[ehsankia]

Their automated system has a non-zero false-positive rate. It will from time to time accidentally take down legitimate videos, which they restore fairly quickly once you request a manual review, such as in this case.

Yet people still jump to conclusion and assume malintent, posting headlines which imply Youtube is intentionally removing these videos. Clickbait.

[polynomial]

> which they restore fairly quickly once you request a manual review

Seems like an overly optimistic view, based on stories you hear that small publishers don't stand a chance.

[ehsankia]

Yet people ignore all the cases where it was indeed recovered very quickly, as is the case here.

[soraminazuki]

I've heard enough of these machine learning buzzword bingos every week when things like this happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again.

[skronch]

This is akin to saying "I've heard enough of these NHTSA reports every week when car accidents happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again."

A 0% error rate is a great aspirational target. But it's also important to acknowledge that a complex system may never be perfect. Insisting otherwise is ignoring reality.

[soraminazuki]

Except that these takedowns aren't "accidents." It's more of a catch-all filter that's designed to proactively censor content that even slightly touches on certain matters.

[zo1]

Near zero (not actual 0%) is definitely achievable and within grasp. We just end up playing funding politics because we don't like the price-tag and liberty-curtailment associated with the value of human life and these things we're trying to solve.

Car accidents? Drunk driving? Murders? Dark-web illegal activities? Domestic violence? Those and many others are all solvable problems that we can get very close to zero instances. But right now we're quibbling and putting measures in place that don't get the numbers anywhere close to zero, they just "incrementally" reduce instances and we all applaud and find those meaningful whilst 99% solutions are ignored.

[ehsankia]

Then we should shut down videos on the internet entirely, because 500 hours of video per minute is not something anyone can manually moderate. We would all love to live in an utopia where everything works perfectly and there's a solution to every problem, but that's not realistic.

[soraminazuki]

Constantly cracking down on videos that slightly mentions a certain topic goes way too far. Do we really want GFW style censoring to maintain an artificial utopia where harmful content™️ won't exist?

[thu2111]

No, that isn't what's happening. You're probably not aware of this if you only read particular media outlets but YouTube keep doing this and they keep defending it. It's absolutely intentional and the headlines aren't misleading people, you are.

Read the article: "They rejected our appeal to have the video reinstated." - appeals are at least looked at by humans and the humans are affirming they made the right call. Most likely the only reason this one got fixed is someone internally caused a stink and got it looked at by someone higher up, as usual for Google. But most of the time that isn't happening.

Here's another example of them erasing a video by an actual epidemiologist:

https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/youtube-censors-epidemiologist...

Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, told The Post in a statement: “We quickly remove flagged content that violates our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. We are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”

Note: you aren't allowed to disagree with or even dispute the efficacy of government policy. Period.

There's no difference at this point in policy between a Chinese video site and YouTube, just that the latter are censoring criticism of the state because they've been internally taken over by authoritarians loyal to generic "authority", not because they're forced to. But in the end how does Chinese censorship work? Well, it's not like Xi individually orders people to kill individual stories. It works by ensuring that information services are run by people loyal to the state, who then take decisions autonomously to defend the state.

[ehsankia]

> They rejected our appeal to have the video reinstated

Yet the video is up and working just fine...