5 ms·

What are these bad actors doing that requires top-down censorship and marginalization?

by noego 8y ago

forgottenpass 8y ago
>What are these bad actors doing As far as I can tell the problem is that they scare sheltered white people.
lilactown 8y ago
Posting videos of death, gore, kiddie porn, targeted bullying, fascist propaganda, trying to incite genocide, rape and other violence. The idea that we should allow sites that are marketed to the general public to be unmoderated is completely ridiculous.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  The only things on your list that they should be prohibited by law from showing is kiddie porn, rape, and targeted bullying. People should be able to police themselves from the rest as they see fit, but there's nothing wrong with posting it online.
  - lilactown 8y ago
    Yeah, those should be prohibited by law. I think that genocide should also be on that list. And youtube can (and IMO should) continue to prevent the rest. Death, gore, genocide, fascism, violence, etc. do not belong in general public discourse. There's always some other website to post snuff porn. I don't agree with the way that youtube has applied their guidelines for removing content in general, but I do generally believe that they should moderate their content.
    - themacguffinman 8y ago
      > Yeah, those should be prohibited by law Then try to get it passed. Write to your representative. If it's so obvious that it should be prohibited by law, then you should have no trouble finding support. I suspect what you'll find instead is that people don't think it should be prohibited by law, and prefer to instead threaten and pressure a more vulnerable and less democratic entity like YouTube into carrying out their unpopular censorship desires.
      - lilactown 8y ago
        I think the things I've outlined are pretty popular TBH.
        themacguffinman 8y ago
        Evidently not popular enough to become prohibited by law. Granted, I'm not as familiar with non-US laws.
layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
They have dangerous thoughts and they express them.
nemothekid 8y ago
Ask @dang and/or your favorite forum admins why any open platform needs moderation.
fzeroracer 8y ago
If you have to ask that question, then you've never been a moderator or ran a platform before. There is a lot of content that is invisible to you, the user, because it ends up being filtered out by moderators because it consists of overt racism, calls to violence, outright trolling, stalking and more. Even as a moderator of a small private platform there was a user that was stalked by someone who would attempt to reregister accounts solely for the purpose of harassing them or finding any personal details that they could dig up about them Eventually you have to establish a certain level of moderation for your platform or those bad actors can and will chase off all of the other users for one reason or another. This gets worse as a platform scales and the level of malicious content your platform is exposed to grows exponentially.
- noego 8y ago
  None of the problems you've raised are related to YouTube's proposed changes in the linked articles. They already have rules against most of the things you mentioned. The proposed changes go far beyond them. https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guideli... > Starting in 2012, YouTube rebuilt its service and business model around “watch time,’’ a measure of how much time users spent viewing footage. A spokeswoman said the change was made to reduce deceptive “clickbait” clips. Critics inside and outside the company said the focus on “watch time” rewarded outlandish and offensive videos. YouTube's engine is currently ranking content based on the amount of time other users are spending actively watching that content. Unwanted videos are already de-prioritized by the current algorithm. The proposed changes are explicitly intended to de-prioritize videos that people are actively watching. It remains to be seen how they will measure "quality". If they find a bias-free way to measure it, I'm all for it. Most likely though, it will be driven by top-down notions of "outlandishness" and "offensiveness", as opposed to bottom-up user engagement.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    You asked what kind of bad actors an open platform might have to deal with and I gave you an example with a very small platform. Now you scale that up to match YouTube and it becomes a nightmare. YouTube is being pressured to take action by it's users because what's happening is exactly what I was talking about: They have bad actors taking advantage of your platform. That's where Elsagate came from or the more recent reveal of pedophiles using the platform to groom kids. There is no unbiased way of solving this problem. Because you have to establish certain things as being bad for your platform, which means you are going to be biased against them. Youtubes reaction is in turn them trying to solve issues at scale when they clearly didn't consider how the platform would scale in the first place.

