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It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewe

by mcast 5y ago

It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewers

Iolaum 5y ago
Indeed. And what's worse they all appear to have the Space X channel name. They look legit the first time you see them unless you treat youtube the same way you do when reading an email, ie looking for phish. And what's worse is that those channels are recommended by the youtube algorithm!!!
- parasense 5y ago
  Actually, what happens is a channel you were subscribed to, or one which you have consumed enough content from to influence the YT algorithm.... has been compromised, taken over, the password was discovered by crypto miners. They take over the channel, change a bunch of settings, etc... then start spewing out the usual Space-X live stream crypto-mining pyramid-scam. Sometimes if you look at the channel hosting the live-stream, you can sometimes still see clues to the old channel you were subscribed. You have to audit through the videos and playlists, old comments, etc...
  - Iolaum 5y ago
    In the two cases I noticed when I investigated the channel looked like it had no uploads other than what I was watching. And there was no visible subscriber count, which I interpreted as likely almost no subscriber. I think YT algorithm tends to push live streamed content. If I see it again I 'll check if the channel has been hijacked or anything else I can find. I 'd rather not see it again though :p
thiht 5y ago
On the last Apple Keynote I wanted to watch the live on YouTube so I looked for it on YouTube directly and the only results I got were older Apple events and crypto scam lives (on channels named stuff like « AppleEvent », stuff like that). I just couldn’t find the real live, but these fake lives had tens of thousands of viewers. YouTube sucks.
rafale 5y ago
If u buy ads from them, you are a honorable and valuable customer, regardless if your ad say "send X btc to this address and we will send you back 2X".
duxup 5y ago
I was on YouTube and got a whole series of ads about a hat that would protect me from 5G …
- LegitShady 5y ago
  i mean, technically true?
  - duxup 5y ago
    Not sure about “protection” … and the other benefits like reducing “brain fog” improved cognition, improved sleep, and the list of bs goes on… whenever you see 5G protection it’s always a rabbit hole.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      well the other 'benefits' obviously not but 100% the hat will protect you from 5g :)
      - duxup 5y ago
        I think the word “protection” implies there’s some reason to be protected.
        LegitShady 5y ago
        I mean technically your skin protects you so you're protected.
        duxup 5y ago
        The add says "from 4G and 5G"
dredmorbius 5y ago
At YouTube (or Facebook, or Twitter) scale, correctly assessing let alone addressing abusive content is a near-intractable problem. One might argue, and I think there's a strong case to do so, that if you can't do a thing viably at scale, then perhaps you should not do it. At the same time, an acknowledgement of the scope of the problem by those criticising practices ... would be a breath of fresh air. (I'm a long-standing critic of most of the information monopolists, and have to the greatest extent possible avoided getting sucked into their respective maws.) Shallow dismissals really don't advance conversation or understanding. Please do better.
- haswell 5y ago
  What are you trying to accomplish with this comment? The intractability of the overall problem is a topic of interest, sure. But this thread is pointing out how poor Google’s current implementation/attempt to solve that problem seems to be. The parent comment adds to the dialog by pointing out that while innocent content is getting removed, truly harmful content still exists and is rampant. Is it piling on? Maybe. But Google is earning the criticism. This doesn’t imply that the solution is simple, but highlights how broken things are. Google is not the only place people can post user generated content, but they have a growing reputation for handling these issues more poorly than most, which isn’t just dismissible because it’s a hard problem to solve.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Before you read the rest of this comment: how many channels do you expect that YouTube removes in year, or a day, or an hour? My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument. The data happen to be readily available online for anyone bothering to look. The problem with both the original comment and your reply here is the denominator is ignored: - How many accounts exist? - How many are removed? - How many of those removals are appealed? I happened to look up the numbers for Facebook a few days ago when similar complaints were lodged against them. And again: I believe in large part that the power and influence of these platforms requires an extraordinary level of care. That said, Facebook blocked 99.8% of fake accounts preemptively before they were flagged by user, in 2021Q3. For a total of 1.8 billion accounts removed. Whatever experience ordinary users of the system had of fake accounts was after that removal of 1.8 billion accounts, nearly 8 billion per year. https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforcement/fake-accounts/facebook/ https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforce... I'm looking up Google's own transparency report based on your comment. The YouTube Community Standards report is here: https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removals https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removal... The headline number is that in 2021Q3, YouTube removed 2.4 million channels. That's an annualised rate of nearly 20 million, and the quarterly removal rate roughly doubled from the 2020Q4 & 2021Q1 rate begining in 2021Q2. The cadence is 55,000 channels per day, or about 2,300 per hour. For comparison, manual reviewers at maximum capacity can moderation about 700--800 items in a day, leaving roughly 30 seconds per item, based on the New York Times comment moderation desk. