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YouTube admits 'wrong call' over deletion of Syrian war crime videos
- ezoe 9y agoWhat I don't like about those web giant services is, to get a human support, it requires to start social pressure like this. If they fucked up something by automation, contacting to human support is hopeless unless you have very influential SNS status or something.
- balozi 9y agoWell, the AI did such a bang–up job sorting out the mess in comment section that it got promoted to sorting out the videos themselves.
- charlesism 9y ago5 minutes reading YouTube comments is enough to make me ill. I don't know what a couple hours a day after school would do to a person after ten years. We'll all find out, I guess, once this generation of kids reaches adulthood.
- dilemma 9y agoProbably has the same effect as computer games did on us - little.
- charlesism 9y agoStatements like that always puzzle me. How would you be able to tell? For example, it is entirely possible that they called it right, back in the 1950s, when they said Rock and Roll would ruin society. We have no access to what would have happened without it, and so nothing with which to compare .
- charlesism 9y ago..should stress I have nothing against Elvis :) It's just useful as a thought experiment.
- goatsi 9y agoThe AI isn't the only problem, Syrian government supporters are actively reporting evidence of war crimes in an attempt to get it removed. https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/898496719125700608 https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/898496719125700608
- RandVal30142 9y agoSomething people need to keep in mind when parsing this story is that many of the effected channels were not about militancy, they were local media outlets. Local outlets that only gained historical note due to what they documented as it was unfolding. In Syria outlets like Sham News Network have posted thousands upon thousands of clips. Everything from stories on civilian infrastructure under war, spots on mental health, live broadcasts of demonstrations. Everything. Including documenting attacks as they happen and after they have happened. Some of the effected accounts were ones that documented the regime's early chemical weapons attacks. These videos are literally cited in investigations. All that is needed to get thousands upon thousands of hours of documentation going back half a decade deleted is three strikes. Liveleak is not a good host for such outlets because it is not what these media outlets are about. Liveleak themselves delete content as well so even if the outlets fit the community it would not be a 'fix.'
- osteele 9y agoHN discussion of deletion event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429
- alexandercrohde 9y agoI think youtube needs to consider backing off regulating political content. The fact is politics and morality are inherently intermingled. One can use words like extremist, but sometimes the extremists are the "correct" ones (like our founding fathers who orchestrated a revolution). How could any system consistently categorize "appropriate" videos without making moral judgements?
- secfirstmd 9y agoAgree but it's far easier for politicians (May, Rudd, Trump, Turnball, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Mugabe, Zuma, Chan-ocha, el-Sisi, Erdoğan, Khamenei, Maduro - the list is endless) to blame videos on Youtube for radicalising people then it is to tackle the long running political, historical and socio-economic grievances that fuel the fire.
- jjoonathan 9y agoNot only politicians, unfortunately.
- hammock 9y agoHillary Clinton/Benghazi...
- snakeanus 9y agoHe did say that the list is endless.
- hammock 9y agoToo bad my comment got flagged by HNers who disagree
- secfirstmd 9y agoLol. I still support your free speech (right or wrong) :)
- jimmy2020 9y agoi really don't know how to describe my feeling as a syrian when i know the most important evidence that witnessed the regime crimes were deleted because of wrong call. And it's really confusing how artificial algorithm get confused between what is is obvious as isis propaganda and a family buried under the rubble and this statement makes things even worse. mistakenly? because there is so many videos? just imagine that may happen to any celebs channel. Will youtube issue the same statement? dont think so.
- tdurden 9y agoGoogle/YouTube needs to admit defeat in this area and stop trying to censor, they are doing more harm than good.
- tzs 9y agoIs there sufficient data available to actually draw that conclusion? All we generally hear about are videos that are taken down because they are false positives, and usually those are just down temporarily. We'd have to know how many are taken down that are not false positives, and how harmful those were, in order to begin to estimate net harm or good.
- Buge 9y agoJust admit defeat and let all the advertisers pull out?[1] Then go bankrupt and (like Soundcloud was on the verge of) let everything get deleted? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/25/google-youtube-advertising-extremist-content-att-verizon https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/25/google-yo...
- CaptSpify 9y agoMaybe the advertisement-funded content needs to be pulled into question then
- itaris 9y agoI'm much a proponent of automation as anyone else. But I think right now Google is trying to do something way too hard. By looking for "extremist" material, they are basically trying to determine the intention of a video. How can you expect an AI to do that?
