Right, YouTube’s goals tend to be aligned with what advertisers want, not what creators want. This is because advertisers supply YouTube with money, while creators supply YouTube with toothbrush unboxing videos.
If I seem bitter, it’s because I find it absurd to expect that YouTube could ever be concerned with justice, fairness or free expression. They say they’re “working on it”, but they just don’t care. That’s not their business model, never has been. Stop using YouTube.
If I know anything about machine learning and algorithms, NO. Google did not decide to punish sexual minorities. This just happened because more people (*more in terms of influence, not population) decided to report it.
The reality of machine learning is that not even the developers of the product know what decisions it’s going to make. It learns from the values of the imaginary person who is using it. This is both good and bad. This is an unavoidable side-effect of machine learning = shit in / shit out.
It’s remarkably telling how these “disruptive” tech evangelists will summarily dismiss any practical barriers to something they want to do even if it’s doomed by design, but woah-boy does fixing something suddenly become insurmountable when it’s something they simply don’t want to do. /s
Please explain to me the legal and logical reasons why the owners and operators of Youtube can’t set up whatever kinds of filtering/controls/rules they want. Please give me a coherent, rational reason why the owners of a thing do not have the right to manage that thing as they like.
Then follow that with some other reasons on why the owners of thing don’t have the right to set limits to its use. Give me a sensible reason why the New York Times has to allow its readers to decide what they print and don’t print. Then try to give me a halfway serious reason why a person who owns a fence has to allow strangers in the general public to decide what signs he allows or doesn’t allow to be stapled to it.
I suppose it was okay for restaurants to not serve black patrons in the south during Jim Crow, then… /s
“They will be held responsible for it, one way or another.”
And just exactly how do you propose to “hold them responsible”?
Also, what law have they broken other than your personal law that anyone who does something you don’t like must be made to suffer?
1, The have a defacto monopoly on video content, and the barrier to entry to compete on that level is so astronomically high no one will even try, coupled with
2. No monopoly oversight because they are not a monopoly, leading to
3. The inevitable reality that minorities and vulnerable populations will be under-represented, as always ends up being the default state in any situation with unfettered, unregulated control, leading to
4. One service, whom controls the vast majority of video revenue for the world, making decisions that disenfranchise vulnerable populations for expediency.
Now, clearly by evidence of what has existed to this point, this is what the US goverment is happy with. However, as a citizen of the world who has little choice as to where I get my video from, and definitely as a fan of video creators who have no choice as to where they get their revenue from, I am not ok with the demonitization of vulnerable groups because it is “easier” for Youtube to do so, or even because it is their right to do so.
Someone programs the bots. Their prejudices come through in their code.
Whatever happened to “Don’t be evil?” I know that Google writ large said that, but it can’t be that compartmentalized, can it? The corporate cultures of these giants are turning out to be remarkably toxic in the pursuit of revenue.
“Modern discourse” has come to mean lots of things which are not modern and which frankly, are better described as grift instead of discourse.
Still, it is why YT is a cesspool. What’s the fix? My suggestions involve measures like pushing grifters into the street instead of retaining them on the site, and as such, could be construed as “policing speech.”
Because that right has made YT into an ever-expanding ocean of digital shit?
Having a right is good. But it comes with responsibilities, or else what you get is, well, You Tube.
Edited to add:
Also, if I may, there’s nothing inherently rational about this stuff. It’s not a math problem you can throw algorithms at.
ETA2 (just thought of this):
Show of hands, how many visit YT just for their ads?
But since creators supply the reason to go there in the first place, you’d think there was at least some math suggesting keeping legit creators happy.
And they do not have the “right” to discriminate. That’s taking rights away from others.
Yep. Everyone defending tech types talks about their rights.
But rights come with responsibilities, and no right, not even if they built the house surrounding it, is absolute.
“We’re not really sure who or why our automatic kill-bots are killing, but we’re constantly evaluating our systems to help ensure that they are reflecting our policies without unfair bias.”
-Skynet probably…
There are legal reasons. I believe @anon61221983 has answered this better than I could.
Logical reasons? That’s a dicier proposition because, of course, it’s an underspecified query you just made there. Logic is how you go about getting an answer. What axioms you start from, however, is a different matter altogether, especially when you consider that to use logic outside a strictly formal context requires a praxis for a consistent making of judgement calls where reality and our comprehension thereof is inadequate to the stern demands of formal reasoning, especially pre-Frege, which is what most people use ‘logic’ for.
But let me give you some reply. Your reasoning seems to you unassailable but the only reason it does so, as far as I can make out, is that you’ve internalized a particular conception of ownership which is based on taking an originally Roman standard and then generalizing it to the point of where it doesn’t actually match the practice of ownership anywhere in the world. The Romans held that to own a thing is to have the rights of usus, fructus, and abusus: to use, to derive profit thereby, and to dispose of for any reason. If you generalize it you end up with absolutist notions of ownership where as long as a thing is yours, you have absolute rights over it.
