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Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine
1095 points by foxfluff on Feb 25, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 285 comments
Reddit is now full of reports of people (and their channels) getting banned for supporting Ukraine or even just watching related live streams. Reddit is also censoring and removing these reports..

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13wyv/im_banned_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t13h44/so_youtube_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t147c3/defending_u...




We’ll this is just massively embarrassing for YouTube. The Reddit thread will get picked up by National media. YouTube will say the reporting was misuse of their terms and was a cyberattack from state level actors implying their reporting algo isn’t actually at fault. They will mention that the automated algo protects children and at risk people. They will then reinstate the accounts and say they are sorry for the temporary inconvenience and pleased that they could respond so swiftly. And the algos won’t change, not one bit. And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans.


Google's fetish for serving more users with fewer employees has been responsible for the failure of so many of their initiatives I often wonder who's behind it.


They are an internet company. This is how internet companies work, generate such high profits, and command such high valuations.

Businesses which scale by hiring are much harder to grow and tend to be a lot less profitable. As a result, internet companies tend to see such businesses as not worth being in. Sure, there are lots of successful companies which operate this way, but Google sees it as an unacceptably high opportunity cost. Rather than pour resources into growing a scale by hiring business, they would rather put the resources toward a different business that they think they can scale with non-linear hiring.

Given this, it surprises me that Google is going after the enterprise cloud business. It is pretty well known that such businesses scale fairly linearly with sales and support staff. My understanding is that they know this and are attempting to scale the business this way instead of their usual strategy of ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.


> They are an internet company. This is how internet companies work, generate such high profits, and command such high valuations.

When something goes wrong, Apple, Amazon and Netflix (as examples) all manage to provide free, robust customer service.

Google can afford to support it's customers. They choose not to.


> My understanding is that they know this and are attempting to scale the business this way instead of their usual strategy of ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.

Ha ha. Last I heard, Google were actively trying to remove their engineers from client engagements, and replace them with third party "Google preferred suppliers". They really don't want to ever be face to face with a customer.


Isn't that every big tech company?


Yeah, because satisfying shareholders is more important than providing a quality service. Entropy exists even in digital systems. Maintenance is a must, and the easiest thing to overlook is the people who use your services (providing them value) when the people who pay for the value the users provide as the ones putting money in your bank account.

It's too easy to forget that if you do not take care of the users, they will leave and take the payers with them. Right now it's hard to escape Google.

But a little river carved the Grand Canyon, and as more people leave the services and provide easy to use alternatives, more people will follow. My guess is that, even though it might take 20 years if Google does not redirect their focus to be more equilaterally supportive of their users then Google will inevitably become a modern Yahoo.


This is a complete tangent, but to be fair, the river was much larger when said carving began. :)

Rim to rim, the canyon is pretty darned wide.


> Given this, it surprises me that Google is going after the enterprise cloud business. It is pretty well known that such businesses scale fairly linearly with sales and support staff. My understanding is that they know this and are attempting to scale the business this way instead of their usual strategy of ignoring the issue and hoping it will go away.

GCP can't get their act together to get a consistent enterprise sales model done....


You're missing the point, this debate isn't about FAANG profits, it's about protecting democracy.

Maybe the root issue was letting 4 private companies control the entire public debate with dangerous moderation practices.


Indeed.

This is the reason I was able to sway the C suite at my last position to avoid anything Google. I'm estimating it's probably around $9m/month revenue they lost from GCE and GApps.

They're simply not trustworthy, no/terrible support, and capricious about arbitrarily holding user's data hostage when some random automated abuse system decides you're horrible.

System Engineers don't let fellow system engineers use anything google for production purposes.


"Shareholders" and the McNamara Fallacy mostly


For others like me who didn't know what the McNamara Fallacy is, here's a quote from its Wikipedia Page [1]:

"The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy


in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with using numbers and there's nothing that can't be quantified. The problem is when important metrics which are hard to turn into numbers are ignored. or, when metrics aren't reevaluated to combat over-fitting.


" there's nothing that can't be quantified"

That is indeed....your opinion.


McNamara Fallacy - thank you for posting this, it's extremely obvious, but seeing it in print is super helpful, and I think it's important for anyone working in a corporate setting to keep in mind


I've worked in this industry long enough to understand when people are "McNamaranites" and I tend to push back against them....vigorously.

To be a person is to not be reduced to an array of arbitrary scores in a worksheet.


At YouTube's scale I don't see how you can have manual reviewers without making it a paid service. The amount of videos uploaded per day is just way too high.


Why does scale always come up as an excuse in these discussions? If one employee can profitably monitor 10k uploads per day, a thousand employees can profitably monitor 10m.


This is unfair. It's a cyber attack on Youtube, and I'm sure the people at Youtube are frantically working on mitigations. It's an ongoing battle and hopefully Russia is burning their bot networks over this.


It's completely fair - YouTube picked a business model that has certain benefits and costs and this is one of the costs.

They are happy to reap the benefits so it is fair to put the costs on them.


Do you think they could be prepared in advance for this kind of attack? Maybe, but you are not the man in the arena. I don't know for certain, but I know at least one engineer on the youtube team and I'm willing to bet that they're frantically writing software to match a new and painful set of assumptions about how the world works.

How are you helping?


> Do you think they could be prepared in advance for this kind of attack?

This is not a new attack in either type or scope. It's merely more visible.

> How are you helping?

Not at all. I don't benefit from YouTube's business model so why do you think that I have some obligation to help YouTube?

Of course, since you think that I have some obligation, you surely do. What are you doing besides attacking people who point out that this is a foreseeable consequences of YT's business decisions?


I wonder how soon administration recognizes this is a national security threat.


I’m not so sure that it’s embarrassing for YouTube, although I think your expected timeline is pretty much spot on.

I don’t think people expect much from YouTube.


Considering they are a data company with heavy AI departments - not be able to differentiate basic russian bots from users is very embarrassing.


Most problems Google (& DeepMind) have seen success in are not arms races; you're simply trying to accomplish a difficult task.

Dealing with bots, and content moderation in general, is an arms race. You're fighting another person who could be just as smart as you in developing evasion strategies as you are in countering them. Getting it right all of the time is impossible.


adversarial networks - isn't this exactly the branch of AI which is supposed to solve this?


I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'adversarial networks', it could be GANs or adversarial training.

Either way, yes, there are techniques for improving performance in the presence of an adversary but it doesn't negate the problem; anything you do will be countered eventually. Clever techniques only buy you more time before someone figures out a way around it.


Yes, not embarrassing for them -- but is more clarification for us.


Embarrassing is not the same as surprising


The problem is that a finite number of human moderators can't win a fight against an infinite number of spammer robots. Also, keep in mind that humans aren't infallible judges, especially if you're reviewing hundreds of videos a day.


It remains amusing to me that Google is able to be stymied by what is probably a ~200 person or less sweatshop of hackers and spammers. It doesn't match all their bravado about their level of expertise in AI/ML, automation, troves of metadata and historical patterns, etc.


It's not a symmetric battle. The team of hackers and spammers has nothing to lose. Even if they're only successful 1% of the time, it's still a win.


I'd venture it has more to do with where Google applies all that expertise. If it were hurting them, I imagine they would solve it quickly.


And even without all the AI, nothing is stopping Google from employing ten thousand human moderators or whatever.


Cost is a really big stopping reason. The problem not being worth solving to Google is another.


I don't believe this argument for a second. Google almost single-handedly solved the problem of email spam a decade ago. And yet, robot accounts are a problem?

For the company that loves encouraging obnoxious Captcha's to self-fund their AI/ML research and data harvest the web, they surely don't seem to like using it on their own platforms.


>Google almost single-handedly solved the problem of email spam a decade ago

Google still has to routinely invent new techniques to stop spam. This problem is not solved - it's an ongoing arms race.

It is also a vastly easier problem - spam filters at google scale work because they see the same spam across zillions of accounts. This is not the case for youtube, where a spammer provides them with far fewer samples, and those are across a much wider space.

These problems are barely related.


Recently, comment sections of popular YT videos are littered with bots spamming links accompanied by phrases like 'hot girls' and '18+ only'. They're everywhere, and this really doesn't strike me as an inherently hard problem to solve.

(In fact, I wonder who these spammers are targeting. Surely the average YT user is smart enough to recognize blatant spam?)


