Game Creator Has His YouTube Video Of Game Demonetized Over Soundtrack He Also Created

from the on-the-money dept

Content moderation, whether over social or intellectual property issues, is impossible to do well. It just is. The scale of content platforms means that automated systems have to do most of this work and those automated systems are always completely rife with avenues for error and abuse. While this goes for takedowns and copyright strikes, it is also the case for demonetization practices for the big players like YouTube.

But how bad are these systems, really? Well, take, for instance, the case of a man who created a video game, and the soundtrack for that game, having his YouTube videos of the game demonetized due to copyright.

Doki Doki Literature Club creator Dan Salvato is being demonetized for his own music on YouTube because the platform claims the soundtrack included in his videos - which he himself composed - is "someone else's content."

Salvato took to Twitter in order to share his grievances. Apparently, his videos have been subjected to demonetization for several months due to purported copyright infringement for the music he used in them - however, Salvato himself composed all of said music, meaning that YouTube is claiming that he is essentially stealing his own intellectual property.

We have of course heard of this sort of thing in the past: a person has videos demonetized despite the content being of their own creation. Still, there is something perfectly simplistic about this case. A game and music maker puts videos up of his own game and music...and it gets demonetized. While no system is ever perfect, that YouTube's system allows for this sort of thing to not only happen, but to go on for months without correction, is an indication that the system sucks and something else should be done.

Now, as often happens, once Salvato complained publicly, YouTube got in touch to investigate. People will point to this as though future rectification made all of this acceptable. But that's absurd. After all, you're forced to wonder just how often this sort of thing occurs and doesn't ever get fixed.

Filed Under: contentid, copyright, dan salvato, demonetization
Companies: youtube

YouTube And Demonetization: The Hammer And Nail Of Content Moderation

from the not-so-easy dept

Last week we had a story about a bunch of Pokemon YouTubers discovering their accounts were dropped after YouTube confused their discussion of "CP" (Combat Points), thinking it might actually refer to a different "CP": child porn. The accounts were reinstated after a bit of an outcry.

It appears that this was part of a larger effort by YouTube to deal with a variety of problems on its platform (and, yes, its platform has problems). But some of the resulting stories suggest that YouTube is so focused on "demonetization" as a tool that it's losing sight of alternatives. The Pokemon story appears to have actually been part of a larger effort to respond to claims that child predators were using the comments of certain, perfectly normal videos of kids to, well, do bad stuff. The whole thing is pretty sickening and horrifying and I have no interest in going into the details.

As the controversy over this -- quite reasonably -- gained attention, some pointed out that these videos with exploitative comments were, in many cases, being monetized with big brand name ads appearing next to them. This type of complaint is... not new. People have been complaining about brand names appearing in ads next to "bad" content or "infringing" content for many years. Of course, it's pretty much all matched by algorithm, and part of the problem is that because people are gaming the system, the algorithm (and YouTube) hadn't quite caught on to what was happening. Of course, the outcry from the public -- especially about the monetization -- then resulted in advertisers pulling all their ads from YouTube. And, whether it was the advertisers leaving or the general public outcry (it was almost certainly both, but I'm sure most people will assume it was the advertisers bailing that really made the difference), YouTube went on a big new effort to pull ads from lots of videos.

And in doing so, it created a brand new controversy. Just as this started, a mother named Jessica Ballinger complained on Twitter that YouTube had demonetized videos of her 5 year old son. YouTube responded on Twitter, noting that it was because of the comments on the video, obliquely referencing the stories discussed above.

Of course, this immediately created a new kind of backlash as people (rightfully!) pointed out that disabling monetization of a video based on the comments on that video just seems to empower and encourage trolls. Want to harm a YouTuber you don't like? Just post a sketchy comment on their videos and, boom, you can take away their money.

And, to be clear, this is not a new thing for Google. Just last month we noted that the company has a similarly silly policy with Adsesnse and blogs that have comments. If Adsense decides that some of your user-generated comments are "bad" they might demonetize the page that hosts those comments. As with the stories above, this is mostly to appease advertisers and avoid the sort of (slightly misguided) screaming about "big brand ad appearing next to awful comments." We found that policy to be silly in that situation, but it's even more ridiculous here.

As Dan Bull noted in response to all of this it seems that a much simpler solution compared to demonetizing such videos is to just remove the sketchy, awful, predatory comments.

That doesn't work in the Adsense context, where the comments are out of Google's control, but on YouTube it's their own damn platform. Of course, the reality is probably that YouTube freaked out following the initial reports about the predatory comments, and then did what it could do most quickly -- which was to demonetize any such video that might possibly have such content, before doing a more thorough sweep of the awful comments.

Still, this once again highlights the difficulty, perils, and trade-offs associated with content moderation on a massive platform. Every choice has trade-offs and creates different kinds of problems. And between the speed with which people freak out about stuff and the scale that this is happening, you get situations like this where people (rightly!) freak out about the awful thing some people are doing in the YouTube comments (with the associated freak-out about how the videos are monetized) leading to YouTube to rush to demonetize... leading to a freak-out from others who were demonetized for totally innocent videos, where they had done absolutely nothing wrong. You can see how these choices may get made to deal with that situation, and still end up in a kind of messed up position.

