5 ms·

On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles

37 points by vaultcool 7y ago

neaden 7y ago
"Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations. So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children’s clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as 5 or 6 wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split." Holy shit, just burn it down at this point. This is what happens when you just mindlessly optimize.
- untog 7y ago
  At this point I have to assume there is absolutely no-one behind the wheel at YouTube. They just set up an algorithm, check that it's increasing view counts, and did literally nothing else. Forgivable when you're an early stage startup with a small audience perhaps, but absolutely unforgivable at this scale. Time for Google shareholders to demand some level of accountability here (but while the profit is good, I guess they'll be quiet)
- JorgeGT 7y ago
  This reminds me of the day I disabled Youtube history, suggestions, etc: I sometimes listen in Youtube to old civil war-era songs from my country, Spain (my great uncle was a partisan who fought against the fascists). Once I left the autoplay engaged and returned to my Youtube feed filled with current neonazi/extreme-right/conspiracy recommendations. Retracing the browser history, it went something like: historic recordings of civil war/partisan songs -> later recordings by popular musicians of the most vanilla/famous ones -> current renditions of the old songs by extremist groups -> crazy political propaganda from those extremist groups. As you say, it was a first hand experience of what unsupervised, mindless optimization looks like. Ethics are not factored in the merit function, so they just don't exist for the machine.
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- molestation 7y ago
  How is that my problem? It isn't. First of all, I don't activate auto chaining playback, because YouTube's recommendations are an uncanny valley of things I'd consider watching. There but not there. An animated corpse of hypothetical suggestions, undead, clueless and lacking authentic cognition. You can see the machine beneath the still living, disembodied meat on life support. Meanwhile, I didn't make the videos. Nor seek them out, nor does having them dropped in front of me confront my sensibilities as terrifying or humiliating. I'm blameless in this equation and that's not my problem to solve. But hey, wait a minute. There's two parts to this, not one. What about those individuals that do seek out and consume this media? Those who do knowingly violate, pursue such malignancy with intent? That is only a problem for those empowered to stop it. YouTube operations and authorities within their jurisdiction. But what about those individuals who are turned to the dark side, enticed by a new thing they were unprepared to fend off? What if this becomes a mint, effectively stamping criminals, coined anew by the machinations of the platform? Wouldn't that place culpability in a strange place, feeding, fueling, creating crime where it would not have previously existed? This narrative of YouTube "The Enabler" is a lie. That's not how crime works. The internet vice squad would certainly try to prop up a story like that, but the truth is that child molestors are already going be on the prowl in the real world, long before the internet clues such a person in on latent, unrealized desires that make lightbulbs turn on in their already warped minds. Put another way, consider the tendency for Game of Thrones to provoke incest among brothers and sisters. Does a stimulating sex scene between chracters in a TV show awaken latent desires among attractive siblings, such that they now act on ideas that seemed previously impossible? Not really. Not under circumstances where it wasn't going to happen anyway. You can't put the blame on content, and hypothesize that the fault is upon HBO. So too, with YouTube.
child-molestors 7y ago
Oh, shut the fuck up. Why are we still fucking blubbering about pedophiles? It's 2019. They basically don't exist. Law enforcement is so overmatched to hunt them to the ends of the earth, that what few there are, represent a hazard lower than lightning strikes. Regular people playing games as vigilantes only serves to introduce complications into an otherwise predictable cat and mouse game between professional hunters and the hunted, so stay out of the way. So why? Why do I need to know? Why do I need to care? Why does it matter? Maybe the goal is to harm a brand, and NYT is getting paid to smear a name. What the fuck do I care about how YouTube administers and moderates their platform? I'm not a moderator. I can't moderate YouTube. I'm not enforcing and prosecuting laws on the internet. I, the powerless reader, simply get to read a yet another guilt trip from The New York Times. Maybe I should pay money for a subscription! Wow! Yay! Paying to read about child molesters! Great! Thanks NYT!
psychometry 7y ago
What keeps getting lost in this discussion is the fact that young kids are uploading videos to Youtube. That should not be allowed, both de facto and de jure. It's up to both parents and technology providers to make this all but impossible.

