7 ms·

YouTube Knows How to Stop Serving Toxic Videos

35 points by charlesism 8y ago

charlesism 8y ago
Minor point of irritation here. Apparently, there's no C-Level execs, just... The humans who run YouTube and The people who run YouTube and the people in charge of YouTube I always search the page for "Susan Wojcicki" when there's a new article critical of Youtube. No dice. Is there any mention of "Wojcicki" in the Vox article behind this? Nope. How about the NYT article from March that they link to? Nope. No "Wojcicki" there either. Youtube remains a CEO-less company.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  YouTube isn't an independent "company" in the strict sense of the word (even if it has its own legal entities), it is just a division/product of Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet.
- deogeo 8y ago
  It's impolite to demand personal responsibility from corporations. It was the 'United Fruit Company' that funded dictatorships, and 'Comcast' and 'Disney' that bribed for favorable net-neutrality/copyright laws, and 'Monsanto' and 'Big Pharma' that extort people by abusing and writing in their favor the drug regulatory framework. Not any CEO or major stockholder with a name and address, goodness no.
- monksy 8y ago
  A few theories. (From the simpliest to the more complicated) 1. The person who wrote this article is very uneducated about this and they're showing their insecurity. 2. They're trying to defer blame of the problem to a pseudo-anonymous group 3. They're trying to avoid putting blame on Mrs. Wojciki due to personal views on identity (identity is a relevant point as that they have a massive bias on what identity and content they want others to find successful) I'm going to go with #1 because they're pretty preachy.
yllus 8y ago
I don't think the logic here holds up, and the issue is the author's ignorance of the technology and dataset involved. It's very easy for Google.com to show non-toxic results in its Video tab; it basically limits itself to retrieving results from sites humans have whitelisted for inclusion in Google News. They don't whitelist QAnon crackpot sites, so naturally you'll never see those results come up. YouTube, however, is a completely different paradigm - no human pre-filtering happens before content goes online, and its _point_ is to search a catalog of millions of amateur-produced videos. That's very different from searching a few thousand media orgs and their indexed results. Hell, if you only got the results of the media orgs (from their YouTube channels) you could reasonably conclude that YouTube search is broken. My conclusion is that there's no technology solution being held back from YouTube; it's just that Google Video tab just has a completely different point to it.
- 80386 8y ago
  Consider the possibility that turning Youtube into Google News is the goal of the people who talk like this. The internet democratized publishing. That made a lot of people unhappy - not just because of nonsense like Q, but because it let people say they weren't too keen on Communism in China, Ben Ali in Tunisia, or Clinton/Macron-style progressivism in the West. China went and un-democratized it, and a lot of people want the same thing to happen here. It's like how social conservatives wiped out queer communities in places like LiveJournal by targeting NSFW content - they can't come right out and say they liked it better when the only easily accessible sources of information were two local papers and three TV channels, all of which could be depended on to (for example) come out in favor of the war in Iraq, just as the social conservatives couldn't say they wanted to wipe out the fags. So they're targeting conspiracy videos instead.
- anonymouzz 8y ago
  I think it is a matter of target metric. You can optimize just for click-through/watch time (short term reward), but you can also target a composite of that and quality/trustworthiness (long term reward). YouTube seems to mostly optimize the former, while search seems to compromise between both.
- wtracy 8y ago
webwanderings 8y ago
This is nothing compared to what they serve to kids. I long for the TV days when it was safe for kids to watch public TV or PBS. Google is single handedly responsible for fast evolving humans to a time when kids are no longer safe (and there's no oversight assurance by any entity except for the parents themselves).
- favorited 8y ago
  Isn't PBS still available, and free?
strictnein 8y ago
The algorithms aren't complex: People who watched video A and also watched video B and were very likely to comment and interact with it, therefore people watching video A should be presented with video B. It is not making a judgement on video A or B, just that it has noticed the relation. Of course, we now all understand that the most engaging type of content on the internet is the most offensive, negative, and aggressive content. This is no different than much of what is shown on TV, where vast quantities of it are pure garbage, including much of what is shown on the "serious" news channels. Too frequently, the people writing about this and the politicians talking about it really just want to be the ones to set the line on what is "toxic" and "offensive" and have a very strong desire to influence what Google and these other companies should censor. There's also a very strong contingent of the old guard media that wishes to be restored as gatekeeper and view this as their opportunity.
