5 ms·

YouTube's moderation is ridiculous, and it demonstrates the problem Google has in general. They don't like paying actual people to moderate their sites, and rel

by CM30 4y ago

YouTube's moderation is ridiculous, and it demonstrates the problem Google has in general. They don't like paying actual people to moderate their sites, and rely on automated systems and bots to do everything for them. So, if there's ever an issue (or you have a bunch of scammers mass reporting you because you debunk their 'work'), then YouTube/Google seems to think you're the problem instead of the scumbags. We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their services properly, and we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info, and putting people's lives at risk.

deepstack 4y ago
Or instead use specialised communities that does do moderation like peer tube, odysee.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their services properly, Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually. What are people willing to give up in exchange for a human-moderated version of YouTube? Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight. I don’t see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube uploads as realistic in any way.
- Retric 4y ago
  YouTube could set a views threshold to make manual reviews scale. My guess is 99% of what people watch is the top 0.1% most popular videos which makes things manageable. Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000 people not a big deal. Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000,000 people is.
  - protonfish 4y ago
    And this small percentage of popular videos are made by a smaller amount of reputable or disreputable channels. Give me the tools and a few months and I'll clean up the English-speaking toxic content by pruning it at the source. But that won't happen because removing these dangerous, stupid, click-bait farms hurts the business. Fine, whatever. But stop claiming moderation is "impossible" or "too expensive." That is a heinous lie.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  No one expects things to be perfect or that there will be no mistakes, but there's a whole lot of space between "perfect" and "braindead stupid". The worst part isn't so much that mistakes get made, but the way those mistakes are dealt with, which is often a frustrating and silly experience.
  - MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
    Exactly. A rogue moderator might make the wrong call on a video, but unlike an algorithm that call won't affect hundreds of videos at once. And also unlike an algorithm the moderator might be a different person the next day. So mistakes are not magnified the way they are with an algorithm.
  - Mindwipe 4y ago
    > No one expects things to be perfect or that there will be no mistakes, but there's a whole lot of space between "perfect" and "braindead stupid". There is but I am not terribly convinced the difference is employing a badly paid human.
  - fho 4y ago
    Could this be a browser plugin? No idea how "invasive" a plugin can be, but ad-blockers and privacy plugins seem to be able to change a lot on webpages (including blocking ad videos on Youtube). So theoretically it seems possible to build a plugin that moderates comments on web pages ... "No one expects things to be perfect" ... so it does not hurt to try?
- AlphaOne1 4y ago
  Moderation is very complicated especially since it can be subjective based on the background and skill level of who is watching the video. Would it be possible to crowd source this? For example, I could add a filter to my search saying exclude 'profanity' and videos with profanity would be removed. Or exclude videos that are 'dangerous' or 'for entertainment only' and those would be removed. My thought is that we should use the shear numbers of persons watching the videos to our advantage. Honestly, I sort of do this by looking at the comments since many times you can gather the flavor of the video based on the comments. This could also be used to political bias. Videos with a right-wing leaning would get tagged as leaning right and vice-versa. Also, content creators would be incentivized to accurately tag their videos and perhaps the algorithm could penalize content creators with discrepant self-tag versus what viewers tag as.
  - ericbarrett 4y ago
    Anything "crowdsourced" can and will be gamed by spammers. Such tags would become useless very quickly without traditional moderation.
- throw10920 4y ago
  > Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight. That would actually be pretty ideal - most consumers watch YouTube for the bigger channels and popular content anyway, so they would stay on the platform, which would validate that revenue model. The smaller producers and consumers would both leave, which would help build competitors to YouTube. The big producers who remain will be slightly disincentivized to spam low-quality videos (including those text-to-speech automated ones that some people here have found). And, Google will have no excuse for not using humans to moderate videos anymore (can't cite "cost concerns" when you're literally pricing it in). Seems like a win-win-win to me.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > I don’t see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube uploads as realistic in any way. Then don't add the word "perfect."
- realusername 4y ago
  > Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually. Those aren't just random channels though, they are top youtube channels, surely they can manage to review the most popular ones at least... And we're talking about tips which can make people die if they follow them, that's the most clear cut case, there's nothing opinion based. There's just no excuses there.
- CJefferson 4y ago
  I'd be happy with a law that said Youtube were responsible for people who hurt themselves copying videos which they were recommended which were wildly unsafe. If the result of that is Google has to charge people a moderation fee for videos they then recommend, then fine, that's the cost we have to pay.
- Majromax 4y ago
  > It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually. You could flip this around, however? Why is YouTube promoting videos that no responsible human has reviewed? These videos don't just trip and fall into people's feeds. They're selected by YouTube's recommendation algorithm, presumably targeting maximum engagement. That decision is automated, but it's still an editorial decision -- it's not based on an objective, chosen criterion like "most recent" or even "most viewed." This isn't how YouTube is currently structured (nor the other social media platforms), but I think it's fair to suggest that if a platform is in the business of picking and choosing winners, it should bear at least a moral responsibility for the content it promotes.
- jimmydorry 4y ago