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv... I've discussed content moderation in terms to total personal media capacity a few years ago here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53qbx3/estimating_personal_daily_media_consumption/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53qbx3/estimat... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/information_security_peps_podesta_who_are_you/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa... Note that we're taking both FB and YT accounts at face value, that the removals were legitimate. Facebook offers information on appeals, Google (so far as I can tell) does not. But at a first approximation the removals seem to be mostly valid. A huge problem is that a small fraction of a very large number ... is still a large number. A 1% misclassification rate of 20 million channels is 200,000 channels/year. A 99.99% accurate classification is still 2,000 channels year. For Facebook, with 5 billion removals/year, a 99.99% accurate rate is 500,000 erroniously banned profiles. And the risk profiles are asymmetric. For the platform. 99.99% success is ... well, pretty good. But for each individual who's erroneously classified, the consequences range from a major annoyance to catastrophic. And lest you think I'm making the case that this is "good enough" or "acceptable losses", I'm not. I think it would be fairly straightforward to make a strong argument for the heavy regulation or break-up of these services strictly on this basis. They have too much control and influence, both at the macro and micro scales, and even near-perfect operations, management, and policies are not nearly good enough. You might also want to think about your own actions, and those of formal and informal institutions in which you believe and/or rely, and consider what their own failure rates in judgement and adjudication are. How many false arrests, or evictions, or debt collections, or sentencings, or executions are you willing to live with, transacted in the name of society?
jandrese 5y ago
This makes sense in a weird way. The spammers have full time jobs figuring out Google's algorithm and how to manipulate it. Regular content creators don't, so they tend to get clobbered by the algorithm. As Google continues to tighten the algorithm to fight spam, eventually the only users who will be able to post are the spammers.
- myself248 5y ago
  If Google were a solo schlub in their basement writing code because they didn't have time to do manual review, that would be understandable, even excusable. But last I checked, they were the #5 largest company in the world. You'd think that an issue that's obvious to literally everyone who uses the platform would also be obvious to even a handful of manual reviewers, and they could take the fight to the spammers a little more aggressively. Just a smidge. Like, one full-time reviewer, since it appears on my feed with devastating regularity, I'd even apply for the job myself, if it meant I could keep that scourge out of my own recommendations. I'm left to conclude that maybe the #5 largest company in the world can't afford one full-time reviewer?
  - jandrese 5y ago
    More likely they outsource the review job to a contractor who operates out of whichever country currently has the most lax labor laws. The contractor hires only the cheapest labor they can find and sets a quota like reviewing at least 360 complaints every hour for their 12 hour shift. Also, if the workers allow an actual bad faith objection to go through they get penalized.
- curun1r 5y ago
  I wonder if Google should be using signals outside of YouTube to help their ML detection efforts. This example seems like a good one…if an account has a paid YouTube Music account that’s been in good standing for months/years, that seems like it should be taken into account. How many spammers would be willing to nurse an account through months/years of paid service only to have it pay off in a brief attempt at scamming people? If you added in listening data, you’d get an even clearer signal that the account is at least attempting to stay within the rules. It feels like Google has it backwards…they’re siloing the fraud detection and banning across different products. If they switched that and did fraud detection across product boundaries and more targeted bans, we’d see far fewer of these AI-run-amok pleas to publicly shame them into getting a human to look into an obvious mistake.
rebelpixel 5y ago
Exactly. In my specific case, there is so much fake news related to the Philippines because of the upcoming May 2022 presidential elections. The son of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos is running for the position and is heavily propped up by a fake news machinery, most likely self-funded by their ill-gotten wealth. Big tech is ruining democracies simply by having so much power yet not having a proper method of flagging targeted misinformation.
CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
And don't forget all the crypto/dropshipping/.. spam advertisement there is on YT.
helloworld11 5y ago
These probably get flagged away just as often or even more so than some rando legit channel that triggered some "reason". The reason they seem to always stay online though is because, well, the people behind them are scammers, and their daily bread comes from repeatedly thwarting anti-scam efforts by bigcorps and scaling back to thousands of apparent viewers as rapidly as possible. None of this is to deny Google's fair share of deserved shit in its face for its hideous customer and user service, but it's a point worth mentioning.