- Kalium 8y ago
  > Too frequently, the people writing about this and the politicians talking about it really just want to be the ones to set the line on what is "toxic" and "offensive" and have a very strong desire to influence what Google and these other companies should censor. I've definitely seen this pattern from people. It's rarely overt, but I do see demands that others "punch down" or that "toxic" things be treated a certain way. This is always coupled with an implicit assumption that there's some clearly understood definition of what those mean that just happens to be exactly what the person using those idioms would offer. Like you, I think this pattern suggests people trying to grab for the privilege of writing definitions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- porpoisely 8y ago
  Good point. It does seem like these people just want their "toxic" videos visible and the other side's "toxic" videos censored. At the end of the day, it's all about control and propaganda. How about hmmdaily and the people who are against "toxic" video just put out interesting videos? Why not compete instead of trying to censor everything? Also, I've never heard of hmmdaily. If anyone knows what it is and what their agenda is, I'd love to learn more about it.
xg15 8y ago
Sorry, I'm surprised how complacent everyone here is. Yes, the internet (and social networks in particular) have been able to democratize publishing and journalism like nothing comparable before - this is a good thing. BUT this advantage is being turned into a horrible disadvantage when that same publishing is causing people to lose touch with reality. If the end result is that we'll get flooded with information, but most of it is meaningless noise then we will have less freedom than before because we cannot be sure the any information we perceive is trustworthy. You cannot seriously want this.
- azangru 8y ago
  > but most of it is meaningless noise then we will have less freedom than before What does this mean? In concrete, practical, down-to-earth sense? > we cannot be sure the any information we perceive is trustworthy This point was already made ages ago. Most famously, by ancient Greek skeptics, and by Descates’ cogito. We live in a world where anything may turn out to be untrustworthy. But we somehow cope, and chug along just fine.
- zeroname 8y ago
  People have never been "in touch" with reality, they're characters in a drama play of their own imagination. Every drama needs villains and heroes.
- adamrezich 8y ago
  "[...] But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulated every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All of this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. You seem to think that our plan is one of censorship. What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context. The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. [...] You exercise your right to 'freedom' and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever 'truth' suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in 'truth.' We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations? That's what it means to create context." –"Colonel" AI, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)
tengbretson 8y ago
I have a question for anyone who reads this and thinks that YouTube needs to police it's own content: How many flat-earther videos would you have to watch before you started to believe that the earth was flat? If your answer is "No amount of flat-earther videos would convince me the earth is flat": 1. Thank goodness 2. Why do you care that they (or any other weird conspiratorial videos) exist at all?
- hobs 8y ago
  This is an argument from personal experience - just because you cant see yourself do it doesnt mean it isnt happening to others. Clearly since flat earthers continue to exist, your logic is broken.
- zeroname 8y ago
  It's never them, it's always the "other" people that need to be "protected" from "toxic" content. Having said that, fake news and conspiracy theories have played a major role in setting the groundwork for the Holocaust, so there's a valid argument to be made there. I wouldn't want the people writing/reading Vox to make the call though.
  - dgacmu 8y ago
    It's easy to identify when others repost propaganda. It's hard to identify when we ourselves fall for it, because by definition, we were fooled. Just as most people believe they are above average drivers, most people probably believe they are above-average at filtering out internet propaganda. Even in a media-savvy forum like HN, I would be willing to bet that most of us, myself obviously included, have at least liked/up voted/whatever'd a modest number of maliciously spread memes/posts/etc.
- minikites 8y ago
  YouTube is extremely popular with children and adolescents who generally lack developed critical thinking skills and the context to evaluate the claims in these videos.
  - 8y ago
mindslight 8y ago
Responding to the title which, while not the entire article, does set the tone: And most everybody knows how to burn books. Lack of knowing how to perform the mechanics is not the reason we refrain.