  What about a $3 fee that automatically comes out of the ad revenue when your video exceeds $Arbitrary limit (they could start at 200,000 views to start with).
denton-scratch 4y ago
> we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info Don't you think that it's the broadcaster that should be penalised? It is Goo/YT that is promulgating the misinfo. The scammers/creators would go away, if Goo/YT moderated as if their income depended on it.
- onepointsixC 4y ago
  I would agree that at a certain point there's a responsibility of Alphabet recommending videos that can literally cause viewers to accidentally kill themselves.
- CM30 4y ago
  Eh, both are to blame here. The platforms/broadcasters for hosting this content and not removing it when it's proven to be dangerous/illegal/whatever, and the creators for making such content and putting people's lives at risk. It's like the situation with fake products on Amazon; yes Amazon shares some of the blame for not policing their marketplace, but we can't let the scammers/counterfeiters off the hook either, since they're deliberately trying to scam people. Plus these folks likely wouldn't go away, they'd just go to other places to distribute their 'wares'.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    The greatest trick companies like google and facebook made was to remove themselves from blame. If a newspaper publishes something like this, they are liable and have punitive punishment. If a TV channel does the same applies. If google publishes it, they just say "not our problem", while continuing to rake in the cash.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      But @mrtksn (the GP?) states that google doesn't publish it, rather it's published by the author/uploader. I think that's sophistry. If I visit Youtube's website, search for "xyz", and play the first result, which happens to have been uploaded by "abc", that's analogous to visiting guardian.co.uk, and reading the top article on the page, bearing the byline "Paul Mason". Paul Mason didn't publish it; The Guardian published it. The legal fiction that a system like Youtube or Faceache is not a publisher is to protect independent message-boards from being sued, e.g. for libel. But I think even a tiny indy message-board, with say 100 users and no income, is still a publisher. I don't see how you can draw a clear line between the tiny indy publisher and a giant one like Youtube. And I don't see how you can draw a clear line between something like Youtube, and Guardian Online. Both publishers accept content submissions from multiple authors, review them (The Guardian perhaps not so much), and make them available to the public, possibly with amendments (e.g. overlaid or prefixed with ads). So I'm sorry: I can't see how Faceache or Youtube is not a publisher, while The Guardian is. If the laws relating to what you can and can't publish are wrong, then they should be fixed. But simply declaring that a system is a "platform" doesn't make it not a publisher, and doesn't fix the defective publishing laws.
onepointsixC 4y ago
What's beyond belief is that even the auto moderation is useless. I've cost count of how many video's I've seen the comment: "It's finally here: someurl" *On every single video comment* Or: "(Username:Whatsapp±SOMENUMBER): Chat up for more info" Again, on every comment. It seems like Youtube just doesn't care in the slightest to bothered with the most basic auto moderation of the most overtly obvious spam.
lrem 4y ago
https://mashable.com/article/youtube-human-content-moderation https://mashable.com/article/youtube-human-content-moderatio...
chrisjc 4y ago
The "moderation" for Shorts is just spectacular! And I don't mean good. The amount of back-to-back "Hi I'm Elon Musk and I'm something something bitcoin something something..." deepfakes is astounding. There are a handful that are seemingly pixel for pixel identical, yet as much as you report them over and over again, they only seem to shown more and more. Then there are the countless sexually inappropriate ones that also fills the stream. The gruesome ones showing rats/mice getting spiked to death, animals suffering on the side of the road after they've been hit by a truck/bus/car, so on and so forth. It's just horrible.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Okay, so assorted cryptocurrency scams have obvious financial incentives, and I assume the sexual ones are trying to get people onto a paid site. What's driving the animal gore videos? I can't think that there's anything to sell there; is it just people uploading stuff for the shock value?
  - chrisjc 4y ago
    It's 4-5 distinct animal gore videos but through different user accounts, so i don't think it's just people uploading stuff. Maybe there are accounts (compromised or just bots) racing against each other bringing content over from TikTok? And who knows what happens when you click on links in the description or follow instructions in the overlays. I swipe away before the gore comes and haven't read any of the descriptions or overlays.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > I assume the sexual ones are trying to get people onto a paid site. What's driving the animal gore videos? The latter is sexual for psychos.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
I am SHOCKED that Google wants to make money and does not care if they hurt people in the process! SHOCKED! If google had to moderate YouTube in any meaningful way they would go broke, not only because of how much it would cost, but also because of the lawsuits. There is a reason we have regulations in the United States. It is so things like YouTube never happen in the first place. If they were treated as publishers in the first place we would not be having had this problem. YouTube is a broadcaster with millions of independent program directors. Until it is seen as such my the Feds nothing will change. P.S.A.: Don't let your kids use YouTube.
hedora 4y ago
This case pretty clearly crosses the line into criminal negligence / manslaughter / murder. If they were are book publisher or TV network, someone at Google would be facing jail time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
usrusr 4y ago
Yeah, it's not just about moderation being automated, it's about automated moderation being based on crowdsourced flagging. The debunked will always have stronger incentives than the debunking. Actually the debunking don't even have any incentive to flag at all, because they require the scandal to vlog about. It's worse than the SEO battles.
corrral 4y ago
Youtube shouldn't exist. Video hosting and discovery should be separate, like they (largely) are with podcasts.
bergenty 4y ago
Paying actual people to moderate a platform as large as YouTube is not reasonable.
- ziml77 4y ago
  I would love to know how many hours of video get appealed each day. I'd be willing to bet there isn't even close to enough money to pay people to make decisions on all of that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by CM30 4y ago

