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We’ll this is just massively embarrassing for YouTube. The Reddit thread will get picked up by National media. YouTube will say the reporting was misuse of thei
by throwthere 5y ago
We’ll this is just massively embarrassing for YouTube. The Reddit thread will get picked up by National media. YouTube will say the reporting was misuse of their terms and was a cyberattack from state level actors implying their reporting algo isn’t actually at fault. They will mention that the automated algo protects children and at risk people. They will then reinstate the accounts and say they are sorry for the temporary inconvenience and pleased that they could respond so swiftly. And the algos won’t change, not one bit. And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans.
- megaman821 5y agoI can't imagine what change they could make to the the algorithms to understand world context at an acceptable level. Reporting on the Russian Ukraine conflict and show a dead body. That is news and should probably be left up. A school shooting and show a dead body. Why did the algorithms leave that up so long?
- freeflight 5y ago2017 had a kind of similar situation where YouTube started deleting a whole lot of Syrian civil war related channels [0], apparently due to the algorithm going haywire trying to censor "extremist propaganda". [0] https://www-nytimes-com.translate.goog/2017/08/22/world/middleeast/syria-youtube-videos-isis.html?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=de&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=op,sc https://www-nytimes-com.translate.goog/2017/08/22/world/midd...
- consumer451 5y agoI always assumed this was related to abuse of reporting systems by the opposition.
- jquery 5y agoThe only thing Google understands is money. A nice fat fine from Uncle Sam for aiding and abetting Russia in violation of sanctions might make them prioritize a fix.
- criddell 5y agoI’m not so sure that it’s embarrassing for YouTube, although I think your expected timeline is pretty much spot on. I don’t think people expect much from YouTube.
- kerneloftruth 5y agoYes, not embarrassing for them -- but is more clarification for us.
- HWR_14 5y agoEmbarrassing is not the same as surprising
- risyachka 5y agoConsidering they are a data company with heavy AI departments - not be able to differentiate basic russian bots from users is very embarrassing.
- zacmps 5y agoMost problems Google (& DeepMind) have seen success in are not arms races; you're simply trying to accomplish a difficult task. Dealing with bots, and content moderation in general, is an arms race. You're fighting another person who could be just as smart as you in developing evasion strategies as you are in countering them. Getting it right all of the time is impossible.
- dorgo 5y agoadversarial networks - isn't this exactly the branch of AI which is supposed to solve this?
- zacmps 5y agoI'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'adversarial networks', it could be GANs or adversarial training. Either way, yes, there are techniques for improving performance in the presence of an adversary but it doesn't negate the problem; anything you do will be countered eventually. Clever techniques only buy you more time before someone figures out a way around it.
- seaman1921 5y agoyes, because human over-site is not viable at that scale. Please educate yourself on the scale of youtube. its not like folks at youtube didn't think of the idea of using humans. even classifiers with 99.99% precision means hundreds of thousands of videos and channels will be incorrectly marked as abusive every year - we just need to accept that and hope that the automated systems are improved over time.
- spyc 5y agoWe need to accept that why exactly?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anthonygd 5y ago> Please educate yourself on the scale of youtube. Please be less smug. YouTube has no right or requirement to operate at that scale. They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well. This is no different than a developer who produces terrible non-functional code but defends it to their boss by pointing out the line count is really high. I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.
- seaman1921 5y ago> YouTube has no right or requirement to operate at that scale. so only you can be smug, eh ? > They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well. That is not true. They are doing quite well considering the overall scale. > I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also. So you assess quality by random one-off/anecdotal articles always highlighting the negative ? How do you know what their quality is when you can never know the number of abusive videos correctly blocked ?
- gdulli 5y agoI love the idea of admitting that scaling up technology arbitrarily can make our lives worse instead of better. But no, the answer is not to accept it and hope that it will get better despite no specific and substantive reason to believe it will.
- tertius 5y agoI do fall for the argument that oversight would be too costly given the sheer numbers. I don't like it though.
- ethbr0 5y agoKnow your customer rules are extremely costly for banks to implement, given the sheer numbers. But we mandate it because that's the world we want to live in. The real conversation here is about Alphabet and Facebook's margins. If they're not doing enough, they can spend more and do more.
- bradly 5y agoI’ve work on similar sized systems that utilized a very large human workforce to verify models before release and to monitor/measure production models on a daily basis after release. There are ways to make it efficient.
- philipov 5y agoIt would be costly, but I am confident that Google has the money. They just don't want to spend it, and I am not sympathetic to that.
