Tell HN: YouTube is banning accounts that support Ukraine
We’ll this is just massively embarrassing for YouTube. The Reddit thread will get picked up by National media. YouTube will say the reporting was misuse of their terms and was a cyberattack from state level actors implying their reporting algo isn’t actually at fault. They will mention that the automated algo protects children and at risk people. They will then reinstate the accounts and say they are sorry for the temporary inconvenience and pleased that they could respond so swiftly. And the algos won’t change, not one bit. And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans.
Google's fetish for serving more users with fewer employees has been responsible for the failure of so many of their initiatives I often wonder who's behind it.
"Shareholders" and the McNamara Fallacy mostly
I’m not so sure that it’s embarrassing for YouTube, although I think your expected timeline is pretty much spot on.
I don’t think people expect much from YouTube.
Yes, not embarrassing for them -- but is more clarification for us.
The problem is that a finite number of human moderators can't win a fight against an infinite number of spammer robots. Also, keep in mind that humans aren't infallible judges, especially if you're reviewing hundreds of videos a day.
It remains amusing to me that Google is able to be stymied by what is probably a ~200 person or less sweatshop of hackers and spammers. It doesn't match all their bravado about their level of expertise in AI/ML, automation, troves of metadata and historical patterns, etc.
It's not a symmetric battle. The team of hackers and spammers has nothing to lose. Even if they're only successful 1% of the time, it's still a win.
I'd venture it has more to do with where Google applies all that expertise. If it were hurting them, I imagine they would solve it quickly.
I don't believe this argument for a second. Google almost single-handedly solved the problem of email spam a decade ago. And yet, robot accounts are a problem?
For the company that loves encouraging obnoxious Captcha's to self-fund their AI/ML research and data harvest the web, they surely don't seem to like using it on their own platforms.
When a system involves a human it's harder to massively infiltrate it.
Take counting votes. A bad human here or there could fudge the tally of pen on paapper ballots. BUT if you attempted to compromise a large percentage of these human ballot counters, one of the other human counters would start to notice and alert the world to it.
Compromising a system that involves 100k people is generally harder than compromising a computer algo.
Are you saying they can't tell what the topic of a video is about automatically.. because they can.
Using that information I would implement a system that would figure out the topic and prevent bots flagging that specific content only.
I do fall for the argument that oversight would be too costly given the sheer numbers. I don't like it though.
If the oversight you provide as part of your service is unreasonably expensive then you probably shouldn't be in business - if you can't sanely moderate your platform then you also shouldn't be in business. I can rationally accept that argument as quite logical but I can also accept the fact that news papers ran classified ads for years and years without assisting terrorists by giving them a platform to coordinate attacks in plain text on - facebook comes along and suddenly the bar for obfuscated text is "r u rdy 4 the b0mb?"
Companies that are providing such an amazingly affordable service because they're just skipping out on doing moderation don't get to use "Well, doing it the right way would be too expensive" as a defense - that's how you end up with Uber. Uber broke laws, Uber shouldn't exist at this point, something like Uber should exist, but Travis Kalanick should have been fined into near non-existence and not currently be sitting happy on 2.8 billion. We, as a society, need to have standards.
If your business is impossible to operate at its current scale pro-socially and without negative externalities, it doesn't get to operate at that scale.
Share-holders don't have a natural right to profit off of societally destructive behavior.
Now your customer rules are extremely costly for banks to implement, given the sheer numbers.
But we mandate it because that's the world we want to live in.
The real conversation here is about Alphabet and Facebook's margins. If they're not doing enough, they can spend more and do more.
It would be costly, but I am confident that Google has the money. They just don't want to spend it, and I am not sympathetic to that.
The question is would it be so costly that YouTube's profitability would look significantly different, and at that point would Google want to keep running YouTube?
I'm not sure, but I don't think the answer is that it obviously won't materially change YouTube's profitability.
Youtube's value isn't as a profit center, but a way of keeping people inside Google's ad ecosystem. Its value is to dominate the video hosting market so that viable competitors can't rise up in its place. If Google can squeeze profit out, that's icing on the cake, but not the core reason why Google wants to hold on to Youtube.
If the profitability of Youtube is on the table, then so should be antitrust, and Google should not be allowed to own it.
Youtube gets roughly 30,000 hours of content uploaded to it every hour. They'd need an army the size of all of Google, Apple and Facebook put together just to review it all.
How much of that remains if you don't review immediately, but when view count exceeds -- for example -- 100 views? I'd expect a dramatic drop from 30 000 hours.