deepstack 4y ago

Or instead use specialised communities that does do moderation like peer tube, odysee.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their services properly, Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually. What are people willing to give up in exchange for a human-moderated version of YouTube? Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight. I don’t see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube uploads as realistic in any way.

Retric 4y ago
YouTube could set a views threshold to make manual reviews scale. My guess is 99% of what people watch is the top 0.1% most popular videos which makes things manageable. Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000 people not a big deal. Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000,000 people is.
- protonfish 4y ago
  And this small percentage of popular videos are made by a smaller amount of reputable or disreputable channels. Give me the tools and a few months and I'll clean up the English-speaking toxic content by pruning it at the source. But that won't happen because removing these dangerous, stupid, click-bait farms hurts the business. Fine, whatever. But stop claiming moderation is "impossible" or "too expensive." That is a heinous lie.
Beltalowda 4y ago
No one expects things to be perfect or that there will be no mistakes, but there's a whole lot of space between "perfect" and "braindead stupid". The worst part isn't so much that mistakes get made, but the way those mistakes are dealt with, which is often a frustrating and silly experience.
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
  Exactly. A rogue moderator might make the wrong call on a video, but unlike an algorithm that call won't affect hundreds of videos at once. And also unlike an algorithm the moderator might be a different person the next day. So mistakes are not magnified the way they are with an algorithm.
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  > No one expects things to be perfect or that there will be no mistakes, but there's a whole lot of space between "perfect" and "braindead stupid". There is but I am not terribly convinced the difference is employing a badly paid human.
- fho 4y ago
  Could this be a browser plugin? No idea how "invasive" a plugin can be, but ad-blockers and privacy plugins seem to be able to change a lot on webpages (including blocking ad videos on Youtube). So theoretically it seems possible to build a plugin that moderates comments on web pages ... "No one expects things to be perfect" ... so it does not hurt to try?
AlphaOne1 4y ago
Moderation is very complicated especially since it can be subjective based on the background and skill level of who is watching the video. Would it be possible to crowd source this? For example, I could add a filter to my search saying exclude 'profanity' and videos with profanity would be removed. Or exclude videos that are 'dangerous' or 'for entertainment only' and those would be removed. My thought is that we should use the shear numbers of persons watching the videos to our advantage. Honestly, I sort of do this by looking at the comments since many times you can gather the flavor of the video based on the comments. This could also be used to political bias. Videos with a right-wing leaning would get tagged as leaning right and vice-versa. Also, content creators would be incentivized to accurately tag their videos and perhaps the algorithm could penalize content creators with discrepant self-tag versus what viewers tag as.
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  Anything "crowdsourced" can and will be gamed by spammers. Such tags would become useless very quickly without traditional moderation.
throw10920 4y ago
> Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight. That would actually be pretty ideal - most consumers watch YouTube for the bigger channels and popular content anyway, so they would stay on the platform, which would validate that revenue model. The smaller producers and consumers would both leave, which would help build competitors to YouTube. The big producers who remain will be slightly disincentivized to spam low-quality videos (including those text-to-speech automated ones that some people here have found). And, Google will have no excuse for not using humans to moderate videos anymore (can't cite "cost concerns" when you're literally pricing it in). Seems like a win-win-win to me.
pessimizer 4y ago
> I don’t see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube uploads as realistic in any way. Then don't add the word "perfect."