Check this video by linus tech tips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo_uoFI1WXM

Some random dude built an anti youtube comment spam tool. Youtube could absolutely fix this problem, they just don't care


Google single-handledly solved the problem of how to send legitimate emails from other providers into the spam box. In effect, non gmail emails are second class.


Yup, they nailed it! Where before I had to check one Inbox folder, I now need to check two - Inbox and Spam. Because half of legit emails end up in spam now. And no, I am not researching internet daily about manhood enlargement.


With a score of 13.7, the parent comment has been automatically flagged as spam.

    5.7 - restricted terms
    8.0 - username looks like base64
Maximum score is 10.0


You mean they decided to use advanced spam filters that were already used by small sites before other large sites decided to care about the problem? On some cases, a couple of weeks before.

Gmail has the worst spam filter of any email provider I use today, excluding the one email server I have running on my domain that gets almost no email and has no filter. Or, well, spam filtering is a lesser problem on my server too because it doesn't block nearly all the email that I care about.


Google's spam blocking is showing cracks, too.


I am unsure how to take the assertion that Google has "solved" spam.

80-90% of the emails in my "Spam" folder are not spam.

It's worse than no filtering at all, since I still get exposed to the spam, but now I have to check two inboxes instead of just one, and then jump through annoying hoops to view images or access links in the second one.


On my Fastmail I have the opposite problem. Spam gets filtered correctly, but 90% of the spam I receive is from gmail.com accounts.


Just an anecdote but quite recently it seems to be much less reliable at catching spam.


When a system involves a human it's harder to massively infiltrate it. Take counting votes. A bad human here or there could fudge the tally of pen on paapper ballots. BUT if you attempted to compromise a large percentage of these human ballot counters, one of the other human counters would start to notice and alert the world to it.

Compromising a system that involves 100k people is generally harder than compromising a computer algo.


Are you saying they can't tell what the topic of a video is about automatically.. because they can.

Using that information I would implement a system that would figure out the topic and prevent bots flagging that specific content only.


I do fall for the argument that oversight would be too costly given the sheer numbers. I don't like it though.


If the oversight you provide as part of your service is unreasonably expensive then you probably shouldn't be in business - if you can't sanely moderate your platform then you also shouldn't be in business. I can rationally accept that argument as quite logical but I can also accept the fact that news papers ran classified ads for years and years without assisting terrorists by giving them a platform to coordinate attacks in plain text on - facebook comes along and suddenly the bar for obfuscated text is "r u rdy 4 the b0mb?"

Companies that are providing such an amazingly affordable service because they're just skipping out on doing moderation don't get to use "Well, doing it the right way would be too expensive" as a defense - that's how you end up with Uber. Uber broke laws, Uber shouldn't exist at this point, something like Uber should exist, but Travis Kalanick should have been fined into near non-existence and not currently be sitting happy on 2.8 billion. We, as a society, need to have standards.


>If the oversight you provide as part of your service is unreasonably expensive then you probably shouldn't be in business - if you can't sanely moderate your platform then you also shouldn't be in business.

So you'd rather have the status quo of a few decades ago (ie. large media organizations acting as gatekeepers), rather than the democratized ecosystem we have now?


I mean, both have their glaring issues... but I think our modern system is worse. Independent news outlets didn't get a large readership but they did exist and people did express non-mainstream views in them - and while the main companies were definitely status quo aligned they attracted (and focused on attracting) actual journalists that occasionally broke stories that gave the editors headaches. In the absence of them being required to be the source of news (and due to competition from blogs running on a completely non-existent budget) they've focused more and more on advertiser revenue acquisition which really just only cares about the number of clicks you're getting.

I'd prefer neither system, and I don't think it's a binary choice - but if forced to choose between the two I'd probably go with the monolithic status-quo machine (even though I'm extremely progressive and they hated us).


Know your customer rules are extremely costly for banks to implement, given the sheer numbers.

But we mandate it because that's the world we want to live in.

The real conversation here is about Alphabet and Facebook's margins. If they're not doing enough, they can spend more and do more.


It would be costly, but I am confident that Google has the money. They just don't want to spend it, and I am not sympathetic to that.


The question is would it be so costly that YouTube's profitability would look significantly different, and at that point would Google want to keep running YouTube?

I'm not sure, but I don't think the answer is that it obviously won't materially change YouTube's profitability.


Well, it's better if they don't keep it running them.

They have a monopoly on search, that they use to censor any competing video hosting. If they go and start censoring their own service too, this is a very serious problem.


Youtube's value isn't as a profit center, but a way of keeping people inside Google's ad ecosystem. Its value is to dominate the video hosting market so that viable competitors can't rise up in its place. If Google can squeeze profit out, that's icing on the cake, but not the core reason why Google wants to hold on to Youtube.

If the profitability of Youtube is on the table, then so should be antitrust, and Google should not be allowed to own it.


> Youtube's value isn't as a profit center, but a way of keeping people inside Google's ad ecosystem.

Even more important from Google's point of view is it was the way to push Chrome to dominance. And a way to keep it there ahead of any potential competitors.

Which is valuable because of the data and ability to block ad blockers. That is, Google's ad ecosystem.


> it was the way to push Chrome to dominance.

How did YT push Chrome?


In 2009/2010 YouTube advertised Chrome as a better way to view YouTube videos pretty extensively. YouTube also is a moving target that other browsers have to hit (see also GoogleDocs.)

It's similar to how "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run", only with YouTube and other browsers.


Microsoft abandoned their "not Chrome-based" Edge code base, despite the fact that it was significantly faster than Chrome on almost every other site, because of the way that YouTube does some layers. This "way" has no functional effect, but it does block certain optimizations, optimizations that Edge was using and Chrome still isn't.

Google optimizes YT for Chromium-based renderers. Or rather, Google pessimizes YT for other renderers.


Youtube gets roughly 30,000 hours of content uploaded to it every hour. They'd need an army the size of all of Google, Apple and Facebook put together just to review it all.


How much of that remains if you don't review immediately, but when view count exceeds -- for example -- 100 views? I'd expect a dramatic drop from 30 000 hours.


If you want to be so successful as to become one of the premier public forums in society, don't start crying when you're held up to the standards and expectations of other public institutions. Google, go get ye that army of moderators.


Employing that many people would likely cost in the region of Google's entire earnings. It would make Youtube, or any service like it, financially impossible for anyone to run. So sure, I'm not saying we need Youtube, but what you're saying is we can't have it or anything like it.


> Employing that many people would likely cost in the region of Google's entire earnings.

It would cost 2.5% of their profits if they had an entire US workforce and every video needed to be viewed in its entirety.


I really appreciate YouTube's existence, but chances are a communal video streaming site that the entire world can trivially upload videos to should probably be a government run service if it exists at all.

There are a plethora of much more conservatively sized video uploading sites that vet and have specific contracts with their content producers.


> Youtube gets roughly 30,000 hours of content uploaded to it every hour. They

Clearly you wouldn't need to review all of it. You could use AI to identify things for review (as opposed to remove them), limit it to people with a number of downvotes or views. Hell, you could just pay people to handle the reviews/escalations/appeals.

Although, Google totally could afford it. It would cost less than 2.5% of their profits to pay US minimum wage to review every video.


> It would cost less than 2.5% of their profits to pay US minimum wage to review every video

So you think employing those hundreds of thousands of workers would incur no office space costs, no IT system costs, no management, no service staff, no HR, no payroll, no recruitment, no training. Wow. And your talking about Google profits, but YouTube is a business itself that needs to make money. Why does the rest of Google need to subsidise it?


> employing those hundreds of thousands of workers would incur no...

Well, my numbers do allow for a $50MM/year in the various IT/management/training. I would think you could have people working from home, so office/etc. costs would be minimal. But I also made them US based and reviewing every random cat video's full length that is only seen by 1 person. Some savings could be achieved.

> your talking about Google profits, but YouTube is a business itself that needs to make money. Why does the rest of Google need to subsidise it?

Okay, fine. YouTube could internally have added the costs of reviewing every video's full length with US based people in 2021 it would have only cut in half their increase in profit over 2020.


> my numbers do allow for a $50MM/year

That’s hilarious. The $50m was a rounding error you forgot to account for. Given a work force of several hundred thousand, that would just about pay for an office chair each, let alone any other equipment or infrastructure, or office space to put the chair in.


