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We Discovered Google’s Social Justice Blocklist for YouTube Ad Placements

55 points by danso 6y ago

formerly_proven 6y ago
"Black power" being blocked but "white power" not is pretty grim.
- minikites 6y ago
  It's because white people are incredibly sensitive regarding any threat, no matter how weak, to their cultural and political hegemony. Look at white America's reaction to Colin Kapernick's initial silent protest.
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
    This is a pretty racist thing to say.
- abstractbarista 6y ago
  All I want is equality; either block both, or block neither. As a user, I can guarantee I hate all ads equally, but also put up with all equally, because I'm too cheap to pay.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    "White power" is a phrase used to enshrine social inequality and promote violence against minorities. "Black power" is a phrase used to stand against social inequality and to resist that violence. These are not equivalent terms. One is the rallying call of violent aggression and pogroms, while the other is a defense against that. Painting the two phrases as equivalent ignores the social context behind each of them.
    - frob 6y ago
      It's times like these that remind me of my very favorite Bill Buckley quote: "That is like saying that the man who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus is morally equivalent to the man who pushes her out of its path, because they both push little old ladies around." I may disagree with the guy in many ways, but that's a fine quote.
  - tekromancr 6y ago
    This is a bad take. "White power" is a call for supremacy. "Black power" is a call for equity and solidarity. Conflating the two by saying that blocking both or allowing both would be "equality" is.. Mind you, I've only been awake for half an hour; but it's definitely the worst take I have read so far today.
    - MereInterest 6y ago
      For a while there was an internet game going around where you would give a deliberately vague and ambiguous description, then use it to imply similarity for the sake of invoking cognitive dissonance in the reader. For example, "A small group of rag-tag rebels strike at the empire that brought war to them, bringing down a mighty symbol of that empire. Am I describing Star Wars Episode 4, or the 9/11 attacks?". When done for humor sake, these can be rather amusing. abstractbarista's comment is a political attack along the same lines. By drawing an equivalence between the phrases "white power" and "black power", there is the implicit statement that the two are morally equivalent, which is by no means the case. They then follow-up by saying that since the two are equivalent, they should be treated the same. It's a bait and switch, where the syntactic similarity is used to imply semantic similarity where no such semantic similarity exists.
- unanswered 6y ago
  "Black power" is associated with a political ideology shared by tens of millions of people across the US. "White power" is associated with a political ideology shared by dozens of people across the US. If we discover that phrases associated with Cthulhu cults and flying spaghetti monster adherents are likewise not blocked, it's probably not because Google is secretly promoting those religions. But with the publication of this article "white power" no doubt increases in popularity as an ad targeting term, so Google has to add it. There's absolutely nothing surprising or nefarious going on here.
  - minikites 6y ago
    >"White power" is associated with a political ideology shared by dozens of people across the US. You might want to check your numbers. There are a lot of real deal white supremacists in the USA and they're growing stronger: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/episode/2010/9/30/white-power-usa-2 https://www.aljazeera.com/program/episode/2010/9/30/white-po...
    - everythunhuz 6y ago
      Everything that doesn't agree with Critical Race Theory is white supremacist. That's why when black people kill Asians in the US it's because of white supremacy. Black people are forced to kill Asians because of the history of slavery and individuals are merely pawns in the great race struggle, incapable of independent thought or action. That's why prisons should be abolished. At least that's what the Justice Democrats and Black Lives Matter believe
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
bigth 6y ago
I read the whole article and still don't know what they discovered. Highly abused and unlikely to profitable or legit search terms are banned...? What was the discovery?
- falcolas 6y ago
  “Black Lives Matter” is blocked, “All Lives Matter” is not. That’s one thing I took from this. I also took that their implementation of such keywords are poorly implemented - a token implementation at best.
  - noxer 6y ago
    So the one that excludes several races and is the name of an extremist organization is blocked and the other not surprised pikachu
- MereInterest 6y ago
  The asymmetry is the bigger part. Advertising allows for community growth by pointing to more resources and I formation. Essentially, "If you support X, here is a group working on the topic of X.". When this is allowed for X="white power" but forbidden for X="black lives matter", that's a huge disparity. That means ads cannot be used to recruit against police violence, but can be used to recruit for white supremacy.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    It's very easy to make a list like this look asymmetrical when your article cherry picks the most outrage-inducing results from your test and disregards any results that don't fit your narrative.
