Re:Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
by envy2 on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:04PM
(#23224183)
Except YouTube is blocked in China, so no one really should be trying to solve this to begin with...
Re:Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
by natestemen on Monday May 18, 2020 @02:58PM
(#23226896)
people read/write chinese outside of China though...
Re:Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
by fermienrico on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:01PM
(#23230590)
Why do we have to kowtow to them or even the Chinese government?
If someone says "Fuck the US government", we allow that on Youtube, don't we?
Re:Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
by seanmcdirmid on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @01:08AM
(#23231425)
But outside of the jurisdiction of mainland China. People from Taiwan and Hong Kong really hate it when mainland censorship are imposed on them.
Re:Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
by st1ck on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:43PM
(#23230829)
I'd assume most of Chinese speakers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia etc. would not be triggered by "communist bandits".
Re:Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
by codegladiator on Monday May 18, 2020 @11:58AM
(#23224083)
> He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string
But they have the best people of the industry who are highly paid for their engineering and problem solving skills.
Isn't this the kind of problem they are supposed to solve ?
> As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs.
As a software engineer I would have understood this sort of bug if it was some startup.
Re:Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube
by jpxw on Monday May 18, 2020 @11:47AM
(#23223898)
If you’re right, Google will stop removing these comments now that it has gotten publicity (although personally I heard about it ~a week ago) and apologise.
I won’t be holding my breath.
Edit: I’ve just noticed the Google support claim here was posted in late 2019. It’s somewhat hard to believe that this has just flown under Google’s radar.
A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather the required training data and annotate it. There is also no budget for this project.
So the engineer goes off to find a new plan and finds that Google already has a basic spam comment detector which uses simple heuristics to delete comments. He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string.
His boss is now happy, it gets sent to a test team in China who confirm that commenting with the word 共匪 on one of the videos results in the comment being deleted. Test passed job done, ticket closed. At no point does this get escalated or reviewed by anyone properly.
And if you don't believe this can happen anywhere, see the Scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem