12 ms·

The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can pos

by zaroth 8y ago

The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.

_wmd 8y ago
The ramifications of this are profound, at least: - shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!) - they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate) - they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google's.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don't have a technical cure all. It'll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they're the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don't "care about children", they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation. (gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented 'controversial' stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)
- theNJR 8y ago
  I, for one, do not want Google deciding what is true.
  - brentonator 8y ago
    God forbid they put a link to Wikipedia under flat earth videos, huh?
    - mediocrejoker 8y ago
      You only think that's a good idea because you don't believe in flat earth. They could equally put a link to flat earth sites under NASA/SpaceX videos. Do you really want to decree that whatever they link is "true" just because you agree with them in this particular instance?
      - groby_b 8y ago
        Yes. Because obvious idiocy should not be rewarded. There are many things that are debatable, but flat earth? That falls under verifiable facts, and we shouldn't equivocate about those.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        "You only want them to do good things, not bad things! How hypocritical!"
      - claudiawerner 8y ago
        Do you realise how silly this line of argument is? Why exactly should we (or Google for that matter) not recognise that there are differences in some actions? That some things are good, and some things are bad? In what world do you conceive it to be the same to advertise flat earth theories as legitimate unless you are yourself a flat earther? This idea that because nobody has a monopoly on the truth then we can't make decision is utterly futile and silly; I have no idea where it originates, except perhaps in the darkest places where reason has utterly collapsed.
        hackinthebochs 8y ago
        Of course, every authority since the beginning of civilization has carried this mantle in justification for censorship of all sorts. Having Google decide what information can and can't be shared on their platform (read: utility) is a dangerous state of affairs. What new social movement, or recognition of a current injustice will be stifled due a status-quo bias that is codified by such top down control over the media? We can't know from where we currently stand, which is what makes such control dangerous.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Do I want Nestle deciding what video content is worthwhile? No. Do I want edgelords and abusers all over my screen? Also no. At this stage I'll take any attempt to do something, even if it is deeply corporate. At least Nestle you can argue with without getting death threats. (Not always true of e.g. Shell...)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >- they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate) No, they didn't. The problem that Youtube is dealing with is advertisers leaving, not the actual comments. Dealing with the problem of advertisers leaving is different from dealing with those comments. It's unclear whether dealing with those comments is even desirable, because Youtube would, in essence, become the censor of what is and is not okay to post in the comments sections, even if they don't break any codifiable rules or laws. Would you find it acceptable that what your freedom of expression is filtered by rules as unclear as that? Laowhy86 got his comments disabled because his daughter appeared in some of his videos. If this standard were to be pushed across the board then it would effectively ban comments on any videos that have underage people appear in them. Is this desirable for our society? >Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. But this is not true. Firstly, kids on YouTube were NOT impacted by this. When a creep watches a video of a person then that person is not negatively impacted by it. Secondly, all you've done is hide the problem. The videos of the kids still exist, the time stamps can still be created. All the creeps need to do is share that information somewhere else. That's it. And the only way to fight this one is to simply bar kids from appearing in any media content. Good luck posting a video of you walking around town or of an event where somebody underage might be. This is similar to the discussion about whether you are allowed to let your 9 year old go outside unsupervised. It's a question of how much freedom do we allow people and kids in our society. It seems to be that public opinion is on the side of less freedom and more protection.
  - _wmd 8y ago
    > Firstly, kids on YouTube were NOT impacted by this Unfortunately this is inaccurate. There are billions of daily adolescent YouTube users, some of whom entering puberty that were exposed and continue to be exposed to the recommendation algorithm that created this mess in the first place, and for periods running into hours every evening. At such an early stage in development, it is absolutely the company's duty of care to ensure that a 5 year old is not being sent up a gradient of a recommendation system that is encouraging them (with the help of the comments just removed) to view people of their own age in a sexual manner. Not only were children impacted by this, but the mechanism that enables it remains active to this day. I agree with the idea of allowing children outside, but as per my reply to your previous comment, not if that means spending all day in the back yard of the village creepy old man. Balance is required in every situation, and denial of the kind your comment is riddled with accomplishes nothing.
ceejayoz 8y ago
I can't think of having ever seen a comment on YouTube that made the commenting feature seem worthwhile.
- brootstrap 8y ago
  I extensively watch music videos and live music performances on youtube, comments are fun to read. Not sure they are completely necessary but i've learned some interesting things and been turned on to good bands from YT comments!
- Fellshard 8y ago