    - danso 6y ago
      The story links to a Github repo [0] with code, input data, and several notebooks, as well as a lengthy methodology [1]. [0] https://github.com/the-markup/investigation-youtube-ad-placements https://github.com/the-markup/investigation-youtube-ad-place... [1] https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/how-we-discovered-googles-hate-blocklist-for-ad-placements-on-youtube https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/how-we-dis...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
minikites 6y ago
>Yet our investigation revealed that YouTube blocked advertisers’ ability to find social justice content, potentially restricting ad revenue for those YouTubers. When we checked in November, Google Ads did not allow companies to find YouTube videos or channels related to more than a dozen terms associated with these movements—including “Black Lives Matter,” “Black power,” and “I stand with Kaepernick.” >More striking, we found this contradicted how the company treated equivalent terms used by the movement’s critics. “All lives matter,” “blue lives matter,” and “White lives matter” could all be used on Google Ads to find YouTube videos and channels on which to advertise. Facebook and many other companies do the same thing because they realized conservatives are incredibly sensitive and need to be coddled and protected in this way or else they freak out and then it's a giant PR headache.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I find it funny that this has been downvoted into the ground. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
- busterarm 6y ago
  Might want to check your critical reading skills. The takeaway from this is that there are no ad restrictions around the "sensitive conservative" content and there are around social justice content. If there's anyone who is freaking out about the ads, you've got it backwards.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    I think the parent comment was suggesting that the “sensitive conservative” types would be unhappy that their content is considered unworthy of advertising and therefore bad by Google. If Google won’t show ads, people publishing those videos may not make much money.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Youtube has made it pretty clear that they don't give a shit what "sensitive conservative" types on their platform are unhappy about, or really content creators on their platform in general. They only care about public freak outs over the matchup between ads and content, as demonstrated by the multiple Adpocalypse events that have happened.
codethief 6y ago
Honestly, I don't understand what the issue is. I actually appreciate it that YouTube seems to suppress ads that target political topics (even if the blocklist is still incomplete / unbalanced). We already have enough political ads on Facebook; we don't need them on YouTube, too.
- minikites 6y ago
  Weird how it only seems to affect one side of political spectrum though. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - krapp 6y ago
    It's not weird if you consider that Google's primary motive is to make their platform attractive to advertisers and first-party rightsholders, and thus maximize revenue, rather than to spread social justice activism. It's always been the case that left-wing, LGBT and other non-traditionally mainstream content is considered a greater risk for advertisers than right-wing content.
- suifbwish 6y ago
  I really hope that’s sarcasm.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Isn’t the solution to reducing political advertising to ban political ads like Twitter did, rather than binning targeting ads to political topics? Most political ads seem to targeted towards general locations anyway.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Banning political ads on twitter is like sticking your finger in a collapsed dam. 99% of twitter usage is journalists covering politics and political activism. The other vertical on Twitter is celebrities and they mostly have switched over to Instagram content.
eplanit 6y ago
I almost stopped at "southern poverty law center", but I took a grain of salt instead. It's good that I kept reading, so that I could learn that "all lives matter" is considered to be "hate speech".
- ignoranceprior 6y ago
  https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/6954/production/_113046962_6c04f178-e5d7-4453-83be-3f1d69e53327.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/6954/production/...
  - noxer 6y ago
    If black lives would actually be in danger then fine, but they aren't. Its all based on the lie that police somehow shoots people based on their skin color.
- f-word 6y ago
  I mean, really. For a statement noone thought to make until black people started asking to stop being wantonly murdered by cops and which only the sickest people would think to abuse into a "response" to such cries against what is in effect ethnic cleansing it does sure attract a lot of controversy.
CivBase 6y ago
I dislike Google as much as anyone else on HN, but this article is reaching so far I'm afraid it might pull a muscle. They just cherry pick a bunch of terms that were and were not on some random blacklist in a misguided attempt to paint Google as some kind of secret white supremacist sympathizer. This article is trash.