If you want to be so successful as to become one of the premier public forums in society, don't start crying when you're held up to the standards and expectations of other public institutions. Google, go get ye that army of moderators.
Employing that many people would likely cost in the region of Google's entire earnings. It would make Youtube, or any service like it, financially impossible for anyone to run. So sure, I'm not saying we need Youtube, but what you're saying is we can't have it or anything like it.
I really appreciate YouTube's existence, but chances are a communal video streaming site that the entire world can trivially upload videos to should probably be a government run service if it exists at all.
There are a plethora of much more conservatively sized video uploading sites that vet and have specific contracts with their content producers.
I’ve work on similar sized systems that utilized a very large human workforce to verify models before release and to monitor/measure production models on a daily basis after release. There are ways to make it efficient.
I can't imagine what change they could make to the the algorithms to understand world context at an acceptable level. Reporting on the Russian Ukraine conflict and show a dead body. That is news and should probably be left up. A school shooting and show a dead body. Why did the algorithms leave that up so long?
I always assumed this was related to abuse of reporting systems by the opposition.
It may be embarrassing but are they embarrassed?
It's not like they're going to suffer for it.
> And the algos won’t change, not one bit. And there will still be no human oversite of these sorts of bans.
YouTube does not care. They only care when large popular cable TV networks or large partners leave YouTube. When that happens, that is a big frown for advertisers. Small users, creators or live-streamers have no chance against being listened to by YouTube. The algorithms won't ban the partners throwing cash at them but the small users will get banned automatically and YouTube doesn't care and won't care.
That is how it is on YouTube and their private platform with their rules or ToS and we have known for years that they continue to do this and ultimately, they will NEVER change.
yes, because human over-site is not viable at that scale. Please educate yourself on the scale of youtube. its not like folks at youtube didn't think of the idea of using humans.
even classifiers with 99.99% precision means hundreds of thousands of videos and channels will be incorrectly marked as abusive every year - we just need to accept that and hope that the automated systems are improved over time.
> Please educate yourself...
Side note on communication here.
Any time someone uses a phrase like "Please educate yourself on $THING", they lose a lot of credibility, at least in the context of that communication. Why?
1) It comes across as incredibly dismissive of both any knowledge that that individual may have - especially on HN, I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with YouTube's scale - and of the idea that there may be missing information, on either the situation or context for the other persons point of view.
2) It's quite condescending as well - and if someone thinks that you are coming at a conversation from a combative place, they won't want to listen to what you are saying. Why should they listen if they think you don't care?
3) It's often used to paint broad strokes in places broad strokes may not be appropriate, and the phrase being attached to that makes it lose credibility even when it is appropriate.
Ok, now a response to the actual content:
I don't know why we've decided to allow things to exist "at scale" willy nilly. If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".
No one is entitled to a business model.
> If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".
Hear! Hear! We shouldn't have to give over society to the fattest, most insatiable stomachs masquerading as technology companies.
Well don't do that. I'm not doing it and I'm fine. It's not like Youtube is the society.
I'm trying to avoid getting by zombies too, but their number keeps growing and they're generating nice profits for ZombieCorp!
> If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".
I've taken to thinking of this sort of scaling as being the digital equivalent of race to the bottom (i.e. cheap mass-produced garbage products).
>If something becomes a net negative "at scale", don't allow it to be "at scale".
>No one is entitled to a business model.
When it's just ordinary American conservatives being censored by social media, somehow nobody says things like that. Ban Trump and allow the Taliban? There's nothing wrong with that, they're private individuals, they can ban whatever they want. What do you mean nobody is entitled to a business model? Go away with your freeze peach.
> I don't know why we've decided to allow things to exist "at scale" willy nilly.Because we allow things to exist by default. Because we're a free society.
If you want an exception, then recognize and carve that out within the democratic process, not by preemptively applying authoritarianism.
> Please educate yourself on the scale of youtube.
Please be less smug.
YouTube has no right or requirement to operate at that scale. They've consciously decided to scale past what they're able to manage well. This is no different than a developer who produces terrible non-functional code but defends it to their boss by pointing out the line count is really high.
I'd be impressed by their scale only if they managed to maintain some level of quality also.
> Please educate yourself on the scale of YouTube
You're being very condescending when it's totally unwarranted. I assure you people are aware of the scale of YouTube.
But why should we give YouTube a free pass? You're talking about the service as if it's a force of nature rather than something human created and managed. Why are they entitled to operate at a scale beyond their own control, all while extracting huge profits?
This is the thing exactly! They built a system that allows infinite uploads but did not build a system to handle the workload of dealing with infinite uploads.
