I posted an article on my tumblr last week from CNN Tech about how YouTube may
be facing the adpocalypse part 2? 3? Eleventy? because it's still running ads against
extremist videos "ads from over 300 companies and organizations including
tech giants major retailers newspapers and government agencies ran on YouTube
channels promoting white nationalists Nazis pedophilia conspiracy theories and
North Korean propaganda" so how did this happen? again? and why can't youtube stop
it? well let's look at some of the things they've done since last time one of
YouTube's previous responses through the whole adpocalypse mess was to restrict
channels with fewer than 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch
time from being able to monetize and also requiring that you keep your watch
time above a certain level to stay monetized to say that this was not a
popular move among small creators would be something of an understatement
but it does at least partially solve the problem of people starting up YouTube
channels immediately monetizing them and then proceeding to post videos about how Hitler
is a really nice person who likes dogs or how Daesh is awesome. one of the
other methods that YouTube has brought in to make sure that all of the videos
it runs ads against are brand safe is its Demonetization algorithm the
algorithm scans videos as they're uploaded to the site for potentially
inappropriate content and may demonetize them on that basis. and YouTube brought
this feature in without really announcing or explaining it but
YouTube's failures of communication are not the topic of this video. Now it's
true that if your video is Demonetized by this algorithm you can appeal it but
it may or may not work the odds that you'll actually get your video seen by a
human are relatively low unless you're already a large channel and if your
video is demonetized it's almost certainly going to be during your first
day or two which is when you'd expect the highest number of views and thus the
highest ad revenue because all of your subscribers are coming to check it out
so for creators not helpful however the advantage of the algorithm is that it
learns so the more we submit appeals the more it can learn whether or not that's
actually unsafe content or inappropriate content or whether it's actually okay
and hopefully that means there will be fewer false positives in future which
may not be good news for you of everything you do is deemed brand
unsafe by YouTube but does at least that the more obvious bad actors are
probably going to get caught. so there is some utility to it but why do you need
an algorithm at all is it just that youtube are unwilling to put in the money
to hand check every dodgy video well I don't know if they're unwilling to spend
money but given the demands of the platform they would be physically unable
to keep up with all of the videos on here because so much content is uploaded
to YouTube every day I looked up some estimates which run from 300 to 500
hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every minute even if only a
fraction of a fraction of those videos were going to cause problems that is a
higher workload than any human moderation team can handle so you need
the algorithm but by the same token you can't rely solely on the algorithm
humanity is a creative species if we perceive an obstacle we are ingenious at
figuring out ways around it and people are willing to put in a whole lot of
work to do so I mean those Nigerian prince scams don't write themselves now
do they? so say you want to start a channel which you know that YouTube
would immediately want to crack down on you know neo-nazis
pedophilia North Korean propaganda I mean you could just put up your videos
which are obviously about neo-nazis or Daesh or whatever and you could tag them
with neo-nazi or Daesh or whatever but YouTube reads your title and your
description and your tags it looks at your thumbnail for inappropriate content
like gore or weapons and it listens to your audio so it can generate automatic
captions what I'm saying is if your video is obviously about a topic that
YouTube has deemed unsafe or inappropriate it's not gonna happen
they might not ban you and delete your account but they won't monetize you but
if you had time and you were willing to play the long game and as we have seen
from the Russian tumblr bots thing governments are, then you can make a lot
of videos most of which are fairly innocuous and then when you want to
sneak your not so innocuous videos past YouTube you have this whole backlog
of appropriate content plus you can scrupulously avoid using any of the
words which might ping the algorithm in the video itself. There was a good
example of this from Facebook actually. there was a group on Facebook called
Britain first which got banned after coming to global attention having been
shared by Donald Trump the reason that Facebook ban
is for inciting hatred by posting videos like "Muslim migrant (who wasn't actually
a Muslim migrant at all) beats up Dutch boy on crutches!" at the time that they
were banned though Britain first had more than 2 million likes on Facebook
how does a page which posts videos comparing Muslims to animals get more
than 2 million likes well because Facebook doesn't show you
everything a page does right and while Britain first posted the occasional
video which should have gotten them an insta ban mostly they posted really
innocuous stuff we love this british sports star like if you do too! share if
you love your military family! give this post a thumbs up if you're proud of our
veterans! look at this cute picture of a dog! okay I'm not sure about that last
one but and then every so often they'd put up something like Muslim migrant who
isn't actually a Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches but Facebook being
Facebook only shows a fraction of the people who follow a page each post that
the page puts up it would be entirely possible to be a follower of Britain
first for years particularly if you don't use Facebook all that often and to
have seen nothing from them but cute pictures of dogs and poppy wreaths
Facebook knows what you like remember
so to bring this back to youtube they can crack down but it's really hard. when
something comes to mass media attention obviously they'll remove it but there
are thousands and thousands of channels which are basically akin to the Britain
first Facebook page and they're not being taken down because they're just not
getting flagged that often keeping bad actors off your platform when you're the
size of YouTube is not hard it's pretty much impossible but you can cut down on
the numbers of bad actors. and so you have the algorithms because you can't
possibly manage the quantity of content on YouTube without them and on top of
that you have your moderation team because people are smart and will figure
out ways around your algorithm.s but the moderation team needs someone to tell
them about the bad actors they need people to report the animal abuse and
the pornography and the beheadings unfortunately that's a difficult thing
to incentivize well because what you actually want is for good people with
good intentions to flag videos which are actually inappropriate while
discouraging bad people with bad intentions from flagging things because
they don't like it YouTube Heroes which you might remember as one of YouTube's
2016 controversies was supposed to be YouTube's way of getting the people who
use the site to provide them with free labor ie we will gamify the system by
giving you points for doing this grunt work and as you get higher up the ranks
we will give you things like a small amount of power over others mwahaha
which was possibly not the best idea in the world given that it actively
incentivized flagging videos I mean if YouTube agrees with your flag and takes
a video down you get a point but if YouTube disagrees then nothing happens
so why not try it? so this is the problem why can't youtube just find all of the
bad actor channels and delete them? because people are smart even bad people
and so it's basically an arms race. but what do you think? how do you reckon that
YouTube should solve its problems? the ad problem or the terrorist content problem
or any of its many other problems leave a comment let me know and I'll see you
next time!