eric4smith 6y ago
It's a private corporation. They can do what they like. And unfortunately, the alternatives, like BitChute, etc are rife with far right, far left, nazi and other stuff. I really tried to use some of them. Really. But even checking some of my favorite content creators, it's kind of jarring to see people in the comments using the nazi symbol as avatars and openly racist language (on both sides) being used. The taste was really bad in my mouth just spending a few minutes over there. Couldn't deal. Had to leave and never to return. Never even tried to load it in my browser again. Have they tried to use any moderation so far? I would love to try it again if they do. Something to be said for even the imperfect moderation on YouTube.
- swebs 6y ago
  How about something like PeerTube that can be self hosted?
  - eric4smith 6y ago
    I will try! Thanks for the rec.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  I can't remember where I first heard it, but there was a good description of a lot of the new social networks popping up. If you make a community whose founding virtue is "no witch hunts", you shouldn't be surprised when it is primarily used by witches, regardless of the prevalence of witches in general society.
swebs 6y ago
>important racial justice terms—including Black Lives Matter, Black power, and Black Muslim >“White lives matter,” “White power,” “White nationalists,” and other retorts and hate phrases. Am I the only one who thinks modern identity politics is completely fucked up?
- emerged 6y ago
  Everyone who is both intelligent and has a soul agrees with you.
snurfer 6y ago
Be sure you get to the penultimate paragraph: "After we approached Google, the company also blocked all the hate phrases that we pointed out were in conflict with the social and racial justice ad blocks. Google began blocking innocuous phrases with other religious words during our reporting, after we began conducting interviews in which we revealed our findings to third parties."
frob 6y ago
I find it very interesting that Google will voice support for the Black Lives Matter movement, but it won't allow others who support BLM to monetize their YouTube content. Google loudly and proudly supports their LGBTQ+ employees and marches in pride parades every year, but won't allow advertisers to support LBGTQ+ channels. Google loudly denounced Trump's Muslim-ban but thinks advertising for "Muslim fashion" might cause PR issues so blocks it. These are not the actions of a company taking a stand for what's right; these are the actions of a company that's always playing the PR game for the sake of their bottom line. As someone who has worked there before, Facebook is just as two-faced in the exact same way.
suifbwish 6y ago
This article reads like it was written by a 9th grader. Google is trying to discourage any racially biased media from their platform (YES black power and white power are equally racist). Here’s a little trick. If you see a phrase with the word “black” in it, in your mind substitute it for “white”. If the new phrase sounds racist to you, it means it was racist before you substituted as well, and the fact that you didn’t think so means you have racial bias that you aren’t even questioning. Is the whole world insane? Logic is not that difficult. Seriously, we let the dumbest stuff divide us as a species.
- danso 6y ago
  So you agree that Google removing divisive categories is better for them and their users – but you're angry that people did the work and found that this policy is unevenly applied? Why is it not worth asking why "Muslim" was blacklisted but not "Christian", "Jewish", or "Buddhist"? > The religious descriptions “Jewish,” “Christian,” and “Buddhist” were also blocked as standalone words. But when we combined them with the word “fashion,” only “Muslim fashion,” one of the terms suggested by advocates, was blocked. “Jewish fashion,” “Christian fashion,” and “Buddhist fashion” were not blocked for advertising when we conducted our study, showing the blanket ban on “Muslim” in combination with any other word did not extend to other religions.
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    You should ask the AI why it decided those terms were worse than others
- noxer 6y ago
  This is how it should work. But reality is different. Have a look at Wikipedia Black pride/White pride for example. One is celebrating culture the other is racist/white supremacist slogan.
DorianSinDeep 6y ago
Appreciate the work done by the journalists to show these discrepancies to Google. They obviously fixed it as one would expect. It is worth noting though that this discrepancy would have been much easier to spot by someone on the other side of the aisle. Maybe Google should put a small rotating committee of paid employees to audit these blocklists. It seems a small cost in exchange for avoiding way too much PR drama.
dtrain2017 6y ago
The story here is that YouTube does not care about content moderation. YouTube has a blacklist but the blacklist is missing the most obvious terms like "White Power' and 'Great Replacement'. Someone at the company is in charge of maintaining the blacklist but was negligent. Why? Also, if searches for words associated with White supremacist culture returned videos then there are other ways to access them, why doesn't Google simply take them down if they are already labelled?

