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Google: YouTube is so overloaded staff cannot filter content
- briandear 12y agoHowever, if you were to post a clip from a copyright infringing song -- it gets removed immediately.
- logicalman 12y agoIt's much easier for a computer to recognize audio than video content. I'm sure in a couple of years, YouTube will automatically flag violent terrorist propaganda.
- kozhevnikov 12y agohttps://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- hatu 12y agoNot just any audio but known audio. Finding known video is something they can do already too. That's why some people upload clips from their favorite shows and flip them horizontally to avoid automatic detection. Think of it like a hash for the audio/video portion. Pretty easy to check if it's in the database.
- tedunangst 12y agoI'm surprised whatever feature detection they use isn't robust against trivial changes like that. Rotation, flipping, and scaling/cropping should all result in the same hash.
- viewer5 12y agoWe only brushed over how hashes work in college, so I may be totally ignorant, but-- wouldn't rearranging the order of the data (rotate, flip, etc) necessarily change the resulting hash?
- icebraining 12y agoThey don't use those hashes, they use content fingerprinting: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- noir_lord 12y agoWas curious so worked it out. Assuming filter people work 40 hour week 50 weeks a year with near perfect efficiency. (300(60 24 * 365))/2000 = 78840 people. Of course it's nowhere near that intractable as a simple reputation/time based filter (is this account more than a month old, skip, does this user have a good reputation, skip) would bring that down hugely (and this assumes they watch 100% of each video). In any case you are still at a good number of people.
- anon4 12y agoSo why don't Google just hire 100 000 people to do it? Assuming a generous 30k/yr salary, that is only 3mln/yr.
- matt4077 12y agoBecause they're better at math than that.
- noir_lord 12y agoBecause that would be 3 billion dollars plus office space, computers, power and HR for 100,000 people. Call it 4 billion with overhead. Not a winning idea when they only have 55,000 now.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ariwilson 12y ago$3b != $3m
- cortesoft 12y ago"Despite the serious threat posed by extreme and violent videos" Wait... what exactly is the THREAT of violent videos? The videos themselves aren't dangerous, and removing them won't stop the violence... what is portrayed in the video is the danger, not the fact that it was videoed.
- kissickas 12y agoI suppose they would say that the threat is that the videos serve as propaganda pieces for these organizations, including use as recruitment tools.
- devindotcom 12y agoThe threat may be to the standards and community that have been part of YouTube's success. Sites like Dailymotion and LiveLeaks are a totally different world for a reason.
- stinkytaco 12y ago>The videos themselves aren't dangerous, and removing them won't stop the violence I actually take some issue with that. I think publicizing violence can be a cause of violence (the same critique could be applied to 24/7 media coverage of a shooting tragedy, which is possibly just what the shooter wanted). That's really not a point worth having an argument about, I just thought I'd throw it out. I think what that sentence actually means is "it's a threat to the edifice of safety we've created and potentially to the usability of our service", i.e. "People want to pretend this kind of stuff doesn't exist and certainly don't want to see it when they are watching cat videos." Honestly, I somewhat agree. If I thought I would stumble across a beheading video when watching YouTube, I'd probably skip it entirely.
- cortesoft 12y agoYeah, I might have been a little bit flippant in my dismissal any danger at all, I just found it a bit melodramatic to act like the video is some huge danger. I agree, I don't want to stumble on a violent video while browsing youtube. I just don't think it is actually a threat to our safety.
- abandonliberty 12y agoWow, censorship is hard and has many related risks and costs to society. I wonder if it's worth it.
- frandroid 12y ago> But when individuals flag up problems only a third of it is taken down. Because they don't give enough importance to these requests, or because many of the requests are invalid? If it's the former, that's something that content hosts should be held accountable for. If people flag stuff for you for free, you better use that information...
- mynewwork 12y agoFlagging as a means of shutting down opinions people disagree with or to target groups they don't like is unfortunately very common. Sometimes even in organized fashion, where a group will urge its members to flag content from someone they oppose. There have also been instances where a group tried to invoke copyright infringement because someone said their name in a video.