  This very much depends on what part of YouTube you tend to be in. Much like any online massively-used portal, different segments of videos will attract vastly different users and types of comments. There is somewhat of an over-generalization of YouTube comments, where the description of toxic comments seems more accurately applied to truly /viral/ videos: those that have broken beyond normal segment boundaries, and where the 'best' comments are perceived to be those that draw the greatest reaction, as opposed to genuine commentary on the video itself.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I'm surprised they don't just disable comments for viral videos, too. Now that I think about it, imagine the equivalent of that for other services. For example, imagine if all of Reddit's "default" subreddits (the ones that make up the front page when you're not logged in) had no comments attached to posts. To get comments, you'd have to opt into a community. (Which might very well just be a post-for-post mirror of a "default" community, but with comments enabled.) Seems like it'd be kind of... nice?
- notJim 8y ago
  What? Is it 2006 again? I mostly watch photography videos and vines/weird videos, and the comments sections are often fun and sometimes informative.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  There are a few channels -- Ben Krasnow's 'Applied Science' comes to mind -- where the commenters tend to be well-informed and supportive. But yes, in general YouTube commenters are enough to make one question the long-held conventional wisdom that a nuclear war would be a bad thing. I don't envy the people at Google who have to support and maintain the commenting system on YouTube.
wutbrodo 8y ago
The common theme in every discussion about moderation is that Google, Facebook et al have a division of literal wizards who can wave magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale. This just isn't in touch with reality, but public opinion and pressure has no incentive to be rational, so blunt, restrictive policies like this one are the only path left open to these companies.
- zaroth 8y ago
  In Google’s latest press release they admit they are pushing out a new classifier which flags 2x more comments, and that they are increasing efforts in this area. I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools. I don’t moderate a large YouTube channel, but I will go out on a limb and guess that the tools are rudimentary. Basic things like scoring the comment poster as well as the comment itself, the ability to have verified commenters (but why should this have to be a manual switch?), the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the classifier based on the intended audience of the video... There is a massive valley of opportunity in between what we have today, and “magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale” and perhaps the biggest comment platform on the Internet just decided they need to turn off comments entirely and if you do turn them back on, you need to do manual human pre-approval on each one.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    >I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools. Uh, spam? Spam has a pretty damn massive bag of money attached to it and nobody has managed to get it right. Every single spam filter catches a ridiculous amount of false-positives and spam is far easier to classify than what's required here. Youtube catches a ridiculous amount of comments as false positives in their spam filter. I can't imagine this new category is going to be any better.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
      > ridiculous amount of false-positives Not to mention quite a few false negatives. And the stakes on this are possibly higher, so it will be tuned toward an even higher false-positive rate.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
My guess is they decided it would take them a little while to do it algorithmically and would thus lose even more advertisers, so they bit the bullet and disabled comments. I suspect they're working hard on a different solution.
Pharmakon 8y ago
It’s important to note they’re ceding a fight they never even seriously attempted to engage in where comments and content are concerned. As with all things Google and YT, if it can’t be badly automated, they’d rather kill it than set the precedent of doing anything useful. The short term result will be attention moving on. The long term is building up pressure that will probably result in major regulation. I wouldn’t be shocked if they’re digging a grave in the shape of “They’re too big to be responsible, so break them up.” If your company has a platform that is beyond your capacity to manage responsibily, then your platform needs to shrink, or be chopped up.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >a fight they never even seriously attempted to engage in // Google+ started with a requirement for real names didn't it, no adopted identities. They stuck with it for quite some time. IIRC it did largely cure YouTube comments. But, it damaged engagement, so ...
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    Exactly, they want to have their cake and eat it too. Low overhead, automated everything, anonymous comments, and respectability to draw ad revenue and avoid sanctions. Those are mutually exclusive goals on a large platform, and I don’t look forward to seeing hamhanded legislation with the inevitable cronyism and political infighting “solve” the problem either. Like the big game companies and their kiddie casino business model, it will eventually be slapped down if they can’t control themselves first.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bduerst 8y ago
    Yeah, this whole "Youtube isn't even trying" is a massive survivor bias/fallacy because it ignores all the failed moderation attempts that aren't visible.
    - 8y ago
krapp 8y ago
Google probably could devise such an algorithm or system, but rather chose the cheapest solution that required the least amount of human intervention. That shouldn't surprise anyone, as their goal is maximizing ROI from ad revenue.
notJim 8y ago
I think it's actually a pretty hard problem. > ensure comments meet a basic level of decency Decency is famously difficult to define [0]. One person's idea of decency is another's idea of "free and open debate", is another's idea of alternative culture, etc. And the truly bad actors are using throwaway accounts anyway, or will start as soon as you start banning them. I think active moderation and community curation is the only real solution to this. Sub-communities (formed around particular channels or topics) have to define and enforce their own standards of decency. In this case, I can understand Youtube taking the conservative approach of not trusting communities to do that, especially given a lot of the stories that have come out showing that they aren't. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
- derefr 8y ago
  > And the truly bad actors are using throwaway accounts anyway Have you tried to make a throwaway Google account lately? It's kind of useless to do so. Not so much in the sign-up, but due to the fact that accounts with no history and no clear ties to a physical identity have nothing "vouching" for them, so constantly trip the "Are you a robot?" checks. (And, I imagine, {email, comments, Google Docs shares, etc.} from such accounts also are invisibly thresholded lower on any spam filters they are run through. This is why people write viruses to take over people's existing Google accounts—accounts without "reputation" are kind of worthless for doing anything public-visible.)