Some people just want to throw their hands up: "Dealing with infinite uploads is hard!" "It doesn't scale!" without realizing the youtube is responsible for the very problem they created. They designed it this way!
I'm actually not sure this is a question of scale at all? The amount of revenue and the amount of moderation needed both scale with the amount of content.
If anything, YouTube's scale gives it a better chance of being able to address this issue, since there are likely fixed costs here that YouTube can better fund (obviously investing in better automated screening, but also setting up the workflows for human moderation, etc.) I think the only benefit a smaller scale competitor has is that they're less visible and unlikely to be "caught" for hosting content they "shouldn't". But if the rules applied equally to everyone, I think YouTube is strictly at an advantage in being able to implement better human moderation.
Interesting points.
If I were designing from scratch, I would probably use a Peertube/Mastodon type federated system.
Each host would responsible for the videos they host - meaning they would have incentive to limit videos uploaded to any given host to an amount they could handle, or only allow trusted uploaders to their host.
Then you would have the federation so that you could allow hosts that you didn't have issues with, while blocking those you did. Eventually, there would evolve safe/block lists - like with email and adblockers - so it wouldn't even require that much effort on the parts of those running the hosts.
Human oversight should be a necessary cost and constraining factor of scale. Can't deal with providing non-kafka-esque support to n-many users? Then you shouldn't have n-many users.
I love the idea of admitting that scaling up technology arbitrarily can make our lives worse instead of better. But no, the answer is not to accept it and hope that it will get better despite no specific and substantive reason to believe it will.
Again, simply watching or having watched live streams from Kiev might net you a ban.
> If you watched any Kiev livestream it may have been the reason for your termination. It happened to a lot of us too, it seems some Russian bots have been mass-reporting every single person that watched them
> Yes, yesterday night I watched a livestream. Im shocked
> I also watched a Livestream yesterday night. How i wish I didn't now since my account got terminated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/t1445p/this_accoun...
Do you lose your entire google account just for watching a stream on YT??? Because if yes, that's an absolute madness
On the reddit thread the hypothesis is that somehow viewers got mass reported.
I wonder if their accounts were picked up for using the chat or if there's a viewer list that is being fetched via API.
So now if you watch the wrong video and you are in some list. Looks like it wasn't a good idea to have your full name visible and online identity tied to your youtube account.
Damn google for pushing for that crap, google+ was a blight.
People still fall for using their real name on facebook, twitter, instagram. It's not just google..
Welcome to Google. I know it sounds like cheap answer, but yes, some people lost access to their entire google related accounts including GMAIL and DRIVE when they were banned from specific services, like adsense for instance.
Does this apply to embedded videos too? Imagine reading a news article during lunch at work and getting your corporate account kicked!
Besides autoplay being evil, sounds like the GDPR-compliant pages have it right. Your data is only sent to YT after your approval.
One great example of this is the Gumtree site[0]. The social media share buttons at the bottom only load in when you hover over them (with the placeholder being Gumtree-styled social media icons). Great for performance
and privacy (although I would prefer no buttons / social media code at all). I've always been really impressed by this, I wish more sites would do it.
[0]: https://www.gumtree.com/
I don't think YT bans usually affect your google account. I got falsely flagged by a bot for copyright striking a bunch of my own videos which resulted in permanent, apparently unappealable, ban of all my YouTube accounts on that google account but the google account still works just fine.
It's a good reason why nothing important should be in an online account these days, it's too easy to lose access.
You are overreacting, nothing important should be on Google account is enough.
Ukraine has actually discouraged people live streaming or publishing Ukranian troop movement, it's revealing their positions and capabilities to the Russians. I'm sure that's a two way street.
How much live streaming happened on Youtube - and how many accounts were terminated - during the conflicts in the middle east?
This could be why YouTube is banning everything. People assume this is anti-Ukraine, but it could be the opposite.
How would a bot know to report you? How could it tell you watched a livestream?
Maybe if you commented on it, liked it or chatted on the livestream. Otherwise I don't see how they know you actually viewed it.
OP of the Reddit submission claims they didn't comment or chat.
But afaik YouTube livestreams with a chat also have a user list for who is present, at least they used to when I last checked.
Isn't there a "chat"-like feature similar to Twitch, where you can see everyone's usernames?
Yes, I checked and in the chat window you can get a list of participants. I'm watching the (non-Ukraine) stream but not in the participants list, so I assume you have to actually say something in chat.
This should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody. People have been complaining for a decade now that all automated takedown bots are ripe for abuse are are actively being abused by media cartels. You can't be shocked when systems that enable abuse are abused by foreign intelligence services.
