Youtube Takes Down CHESS PODCAST for Being HARMFUL or DANGEROUS
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as an example of automated content moderation misfiring, notably the incident where chess talk was flagged as hate speech.
What it is
Chess YouTuber agadmator reports that YouTube took down his podcast with Hikaru Nakamura as harmful or dangerous content. It was later restored.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2020 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Cites mikhailfranco · 2020-06 · on “YouTube bans Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer for hate speech”
Chess channel agadmator was taken down by a YouTube bot: [this video] He speculates the bot detected phrases like "white will always be better here...", etc., then goes on to say that in his ~1800 uploads "it's pretty much black and white to the death in every video". He appealed, but was immediately rejected by the automated appeals system. The channel was restored when further responses and feedback from subscribers eventually got a human in the loop at YouTube.
Cites dandanua · 2020-08 · on “Artificial Intelligence is stupid and causal reasoning won't fix it”
Relevant: Youtube algorithm blocked a video on a popular chess channel with 1800 videos, supposedly for a "racism" [this video]
Cites jimmytucson · 2021-02 · on “YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs”
I didn’t know Agadmator was censored so I looked for information and found a video of him talking about it here: [this video] He doesn’t know why his podcast was flagged. He mentions a few possibilities-one of which is the black and white thing, which would be a mistake. It’s notable how guarded his speech is, as though he might say something else verboten. I’ve watched hundreds of chess videos on YouTube and never heard of one getting flagged until now.
Cites tehnub · 2021-07 · on “A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech”
Agadmator, the person who made the video in question, also made a video soon after explaining the situation, and gave some hypotheses on why the video got taken down. In addition to the reason being hate speech, he suggested it may have been because they discussed Covid-19, lockdowns, etc, and YouTube was attempting to stop the spread of misinformation. The video I’m talking about is here: [this video]