55 points by danso 6y ago

formerly_proven 6y ago

"Black power" being blocked but "white power" not is pretty grim.

minikites 6y ago
It's because white people are incredibly sensitive regarding any threat, no matter how weak, to their cultural and political hegemony. Look at white America's reaction to Colin Kapernick's initial silent protest.
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  This is a pretty racist thing to say.
abstractbarista 6y ago
All I want is equality; either block both, or block neither. As a user, I can guarantee I hate all ads equally, but also put up with all equally, because I'm too cheap to pay.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  "White power" is a phrase used to enshrine social inequality and promote violence against minorities. "Black power" is a phrase used to stand against social inequality and to resist that violence. These are not equivalent terms. One is the rallying call of violent aggression and pogroms, while the other is a defense against that. Painting the two phrases as equivalent ignores the social context behind each of them.
  - frob 6y ago
    It's times like these that remind me of my very favorite Bill Buckley quote: "That is like saying that the man who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus is morally equivalent to the man who pushes her out of its path, because they both push little old ladies around." I may disagree with the guy in many ways, but that's a fine quote.
- tekromancr 6y ago
  This is a bad take. "White power" is a call for supremacy. "Black power" is a call for equity and solidarity. Conflating the two by saying that blocking both or allowing both would be "equality" is.. Mind you, I've only been awake for half an hour; but it's definitely the worst take I have read so far today.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    For a while there was an internet game going around where you would give a deliberately vague and ambiguous description, then use it to imply similarity for the sake of invoking cognitive dissonance in the reader. For example, "A small group of rag-tag rebels strike at the empire that brought war to them, bringing down a mighty symbol of that empire. Am I describing Star Wars Episode 4, or the 9/11 attacks?". When done for humor sake, these can be rather amusing. abstractbarista's comment is a political attack along the same lines. By drawing an equivalence between the phrases "white power" and "black power", there is the implicit statement that the two are morally equivalent, which is by no means the case. They then follow-up by saying that since the two are equivalent, they should be treated the same. It's a bait and switch, where the syntactic similarity is used to imply semantic similarity where no such semantic similarity exists.
unanswered 6y ago
"Black power" is associated with a political ideology shared by tens of millions of people across the US. "White power" is associated with a political ideology shared by dozens of people across the US. If we discover that phrases associated with Cthulhu cults and flying spaghetti monster adherents are likewise not blocked, it's probably not because Google is secretly promoting those religions. But with the publication of this article "white power" no doubt increases in popularity as an ad targeting term, so Google has to add it. There's absolutely nothing surprising or nefarious going on here.
- minikites 6y ago
  >"White power" is associated with a political ideology shared by dozens of people across the US. You might want to check your numbers. There are a lot of real deal white supremacists in the USA and they're growing stronger: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/episode/2010/9/30/white-power-usa-2 https://www.aljazeera.com/program/episode/2010/9/30/white-po...
  - everythunhuz 6y ago
    Everything that doesn't agree with Critical Race Theory is white supremacist. That's why when black people kill Asians in the US it's because of white supremacy. Black people are forced to kill Asians because of the history of slavery and individuals are merely pawns in the great race struggle, incapable of independent thought or action. That's why prisons should be abolished. At least that's what the Justice Democrats and Black Lives Matter believe
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

bigth 6y ago

I read the whole article and still don't know what they discovered. Highly abused and unlikely to profitable or legit search terms are banned...? What was the discovery?

falcolas 6y ago
“Black Lives Matter” is blocked, “All Lives Matter” is not. That’s one thing I took from this. I also took that their implementation of such keywords are poorly implemented - a token implementation at best.
- noxer 6y ago
  So the one that excludes several races and is the name of an extremist organization is blocked and the other not surprised pikachu
MereInterest 6y ago
The asymmetry is the bigger part. Advertising allows for community growth by pointing to more resources and I formation. Essentially, "If you support X, here is a group working on the topic of X.". When this is allowed for X="white power" but forbidden for X="black lives matter", that's a huge disparity. That means ads cannot be used to recruit against police violence, but can be used to recruit for white supremacy.
- CivBase 6y ago
  It's very easy to make a list like this look asymmetrical when your article cherry picks the most outrage-inducing results from your test and disregards any results that don't fit your narrative.
  - danso 6y ago
    The story links to a Github repo [0] with code, input data, and several notebooks, as well as a lengthy methodology [1]. [0] https://github.com/the-markup/investigation-youtube-ad-placements https://github.com/the-markup/investigation-youtube-ad-place... [1] https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/how-we-discovered-googles-hate-blocklist-for-ad-placements-on-youtube https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/08/how-we-dis...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