35 points by charlesism 8y ago

Minor point of irritation here. Apparently, there's no C-Level execs, just... The humans who run YouTube and The people who run YouTube and the people in charge of YouTube I always search the page for "Susan Wojcicki" when there's a new article critical of Youtube. No dice. Is there any mention of "Wojcicki" in the Vox article behind this? Nope. How about the NYT article from March that they link to? Nope. No "Wojcicki" there either. Youtube remains a CEO-less company.

ucaetano 8y ago
YouTube isn't an independent "company" in the strict sense of the word (even if it has its own legal entities), it is just a division/product of Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet.
deogeo 8y ago
It's impolite to demand personal responsibility from corporations. It was the 'United Fruit Company' that funded dictatorships, and 'Comcast' and 'Disney' that bribed for favorable net-neutrality/copyright laws, and 'Monsanto' and 'Big Pharma' that extort people by abusing and writing in their favor the drug regulatory framework. Not any CEO or major stockholder with a name and address, goodness no.
monksy 8y ago
A few theories. (From the simpliest to the more complicated) 1. The person who wrote this article is very uneducated about this and they're showing their insecurity. 2. They're trying to defer blame of the problem to a pseudo-anonymous group 3. They're trying to avoid putting blame on Mrs. Wojciki due to personal views on identity (identity is a relevant point as that they have a massive bias on what identity and content they want others to find successful) I'm going to go with #1 because they're pretty preachy.

yllus 8y ago

I don't think the logic here holds up, and the issue is the author's ignorance of the technology and dataset involved. It's very easy for Google.com to show non-toxic results in its Video tab; it basically limits itself to retrieving results from sites humans have whitelisted for inclusion in Google News. They don't whitelist QAnon crackpot sites, so naturally you'll never see those results come up. YouTube, however, is a completely different paradigm - no human pre-filtering happens before content goes online, and its _point_ is to search a catalog of millions of amateur-produced videos. That's very different from searching a few thousand media orgs and their indexed results. Hell, if you only got the results of the media orgs (from their YouTube channels) you could reasonably conclude that YouTube search is broken. My conclusion is that there's no technology solution being held back from YouTube; it's just that Google Video tab just has a completely different point to it.

80386 8y ago
Consider the possibility that turning Youtube into Google News is the goal of the people who talk like this. The internet democratized publishing. That made a lot of people unhappy - not just because of nonsense like Q, but because it let people say they weren't too keen on Communism in China, Ben Ali in Tunisia, or Clinton/Macron-style progressivism in the West. China went and un-democratized it, and a lot of people want the same thing to happen here. It's like how social conservatives wiped out queer communities in places like LiveJournal by targeting NSFW content - they can't come right out and say they liked it better when the only easily accessible sources of information were two local papers and three TV channels, all of which could be depended on to (for example) come out in favor of the war in Iraq, just as the social conservatives couldn't say they wanted to wipe out the fags. So they're targeting conspiracy videos instead.
anonymouzz 8y ago
I think it is a matter of target metric. You can optimize just for click-through/watch time (short term reward), but you can also target a composite of that and quality/trustworthiness (long term reward). YouTube seems to mostly optimize the former, while search seems to compromise between both.
wtracy 8y ago

webwanderings 8y ago

This is nothing compared to what they serve to kids. I long for the TV days when it was safe for kids to watch public TV or PBS. Google is single handedly responsible for fast evolving humans to a time when kids are no longer safe (and there's no oversight assurance by any entity except for the parents themselves).

favorited 8y ago
Isn't PBS still available, and free?

strictnein 8y ago

The algorithms aren't complex: People who watched video A and also watched video B and were very likely to comment and interact with it, therefore people watching video A should be presented with video B. It is not making a judgement on video A or B, just that it has noticed the relation. Of course, we now all understand that the most engaging type of content on the internet is the most offensive, negative, and aggressive content. This is no different than much of what is shown on TV, where vast quantities of it are pure garbage, including much of what is shown on the "serious" news channels. Too frequently, the people writing about this and the politicians talking about it really just want to be the ones to set the line on what is "toxic" and "offensive" and have a very strong desire to influence what Google and these other companies should censor. There's also a very strong contingent of the old guard media that wishes to be restored as gatekeeper and view this as their opportunity.