- stinkytaco 12y agoIt's assumed this is just an issue of manpower, but it's a much thornier problem. There's a point where a video isn't obviously in violation of community standards and at that point, you're asking one of 100,000 different people to make a judgement call. You're bound to get some wrong and the someone will create a whole other post on HN about it.
- sp332 12y agoHow can the host be accountable for not having enough manpower to deal with abusive videos people upload to the service?
- kleiba 12y agoAnd why would they? Is this because they are (legally) obliged to filter content? If this is an actual problem then I suppose one way to deal with it is to either hire more staff or restrain the number of videos users can upload -- except the first one doesn't scale and the second one will not be popular with YouTube users. And given that Google is all about doing everything they do at a massive scale, neither of the two suggestions fit their weltanschauung.
- raldi 12y agoWould s/filter/pre-filter/ make for a more accurate headline?
- sp332 12y agoNo, they wait for viewers to flag content before they review it. But even reviewing only flagged content is still overwhelming, because the flag function gets abused so much. The new idea is to have a separate channel for known-good agencies to have a priority-flag function that gets reviewed first. Since that feature will hopefully be abused less, it will have less traffic.
- jbob2000 12y agoWhen does a video do harm? How can you be harmed by watching a video? If you don't like it, close your browser. If you don't want your kids seeing it, using parental controls or watch them when they use the computer. This just reeks of governments trying to impose censorship by using recent terror events as leverage.
- voidz 12y agoI saw an animal torture video once. It went very fast and because I was in both a state of shock/fear/sadness/whatever, I couldn't even get myself to stop, pause or close it in time. The torture just happened too fast. I own and care a great deal for my own pets. So what happened to the same animals in the video.. it haunted me for weeks and was a really depressing experience. Sure, I'm more careful now.. heck, I'm even outright censoring a lot of stuff from myself, because of this experience. But it sounds like you are saying "videos can never do harm" and I just really disagree with this, because of how I was affected by this particular one.
- lugg 12y agoI'd rather people were able to post animal cruelty videos. That shit needs to be stopped and people need to be aware that this stuff happens. How are you meant to expose animal cruelty if youtube censors it? I doubt what you were watching was an exposure video but the content you want filtered is the same.
- eridius 12y agoWhy are you trying to "expose" animal cruelty? That's a crime. Give your video to the police. Uploading it to YouTube so the general public can see it not helpful.
- Crito 12y agoAnd if the police decide to do nothing? And what of states where creating that video in the first place is itself a crime? What if the abuse is not criminal, but you wish to convince the public that it should be?
- douncks 12y agoWhen you're systemically banning speech because it's a "threat"... isn't that literally, exactly, the same argument that every censorship regime in history has used in order to manipulate the public to support things it wouldn't otherwise? Isn't China, Russia, Singpore, and everyone else pushing that same line? Are we going to tolerate it here?
- sp332 12y agoIt's illegal to incite people to violence and make death threats in the USA, even on YouTube.
- undersuit 12y agoHitler's speeches did an amazing job of inciting people to violence, guess we should ban any videos of that, you know just in case.
- mmagin 12y agoGoogle is a private company not a state.
- brettkc 12y agoGoogle is a public company.
- mmagin 12y agoDisingenuous use of a different use of the words public/private. I meant that they are not necessarily expected to treat Youtube as we would expect, say, the US Government to treat a piece of public land like a park (ignoring of course the recent phenomenon of "free speech zones" and such.) You are referring to the fact that fractional ownership of the company is available to nearly any member of the public, as opposed to a company held by a small set of owners.
- pc2g4d 12y agoThis is an effort to fight ideas by suppression. My preference would be to fight ideas using other ideas.
- tomphoolery 12y agolol they're "overloaded" yet they still find time to screw over musicians? stop being so evil google.
- VOYD 12y ago"Can't", I think they meant "won't". Google could hire a few more people easily.
- frankchn 12y agoAccording to calculations, they need approximately 70k people to screen every minute of video uploaded onto Youtube. Even if ML could cut this down by 85%, that is still 10k people. Not a brilliant idea when Google only employs 50k people worldwide.