YouTube Says Computers Helped It Pull Down Millions of Objectionable Videos Last Quarter (recode.net) 152
YouTube says it has successfully trained computers to flag objectionable videos. In the last quarter of 2017, the company reportedly pulled down more than six million of these videos before any users saw them. The news comes from a brief aside in Google CEO Sundar Pichai's scripted remarks during parent company Alphabet's earnings call today. "He said YouTube had pulled down more than six million videos in the last quarter of 2017 after first being flagged by its 'machine systems,' and that 75 percent of those videos 'were removed before receiving a single view,'" reports Recode.
Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't censuring videos like that kinda of defeat the whole point of youtube? The idea that anybody could post whatever. Now Youtube is filled with commercial businesses. Wish there was a good alternative to post my cat videos on!
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This YouTube algorithm has a nasty habit of "flagging" conservatives. For example, recently it "flagged" a discussion between Dave Rubin and Thomas Sowell.
Re:Kinda defeats the purpose of youtube (Score:5, Interesting)
This YouTube algorithm has a nasty habit of "flagging" conservatives. For example, recently it "flagged" a discussion between Dave Rubin and Thomas Sowell.
Only Sowell is a conservative. The channel operator, Rubin, is a liberal (in spite of being called alt-right because he dares to also interview conservatives.)
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I would be more interested in the false positives - where they took down videos that triggered the system because of a word, or a fair use clip or some other innocuous trigger and the amount of effort required for somebody to
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So long as you're good with YouTube regurgitating mainstream media partners at you, it's all good.
Otherwise, the recommended section is utter crap.
And their umpty-quadrillion layers of "subscription" is an exercise in sisyphean bullshit.
AI (Score:3)
Re:AI (Score:4, Insightful)
You may have been downsized because of this, but don't believe all the hype. AI only helps partially. Youtube still needs human reviewers (even if they're unwilling to pay them).
Remember what prompted the advertiser pullouts last year, youtube was still incapable of filtering very obvious unambiguous swear and racist language from the text subject lines and the text descriptions of its hosted videos. To me, that just means that they didn't care, and/or that they were unwilling to pay for that kind of manual sifting by actual human beings.
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From your posts in other threads, I thought you thought that AI was non-existent, never emerging, impossible and unfeasible. Now you say that it works as advertised.
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If a computer can do your job then you are not doing a useful service. You need to value add and offer something a computer cannot do.
I don't disagree with you, but by this logic, in 20 or 30 years, no human will be doing a useful service. Not sure how the economy will work then.
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A relative handful of inbred upper class twits will live in splendor and ease sufficient to make Nero envious. While the rest of us die in the street like dogs.
Soylent Green is made of PEEEEEEEEEEOPLE!
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There won't be any Soylent Green because the AI will use humans for its fuel. Humans are too valuable as fuel to be wasted as food for other pesky, inefficient, humans unable to perform even a single useful service that cannot be performed by AIs.
And yes, this will include even the rich upper class snobs who think that they are safe, because they avoided the first two die-off waves after AI.
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Objectively speaking this could be good. With 99% of the human population gone, mankind will become highly sustainable and the 1% is still geneticalky diverse enough to prevent inbreeding. It may well be that the endgame is this: paradise on Earth for the chosen few. And why not?
That's easy enough for you to say now - but what if you were one of the 99% in the future? I'm sure that it would feel quite unfair to you (awww). Alternatively, future 99%ers may decide to pass "compassionate" laws that only allow for the reproduction of the glorious 1%ers, so the 99%ers children don't feel badly about themselves while all of the adults gets their nads snipped! Yeah that sounds realistic - sign me up*!
*snipsnip
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So instead we should all wallow in an overpopulated cesspool of poverty, disease, and starvation...
The earth cannot sustain infinite human growth. It can't even sustain what we have now. The inequality that you see is a direct result of this. The only solution is mass population control, and it's only logical that the best and brightest should reproduce.
It's been my experience that those with the money - hence, influence (the 1%) - aren't always "the best and the brightest". So now how do we decide who is "the best and the brightest"? "Big gun, big man" usually ends up as the final decider during draconian times, and then we start the whole mess all over again, minus the smarter people (the "best and brightest" intellectually, if not physically) who are the keepers of accurate history. The others will simply "Soviet airbrush" into existence that which t
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The earth cannot sustain infinite human growth.
Well, it looks like you will not be one of the "best and brightest" that gets to reproduce. You are thinking too small, the earth cannot sustain infinite human growth but the fucking universe can.
Hell, disassemble the earth and use the raw materials to make large habitats orbiting the sun. Just the material in the earth is enough to make and support 100,000 x the existing population or we could get to the point where we have a Ecumenopolis first. We are nowhere near that level!