Except, no, that’s not how anything works. Yes, if you own a brick, you may use it, profit by it, or grind it up into powder, certainly, but if you own, say, a gallon of dimethylmercury you will find that your ability to own it at all is in question, and even if you do, your ownership is contingent on certain rules. A lot of them, in fact.
But okay, dimethylmercury is an extreme example. Fine. Here’s something much simpler: it is near-universally accepted that certain things may be too large to own. If you tried, for instance, to own a great majority of all petrochemical resources in the country or to own all microchip production capacity you would find that the laws of the land won’t let you. It’s called anti-trust, and it is most certainly a limit to the absolute right of ownership.
My point, therefore, is that the right to own something comes with limits, rules, and that these are established by the sovereignty of the people, via laws (ideally; all incarnations of democracy are, of course, flawed) and with the aim of establishing justice and promoting general welfare which generally takes the form of a balancing act of letting you own what you own while limiting your ability to make mischief with it.
So. In this case: your fence can have whatever signs you like because there’s plenty of other fences and therefore, your right to own what you own, easily triumphs over the general interest. The NYT is much vaster than your fence, but is still just one of many papers. What does not get published there will be published elsewhere if there’s a desire for it. Note, however, that there’s still some legal obligations the NYT has regarding rights to privacy, libel, and the like, and that we also, generally speaking, feel the NYT has ethical obligations to act in a certain way.
YouTube has a monopolistic position in an important field. It has no real competition and it provides a platform which is generally seen as important to the public discourse. Therefore, it can be regulated in much the same way that monopolistic or oligopolistic entities of a similar type were regulated in the past. Note that the phone company doesn’t get to pick which calls get through and which don’t. And note, furthermore, the authority that the FCC has over terrestrial broadcasters. There’s only so many frequencies one may broadcast over and, therefore, anyone having one is in a oligopolistic position and is subject to regulation.
Now you may counter to all of this that you believe the right of ownership to be utterly absolute and that all of these cases are wrong. That’s a fine position, but you can’t then pretend that you represent merely common sense and what is reasonable—your position would be in variance with just about any society on Earth and the burden of proof rests on you to show that this radical restructuring would lead to a more just world.
I don’t know why people rag on YouTube. Yes, there’s asshats on it, but there’s people like 3Blue1Brown who not only has exquisite videos that make the world a better place, but even has comment sections which are generally quite positive and sometimes even worth reading.
And as for policing speech: sure. But it needs to be transparent, and it needs to be for really well defined cases on which there’s a robust cultural consensus. I’d rather have a hundred grifters posting away than silence one worthy voice.
Perhaps if you’re unable to properly police the content on your platform, you shouldn’t have a platform that big.
They quite literally retired it last year.
Yes! No matter what I need to know, somebody out there has an answer, or something close enough for me to adapt to my needs. I’ve learned home repairs, hardware and software fixes, crochet and art techniques, scientific and political concepts. Sure, some of the comments are truly awful, but others aren’t. Like any tool, like the Internet in general, what you get out of it depends on how you use it, and the critical thinking you apply to it.
As far as moderating the platform… I think we basically agree. Free speech has never been completely absolute, and I believe consensus on a set of rules eliminating, or at least limiting, hate speech and fraud could be achieved without punishing the good channels that exist. I’m certainly not willing to absolve YouTube and Google of their responsibility based on the tired excuses of “it’s too hard” and “it’s too expensive.” A multi-billion-dollar corporation packed with technological geniuses should be able to find a solution. If they can’t, or won’t, find some way to accommodate the needs of their users for a safe and secure platform, then they leave themselves vulnerable to the consequences. Viewers and content creators may stop participating, or even migrate to rising competitors who can build a more friendly alternative. (It could happen. MySpace probably never thought they’d lose their popularity either…) Or the government might step in with regulations or a Bell-style breakup. It’s in Google’s best interests to step up and manage any needed changes themselves. They probably wouldn’t like the alternatives…
I dunno. Maybe you’re lucky. But YT is run by stupid people who routinely make sure crap vids by crap folk come my way. No idea why. I like science, social justice, and video game hardware, but my experience with YT has no filter for the worst elements or aspects of this stuff. My argument isn’t that that experience is universal, or that there isn’t some inherent utility in YT, but that dealing with dishonest people on the service being coddled and protected by the platform itself.
So I try to now pretty much only go directly to content creators who I like. (But, as I’ve found, that doesn’t prevent garbage from coming my way via friends or family.)
We agree on the transparency for sure. But part of the issue is surrendering any of this responsibility to an algorithm, which plainly doesn’t work. Use that robust cultural consensus and hire real people to moderate content.
Want to post a pro-Nazi video? Gotta run that by legal/holocaust historians first. Want to post a climate crisis denial video? Same process. Gonna run that by biologists and climate science reps. Creationism? Same process. Anti-vaccine? Same deal, &c.
They can have their “voice” — but if they have to start distributing links on paper slips on the street while their content receives no ranking or recommendation, money from ads, or promotion or discovery, that’s certainly better than what they have now, and runs less risk of silencing any worthy voices besides.
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