YouTube admits mistakes in manual moderation

[Crown]

YouTube said its effort to crack down on misinformation with more human moderators hit some snags, acknowledging mistakes in deleting some channels in the wake of the Florida school shooting.

YouTube's reversal of several enforcement actions against video creators are a sign of growing pains at the video service, which aims to hire several thousand moderators this year to deal with fake news, conspiracy theories and offensive videos. It aims to have 10,000 people checking videos for compliance with YouTube's standards by the end of the year.

Last week, several channels said YouTube shut them down after their coverage of the shootings, including Defango , Charles Walton , Bombard's Body Language and others. Infowars, the conspiracy website run by Alex Jones, said it received a second strike from YouTube, which would have frozen new uploads, only to have it reversed hours later. Several channels were subsequently reinstated.

YouTube said Thursday that as it adds moderators, newer hires may "misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals."

Mandy O'Brien, who runs Bombard's Body Language, said in an email she had three strikes issued against her channel in the last week accusing her of bullying and harassment, including for a video in which she scrutinized the expressions of Florida shooting survivors in TV interviews. Her channel was deleted, she said, but reinstated as of Wednesday after she appealed.


Full article and source (with more details from other social media like Twitter and facebook): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-5452515/Twitter-CEO-asks-help-fixing-civility-Twitter.html#ixzz58adowC59

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I think that the bit I bolded in red is interesting. Everyone complained (rightly so) that algorithm-driven moderation based on scanning keywords, tags and comments was flawed because the algorithm can't detect context, sarcasm, irony, humour, parody etc. So that is why Youtube are recruiting 10,000 human moderators to do the job.

But now they have a new problem - Humans also have their flaws and the process of deciding what is or isn't appropriate is extremely subjective. I would also add that 10k moderators sounds like a lot but in reality it's just a drop in the ocean compared to the number of hours of video that gets uploaded to YouTube every day. It looks like YouTube is in between a rock and a hard place. It's almost a no-win situation and in the meantime, they have angry advertisers, angry creators, angry viewers, angry politicians and angry members of the public.

Tough times are ahead for Youtube in 2018 IMHO. - Thoughts?

 

[DigiBox]

Good they are acknowledging this.

I never said this here cause i don't want to look full of myself, but i'm head Mod for a very large steam game, do mistakes happen? Yes. Do we acknowledge it? Yes.

YouTube needs to take more responsibility for it's mistakes instead of just leaving people to work it out themselves.

 

[Dewmonic Abyss]

That is kinda unnerving. I'm sure YouTube puts a lot of pressure on 'newer hires' to do their jobs, and since deeming content is suitable for advertisers is a grey area, I feel like putting people under pressure to moderate content, content that could be paying for a YouTuber's next rent, is a bad idea. People are going to think they're expendable. 'If I don't report/demonetize this video, am I going to get fired?' YouTube has a problem with transparency. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the staff there are just as confused. And then there's this human bias. Like this Mandy O'Brien. A human moderator essentially censored her for her opinion. It's really hard to say whether or not the bots or the humans are doing a better job.

 

[Dr. Creepster]

I don't know about you guys, but sometimes youtube feels like a minefield to me... I think their decision making is weird... It gives an opportunity to other filmwebsides to take some of youtubes "offensive" creators to let them make a community on another webside. But i guess we will se what happens