Less "forgot" and more "didn't care to". But, yes, specifically the rounding error.

I have no idea why minimum wage workers would get an office chair worth a grand, or whatever you're assuming. You can have people do the work from their own couches and phones.

For $50MM/year I could set up the infrastructure to manage the process.


They managed to pretty well identify when you are quietly singing some song and claim all revenue from your videos, I am sure they can handle basic bots.


Human moderators probably wouldn't have to intervene in most of it.


If your business is impossible to operate at its current scale pro-socially and without negative externalities, it doesn't get to operate at that scale.

Share-holders don't have a natural right to profit off of societally destructive behavior.


I’ve work on similar sized systems that utilized a very large human workforce to verify models before release and to monitor/measure production models on a daily basis after release. There are ways to make it efficient.


They allowed it to grow past what they can control. They just didn't anticipate the risk.


> And the algos won’t change, not one bit. And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans.

YouTube does not care. They only care when large popular cable TV networks or large partners leave YouTube. When that happens, that is a big frown for advertisers. Small users, creators or live-streamers have no chance against being listened to by YouTube. The algorithms won't ban the partners throwing cash at them but the small users will get banned automatically and YouTube doesn't care and won't care.

That is how it is on YouTube and their private platform with their rules or ToS and we have known for years that they continue to do this and ultimately, they will NEVER change.


> And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans.

Articles about YT say that 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Moderation has to be automated. You cannot throw more humans effectively at this problem.


500 hours of video per minute = 30000 per hour. If a moderator watches 30 hours per week that'd be about 0.2 hours per hour. So you'd need 150,000 moderators to watch every minute. Given that billions of people watch youtube, this is one moderator per ten thousand or more viewers. Also considering most of those videos are not going to be watched by more than a handful of people, you could probably get away with a tenth that by only moderating videos with say 100+ views.

So about 10,000 moderators required. This costs under a billion per year. Given that Youtube brings in $20B + of revenue, I'm sure this would not kill their profits.


It's not just the wages, it's also the extra cost of handling a considerable part of the mods who will develop PTSD.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52642633

So you now have a situation where you are making thousands ill and in doing so will incur a cost much higher than 1B per year.

But yes, it can be done.


You could save a lot more by watching faster than real-time and automatically skipping title sequences, gaps, etc.


If we're going to go that approach, then I'd rather 100 videos be incorrectly left up than 1 video to be incorrectly taken down.


Well, it's not really an "if".

But, clearly YT's assessment is that the harm of a "bad" video being served on their platform greatly outweighs the harm of incorrect takedowns (which can be appealed). I will call this "The Principle Of Can't Unsee."


YouTube could easily reduce the numerator rather than trying to scale up the denominator. Almost every major subreddit has some minimum karma a user needs before they can participate. YouTube could similarly cap brand new accounts at X minutes of publicly available/searchable video.


I can't imagine what change they could make to the the algorithms to understand world context at an acceptable level. Reporting on the Russian Ukraine conflict and show a dead body. That is news and should probably be left up. A school shooting and show a dead body. Why did the algorithms leave that up so long?


2017 had a kind of similar situation where YouTube started deleting a whole lot of Syrian civil war related channels [0], apparently due to the algorithm going haywire trying to censor "extremist propaganda".

[0] https://www-nytimes-com.translate.goog/2017/08/22/world/midd...


I always assumed this was related to abuse of reporting systems by the opposition.


The only thing Google understands is money. A nice fat fine from Uncle Sam for aiding and abetting Russia in violation of sanctions might make them prioritize a fix.


It may be embarrassing but are they embarrassed?

It's not like they're going to suffer for it.


yes, because human over-site is not viable at that scale. Please educate yourself on the scale of youtube. its not like folks at youtube didn't think of the idea of using humans.

even classifiers with 99.99% precision means hundreds of thousands of videos and channels will be incorrectly marked as abusive every year - we just need to accept that and hope that the automated systems are improved over time.


> Please educate yourself...

Side note on communication here.

Any time someone uses a phrase like "Please educate yourself on $THING", they lose a lot of credibility, at least in the context of that communication. Why?

1) It comes across as incredibly dismissive of both any knowledge that that individual may have - especially on HN, I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with YouTube's scale - and of the idea that there may be missing information, on either the situation or context for the other persons point of view.

2) It's quite condescending as well - and if someone thinks that you are coming at a conversation from a combative place, they won't want to listen to what you are saying. Why should they listen if they think you don't care?

3) It's often used to paint broad strokes in places broad strokes may not be appropriate, and the phrase being attached to that makes it lose credibility even when it is appropriate.

---

Ok, now a response to the actual content:

I don't know why we've decided to allow things to exist "at scale" willy nilly. If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".

No one is entitled to a business model.


> If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".

Hear! Hear! We shouldn't have to give over society to the fattest, most insatiable stomachs masquerading as technology companies.


Well don't do that. I'm not doing it and I'm fine. It's not like Youtube is the society.


I'm trying to avoid getting by zombies too, but their number keeps growing and they're generating nice profits for ZombieCorp!


> If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".

I've taken to thinking of this sort of scaling as being the digital equivalent of race to the bottom (i.e. cheap mass-produced garbage products).


> I don't know why we've decided to allow things to exist "at scale" willy nilly.

Because we allow things to exist by default. Because we're a free society.

If you want an exception, then recognize and carve that out within the democratic process, not by preemptively applying authoritarianism.


> If you want an exception, then recognize and carve that out within the democratic process, not by preemptively applying authoritarianism.

You mean like I'm advocating for now? We've let it exist, and I am now advocating for it to be broken up - like I've been for a while.

Edit: I should specify - I am advocating for platforms at the scale of Facebook/Youtube/Twitter to be broken up in general, with an explicit preference towards federated services. We've let them run, and it's time for this generations round of trust busting. I'm am advocating for it to be run through a legal manner though, and discussed and acted upon via democratic means.

I think that all over comments on my gp we've gotten off topic, my email is available in my profile for anyone who wants to discuss this sort of thing further in any manner.


Which federated services would you advocate for? Just want a sampling for my own research. I would assume Matrix is one (for chat servers.) What are some others?


As far as existing tech goes, I personally like and use Matrix.

Mastodon seems promising as a social media replacement, and PeerTube has the tech for YouTube replacements. Both of these two are using ActivityPub, which is on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

The problem comes with content. Matrix is in the strongest position at the moment imho - moving chat platform has the least network effect, and it has the most effective (only?) bridges between "standard" centralized services out of the three. Mastodon has a decent presence, especially of tech people, but not so much outside of the tech or "got banned from twitter" bubbles. PeerTube is in the weakest position of the three afaict - it's mostly again the tech bubble and the "got banned from youtube bubble", but with a much worse distribution.

The tech on Matrix and Mastodon at least seems well established though[0], and I think both would succeed if not for the massive network effects of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc.

My honest opinion is that even if a federated solution doesn't exist or isn't far enough along yet for any of the above it would be better to break down the current state of things and force the creation of one.

[0] I've not used Peertube really, so I don't know how far along it is.


It is telling that even you -- an advocate of these things -- have not tried Peertube. Network effects are the main problem. I use Matrix for my conference [0] and the audience has gotten more used to it, but it's been a high friction battle.

Thanks for the info.

[0] https://handmade-seattle.com


I fully agree.

Network effects make this a losing battle, and that will not change until it is forced to - this my advocacy for it to be done via law.

I should not that I have and do occasionally watch content on peertube, there's just sadly not much there.

The conference looks quite interesting, I'll have to try to watch some of the talks this year!


>If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".

>No one is entitled to a business model.

When it's just ordinary American conservatives being censored by social media, somehow nobody says things like that. Ban Trump and allow the Taliban? There's nothing wrong with that, they're private individuals, they can ban whatever they want. What do you mean nobody is entitled to a business model? Go away with your freeze peach.


They can ban who they want.

<us-pov> FWIW, I see much more domestic harm in letting unchecked lies be spouted by US politicians and having that beamed into our minds non-stop then in allowing people to see atrocities committed by people on the other side of the world.

Yes that goes both ways, I'm an independent.

Edited again: Got too deep into politics on that first edit. Suffice it to say one party is worse than the other in my opinion, and that may color my POV. I still expect to see those who are lying or encouraging violence banned/fact-checked/whatever - on both sides equally.