What are these bad actors doing that requires top-down censorship and marginalization?

by noego 8y ago

What are these bad actors doing that requires top-down censorship and marginalization?

forgottenpass 8y ago

>What are these bad actors doing As far as I can tell the problem is that they scare sheltered white people.

lilactown 8y ago

Posting videos of death, gore, kiddie porn, targeted bullying, fascist propaganda, trying to incite genocide, rape and other violence. The idea that we should allow sites that are marketed to the general public to be unmoderated is completely ridiculous.

stronglikedan 8y ago
The only things on your list that they should be prohibited by law from showing is kiddie porn, rape, and targeted bullying. People should be able to police themselves from the rest as they see fit, but there's nothing wrong with posting it online.
- lilactown 8y ago
  Yeah, those should be prohibited by law. I think that genocide should also be on that list. And youtube can (and IMO should) continue to prevent the rest. Death, gore, genocide, fascism, violence, etc. do not belong in general public discourse. There's always some other website to post snuff porn. I don't agree with the way that youtube has applied their guidelines for removing content in general, but I do generally believe that they should moderate their content.
  - themacguffinman 8y ago
    > Yeah, those should be prohibited by law Then try to get it passed. Write to your representative. If it's so obvious that it should be prohibited by law, then you should have no trouble finding support. I suspect what you'll find instead is that people don't think it should be prohibited by law, and prefer to instead threaten and pressure a more vulnerable and less democratic entity like YouTube into carrying out their unpopular censorship desires.
    - lilactown 8y ago
      I think the things I've outlined are pretty popular TBH.
      - themacguffinman 8y ago
        Evidently not popular enough to become prohibited by law. Granted, I'm not as familiar with non-US laws.

layoutIfNeeded 8y ago

They have dangerous thoughts and they express them.

nemothekid 8y ago

Ask @dang and/or your favorite forum admins why any open platform needs moderation.

fzeroracer 8y ago

If you have to ask that question, then you've never been a moderator or ran a platform before. There is a lot of content that is invisible to you, the user, because it ends up being filtered out by moderators because it consists of overt racism, calls to violence, outright trolling, stalking and more. Even as a moderator of a small private platform there was a user that was stalked by someone who would attempt to reregister accounts solely for the purpose of harassing them or finding any personal details that they could dig up about them Eventually you have to establish a certain level of moderation for your platform or those bad actors can and will chase off all of the other users for one reason or another. This gets worse as a platform scales and the level of malicious content your platform is exposed to grows exponentially.

noego 8y ago
None of the problems you've raised are related to YouTube's proposed changes in the linked articles. They already have rules against most of the things you mentioned. The proposed changes go far beyond them. https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guideli... > Starting in 2012, YouTube rebuilt its service and business model around “watch time,’’ a measure of how much time users spent viewing footage. A spokeswoman said the change was made to reduce deceptive “clickbait” clips. Critics inside and outside the company said the focus on “watch time” rewarded outlandish and offensive videos. YouTube's engine is currently ranking content based on the amount of time other users are spending actively watching that content. Unwanted videos are already de-prioritized by the current algorithm. The proposed changes are explicitly intended to de-prioritize videos that people are actively watching. It remains to be seen how they will measure "quality". If they find a bias-free way to measure it, I'm all for it. Most likely though, it will be driven by top-down notions of "outlandishness" and "offensiveness", as opposed to bottom-up user engagement.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  You asked what kind of bad actors an open platform might have to deal with and I gave you an example with a very small platform. Now you scale that up to match YouTube and it becomes a nightmare. YouTube is being pressured to take action by it's users because what's happening is exactly what I was talking about: They have bad actors taking advantage of your platform. That's where Elsagate came from or the more recent reveal of pedophiles using the platform to groom kids. There is no unbiased way of solving this problem. Because you have to establish certain things as being bad for your platform, which means you are going to be biased against them. Youtubes reaction is in turn them trying to solve issues at scale when they clearly didn't consider how the platform would scale in the first place.