  - zbentley 8y ago
    I agree. Much like the email reputation systems that evolved over time, I think other companies (like Google/FB/etc.) will eventually create hidden "reputation scores". For brand-new (maybe throwaway) accounts, those scores will harm the ability to participate in many places. After cultivating reputation (sending emails that don't look sketchy, talking to people who are deemed likely--by IP/demographics/click habits--to be your real-life peers), more participation in different communities will be allowed. Situations where reputation is insufficient for participation will be shadowbans more often than not. This type of system solves a lot of the throwaway-for-purposes-of-evil-behavior problem, and may well be able to do that algorithmically, in lieu of human moderators. In return, it requires people to give up a lot of privacy/anonymity to participate. I don't think that's an inherently good or bad tradeoff, but it is definitely one people should be aware of.
rtkwe 8y ago
Note this is ONLY for videos featuring minors not general videos. Really big difference I think and doesn't mean they're giving up on all comments. Really is seems like an harder problem than general toxic videos. From the reporting it seemed like the whole thing was just comments linking to other videos (not sure anywhere had examples) which is perfectly innocent and the line between that and being part of this pedo comment ring is a matter of exactly where in the video the link leads.
natalyarostova 8y ago
Algorithmic contextual sentiment analysis is still, very much, an open question. Not even the best data and scientists in the world can get all that close to inferring the context clues that the human brain is capable of.
gambler 8y ago
Will you stop using YouTube because of this? No. So Google doesn't loose anything and gains the ability to say they're "fighting toxicity". In reality, if they wanted to fix comments, they could easily do it without any high-tech stuff, through basic UI redesign. It's the quintessential broken window effect. The comment section design is horrible for actual discussions. People who have something intelligent to day simply don't bother. On the other hand, anyone who wants a place to put some hostile nonsense with high visibility gets exactly that. The behavior gets normalized and the ratio of hostile nonsense keeps itself at a high level.
- zbentley 8y ago
  > In reality, if they wanted to fix comments, they could easily do it without any high-tech stuff, through basic UI redesign. Do tell.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    They won’t. You can’t fix it through UX or algorithms. Honestly why allow comments on kids videos at all? What value do they deliver over the risk of abuse? None. This is a step in the right direction for google.
proc0 8y ago
You think they're doing this manually? There's probably some human supervision, but this is actually a failure of their algorithms.
baybal2 8y ago
> The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. Not shocking at all, it's like a typical "welcome to Internet" thing that somebody outside of "computer people culture" gets. Internet is the future of ads, Internet is also the end of ads. Ads are made and used by rich, well fed people, and in their majority targeted at people on other side of social ladder. The TV was perfect for that, it was one sided. Now, the "reflux" that comes back from the Internet culture is hurting them. When some random nobody can pour dirt and bile on videos of pierre cardin toating, avocado munching "successful people" it destroys that image. Google really should do it that way: you either agree to have your ads run on every type of scatalogic content, and your image covered by a metre of dirt, or you don't advertise at all. They can do that.
kick_in_the_dor 8y ago
At Google/YouTube scale, something will always fall through the cracks, and someone will be there to be outraged.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I think this is indicative of their actual ability to meaningfully use this data. The hype around their algorithms and machine learning paints a picture that doesn't match reality.
notatoad 8y ago
What are their other options? Imagine they could, with great accuracy, predict whether somebody is going to leave a good comment or a bad one. Do they expose that to the commenter, saying they've been blocked from commenting because the algorithm thinks they're a shitty person? Imagine the optics of that... The other option is the shadowban, where toxic commenters are hidden without notice. It sounds like a good idea, but just about led to a user revolt when Reddit tried it. Simply turning off comment sections that have the potential to become toxic may not be the most technologically interesting solution, but it's the safest PR move.
- _wmd 8y ago
  If the structure of the service offering exceeds the limits of available technology, then the structure of the service is at fault and needs to change -- wishing away the bad people doesn't work, nor does pretending the issue does not exist (their current strategy) until advertisers are forced to threaten them The option available to them is clear, it's just not something anyone is willing to accept: connecting untrustworthy anonymous third parties to the bedrooms of 5 year olds cannot be done safely within the limits of existing technology.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    That's a funny thing to say. I take it that you are against freedom of expression and speech? Because both of those will (hopefully) never be censored in the way you desire. Remember, nothing in those comments was illegal or even broke the actual rules of basically any online service. >The option available to them is clear, it's just not something anyone is willing to accept: connecting untrustworthy anonymous third parties to the bedrooms of 5 year olds cannot be done safely within the limits of existing technology. Would you ban beaches as well, because creeps might watch others on a beach?
    - _wmd 8y ago
      This reply is needlessly personal, are you materially affected by this issue somehow? > Would you ban beaches as well, because creeps might watch others on a beach? No, but nor would I pretend people can shower and change without cubicles, or permit the nearby village to drown during the first storm because I deluded myself in the belief there was no need for a seawall. There is no rationality to be found in an absolute "save the children at all costs" position, much as there is none in "freedom of speech at all costs". This issue like so many more is nuanced, and I'm surprised people here are so easily willing to deny its possibility, but prefer to get worked up by its very existence or the plain reality nuance is required to solve the problem. Progress is never due to people like that.