If one side still has it happen more under those circumstances, I guess that says more about the side then the circumstance. </us-pov>

Also, free speech isn't immunity from repercussions. If I say something incredibly dumb, I expect to be mocked. If I say something hateful/dangerous, I expect people to avoid being associated with me - including being banned under certain circumstances.


This thread feels like it's getting pretty far-removed from the original topic but:

I wish we wouldn't equate "free speech" with the first amendment. IMO "free speech" is a much broader concept than the specific legal protections outlined in 1A.

Mocking people for saying things you disagree with ("dumb things") doesn't violate 1A, but that doesn't mean it's aligned with the general ethos of free speech.


+1

I feel I failed to communicate all aspects of my POV above - I definitely agree with this. Also yeah, this did get off topic and I apologize for pushing that even further just now.

In general, I try to advocate more for polite conversation and actual exchange/malleability of ideas - I just also expect for not everyone to agree with that, and to get mocked if I say something stupid.

The bigger thing is association - If I say something that someone else finds reprehensible, I bear them no ill will for trying to stop themselves from being associated with me, regardless of if that's through banning/mocking/public press conference[0]/a music video[0]/anything else.

[0] I'm glad I don't have a big enough platform to worry about these though.


>Also, free speech isn't immunity from repercussions.

Well, people are facing repercussions for viewing pro-Ukraine material. There's no immunity from repercussions, right?

(Or more precisely, people are facing repercussions for violating the algorithms that Google chose. But they're still repercussions.)

The point is that there's a double standard. If social media censors someone you hate, it's "there's no freedom from repercussions" or "they're a private group so they can ban anyone they want" or "their system, their rules". If they censor someone you like, this suddenly changes to "nobody is entitled to a business model" and "Youtube has no right to operate like that".


The problem isn't that they are banning people. As I've said in other comments, I support the right of people/companies to avoid association with other people/companies via many(most?) methods - including banning. Much like I said in the other comment as well - Gab can ban lefties while touting free speech, Twitter can ban righties while touting free speech, Youtube can ban both - I don't really care.

The issue is when automated banning leads to there not being a human in the loop, or when "well it's just the algorithm" becomes the go to excuse.


> Please educate yourself on the scale of youtube.

Please be less smug.

YouTube has no right or requirement to operate at that scale. They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well. This is no different than a developer who produces terrible non-functional code but defends it to their boss by pointing out the line count is really high.

I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.


> YouTube has no right or requirement to operate at that scale.

so only you can be smug, eh ?

> They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well.

That is not true. They are doing quite well considering the overall scale.

> I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.

So you assess quality by random one-off/anecdotal articles always highlighting the negative ? How do you know what their quality is when you can never know the number of abusive videos correctly blocked ?


> Please educate yourself on the scale of YouTube

You're being very condescending when it's totally unwarranted. I assure you people are aware of the scale of YouTube.

But why should we give YouTube a free pass? You're talking about the service as if it's a force of nature rather than something human created and managed. Why are they entitled to operate at a scale beyond their own control, all while extracting huge profits?


This is the thing exactly! They built a system that allows infinite uploads but did not build a system to handle the workload of dealing with infinite uploads.

Some people just want to throw their hands up: "Dealing with infinite uploads is hard!" "It doesn't scale!" without realizing the youtube is responsible for the very problem they created. They designed it this way!


I love the idea of admitting that scaling up technology arbitrarily can make our lives worse instead of better. But no, the answer is not to accept it and hope that it will get better despite no specific and substantive reason to believe it will.


Human oversight should be a necessary cost and constraining factor of scale. Can't deal with providing non-kafka-esque support to n-many users? Then you shouldn't have n-many users.


I'm actually not sure this is a question of scale at all? The amount of revenue and the amount of moderation needed both scale with the amount of content.

If anything, YouTube's scale gives it a better chance of being able to address this issue, since there are likely fixed costs here that YouTube can better fund (obviously investing in better automated screening, but also setting up the workflows for human moderation, etc.) I think the only benefit a smaller scale competitor has is that they're less visible and unlikely to be "caught" for hosting content they "shouldn't". But if the rules applied equally to everyone, I think YouTube is strictly at an advantage in being able to implement better human moderation.


Interesting points.

If I were designing from scratch, I would probably use a Peertube/Mastodon type federated system.

Each host would responsible for the videos they host - meaning they would have incentive to limit videos uploaded to any given host to an amount they could handle, or only allow trusted uploaders to their host.

Then you would have the federation so that you could allow hosts that you didn't have issues with, while blocking those you did. Eventually, there would evolve safe/block lists - like with email and adblockers - so it wouldn't even require that much effort on the parts of those running the hosts.


We need to accept that why exactly?


Edit - Firstly, sorry about how the phrase "please educate yourself" sounded - english is not my first language, although that shouldn't be an excuse to sound like an ass in a public forum. What I meant is that the scale of youtube is often underestimated (Eg. stats like the number of abusive channels and videos that they take down every day etc. are just mind-boggling)

Secondly, for the folks saying why should we allow youtube to scale beyond what it can handle, or why should we accept the 99.99% precision ?

It is because I do not see a futuristic society in which humans are doing work like "manual reviews" - to progress humanity we need to automate such manual labour so I support the fact that companies are testing the limits of automatic content moderation - and working to improve it - I see it as a win overall. Adding human reviewers would be a step in the backward direction IMO.


> What I meant is that the scale of youtube is often underestimated

Why are you assuming that HN readers don't understand YT scale?

You do know that HN has readers who have built things at YouTube scale, including YouTube itself, right?


Again, simply watching or having watched live streams from Kiev might net you a ban.

> If you watched any Kiev livestream it may have been the reason for your termination. It happened to a lot of us too, it seems some Russian bots have been mass-reporting every single person that watched them

> Yes, yesterday night I watched a livestream. Im shocked

> I also watched a Livestream yesterday night. How i wish I didn't now since my account got terminated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t1445p/this_accoun...


Do you lose your entire google account just for watching a stream on YT??? Because if yes, that's an absolute madness


On the reddit thread the hypothesis is that somehow viewers got mass reported.

I wonder if their accounts were picked up for using the chat or if there's a viewer list that is being fetched via API.

So now if you watch the wrong video and you are in some list. Looks like it wasn't a good idea to have your full name visible and online identity tied to your youtube account.

Damn google for pushing for that crap, google+ was a blight.


People still fall for using their real name on facebook, twitter, instagram. It's not just google..


Welcome to Google. I know it sounds like cheap answer, but yes, some people lost access to their entire google related accounts including GMAIL and DRIVE when they were banned from specific services, like adsense for instance.


Definitely, but not in this case. They only lost access to Youtube.

Source: Got banned yesterday and unbanned today.


It's never too late to de-google. Use it as a good excuse to switch to a password manager if you aren't using one. If you are then it is much less painful to switch.

Internet identity is too valuable to trust to a company that demonstrates they are willing to fall asleep with an armed grenade in their hand.


Does this apply to embedded videos too? Imagine reading a news article during lunch at work and getting your corporate account kicked!


Besides autoplay being evil, sounds like the GDPR-compliant pages have it right. Your data is only sent to YT after your approval.


One great example of this is the Gumtree site[0]. The social media share buttons at the bottom only load in when you hover over them (with the placeholder being Gumtree-styled social media icons). Great for performance and privacy (although I would prefer no buttons / social media code at all). I've always been really impressed by this, I wish more sites would do it.

[0]: https://www.gumtree.com/


I don't think YT bans usually affect your google account. I got falsely flagged by a bot for copyright striking a bunch of my own videos which resulted in permanent, apparently unappealable, ban of all my YouTube accounts on that google account but the google account still works just fine.


permanent, apparently unappealable

This should be illegal. It's like a diner owner saying he's going to deny service to all terrorists and then denying service to anyone with brown skin because it's how he determines who is a terrorist.


It's really sad. I lost one channel that I had been uploading content to for years. I supplied some small communities with, in my opinion, what were high quality tutorials and guides. All gone [see note below]. On top of all that, the videos which I tried to flag are still mostly up and I don't want to risk other accounts or my whole google account by flagging them. My only hope is to one day get in contact with someone at YT and ask them to take a look (doubt this will ever happen).

