounts from their services.

It baffles me, they hire some of the worlds more intelligent people but the
products/systems they produce are constantly idiotic and daft.

------
tahdig
There are too many people here advocating to host your own email in your own
domain. Please be warned that it has its own risks:

By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new
attack vector for identity theft. There was an article on HN just a couple
weeks ago about someone getting hacked by exactly this attack form. IIRC it
was godaddy having stupid verification process.

Someone can hijack your godaddy/namecheap/gandi account and point the MX DNS
records of the domain to their own server and receive all your "Forgot your
password? here is the link to reset!" emails

This a very bad advice unless you actually know what are the risks.

Maybe suggesting a paid email provider would be better, does anyone know of
any reliable email providers that you pay for what you are getting and they
are not selling your account data or block you for some reason?

~~~
Recursing
Also, you randomly won't be able to send mails, as google will randomly mark
them as spam (for no reason, with no explanation and with no chance to appeal)

So you'll never know if any mail you send to a gmail user (which is pretty
much everybody) will ever actually reach an inbox

[https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08806.html](https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08806.html)

[https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/10381...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/103817.html)

~~~
stevenicr
This. I recently found that even though several emails from my custom domain
accounts had gotten through to gmail users - some of them did not get to the
main box instead ended up in promotions.. and some of them did not get
delivered at all.

These cases were to the same person, from the same computer and account - some
would go through and some would not, some could be found in spam box, others
just vanished -

then I started calculating the time I spent writing some emails that I never
got a reply to - like hours of writing - and I though I was just ghosted for a
competitor - turns out it's likely they never saw the work I sent.

I have witnessed this with 3 different receivers the past year.

The last back and forth I just resorted to using my personal gmail account to
communicate with new business associate as the receiving was so erratic. At
first they wondered why google was putting stuff in spam folder that did not
belong there - then it just turned to non-stop frustration and delayed thumbs
up on work orders.

the algo should know if you sent one email and they opened and read and
replied - and you sent another, it should not matter if you put in the second
email, 'your desire to do Z with your web site is understood, and can be done,
but you may run into a bad SEO issue that could affect where your site
displays in search results, so instead we reccomend not doing X and instead
doing Y.."

something like that - so many times is seems that the anti-spam seo hating
google teams trump and destroy all the things, regardless of false positives -
and no transparency which hurts people - but saves the secret sauce of the
anti-spam team I guess.

This is a tough place to be in when so many use gmail.

------
sorenjan
Constant news about Google banning accounts for various mistakes, small or
large, reminds me of a certain country's social credit system. When will they
start banning people that have any kind of contact with accounts in bad
standing? Will they start denying purchases on Google Pay depending on how
well behaved the account is?

~~~
pixl97
Companies are authoritarian dictatorships

~~~
throwaway2048
Which is why its baffling to me that lots of people who are deadly afraid of
government tyranny are completely ok with privately owned tyranny (even
monopolistic kinds)

~~~
chr1
Government tyranny is a far greater danger because government can use force in
the form of army and police, and when established it effectively owns
everything else in the country.

The privately owned tyranny has much less power, and when it becomes bad,
government can intervene.

So while no tyranny is ok, government deserves much more attention, because it
is the more powerful tool, that needs to be protected much more vigilantly.

~~~
tripzilch
Some of these private multinational corporations are _easily_ more powerful
than some smaller governments.

Let's just agree that both can grow bad. It's just that clearly,
governments+people can grow a LOT bigger (in absolute number of people) than a
corporation, before it generally goes bad.

None of the largest corporations are really trustworthy, and neither are the
largest countries stellar examples of good governing. The difference, however,
is an order of magnitude more people being "managed". Apparently Google
(Alphabet) employs about 100,000 people, most of them subjects not rulers.
That's just a very small city or large town.

