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Youtube used to be a distribution channel but it slowly became an ad delivery tool with content along for the ride. Like 99% of other free (and even some paid)
by ballenf 9y ago
Youtube used to be a distribution channel but it slowly became an ad delivery tool with content along for the ride. Like 99% of other free (and even some paid) internet sites.
Either way, totally agree that it's a tragic situation.
The only sympathy I have for Google is that trying to separate the good vs. "evil" (as in "Don't be evil.") content is a monumental task that machine learning will probably never be capable of performing. So they're left with the choice of spending an inordinate amount on human review and detailed research or just make wildly over-broad removals.
I'd rather they leave up more rather than less, but they tried this approach and it almost lost them every major advertiser. So continuing down that road would potentially lead to the whole platform losing viability. Maybe some would like that outcome but these historical videos would be just as lost.
Maybe we'll see the pendulum swing back in an effort to reach a more reasonable middle ground.
- nxc18 9y agoGoogle has an inordinate amount of money to spend on inordinate amount of content review. Deleting history and evidence of war crimes is Evil; good thing Google had abandoned their earlier aspirations.
- jptman 9y agoI think you are underestimating the amount of video that gets uploaded to Youtube. Smaller sites may be better at stuff like this but that's solely because they don't have quite the amount of content. Hundreds of hours of videos are uploaded per minute. They may eventually have AI good enough to do a better job, but this is an unprecedented amount of content to review.
- CaptSpify 9y agoSo? If youtube can't handle the load, then they shouldn't claim that they can. At the absolute lest, they need a usable appeals process. If they can't do that, then they need to own up to it, and stop allowing anyone to upload anything.
- koide 9y agoSorry, but why? Google owns nobody anything. If you have war crime evidence or other important content to publish, upload it to YouTube and all other video sites, letting archive.org and other human rights organizations in the loop. You can put the press in the mix as well.
- CaptSpify 9y agoBecause it's a shitty thing to do, and we shouldn't encourage shitty behavior? Just because they want to take the cheap and lazy route doesn't mean that we can't criticize them for it.
- fastball 9y agoWhy? Own up to what? YouTube is a company that is beholden to advertisers. YouTube wants/pays for videos that they can put ads in front of. If your content is not the type of content YouTube can wrap in ads, and you need longevity for your videos, YouTube is not the platform for you. YouTube never claimed to be an everlasting video storage space for all your video needs, so I'm not sure why you're expecting that of them.
- Kequc 9y agoIt's in part because that is what Google has done in the past. They give you unlimited space to store your photos, your email, and your data, why wouldn't you expect to be able to store video. Video has become politicised because it is a popular medium for political topics and one which can be rapidly produced and consumed. Advertisers are perhaps influencing Google's decisions on this, but they are equally political. The debacle with the diversity memo is one example of biases inside of the company. There have been many more examples over the last years, one such example is censorship across the board of conservative commentators. It goes on in Facebook, Twitter and so on. So we have to wait for competitors to turn up, how many years will that take? Is that a responsible route considering the foothold these companies have?
- 9y ago
- wbl 9y agoIt's hopeless for people. Is that footage of ISIS burning a prisoner alive evidence of war crimes or propaganda? How about both! Ban child nudity and depictions of cruelty to children: you've just banned a Pulitzer prize winning photograph from the Vietnam war.
- ikeboy 9y agoLeave them up, but remove ads?
- davidreiss 9y ago> The only sympathy I have for Google is that trying to separate the good vs. "evil" (as in "Don't be evil.") content is a monumental task that machine learning will probably never be capable of performing That's an impossibility because evil depends on perspective. This is why we have free speech rights in america. If we determined others to limit our free speech by their perception of evil, then atheist speech and lgbt speech would be banned. Pornography would be banned along with "offensive" music. Hell books like huckleberry finn would be banned. This is why we cherish free speech rights in america ( or we used to ) and why we have the saying "You have the right to be offended".