Oh, this coronavirus. First, he canceled MWC 2020, then Google I / O and other exhibitions and conferences were canceled. Now he took buckwheat, stewed meat and toilet paper from stores. It's time for him to get to our beloved YouTube and pick up a lot of interesting videos from there. These are not even the kind of videos that can be called provocative, inciting, sowing, frightening, or just those that someone does not like. We are talking about normal rollers, which no one would have removed in normal times, but now they will go under the knife, and it is not a fact that they will then return to the common space. But why does this happen if they are so harmless?
The virus got to 'our everything'.
Quarantine mode due to coronavirus
It's no secret that many large companies have transferred their employees to remote work. Someone did it completely, and someone partially, but this phenomenon has never been so massive.
In IT, this is much easier than in others. For example, it will not work to get a person to work remotely who needs to work with papers in an office archive, or a factory worker who works physically and needs to turn the nuts at the workplace.
Developers, system administrators, designers, CEOs and many others, of whom Google mainly consists, are already sitting at home and this does not interfere with their work duties. Nearly…
YouTube censorship
The YouTube video verification process is largely automated. The system itself selects videos that seem suspicious to it, after which it offers the person to deal with controversial situations and he already decides to leave the video or delete it for violating some rules.
Due to the departure of many employees to remote work and the refusal of the services of third-party assistants, the service will now rely to a much greater extent on their opinion. As a result, this may lead to the fact that artificial intelligence, as before, will mistake some videos for violators of the rules, but no one will restore them.
Of course, the process may be reversible, but in this case it will be done on a separate request from the author. The problem is that many creators may simply not notice this if the YouTube channel is not their main place of work and they do not have control over every video. In some cases, even the notification system may not help and the letter with it will simply get lost among countless others.
Temporary changes to YouTube
Chances are high that changes will not be permanent and YouTube will only temporarily rely on technology more. In current realities, this is the only way to protect the service from unwanted content.
This will allow during the period of structural changes to preserve the main principle of cleaning uploaded videos – speed. In this case, it is very important, since only such an approach will significantly reduce the number of consumers of inappropriate content.
Sometimes censorship becomes a blessing, but not always.
According to Google, an automated system won't hit content that is compliant with the rules. True, one must understand that it is very difficult to find a balance. In their work, we have repeatedly encountered situations from which it was possible to conclude that Google prefers to play it safe.
Changes and live streams will be affected. When they walk, no one will stop them, but they will be recommended more carefully. Also, content that has not yet been automatically checked will not appear in recommendations and will not be displayed in search results.
Automatically check social media content
In conclusion, it remains to add that this method of censoring will affect other Google products, but so far there is no reliable information about this.
In general, automatic checks have become the norm in our time. If earlier they worked only with text and simply looked for coincidences with stop words in it, now artificial intelligence has learned to work with video and audio. This made it possible to significantly relieve people and improve the quality of inspection.
The problem is that the systems can still make mistakes and send to the lock, for example, comments with the words “belt plaque” or “cholesterol plaque” due to the presence of familiar letters in the composition. As a result, moderators check this message manually and open them on sites if there is nothing in them that violates the rules of the community.
Sometimes this causes certain inconveniences, but they are not as critical as in the case of videos on YouTube, which will take much longer to be checked in case of an appeal. Well, what can you do. Difficult times require change and temporary inconvenience.