If we compare this to a small-medium sized country with a reasonably well-
working economy, the difference becomes laughable: The corporation is a much,
much, smaller group of people, with a disproportionally unwieldy huge amount
of power, completely unable to control themselves and behave in an ethical
manner. It's _pathetic_. YES they absolutely need a government to regulate
them just like a baby needs someone to change their diapers.

~~~
speedplane
> It's just that clearly, governments+people can grow a LOT bigger (in
> absolute number of people) than a corporation, before it generally goes bad.

I don't think it's so easy to separate the two. A corporation is not a real
thing, it's a legal fiction _created by a government_. If a corporation acts
badly, it's really the government that allowed it to act badly.

The complications occur when a corporation obtains enough power to be able to
influence the government, and thus the ability to influence the rules by which
it abides, like a recursive program which is able to alter the mechanics which
created it.

At this point, the difference between government and corporations start to
blur. It's entirely possible for a corporation to be initially created by a
democracy at the will of the people, but over time, as its size and power
grows, is able hold the government captive, and control its own rules.

Sadly, this is not just a hypothetical thought experiment.

------
falcolas
What blows me away is that the supposedly manual reviews believe that these
Google-wide permanent bans are appropriate for “spamming emotes” in a stream.

Google employees, you hold too much power to be so arbitrary with your bans.
You hold people’s digital lives (and, with Android, a portion of their
physical lives) in your hands. Please be a bit more responsible with that
power.

------
dugditches
And he'll make a fuss, a video, and it'll get fixed. They'll all get their
stuff back. It'll add to the\ sour taste in his mouth but it'll get fixed.

While smaller creators in similar situations are completely out of luck. Throw
a support ticket into the ether. And just have to hope more and pray a bigger
Youtuber picks up their plea and their video gets popular so that it gets
fixed.

------
willis936
This boils down to trust. We need to trust that our email provider won’t turn
off. We need to trust that our ISP won’t shut off our internet. We need to
trust that our cell provider won’t shut off our service. We need to trust that
our power company won’t shut off our power.

There is simply far too much on the line here to not have protections. The use
contract of email providers needs to regulated.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've been working on a theory for a few years now that advances in
communications technologies fall somewhere on the spectrum of either tending
to, or absolutely, reducing trust between individuals and social groups.

Note that trust != reliability. Trust is an extension of faith beyond
available information. Reliability is a statistical measure. You can achieve
higher reliability with low trust through surveillance, enforcement,
punishment, and/or a limited-options environment. But that's _not_ engendering
trust (and may actually be a reasonably good summary of why tech tends to
break down trust -- I'm still thinking this through).

Keep in mind that trust is a two- or multi-way street. In our mediated
relationships, there's trust between user and provider, provider and user, and
third parties. Any or all may be or contain untrustworthy elements. And the
channels of information are limited making decisions on who or what to trust
challenging.

It's complicated. Though I think Google can and should do better.

------
LudwigNagasena
I wish platforms like Facebook and YouTube would stop pretending they can
build “communities” with one billion people.

~~~
friendlybus
Yes communities is the wrong word. They are just YouTube viewers, the people
watching are not united in a common purpose and may be watching for many
different reasons. Youtubers are just mass market celebrity like it's always
been. Some of them are barely 'creators'.

------
megous
[https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-
modification](https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-modification)

"Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits
to our Services at any time."

~~~
throwaway2048
Wow I'm sure that they are compliant with the EULA is a relief to everyone
involved.

------
pja
Google’s approach to coping with bad actors, i.e. immediately cutting off
people from their entire Google presence for anything that trips their
automated systems on any individual platform, is incredibly abusive. People
can have years and years worth of data locked away permanently simply because
they post a line of emojis on a YouTube video? Simply astonishing.

Why would anyone trust Google with any important part of their lives based on
this kind of behaviour?

------
brenden2
Things like this are a good argument for breaking up the tech giants. It's an
example of how monopolies hurt consumers.

------
privateSFacct
Wonder if the ban related to this rule

Repetitive comments: Leaving large amounts of identical, untargeted or
repetitive comments.

------
thinkingemote
Looks like they are trying to use AI for automation and it's screwed up.
Again. And it will and must happen again and again to get better.

Actually they call this stressful work and actively explicitly are working
towards not getting workers to do this work for their own benefit if you
believe HR and the mental health supporters of this policy.

I forget the actual term it's something like "Mental Health Ops'.

Why should Google make their contactors suffer digging through video chat when
they can get an AI to do it for them? This is literally their policy, it's not
satire.

~~~
megous
Yes, but just block further commenting, lol. If your algorithm has bad false
positive rate, don't hook it to "delete this person from Google" action, but
something less intursive.

------
rolph
"The accounts have already been reinstated. We handled that last night. 2. The
whole-account "ban" was a common anti-spam measure we use. The account is
disabled until the user verifies a phone number by getting a code in an SMS."

