4 ms·

They could just flag the accounts of educational institutions as educational. I sincerely doubt the Cornell University Library is going to pivot to pornography.

by tedivm 4y ago

puffoflogic 4y ago
On the other hand, wrongthink is quite likely to come out of such an institution (historically speaking, maybe not so much in the current place and time). So it would be a bad idea from the censors' point of view to allowlist the account.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Are you using "wrongthink" to ironically mean a wrong thought?
- sophacles 4y ago
  So what you are saying that it makes sense to ban people for ideas you consider wrong, because you worry that those ideas might lead to people being banned for ideas that are wrong?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  Still seems like a bad political[0] move for them to so shamelessly censor an institution of learning. [0] As in it will leave a bad impression on a lot of people, not that they'll lose the next election.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I'm not sure if they'd even want to. Youtube exists to make money of ads and giving account exemptions so that they can upload long-form content explicitly not fit for advertisers seems like a poor business model. Google is definitely not in it for the good of humanity (and neither are the decision makers at a lot of educational facilities, as hard as some staff may try to improve that). In a perfect world your solution would fix the problem, but in practice it doesn't work out. Vimeo seems like a much better fit for eduction to be honest. They're probably more expensive, though.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Vimeo is moving to a B2B model, so definitely too expensive. What they really want is to upload the Internet Archive, but the UI really sucks.
- bambax 4y ago
  But why would all advertisers refrain from putting ads next to lectures, even if some imagery is a little risqué? That some advertisers would not like it, sure, but all of them?
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    In the US, mainstream culture considers pornography to be totally beyond the pale and no company that isn't itself selling sex would allow its brand to be associated with porn.
    - bambax 4y ago
      Discussing nude imagery in an academic setting doesn't have much to do with "pornography". To the credit of YT, they host plenty of nude videos that aren't, somehow, "porn" (search for "Brazilian wax" for instance...) So much so that one begins to wonder if the problem with Cornell and such may stem more from the political message than the imagery itself.
      - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
        This particular lecture series, focused on the erotica magazine On Our Backs (with a mandate to "deliver sexual content" in the lecturer's words) and presented by one of the early editors of that magazine, has quite a bit to do with pornography. That doesn't make it non-academic, but it's not some kind of abstract analysis at a distance either.
bambax 4y ago
Came here to say this. An "AI" system may have a hard time distinguishing a porn image published for arousal, from the same image studied in a lecture. But how hard can it be to mark Cornell University as an account important enough that every action needs a human review, or two?
- civilized 4y ago
  Disclaimer - just my theory, but... The love for tech companies on Wall Street stems from their ability to scale up revenues much more rapidly than their costs. Human review is costly, and at YouTube's scale, every reasonable request for more human attention opens the floodgates for tons of other, equally reasonable requests. Thus, any broad policy change that increases demand for human review can eat into profit margins and stock prices big time, and will therefore be resisted with great ferocity and vigilance.
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
I'm not sure they'd agree with the premise that it's OK to show pornography as long as your purpose is to educate people about it. Their current policy on the topic (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802002 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802002) is that even in an educational context "gratuitous" nudity isn't allowed.
- fatherzine 4y ago
  It's gratuitous shock technique. Sir Timothy has blessed us with the revolutionary concept of the "hyperlink" and these days everyone has a "web browser" in their pocket where accessing a "hyperlink" is one tap away. Absolutely trivial to upload the pornography one "hyperlink" away and let people decide for themselves whether they want to look at it or not.
  - rcoder 4y ago
    These were literally _lectures_ containing images from pornography because it was _part of the lecture_. IIUC you're suggesting people -- academic lecturers, no less, not professional streamers -- splice out sections of their lecture, replace them with a content warning, provide a contextual link to the "risky" content, and then hope that people will follow it, jump right back to the original lecture, and then come back? (And that somehow that link won't trigger the same YouTube content flag, b/c obviously they're going to at least broadly categorize outbound links to combat spam.) This (meaning HN) community regularly nerds out over SEO, landing page optimization, and zero-friction payment flows. Why should we expect educators to be successful delivering complex content in an approachable way if we're also going to require them to carefully slice their content into "acceptable" and "NSFW" segments and deliver them separately, even when the original lecture was linear?
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      We shouldn't expect them to be! I just don't think it's tremendously important whether educators can effectively deliver complex pornographic lectures on Youtube.
duxup 4y ago
>I sincerely doubt the Cornell University Library is going to pivot to pornography. Probably not but what rando has the password to that account could be crazy wide ranging, that's the real key. Professional sports teams still have run ins with "oh some rando intern was posting sorry". Still worth a try. Maybe have it so the filter "flags" questionable video, the account is special so it doesn't remove the video and it gets checked "quickly" with some identifier that this is an educational account. Granted exceptions are always complicated. What happens when someone else gets their content shut down and a concerned educational account starts reposing it ;) (and that's just the first complication I can think of)
neilk 4y ago
That’s a solution that works for 150-year-old universities, not for little indie publishers. If we don’t have solutions that work for obscure and unpopular ideas - like Susie Bright in the 1980s - what good is the right to free speech? I wish that regulation was the answer, but back in the day, government censorship was the problem. Which also fell disproportionately on small and weak organizations. In the 80s and 90s, in Canada, there were Supreme Court cases about small LGBT-identified bookstores routinely having their orders seized by Customs on obscenity grounds. EDIT: I don’t know what I believe any more. We know that censorship falls heavily on on unpopular speech from marginalized people, no matter whether it’s government or private industry. On the other hand, without censorship or regulation, it seems to be true that content providers and adtech will turn about 10-15% of the population insane with far-right conspiracy theories.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  There's no single uniform right answer, and the tech community got away with naively believing their might be one for decades because they actually didn't have the social clout for the median person to care what was going on in online fora. But the tension between free speech, censorship, information, and misinformation is as old as communication itself, and there's more to be learned on the subjects from history than from the YouTube Terms of Service.
- stickfigure 4y ago
  > content providers and adtech will turn about 10-15% of the population insane with far-right conspiracy theories. I have some of these people in my family tree. Adtech, content providers, censorship, etc are all irrelevant. Those 10-15% are going to find their nutjob content no matter where it lives. The content doesn't make them crazy, they make themselves crazy by filtering their memetic exposure to stuff that confirms their biases. Kicking it off of youtube does not prevent them from finding it, it just confirms their suspicion that there's a conspiracy trying to stop them from hearing "the truth".

