His funding campaigns were stopped, you cannot find his name on certain social media sites. I don't care if is a grand conspiracy or a group of fools responsible for this. The result is the same and needs to be addressed without you trying to paint this as unreasonable.

Is this the same failure in automation that is keeping Rittenhouse from being searched on Facebook?

yes just like the automation failure that removed his GoFundMe legal defense campaigns.

And the automation failure that doxxed someone who donated to his campaign and got that person fired from their job.

I literally just searched Rittenhouse on Facebook.

Interesting. Perhaps they fixed the automation glitch now that it has been called out.

Still broken for "kyle rittenhouse" however.

More than likely whatever limiter was put in place hasn't been handled cleared yet. Facebook has a bunch of "safety" systems to stop abuse.

Like, say, a bunch of people searching for a single person's name, finding people named that, and harassing them.

It is always the algorithm to blame, never the people who wrote it, audited it, etc.

What do you expect? It's not possible to write an algorithm that will not have misfires at the scale of YouTube, if it's not an intentional effort then I fail to see what the big deal is.

> It's not possible to write an algorithm that will not have misfires at the scale of YouTube

Well there is; you don't put takedowns in the hands of an algorithm. Ideally you put them in the hands of a court of law.

If "courts of law" decided what content should and should not be on YouTube, they'd be hosting hardcore porn.

> Ideally you put them in the hands of a court of law.

Why?

It's an adversarial proceeding where both sides get to present their case and a takedown has to be for a violation of a law that complies with the First Amendment.

Notice that this is different than what you promote. Search results are sorted by an algorithm; that's unavoidable and excessively simple algorithms like "alphabetical order" are useless. And then it's a hard problem, to which the best solution is probably multiple independent search engines with different algorithms.

But removing the thing whatsoever? Court order or GTFO.

> It's an adversarial proceeding where both sides get to present their case and a takedown has to be for a violation of a law that complies with the First Amendment.

Why should this be the standard by which YouTube can remove videos? Why shouldn't they be legally allowed to remove content via algorithms even if it creates a bad user experience?

Because they're de facto not just a public space but a vital part of the public discourse. Court-like processes are the appropriate standard for decisions about the use of something that affects so many people.

> de facto not just a public space

Could you explain what you mean by "public space"?

> vital part of the public discourse

I don't agree. In my view, YouTube is one of the lowest forms of public discourse, its fundamental purpose is to generate ad revenue and the nature of the content hosted there reflects this pernicious incentive. Yes, YouTube does have some great things on it, but it's just one tiny facet of "the public discourse".

> Court-like processes are the appropriate standard for decisions about the use of something that affects so many people.

Can you quantify "affects" and "so many people"? YouTube is mostly an entertainment triviality, even (especially) in the realm of politics, I don't see how videos being removed from the site is important.

> In my view, YouTube is one of the lowest forms of public discourse, its fundamental purpose is to generate ad revenue and the nature of the content hosted there reflects this pernicious incentive.

You could say the same for all media. Television is advertising-driven, radio is advertising-driven, even the most respectable of literary magazines is advertising-driven. Most content is pandering to someone or other.

> Can you quantify "affects" and "so many people"? YouTube is mostly an entertainment triviality, even (especially) in the realm of politics

Again, you could (and many would) say the same for television or what have you. It would still be corrosive to society if a single entity controlled the majority of television, or the majority of radio, or... - and that's much the situation that YouTube is in.

> You could say the same for all media. Television is advertising-driven, radio is advertising-driven, even the most respectable of literary magazines is advertising-driven. Most content is pandering to someone or other.

I don't necessarily disagree, but what's your point?

> It would still be corrosive to society if a single entity controlled the majority of television, or the majority of radio, or... - and that's much the situation that YouTube is in.

This is already the case. Additionally, I don't think you've demonstrated that YouTube's video moderation policy is "corrosive to society"

You can refuse to remove content without a court order even if you're legally allowed to remove it without one. Why should they choose to create a bad user experience by removing content via algorithms? They could just not.

> Why should they choose to create a bad user experience by removing content via algorithms

Removing obscene, explicit, and even illegal content is only practical at YouTube's scale using algorithms, the idea that they should just abandon algorithmic removal of videos entirely is not a realistic suggestion.

Is it only possible using algorithms or is it just more profitable using algorithms?

Both. Yet, even if it were only motivated by profit, YouTube is an ad delivery business, its only purpose is profit.

>> Ideally you put them in the hands of a court of law.

>Why?

So that the Rekieta folks can live stream it, of course!

Why do algorithms get a free pass? We generally don't allow those kinds of copouts in most other areas of life. If a physical tool causes harm it's a pretty weak defense to say the effects were too complicated to understand in detail.

What do you mean? YouTube successfully serves billions of users every month, the users that suffer from the fraction of videos temporarily removed by an overfit model are a rounding error; the results of which are essentially harmless. We regularly accept much higher rates of catastrophic failure for things that are actually harmful e.g. traffic accident rates or medical error rates.

Just because someone hasn't thought through the logical ends of their system doesn't mean they're not responsible for those ends when they occur.

I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at. Of course the creators of YouTube are responsible for the behavior of YouTube. I'm just confused why a forum for programmers finds it so hard to accept that the program sometimes does things that the creators do not intend.

That is almost certainly what happened. Google's systems are lazy and automatic, reading into it further is trying to create patterns where none exist. Chances are he got mass reported for whatever dumb thing, valid or not, and Google's system tripped without any human review. This after all is the same company and system that banned influential YouTubers for impersonating themselves, after all.

> without any human review

Therein lies the problem.

Oh yes. Googles capriciousness and utter lack of customer service is a very bad combination. I actually moved off Gmail because I feared getting banned for some bug and not being able to get my email back.

For how long will we excuse this kind of activity with "oops automation"?

The fact that there is a faceless algorithm which has seemingly been programmed specifically to remove content which fails to align with a specific political narrative, and that no human is in active control of this, is actually worse.

>there is a faceless algorithm which has seemingly been programmed specifically to remove content which fails to align with a specific political narrative

Or, without having to put on a tinfoil hat, it's been trained to remove content that discusses shooting and killing people?

Or even more benignly, a lot of people reported the stream because users also have a vested interest in abusing censorship systems for political purposes, and it's not always easy to separate that kind of collective bad actorship from legitimate reports.

> Or, without having to put on a tinfoil hat...

You don't have to attack the legitimacy of someone's position like this. Sure, it is possible that the reasons for it are what you're saying, but this personal dismissive attack is unwarranted, and frankly at this point tired and ineffective.

.. but it's so easy and lazy to just blame "the man" or a big conspiracy.

It's also so easy and lazy to just blame "the algorithm" than fixing your broken system.