610K views · Jun 28, 2020 · 9:01 · 0 HN recommenders · 4 mentions · discussed 2020–2021
Chess YouTuber agadmator reports that YouTube took down his podcast with Hikaru Nakamura as harmful or dangerous content. It was later restored.
Why Hacker News points people here: Cited as an example of automated content moderation misfiring, notably the incident where chess talk was flagged as 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.
Relevant: Youtube algorithm blocked a video on a popular chess channel with 1800 videos, supposedly for a "racism" this video
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.
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