37 points by vaultcool 7y ago

"Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations. So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children’s clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as 5 or 6 wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split." Holy shit, just burn it down at this point. This is what happens when you just mindlessly optimize.

untog 7y ago
At this point I have to assume there is absolutely no-one behind the wheel at YouTube. They just set up an algorithm, check that it's increasing view counts, and did literally nothing else. Forgivable when you're an early stage startup with a small audience perhaps, but absolutely unforgivable at this scale. Time for Google shareholders to demand some level of accountability here (but while the profit is good, I guess they'll be quiet)
JorgeGT 7y ago
This reminds me of the day I disabled Youtube history, suggestions, etc: I sometimes listen in Youtube to old civil war-era songs from my country, Spain (my great uncle was a partisan who fought against the fascists). Once I left the autoplay engaged and returned to my Youtube feed filled with current neonazi/extreme-right/conspiracy recommendations. Retracing the browser history, it went something like: historic recordings of civil war/partisan songs -> later recordings by popular musicians of the most vanilla/famous ones -> current renditions of the old songs by extremist groups -> crazy political propaganda from those extremist groups. As you say, it was a first hand experience of what unsupervised, mindless optimization looks like. Ethics are not factored in the merit function, so they just don't exist for the machine.
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molestation 7y ago
How is that my problem? It isn't. First of all, I don't activate auto chaining playback, because YouTube's recommendations are an uncanny valley of things I'd consider watching. There but not there. An animated corpse of hypothetical suggestions, undead, clueless and lacking authentic cognition. You can see the machine beneath the still living, disembodied meat on life support. Meanwhile, I didn't make the videos. Nor seek them out, nor does having them dropped in front of me confront my sensibilities as terrifying or humiliating. I'm blameless in this equation and that's not my problem to solve. But hey, wait a minute. There's two parts to this, not one. What about those individuals that do seek out and consume this media? Those who do knowingly violate, pursue such malignancy with intent? That is only a problem for those empowered to stop it. YouTube operations and authorities within their jurisdiction. But what about those individuals who are turned to the dark side, enticed by a new thing they were unprepared to fend off? What if this becomes a mint, effectively stamping criminals, coined anew by the machinations of the platform? Wouldn't that place culpability in a strange place, feeding, fueling, creating crime where it would not have previously existed? This narrative of YouTube "The Enabler" is a lie. That's not how crime works. The internet vice squad would certainly try to prop up a story like that, but the truth is that child molestors are already going be on the prowl in the real world, long before the internet clues such a person in on latent, unrealized desires that make lightbulbs turn on in their already warped minds. Put another way, consider the tendency for Game of Thrones to provoke incest among brothers and sisters. Does a stimulating sex scene between chracters in a TV show awaken latent desires among attractive siblings, such that they now act on ideas that seemed previously impossible? Not really. Not under circumstances where it wasn't going to happen anyway. You can't put the blame on content, and hypothesize that the fault is upon HBO. So too, with YouTube.

child-molestors 7y ago

Oh, shut the fuck up. Why are we still fucking blubbering about pedophiles? It's 2019. They basically don't exist. Law enforcement is so overmatched to hunt them to the ends of the earth, that what few there are, represent a hazard lower than lightning strikes. Regular people playing games as vigilantes only serves to introduce complications into an otherwise predictable cat and mouse game between professional hunters and the hunted, so stay out of the way. So why? Why do I need to know? Why do I need to care? Why does it matter? Maybe the goal is to harm a brand, and NYT is getting paid to smear a name. What the fuck do I care about how YouTube administers and moderates their platform? I'm not a moderator. I can't moderate YouTube. I'm not enforcing and prosecuting laws on the internet. I, the powerless reader, simply get to read a yet another guilt trip from The New York Times. Maybe I should pay money for a subscription! Wow! Yay! Paying to read about child molesters! Great! Thanks NYT!

psychometry 7y ago

What keeps getting lost in this discussion is the fact that young kids are uploading videos to Youtube. That should not be allowed, both de facto and de jure. It's up to both parents and technology providers to make this all but impossible.