The real problem here is that people are envisioning human interaction as something that can produce better outcomes, but the cost of that may not be economical.

You can hire a generic human to look over a flagged video for 15 seconds and render a verdict, but the verdict is going to be bad. That's not enough time to make an accurate evaluation.

Suppose you have an epidemiologist on YouTube making a claim about virus propagation. It gets flagged because there is a CNN article reporting that the CDC said something contradictory. The epidemiologist argues that the CNN article is a misinterpretation and if you look at the original CDC publication, that's not really what they said.

At this point for YouTube to get it right they've basically got to hire their own M.D. to study the CDC publication in enough detail to understand the context. That is prohibitively expensive. But the alternative is often censoring an epidemiologist who is trying to correct misinformation being disseminated by CNN.

And science is a moving target. The infamous example was the CDC in 2020 telling people not to wear masks. But there was a point in time when scientists were publishing studies on the health benefits of tobacco consumption. Challenging the established orthodoxy is inherently necessary for progress.

The underlying problem here is that YouTube isn't competent to make these determinations. They're attempting to do something they have no capacity to succeed in.

When it comes to government agencies, they are contactable (usually with a simple email). You might not get an immediate response, but a few hours to a few days later you can expect to hear back.

"Hi Sun Knudsen, Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our harmful and dangerous policy."

Google has always had humans in the loop. Not for every decision but certainly the more impactful ones that affect user generated content. When I worked there, there were even humans reviewing requests for account un-suspensions (yes, really! they didn't do a great job though, needless to say).

Also, it's quite hard to understand what sort of algorithm could result in this sort of suspension. What training data would give it hundreds of thousands of examples of infosec discussions labelled as harmful? But it's very easy to see how a large army of low paid humans given vague advice like "don't allow harmful or dangerous content" could decide that linking to hacking information is harmful.

The problem here is not AI. The problem here is Google allowing vague and low quality thinking amongst the ranks of its management, who have decided to give in to political activists who are determined to describe anything they're ideologically opposed to as "harmful", "dangerous", "unsafe" etc. When management give in to those radicals and tell their human and AI moderators to suspend "harmful" content, they inevitably end up capturing all kinds of stuff that isn't political in nature, simply due to the doublespeak nature of the original rules.

That's why I turned this around. Why do you assume they're lying, without evidence?

They are a massive monopoly and just the other day it was reported that they manipulated their own ad markets for their own profit. They constantly inaccurately accuse people of malicious intent and copyright infringement, often massively hindering peoples' careers and generally providing zero recourse. To not assume lying and at best self-serving intent given Alphabet/Google's position in the world would be foolish.

On top of that, is it really that different to use inaccurate AI or to use humans who are intentionally not given the time or tools to do human-quality work?

The problem is obviously with the overall quality of moderation, and the level of power exerted by platforms over users. Whether a non-skilled human reviewer or an AI is handling the broken process hardly matters given the results.

The point is that involving more humans in the moderation decisions at YouTube does not guarantee nor is there any evidence to suggest, that it would result in better moderation.

Somebody with the technical and industry knowledge to know that talking about security vulnerabilities like this shouldn't be removed can probably find a better job that YouTube video moderation.

There's a very wide chasm between "an AI decided" or "someone spent 20 seconds on it", and "we hired an expert in every possible field and they thoroughly research the facts at hand before making a decision".

The latter is obviously not feasible, but there are many options in between that will give markedly better outcomes than the status quo while not making YT moderation economically infeasible.

I'll settle for "Google makes a well-informed decision and will communicate the weighted pros and cons that led to that decision."

The post literally quotes Google as saying that for the _last_ time this happened. Then the post literally states they appealed and never heard back. There is nothing concerning a human for this instance, though I suspect once the uploader reaches out (were it not for the popularity this is gaining), one could expect similar dismissal. That there are barely humans involved, and in a poor way when they are, doesn't mean there are never humans involved, true. But for many, the bare minimum of assistance is indistiguishable from no assistance.

It shouldn't, and we need to hold Google and others to a much higher standard here. I'm not sure how we do that, but the status quo is garbage.

But I am skeptical it would be successful. It might be, but it would probably require a much larger percentage take of video revenues, which would discourage most YT content creators from going there because in fact, relative to overall YT volumes, these suspensions are rare. That's why we're discussing individual cases instead of studies with percentage figures in them.

It feels a bit weird to be playing the devil's advocate in this case because frankly the state of modern Google saddens me. It seems not much like the firm we built back in the day. They obviously shouldn't be doing this kind of thing and in the past they didn't, which is why I place the finger of blame not on AI (which may not even be at fault here, and is a general tool anyway) but rather on bad ideologies and ideas permeating the management classes in America.

In this case I blame favouritism and feminism. YouTube content moderation is run by Wojcicki, a woman who got in to Google by renting Larry and Sergey a garage, by being the sister of Sergey's wife. She's not an engineer. Thanks to the prevailing ideology an ambitious feminist woman in an executive position at a west coast tech firm is utterly untouchable, and must be given whatever she wants. So despite being the exec in charge of Google Video when it was utterly beaten by YouTube, she has ended up running YouTube. A clearer case of failing upwards can't be imagined. It's her personality that dictates the post-2016 swing towards promoting woke "authoritative content" on YT and the general culture of unaccountability for women that prevents anyone else pushing back, even as the bad PR racks up.