minikites 6y ago

>Yet our investigation revealed that YouTube blocked advertisers’ ability to find social justice content, potentially restricting ad revenue for those YouTubers. When we checked in November, Google Ads did not allow companies to find YouTube videos or channels related to more than a dozen terms associated with these movements—including “Black Lives Matter,” “Black power,” and “I stand with Kaepernick.” >More striking, we found this contradicted how the company treated equivalent terms used by the movement’s critics. “All lives matter,” “blue lives matter,” and “White lives matter” could all be used on Google Ads to find YouTube videos and channels on which to advertise. Facebook and many other companies do the same thing because they realized conservatives are incredibly sensitive and need to be coddled and protected in this way or else they freak out and then it's a giant PR headache.

AlexandrB 6y ago
I find it funny that this has been downvoted into the ground. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
busterarm 6y ago
Might want to check your critical reading skills. The takeaway from this is that there are no ad restrictions around the "sensitive conservative" content and there are around social justice content. If there's anyone who is freaking out about the ads, you've got it backwards.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I think the parent comment was suggesting that the “sensitive conservative” types would be unhappy that their content is considered unworthy of advertising and therefore bad by Google. If Google won’t show ads, people publishing those videos may not make much money.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Youtube has made it pretty clear that they don't give a shit what "sensitive conservative" types on their platform are unhappy about, or really content creators on their platform in general. They only care about public freak outs over the matchup between ads and content, as demonstrated by the multiple Adpocalypse events that have happened.

codethief 6y ago

Honestly, I don't understand what the issue is. I actually appreciate it that YouTube seems to suppress ads that target political topics (even if the blocklist is still incomplete / unbalanced). We already have enough political ads on Facebook; we don't need them on YouTube, too.

minikites 6y ago
Weird how it only seems to affect one side of political spectrum though. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 6y ago
  It's not weird if you consider that Google's primary motive is to make their platform attractive to advertisers and first-party rightsholders, and thus maximize revenue, rather than to spread social justice activism. It's always been the case that left-wing, LGBT and other non-traditionally mainstream content is considered a greater risk for advertisers than right-wing content.
suifbwish 6y ago
I really hope that’s sarcasm.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dan-robertson 6y ago
Isn’t the solution to reducing political advertising to ban political ads like Twitter did, rather than binning targeting ads to political topics? Most political ads seem to targeted towards general locations anyway.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Banning political ads on twitter is like sticking your finger in a collapsed dam. 99% of twitter usage is journalists covering politics and political activism. The other vertical on Twitter is celebrities and they mostly have switched over to Instagram content.

eplanit 6y ago

I almost stopped at "southern poverty law center", but I took a grain of salt instead. It's good that I kept reading, so that I could learn that "all lives matter" is considered to be "hate speech".

ignoranceprior 6y ago
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/6954/production/_113046962_6c04f178-e5d7-4453-83be-3f1d69e53327.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/6954/production/...
- noxer 6y ago
  If black lives would actually be in danger then fine, but they aren't. Its all based on the lie that police somehow shoots people based on their skin color.
f-word 6y ago
I mean, really. For a statement noone thought to make until black people started asking to stop being wantonly murdered by cops and which only the sickest people would think to abuse into a "response" to such cries against what is in effect ethnic cleansing it does sure attract a lot of controversy.