realusername 4y ago
> Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually. Those aren't just random channels though, they are top youtube channels, surely they can manage to review the most popular ones at least... And we're talking about tips which can make people die if they follow them, that's the most clear cut case, there's nothing opinion based. There's just no excuses there.
CJefferson 4y ago
I'd be happy with a law that said Youtube were responsible for people who hurt themselves copying videos which they were recommended which were wildly unsafe. If the result of that is Google has to charge people a moderation fee for videos they then recommend, then fine, that's the cost we have to pay.
Majromax 4y ago
> It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually. You could flip this around, however? Why is YouTube promoting videos that no responsible human has reviewed? These videos don't just trip and fall into people's feeds. They're selected by YouTube's recommendation algorithm, presumably targeting maximum engagement. That decision is automated, but it's still an editorial decision -- it's not based on an objective, chosen criterion like "most recent" or even "most viewed." This isn't how YouTube is currently structured (nor the other social media platforms), but I think it's fair to suggest that if a platform is in the business of picking and choosing winners, it should bear at least a moral responsibility for the content it promotes.
jimmydorry 4y ago
What about a $3 fee that automatically comes out of the ad revenue when your video exceeds $Arbitrary limit (they could start at 200,000 views to start with).

denton-scratch 4y ago

> we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info Don't you think that it's the broadcaster that should be penalised? It is Goo/YT that is promulgating the misinfo. The scammers/creators would go away, if Goo/YT moderated as if their income depended on it.

onepointsixC 4y ago
I would agree that at a certain point there's a responsibility of Alphabet recommending videos that can literally cause viewers to accidentally kill themselves.
CM30 4y ago
Eh, both are to blame here. The platforms/broadcasters for hosting this content and not removing it when it's proven to be dangerous/illegal/whatever, and the creators for making such content and putting people's lives at risk. It's like the situation with fake products on Amazon; yes Amazon shares some of the blame for not policing their marketplace, but we can't let the scammers/counterfeiters off the hook either, since they're deliberately trying to scam people. Plus these folks likely wouldn't go away, they'd just go to other places to distribute their 'wares'.
- iso1631 4y ago
  The greatest trick companies like google and facebook made was to remove themselves from blame. If a newspaper publishes something like this, they are liable and have punitive punishment. If a TV channel does the same applies. If google publishes it, they just say "not our problem", while continuing to rake in the cash.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    But @mrtksn (the GP?) states that google doesn't publish it, rather it's published by the author/uploader. I think that's sophistry. If I visit Youtube's website, search for "xyz", and play the first result, which happens to have been uploaded by "abc", that's analogous to visiting guardian.co.uk, and reading the top article on the page, bearing the byline "Paul Mason". Paul Mason didn't publish it; The Guardian published it. The legal fiction that a system like Youtube or Faceache is not a publisher is to protect independent message-boards from being sued, e.g. for libel. But I think even a tiny indy message-board, with say 100 users and no income, is still a publisher. I don't see how you can draw a clear line between the tiny indy publisher and a giant one like Youtube. And I don't see how you can draw a clear line between something like Youtube, and Guardian Online. Both publishers accept content submissions from multiple authors, review them (The Guardian perhaps not so much), and make them available to the public, possibly with amendments (e.g. overlaid or prefixed with ads). So I'm sorry: I can't see how Faceache or Youtube is not a publisher, while The Guardian is. If the laws relating to what you can and can't publish are wrong, then they should be fixed. But simply declaring that a system is a "platform" doesn't make it not a publisher, and doesn't fix the defective publishing laws.