Note: I think I've got the videos backed up somewhere, but losing the channel kind of ruined the appeal of re-uploading. Lost the channel url, subscribers, and most importantly all of the video links across the web are dead.


While outrageous, that's not quite the same.

What you described in your simile is a violation of Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it is public (as in John Q can walk in) business practicing discrimination based on a protected class (race, in this case).


And my point was that this should be illegal too.


It's a good reason why nothing important should be in an online account these days, it's too easy to lose access.


You are overreacting, nothing important should be on Google account is enough.


Even that's an overreaction. Saying as someone who has moved out everything from Google, the best bet is to own your "identity" (domains, email address, & logins - don't use Google login), and backup your data (either in another cloud or locally in a Desktop/Laptop).

I use a throwaway Google account for YouTube as well, just in case.


I got banned from this, so yes, it can happen to someone that does not comment on any video, has no videos of their own, and only makes a few comments in these Ukraine live streams.

I did not lose any other Google services during this, just access to youtube.

Thankfully, the ban got reversed today.


This is exactly the reason I am migrating away from a Gmail address to my personal domain. I don't think most people realise just how in trouble they are if they lose access to their primary email address.


Ukraine has actually discouraged people live streaming or publishing Ukranian troop movement, it's revealing their positions and capabilities to the Russians. I'm sure that's a two way street.

How much live streaming happened on Youtube - and how many accounts were terminated - during the conflicts in the middle east?


This could be why YouTube is banning everything. People assume this is anti-Ukraine, but it could be the opposite.


One more reason to never watch YouTube logged in or by using any of the official apps. Ideally we should switch to alternative platforms, but the amount of content on YT is unmatched. So try these instead:

- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

- https://newpipe.net/

- https://github.com/iv-org/invidious


> Ideally we should switch to alternative platforms

Please consider supporting PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org.


I noticed something last night watching a live stream of Kyiv.

A lot of accounts were posting the comment '/cam2', with others implying something was happening on cam2. Others were saying that the cam thing was fake. I kind of thought it was a way to find out who was watching the video, since obviously youtube chat isn't going to change the video angle...And now I think that's exactly what it was, for this exact purpose.

One thing is clear, and it's very scary in light of all the NATO press conferences where people are asking if a cyber attack constitutes an act of war: There is a massive war happening on the internet right now. Reps are reluctant to respond to these questions because it's clear that total cyber war has been going on for years.


How would a bot know to report you? How could it tell you watched a livestream?


Maybe if you commented on it, liked it or chatted on the livestream. Otherwise I don't see how they know you actually viewed it.


OP of the Reddit submission claims they didn't comment or chat.

But afaik YouTube livestreams with a chat also have a user list for who is present, at least they used to when I last checked.


Isn't there a "chat"-like feature similar to Twitch, where you can see everyone's usernames?


Yes, I checked and in the chat window you can get a list of participants. I'm watching the (non-Ukraine) stream but not in the participants list, so I assume you have to actually say something in chat.


This should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody. People have been complaining for a decade now that all automated takedown bots are ripe for abuse are are actively being abused by media cartels. You can't be shocked when systems that enable abuse are abused by foreign intelligence services.

Google has said it is cheaper to ignore the problem and until that changes they aren't going to fix it. And remember that on the other end of these abusive systems are corporations that are willing to sue individuals for literally billions of dollars over sharing files.

Big corporations will not have your back when it could affect their income stream.


tbh what is the harm done to Alphabet/Youtube here? Bunch of alleged russian bots mass report youtuber's account temporarily and Youtube reversed their incorrect ban.

It seems to me the system is working as intended as demonstrated by the reversal of the bans being reported 90 minutes ago.

title written by OP is obvious clickbait. Youtube isn't banning accounts that support Ukraine, the automated queue mod system's threshold has been breached and after a human review on the AI's decision, the bans were reversed.


My YouTube channel also got removed, received an email 3 hours ago.

"We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube."

Also posted a message showing support to Ukraine in a Kiev livestream.


Update:

Hi ***,

We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve recently reviewed your YouTube account, and after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational.

We’d like to thank you for your patience while we reviewed this case. Our goal is to make sure content doesn't violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can be a safe place for all - and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it right. We hope you understand, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this has caused.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to us here.

Sincerely, The YouTube Team


Did your entire Google account get deactivated? My Google account is linked to Gmail, GCP/Firebase, Youtube, Drive, and a ton of SSO apps. Used it for the past decade, but I know now not to put all my eggs in one basket so I have backups of my most important data. Still, what happened to you is a big fear of mine.


> My Google account is linked to Gmail, GCP/Firebase, Youtube, Drive

Don't. Have separate accounts for dev stuff, entertainment, storage, social media each.

> and a ton of SSO apps

Never do so. Use a password manager (self-host if you want) and use good old username-password to sign up and log in. I once had all my passwords stored in Chrome leaked in a security breach.

A friend's Gmail was suspended that was connected to bank. He had to waste literally tens of hours in commute and waiting and meetings to change it.


>Have separate accounts for dev stuff, entertainment, storage, social media each.

FYI this isn't enough. There are thousands of reports of people having all their Google accounts terminated because they shared the same payment method/IP/cookie session data/etc. This is how bad it can get: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...


This is what happens when you remove all humans from the loop. The decisions made by software can be manipulated once you have a reasonable estimation of what the software is doing.

This time it's Russia. Next time it will be an American political party (whichever one you don't like). YouTube saved some money on human moderation, and all it cost was selling their platform to the first group willing to abuse the system.

And do you know how they'll respond? By trying to improve the automation. No no, no need to add costs by having humans in the loop, we'll just make better software. Because that's what worked so well for SEO, right?


> YouTube saved some money on human moderation, and all it cost was selling their platform to the first group willing to abuse the system.

Last week I thought I had invented the phrase "accountability arbitrage" to describe the core FB, Google, section 230 business model. But a quick search found it actually has been previously used in some interesting documents.

I would like to see that phrase used more commonly. It seems important and timely.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22accountability+arbitrage%...


I'd be willing to wager money this is a cyber operation by a nation state weaponizing YT's automated systems.


That's what the first reddit post is saying. Which makes sense to me. If YouTube had an interest in blocking support of Ukraine, they wouldn't have replaced the COVID news section on the main page with one for the Ukraine invasion news. All of the US mainstream media (except for one) is taking a pro-Ukrainian sovereignty angle, and that's what shows in the news area.

Seems like Google needs to disable autobans triggered by user reports until they have a solution to filter out the reports originating from Russian-operatred bots.


> All of the US mainstream media (except for one) is taking a pro-Ukrainian sovereignty angle

Which one would that be? I haven’t seen a single US media outlet saying this is a good thing…


A decent amount of Fox News programming is ending up on Russian state television to show that the US supports the invasion into Ukraine.


Can you cite any examples? Looking at Fox's coverage online [1], I don't see anything suggesting the US (or Fox) supports the invasion.

1: https://www.foxnews.com/category/world/conflicts/ukraine


https://twitter.com/johnkruzel/status/1496905740203827205


I'm specifically not calling them out since their opinion may have shifted since the latest escalations of the conflict.

I added that parenthetical because I expected without it that I might see an onslaught of comments from people saying that not all of the US mainstream media is in agreement that Russia is in the wrong here. But it's sounding like the parenthetical actually makes my statement wrong... I lost the coin flip I guess


> Which one would that be? I haven’t seen a single US media outlet saying this is a good thing…

Fox is taking a more strongly pro-Russian stance than most other networks.


I don't watch Fox News generally so I can't speak to that (though I doubt it). I do watch Tucker Carlson - easily their top rated program - and the notion that he is taking a pro-Russian stance is patently false.


Russian state television does not agree with you.

https://twitter.com/johnkruzel/status/1496905740203827205


So should poster trust his own experience with his own eyes or Russian state television?

If an observation is also repurposed as a propaganda piece, does that negate the validity of said observation?

I can't stand this bit of logical fallacy that's being used to stifle discussion. You asserted X, but so did some objectionable entity. Therefore, X is false, and you are just as bad as said objectionable entity.


The poster should maybe have some introspection that if he thinks that Tucker Carlson isn't disgustingly pro-Putin, and Russian state television disagrees so vigorously that they literally threw him up there with subtitles to show how pro-Putin he is, maybe he's, you know, wrong about his assertion.