bno1 8y ago
>In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency. Those solutions are not perfect and every time Google implemented them they caused collateral damage or even major changes to the whole platform (see the demonetization situation). I believe that they refrain from using them unless pressured to because fixing a problem that is not know to the general public isn't worth the negative PR, complaints, investigations and the damage to stability of the platform.
tsycho 8y ago
SlateStarCodex's recent post on a similar topic was illuminating [1] > It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did. > But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all. > Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons. ... > The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time. > Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
janitor61 8y ago
Google is really a former shell of itself... hell, search doesn't even function correctly for me in Gmail of all things. Google's hands-off algorithmic approach to moderation and support has repeatedly been shown to fail and be easily exploited by nefarious actors. I'd like to see them hire some actual people for once, I think they have the budget for it.
- aehtyb 8y ago
  are you by any chance pineapple clock
TLAFanBoy 8y ago
>In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency. I don't completely blame Google, but all one needs to do is read the comments here to know what's actually happening. This pedophile issue - a real issue - is being paired with the "racist" issue in order to give partisan, political-ideological groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center a quasi-official regulatory status to censor comments on mainstream social media websites. This isn't new, it's just now they found a way to push it openly. When the recent government shutdown ended, the first piece of legislation the US Congress considered, and passed, was to denounce criticism of the government of Israel as "anti-semitism." This legislation was pushed by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL isn't just some objective watchdog, it's an agent of a foreign government with deep ties to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington DC - and an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The Southern Poverty Law Center is, essentially, an off-shore hedge fund, started by a direct-mail scam artist who reinvented themselves as an "anti-hate watchdog" that is given undue credibility by virtually the entire corporate media in the USA. It's a major pressure group aligned with the Democratic party, and it is as "racist" as any of their critics. Border controls - one of Hillary Clinton's campaign issues when she ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic party primaries - is now considered "racist hate speech" by partisans of the SPLC. This particular faction is now leveraging "pedophilia" in order to censor non-left-wing sentiments on social media. It's ironic, because the left, not the right, has spent nearly the last 50 years promoting pedophilia. Just recently, Salon.com, a far left website, infamously gave a platform to a so-called "virtuous pedophile." Of course this website, Hacker News, barely allows non-far-left opinions outside of some "libertarian capitalist" sentiments. But what is kind of shocking is how anti-free-speech so many on this site are. I'm old enough to remember the idealistic - although rather fatuous in hindsight - early days of the "internet culture" which promoted John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" [0] and John Gilmore's sentiment that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." [1] The cowardly weaseling expressed in previous comments here, that this has nothing to do with political pressure or partisan politics, but is merely hard-headed business concern, is absurd on its face. Donald Trump, and "racist" sentiments, are quite popular in America, Europe, and in all countries among all human populations on earth. It's just that the partisan denizens of YCombinator - a far left San Francisco investment company aligned with the far left of the Democratic party and specific Democratic party politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, perhaps the most powerful legislator in the USA (and an extreme racist) - always posture that expressing their political power is really just "hard headed business sense" when it clearly is not. [0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore
bigbluedots 8y ago
Google might not be ready to make it's own social credit scoring system public just yet...
burtonator 8y ago
I think this says more about Google than anything. Google is the new "too big to fail" ... they can't seem to do anything right lately.
checkyoursudo 8y ago
> In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, Maybe the problem is that they don't actually know that much about us. Since one of the other threads (which one, I cannot remember right now -- one of the adtech ones I think) brought up how much supremely accurate location data Google or FB etc knows about any given user, I have been thinking about how much the megacorps actually know, you know, about us. If someone knows that I go to the grocery store two or three times per week, do they also know that I detest going to the grocery store? I do it for a reason, of course, but e.g. showing me ads for grocery stores is likely to create negative feelings in me. So, someone might know I go there a lot, but that doesn't mean they know enough about me to make my world better in any useful way. I don't doubt that some companies know a lot of objective facts about me -- where I go, what I spend money on, with whom I associate -- but I would be surprised if any of them know much about me, about who I am, about what I really like and dislike, about what motivates me, about what I care about, et cetera. Maybe they know more than I can possibly imagine; maybe they know less. Maybe that's not at all why moderating comments programmatically is so difficult. I certainly have no idea. But it makes me wonder.
on_and_off 8y ago
Let's say they are able to make an IA that detect toxic comments. They can even make it relatively accurate with 1 error out of 1000 detections. Sooner or later they will have a false positive that gets a lot of bad publicity as censorship or a false negative on somebody truly horrible. Just cutting all comments on kid seem like the only option that will allow them to give the impression that they are taking the problem seriously. Just like they could not afford to have google photo call dark skinned people gorilla 1 time out of 100000 photos. Better to just remove that label entirely.
FilterSweep 8y ago
This is a company that recommends you nazi videos just for watching anything political. I think they’ve given up on ethics and the greater fight for what’s right long ago.

