Sciencemadness Discussion Board

A minor but interesting side effect to social distancing.

RJ2 - 9-4-2020 at 23:15

Quote:
So, I was on YouTube the other day, and I found a notice saying that some of the company's policies would be changed during the coronavirus pandemic.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9777243?p=covid19_...

[Quote]We are taking the steps needed to prioritize the well-being of our employees, extended workforce, and the communities where they live, including reducing in-office staffing in certain sites. We will start relying more on technology to help do some of the work normally done by reviewers, which may result in some accidental removal of content that does not violate our policies. This may affect additional types of YouTube user and creator support and reviews, such as applications for the YouTube partner program or responses on social media.


in other words, videos that get flagged for removal are going to get removed by a bot, which will not be as discriminating as a human reviewer. It will be interesting to see if this makes things easier or harder for chemistry channels to stay open. I'd tend to imagine more videos will be deleted quicker, based on YouTube's description of the process and apology in advance.

In the scheme of this pandemic, this is an inconsequential change. But it's interesting to think about. There is also a flip side to this whole thing. If there is a video that you want to remove from YouTube, this is the time to do it. For example, this video I stumbled onto about a month ago, when it was "trending."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqAJLh9wuZ0

Promotes misinformation and sexism. It showcases baseless sexist stereotypes in the same manner that blackface acting showcases baseless racist ones. Normally, it would be hard to get rid of a video like that just by reporting it, since the employee's have been biased against removing it. But now, if we can get enough help reporting it, it may be possible to remove it completely.Better yet, if we can flag the other videos about this same song, we might very well be able to remove the entire channel. I would strongly recommend that everyone with a Google account reports these videos for encouraging hate. And it's just one example. Any other content you want removed, you should take advantage of this situation while you still can.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd share this little heads up. It's a minor issue in the bigger picture, but it will be fascinating to see how much impact this quarantine really has.

Tsjerk - 10-4-2020 at 01:27

Can this go to detritus? This has nothing to do with science.

fusso - 10-4-2020 at 01:55

Quote: Originally posted by RJ2  
In the scheme of this pandemic, this is an inconsequential change. But it's interesting to think about. There is also a flip side to this whole thing. If there is a video that you want to remove from YouTube, this is the time to do it. For example, this video I stumbled onto about a month ago, when it was "trending."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqAJLh9wuZ0

Promotes misinformation and sexism. It showcases baseless sexist stereotypes in the same manner that blackface acting showcases baseless racist ones. Normally, it would be hard to get rid of a video like that just by reporting it, since the employee's have been biased against removing it. But now, if we can get enough help reporting it, it may be possible to remove it completely.Better yet, if we can flag the other videos about this same song, we might very well be able to remove the entire channel. I would strongly recommend that everyone with a Google account reports these videos for encouraging hate. And it's just one example. Any other content you want removed, you should take advantage of this situation while you still can.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd share this little heads up. It's a minor issue in the bigger picture, but it will be fascinating to see how much impact this quarantine really has.
This part is unnecessary, the rest can stay i think

Heptylene - 10-4-2020 at 01:59

This is still interesting info, indeed we will see whether this affects chemistry channels. Thanks for sharing.

Keep your political opinions to yourself though. What makes sciencemadness so great (among many other things) is we keep the discussion focused on the science.

j_sum1 - 10-4-2020 at 02:02

I think that this has implications for chem videos.

I think that trying to exploit this is misguided. And advising othets to do so is also misguided. For a start, we don't have good information. YT never reveals much about its policies for video removal and demonetisation.

Secondly, we know there are problems with censoring bots. It would be good to encourage human decision-making as much as possible. What you are suggesting flies against that.


There are issues here that may be worth discussing. But if this thread descends into questionable terrirory then it will go to Detritus.