I saw this episode live and re-watched the clip you posted. This isn't Tucker being pro-Putin and pro-Russian, and it doesn't sway me at all if Russian state television snips a little bit out of context as propaganda - nor should it bother you, having just done so yourself.

This was part of a larger point that there's no good reason for America to get involved. I for one would not feel proud of this country if my son dies fighting in a war 5000 miles from my home, lending his young hands to one side of a territorial war that does not effect him, me, or any of us in a direct way. I'd strongly prefer to let the despot and the figurehead of the sham democracy we installed sort it out for themselves.

The rest of it is culture war stuff, and while I don't take it extremely seriously, I feel the same way about the things he brings up and I think he's fun. There are a lot of people who feel the same way as I do and you can't malign or name-call us out of our opinions.


Carlson's manner of speech here is intended to make you take a giant step back, look, and think. This is very threatening to people for whom beliefs are packages you subscribe to, not things you arrive at with effort. Folks can make anybody sound any way by cherry-picking sound bites out of context. I see it happen constantly here.


I remember when we were told that if we voted for Hillary Clinton, it would lead to war because she was a warmonger.

Well, we did, and now...


> I do watch Tucker Carlson

Why? What does watching his shows or segments get you?


He's obnoxious, but also funny and entertaining. It's a guilty pleasure, not an alternative to intelligent commentary. Enjoyable for the same reasons as South Park.


It’s crazy how many news organizations are complaining about Russian propaganda, and then out of the other side of their mouths are using propaganda to strongly imply if not outright state (falsely) that Fox is supporting Russia and Putin’s invasion.

The media’s “don’t question or stray from what we tell you to think in the slightest or we’ll use whatever name we want to drag your name and character through the mud” just makes me and everyone else distrust the media even more.


This is unquestionably the case. Manipulating the flow of information has been part of Warfare 101 for thousands of years. Russia's manipulation of social media is mature and well documented, during times of non-war. The idea that they would make use of those capabilities during wartime is not just plausible, it's just as plainly predictable as "the soldiers guns probably shoot bullets".


It's safe to say that Russian state-sponsored hacker groups have become more skilled since 2017 where NotPetya struck:

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/russian-military-almost-certain...

It's not farfetched to think they have something worse planned.


I think there's multiple things going on. One is coordinated reporting spam from Russia, two is actual misinformation being posted (tons of Ukraine videos being shared are fake) and mix in the general churn of abusive user behavior (trolling) and YT's moderation algos just can't keep up. I sincerely doubt YT is actively suppressing relevant information on Ukraine. Especially at a company founded by Soviet emigres. It's a very hard thing to get right at scale and they just can't do it.


YouTube is quickly going on its way to becoming of low relevance. It will take a while, but when even non-controversial YouTube channels have to speak in code words in order to not get demonetized/striked/deleted, you know there's a real problem. I don't know if this banning of Ukraine support is real and, if it is, whether it's intentional or just another round of The Google's Best AI snagging on bugs again, but it doesn't matter. YouTube simply is becoming an nonviable platform to tie to one's business or opinions. At this point, you're not even that likely to get a following without several years of posting videos every day because of just how biased YouTube has become against small creators; you're better off posting on smaller video platforms or even just making your own website.


I highly doubt that youtube will become irrelevant any time soon. The infrastructure cost to hosting over a decade of video across the globe is immense and that alone creates a significant moat.

Even if some channels leave, others will take their place quickly. Youtube has sufficient size for that.


I didn't say "irrelevance". Just low relevance, kind of like how ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox are all still "relevant", but they mean a fraction to younger generations what they meant to even my generation (Gen Y). They're of such low relevance that those organizations have to pay YouTube to promote their content. There may come a day, maybe in another couple decades from now, where YouTube is paying some TNG platform to cross-post its content in much the same way.

Relevance is a relative term, so I have to apologize for being pedantic here, but I also can't really help it in this case either.

> Even if some channels leave, others will take their place quickly. Youtube has sufficient size for that.

To some extent, yes. That doesn't mean it will be able to keep up with loss forever, especially when it's doing things to outright sabotage new channels.

People will get tired of a mostly PG-rated platform once YouTube truly reaches that point. Cultures shift and change, and if global internet culture swings back to being more like it was in the 2000s, the warm safety blanket YouTube provides will be a totally uncool thing only old people and little kids watch. YouTube will someday have a rude awakening when their pushing of late-night TV and mainstream news clips is no longer a significant ROI to their customers. As for movies, well, they're definitely not the only ones in town for that.


yeah weve seen other video providers come and go, but it feels like nobody else is capable of hosting this much content and having this many active content creators. its kindof sad really, if its not on youtube it probably wont be seen.


I don't think many alternative platforms are particularly serious. This is probably in part because hosting massive amounts of video and supporting streaming is a very hard problem. At the same time, they all shoot themselves in the foot in many ways, whether it's their marketing, lack of real moderation, low momentum of improvement, or their UI design.


YouTube is not going to be the source for breaking news like this. There's too much liability and not much money to be made.

The fact is - less than 2% of content watched is stuff like this.

People are mostly watching work out videos and game streams and sports commentary and so on. Not live streams of wars.


Well yeah, if you examine YouTube in isolation and disregard how its algorithm surfaces content, then sure, most people watching YouTube are watching workout videos and game streams. And maybe that's how YouTube is defining itself, and that's fine, but that's not how you create cultural phenomena. Likewise, millions of people drink Coca-Cola every day, but no one really gives a shit about Coca-Cola even though nearly 2 billion servings are drunk every day worldwide. But people still write actual articles about coffee for some reason, and that probably has to do with its relative lack of homogeneity and safety (from a taste standpoint). YouTube wants to sell fizzy sugar water, and that's the sort of relevance they will get.

The only reason I point this out as a bad thing is that YouTube long ago represented something else that I think mattered more than cat videos, no matter how small the audience was or is.


I was watching live streams from Ukraine on TikTok last night. No problems.


I have been VERY impressed with Odysee and have been using it more regularly. Just need more creators on there.


@dang, I'm speaking from a position of ignorance here, but I think this thread is getting flagged, given its age, score, and position on the (currently) second page. It's possible that it has triggered some other less-documented condition, like "political keywords + too many upvotes?" or something, in which case disregard.

If it is the flagging, I think we can agree that if any political thread were ever HN-appropriate then this one is. It would also be nice to have confirmation one way or another, since if it has been that fact in and of itself becomes part of the conversation.


On the other hand, RT is still happily streaming on YouTube, spouting their non-sense. German viewers is not even IP blocked, even though the have lost their broadcasting license.


I mean, Fox News and One America News Network are still on there as well.


Putin should go on Rogan. The censors at Spotify's brains will break.


Reddit I understand but Alphabet/Google/YouTube reached next level of incompetence.


Yeah, but that's about "normal" for what they have been doing with YouTube and account security for the last 10-15 years.

It's incredibly difficult to reach a human being in their customer support chain, and using bots to take out rival / oponent / people you don't like YouTube channels has been "normal" for years.

Anyone can literally create a few fake Google accounts (or take over / steal existing ones esp. long-running ones) and write a bot to ban practically anyone else.


Creators have been complaining about youtube robot moderation for a while


Don't browse youtube on the browser you have logged in to google. Use firefox with ublock origin and don't log in to google. Youtube is great without ads. Use chrome for any of those things that you are okay with being tracked. Use archive.is when they bitch about blockers. Use tor browser to see interesting ads not targeted to you.


The chilling effect of this should be taken in account too. Once this is more widely reported, I can see many people choosing to avoid these sources of information even after bans are lifted because they are afraid of losing their google account.


Isn't YT moderation outsourced? The infiltrators might just be overzealous Russian nationals in one of those cubicle farms.


That's an interesting possibility. Another hazard to outsourcing everything.


Or Russian money swaying the occupants of said farms.


I wasn't aware you can see what others are watching. How does one do that?


On a live stream there's chat and in the "..." menu you can click to see participants.


What the hell?!?!


I think you need to have posted something in the chat for your account to appear there


yeah - add to that the Google AUTH with location records, and you get the New New Tech scene


This has happened to other wars in the region too. State trolls mass report twitter and youtube accounts to get people banned, or have their videos "age restricted" (which means youtube does not recommend them). It' s the standard practice of google's nonexistent jouranlism/publishing ethics.