We could continue to expand af
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Easy, people will demand to interact with people. You want to keep a human employed refuse to interact with an AI, easy. Your choice, you set the rules.
How many of them were false positives? (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is not good enough for detecting hate speech yet.
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It's likely not that much.
It's also fairly obvious that that number is inflated. If objectional videos were really being pulled down, ALL of Alex Jones infowars content would never show up.
Rather "objectionable" , includes reaction videos and uploads/re-uploads of television footage that was live not to long ago, before ContentID gets to it. If they have successfully trained AI to be able to tell the difference between a video game and live footage, that would be an amazing breakthrough. That said, most of
Re: How many of them were false positives? (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are plenty of reasons to silence people without fearing them.
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There are plenty of reasons to silence people without fearing them.
Sure there are: fascism, bullying, stupidity, arrogance, you don't like what they have to say, etc.
People like you make the world a worse place and you suck.
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When you tell a man to get off your lawn, you only exert control over your lawn, and the man is free to say his piece elsewhere.
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Zuckerberg can prevent you from putting something on Facebook. He can't stop you from putting it elsewhere. Facebook is top dog now, but if it annoys too many people that can change. Twitter could lose top dog status even faster, since it doesn't have quite the same network effect.
Do you realize what you'd have to do to get your say in, say, the 1960s? News was controlled by relatively few organizations. You technically could start your own paper, but it would be expensive to get it out to people, a
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Now you're bitching, not because you can't say what you want, but because you can't say what you want on somebody else's podium. Get your own. The Daily Stormer could do it, and so can you.
And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.
Rules for thee, not for me. Such are the excuses of an authoritarian.
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Any halfway competent campaign will check to see how the message is getting out, so shadow bans won't work. (If the campaign's incompetent enough to not do that, I don't want that candidate in office.) At that point, there are laws about political campaigns that come into play, and things get more complicated. (I don't know how complicated; I'm not a lawyer.)
I also don't see what you mean by "rules for thee, not for me", since I've been consistent on this subject and haven't mentioned particular group
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Yet that is exactly what you advocate. You want to force privately held businesses to host and distribute messages that they do not want to carry.
Will you host and distribute messages that you do not want to carry? Because I guarantee that I can come up with a bunch of them and make you suffer for the offer.
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And if they don't (because they don't)? Edge services operate under a Communications Decency Act immunity -- not as a common carrier, which is a status that only applies to telecommunications providers under the Communications Act of 1934. Therefore they can operate precisely how they wish.
47 U.S.C. 230(c) [cornell.edu]
Civil liability - No provider or user of an interactive c
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Again, edge providers are not the government [wikipedia.org]. Under your apparent definition, you are equally authoritarian -- you want to force privately held businesses to host and distribute messages that they do not want to carry because you, an authority, dictate so to them.
I should be so thankful that an internet lawyer showed up to put me in my rightful place for daring to even question my corporate better's ability to decide and influence the nature of political discourse in modern society.
How silly to think that when such 'private businesses' handle, process and regulate the speech between hundreds of millions of individuals in a country, and become the authority of who will be allowed to participate, that the line between it and government could become blurred.
Since y
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Actual internet lawyer. And you should be.
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They very fact that you could post this drivel here shows that we do not have such a system.
No meaningful space between corporate power and government power? Is Zuckerberg preventing you from posting everywhere? Can Zuckerberg jail you?
Not even close.
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It just shows that Slashdot is too small and meaningless to bother with shadowbans. Like it or not, Facebook/Twitter/Youtube are today's public square. Instead of being publicly owned, they are privately owned, and their owners are banning conservatives all over. This is why they need to be nationalized, for the protection of our country. We can't have a discussion when one side is silenced.
When Right wingers do not like how the community is managed, they build the alternative one. When Left wingers do
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How very conservative of you... by which I mean how painfully plainly you seek to utterly overturn conservative princi
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Moron. No one ever said yelling fire in a crowded theatre was ok.
I said it and I'll say it again. If someone sees a fire in any theater where I am in attendance, I greatly appreciate them letting me know so I can exit quickly.
Re:How many of them were false positives? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hate speech".
I bet you would have been the type to have called the Founding Fathers hate speeches for their anti-British stance back in the day. I understand Youtube is a private company with no reason to uphold anybody's free speech, and that I don't mind... but people like you would give it away that right wholesale without a fight everywhere and help barricade any companies who do want to provide it, and then wonder why in 20 years down the road the ruling political elites have no fear not representing any of your interests.
AI is certainly already good enough at replacing your shilling with their own.
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AI is not good enough for detecting hate speech yet.
That would a feat. As far as I'm aware, humans can't do that reliably either.
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They do stupid shit so you don't have to. (Score:5, Informative)
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U haters, hos and bots (Score:2, Insightful)
Who Judges?? (Score:2)
So, if Google/YouTube had some point of view, or points of view, that they wished to either promote or demote... how do we know if they are protecting us or harming us? I do data science sorts of things as part of my job. I know that very, very minor tweaks to algorithms provide quite different results.