by zaroth 8y ago

_wmd 8y ago

The ramifications of this are profound, at least: - shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!) - they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate) - they've all but admitted they can't fix this in reasonable time, if at all This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google's.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don't have a technical cure all. It'll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they're the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don't "care about children", they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation. (gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented 'controversial' stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)

theNJR 8y ago
I, for one, do not want Google deciding what is true.
- brentonator 8y ago
  God forbid they put a link to Wikipedia under flat earth videos, huh?
  - mediocrejoker 8y ago
    You only think that's a good idea because you don't believe in flat earth. They could equally put a link to flat earth sites under NASA/SpaceX videos. Do you really want to decree that whatever they link is "true" just because you agree with them in this particular instance?
    - groby_b 8y ago
      Yes. Because obvious idiocy should not be rewarded. There are many things that are debatable, but flat earth? That falls under verifiable facts, and we shouldn't equivocate about those.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      "You only want them to do good things, not bad things! How hypocritical!"
    - claudiawerner 8y ago
      Do you realise how silly this line of argument is? Why exactly should we (or Google for that matter) not recognise that there are differences in some actions? That some things are good, and some things are bad? In what world do you conceive it to be the same to advertise flat earth theories as legitimate unless you are yourself a flat earther? This idea that because nobody has a monopoly on the truth then we can't make decision is utterly futile and silly; I have no idea where it originates, except perhaps in the darkest places where reason has utterly collapsed.
      - hackinthebochs 8y ago
        Of course, every authority since the beginning of civilization has carried this mantle in justification for censorship of all sorts. Having Google decide what information can and can't be shared on their platform (read: utility) is a dangerous state of affairs. What new social movement, or recognition of a current injustice will be stifled due a status-quo bias that is codified by such top down control over the media? We can't know from where we currently stand, which is what makes such control dangerous.
pjc50 8y ago
Do I want Nestle deciding what video content is worthwhile? No. Do I want edgelords and abusers all over my screen? Also no. At this stage I'll take any attempt to do something, even if it is deeply corporate. At least Nestle you can argue with without getting death threats. (Not always true of e.g. Shell...)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Mirioron 8y ago
>- they've admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can't be trusted to self regulate) No, they didn't. The problem that Youtube is dealing with is advertisers leaving, not the actual comments. Dealing with the problem of advertisers leaving is different from dealing with those comments. It's unclear whether dealing with those comments is even desirable, because Youtube would, in essence, become the censor of what is and is not okay to post in the comments sections, even if they don't break any codifiable rules or laws. Would you find it acceptable that what your freedom of expression is filtered by rules as unclear as that? Laowhy86 got his comments disabled because his daughter appeared in some of his videos. If this standard were to be pushed across the board then it would effectively ban comments on any videos that have underage people appear in them. Is this desirable for our society? >Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. But this is not true. Firstly, kids on YouTube were NOT impacted by this. When a creep watches a video of a person then that person is not negatively impacted by it. Secondly, all you've done is hide the problem. The videos of the kids still exist, the time stamps can still be created. All the creeps need to do is share that information somewhere else. That's it. And the only way to fight this one is to simply bar kids from appearing in any media content. Good luck posting a video of you walking around town or of an event where somebody underage might be. This is similar to the discussion about whether you are allowed to let your 9 year old go outside unsupervised. It's a question of how much freedom do we allow people and kids in our society. It seems to be that public opinion is on the side of less freedom and more protection.
- _wmd 8y ago
  > Firstly, kids on YouTube were NOT impacted by this Unfortunately this is inaccurate. There are billions of daily adolescent YouTube users, some of whom entering puberty that were exposed and continue to be exposed to the recommendation algorithm that created this mess in the first place, and for periods running into hours every evening. At such an early stage in development, it is absolutely the company's duty of care to ensure that a 5 year old is not being sent up a gradient of a recommendation system that is encouraging them (with the help of the comments just removed) to view people of their own age in a sexual manner. Not only were children impacted by this, but the mechanism that enables it remains active to this day. I agree with the idea of allowing children outside, but as per my reply to your previous comment, not if that means spending all day in the back yard of the village creepy old man. Balance is required in every situation, and denial of the kind your comment is riddled with accomplishes nothing.

ceejayoz 8y ago

I can't think of having ever seen a comment on YouTube that made the commenting feature seem worthwhile.