Twitter has this thing in Germany where they are required to tell you if someone reported your account. This is at least a good way for reporters to know that they are being targetted by trolls.


It's probably worth noting that these are livestreams which have chat enabled. You are automatically added as a participant, and show up on the participant list, which anyone can see. I suspect watching, say, the WaPo livestream is fine because they have disabled chat and comments. If you must go to one of these livestreams, for some reason, check to see if chat is enabled, and if so, probably avoid it until Youtube figures out how to deal with this.


This has happened way too frequently and in distinct cases to keep pretending 'it's just incompetence/ignorance'. By the time people realize it's more akin to malevolence it will sadly be too late.

I now propose an updated motto: "Don't be evil: just look away."


For starters, regarding live streams, the Ukraine government doesn't want citizens filming what is happening because it might give away positions of the Ukraine defenders as they attempt to maneuver in Kyiv, so that could be one motivation.


If that were the case, then deleting the videos would be sufficient. Banning or deleting accounts for watching these streams makes no sense at all.


That makes sense.


A livestream about watching Kiev livestream to demo how long it takes for the account to get banned should be interesting.


YouTube, where oppressive regimes decide what you can watch.

I'm sure this is top priority right now for Google to fix. But perhaps everything is automated to an extent that this has no good countermove. We shall see.


Oppressive regimes decide what you can watch and megacorps decide if you are allowed to downvote.

"It's automated" has become the new "it's policy," the go-to excuse for doing evil and pretending it's not a choice.


Probably what happens is that people are being reported for saying something in chat that others don't like. X reports and your account is terminated automatically.


What is the state of decentralized (ake Web3) video hosting platforms?

Are they ready to fill the gap to some extend?

I think this is a typical use case for the decentralized approach?


This is what I exactly want, and I believe it will happen in the long run. We need a convenient/fast/reliable way of hosting content in global scale and incentivize who host content.

Still not there, once it gets there it will revolutionize media.

Yet we definitely need something different than BitTorrent, Tor, or IPFS. Something that incentivizes hosting and creation of an economy around this is a must.


Well there are a few 'alternative' social networks, but they weren't very successful (gab, parler, truth social is the latest one iirc).


Everyone keep an eye on https://youtube.com/channel/UCXZs3e_VSlYgrUuTqm3GgVA

They have been posting very consistently and frequently. They went from tens of subscribers two days ago, to over 100K as of like 12 hours ago. They're putting in the work.


On the other hand, Facebook has temporarily lifted its ban on the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-nazi paramilitary group.

https://theintercept.com/2022/02/24/ukraine-facebook-azov-ba...


Not a new problem.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

People have talked a lot about how this is morally wrong.

It's more morally pretty wrong for a long time.

Copyright complaints shouldn't get settled by a "report them instant action," model. Not having a fair hearing in a court of law, is a serious weakness in our modern day legal system.

Jurists legitimately have not figured out how to solve this problem. Copyright & patent law when social graphs spread IP at light-speed is a real conundrum.

But it's not a new problem.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's new is Youtube's algorithm has become a huge asset to Russian foreign policy.

Which is directly opposed to the United State's interests.

If you're working in the foreign policy apparatus of the US Government and watching this... the fact Alphabet is projecting Russian soft power is a big big problem.


Google's approach to abuse has a lot of false positives and false negatives but no proper way to remedy either of them.

The spiciest example I can think of is one Estonian parish being marked as belonging to Russia, even right this moment, on Google Maps.


Perhaps a happy medium for Youtube and other content hosters might be to disaggregate content uploads into two buckets of service:

1.) Generalized content hosting that has minimal oversight with commenting, upvotes and monetization, etc. Basically "bring your own audience" Vimeo style.

2.) More carefully moderated content that gets reviewed by human moderators/stricter opinionated screening filters before it is pushed into the auto-recommendation engine/viral feed algorithm.

This blind viral content also based solely on uplikes seems a bit too blind/automated.


It’s a private corporation, they can do what they want!!

Wait not like that


Maybe they calculate that too much outrage will make Russia appear more powerful especially if at the same time Western leaders are not going to do that much(not sure if they will).

Maybe they want to save face for politicians who - people will argue - mishandled this crisis.

Maybe it is just not really true, despite some people saying it on the internet.


I think larger interesting problem here is possibility of those huge corporations taking sides in wars.


I don't know. I think it would have been good if IBM had taken sides during WWII instead of helping Germany build the infrastructure for genocide.

It's usually not that clear cut, but the war in Ukraine has a clear unilateral nature (aggressor is pretty obvious). It's not crazy for western companies to echo western values and interests in such situations.

Edit: Consider the alternative, where western companies maintain "neutrality" and help oppressive regimes surveil their citizens or spread propaganda at home and abroad. This seems like a great way for western democracy to shoot itself in the head.


Corporations don’t much care what system of federal governance is in use. Heck, it’s arguable that they prefer dictatorships and oligarchies: easier to bribe.

If the West expects corporations to ensure democracy prevails, the West will fail.


I've been leaving comments on YouTube videos and have seen some strange things. I post a comment, get a few thumbs up and engage in some responses, and then the video will disappear, taken down. Quite a coincidence. So I 100% believe the claim of this post.


In Germany this is an important new principle called "Täterschutz". Eg if an amokrunner is active, you cannot post information of his location or identification. First I thought it's Reddit crazyness only, but it spread over.


I stand corrected. My apologies.


The Reddit accounts are not new

Eg, 6 year old account https://www.reddit.com/user/lamka02sk/ Or 2 years https://www.reddit.com/user/SoftGreener/ 4 years https://www.reddit.com/user/omerby12/comments/


There are thousands of dormant accounts, the other day I found one dormant for 5-6 years, became active 1 year ago and had 95k comments! Most bashing the west and defending Russia and populist regimes


Those are not usernames, but auto-generated ids of the linked comments/posts. The rest of the url is just a human readable title, which you can erase and still get to the same post.


and this is how fake news is born....

These are the reddit thread ids which have "similar namess". The users behind them have different names and have been active on the network for up to 6 years.


Those aren't user names.


What's the chance of these accounts having been compromised for a while, and they were now activated to serve as bots, with YouTube detecting that increased activity and changed behavior, thus flagging them for suspend?


Some commenters have said it could be that the videos make it easier for Russia to see what the Ukranians are doing, though I'd imagine they'd just take those respective videos down instead of outright banning people's accounts (since several years ago they force tied our YT accounts directly to our Google accounts even though some of us pay for services like Drive storage and Google Domains - and YT Premium for that matter).

Aside from that, food for thought; I know this won't be popular but Google does have ties to JetBrains (Android Studio, Android development used to be done in Eclipse, I prefer Eclipse). JetBrains has offices in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Google has a strong interest in pushing nginx (formerly (?) Russian made, though I personally prefer Apache) in Kubernetes.


Twitter was shutting down mainstream OSINT accounts. They eventually apologized.

It seems like the new media are keen to shut down information offensives, but are trying to use AI or some other lazy technique.


The cynical side of me thinks this to remove competition from the approved (read monetization) news networks on YouTube, but I bet it is more algorithmic incompetence with no human oversight.


Question: When YouTube (aka Google, aka Alphabet) bans a user, is that user then deleted from the ad database so that Alphabet no longer makes any money from that user's data?


No. To the data was never the user's to begin with.


Sure it was. Your data is a currency that buys you the services.


There's no "my data". There's my usage of their service and there's their data about my usage


Some users reported that their accounts were restored. So it appears that Google is actually capable of reading complaints and checking for wrong removals, when they want to.


It's far past time for American companies to espouse some American values like freedom and democracy rather than boot licking foreign dictators for nickles.


The ironic thing is vk is not censoring similiar content.


When Google bans an account like this, and that account is a Premium subscriber, do they automatically cancel the subscription?


I presume so, else Google would get sued for charging for a service not delivered.


How likely is it that this is the result of Russian bots mass-reporting Ukraine supporters for "violations"?


Most of Russian side social media is on Telegram. Does anyone even know if they ban people or moderate content?


Is this actually happening or are people trying to keep others from supporting Ukraine?


its crazy to me this can occur for any reason, even if they blame the algo, most companies would not be able to get away with something like this without a major effect on their reputation.