Of course, demonetization is a perfectly reasonable tool for YouTube to use in some cases. Soon after the mess described above, YouTube also demonetized a bunch of quack anti-vaccine videos, which had also resulted in people being reasonably upset about the kind of nonsense that was showing up in their YouTube feeds (and making these anti-science quacks money). But, again, it's likely that there's a cat and mouse game going on here, and filters of questionable quality. It won't surprise me to find out that (1) anti-vaxxer conspiracy nuts figure out ways to get around this monetization block and (2) perfectly innocent videos get de-monetized (while I haven't heard of any yet, it wouldn't surprise me if -- for example -- a legitimate news report about the anti-vaxxer movement might get caught up in the flow).

Again, there's nothing wrong with YouTube or other platforms making these kinds of decisions, but they're not easy decisions and they (1) make mistakes and (2) have unintended consequences that are worth watching carefully as well. Right before YouTube did that demonetization, another story was making the rounds about how Pinterest took an even more extreme position in basically blocking all anti-vax content and searches on its platforms. Especially given the latest stories of measles outbreaks caused entirely by gullible anti-vaxxers, there's a perfectly reasonable argument that Pinterest is doing the right thing here. But... as others like Christina Xu noted, this kind of move is kind of difficult to separate from Chinese internet censorship.

Indeed, it would not surprise me in the slightest to see stories appear in the Chinese media before long pointing to these examples of why it is taking the right approach with the Great Firewall of China and its free speech suppressing censorship. After all, the Chinese have done it in the past with other, similar, stories.

And, thus, once again, there's a key point to make in all of this: anyone who thinks there are "easy" choices here is wrong. There is not. Almost any choice has massive problems and potentially huge consequences -- including the choice of doing nothing at all. And while many people use this to argue that it is a bad look for the internet platforms, it seems a stronger argument is that it's a bad look for humanity. These platforms are reflecting humanity, including some pretty awful humans. And society hasn't been able to stop some humans from being awful, terrible people with awful ideas, and it would be unfair to suggest that internet companies should magically be able to step in and solve that problem with hamfisted tools like "demonetization."

Filed Under: comments, content moderation, demonetization, free speech, youtube, youtube comments
Companies: google, youtube

Google Says Our Article On The Difficulty Of Good Content Moderation Is... Dangerous

from the proving-the-point dept

Back in August, I wrote a big post about the impossible choices that large internet platforms have to make concerning content moderation. A large part of the point of that post is that there is no perfect content moderation, and especially at scale, there are going to be large swaths of people who disagree with any choice (leaving content up, taking it down, demonetizing it, putting a flag on it, whatever). And expecting these platforms to magically get things right is going to end in serious disappointment for everyone.

In its own hamfisted way, Google has now proven that point (and, no, they're not doing this on purpose). About a month after that post went up, we got a notification from Google, telling us that this article violated Google's AdSense policies (we use AdSense to backfill ads when we don't have a better solution -- it pays us close to nothing) and therefore they were restricting AdSense from appearing on that page. The only details we received were that it was "dangerous or derogatory."

If you can't see that, it says that our link is "dangerous or derogatory" in that it:

• Threatens or advocates for harm of oneself or others;
• Harasses, intimidates or bullies an individual or group of individuals;
• Incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.

I've reread my article a bunch of times, and I don't see how it goes anywhere near any of those categories. There are some curse words in the post, but they're not directed at anyone. The whole thing was quite bizarre.

As you can see, at the bottom there's a button to "request a review." We did that, and the next day were told that they had lifted the restriction. This surprised us, as the "review" button usually does nothing. Fast forward to this past weekend, and we get another notice... on the same article, again saying that it is "dangerous or derogatory." No further explanation. No recognition that we already went through this.

We asked for a review again... and got the following:

If you can't read that, it says:

1 page was reviewed at your request and found to be non-compliant with our policies at the time of the review. Ad serving continues to be restricted or disabled on this page.

There appears to be no further information. We are told that the only thing we can do is "fix any violations." But they won't tell us what the "violations" are (because there aren't any) or how to "fix" them. And, seriously, fuck that. There's nothing to "fix" and it's our general policy -- and the policy of any good journalism site not to allow advertisers to dictate anything having to do with content. And we're sticking by that.

Now, to be clear: Google has every right to make whatever awful decisions it wants to make about where its ads appear. If it really wants to demonetize our article highlighting the impossible choices that Google and others have to make, well, that's quite ironic, but that's on them. I certainly don't think this was a "choice" that Google made. I think that it is likely constantly scanning all pages that use AdSense for "flag" words, and maybe something like the curses (or the mention of Alex Jones or the holocaust?) flagged the article for review. At that point, I'm guessing it was handed off to some low-paid individual tasked with "reviewing" content policy violations, who has somewhere between 5 and 30 seconds to make a judgment call. That person maybe sees the curses and says "BAD!". When we click "review" it probably goes to another person like that. The first time we asked for a review we got someone who voted one way, and the other time... the other way.

It's a marginal pain for us, though it's more amusing than anything else (though, hey, if you'd like to help cover our losses from having that page demonetized, go for it!). But, again, all it really serves to do is highlight the point that these all come down to judgment calls, and you can't really scale judgment calls to the level that these platforms operate on without making a whole bunch that are highly questionable.

We shouldn't want giant platforms with a bunch of "content moderators" determining what is acceptable content and what is "dangerous and derogatory," because they're going to do a shitty job of it (now watch this post get demonetized too...). It really is time to search for better solutions.

Filed Under: content moderation, dangerous, demonetization
Companies: google