<story><title>YouTube bans comments on all videos of children</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47408969</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mediocrejoker</author><text>You only think that&amp;#x27;s a good idea because you don&amp;#x27;t believe in flat earth. They could equally put a link to flat earth sites under NASA&amp;#x2F;SpaceX videos. Do you really want to decree that whatever they link is &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; just because you agree with them in this particular instance?</text></item><item><author>brentonator</author><text>God forbid they put a link to Wikipedia under flat earth videos, huh?</text></item><item><author>theNJR</author><text>I, for one, do not want Google deciding what is true.</text></item><item><author>_wmd</author><text>The ramifications of this are profound, at least:&lt;p&gt;- shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!)&lt;p&gt;- they&amp;#x27;ve admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can&amp;#x27;t be trusted to self regulate)&lt;p&gt;- they&amp;#x27;ve all but admitted they can&amp;#x27;t fix this in reasonable time, if at all&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google&amp;#x27;s.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don&amp;#x27;t have a technical cure all. It&amp;#x27;ll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that&lt;p&gt;Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they&amp;#x27;re the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;care about children&amp;quot;, they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation.&lt;p&gt;(gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented &amp;#x27;controversial&amp;#x27; stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)</text></item><item><author>zaroth</author><text>The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking.&lt;p&gt;In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawaymath</author><text>I try not to consider things in terms of absolutes, so to answer your direct question: yes, I am pretty comfortable believing the vast majority of such links would be substantially factual.&lt;p&gt;Google already does this, I don&amp;#x27;t see the issue with it hypothetically happening on YouTube. If you search for a well-known person, place or thing, you&amp;#x27;ll be presented with information aggregated from trustworthy sources. Can they be wrong? Sure, and it happens. It&amp;#x27;s not sinister.&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you&amp;#x27;re envisioning someone manually tagging things. That would be odd and suboptimal. Instead, just tag helpful Wikipedia pages about the broad scientific consensus of things on relevant videos.</text></comment>
<story><title>YouTube bans comments on all videos of children</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47408969</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mediocrejoker</author><text>You only think that&amp;#x27;s a good idea because you don&amp;#x27;t believe in flat earth. They could equally put a link to flat earth sites under NASA&amp;#x2F;SpaceX videos. Do you really want to decree that whatever they link is &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; just because you agree with them in this particular instance?</text></item><item><author>brentonator</author><text>God forbid they put a link to Wikipedia under flat earth videos, huh?</text></item><item><author>theNJR</author><text>I, for one, do not want Google deciding what is true.</text></item><item><author>_wmd</author><text>The ramifications of this are profound, at least:&lt;p&gt;- shake the money stick at them and they will dance (thanks, of all people, Nestle!)&lt;p&gt;- they&amp;#x27;ve admitted a serious problem exists that they were unwilling to deal with until external pressure forced them to (i.e. they can&amp;#x27;t be trusted to self regulate)&lt;p&gt;- they&amp;#x27;ve all but admitted they can&amp;#x27;t fix this in reasonable time, if at all&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I can think of where there has been a seriously material chink in Google&amp;#x27;s.. cultural armour? Turns out the advertisers are in control, and turns out they don&amp;#x27;t have a technical cure all. It&amp;#x27;ll be interesting to see how they attempt to reintroduce comments in the long term, no doubt more ML. Of course, this says nothing about a recommendation system that continues to blindly cluster videos of lithe toddlers together. I wonder if any advertisers are making a stink about that&lt;p&gt;Favourite summary: kids are safer on YouTube today because of Disney and Nestle, not because of Google. Let that sink in. The subtext here of course is that Nestle and Disney are some of the most evil companies around, and yet they&amp;#x27;re the ones that were forced to strong-arm Google. The irony of this defies words, and the reality of the only mechanism at play here to protect children is almost as disturbing - these companies don&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;care about children&amp;quot;, they were only forced into action to maintain their reputation.&lt;p&gt;(gentle reminder: HN punishes highly commented &amp;#x27;controversial&amp;#x27; stories. If you care about this issue being more widely understood, try to limit your commenting)</text></item><item><author>zaroth</author><text>The fact that Google is ceding the fight against toxic comments on YouTube is actually pretty shocking.&lt;p&gt;In a company that knows more about you than you can possibly imagine, and more about automated sentiment analysis than anyone in the world, they couldn’t algorithmically determine who should be allowed to post on certain subsets of videos, or devise a system they thought was worth deploying to ensure comments meet a basic level of decency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ben_w</author><text>When I am objectively wrong, I want my mind to be changed. I expect this to be the case for around 10% of my ‘knowledge’, even on topics I care to educate myself about, and much worse on other issues.&lt;p&gt;Putting a link under the videos isn’t likely to achieve that, but that’s a separate issue.&lt;p&gt;The only problem I have with Google doing this, is that I trust corporations and government about the same — i.e. that both will lie and dissemble as much as they are allowed to get away with for their own or their leader’s benefit, without regard for my interests.</text></comment>