Fri 7 Jun 2019, 05:43 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER by Miles Pilgrim
An article appeared in The Guardian today (June 7th 2019), highlighting that YouTube, owned by Google/Alphabet, was responsible for deleting videos and blocking content creators from uploading footage of Adolf Hitler. YouTube, like many other social platforms, has been under scrutiny in the wake of atrocities such as Christchurch massacre, for allowing far-right information to be circulated and they are now attempting to moderate the content that gets uploaded to the site. The archive footage of Hitler, often used for educational purposes by history teachers across Britain has now been removed for the promotion of ‘hate-speech’.
While the Guardian article does not say explicitly, it can be safely assumed that YouTube has used algorithms in some way to identify, block, and remove the content, since a human capable of critical and contextual thinking would have most likely identified the content in question as historical and suitable for use in education. Algorithms are simply not yet intelligent enough to make that discrimination. Moderating content on YouTube, however, would require hundreds, if not thousands of human content moderators to be continually working around the clock in order to correctly identify hate-speech and other harmful content that gets uploaded to the platform. For a company like Google, a flawed quick-fix blanket algorithm is most likely a far cheaper option – even if ultimately, once again, innocent end-users are the ones that suffer.