Is g00gle harvesting mobile numbers?

~~~
tripzilch
1\. Yes obviously

2\. They are lying through their teeth about the accounts being reinstated
(many have not been), as well about the SMS thing, given that the video shows
actual screenshots of people being denied having their accounts reinstated, so
obviously that SMS thing doesn't work at all as they claim it should.

------
zahrc
Google seems to be constantly playing with any of their algorithms... I
totally understand that it’s their business, but especially YouTube gets worse
and worse.

------
blondin
oh wow! there must be more backstory to this. finding it hard to believe that
whole google accounts got suspended for spamming a youtube video chat!

~~~
wlesieutre
This is why I avoid as many google properties as possible. Who even knows what
actions might get my Gmail account disabled. And when they do, there’s no
chance of their support system fixing it. The ban bot decided a rule was
violated, and when reviewing its decision the ban bot unsurprisingly decides
the same thing on appeal.

So no, I’m not going to start shopping with Google Wallet no matter how many
coupon offers they send me.

~~~
tzfld
I would not rely on a third party (especially a platform with so inconsistent
behavior and unclear rules) when talking about an irreplaceable asset.

~~~
wlesieutre
Yeah, switching to a better email provider is on my to do list, but it’s a big
project that I’ll get around to “someday”. Easier to fly under Google’s radar.

~~~
falcolas
I'm sure some of those commenters in the video stream believed the same thing.

~~~
wlesieutre
They made the critical mistake of touching a second Google product

------
dsamarin
Would it be a reasonable and temporary solution to ban accounts at a service
level? So spamming on YouTube bans access to YouTube, etc.

------
winrid
How does this even get coded? Bug in some rules engine for detecting spam?

~~~
dredmorbius
Much of Google's behaviour seems to be AI/ML based.

Which effectively means Google's own engineers don't understand what is
happening or why.

------
dredmorbius
You'd think that Google would get better at dealing with this situation after,
oh, say, _six years_ of having the problems of forced multi-service
integration (and abuse countermeasures) pointed out to them:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731)
[1]

But no.

Just from my own experience, I've been locked out of my Google account[2], my
_real_ Google account[3], and of course, when the company, as it on very rare
an infrequent occasions does, cancels services, found myself (and a few
million others) scrambling to salvage content and communities.[4]

Others have had slightly worse authentication/access situations.[5]

To be fair: the problem is a complicated one, and Google sees a lot of abuse.
Or, as in Mariplier's community's experience: activity which looks a lot like
spam, at a multi-billion-user scale, which can make assessment difficult.

(Though as has been pointed out: if scale of operations makes reasonable
levels of service provisioning prohibitive, perhaps you shouldn't be operating
at that scale?)

Google _do_ manage to cull a lot of spam, abuse, and other crud. In my some-
time career of trying to get hard numbers regarding aspects of Google+
membership and activity, I found:

\- G+ communities were being created _and deleted_ at a prodigious clip of
thousands per day. Even in the final months of the site, several hundred
thousand new communities were added.

\- A strong predictor for whether or not a G+ profile would be deleted was _if
it had ever posted public content_. By a factor of about 10 over profiles with
no visible content. Presumably, many of these were spam or other abusive
profiles.

\- The very most active profiles across a small sampling of recent Communities
posts were spammers, and by the time I'd gone back to verify the top few, most
or all their content was removed.

When you're operating at large scale, it's difficult to make discerning,
accurate, fair, or consistent decisions. That's understandable.

But _you should be aware of this_ and design systems to recover gracefully
from errors. Which includes not discomfitting, annoying, or distressing users
excessively. Someting Google have repeatedly failed at.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. The day that item ran, the top three items on HN were either directly or
indirectly about my experience or frustrations with the then-new Google+ -
YouTube accounts merger.
[https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f...](https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium)

2\.
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_kill_your_google_account_access_it_via_tor/)

3\.
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_go...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_google_identity_thing_again_who_are_you_is/)

4\.
[https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Goals](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Goals)

5\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-
hack-e...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-
election-dnc.html)

------
logix
I wish we could ban them too.

------
Nextgrid
You mean YouTube comments are now moderated? That’s very welcome and long
overdue.

~~~
Kiro
This is about livestream comments.

