Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by albertsun 2225 days ago
It's only a tradeoff if you assume that the process must be automated and operate with a minimum of actual human scrutiny or consideration.

Any qualified human review would immediately be able to distinguish and vastly improve both the false negative and false positive rates.

But because these tech companies devalue that kind of work they aren't willing to invest in it.

2 comments

A couple of things to consider:

1. There's a real social cost associated with constantly subjecting human reviewers to traumatizing content. It can lead to devastating mental health problems. (some relevant articles: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo..., https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/12/16/youtube-mo...)

2. Humans make mistakes as well, especially as volume of content increases and policies get more nuanced.

3. There's way more violating content then you could ever imagine. As just one example, YouTube reported having to remove >1.8 BILLION comments for spam or other policy violations in 2019 (https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy).

4. The large tech companies spend billions on human moderation as it is. YouTube alone for example has >10,000 full time human reviewers. (https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-ag...)

Regarding 1: I find it unlikely that most DMCA takedown notices contains traumatizing content. (Arguably) most of it has a copyright on it, which means that someone probably wanted to sell it to a sizeable market. The DMCA takedown notices identify URLs, so you don't really need to use the same pool of people that screen for child abuse and various horrors, and they don't get an unfiltered view of every sort of terms of service violation from every platform, just potential copyright violations, a completely separable issue.
So why not raise the cost of submitting arbitrary user content?
Because I, the user, don't want that. I don't have a problem subjecting myself to Content ID in exchange for the ability to just host all sorts of crap.
Umm, you do realize that this is basically a DDOS attack, and automated tools are a necessity. What needs to happen is a law/legal process where you can counter sue against false DMCA/copyright complaints, with large penalties for indiscriminate and abusive filings. That would put the onus on copyright holders to put in some validation effort before filing.