I haven't watched anything from Prager in at least a decade, but I'd be surprised if it was anything more "incendiary or demeaning" than "Trump is a great president!" The point stands, that regardless of how many categories they list, the switch that turns off porn shouldn't also turn off political speech. That is a flaw in Youtube, that probably wouldn't exist if they didn't have a monopoly.

"Shouldn't" in what sense? Are they leaving money or users on the table by failing to increase the granularity of the filter?

The core market for the feature is schools, and that group is generally okay with the filter being conservative and low-granularity (read: little thought required for configuration)

Money: These videos are playing less than they would have without being restricted, therefore less associated advertising is playing. It's probably not much money on Alphabet's scale.

Users: Somewhere in this nation, there is a high school administrator who consents to students learning about politics. There might even be more than one.

As a private organization, if that's money they want to leave on the table and users they don't choose to serve, that's their right. As you've noted, it's not much at Alphabet's scale.

Another company could pick up the slack. Hell, PragerU could do it. Nothing stopping them from brokering their own ad deals to run prerolls on video they host with their own infrastructure. A few schools might allow access, and many will just black-hole prageru.com in their firewalls.

This feels like ground we've already covered ITT. Sure, the current interpretation of current laws allows Alphabet to do basically anything they want. We can still talk about what they should do, and better serving users and making more money are both criteria that can inform that discussion. I thought you had suggested these criteria above.

Indeed; I was speaking broadly, not in absolute categoricals, and my question should have read "Are they leaving large amounts of money or users on the table." My apologies for being unclear. Yes, every decision they make in both directions leaves nonzero money and users on the table.

At Google scale, one has to weigh the risk of false-positive and the risk of false-negative on a low-granularity feature like this, and the risk of error due to misconfiguration being blamed upon YouTube if it's turned into a high-granularity feature. Because the failure mode for YouTube if they false-negative something that is visible to students who should not have seen it (and generate a negative press cycle for themselves) is that schools choose to black-hole youtube.com instead of bothering with Restricted Mode at all. That's what was happening before they added the feature, and it's the reason Restricted Mode exists.

That's a pretty clever way to add immediate framing for anyone viewing the content: conservatism is - by definition, apparently - incendiary and demeaning. Convenient.

Other commenters (https://medium.com/@ephromjosine/okay-prageru-lets-look-at-w...) note it may simply fall under "mature" for dealing with topics of violence, war, and terrorism.

From that link:

Mature subjects: Videos that cover specific details about events related to terrorism, war, crime and political conflicts that resulted in death or serious injury, even if no graphic imagery is shown.

. . . .

You can’t post videos on Terrorism, War, Crime, and Politics.

It's interesting that all USA politics is acknowledged to be "political conflicts that resulted in death or serious injury", but somehow I doubt that MSNBC will be held to this standard...

They appear to be. Only a handful of PragerU's videos are marked restricted. A cursory check on https://www.youtube.com/user/msnbcleanforward/videos with restricted mode on and off shows a handful of their videos are also marked restricted, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZWasc1rC_U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSFQos3XTEQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZWtdFVU904

Mentioning coronavirus is violent or demeaning? I am more and more confused...

I have no idea by what criteria, precisely, these videos or the PragerU videos were marked restricted. Neither does PragerU, for that matter; Google doesn't surface that level of detail on the Restricted algorithm to end-users. I've been making educated guesses at the detailed cause, but it's somewhat irrelevant; the answer is, really, "Google's algorithm deems this content should be restricted."

By that criteria, MSNBC and PragerU appear to be treated the same way.

(Edit: FWIW, I went ahead and clicked through one video and that micro-sample should probably be flagged for "politics;" pundit accusing the President of, at best, being ignorant of science, and at worst, misleading the American people intentionally. That's clearly inflammatory political content).

That's key to the current frustration with YouTube, outside of constitutional grounds: as a platform, it's become wildly unstable to depend on, as you simply are not given the ability to understand where it will or will not draw the line, and their application of their standards leaves such an ambiguous and inconsistent trail of evidence that it's harmful to everyone who tries to rely on it.

I know you keep linking this blog post as if it proves a point, but its argument is tenuous at best.

The crux of the author's case is that PragerU's videos fall into the category of "videos on Terrorism, War, Crime, and Politics."

This is a remarkably wide net to cast. Surely you can think of countless YouTube channels which were not subject to the same scrutiny that Prager was, yet obviously have videos on politics and war.

At the end of the day, Google disagrees with Prager's politics. I don't think it's much more complicated than that.

Under the same Restricted Content scheme, Google also flagged LGBTQ+ videos (https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17424472/youtube-lgbt-demo...). I don't think anyone argues seriously that the company's politics (in general) are at odds with supporting LGBTQ+ causes and people.

It may be worthwhile to ask not what YouTube wants, but what the audience for these features wants. Are PragerU videos restricted because most schools think they're worthy of restriction?