Over the past few months, the problem of users’ videos being flagged and removed without any clear reason why has become more prevalent. I feel that there is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence pointing to malicious behavior to flag videos. Only YouTube would know for sure.
Assuming that it is malicious users that are the problem, let me further speculate what the problem is:
- Flagging a video has a benefit of removing videos with opposing views of your own.
- Flagging a video incorrectly has no consequences.
- Flagging a video can be done by any user, not just users who have earned the privilege.
Thus, I feel like YouTube needs to enact consequences for improperly flagging videos. If a video is removed and it was later found that the video did not violate the YouTube terms of service, all accounts that flagged the video should have their account locked for a period commensurate with how many times this has happened. For example, a first time offender maybe only gets their account locked for 3 days, while a third time offender may get a month penalty.
Next, I feel that YouTube should make flagging only be enabled for accounts that have met certain requirements. A few examples that might work:
- A user has watched more than X time of videos (assuming they have a way to measure this). This would help prevent an automated bot from signing up for a lot of fake accounts just to flag videos.
- A new account cannot flag a video within 24 hours. This would help prevent people from flagging via a manual effort. For example, if someone emailed or chatted you to flag a video and you didn’t want to risk your main account, you would sign up for a new account only to find it didn’t work. Within 24 hours you may have forgotten about it.
I’m sure there’s many other creative ways to tell a real account from a bot-driven account. The people at Google are not dumb, and probably can come up with some great mechanisms to limit flagging to legitimate users.
Finally, I would implement a weight to a flagging. Rather than a rule, e.g. “50 flags for video removal,” I would make a user who has flagged videos truthfully more than 5 times be worth 50 points, while new users or users who have flagged incorrectly before only worth 1 point. Now use this weighted score to trip the automatic removal of the video.
As a programmer myself, I don’t think any of these are technically challenging to implement, and I think that they would help greatly reduce the problems YouTube has with malicious flagging.
Tags: technology