Google has said it is cheaper to ignore the problem and until that changes they aren't going to fix it. And remember that on the other end of these abusive systems are corporations that are willing to sue individuals for literally billions of dollars over sharing files.
Big corporations will not have your back when it could affect their income stream.
My YouTube channel also got removed, received an email 3 hours ago.
"We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube."
Also posted a message showing support to Ukraine in a Kiev livestream.
This is what happens when you remove all humans from the loop. The decisions made by software can be manipulated once you have a reasonable estimation of what the software is doing.
This time it's Russia. Next time it will be an American political party (whichever one you don't like). YouTube saved some money on human moderation, and all it cost was selling their platform to the first group willing to abuse the system.
And do you know how they'll respond? By trying to improve the automation. No no, no need to add costs by having humans in the loop, we'll just make better software. Because that's what worked so well for SEO, right?
> YouTube saved some money on human moderation, and all it cost was selling their platform to the first group willing to abuse the system.
Last week I thought I had invented the phrase "accountability arbitrage" to describe the core FB, Google, section 230 business model. But a quick search found it actually has been previously used in some interesting documents.
I would like to see that phrase used more commonly. It seems important and timely.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22accountability+arbitrage%...
YouTube is quickly going on its way to becoming of low relevance. It will take a while, but when even non-controversial YouTube channels have to speak in code words in order to not get demonetized/striked/deleted, you know there's a real problem. I don't know if this banning of Ukraine support is real and, if it is, whether it's intentional or just another round of The Google's Best AI snagging on bugs again, but it doesn't matter. YouTube simply is becoming an nonviable platform to tie to one's business or opinions. At this point, you're not even that likely to get a following without several
years of posting videos every day because of just how biased YouTube has become against small creators; you're better off posting on smaller video platforms or even just making your own website.
YouTube is not going to be the source for breaking news like this. There's too much liability and not much money to be made.
The fact is - less than 2% of content watched is stuff like this.
People are mostly watching work out videos and game streams and sports commentary and so on. Not live streams of wars.
Well yeah, if you examine YouTube in isolation and disregard how its algorithm surfaces content, then sure, most people watching YouTube are watching workout videos and game streams. And maybe that's how YouTube is defining itself, and that's fine, but that's not how you create cultural phenomena. Likewise, millions of people drink Coca-Cola every day, but no one really gives a shit about Coca-Cola even though nearly 2 billion servings are drunk every day worldwide. But people still write actual articles about coffee for some reason, and that probably has to do with its relative lack of homogeneity and safety (from a taste standpoint). YouTube wants to sell fizzy sugar water, and that's the sort of relevance they will get.
The only reason I point this out as a bad thing is that YouTube long ago represented something else that I think mattered more than cat videos, no matter how small the audience was or is.
I highly doubt that youtube will become irrelevant any time soon. The infrastructure cost to hosting over a decade of video across the globe is immense and that alone creates a significant moat.
Even if some channels leave, others will take their place quickly. Youtube has sufficient size for that.
I didn't say "irrelevance". Just
low relevance, kind of like how ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox are all still "relevant", but they mean a fraction to younger generations what they meant to even my generation (Gen Y). They're of such low relevance that those organizations have to pay YouTube to promote their content. There may come a day, maybe in another couple decades from now, where YouTube is paying some TNG platform to cross-post its content in much the same way.
Relevance is a relative term, so I have to apologize for being pedantic here, but I also can't really help it in this case either.
> Even if some channels leave, others will take their place quickly. Youtube has sufficient size for that.
To some extent, yes. That doesn't mean it will be able to keep up with loss forever, especially when it's doing things to outright sabotage new channels.
People will get tired of a mostly PG-rated platform once YouTube truly reaches that point. Cultures shift and change, and if global internet culture swings back to being more like it was in the 2000s, the warm safety blanket YouTube provides will be a totally uncool thing only old people and little kids watch. YouTube will someday have a rude awakening when their pushing of late-night TV and mainstream news clips is no longer a significant ROI to their customers. As for movies, well, they're definitely not the only ones in town for that.
yeah weve seen other video providers come and go, but it feels like nobody else is capable of hosting this much content and having this many active content creators. its kindof sad really, if its not on youtube it probably wont be seen.
I don't think many alternative platforms are particularly serious. This is probably in part because hosting massive amounts of video and supporting streaming
is a very hard problem. At the same time, they all shoot themselves in the foot in many ways, whether it's their marketing, lack of real moderation, low momentum of improvement, or their UI design.