And you wonder what happens around politics season..


Twitter, Facebook and Google - reliable allies of evil everywhere in the world.

I mean we knew that, but now it's like they're competing who is worse.


The most interesting thing about this, is that the people that run big tech are all anti-Russia. They're in the Biden | Obama | Hillary camp, not the perceived Trump | Putin camp philosophically (the far left regards Trump and Putin as being aligned and view that as one connected political union; and they view themselves as being specifically on the other side of that; the people in charge of Twitter, Facebook, Google are all far left and very anti-Trump | Putin).

Big tech more likely wants to censor the Kremlin than the pro Ukraine wing. Which leads me to believe this is YouTube getting trapped in its own algorithmic approach to moderation, until or unless they can manually intervene.


I don't think they're anti-Russia or anti-anything really, they're pro-being-even-more-insanely-rich and that can materialize in many ways, like talking about being in one camp while doing things that help the other, no matter which camps those are.


I believe those are weakly held beliefs relative to their strongly held belief of making piles of money. Despite the lip service Google and others haven't exactly been going out of their way to help improve democracy and institutions in recent years.


What piles of money? Russia is an entirely irrelevant source of income for them.

And if that were true, they would not have de-platformed Trump and they wouldn't take down lots of other high traffic content (eg anti vax) that they do.

Russia has a mediocre economy, mediocre median standard of living, mediocre consumer economy, zero economic growth for a decade, and a disaster of a future economically going forward.

US big tech all by itself generates more surplus cash (capital available for saving after expenses) every year than the entire nation of Russia does.

Russia is an economic weakling and provides no great allure for big tech.


I don't mean that these companies are literally shilling for Russia directly. Rather it's that their entire approach is based around maximizing revenue, regardless of the consequences.

Deferring all decisions to an opaque algorithm isn't the most responsible approach, it's just the cheapest. Worrying about externalities of their services costs money and produces little, so they mostly don't.

The fact that their approach can be used to help horrendous warmongers is not intentional, but maintaining a system that can be used in that way is.


Sergey Brin was born in Moscow though so who is to say when it comes to war.

I do agree though, this is most likely just the nature of the problem of trying to moderate such a massive amount of video content.

Some will be caught in the net and attribute agency to the process when it was just completely random.

I mean there is 50k watching a live stream of Kyiv right now.


> the far left regards Trump and Putin as being aligned and view that as one connected political union

I mean, it's not like this idea is unfounded. Trump has praised Putin many times, including during the current invasion. Meanwhile, Putin has been very friendly towards Trump.

I think the "Russian election interference" stuff is very overblown, but it's pretty clear that Trump respects (and maybe even idolizes) Putin.

One other problem with what you said is that I think the cause and effect goes the other way. The democrats are anti-Trump in part because he's pro Putin. They're not anti-Putin because Putin is pro-Trump. Being anti-Putin is very simply a matter of being anti-dictator and doesn't require tying Putin to a controversial US political figure.


Trump might say he likes Putin and Xi and that fat fuck in NK, but nevertheless he started a trade war against China, sent the first Javelins to Ukraine after Obama didn't want to do so, blocked NS2(that Biden rushed to unblock in his first week!), sent more troops to Poland and all Eastern Europe countries, strongly "encouraged" NATO countries to up their spending on defense etc.

It's almost like the conman Trump says one and does the other, but because he's our political nemesis this does not matter anymore, and all of the sudden we start believing what he says and not look at the actions.

Tell me, is this praising Putin, or trying to put some sense into Germany:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRyuW51M_fI

https://publimetros.publimetro.us/2018/07/trump-blasts-allie...


Who said anything about it being unfounded. That was quite obviously not the point.

The point was: big tech is exclusively run by people that dislike the perceived Trump | Putin axis, and there's nothing to debate about it frankly, it's something beyond overwhelmingly the case.

I stated no position on whether I thought that was good or bad.

There was no problem with what I said in fact. I never declared cause and effect (order to why such was the case), that'd be a pointless distraction from the core (and would merely prompt endless opinion thrashing based on partisan beliefs on this forum, or most any forum these days). I simply stated the part that they're quite obviously anti-Putin, and they are. Why for the purposes of the thread doesn't matter. Thus it's more interesting that they'd be blocking pro-Ukraine content and most likely indicates it's not their preference and is an automation problem that they'll have to manually act against.


No, Democrats only became anti-Putin after Trump.

“The 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back.” - Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.

Remember how all the journos and Democrats barked and clapped at that line like trained seals whenever you read them now angsting over Russia.


Good in one sense though: people are really seeing how evil they are than ever before.


Dollars to donuts says they were fed posting and got in trouble for it.


YouTube: "What're you gonna do? Go use Vimeo?"


And yet YouTube allows channels that call the holocaust a hoax, that threaten people, etc to stay up and collect superchats.

Strange.


I'll always be amazed at how advanced and desperate pro-Kremlin shilling is, using a throwaway account just in case they decide to DDoS my side project as retaliation.


There has also been huge amounts of bans on twitter. Say the wrong thing and you get ejected. Yet the clear russian propaganda is allowed to stay. I wonder what the threshold is to accuse twitter of russian collaboration.

It's certainly a charged event with emotions running hot. People are going to say things that are wrong.

Crimea was a difficult subject because they are ethnically russian. Due in large part to a gigantic naval base. They did vote to separate from the Ukraine.

That was then, today is different. The direct invasion of Ukraine is aggression. Putin lied, diplomacy has failed.

As emperor of canada I would have done what my gov has done so far, but also put a sunset. In 1 year, unless something changes, we end any and all connection to russia. their citizens may not come here. none of their citizens may own property here. Absolutely no trade of any kind. Anyone who is currently doing business with them, your contracts are null and void. Find new suppliers.


Just to remind you all YouTube and Stadia product manager was/is Russian person in Silicon Valley.


[flagged]


I can't verify the claim that r/youtube was deleting reports but having regularly used ceddit, I wouldn't be surprised.

However, there's no need for me to argue about the first sentence. Please take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/ and it is literally filled with reports of account bans from the past few hours. 95% of the hot stories. You look in the comments, you find dozens more.

Saving screenshots for posterity (those termination/strike threads on r/youtube are all relevant): https://imgur.com/a/ekqk3B7


OK what seems more plausible: YT is banning people simply for watching a live stream that they are hosting, or that these reports are mistaken or part of a disinformation campaign by a country known for them.


The most plausible explanation I've seen is that Youtube's reporting algorithm is being gamed. It's a known weakness that Google has had no interest in fixing in the past.


Given what we know about YT’s gameable enforcement mechanisms, probably the former.


One report came to me personally from a small local IRC channel (less than 100 people) from a person who's been around for years. I trust them 100%.


Too bad but luckily I don't really care anymore. I de-googlified myself some time ago. My email is fastmail on my own domain, I don't use Google's cloud services.

Sucks for people who are still trapped in the Goolag ecosystem though. Maybe this should be a warning at least not to host your precious family photos with Google and not to use their email service.


This is absolutely irrelevant for the situation. I did similar things, yet you cannot deny that Youtube is hugely important for people's viewpoints on world politics. This isn't about you or me.


I de-googlified myself too and never intend to go back, though this is not just about Google.

This is about centralization. If there isn't Google, there is Facebook Video which would do the same. If there isn't FB Video then there's Twitter, which would do the same and so on.

Even if we, as a minority remove all our accounts from those platforms, the majority use them as the primary media platforms.

We need a paradigm shift at scale to move people off centralized platforms, but we need a candidate first that is convenient for people.


Your personal habits are irrelevant. We live in a shared society and Youtube content will still have an effect on you by way of its viewing by everyone else.


I am not sure about watching, but a few different streamer have said showing dead bodies other other list of things can get you banned. Some streamer I was watching mentioned that even violent gun fights and other things might get you in trouble. They were watching videos first without showing it to make sure it was safe.

I also wonder if youtube is trying to do detect propaganda somehow. Some videos were clearly using old/altered clips and making claims about the war. This might be factoring in too. Unfortunately, no actual detail is provided of what exactly was the trigger. Even some of the reddit thread seems to have disappeared.

In my humble opinion, HN is a file place to be outraged about something some company/person has not but not really that good of a place if there is no data/information/real indication/ that something bad has happened. I am happy to listen to counter points.




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