Kalium 8y ago
> Too frequently, the people writing about this and the politicians talking about it really just want to be the ones to set the line on what is "toxic" and "offensive" and have a very strong desire to influence what Google and these other companies should censor. I've definitely seen this pattern from people. It's rarely overt, but I do see demands that others "punch down" or that "toxic" things be treated a certain way. This is always coupled with an implicit assumption that there's some clearly understood definition of what those mean that just happens to be exactly what the person using those idioms would offer. Like you, I think this pattern suggests people trying to grab for the privilege of writing definitions.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
porpoisely 8y ago
Good point. It does seem like these people just want their "toxic" videos visible and the other side's "toxic" videos censored. At the end of the day, it's all about control and propaganda. How about hmmdaily and the people who are against "toxic" video just put out interesting videos? Why not compete instead of trying to censor everything? Also, I've never heard of hmmdaily. If anyone knows what it is and what their agenda is, I'd love to learn more about it.

xg15 8y ago

Sorry, I'm surprised how complacent everyone here is. Yes, the internet (and social networks in particular) have been able to democratize publishing and journalism like nothing comparable before - this is a good thing. BUT this advantage is being turned into a horrible disadvantage when that same publishing is causing people to lose touch with reality. If the end result is that we'll get flooded with information, but most of it is meaningless noise then we will have less freedom than before because we cannot be sure the any information we perceive is trustworthy. You cannot seriously want this.

azangru 8y ago
> but most of it is meaningless noise then we will have less freedom than before What does this mean? In concrete, practical, down-to-earth sense? > we cannot be sure the any information we perceive is trustworthy This point was already made ages ago. Most famously, by ancient Greek skeptics, and by Descates’ cogito. We live in a world where anything may turn out to be untrustworthy. But we somehow cope, and chug along just fine.
zeroname 8y ago
People have never been "in touch" with reality, they're characters in a drama play of their own imagination. Every drama needs villains and heroes.
adamrezich 8y ago
"[...] But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulated every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All of this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. You seem to think that our plan is one of censorship. What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context. The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. [...] You exercise your right to 'freedom' and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever 'truth' suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in 'truth.' We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations? That's what it means to create context." –"Colonel" AI, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)

tengbretson 8y ago

I have a question for anyone who reads this and thinks that YouTube needs to police it's own content: How many flat-earther videos would you have to watch before you started to believe that the earth was flat? If your answer is "No amount of flat-earther videos would convince me the earth is flat": 1. Thank goodness 2. Why do you care that they (or any other weird conspiratorial videos) exist at all?

hobs 8y ago
This is an argument from personal experience - just because you cant see yourself do it doesnt mean it isnt happening to others. Clearly since flat earthers continue to exist, your logic is broken.
zeroname 8y ago
It's never them, it's always the "other" people that need to be "protected" from "toxic" content. Having said that, fake news and conspiracy theories have played a major role in setting the groundwork for the Holocaust, so there's a valid argument to be made there. I wouldn't want the people writing/reading Vox to make the call though.
- dgacmu 8y ago
  It's easy to identify when others repost propaganda. It's hard to identify when we ourselves fall for it, because by definition, we were fooled. Just as most people believe they are above average drivers, most people probably believe they are above-average at filtering out internet propaganda. Even in a media-savvy forum like HN, I would be willing to bet that most of us, myself obviously included, have at least liked/up voted/whatever'd a modest number of maliciously spread memes/posts/etc.
minikites 8y ago
YouTube is extremely popular with children and adolescents who generally lack developed critical thinking skills and the context to evaluate the claims in these videos.
- 8y ago

mindslight 8y ago

Responding to the title which, while not the entire article, does set the tone: And most everybody knows how to burn books. Lack of knowing how to perform the mechanics is not the reason we refrain.