- jmcdiesel 9y agoI dont think the problem is automation... It's people's expectation for it to be perfect, and the egoic drive to blame someone when something goes wrong. There was no reason for the hype around this story... an AI determinator had a false positive. Thats not google attacking the videos, thats a technical issue and it needs to have zero feelings involved because the entire process happened in a damned computer incapable of feelings... But everyone needs to feed their outrage porn addiction...
- colordrops 9y agoIt's not a technical issue. Software is not yet capable of accurate content detection, and even if it were, it's not clear whether this sort of thing should be automated. It's not like google can just change a few lines of code and the problem is gone.
- jmcdiesel 9y agoThe point is, there will be false positives, there is no reason to get upset and hurt over them... There is no perfect system. If its automated, there will be false positives (and negatives), if there is a human involved, you have a clear bias issue, if there is a group of humans involved, you have societal bias to deal with... There is no perfect system for something like this, to the best answer is to use something like this, that gets it right most of the time... then clean up when it makes a mistake. And you shouldn't have to apologize for the false positive, people need to put on their big boy pants and stop pretending to be the victim when there is no victim to begin with...
- 9y ago
- norea-armozel 9y agoI 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.
- schoen 9y 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".
- norea-armozel 9y agoThe 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.
- 9y ago
- 762236 9y agoAutomation is the only real solution. These types of conversations seem to always overlook how normal people don't want to watch such videos. Do you want to spend your day watching this stuff to grade them?
- EpicEng 9y agoYet youtube is admitting that the videos should not have been pulled, and there's no AI in the world that could have made the right call here. So... what sort of automation are you suggesting? It seems as though the real solution is the exact opposite of what you're proposing; human review by better trained personnel with clearly defined criteria.
- 762236 9y agoThis is irresponsible to the trained personnel. We have job safety requirements for people working on assembly lines. We should also have psychological safety for people, and there are lots of stories of employees that are paid to view the toxic videos suffering (even developing PTSD).
- CaptSpify 9y agoWe have psychological safety checks for police/social service workers/military/etc. Could those not apply here?
- EpicEng 9y agoSo we shouldn't allow jobs which may expose employees to psychologically harmful experiences? You realize you'd have to outlaw a whole slew of professions, right? If you can't take it then don't work the job, Yeesh.
- qbrass 9y agoThe real solution is to continue to blame the machines whenever an angry mob decides to show up at their doorstep instead of admitting it was their clearly defined criteria that was at fault.
- 9y ago
- pgnas 9y agoYouTube (google) has become the EXACT opposite of what they said they were not going to do. They are evil.
- zeep 9y agoAt least, someone at Google was good (honest) enough to drop that motto...
- DINKDINK 9y agoWhat about all the speech that's censored that doesn't have enough interest or political clout to make people aware of the injustice of its censoring.
- williamle8300 9y agoGoogle (parent company of YouTube) already sees itself as the protector of the public's eyes and ears. They might be contrite now but they behave as a censorshipping organization.
- Qwertious 9y agoGee, you don't say.
- molszanski 9y agoLet's look at the bigger picture. First, in March some newspapers find an extremist video. It has ~14 views and YT advertising all over it. They make a a big deal out of it. As a result YouTube looses ad clients and tons of money. Then, as a response, they make an alg. They don't want people to call them a "terrorist platform" ever again. Hence they take down the videos. Now, this algorithm is hurting the bystanders. IMO the real problem is a public and business reaction to the initial event. And this peace of news is an inevitable consequence.
- chii 9y agoif you look at this sequence of events, the deeper trouble is really that of the newspapers (or any other media outlet). Their incentive is to find things people are going to get shocked by, and report it to get views/clicks (that fuel advertising). They aren't going to fully explore the pros/cons, like long form journalism, since that's expensive, and they get paid peanuts from advertisers. The public's reaction is going to be the one of outrage, because the news article was _designed_ to evoke such feelings! If the public sentiment was more liberal, then the news article would've picked an even more extreme event, and evoke the same reaction. Fix the problem at its root - that of advertising funded news and media.
- molszanski 9y agoCouldn't agree more. In my opinion, advertising is not the _only_ problem. Remember, YT is a competitor to the "old media". And hurting them is in their best interest. Hope that initiatives like wikitribune will pave the way to a better future
- miklax 9y agoBellingcat account should be removed, I agree on that with YT.