by mcast 5y ago

It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewers

Iolaum 5y ago

Indeed. And what's worse they all appear to have the Space X channel name. They look legit the first time you see them unless you treat youtube the same way you do when reading an email, ie looking for phish. And what's worse is that those channels are recommended by the youtube algorithm!!!

parasense 5y ago
Actually, what happens is a channel you were subscribed to, or one which you have consumed enough content from to influence the YT algorithm.... has been compromised, taken over, the password was discovered by crypto miners. They take over the channel, change a bunch of settings, etc... then start spewing out the usual Space-X live stream crypto-mining pyramid-scam. Sometimes if you look at the channel hosting the live-stream, you can sometimes still see clues to the old channel you were subscribed. You have to audit through the videos and playlists, old comments, etc...
- Iolaum 5y ago
  In the two cases I noticed when I investigated the channel looked like it had no uploads other than what I was watching. And there was no visible subscriber count, which I interpreted as likely almost no subscriber. I think YT algorithm tends to push live streamed content. If I see it again I 'll check if the channel has been hijacked or anything else I can find. I 'd rather not see it again though :p

thiht 5y ago

On the last Apple Keynote I wanted to watch the live on YouTube so I looked for it on YouTube directly and the only results I got were older Apple events and crypto scam lives (on channels named stuff like « AppleEvent », stuff like that). I just couldn’t find the real live, but these fake lives had tens of thousands of viewers. YouTube sucks.

rafale 5y ago

If u buy ads from them, you are a honorable and valuable customer, regardless if your ad say "send X btc to this address and we will send you back 2X".

duxup 5y ago

I was on YouTube and got a whole series of ads about a hat that would protect me from 5G …

LegitShady 5y ago
i mean, technically true?
- duxup 5y ago
  Not sure about “protection” … and the other benefits like reducing “brain fog” improved cognition, improved sleep, and the list of bs goes on… whenever you see 5G protection it’s always a rabbit hole.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    well the other 'benefits' obviously not but 100% the hat will protect you from 5g :)
    - duxup 5y ago
      I think the word “protection” implies there’s some reason to be protected.
      - LegitShady 5y ago
        I mean technically your skin protects you so you're protected.
        duxup 5y ago
        The add says "from 4G and 5G"

dredmorbius 5y ago

At YouTube (or Facebook, or Twitter) scale, correctly assessing let alone addressing abusive content is a near-intractable problem. One might argue, and I think there's a strong case to do so, that if you can't do a thing viably at scale, then perhaps you should not do it. At the same time, an acknowledgement of the scope of the problem by those criticising practices ... would be a breath of fresh air. (I'm a long-standing critic of most of the information monopolists, and have to the greatest extent possible avoided getting sucked into their respective maws.) Shallow dismissals really don't advance conversation or understanding. Please do better.