Well, as long as they haven't nuked my '80s retro videos, then I'm good. Ah, Leah!
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So, if Google/YouTube had some point of view, or points of view, that they wished to either promote or demote... how do we know if they are protecting us or harming us? I do data science sorts of things as part of my job. I know that very, very minor tweaks to algorithms provide quite different results.
Well, as long as they haven't nuked my '80s retro videos, then I'm good. Ah, Leah!
It's quite possible now to place individuals and groups into internet "algorithm ghettos". Like the Nazis did to Jews in Poland by crowding them into a section of the city and erecting tall walls both to prevent escape and so the people outside the walls didn't see what went on inside, companies like Google, Facebook, and others can place individuals and groups into a digital algorithm ghetto where what they can access is controlled & filtered and what they publish/post/send can be filtered or blocked s
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That's crazy paranoid. Especially them somehow overhearing your call (I guess if you send a message through FB/Google, it's possible, but still seems unlikely). I don't know why you don't just use a phone. if you're worried about FB/Google as opposed to their messengers. Many phones exist that have no connection to FB/Google.
What is true is that FB/Google put you in bubbles and try to show you what they think you want to see. But that's been happening for a while.
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That's crazy paranoid.
Just as crazy paranoid as the idea that US TLAs were slurping up and storing every bit of phone & web traffic they could get their paws on was not too long ago. So was the idea of local police mass-spying on cellphone conversations and using what they learn to perform "parallel construction" to " legally find" evidence of a crime. That used to be tinfoil-hat territory as well.
Strat
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Huh, the US (and other) intelligence services slurping up data has been known for at least a decade. The local police mass-spying on cellphones is still a technical possibility that hasn't yet been demonstrated. And there's no technical way that Google/FB have your phone tapped unless you install their apps.
The bubbles are a real think. Shadowbans are a real thing (but mostly on twitter/reddit, I don't think FB/Google does it). But the idea that they can overhear your phone calls is not.
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Huh, the US (and other) intelligence services slurping up data has been known for at least a decade.
Nope, it was known since the revelations regarding the "secret" locked rooms at the major backbone provider facilities.
That's when people were called conspiracy-nutcases for trying to tell people what the TLAs were up to. It wasn't until Snowden that they stopped calling such people paranoid. Ten years is not long unless you are very young.
The local police mass-spying on cellphones is still a technical possibility that hasn't yet been demonstrated.
Well, except for all those court cases where "Stingray" evidence was dropped from the case when defense lawyers attempted through the discovery process to learn exactly h
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Please, since the Patriot act it was clear that mass surveillance was happening. There were public records. I'm not responsible for what people refuse to accept. (See also, FB wasn't secretly invading people's privacy, they were willing to accept it)
Stingrays are in use, but it's not clear they are used dragnet style vs. as a wiretap (without the fuss of a court order that would make it legal.)
Umm... FB/Google aren't buying access to your phone calls. That's crazy. Now, if you install their spyware^W ap
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Not as long as we've still got some semblance of Net Neutrality, and a reasonable DNS system, that can't happen. If you can go to an arbitrary web address, nobody can control what you can see. If the Daily Stormer can get a host, you can. Google and Facebook can control only what you do on their sites.
Re: Who Judges?? (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer is obvious: Big Brother Google loves us all. If Google wants to enserf us, it's *for our own good*.
Not As Interesting (Score:1)
If YouTube wants to be less interesting, it's their perogative to do so. My seven year old nephew watches a lot of it. It's safer for him to do so now. Also, YouTube is becoming something he will outgrow in a few years. Much the same way Facebook is where your aunt can keep up with what you're doing.
Re: Not As Interesting (Score:2)
Interesting theory. Infantalize the content, and you end up with only infants as your audience. Sure hope you're right!
Re:Not As Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Typical major tech firm failure. That market dominance, rushes to their genitals and they have delusions of total power and promptly start pissing off their customers, only to build up hate and dissension and then wham, they start loosing customers in droves and simply can not get them back. Alta Vista, MYspace, MSN, Yahoo, Lotus Software, all the same end, market dominance, engorged genitals, no blood to the brain, ego dominates over common sense and customer resistance builds whilst arrogance and ego demands it be ignored, until it is too late.
It looks like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22s... [duckduckgo.com] (two for one, heh heh) are the new upcomers, that will dethrone the arrogant egoists. Maps will be the next target, as will Android or oddly enough Android might well fork in an odd way as Google try to force their own proprietary core.
Typical false comparisons. (Score:1)
Facebook isn't going to be replaced by shitty open sores crap - even Google couldn't put a dent in Facebook. Facebook is not fucking MySpace.