I'd be willing to wager money this is a cyber operation by a nation state weaponizing YT's automated systems.
That's what the first reddit post is saying. Which makes sense to me. If YouTube had an interest in blocking support of Ukraine, they wouldn't have replaced the COVID news section on the main page with one for the Ukraine invasion news. All of the US mainstream media (except for one) is taking a pro-Ukrainian sovereignty angle, and that's what shows in the news area.
Seems like Google needs to disable autobans triggered by user reports until they have a solution to filter out the reports originating from Russian-operatred bots.
> All of the US mainstream media (except for one) is taking a pro-Ukrainian sovereignty angle
Which one would that be? I haven’t seen a single US media outlet saying this is a good thing…
I'm specifically not calling them out since their opinion may have shifted since the latest escalations of the conflict.
I added that parenthetical because I expected without it that I might see an onslaught of comments from people saying that not all of the US mainstream media is in agreement that Russia is in the wrong here. But it's sounding like the parenthetical actually makes my statement wrong... I lost the coin flip I guess
A decent amount of Fox News programming is ending up on Russian state television to show that the US supports the invasion into Ukraine.
> Which one would that be? I haven’t seen a single US media outlet saying this is a good thing…
Fox is taking a more strongly pro-Russian stance than most other networks.
I don't watch Fox News generally so I can't speak to that (though I doubt it). I do watch Tucker Carlson - easily their top rated program - and the notion that he is taking a pro-Russian stance is patently false.
So should poster trust his own experience with his own eyes or Russian state television?
If an observation is also repurposed as a propaganda piece, does that negate the validity of said observation?
I can't stand this bit of logical fallacy that's being used to stifle discussion. You asserted X, but so did some objectionable entity. Therefore, X is false, and you are just as bad as said objectionable entity.
The poster should maybe have some introspection that if he thinks that Tucker Carlson isn't disgustingly pro-Putin, and Russian state television disagrees so vigorously that they literally threw him up there with subtitles to show how pro-Putin he is, maybe he's, you know, wrong about his assertion.
> I do watch Tucker Carlson
Why? What does watching his shows or segments get you?
It’s crazy how many news organizations are complaining about Russian propaganda, and then out of the other side of their mouths are using propaganda to strongly imply if not outright state (falsely) that Fox is supporting Russia and Putin’s invasion.
The media’s “don’t question or stray from what we tell you to think in the slightest or we’ll use whatever name we want to drag your name and character through the mud” just makes me and everyone else distrust the media even more.
This is unquestionably the case. Manipulating the flow of information has been part of Warfare 101 for thousands of years. Russia's manipulation of social media is mature and well documented, during times of non-war. The idea that they would make use of those capabilities during wartime is not just plausible, it's just as plainly predictable as "the soldiers guns probably shoot bullets".
Reddit I understand but Alphabet/Google/YouTube reached next level of incompetence.
Yeah, but that's about "normal" for what they have been doing with YouTube and account security for the last 10-15 years.
It's incredibly difficult to reach a human being in their customer support chain, and using bots to take out rival / oponent / people you don't like YouTube channels has been "normal" for years.
Anyone can literally create a few fake Google accounts (or take over / steal existing ones esp. long-running ones) and write a bot to ban practically anyone else.
Creators have been complaining about youtube robot moderation for a while
This has happened to other wars in the region too. State trolls mass report twitter and youtube accounts to get people banned, or have their videos "age restricted" (which means youtube does not recommend them). It' s the standard practice of google's nonexistent jouranlism/publishing ethics.
Twitter has this thing in Germany where they are required to tell you if someone reported your account. This is at least a good way for reporters to know that they are being targetted by trolls.
On the other hand, RT is still happily streaming on YouTube, spouting their non-sense. German viewers is not even IP blocked, even though the have lost their broadcasting license.
I mean, Fox News and One America News Network are still on there as well.
> Reddit is now full of reports of people (and their channels) getting banned for supporting Ukraine or even just watching related live streams. Reddit is also censoring and removing these reports..
That's hard to believe considering everything on youtube and reddit has been extremely pro-ukraine and anti-russian propaganda. If you have been banned from reddit or youtube for pro-ukraine propaganda, then you must have been caught gaming their system.
I can go to reddit right now and it's 100% pro-ukraine propaganda. Why hasn't reddit banned those?
I can't verify the claim that r/youtube was deleting reports but having regularly used ceddit, I wouldn't be surprised.
However, there's no need for me to argue about the first sentence. Please take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/ and it is literally filled with reports of account bans from the past few hours. 95% of the hot stories. You look in the comments, you find dozens more.
