>Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all
And this statement from OP is blatantly false because if it was true, no human would fall for the scams. But they do fall for them, in huge volumes. Especially if the scams appear to come from a known authority like Elon, the police, your boss, etc.
And if you did find a half decent algorithm that worked, the spammers would just iterate again to make spam that doesn't trip it.
So, the solution is not to even try? How has that worked out for other platforms?
I've worked on moderation systems myself, and there's a difference between easy detection and hard detection. This is the easy kind. Legitimate content wouldn't get hurt in this case. It's painfully obvious and yet it goes on streaming for hours.
Imagine for just a moment what YouTube would look like if Google were actually not even trying. Nearly two years ago, 500 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute. YouTube is the higest-value video site in the world. A staggering amount of what is uploaded must be spam, fraud, and otherwise unwanted material, and yet most of us never see any of it.
I, for one, spend no time watching videos about crypto, so even though my watch history is super-nerdy, I don't see the kind of fraud and spam described here.
However, the type of spam I'm seeing recently is literally all the same video title, same channel name (maybe differing by a space or capitalization), same btc giveaway scam, etc. 90% is fake SpaceX streams. The streams stay online for hours before being shut down, and I know a lot of people are seeing them in their recommendations. It's not my fault for being interested in space, while also not wanting to see scam videos about Elon "giving away free crypto".
When I said it seems "like Google isn't even trying", I wasn't referring to all spam on the platform – just this very specific type.
Again, I know it would be worse if YT were really doing nothing. But these streams are getting more and more common (because I assume it's working to some extent for the scammers), and clearly YT isn't doing enough to stop them.
Here's the heuristic: if it's a live stream from a channel with relatively few subscribers and a name that very closely matches "SpaceX" or another high-profile channel name, the channel name was recently changed, and more than x number of people (with a solid history of reporting spam that was indeed later determined to be spam) have reported it as spam, you send it to a moderator to review and remove when appropriate. If the volume of videos matching those criteria is really too large for your moderation staff, then start looking at source IPs/locations of those that match the algorithmic part (I seriously doubt they're streaming over tor or coming from more than a small handful of locations), and tweak the parameters as necessary.
Really, with a little ML and the spam reports alone, they could shut these down 10x faster than they do now. I've reported a ton of them (and I know a lot of others have too), and I've never reported a video that didn't eventually end up being taken down. So have your model identify people like me and give our spam reports more weight. Respond in minutes rather than hours or days.
My point is, yes - YT is obviously already doing a lot to shut down spam, and it's probably 99.9999% effective. But the marginal amount that's making it through now could be dealt with fairly simply. I could never write an algorithm to be as effective as what they already have in place, but I could easily write one that's effective in dealing with this crap that's making it through. Would it be effective forever? Of course not, but it'd improve things significantly until it needs to be adjusted.
But the only way to attract Google attention is either social media outcry or served a notice from law firm or better from government regulators.
The scams seem super obvious, and if you subscribe to more content you’re interested in I guess they’d go away. Are they really causing you a problem?
> The scams seem super obvious
Exactly. That's why I can't fathom why YT keeps letting them through.
Well that’s definitely where you’re going wrong! Subscribing is a strong signal to the algorithm. It’s having to guess otherwise. And at the moment I guess you’re feeding the algorithm with a stream of engagement with all these videos you’re linking to, digging yourself deeper!
Stop engaging with them, and subscribe to content you like instead.
I never get any videos even remotely like this in my feed - I get videos related to things I subscribe to.
You need to give the system some quality input. It isn’t magic. Garbage in garbage out.
I'm assuming the algorithm is showing them to me because I watch lots of SpaceX and other space videos. The descriptions in these videos are even ripped directly from legit videos that I actually watched!
I'm interested in such a wide range of topics that I prefer recommendations based on individual videos I've watched rather than specific creators/channels. I'm glad you don't get these in your feed, but based on others in this thread, it sounds like I'm not that unique in experiencing the issue.
If you have first-hand knowledge that this is true, then I should inform you that this behavior is a bug in your system.
There's no conceivable way someone would want to see more of something they've flagged. And if you can't tell that kind of video from a legitimate SpaceX video I watch on occasion, then that's another issue.
Algos are a scammer's best friend, cause all you have to do is stay one step ahead of the algo . Human moderators would nip this shit in the bud. Such videos would last minutes on Reddit but they last forever on youtube.
I've dealt with similar issues in my own work (I run a platform with a lot of content posted daily and have multiple tiers of spam control in place). The spam I'm seeing on YouTube is not the difficult kind, yet they're doing nothing to deter it. That's my complaint.
I've probably reported hundreds of these, so at the very least, stop recommending videos with the exact same title, description and content to me. It's ridiculous.
> Get a single intern to double-check the ones that your algorithm identifies to avoid FPs
I think you seriously, dramatically misestimate the scale at which both YouTube and the scammers in question are operating. By orders of magnitude, probably.
Can you share some examples? I’ve never seen what you’re taking about. My front page is all channels I subscribe to.
Even if spam detection didn't flag this stuff, their content ID system should be able to identify it as content stolen from other channels (with a fake tweet added at the top), then calling it "live".
Maybe it is suppressed for most users and something about your viewing profile opts you in? I’ve never seen anything like this video or anything else that looks like a scam on YouTube.
Everything on my recommended page is pretty relevant to my interests and seems legitimate.
Correction: the video is still up, ID is "qoFPBms-7g4" Others currently broadcasting similar scams:
BbUnrpFd5do
5VOQXRrfibE
fVNbM8mKHUU
M5dBA-01K88
I think that's the key, I think OP is finding the spam/scam by searching for content which are prone to exploitation, that said the questions raised by OP are valid.
I think YT algorithm actively pushes these scam to the top just because people who made similar searches clicked on those videos because of clickbait thumbnail/title, through which YT made good money through ads and scammers made good money through... scam.
Of course I can tell you that! :)
Abuse is an adversarial and dynamic problem. A simple regex will never solve the problem for more than a very short time period. Sometimes such short term fixes are called for, since they'll buy you the time for something more principled. But they cannot be the solution forever, because the abusers will adapt. The more different variants you end up blocking, the more likely it is that they somehow interact and produce serious FPs.
And then you've got a PR mess on your hands with people complaining about how "Jeff Bezos is being censored by YouTube". Abuse is pretty thankless that way: nobody ever sees your successes, only your failures, and it's all a job of balancing the two.
What you actually want for fighting bulk spam (rather than other forms of abuse) is robust signals that are broadly useful rather than specific to one campaign.
As for your actual question, I haven't actually been seeing this in my recommendations (but then again, I don't have anything related to cryptocurrency or Elon Musk in my recommendations). Maybe this isn't actually as widespread a problem as you're suggesting? To put it bluntly, perhaps cryptocurrency is an area where the legit content is basically indistinguishable from scams.