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by sigmaris 2672 days ago
Instead of hiring enough humans to review the content they make money from, Google's approach to catching this stuff seems to be doing a global search for videos with "CP" in related text and auto-banning the channels: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47278362 and then claiming that they're making use of "artificial intelligence" to moderate the platform.
1 comments
freeflight 2672 days ago
I'd be really interested in how many humans you'd consider "enough humans" to actually be able to make an impact?

Because it's quite easy to underestimate just how much content is constantly uploaded to YouTube, how much of it is watched and reported, on a per second basis [0].

With numbers like that, you could probably fully employ a small nation of people and still wouldn't be able to review and catch everything. That is the main reason why they try to automate all their solutions, they need to work at a massive scale, manual reviews simply can't do that.

[0] http://www.everysecond.io/youtube

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brandonjm 2672 days ago
Also they will not involve humans because it removes their ability to blame the system. If a human employee fails to correctly flag something (which is likely given the sheer volume of incoming content to review) and it slips through, YouTube could potentially be held liable for its effects (whatever they may be). Whereas if the system misses something it's easier to pass it off as just a bug that needs fixing or an obscure edge case that wasn't handled.
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freeflight 2672 days ago
I doubt that plays any actual role because as long as it's properly outsourced nobody can claim it was one of their employees who censored something. Which is exactly what happens in the Philippines [0]:

> There are two ways the content is forwarded to the Philippines. The first is a pre-filter, an algorithm, a machine that can analyze the shape of, say, a sexual organ, or the color of blood or certain skin color. So whenever the pre-filter is analyzing and it picks up on something that is inappropriate, the machine will send that content to the Philippines and the content moderators will double check if the machine was right. The second route is when the user flags the content as being inappropriate.

Afaik Facebook, Twitter, and Google all participate in this kind of "moderation outsourcing" but the only way this is even possible is if they have AI/ML pre-select content for moderation.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywe7gb/the-companies-clea...

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