RJ2 - 11-4-2020 at 12:16

This doesn't seem to be a fully automatic bot. It just removes videos that have enough people reporting them. The people doing the reporting are still in control of what disappears and what doesn't. Under normal conditions, YouTube would use employees to do exactly the same thing. You report, they delete. That system works great if you are reporting nazi wannabes, or people doing illegal activities. But when it comes to sexism, racism, etc, those employees show strong bias. They will only remove the content they find offensive as individuals. The bot, presumably, has no such qualms. I'm not encouraging YouTube to do this more often, I know there are problems with any automatic system, but we might as well make use of the good side to this feature while we can. Yes, I want people to help me remove the video I linked to. But I also want to let everyone know this is the time to remove the videos They want to delete.

As far as whether this is related to science videos, the answer is absolutely. These types of videos are quite common on YouTube, and many of us have got information out of a YouTube video that we then used to design our own experiments. But these experiments are reported by paranoid chemophobic YouTube users on a regular basis. We don't know how this type of video will be effected by the bot, because we don't know to what degree the employees have been "protecting" our videos. If they have been automatically removing any flagged video about chemistry, it wouldn't change anything. If they have been ignoring a lot of the videos being reported, we should see another increase in channels getting strikes and videos removed. I know a lot of the people here have channels, and have had problems with YouTube censorship in the past. It's been a few weeks since they gave the notice, so we'll hopefully see what impact it has on us pretty soon. Hopefully it has no impact.

j_sum1 - 11-4-2020 at 12:41

There's a lot of speculation in your response. Action based on speculation is, well, dumb: unless there is a quantifiable risk such as in investing or gambling.


I have no problem with YT removing videos based on principles. I do have a problem removing videos based on what someone happens to like or dislike. This is what you seem to be proposing. YT's dual censorship problem seems to be that the principles are so ill-defined and they are heavily swayed by the opinions of a few individuals who report videos. This results in both excessive bias and arbitrary deletion depending on viewership numbers. What you are proposing exacerbates this problem.

In short, this new policy of YT is a temporary step in the wrong direction and to respond in the way you suggest will only make things worse.

RJ2 - 11-4-2020 at 13:25

Well, there is a quantifiable risk. If we act on this and it's more effective, that's great. If the reporting works the same as usual, it's not any different from reporting a video any other time of the year. If reporting while the bot is in use is less effective, ah well, we just wasted a few minutes each. In no case does it encourage YouTube to continue using the bot. The bot will be gone soon no matter what we do. There's not a whole lot at stake here, which is why my idea of reporting more videos now was initially a side note. Unfortunately, it seems like enough people took issue with it that its the only thing people are talking about here.

The rest of the speculation I did was just that, speculation. I'm not saying to act on it, just looking at possible outcomes. We will see what effect, if any, this has on science related content posted on YouTube. We can speculate if we want, but the real test is to sit back and see how this unfolds. This seems to be true of everything lately.

[Edited on 11-4-2020 by RJ2]

j_sum1 - 11-4-2020 at 13:58

That's a qualified risk not a quantifiable risk.

RJ2 - 11-4-2020 at 14:19

If we do it, either we win or we lose. If we win, we get what we want. If we lose, its the same as if we didn't play. It's like getting a chance to gamble, but you get all your money back unless you win.
So, say I have a 90% chance of losing if a few people including me report the video, but a 100% chance if we don't. I don't know the odds, I just know we are not really risking anything here. Trying and failing, in this particular case, is no worse than not trying at all.

The "time to report videos" part is a side note, and of general interest, but not really relevant to amateur science. I was hoping for some discussion about the impact on the channels of other amateur scientists, including channels created by fellow SM members. It's not too late for that to happen, in my opinion. If anybody knows more information about what's actually changed, I'd love to hear it. If nobody is interested in ANY of what I've said, you can put it in detritus or it can just get buried under other threads on its own. But lets wait and see.

j_sum1 - 11-4-2020 at 15:10

Report or flag videos that ypu think need reporting.

Posting videos for others to report causes reporting outside the normal viewership and necessarily imparts bias. This is not to be encouraged under any circumstances. A similar th]ng can be said for encouraging others to seize a window of opportinity and engage in reporting that they would otherwise not do.

And this is important. I don't know how many good chemistry channels have been taken down by the reporting of individuals who are uninformed or otherwise uninvolved in the chemistry community.

This is a road to nowhere good. Just quit it.