Saving screenshots for posterity (those termination/strike threads on r/youtube are all relevant): https://imgur.com/a/ekqk3B7
The chilling effect of this should be taken in account too. Once this is more widely reported, I can see many people choosing to avoid these sources of information even after bans are lifted because they are afraid of losing their google account.
It's probably worth noting that these are livestreams which have chat enabled. You are automatically added as a participant, and show up on the participant list, which anyone can see. I suspect watching, say, the WaPo livestream is fine because they have disabled chat and comments. If you must go to one of these livestreams, for some reason, check to see if chat is enabled, and if so, probably avoid it until Youtube figures out how to deal with this.
Isn't YT moderation outsourced? The infiltrators might just be overzealous Russian nationals in one of those cubicle farms.
That's an interesting possibility. Another hazard to outsourcing everything.
Don't browse youtube on the browser you have logged in to google.
Use firefox with ublock origin and don't log in to google. Youtube is great without ads. Use chrome for any of those things that you are okay with being tracked. Use archive.is when they bitch about blockers.
Use tor browser to see interesting ads not targeted to you.
I'll always be amazed at how advanced and desperate pro-Kremlin shilling is, using a throwaway account just in case they decide to DDoS my side project as retaliation.
I wasn't aware you can see what others are watching. How does one do that?
On a live stream there's chat and in the "..." menu you can click to see participants.
I think you need to have posted something in the chat for your account to appear there
yeah - add to that the Google AUTH with location records, and you get the New New Tech scene
Some commenters have said it could be that the videos make it easier for Russia to see what the Ukranians are doing, though I'd imagine they'd just take those respective videos down instead of outright banning people's accounts (since several years ago they force tied our YT accounts directly to our Google accounts even though some of us pay for services like Drive storage and Google Domains - and YT Premium for that matter).
Aside from that, food for thought; I know this won't be popular but Google does have ties to JetBrains (Android Studio, Android development used to be done in Eclipse, I prefer Eclipse). JetBrains has offices in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Google has a strong interest in pushing nginx (formerly (?) Russian made, though I personally prefer Apache) in Kubernetes.
A livestream about watching Kiev livestream to demo how long it takes for the account to get banned should be interesting.
Google's approach to abuse has a lot of false positives and false negatives but no proper way to remedy either of them.
The spiciest example I can think of is one Estonian parish being marked as belonging to Russia, even right this moment, on Google Maps.
The ironic thing is vk is not censoring similiar content.
It's far past time for American companies to espouse some American values like freedom and democracy rather than boot licking foreign dictators for nickles.
For starters, regarding live streams, the Ukraine government doesn't want citizens filming what is happening because it might give away positions of the Ukraine defenders as they attempt to maneuver in Kyiv, so that could be one motivation.
If that were the case, then deleting the videos would be sufficient. Banning or deleting accounts for watching these streams makes no sense at all.
Probably what happens is that people are being reported for saying something in chat that others don't like. X reports and your account is terminated automatically.
What is the state of decentralized (ake Web3) video hosting platforms?
Are they ready to fill the gap to some extend?
I think this is a typical use case for the decentralized approach?
This is what I exactly want, and I believe it will happen in the long run. We need a convenient/fast/reliable way of hosting content in global scale and incentivize who host content.
Still not there, once it gets there it will revolutionize media.
Yet we definitely need something different than BitTorrent, Tor, or IPFS. Something that incentivizes hosting and creation of an economy around this is a must.
Well there are a few 'alternative' social networks, but they weren't very successful (gab, parler, truth social is the latest one iirc).
The cynical side of me thinks this to remove competition from the approved (read monetization) news networks on YouTube, but I bet it is more algorithmic incompetence with no human oversight.
Question: When YouTube (aka Google, aka Alphabet) bans a user, is that user then deleted from the ad database so that Alphabet no longer makes any money from that user's data?
No. To the data was never the user's to begin with.
Sure it was. Your data is a currency that buys you the services.
There has also been huge amounts of bans on twitter. Say the wrong thing and you get ejected. Yet the clear russian propaganda is allowed to stay. I wonder what the threshold is to accuse twitter of russian collaboration.
It's certainly a charged event with emotions running hot. People are going to say things that are wrong.
Crimea was a difficult subject because they are ethnically russian. Due in large part to a gigantic naval base. They did vote to separate from the Ukraine.
That was then, today is different. The direct invasion of Ukraine is aggression. Putin lied, diplomacy has failed.