YouTube isn't going to be replaced by some dumbass with a Linode VPS. YouTube makes no money, and schmuck number fifty two doesn't have Google's bankroll to eat that loss.
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Define 'Objectionable' (Score:2, Insightful)
YouTube Bans Firearms Demo Videos, Entering the Gun Control Debate [bloomberg.com]
Yet.. (Score:2)
Yet Friday by Rebecca Black still exists..
Not that smart (Score:1)
"Then, earlier this week, I was invited to a YouTube 'Hangout on air' seminar about monetization, where they basically told us: Just no more 'controversial' content. No more such videos, no more tags, even the title of a video should not contain any word that may look suspicious, because 'the bots are not that smart,'" Sprave told me. "That was enough. I decided to do something."
Quote from Jorg sprave, relating to the issues youtube has had removing arbitrary videos. Basically they have no idea what to do,
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On every other advertising platform, such as a network TV station, the advertisers choose exactly what shows and time-slots their ads are placed on.
This can of course be fully automated. Put the channel address in one field, times of day in another....
googliness (Score:4, Insightful)
Capitalist stooges sure are proud of mass censorship.
Re: It's about the money (Score:3)
It's not what the masses want - it's what their masters want them to see (or not see).
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Capitalist stooges sure are proud of mass censorship.
SJW run tech corps doing SJW powered censorship are "capitalist stooges"?
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Do you have the slightest evidence that Google examines thoughtcrime and gets rid of the offenders, let alone can enforce industry-wide blacklists? If you're going to throw James Damore at me, read the proceedings of the Labor Board that heard his case. He wasn't fired for having unpopular views. He was fired for being obnoxious and disruptive about them.
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Re: googliness (Score:2)
Ah, my dear Doctor Pangloss! So nice to see you again in this, the best of all possible worlds.
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I'm not pessimistic enough to think this is the best of all possible worlds. Spinoza was a brilliant philosopher, but I don't actually agree with him on a lot of things.
I'm also not quite cynical enough (give it time) to accuse companies of things without reasonable evidence, and my experience is that a lot of claims just don't hold up under scrutiny. To switch sides of the political spectrum, I've seen no good evidence that Monsanto will sue over wind drift of seeds.
Re: googliness (Score:2)
Then why don't they EVER talk about class domination, alienation of labor, property as theft, or communist revolution? Oh wait - it's because they *are* the face of capitalism/financialism.
Wow man (Score:2)
I realize blockchain is a meme and everybody hates bitcoin cuz it's killing all the whales or some shit but, fuck man, we need something. This shit is getting out of hand. Maybe I'm getting older (I am) and when you get older, you get more conservative (I haven't but everybody born after me thinks I have), but we're headed toward some fucked up techno-authoritarian-autocratic bullshit that a whole lot of blood is eventually going to have to be spilled to get us out of.
Now tell me how Alphabet is private and
And what are the training rules (Score:1)
And what do you suppose the training rules were that Youtube used to train its AI 'reviewers' with? I am going to bet there was more than a little politics in the mix
Town Square (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that YouTube has become the town square for video.
Sure, anyone is free to build their own. The problem is, though, that metaphorically speaking, the only land available is out near the town dump.
When YouTube was assuming this role, they were far more benign to viewpoints that differed from their own. But now that they have a lock on internet video, they know they can control the content. They wrap it up in removing "objectionable" video - but they keep changing the standards of "objectionable". With disturbing increading frequency, "objectionable" is defined to include religious views held by people for thousands of years, exercise of constitutional rights, and advocacy for political positions and candidates that do not meet with the approval of the Alphabet ownership.
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YouTube became the town square. It doesn't have to remain the town square. Land near the dump doesn't have to stay there.
If YouTube becomes objectionable, people will establish other forums. If there isn't a GunTube or something whose site is being circulated among NRA members, there will be soon. That's a few million people at least partly disengaging from YouTube. If YouTube drives enough people to other venues, it will lose dominant position, and it's possible to crash real fast at that point.
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Although we'd like to think that all real estate on the 'net is equal, it isn't.
Sure, one could start up guntube, or foodtube, or whatever. But right now, YouTube the one-stop-shopping for all tubes. They are at the center of the proverbial town. Your guntube and foodtube have to be placed on the outskirts. Which means at best, there will be a delay of months/years before the audience of speaking in the town square can be acquired, and at worst, it never will.
Again, remember: YouTube only started being
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Like all free market solutions, it's imperfect. The question is whether specific government regulation is worse than letting the free market solve things. I tend to think government regulation is better more often than some on this site, but in this case some sort of "fairness doctrine" seems untenable. The "fairness doctrine" was imposed as a condition of using the EM spectrum, which was and is considered public property administered by the government.
Fascinating! (Score:2)
Wrongthink (Score:2)