brootstrap 8y ago
I extensively watch music videos and live music performances on youtube, comments are fun to read. Not sure they are completely necessary but i've learned some interesting things and been turned on to good bands from YT comments!
Fellshard 8y ago
This very much depends on what part of YouTube you tend to be in. Much like any online massively-used portal, different segments of videos will attract vastly different users and types of comments. There is somewhat of an over-generalization of YouTube comments, where the description of toxic comments seems more accurately applied to truly /viral/ videos: those that have broken beyond normal segment boundaries, and where the 'best' comments are perceived to be those that draw the greatest reaction, as opposed to genuine commentary on the video itself.
- derefr 8y ago
  I'm surprised they don't just disable comments for viral videos, too. Now that I think about it, imagine the equivalent of that for other services. For example, imagine if all of Reddit's "default" subreddits (the ones that make up the front page when you're not logged in) had no comments attached to posts. To get comments, you'd have to opt into a community. (Which might very well just be a post-for-post mirror of a "default" community, but with comments enabled.) Seems like it'd be kind of... nice?
notJim 8y ago
What? Is it 2006 again? I mostly watch photography videos and vines/weird videos, and the comments sections are often fun and sometimes informative.
CamperBob2 8y ago
There are a few channels -- Ben Krasnow's 'Applied Science' comes to mind -- where the commenters tend to be well-informed and supportive. But yes, in general YouTube commenters are enough to make one question the long-held conventional wisdom that a nuclear war would be a bad thing. I don't envy the people at Google who have to support and maintain the commenting system on YouTube.

wutbrodo 8y ago

The common theme in every discussion about moderation is that Google, Facebook et al have a division of literal wizards who can wave magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale. This just isn't in touch with reality, but public opinion and pressure has no incentive to be rational, so blunt, restrictive policies like this one are the only path left open to these companies.

zaroth 8y ago
In Google’s latest press release they admit they are pushing out a new classifier which flags 2x more comments, and that they are increasing efforts in this area. I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools. I don’t moderate a large YouTube channel, but I will go out on a limb and guess that the tools are rudimentary. Basic things like scoring the comment poster as well as the comment itself, the ability to have verified commenters (but why should this have to be a manual switch?), the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the classifier based on the intended audience of the video... There is a massive valley of opportunity in between what we have today, and “magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale” and perhaps the biggest comment platform on the Internet just decided they need to turn off comments entirely and if you do turn them back on, you need to do manual human pre-approval on each one.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools. Uh, spam? Spam has a pretty damn massive bag of money attached to it and nobody has managed to get it right. Every single spam filter catches a ridiculous amount of false-positives and spam is far easier to classify than what's required here. Youtube catches a ridiculous amount of comments as false positives in their spam filter. I can't imagine this new category is going to be any better.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    > ridiculous amount of false-positives Not to mention quite a few false negatives. And the stakes on this are possibly higher, so it will be tuned toward an even higher false-positive rate.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

My guess is they decided it would take them a little while to do it algorithmically and would thus lose even more advertisers, so they bit the bullet and disabled comments. I suspect they're working hard on a different solution.

Pharmakon 8y ago

It’s important to note they’re ceding a fight they never even seriously attempted to engage in where comments and content are concerned. As with all things Google and YT, if it can’t be badly automated, they’d rather kill it than set the precedent of doing anything useful. The short term result will be attention moving on. The long term is building up pressure that will probably result in major regulation. I wouldn’t be shocked if they’re digging a grave in the shape of “They’re too big to be responsible, so break them up.” If your company has a platform that is beyond your capacity to manage responsibily, then your platform needs to shrink, or be chopped up.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
>a fight they never even seriously attempted to engage in // Google+ started with a requirement for real names didn't it, no adopted identities. They stuck with it for quite some time. IIRC it did largely cure YouTube comments. But, it damaged engagement, so ...
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  Exactly, they want to have their cake and eat it too. Low overhead, automated everything, anonymous comments, and respectability to draw ad revenue and avoid sanctions. Those are mutually exclusive goals on a large platform, and I don’t look forward to seeing hamhanded legislation with the inevitable cronyism and political infighting “solve” the problem either. Like the big game companies and their kiddie casino business model, it will eventually be slapped down if they can’t control themselves first.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bduerst 8y ago
  Yeah, this whole "Youtube isn't even trying" is a massive survivor bias/fallacy because it ignores all the failed moderation attempts that aren't visible.
  - 8y ago

krapp 8y ago

Google probably could devise such an algorithm or system, but rather chose the cheapest solution that required the least amount of human intervention. That shouldn't surprise anyone, as their goal is maximizing ROI from ad revenue.

notJim 8y ago

I think it's actually a pretty hard problem. > ensure comments meet a basic level of decency Decency is famously difficult to define [0]. One person's idea of decency is another's idea of "free and open debate", is another's idea of alternative culture, etc. And the truly bad actors are using throwaway accounts anyway, or will start as soon as you start banning them. I think active moderation and community curation is the only real solution to this. Sub-communities (formed around particular channels or topics) have to define and enforce their own standards of decency. In this case, I can understand Youtube taking the conservative approach of not trusting communities to do that, especially given a lot of the stories that have come out showing that they aren't. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

