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> I guess basically what I'm saying is that Google's content moderation problem is really a problem with our society, our politics, and our press. Were those a

by Faark 7y ago

> I guess basically what I'm saying is that Google's content moderation problem is really a problem with our society, our politics, and our press. Were those activists you mentioned campaigning to explicitly get respected analysts removed? Not from what I remember. Lets compare this with a hypothetical: Lets say activists successfully got gov to newly introduce a speed limit. Some time later, a huge chunk of the emergency service personnel is in prison for breaking this new law. Would you actually blame this on activist's? Or maybe a retarded court system, probably combined with incompetent legislators. Back to Youtube. They are either incompetent at making rules or incompetent at reasonably enforcing them, probably cause they entirely offload the latter on some shitty algorithm. Don't get me wrong, algorithms are great as first heuristic to save work. But there has to be a way to get to higher court levels, even if there is some form of cost.

makomk 7y ago
The activists were explicitly campaigning for Google and all the other tech companies to take the exact same agressive, false positives be damned approach that they did to ISIS. They specifically pointed to the ISIS purge as proof that Google etc could do this and were wickedly refusing to do so. In order to justify their narrative that Google was evil for not doing this, they argued that the only reason not to do this was because Google was worried about it affecting right-wingers - even though in reality we know that it would be much more likely to catch reporters and analysts. A better analogy would be if campaigners demanded the police be forced to arrest anyone who broke the speed limit with no exemptions, called anyone who opposed them supporters of dangerous speeding, and then were shocked whem most of the emergency services ended up in jail. I don't think there's even any way around this problem. The activists want anyone who reports on the far right in ways they consider excessively sympathetic to be banned too, and you can't implement "how activists feel" as the policy dictating what's allowed on something the size of YouTube. It just doesn't scale.

by Faark 7y ago

makomk 7y ago

The activists were explicitly campaigning for Google and all the other tech companies to take the exact same agressive, false positives be damned approach that they did to ISIS. They specifically pointed to the ISIS purge as proof that Google etc could do this and were wickedly refusing to do so. In order to justify their narrative that Google was evil for not doing this, they argued that the only reason not to do this was because Google was worried about it affecting right-wingers - even though in reality we know that it would be much more likely to catch reporters and analysts. A better analogy would be if campaigners demanded the police be forced to arrest anyone who broke the speed limit with no exemptions, called anyone who opposed them supporters of dangerous speeding, and then were shocked whem most of the emergency services ended up in jail. I don't think there's even any way around this problem. The activists want anyone who reports on the far right in ways they consider excessively sympathetic to be banned too, and you can't implement "how activists feel" as the policy dictating what's allowed on something the size of YouTube. It just doesn't scale.