Youtube's artificial "intelligence" takedown algorithm mass-deletes evidence of war crimes
Alphabet workers news
Thomson Reuters Foundation News published an article late last week noting that Youtube is auto-censoring hundreds of thousands of videos of the conflict in Syria, some of which might otherwise be usable in the future to document evidence of war crimes. The article provides an opportunity for a reminder: other people's platforms are not a reliable archive for your content. Particularly if you're creating or posting video content that challenges entrenched systems of power, always try to maintain copies of your content that are under your physical and administrative control.
Some extracts from the article appear below.
- Bruce
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https://news.trust.org/item/20200619151037-6e1oq/
'Lost memories': War crimes evidence threatened by AI moderation
From bombings and protests to the opening of a new health centre, student journalist Baraa Razzouk has been documenting daily life in Idlib, Syria, for years, and posting the videos to his YouTube account.
But this month, the 21-year-old started getting automated emails from YouTube alerting him that his videos violated its policy, and that they would be deleted. As of this month, more than a dozen of his videos had been removed, he said.
"Documenting the (Syrian) protests in videos is really important. Also, documenting attacks by regime forces," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview. "This is something I had documented for the world and now it's deleted."...
Erroneous takedowns threaten content like videos that are used as formal evidence of rights violations by international bodies such as the International Criminal Court and the United Nations, said Dia Kayyali of digital rights group Witness...
Social media firms typically do not disclose how frequently their AI tools mistakenly take down content.
So, the Syrian Archive group has been using its own data to approximate change over time in the rate of deletions of human rights documentation on crimes committed in Syria, which has been battered by nearly a decade of war...
"Our research suggests that since the beginning of the year, the rate of content takedowns of Syrian human rights documentations on YouTube roughly doubled (from 13% to 20%)" said Deutch, calling the increase "unprecendented".
In May, Syrian Archive detected more than 350,000 videos on YouTube had disappeared - up from 200,000 in May 2019, including videos of aerial attacks, protests, and destruction of civilians homes in Syria...
"We don't know how many people are trying to speak and we aren't hearing them," said Alexa Koenig, director of the University of California Berkeley's Human Rights Center.
"These algorithms are grabbing the content before we even see it," said Koenig, whose center uses images and videos posted from conflict zones like Syria to document human rights abuses and build cases.
YouTube said that 80% of videos flagged by its AI were deleted before anyone had seen them in the second quarter of 2019...
Koenig worries this kind of documentation is now under threat: "The danger is much higher than it was just a few months ago," she said.
"It's a sickening feeling, to know we aren't close to where we need to be in preserving this content."
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