As emperor of canada I would have done what my gov has done so far, but also put a sunset. In 1 year, unless something changes, we end any and all connection to russia. their citizens may not come here. none of their citizens may own property here. Absolutely no trade of any kind. Anyone who is currently doing business with them, your contracts are null and void. Find new suppliers.
When Google bans an account like this, and that account is a Premium subscriber, do they automatically cancel the subscription?
I presume so, else Google would get sued for charging for a service not delivered.
Most of Russian side social media is on Telegram. Does anyone even know if they ban people or moderate content?
its crazy to me this can occur for
any reason, even if they blame the algo, most companies would not be able to get away with something like this without a major effect on their reputation.
There are thousands of dormant accounts, the other day I found one dormant for 5-6 years, became active 1 year ago and had 95k comments! Most bashing the west and defending Russia and populist regimes
Those are not usernames, but auto-generated ids of the linked comments/posts. The rest of the url is just a human readable title, which you can erase and still get to the same post.
and this is how fake news is born....
These are the reddit thread ids which have "similar namess". The users behind them have different names and have been active on the network for up to 6 years.
Is this actually happening or are people trying to keep others from supporting Ukraine?
I think larger interesting problem here is possibility of those huge corporations taking sides in wars.
I don't know. I think it would have been good if IBM had taken sides during WWII instead of helping Germany build the infrastructure for genocide.
It's usually not that clear cut, but the war in Ukraine has a clear unilateral nature (aggressor is pretty obvious). It's not crazy for western companies to echo western values and interests in such situations.
Edit: Consider the alternative, where western companies maintain "neutrality" and help oppressive regimes surveil their citizens or spread propaganda at home and abroad. This seems like a great way for western democracy to shoot itself in the head.
Corporations don’t much care what system of federal governance is in use. Heck, it’s arguable that they prefer dictatorships and oligarchies: easier to bribe.
If the West expects corporations to ensure democracy prevails, the West will fail.
YouTube: "What're you gonna do? Go use Vimeo?"
This has happened way too frequently and in distinct cases to keep pretending 'it's just incompetence/ignorance'. By the time people realize it's more akin to malevolence it will sadly be too late.
I now propose an updated motto: "Don't be evil: just look away."
YouTube, where oppressive regimes decide what you can watch.
I'm sure this is top priority right now for Google to fix. But perhaps everything is automated to an extent that this has no good countermove. We shall see.
Oppressive regimes decide what you can watch and megacorps decide if you are allowed to downvote.
"It's automated" has become the new "it's policy," the go-to excuse for doing evil and pretending it's not a choice.
Dollars to donuts says they were fed posting and got in trouble for it.
What's the chance of these accounts having been compromised for a while, and they were now activated to serve as bots, with YouTube detecting that increased activity and changed behavior, thus flagging them for suspend?
Twitter, Facebook and Google - reliable allies of evil everywhere in the world.
I mean we knew that, but now it's like they're competing who is worse.
Good in one sense though: people are really seeing how evil they are than ever before.
The most interesting thing about this, is that the people that run big tech are all anti-Russia. They're in the Biden | Obama | Hillary camp, not the perceived Trump | Putin camp philosophically (the far left regards Trump and Putin as being aligned and view that as one connected political union; and they view themselves as being specifically on the other side of that; the people in charge of Twitter, Facebook, Google are all far left and very anti-Trump | Putin).
Big tech more likely wants to censor the Kremlin than the pro Ukraine wing. Which leads me to believe this is YouTube getting trapped in its own algorithmic approach to moderation, until or unless they can manually intervene.
I believe those are weakly held beliefs relative to their strongly held belief of making piles of money. Despite the lip service Google and others haven't exactly been going out of their way to help improve democracy and institutions in recent years.
What piles of money? Russia is an entirely irrelevant source of income for them.
And if that were true, they would not have de-platformed Trump and they wouldn't take down lots of other high traffic content (eg anti vax) that they do.
Russia has a mediocre economy, mediocre median standard of living, mediocre consumer economy, zero economic growth for a decade, and a disaster of a future economically going forward.
US big tech all by itself generates more surplus cash (capital available for saving after expenses) every year than the entire nation of Russia does.
Russia is an economic weakling and provides no great allure for big tech.
I don't mean that these companies are literally shilling for Russia directly. Rather it's that their entire approach is based around maximizing revenue, regardless of the consequences.
Deferring all decisions to an opaque algorithm isn't the most responsible approach, it's just the cheapest. Worrying about externalities of their services costs money and produces little, so they mostly don't.
The fact that their approach can be used to help horrendous warmongers is not intentional, but maintaining a system that can be used in that way is.
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow though so who is to say when it comes to war.
