Read on Twitter
Thread on Youtube censorship.
Grabbed ex-YT friend (anonymized) to discuss today. They disclaimed that they do not work directly on this, but their hypothesis makes more sense to me than Conspiracy Twitter (Original convo QTed, where I make some guesses that I still stand by) 1/ https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1265201959096606720">https://twitter.com/eigenrobo...
Grabbed ex-YT friend (anonymized) to discuss today. They disclaimed that they do not work directly on this, but their hypothesis makes more sense to me than Conspiracy Twitter (Original convo QTed, where I make some guesses that I still stand by) 1/ https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1265201959096606720">https://twitter.com/eigenrobo...
We (friend + me) currently model the anti-spam anti-bot stuff at Twitter as an interlocking system, which lots of different levers that inform each other. We do not think there& #39;s just some monolithic dude that just sits and censors words, since that doesn& #39;t scale. 2/
My original hypothesis in original thread is that this is automated. My friend agrees that there are probably algos all over the place learning different things like what& #39;s noisy, what pattern-matches to bots, etc., so this is probably literally an accident from YT& #39;s POV. 3/
This doesn& #39;t mean there& #39;s no agency or that PRC didn& #39;t influence it. Some examples:
a) maybe a lot of people (possibly PRC-coordinated) simultaneously flagged comments as abuse that just had these words in it. If this is the case, these anti-CCP words may be learned 4/
a) maybe a lot of people (possibly PRC-coordinated) simultaneously flagged comments as abuse that just had these words in it. If this is the case, these anti-CCP words may be learned 4/
b) maybe there& #39;s an internal bot that "learns" spam accounts, and also learns that spam accounts spam these types of anti-CCP stuff, and blocks that through *another* bot that censors words said by spam accounts that are considered malicious 5/
c) I *totally* think it& #39;s possible that some people have manual override powers, and through social engineering they got some person with plausible deniability to hand-censor a word. However, this leaves trails and I think it& #39;s less likely 6/
Finally, what I do *NOT* think happened is that the CCP straight up asked YT and they kowtowed. YT demonitizes a lot of pro-CCP content, does *not* have market share in China and doesn& #39;t care, and has shown no real political reason to bow to China in this way. No leverage. 7/
Summary: I think this is literally *automated*, possibly CCP-influenced by actions like mass-comment flagging, but no way a conspiracy. Criticizing YT is definitely barking up the wrong tree and feeds into the "tech bad" mind-killer. Real sycophants are elsewhere. 8/8 END
Addendum 1: sorry for not being clear in opening tweet.
Chronology:
1) last night we ended up discussing this, as a tangent in QT-ed thread
2) today I had a private convo with friend (not the thread QTed in OP)
3) I synthesized (2) in this thread, providing (1) as context.
Chronology:
1) last night we ended up discussing this, as a tangent in QT-ed thread
2) today I had a private convo with friend (not the thread QTed in OP)
3) I synthesized (2) in this thread, providing (1) as context.
