Not only Google, though. I closed my Twitter account a few years back and one of the few arguments in favour to leaving it open was that I had a sizeable number of followers (+6k) and I could leverage that if I needed to complain to some company for one reason or another. Social media is the world's support service, provided you carry enough eyeballs.
Edit: grammar.
As a lone voice desperately holding his bowl out to a corporate giant, like a modern day Oliver Twist - and no army of social media friends behind me...
It's unfortunately a pattern we see outside digital, in particular with law enforcement. It's a force that undermines society in a very destructive and pernicious way. People need to feel that there is some fundamental fairness in society or they will stop contributing and start destroying.
It's really too bad that these large tech companies haven't maintained their early prioritization of fairness. It's the root cause of frustration with their search engine as well.
Lol this is really funny.
Sadly it's also true.
Please compete with other customers for outrage and we will support the winner.Personally I see nothing funny in it. It's been a sad reality for many years. Every time I see a comment here under one of these posts "Hi I'm Eric from Google, I'll try to check it with our X department", it's a sad reminder that you have a chance of solving your problem only if you manage to make enough fuss about it in public.
AI mistake administration, no customer support, hackers and inside connections doing the role of the unlicensed plumber.
I believe they're imposing their tyrannical will partially until they're let lose for good when the time is right. They already made obvious how they like to treat our freedom of expression be it discussing political ideas, presenting medical information, researching intel about conspiracies, you name it..
I'd suggest you reconsider using the platform in general or proxy it via an invidious instance until you do.
Still the meat of the article is the insinuation that yt removed the video because of some nefarious motives. So either the author knows otherwise and the article is written in bad faith, or the author genuinely believes his theories. Neither option reflects well on the author.
That's a false dichotomy. I see no reason why Google earns any benefit of the doubt here. Letting Google off the hook by saying "it was just am AI mistake" when we don't actually know just gives Google more room to be draconian with no consequences. We really don't know why Google made this mistake and until Google provides a transparent and plausible explanation (hint, that won't happen even if this is decision is reversed), there is nothing wrong with assuming that Google is acting in bad faith.
If Google wants the benefit of the doubt here, they need to earn it back.
If Google gives zero information on what the real problem was and people want to scream about how its a deliberate policy of suppression on Google's fault we should let them and not feel bad about amplifying it.
Google can fix this all just by being more transparent and providing support.
I don't favor the "protecting corporate interests" theory because of this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=install+nextclo... Doesn't exactly look heavily censored to me.
The core problem remains what people have observed before, which is that Google, and the tech industry in general, seals people off from any support mechanism, other than "generate outrage on social media". Little by little, this becomes a bit more abusive every year.
We also don't know what "human review" constitutes. It may well constitute a human simply reading the incorrect transcription and agreeing that it violates policy, without any reference to the audio track. The details of how these tech companies are overdependent on AI are not publicly known, we merely observe the consequences that can only be explained with reference to it. So I can't tell you if there was never even a human involved in the appeal, or a bad human, or one who didn't care, or whatever. We can only infer the possibility space from the outcome, not nail down the exact details.
There should be a rule against using Hacker News for customer support. Also using Hacker News to talk about sites being up or down.
For the n-th time, they do and it's called Google One.
Yes. Well all know that. We all know that it was some mistake by some AI. Even the author knows that.
But we also know that the only way to get customer support from YouTube is to get some social media outrage.
It's so common, Google should put on their website: "If you need customer support, please try to create some outrage on social media. We do not provide other channels of customer support."