derefr 8y ago
> And the truly bad actors are using throwaway accounts anyway Have you tried to make a throwaway Google account lately? It's kind of useless to do so. Not so much in the sign-up, but due to the fact that accounts with no history and no clear ties to a physical identity have nothing "vouching" for them, so constantly trip the "Are you a robot?" checks. (And, I imagine, {email, comments, Google Docs shares, etc.} from such accounts also are invisibly thresholded lower on any spam filters they are run through. This is why people write viruses to take over people's existing Google accounts—accounts without "reputation" are kind of worthless for doing anything public-visible.)
- zbentley 8y ago
  I agree. Much like the email reputation systems that evolved over time, I think other companies (like Google/FB/etc.) will eventually create hidden "reputation scores". For brand-new (maybe throwaway) accounts, those scores will harm the ability to participate in many places. After cultivating reputation (sending emails that don't look sketchy, talking to people who are deemed likely--by IP/demographics/click habits--to be your real-life peers), more participation in different communities will be allowed. Situations where reputation is insufficient for participation will be shadowbans more often than not. This type of system solves a lot of the throwaway-for-purposes-of-evil-behavior problem, and may well be able to do that algorithmically, in lieu of human moderators. In return, it requires people to give up a lot of privacy/anonymity to participate. I don't think that's an inherently good or bad tradeoff, but it is definitely one people should be aware of.

rtkwe 8y ago

Note this is ONLY for videos featuring minors not general videos. Really big difference I think and doesn't mean they're giving up on all comments. Really is seems like an harder problem than general toxic videos. From the reporting it seemed like the whole thing was just comments linking to other videos (not sure anywhere had examples) which is perfectly innocent and the line between that and being part of this pedo comment ring is a matter of exactly where in the video the link leads.

natalyarostova 8y ago

Algorithmic contextual sentiment analysis is still, very much, an open question. Not even the best data and scientists in the world can get all that close to inferring the context clues that the human brain is capable of.

gambler 8y ago

Will you stop using YouTube because of this? No. So Google doesn't loose anything and gains the ability to say they're "fighting toxicity". In reality, if they wanted to fix comments, they could easily do it without any high-tech stuff, through basic UI redesign. It's the quintessential broken window effect. The comment section design is horrible for actual discussions. People who have something intelligent to day simply don't bother. On the other hand, anyone who wants a place to put some hostile nonsense with high visibility gets exactly that. The behavior gets normalized and the ratio of hostile nonsense keeps itself at a high level.

zbentley 8y ago
> In reality, if they wanted to fix comments, they could easily do it without any high-tech stuff, through basic UI redesign. Do tell.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  They won’t. You can’t fix it through UX or algorithms. Honestly why allow comments on kids videos at all? What value do they deliver over the risk of abuse? None. This is a step in the right direction for google.

proc0 8y ago

You think they're doing this manually? There's probably some human supervision, but this is actually a failure of their algorithms.

baybal2 8y ago

> The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking. Not shocking at all, it's like a typical "welcome to Internet" thing that somebody outside of "computer people culture" gets. Internet is the future of ads, Internet is also the end of ads. Ads are made and used by rich, well fed people, and in their majority targeted at people on other side of social ladder. The TV was perfect for that, it was one sided. Now, the "reflux" that comes back from the Internet culture is hurting them. When some random nobody can pour dirt and bile on videos of pierre cardin toating, avocado munching "successful people" it destroys that image. Google really should do it that way: you either agree to have your ads run on every type of scatalogic content, and your image covered by a metre of dirt, or you don't advertise at all. They can do that.

kick_in_the_dor 8y ago

At Google/YouTube scale, something will always fall through the cracks, and someone will be there to be outraged.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

I think this is indicative of their actual ability to meaningfully use this data. The hype around their algorithms and machine learning paints a picture that doesn't match reality.

notatoad 8y ago

What are their other options? Imagine they could, with great accuracy, predict whether somebody is going to leave a good comment or a bad one. Do they expose that to the commenter, saying they've been blocked from commenting because the algorithm thinks they're a shitty person? Imagine the optics of that... The other option is the shadowban, where toxic commenters are hidden without notice. It sounds like a good idea, but just about led to a user revolt when Reddit tried it. Simply turning off comment sections that have the potential to become toxic may not be the most technologically interesting solution, but it's the safest PR move.

_wmd 8y ago
If the structure of the service offering exceeds the limits of available technology, then the structure of the service is at fault and needs to change -- wishing away the bad people doesn't work, nor does pretending the issue does not exist (their current strategy) until advertisers are forced to threaten them The option available to them is clear, it's just not something anyone is willing to accept: connecting untrustworthy anonymous third parties to the bedrooms of 5 year olds cannot be done safely within the limits of existing technology.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  That's a funny thing to say. I take it that you are against freedom of expression and speech? Because both of those will (hopefully) never be censored in the way you desire. Remember, nothing in those comments was illegal or even broke the actual rules of basically any online service. >The option available to them is clear, it's just not something anyone is willing to accept: connecting untrustworthy anonymous third parties to the bedrooms of 5 year olds cannot be done safely within the limits of existing technology. Would you ban beaches as well, because creeps might watch others on a beach?
  - _wmd 8y ago
    This reply is needlessly personal, are you materially affected by this issue somehow? > Would you ban beaches as well, because creeps might watch others on a beach? No, but nor would I pretend people can shower and change without cubicles, or permit the nearby village to drown during the first storm because I deluded myself in the belief there was no need for a seawall. There is no rationality to be found in an absolute "save the children at all costs" position, much as there is none in "freedom of speech at all costs". This issue like so many more is nuanced, and I'm surprised people here are so easily willing to deny its possibility, but prefer to get worked up by its very existence or the plain reality nuance is required to solve the problem. Progress is never due to people like that.