- alecbz 5y agoThe question is would it be so costly that YouTube's profitability would look significantly different, and at that point would Google want to keep running YouTube? I'm not sure, but I don't think the answer is that it obviously won't materially change YouTube's profitability.
- philipov 5y agoYoutube's value isn't as a profit center, but a way of keeping people inside Google's ad ecosystem. Its value is to dominate the video hosting market so that viable competitors can't rise up in its place. If Google can squeeze profit out, that's icing on the cake, but not the core reason why Google wants to hold on to Youtube. If the profitability of Youtube is on the table, then so should be antitrust, and Google should not be allowed to own it.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
- Aunche 5y agoThe problem is that a finite number of human moderators can't win a fight against an infinite number of spammer robots. Also, keep in mind that humans aren't infallible judges, especially if you're reviewing hundreds of videos a day.
- tyingq 5y agoIt remains amusing to me that Google is able to be stymied by what is probably a ~200 person or less sweatshop of hackers and spammers. It doesn't match all their bravado about their level of expertise in AI/ML, automation, troves of metadata and historical patterns, etc.
- Aunche 5y agoIt's not a symmetric battle. The team of hackers and spammers has nothing to lose. Even if they're only successful 1% of the time, it's still a win.
- tyingq 5y agoI'd venture it has more to do with where Google applies all that expertise. If it were hurting them, I imagine they would solve it quickly.
- Scarblac 5y agoAnd even without all the AI, nothing is stopping Google from employing ten thousand human moderators or whatever.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoCost is a really big stopping reason. The problem not being worth solving to Google is another.
- ipaddr 5y agoAre you saying they can't tell what the topic of a video is about automatically.. because they can. Using that information I would implement a system that would figure out the topic and prevent bots flagging that specific content only.
- causi 5y agoGoogle's fetish for serving more users with fewer employees has been responsible for the failure of so many of their initiatives I often wonder who's behind it.
- kova12 5y agoI wonder how soon administration recognizes this is a national security threat.
- zeruch 5y ago"Shareholders" and the McNamara Fallacy mostly
- kittiepryde 5y agoMcNamara Fallacy - thank you for posting this, it's extremely obvious, but seeing it in print is super helpful, and I think it's important for anyone working in a corporate setting to keep in mind
- zeruch 5y agoI've worked in this industry long enough to understand when people are "McNamaranites" and I tend to push back against them....vigorously. To be a person is to not be reduced to an array of arbitrary scores in a worksheet.
- chrisshroba 5y agoFor others like me who didn't know what the McNamara Fallacy is, here's a quote from its Wikipedia Page [1]: "The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- 5y ago
- frogpelt 5y agoIt may be embarrassing but are they embarrassed? It's not like they're going to suffer for it.
- rvz 5y ago> And the algos won’t change, not one bit. And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans. YouTube does not care. They only care when large popular cable TV networks or large partners leave YouTube. When that happens, that is a big frown for advertisers. Small users, creators or live-streamers have no chance against being listened to by YouTube. The algorithms won't ban the partners throwing cash at them but the small users will get banned automatically and YouTube doesn't care and won't care. That is how it is on YouTube and their private platform with their rules or ToS and we have known for years that they continue to do this and ultimately, they will NEVER change.
- khazhoux 5y ago> And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans. Articles about YT say that 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Moderation has to be automated. You cannot throw more humans effectively at this problem.
- josephcsible 5y agoIf we're going to go that approach, then I'd rather 100 videos be incorrectly left up than 1 video to be incorrectly taken down.
- khazhoux 5y agoWell, it's not really an "if". But, clearly YT's assessment is that the harm of a "bad" video being served on their platform greatly outweighs the harm of incorrect takedowns (which can be appealed). I will call this "The Principle Of Can't Unsee."
- rndphs 5y ago500 hours of video per minute = 30000 per hour. If a moderator watches 30 hours per week that'd be about 0.2 hours per hour. So you'd need 150,000 moderators to watch every minute. Given that billions of people watch youtube, this is one moderator per ten thousand or more viewers. Also considering most of those videos are not going to be watched by more than a handful of people, you could probably get away with a tenth that by only moderating videos with say 100+ views. So about 10,000 moderators required. This costs under a billion per year. Given that Youtube brings in $20B + of revenue, I'm sure this would not kill their profits.
- mkl 5y agoYou could save a lot more by watching faster than real-time and automatically skipping title sequences, gaps, etc.
- sharken 5y agoIt's not just the wages, it's also the extra cost of handling a considerable part of the mods who will develop PTSD. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52642633 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52642633 So you now have a situation where you are making thousands ill and in doing so will incur a cost much higher than 1B per year. But yes, it can be done.