I know youtube is a shithole and yet it still surprises me. My son's favorite kid's show is only on YouTube so I created a new account, subscribed just to their channel and still inappropriate content shows up. How hard is this?
I also can't block it for my daughter because she has school assignments that involve watching YouTube videos. Sooner or later that's going to bite the school in the ass.
I've been using `youtube-dl` successfully for lecture videos on my TV appliance (supposedly to watch while using the stationary bike). An example command line is in a script that grabs the videos from a conference: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/download-racketcon-2019-v...
I suppose one could automate the process, with a simple UI to approve or submit a URL for viewing, and then automatically youtube-dl it and make it available to the kids' devices.
The problem isn't that tech savy people can protect themselves, it's that most people can't and won't.
Our school uses http://www.viewpure.com/ to avoid this.
Also, I agree you don't even need to watch a political video to see political garbage on youtube. Last night they showed me some bizarre political conspiracy ad saying Pelosi and Harris are going to invoke the 25th amendment on Biden to make Harris the president. YouTube was promoting this nonsense at the top of the feed.
You deserve better then to be shown ads.
A bit off topic but a serious question. What's your logical reasoning for blocking the content now. It's just slowing down what he will be able to see (by deliberately going around you) within a couple years. I never understood this with parents.
> A bit off topic but a serious question. What's your logical reasoning for blocking the content now. It's just slowing down what he will be able to see (by deliberately going around you) within a couple years. I never understood this with parents.
Children are not little adults. They're still developing and learning things that you and I would consider basic. It makes sense to delay their exposure to certain things until they have the maturity and knowledge to process them properly.
Hey I have a different opinion than you. I think you should respect that rather than say parents are unnecessary after birth. That's rude.
First off think about it logically. Why indeed do parents have to protect children from things they will not only be exposed to as adults but things they will inevitably seek and successfully expose themselves to BEFORE they become adults.
Your job as a parent is to protect your kid from actual harm and to teach your kid and feed your kid and guide your kid. Your optional side job is to protect your kid from "reality" that's your own personal choice and there are actual scientific observations of the result.
The podcast below actually illustrates a scientific study on the subject:
https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
A part of it actually follows two blind kids with different parents and different parenting choices.
One parent chose to protect his blind kid from reality.
The other parent gave the blind kid a bike for a birthday present two weeks after the crazy blind kid lost his two front teeth from running into a wall.
Do you want to know the end result of sheltering a blind kid versus encouraging one to explore reality? Watch the podcast to find out. Very interesting if your a parent. Let's just say one blind kid (now adult) now walks around the world as if he can see and literally uses echolocation to navigate the world. The other blind kid walks the world as if he's a crippled blind man.
Here's another one: https://www.npr.org/2015/01/16/377517810/world-with-no-fear
Also about kids. Talking about how kids today only wander around their homes while kids in the 60s and 70s wander around the whole town by themselves. It's attributed to different parenting styles and fear of exposing kids to the real world.
Parents in the 70s were much less fearful about protecting kids from reality. Parents today are scared of everything. But the illogical difference here is that from the 70s to now, crime has actually gone down. Your kids today are more safe than ever before but parents are more restrictive and scared than they ever were before.
This is science and its about research that the scientist did to prove something.
It's problematic to say that scientists have 'proved' anything. Scientist's conclusions are always based on the available data, and at any point new data may come along that disproves their conclusion. Scientists know this of course, which is why reputable ones are never going to step forward and announce "I have proved..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_evidence
> evidence cannot prove a theory correct because other evidence, yet to be discovered, may exist that is inconsistent with the theory
When I use the word "prove" i don't mean like proving things in math. Nobody means this, it's obvious to everyone what they mean. Prove in this context means well established. For example if I say scientists have proved the theory of gravity.
What's going on here is extreme pedantry. Prove has meaning in different contexts, you have chosen the most technical pedantic context to suit some misguided purpose rather than the most obvious context. There's no point in taking this further.
However you are referring to a social science when you talk about differences between kids of different generations. I think using 'proved' in that context puts you on pretty shakey ground.
What this means is that whenever you use the word "prove" with "science" it is colloquial. It is always colloquial.
The statistical methods used in social sciences are no different than the statistical methods used to "prove" things in physics.
FYI the two blind kids actually knew each other when they were kids, and I "kid" you not the kid that was the "libertarian" bullied and beat up the other one because he was thinking "wtf, why is this other kid helpless."
Listen to both podcasts. Worth it for any parent as it gives a true more "scientific" perspective on the coddling going on with kids today.
More specifically, I was raised in a generation where adults didn't worry particularly about children seeing violent or upsetting content and it brought me nothing but nightmares and a lifetime of insomnia.
My job as a parent is to help him understand. Not to build a bubble.
As for violent content I would tell my kid to just watch out for that and that the content is unpleasant. It's his choice whether he wants to see it. Usually at that age adult content or violent content is uninteresting or unpleasant so kids tend to avoid it anyway.
As for violent content, with YouTube specifically it is easy to watch it without being forewarned. I don't know if you are aware of Elsagate but the whole goal is to get kids to watch horribly disturbing content without warning.
At 3, he just had a playstation.
At 3 I don't let him run across the street. At 5 I tell him to look both ways and I tell him what happens to someone who doesn't, then I let him play outside.
Youtube, fb & such have monopolized online media. Then these problems "crop up," many as side effects of their own antipatterns.
