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by norea-armozel 3234 days ago
I think YouTube really needs to hire more humans to review flagging of videos rather than leave it to a loose set of algorithms and swarming behavior of viewers. They assume wrongly that anyone who flags a video is honest. They should always assume the opposite and err on the side of caution. And this should also apply to any Content ID flagging. It should be the obligation of accusers to present evidence before taking content down.
1 comments
schoen 3234 days ago
> They assume wrongly that anyone who flags a video is honest.

I don't think they assume that at all. If they did, you'd see at least an order of magnitude more videos removed.

I agree with the sentiment of your criticism, but I think we could phrase it more in terms of prior probabilities or something about the false positive and false negative rate in their review process. Flagging of videos is extremely common and even a small amount of unreliability in the review process translates into a huge number of mistakes.

Also, users of the site don't actually agree with each other much at all about which removals were in error; we could say that there's absolutely abysmal inter-rater reliability if the end-users of the site are the "raters" of the quality of content removal decisions.

Also, most people who flag things don't necessarily know much at all about YouTube's terms of service or how YouTube has interpreted or applied them in the past, so it's hard to be clear on what it means for flaggers to be honest or dishonest. Probably the most common meaning of flagging is "ugh, I'm upset that this video is up on YouTube".

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norea-armozel 3234 days ago
The biggest problem, imo, isn't the random flagger but rather the concerted actions of groups to flag videos. This is obvious in terms of reddit or 4chan users swarming a channel they don't like. This kind of behavior needs to be mitigated in some way. I think a quick solution would be to force a cool down timer on flagging of 24-48 hours for all users to ensure they're not abusing the system. That should include random users who file DCMA takedowns that aren't partnered with Youtube in some way.
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ue_ 3234 days ago
Very much agreed on this swarm behaviour. A political channel made by a very kind person with nice intentions didn't seem to breaking any rules at all, though the /pol/ board on 8chan coordinated mass-flagging attacks against his videos twice which resulted in his channel being deleted twice.
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