I do agree though, this is most likely just the nature of the problem of trying to moderate such a massive amount of video content.
Some will be caught in the net and attribute agency to the process when it was just completely random.
I mean there is 50k watching a live stream of Kyiv right now.
I don't think they're anti-Russia or anti-anything really, they're pro-being-even-more-insanely-rich and that can materialize in many ways, like talking about being in one camp while doing things that help the other, no matter which camps those are.
> the far left regards Trump and Putin as being aligned and view that as one connected political union
I mean, it's not like this idea is unfounded. Trump has praised Putin many times, including during the current invasion. Meanwhile, Putin has been very friendly towards Trump.
I think the "Russian election interference" stuff is very overblown, but it's pretty clear that Trump respects (and maybe even idolizes) Putin.
One other problem with what you said is that I think the cause and effect goes the other way. The democrats are anti-Trump in part because he's pro Putin. They're not anti-Putin because Putin is pro-Trump. Being anti-Putin is very simply a matter of being anti-dictator and doesn't require tying Putin to a controversial US political figure.
Trump might say he likes Putin and Xi and that fat fuck in NK, but nevertheless he started a trade war against China, sent the first Javelins to Ukraine after Obama didn't want to do so, blocked NS2(that Biden rushed to unblock in his first week!), sent more troops to Poland and all Eastern Europe countries, strongly "encouraged" NATO countries to up their spending on defense etc.
It's almost like the conman Trump says one and does the other, but because he's our political nemesis this does not matter anymore, and all of the sudden we start believing what he says and not look at the actions.
Tell me, is this praising Putin, or trying to put some sense into Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRyuW51M_fI
https://publimetros.publimetro.us/2018/07/trump-blasts-allie...
Who said anything about it being unfounded. That was quite obviously not the point.
The point was: big tech is exclusively run by people that dislike the perceived Trump | Putin axis, and there's nothing to debate about it frankly, it's something beyond overwhelmingly the case.
I stated no position on whether I thought that was good or bad.
There was no problem with what I said in fact. I never declared cause and effect (order to why such was the case), that'd be a pointless distraction from the core (and would merely prompt endless opinion thrashing based on partisan beliefs on this forum, or most any forum these days). I simply stated the part that they're quite obviously anti-Putin, and they are. Why for the purposes of the thread doesn't matter. Thus it's more interesting that they'd be blocking pro-Ukraine content and most likely indicates it's not their preference and is an automation problem that they'll have to manually act against.
OK what seems more plausible: YT is banning people simply for watching a live stream that
they are hosting, or that these reports are mistaken or part of a disinformation campaign by a country known for them.
The most plausible explanation I've seen is that Youtube's reporting algorithm is being gamed. It's a known weakness that Google has had no interest in fixing in the past.
Given what we know about YT’s gameable enforcement mechanisms, probably the former.
One report came to me personally from a small local IRC channel (less than 100 people) from a person who's been around for years. I trust them 100%.
Too bad but luckily I don't really care anymore. I de-googlified myself some time ago. My email is fastmail on my own domain, I don't use Google's cloud services.
Sucks for people who are still trapped in the Goolag ecosystem though. Maybe this should be a warning at least not to host your precious family photos with Google and not to use their email service.
This is absolutely irrelevant for the situation. I did similar things, yet you cannot deny that Youtube is hugely important for people's viewpoints on world politics. This isn't about you or me.
I de-googlified myself too and never intend to go back, though this is not just about Google.
This is about centralization. If there isn't Google, there is Facebook Video which would do the same. If there isn't FB Video then there's Twitter, which would do the same and so on.
Even if we, as a minority remove all our accounts from those platforms, the majority use them as the primary media platforms.
We need a paradigm shift at scale to move people off centralized platforms, but we need a candidate first that is convenient for people.
Your personal habits are irrelevant. We live in a shared society and Youtube content will still have an effect on you by way of its viewing by everyone else.
I am not sure about watching, but a few different streamer have said showing dead bodies other other list of things can get you banned. Some streamer I was watching mentioned that even violent gun fights and other things might get you in trouble. They were watching videos first without showing it to make sure it was safe.
I also wonder if youtube is trying to do detect propaganda somehow. Some videos were clearly using old/altered clips and making claims about the war. This might be factoring in too. Unfortunately, no actual detail is provided of what exactly was the trigger. Even some of the reddit thread seems to have disappeared.
In my humble opinion, HN is a file place to be outraged about something some company/person has not but not really that good of a place if there is no data/information/real indication/ that something bad has happened. I am happy to listen to counter points.