haswell 5y ago
What are you trying to accomplish with this comment? The intractability of the overall problem is a topic of interest, sure. But this thread is pointing out how poor Google’s current implementation/attempt to solve that problem seems to be. The parent comment adds to the dialog by pointing out that while innocent content is getting removed, truly harmful content still exists and is rampant. Is it piling on? Maybe. But Google is earning the criticism. This doesn’t imply that the solution is simple, but highlights how broken things are. Google is not the only place people can post user generated content, but they have a growing reputation for handling these issues more poorly than most, which isn’t just dismissible because it’s a hard problem to solve.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Before you read the rest of this comment: how many channels do you expect that YouTube removes in year, or a day, or an hour? My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument. The data happen to be readily available online for anyone bothering to look. The problem with both the original comment and your reply here is the denominator is ignored: - How many accounts exist? - How many are removed? - How many of those removals are appealed? I happened to look up the numbers for Facebook a few days ago when similar complaints were lodged against them. And again: I believe in large part that the power and influence of these platforms requires an extraordinary level of care. That said, Facebook blocked 99.8% of fake accounts preemptively before they were flagged by user, in 2021Q3. For a total of 1.8 billion accounts removed. Whatever experience ordinary users of the system had of fake accounts was after that removal of 1.8 billion accounts, nearly 8 billion per year. https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforcement/fake-accounts/facebook/ https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforce... I'm looking up Google's own transparency report based on your comment. The YouTube Community Standards report is here: https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removals https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removal... The headline number is that in 2021Q3, YouTube removed 2.4 million channels. That's an annualised rate of nearly 20 million, and the quarterly removal rate roughly doubled from the 2020Q4 & 2021Q1 rate begining in 2021Q2. The cadence is 55,000 channels per day, or about 2,300 per hour. For comparison, manual reviewers at maximum capacity can moderation about 700--800 items in a day, leaving roughly 30 seconds per item, based on the New York Times comment moderation desk. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv... I've discussed content moderation in terms to total personal media capacity a few years ago here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53qbx3/estimating_personal_daily_media_consumption/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53qbx3/estimat... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/information_security_peps_podesta_who_are_you/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa... Note that we're taking both FB and YT accounts at face value, that the removals were legitimate. Facebook offers information on appeals, Google (so far as I can tell) does not. But at a first approximation the removals seem to be mostly valid. A huge problem is that a small fraction of a very large number ... is still a large number. A 1% misclassification rate of 20 million channels is 200,000 channels/year. A 99.99% accurate classification is still 2,000 channels year. For Facebook, with 5 billion removals/year, a 99.99% accurate rate is 500,000 erroniously banned profiles. And the risk profiles are asymmetric. For the platform. 99.99% success is ... well, pretty good. But for each individual who's erroneously classified, the consequences range from a major annoyance to catastrophic. And lest you think I'm making the case that this is "good enough" or "acceptable losses", I'm not. I think it would be fairly straightforward to make a strong argument for the heavy regulation or break-up of these services strictly on this basis. They have too much control and influence, both at the macro and micro scales, and even near-perfect operations, management, and policies are not nearly good enough. You might also want to think about your own actions, and those of formal and informal institutions in which you believe and/or rely, and consider what their own failure rates in judgement and adjudication are. How many false arrests, or evictions, or debt collections, or sentencings, or executions are you willing to live with, transacted in the name of society?

jandrese 5y ago

This makes sense in a weird way. The spammers have full time jobs figuring out Google's algorithm and how to manipulate it. Regular content creators don't, so they tend to get clobbered by the algorithm. As Google continues to tighten the algorithm to fight spam, eventually the only users who will be able to post are the spammers.

myself248 5y ago
If Google were a solo schlub in their basement writing code because they didn't have time to do manual review, that would be understandable, even excusable. But last I checked, they were the #5 largest company in the world. You'd think that an issue that's obvious to literally everyone who uses the platform would also be obvious to even a handful of manual reviewers, and they could take the fight to the spammers a little more aggressively. Just a smidge. Like, one full-time reviewer, since it appears on my feed with devastating regularity, I'd even apply for the job myself, if it meant I could keep that scourge out of my own recommendations. I'm left to conclude that maybe the #5 largest company in the world can't afford one full-time reviewer?
- jandrese 5y ago
  More likely they outsource the review job to a contractor who operates out of whichever country currently has the most lax labor laws. The contractor hires only the cheapest labor they can find and sets a quota like reviewing at least 360 complaints every hour for their 12 hour shift. Also, if the workers allow an actual bad faith objection to go through they get penalized.
curun1r 5y ago
I wonder if Google should be using signals outside of YouTube to help their ML detection efforts. This example seems like a good one…if an account has a paid YouTube Music account that’s been in good standing for months/years, that seems like it should be taken into account. How many spammers would be willing to nurse an account through months/years of paid service only to have it pay off in a brief attempt at scamming people? If you added in listening data, you’d get an even clearer signal that the account is at least attempting to stay within the rules. It feels like Google has it backwards…they’re siloing the fraud detection and banning across different products. If they switched that and did fraud detection across product boundaries and more targeted bans, we’d see far fewer of these AI-run-amok pleas to publicly shame them into getting a human to look into an obvious mistake.

rebelpixel 5y ago

Exactly. In my specific case, there is so much fake news related to the Philippines because of the upcoming May 2022 presidential elections. The son of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos is running for the position and is heavily propped up by a fake news machinery, most likely self-funded by their ill-gotten wealth. Big tech is ruining democracies simply by having so much power yet not having a proper method of flagging targeted misinformation.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago

And don't forget all the crypto/dropshipping/.. spam advertisement there is on YT.

helloworld11 5y ago

These probably get flagged away just as often or even more so than some rando legit channel that triggered some "reason". The reason they seem to always stay online though is because, well, the people behind them are scammers, and their daily bread comes from repeatedly thwarting anti-scam efforts by bigcorps and scaling back to thousands of apparent viewers as rapidly as possible. None of this is to deny Google's fair share of deserved shit in its face for its hideous customer and user service, but it's a point worth mentioning.