In Google’s latest press release they admit they are pushing out a new classifier which flags 2x more comments, and that they are increasing efforts in this area.

I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools. I don’t moderate a large YouTube channel, but I will go out on a limb and guess that the tools are rudimentary.

Basic things like scoring the comment poster as well as the comment itself, the ability to have verified commenters (but why should this have to be a manual switch?), the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the classifier based on the intended audience of the video...

There is a massive valley of opportunity in between what we have today, and “magic wands to enforce arbitrarily nuanced moderation policies at scale” and perhaps the biggest comment platform on the Internet just decided they need to turn off comments entirely and if you do turn them back on, you need to do manual human pre-approval on each one.

>I think that the reality is that until very recently there wasn’t a huge bag of money attached the having fantastic moderation tools.

Uh, spam? Spam has a pretty damn massive bag of money attached to it and nobody has managed to get it right. Every single spam filter catches a ridiculous amount of false-positives and spam is far easier to classify than what's required here. Youtube catches a ridiculous amount of comments as false positives in their spam filter. I can't imagine this new category is going to be any better.

> ridiculous amount of false-positives

Not to mention quite a few false negatives. And the stakes on this are possibly higher, so it will be tuned toward an even higher false-positive rate.

Yea, that's probably fair. I didn't mean to suggest there's no scope for improvement or investment. But I suspect that you and I differ on our estimates of the degree to which this is possible, particularly without fundamentally changing the platforms and drastically reducing their value for legitimate usage.

The existence of the gap also doesn't change the fact that my experience is that implicit in the majority of the mainstream conversation about these topics is is an imagining of tech giants as wielders of unlimited power over their billions of users, and I'm skeptical that they'd be satisfied with most/any of the points in the valley you describe.

Not to mention that the flipside of public opinion is that the caprices of an algorithm are even more hated than their cases of leniency! All of the suggestions you make are going to increase false positives, and the PR backlash I've seen from that is far worse than the backlash to unmoderated content.

That isn't to say that there isn't room for reasonable complaint, but most people are really, really stupid, and even worse, entirely unconcerned with the consistency of their objections (a problem exacerbated by the fact that different vocal subgroups complain about different problems, and our various media will happily signal-boost all of them). Again, I don't see a solution that threads the needle effectively other than blunt restrictions, leaving everyone worse off but neutering the worst of the PR damage.

I feel like this cart before the horse vision is the problem. If you are going to suck up as much data about the world and monetize it, you have an obligation to spend some of that dough on a coven of wizards who can make the place you have created safe for people. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, et al have proven to be a disease vector over the past decade and if they want to be rich, they have a responsibility to bleach the shit out of the door handles.

Do you similarly feel that the telephone shouldn't have been rolled out until we could ensure that people couldn't speak about objectionable things, paved roads should have waited on ensuring that getaway cars wouldn't work on them, and the printing press should've been gated on technology that ensured it couldn't print falsehoods? As you can imagine, there are a trillion and one other examples I could bring up: you could ask the same about pretty much every sufficiently big advance in technology and the new structures enabled by it.

This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one: the responsibility line is unclear to me, but it seems to me that there's a level of Ludditic absolutism around the topic of Internet platforms that I don't see anywhere else, and it's possible that I'm missing the variable that makes it relevant here where it wasn't elsewhere.

I think they are shining examples of privatizing the profits and socializing the costs. In Google's case they have accrued over $100 billion in savings, and the Chinese government moderates content more effectively and from more disparate sources. A handful of companies provide phone support to over 100 million customers and Google provides automated emails.

I don't think people are this naive by accident: Google, Facebook, etc. have been pushing this idea for a long time. It has always been unrealistic but I don't think we can blame the average consumer for taking the statements of Google at face value.