bno1 8y ago

tsycho 8y ago

SlateStarCodex's recent post on a similar topic was illuminating [1] > It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did. > But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all. > Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons. ... > The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time. > Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

janitor61 8y ago

Google is really a former shell of itself... hell, search doesn't even function correctly for me in Gmail of all things. Google's hands-off algorithmic approach to moderation and support has repeatedly been shown to fail and be easily exploited by nefarious actors. I'd like to see them hire some actual people for once, I think they have the budget for it.

aehtyb 8y ago
are you by any chance pineapple clock

TLAFanBoy 8y ago

>In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency. I don't completely blame Google, but all one needs to do is read the comments here to know what's actually happening. This pedophile issue - a real issue - is being paired with the "racist" issue in order to give partisan, political-ideological groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center a quasi-official regulatory status to censor comments on mainstream social media websites. This isn't new, it's just now they found a way to push it openly. When the recent government shutdown ended, the first piece of legislation the US Congress considered, and passed, was to denounce criticism of the government of Israel as "anti-semitism." This legislation was pushed by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL isn't just some objective watchdog, it's an agent of a foreign government with deep ties to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington DC - and an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The Southern Poverty Law Center is, essentially, an off-shore hedge fund, started by a direct-mail scam artist who reinvented themselves as an "anti-hate watchdog" that is given undue credibility by virtually the entire corporate media in the USA. It's a major pressure group aligned with the Democratic party, and it is as "racist" as any of their critics. Border controls - one of Hillary Clinton's campaign issues when she ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic party primaries - is now considered "racist hate speech" by partisans of the SPLC. This particular faction is now leveraging "pedophilia" in order to censor non-left-wing sentiments on social media. It's ironic, because the left, not the right, has spent nearly the last 50 years promoting pedophilia. Just recently, Salon.com, a far left website, infamously gave a platform to a so-called "virtuous pedophile." Of course this website, Hacker News, barely allows non-far-left opinions outside of some "libertarian capitalist" sentiments. But what is kind of shocking is how anti-free-speech so many on this site are. I'm old enough to remember the idealistic - although rather fatuous in hindsight - early days of the "internet culture" which promoted John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" [0] and John Gilmore's sentiment that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." [1] The cowardly weaseling expressed in previous comments here, that this has nothing to do with political pressure or partisan politics, but is merely hard-headed business concern, is absurd on its face. Donald Trump, and "racist" sentiments, are quite popular in America, Europe, and in all countries among all human populations on earth. It's just that the partisan denizens of YCombinator - a far left San Francisco investment company aligned with the far left of the Democratic party and specific Democratic party politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, perhaps the most powerful legislator in the USA (and an extreme racist) - always posture that expressing their political power is really just "hard headed business sense" when it clearly is not. [0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore

bigbluedots 8y ago

Google might not be ready to make it's own social credit scoring system public just yet...

burtonator 8y ago

I think this says more about Google than anything. Google is the new "too big to fail" ... they can't seem to do anything right lately.

checkyoursudo 8y ago

> In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, Maybe the problem is that they don't actually know that much about us. Since one of the other threads (which one, I cannot remember right now -- one of the adtech ones I think) brought up how much supremely accurate location data Google or FB etc knows about any given user, I have been thinking about how much the megacorps actually know, you know, about us. If someone knows that I go to the grocery store two or three times per week, do they also know that I detest going to the grocery store? I do it for a reason, of course, but e.g. showing me ads for grocery stores is likely to create negative feelings in me. So, someone might know I go there a lot, but that doesn't mean they know enough about me to make my world better in any useful way. I don't doubt that some companies know a lot of objective facts about me -- where I go, what I spend money on, with whom I associate -- but I would be surprised if any of them know much about me, about who I am, about what I really like and dislike, about what motivates me, about what I care about, et cetera. Maybe they know more than I can possibly imagine; maybe they know less. Maybe that's not at all why moderating comments programmatically is so difficult. I certainly have no idea. But it makes me wonder.

on_and_off 8y ago

Let's say they are able to make an IA that detect toxic comments. They can even make it relatively accurate with 1 error out of 1000 detections. Sooner or later they will have a false positive that gets a lot of bad publicity as censorship or a false negative on somebody truly horrible. Just cutting all comments on kid seem like the only option that will allow them to give the impression that they are taking the problem seriously. Just like they could not afford to have google photo call dark skinned people gorilla 1 time out of 100000 photos. Better to just remove that label entirely.

FilterSweep 8y ago

This is a company that recommends you nazi videos just for watching anything political. I think they’ve given up on ethics and the greater fight for what’s right long ago.