Now they have the public and politicians lobbying beseeching them to please do something... They're being handed the power to censor us, to deal with problems that they themselves create.
There is a big difference between facebook and a Standard Oil or a Bell. Those companies were necessary. Post breakup, we still needed shards to produce oil, phone lines and such.
If facebook was crushed to dust, there would be no shortage of social media.
Social media drives antisocial behavior and social division intentionally, because these bring huge numbers of clicks and thus ad money.
Sorry, I'm not trying to nitpick. But it seems like all you've said so far is "An app which I downloaded and enabled push notifications for sent me a push notification recommending a video I didn't agree with politically". The term "extremist content" can mean basically anything depending on who is speaking.
Despite this YouTube really needs to wake up to the fact that some of it’s content is really toxic and potentially dangerous, and that it potentially suggests this toxic content to an unsuspecting audience. Optimally it wouldn’t do that, while still suggesting some of the great content there.
1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w
2: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q
3: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzR-rom72PHN9Zg7RML9EbA
But yeah, I dread when someone sends me a politically charged video and suddenly my feed is full of crazy people.
You can wish for legislation to save you from your outrage - to shatter these companies into little pieces. But legislation doesn't change underlying incentives. In fact, legislation nearly universally distorts incentives further from what you wish them to be. For example, in this case, fear of legislative action against "Big Tech" having too much power/influence/misinformation-potential, is likely the underlying cause for their inclination toward censorship.
The classic Walmart South Park episode is a nice visual syllogism for this idea.
I offer no solutions at the level of "society", but at the individual level I offer you to consider that "outrage" is a waste of your time and your emotion. Easier said than done, I know.
Is YouTube’s approach to extremist content different from a tabloid in any way other than efficiency/reach?
Are we really complaining about a basic aspect of human psychology rather than a business innovation from these companies?
If we smash YouTube, what about the tabloid press? How do we actually regulate this stuff in a consistent way? (And how do we do it inside the confines of the first amendment?)
I think part of it at least is that you simply get recommended way more things now than then; the shocking recommendations are the only ones we remember.
I do also agree that there is some sort of feedback loop going on here that wasn’t happening as strongly before, and I have a vague hunch that bots / astroturfers may be amplifying these feedback loops in ways that didn’t apply to previous generations.
Could that simply be the inevitable effect of Youtube being filled with garbage? It seems that suggestions linked to the current video by some keyword match (or whatever) but otherwise random would have this problem.
E.g. if you pick a good political YT video on some topic, and then randomly select half a dozen other YT videos on the same topic, they are probably garbage.
So while the selection process isn't blameless (it could be improved to promote quality videos) much of the fault lies with the quality of the available material.
How would the selection process promote quality? How does the machine know that? You can't tell from the likes and dislikes; such populist metrics would promote garbage all the same. It seems that it would require a large team of workers to curate videos.
Another issue is the use of autoplay (which is enabled by default in chrome on my phone), where they keep shoveling more content at you even if you didn't intend to watch more.
I dunno, there's value in suggesting related content. If I subscribe to a woodworking channel, and Youtube suggests other woodworking content... that doesn't seem like a problem.
It should not be possible to search for a Biden or Trump speech and half an hour later, through suggestion surfing alone, you are viewing alt-right or antifa extremist content.
Specifically, there's no reliable way of determining whether content is "extremist content" because a lot of information that the political and religious extremes focus on is actually true information. It often these extreme views that provide unique insights and the most valuable information. So how - and moreover why - should Youtube try to sift through a physics lecture on metallurgy and attempt to differentiate it from a physics lecture on metallurgy.
There's often no way of knowing whether the lecture is being given by a college physics professor or a 9/11 truther, except by examining the contents - and both might be telling the truth. Heck the college physics professor could be a 9/11 truther and the truther could be a college professor... that doesn't mean that this lecture on metallurgy should be removed from the college's account.
The fact that some people can't tell the difference between an Einstein and a wannabe Einstein doesn't mean that we should censor them both.
Exactly this.
Your points about extremist content stand as well. We've countless examples of NGOs that fight extremism, that get their content taken down due to algorithmic monitoring.
AI aren't capable of this sort of nuanced decision making and there is no evidence that they're going to be capable in the near future.
The only method to achieve consistent, quality content monitoring involves human eyes backed by qualified human judgment.
A free flow of information is a net good. Restricting information is a net bad. Western society learned this 400 years ago.
These are the same arguments which were used against the printing press, now being used against the internet, fighting against a new enlightenment the same way that the church fought to maintain their monopoly on knowledge.
All combating "extremism" does is protect entrenched stakeholders from the truth.
From this point, publicly visible information that consistently shows to be counterproductive could be reasonably restricted from the highest volume platforms.
1 zillion loopholes ought to be enough for anyone.
YouTube is the source of this problem, and their solution is censorship? It's ridiculous. Show people the videos they have subscribed or searched for, and that's it. The majority of people don't search out extremist content, they find it through suggestions and related videos.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (Google) are the ones who have created these problems. They profit from this crap when people mindlessly flick through the suggestions. They profit when tweets, FB posts, or videos generate discussion and clicks. They profit when bots post content that actual humans click on and discuss. They have created these problems to pad their pockets. And now their "solution" to it is mass censorship.
What an outrage. These companies need to be absolutely shattered into tiny little pieces.