They could just flag the accounts of educational institutions as educational. I sincerely doubt the Cornell University Library is going to pivot to pornography.

by tedivm 4y ago

They could just flag the accounts of educational institutions as educational. I sincerely doubt the Cornell University Library is going to pivot to pornography.

puffoflogic 4y ago

On the other hand, wrongthink is quite likely to come out of such an institution (historically speaking, maybe not so much in the current place and time). So it would be a bad idea from the censors' point of view to allowlist the account.

robertlagrant 4y ago
Are you using "wrongthink" to ironically mean a wrong thought?
sophacles 4y ago
So what you are saying that it makes sense to ban people for ideas you consider wrong, because you worry that those ideas might lead to people being banned for ideas that are wrong?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
Still seems like a bad political[0] move for them to so shamelessly censor an institution of learning. [0] As in it will leave a bad impression on a lot of people, not that they'll lose the next election.

jeroenhd 4y ago

I'm not sure if they'd even want to. Youtube exists to make money of ads and giving account exemptions so that they can upload long-form content explicitly not fit for advertisers seems like a poor business model. Google is definitely not in it for the good of humanity (and neither are the decision makers at a lot of educational facilities, as hard as some staff may try to improve that). In a perfect world your solution would fix the problem, but in practice it doesn't work out. Vimeo seems like a much better fit for eduction to be honest. They're probably more expensive, though.

KerrAvon 4y ago
Vimeo is moving to a B2B model, so definitely too expensive. What they really want is to upload the Internet Archive, but the UI really sucks.
bambax 4y ago
But why would all advertisers refrain from putting ads next to lectures, even if some imagery is a little risqué? That some advertisers would not like it, sure, but all of them?
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  In the US, mainstream culture considers pornography to be totally beyond the pale and no company that isn't itself selling sex would allow its brand to be associated with porn.
  - bambax 4y ago
    Discussing nude imagery in an academic setting doesn't have much to do with "pornography". To the credit of YT, they host plenty of nude videos that aren't, somehow, "porn" (search for "Brazilian wax" for instance...) So much so that one begins to wonder if the problem with Cornell and such may stem more from the political message than the imagery itself.
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      This particular lecture series, focused on the erotica magazine On Our Backs (with a mandate to "deliver sexual content" in the lecturer's words) and presented by one of the early editors of that magazine, has quite a bit to do with pornography. That doesn't make it non-academic, but it's not some kind of abstract analysis at a distance either.

bambax 4y ago

Came here to say this. An "AI" system may have a hard time distinguishing a porn image published for arousal, from the same image studied in a lecture. But how hard can it be to mark Cornell University as an account important enough that every action needs a human review, or two?

civilized 4y ago
Disclaimer - just my theory, but... The love for tech companies on Wall Street stems from their ability to scale up revenues much more rapidly than their costs. Human review is costly, and at YouTube's scale, every reasonable request for more human attention opens the floodgates for tons of other, equally reasonable requests. Thus, any broad policy change that increases demand for human review can eat into profit margins and stock prices big time, and will therefore be resisted with great ferocity and vigilance.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago

I'm not sure they'd agree with the premise that it's OK to show pornography as long as your purpose is to educate people about it. Their current policy on the topic (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802002 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802002) is that even in an educational context "gratuitous" nudity isn't allowed.

fatherzine 4y ago
It's gratuitous shock technique. Sir Timothy has blessed us with the revolutionary concept of the "hyperlink" and these days everyone has a "web browser" in their pocket where accessing a "hyperlink" is one tap away. Absolutely trivial to upload the pornography one "hyperlink" away and let people decide for themselves whether they want to look at it or not.
- rcoder 4y ago
  These were literally _lectures_ containing images from pornography because it was _part of the lecture_. IIUC you're suggesting people -- academic lecturers, no less, not professional streamers -- splice out sections of their lecture, replace them with a content warning, provide a contextual link to the "risky" content, and then hope that people will follow it, jump right back to the original lecture, and then come back? (And that somehow that link won't trigger the same YouTube content flag, b/c obviously they're going to at least broadly categorize outbound links to combat spam.) This (meaning HN) community regularly nerds out over SEO, landing page optimization, and zero-friction payment flows. Why should we expect educators to be successful delivering complex content in an approachable way if we're also going to require them to carefully slice their content into "acceptable" and "NSFW" segments and deliver them separately, even when the original lecture was linear?
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    We shouldn't expect them to be! I just don't think it's tremendously important whether educators can effectively deliver complex pornographic lectures on Youtube.

duxup 4y ago

>I sincerely doubt the Cornell University Library is going to pivot to pornography. Probably not but what rando has the password to that account could be crazy wide ranging, that's the real key. Professional sports teams still have run ins with "oh some rando intern was posting sorry". Still worth a try. Maybe have it so the filter "flags" questionable video, the account is special so it doesn't remove the video and it gets checked "quickly" with some identifier that this is an educational account. Granted exceptions are always complicated. What happens when someone else gets their content shut down and a concerned educational account starts reposing it ;) (and that's just the first complication I can think of)

neilk 4y ago

That’s a solution that works for 150-year-old universities, not for little indie publishers. If we don’t have solutions that work for obscure and unpopular ideas - like Susie Bright in the 1980s - what good is the right to free speech? I wish that regulation was the answer, but back in the day, government censorship was the problem. Which also fell disproportionately on small and weak organizations. In the 80s and 90s, in Canada, there were Supreme Court cases about small LGBT-identified bookstores routinely having their orders seized by Customs on obscenity grounds. EDIT: I don’t know what I believe any more. We know that censorship falls heavily on on unpopular speech from marginalized people, no matter whether it’s government or private industry. On the other hand, without censorship or regulation, it seems to be true that content providers and adtech will turn about 10-15% of the population insane with far-right conspiracy theories.

shadowgovt 4y ago
There's no single uniform right answer, and the tech community got away with naively believing their might be one for decades because they actually didn't have the social clout for the median person to care what was going on in online fora. But the tension between free speech, censorship, information, and misinformation is as old as communication itself, and there's more to be learned on the subjects from history than from the YouTube Terms of Service.
stickfigure 4y ago
> content providers and adtech will turn about 10-15% of the population insane with far-right conspiracy theories. I have some of these people in my family tree. Adtech, content providers, censorship, etc are all irrelevant. Those 10-15% are going to find their nutjob content no matter where it lives. The content doesn't make them crazy, they make themselves crazy by filtering their memetic exposure to stuff that confirms their biases. Kicking it off of youtube does not prevent them from finding it, it just confirms their suspicion that there's a conspiracy trying to stop them from hearing "the truth".