onepointsixC 4y ago

What's beyond belief is that even the auto moderation is useless. I've cost count of how many video's I've seen the comment: "It's finally here: someurl" *On every single video comment* Or: "(Username:Whatsapp±SOMENUMBER): Chat up for more info" Again, on every comment. It seems like Youtube just doesn't care in the slightest to bothered with the most basic auto moderation of the most overtly obvious spam.

lrem 4y ago

https://mashable.com/article/youtube-human-content-moderation https://mashable.com/article/youtube-human-content-moderatio...

chrisjc 4y ago

The "moderation" for Shorts is just spectacular! And I don't mean good. The amount of back-to-back "Hi I'm Elon Musk and I'm something something bitcoin something something..." deepfakes is astounding. There are a handful that are seemingly pixel for pixel identical, yet as much as you report them over and over again, they only seem to shown more and more. Then there are the countless sexually inappropriate ones that also fills the stream. The gruesome ones showing rats/mice getting spiked to death, animals suffering on the side of the road after they've been hit by a truck/bus/car, so on and so forth. It's just horrible.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Okay, so assorted cryptocurrency scams have obvious financial incentives, and I assume the sexual ones are trying to get people onto a paid site. What's driving the animal gore videos? I can't think that there's anything to sell there; is it just people uploading stuff for the shock value?
- chrisjc 4y ago
  It's 4-5 distinct animal gore videos but through different user accounts, so i don't think it's just people uploading stuff. Maybe there are accounts (compromised or just bots) racing against each other bringing content over from TikTok? And who knows what happens when you click on links in the description or follow instructions in the overlays. I swipe away before the gore comes and haven't read any of the descriptions or overlays.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > I assume the sexual ones are trying to get people onto a paid site. What's driving the animal gore videos? The latter is sexual for psychos.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

I am SHOCKED that Google wants to make money and does not care if they hurt people in the process! SHOCKED! If google had to moderate YouTube in any meaningful way they would go broke, not only because of how much it would cost, but also because of the lawsuits. There is a reason we have regulations in the United States. It is so things like YouTube never happen in the first place. If they were treated as publishers in the first place we would not be having had this problem. YouTube is a broadcaster with millions of independent program directors. Until it is seen as such my the Feds nothing will change. P.S.A.: Don't let your kids use YouTube.

hedora 4y ago

This case pretty clearly crosses the line into criminal negligence / manslaughter / murder. If they were are book publisher or TV network, someone at Google would be facing jail time.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

usrusr 4y ago

Yeah, it's not just about moderation being automated, it's about automated moderation being based on crowdsourced flagging. The debunked will always have stronger incentives than the debunking. Actually the debunking don't even have any incentive to flag at all, because they require the scandal to vlog about. It's worse than the SEO battles.

corrral 4y ago

Youtube shouldn't exist. Video hosting and discovery should be separate, like they (largely) are with podcasts.

bergenty 4y ago

Paying actual people to moderate a platform as large as YouTube is not reasonable.

ziml77 4y ago
I would love to know how many hours of video get appealed each day. I'd be willing to bet there isn't even close to enough money to pay people to make decisions on all of that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]