4 ms·

This is a job for an investigative journalist... if there is some hidden motive, Google have had enough time to bury it under a pile of NDAs.

by mkl95 6y ago

CydeWeys 6y ago
I'm not saying some nefarious hidden motive, just some every day kind of ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation on the YouTube account. That's my guess.
- mkl95 6y ago
  My guess is that this ban is not an isolated incident. Google are notoriously bad at admitting that something is not behaving as intended.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    That may be true of other lower-profile situations, but this particular ban is behaving as intended. They're just not saying anything publicly about why the ban was enacted.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  > "every day kind of ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation on the YouTube account" But that's the nefarious and the hidden bit, and the biggest complaint is that there is no "motive", because people aren't involved at any stage. Every day bots and algorithms tend to YouTube's ToS violations and don't give enough feedback that explains to a human why they did what they don't, don't seem to be reviewed by a human anywhere in the process, and there seems to exist no real human oversight for appeals or post-mortem reviews. It's all very opaque to people, so yes it is hidden and seems nefarious. It especially seems nefarious that there is no real "motive" just machines eating each other endlessly with seemingly no human oversight. (And then that the YouTube account takedown also takes down most of the communications tools such as GMail along with it only furthers the nefarious and "post-mortem" feelings of such an "every day kind of ban".)
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    The grand-grand-whatever-parent post to this entire discussion thread is "I don't believe no one has noticed at Google yet. There has to be something else at this point." That's what I'm agreeing is going on. It's not just some normal automated process that a human hasn't looked at. I think you're confusing "ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation examined by and confirmed by people" (what we're speculating) with "automated ban no one has even looked at".
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in some of my belief: even if people have noticed now, people can't see clearly enough into the machines. You can't scry "motive" from algorithms, no matter how hard you have tried. You've got opaque numbers and scores and rules around them, and somehow you expect a person to come up with an opinion about how the machine arrived at those actions? We know from centuries of human behavior that rules systems and governments syncretize until the average person just trusts them, assumes their outputs are "fair" when they can't see well enough inside the black box. I am under the impression that such a thing has happened at Google. Too much belief in the "impartiality of algorithms" (which has never been true) blinds a group to avoid questioning what the machines have already done because the machines wouldn't have done it if they didn't have a "good reason". Of course we all know that it is unlikely any of those machines actually reason at all ("have motive"), and instead reflect the biases of their programming, the lack of general oversight in their outliers and false positives/false negatives, the questions of ethics that would be asked of a human judge (and jury), etc. I assume, because Google has given me no evidence to assume otherwise, if people examined and confirmed the result, they did so with a rubber stamp and presumption the machine is right unless proven otherwise. That's the nefarious thing: there's no motive here. The people aren't given motive to question the machine's decisions, because the machine's decisions are "fair", and the machines have no motive of their own to suggest the sorts of "fair" that include ethics and judicial process, just a bunch of dice rolled that landed with enough snake eyes to "convict". (It's a classic sci-fi dystopian tale, that Google has made an unfortunate part of so many lives.)
      - 6y ago

This is a job for an investigative journalist... if there is some hidden motive, Google have had enough time to bury it under a pile of NDAs.

by mkl95 6y ago

This is a job for an investigative journalist... if there is some hidden motive, Google have had enough time to bury it under a pile of NDAs.

CydeWeys 6y ago

I'm not saying some nefarious hidden motive, just some every day kind of ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation on the YouTube account. That's my guess.

mkl95 6y ago
My guess is that this ban is not an isolated incident. Google are notoriously bad at admitting that something is not behaving as intended.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  That may be true of other lower-profile situations, but this particular ban is behaving as intended. They're just not saying anything publicly about why the ban was enacted.
WorldMaker 6y ago
> "every day kind of ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation on the YouTube account" But that's the nefarious and the hidden bit, and the biggest complaint is that there is no "motive", because people aren't involved at any stage. Every day bots and algorithms tend to YouTube's ToS violations and don't give enough feedback that explains to a human why they did what they don't, don't seem to be reviewed by a human anywhere in the process, and there seems to exist no real human oversight for appeals or post-mortem reviews. It's all very opaque to people, so yes it is hidden and seems nefarious. It especially seems nefarious that there is no real "motive" just machines eating each other endlessly with seemingly no human oversight. (And then that the YouTube account takedown also takes down most of the communications tools such as GMail along with it only furthers the nefarious and "post-mortem" feelings of such an "every day kind of ban".)
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  The grand-grand-whatever-parent post to this entire discussion thread is "I don't believe no one has noticed at Google yet. There has to be something else at this point." That's what I'm agreeing is going on. It's not just some normal automated process that a human hasn't looked at. I think you're confusing "ban-worthy confirmed ToS violation examined by and confirmed by people" (what we're speculating) with "automated ban no one has even looked at".
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in some of my belief: even if people have noticed now, people can't see clearly enough into the machines. You can't scry "motive" from algorithms, no matter how hard you have tried. You've got opaque numbers and scores and rules around them, and somehow you expect a person to come up with an opinion about how the machine arrived at those actions? We know from centuries of human behavior that rules systems and governments syncretize until the average person just trusts them, assumes their outputs are "fair" when they can't see well enough inside the black box. I am under the impression that such a thing has happened at Google. Too much belief in the "impartiality of algorithms" (which has never been true) blinds a group to avoid questioning what the machines have already done because the machines wouldn't have done it if they didn't have a "good reason". Of course we all know that it is unlikely any of those machines actually reason at all ("have motive"), and instead reflect the biases of their programming, the lack of general oversight in their outliers and false positives/false negatives, the questions of ethics that would be asked of a human judge (and jury), etc. I assume, because Google has given me no evidence to assume otherwise, if people examined and confirmed the result, they did so with a rubber stamp and presumption the machine is right unless proven otherwise. That's the nefarious thing: there's no motive here. The people aren't given motive to question the machine's decisions, because the machine's decisions are "fair", and the machines have no motive of their own to suggest the sorts of "fair" that include ethics and judicial process, just a bunch of dice rolled that landed with enough snake eyes to "convict". (It's a classic sci-fi dystopian tale, that Google has made an unfortunate part of so many lives.)
    - 6y ago