CivBase 6y ago

I dislike Google as much as anyone else on HN, but this article is reaching so far I'm afraid it might pull a muscle. They just cherry pick a bunch of terms that were and were not on some random blacklist in a misguided attempt to paint Google as some kind of secret white supremacist sympathizer. This article is trash.

eric4smith 6y ago

It's a private corporation. They can do what they like. And unfortunately, the alternatives, like BitChute, etc are rife with far right, far left, nazi and other stuff. I really tried to use some of them. Really. But even checking some of my favorite content creators, it's kind of jarring to see people in the comments using the nazi symbol as avatars and openly racist language (on both sides) being used. The taste was really bad in my mouth just spending a few minutes over there. Couldn't deal. Had to leave and never to return. Never even tried to load it in my browser again. Have they tried to use any moderation so far? I would love to try it again if they do. Something to be said for even the imperfect moderation on YouTube.

swebs 6y ago
How about something like PeerTube that can be self hosted?
- eric4smith 6y ago
  I will try! Thanks for the rec.
MereInterest 6y ago
I can't remember where I first heard it, but there was a good description of a lot of the new social networks popping up. If you make a community whose founding virtue is "no witch hunts", you shouldn't be surprised when it is primarily used by witches, regardless of the prevalence of witches in general society.

swebs 6y ago

>important racial justice terms—including Black Lives Matter, Black power, and Black Muslim >“White lives matter,” “White power,” “White nationalists,” and other retorts and hate phrases. Am I the only one who thinks modern identity politics is completely fucked up?

emerged 6y ago
Everyone who is both intelligent and has a soul agrees with you.

snurfer 6y ago

Be sure you get to the penultimate paragraph: "After we approached Google, the company also blocked all the hate phrases that we pointed out were in conflict with the social and racial justice ad blocks. Google began blocking innocuous phrases with other religious words during our reporting, after we began conducting interviews in which we revealed our findings to third parties."

frob 6y ago

I find it very interesting that Google will voice support for the Black Lives Matter movement, but it won't allow others who support BLM to monetize their YouTube content. Google loudly and proudly supports their LGBTQ+ employees and marches in pride parades every year, but won't allow advertisers to support LBGTQ+ channels. Google loudly denounced Trump's Muslim-ban but thinks advertising for "Muslim fashion" might cause PR issues so blocks it. These are not the actions of a company taking a stand for what's right; these are the actions of a company that's always playing the PR game for the sake of their bottom line. As someone who has worked there before, Facebook is just as two-faced in the exact same way.

suifbwish 6y ago

This article reads like it was written by a 9th grader. Google is trying to discourage any racially biased media from their platform (YES black power and white power are equally racist). Here’s a little trick. If you see a phrase with the word “black” in it, in your mind substitute it for “white”. If the new phrase sounds racist to you, it means it was racist before you substituted as well, and the fact that you didn’t think so means you have racial bias that you aren’t even questioning. Is the whole world insane? Logic is not that difficult. Seriously, we let the dumbest stuff divide us as a species.

danso 6y ago
So you agree that Google removing divisive categories is better for them and their users – but you're angry that people did the work and found that this policy is unevenly applied? Why is it not worth asking why "Muslim" was blacklisted but not "Christian", "Jewish", or "Buddhist"? > The religious descriptions “Jewish,” “Christian,” and “Buddhist” were also blocked as standalone words. But when we combined them with the word “fashion,” only “Muslim fashion,” one of the terms suggested by advocates, was blocked. “Jewish fashion,” “Christian fashion,” and “Buddhist fashion” were not blocked for advertising when we conducted our study, showing the blanket ban on “Muslim” in combination with any other word did not extend to other religions.
- suifbwish 6y ago
  You should ask the AI why it decided those terms were worse than others
noxer 6y ago
This is how it should work. But reality is different. Have a look at Wikipedia Black pride/White pride for example. One is celebrating culture the other is racist/white supremacist slogan.

DorianSinDeep 6y ago

Appreciate the work done by the journalists to show these discrepancies to Google. They obviously fixed it as one would expect. It is worth noting though that this discrepancy would have been much easier to spot by someone on the other side of the aisle. Maybe Google should put a small rotating committee of paid employees to audit these blocklists. It seems a small cost in exchange for avoiding way too much PR drama.

dtrain2017 6y ago

The story here is that YouTube does not care about content moderation. YouTube has a blacklist but the blacklist is missing the most obvious terms like "White Power' and 'Great Replacement'. Someone at the company is in charge of maintaining the blacklist but was negligent. Why? Also, if searches for words associated with White supremacist culture returned videos then there are other ways to access them, why doesn't Google simply take them down if they are already labelled?