YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, speaking before the World Economic Forum Global Technology Governance Summit 2021…

“Everyone seems to have an opinion about this - what is good content, what's bad content, what content what should up, what should be down? We engage with many different groups across many different topics, and I'd say that's one conversation.”

[OCS: Therein, Wojcicki seems to have revealed the real problem. Everyone has an opinion, some conditioned by self-interests, some by political ideology, some by the desire to create sensationalism to drive profits, and some to burn down the system.

There is no legitimate way that any technological system, even with the best artificial intelligence and machine learning, can do little more than adding up the number of similar words and then act on that pattern. Facts and context being subjective rather than objective.

In the words of Friedrich Hayek, it is all the “pretense of knowledge.” You do not know that which you do not know.

Leading to the best course of actions, present everything, excluding, of course, calls to violent action, child pornography, and similar subjects. Let the people decide. The tech platforms pretend they protect children under 13, but the truth is today’s 13-year-old is more worldly than yesterday’s 23-year-old.]

“There's a different question, which is, 'Well how good a job do you do at removing that content once you've identified it?'. This report that just came out showed exactly where we are, which is at 99.85% [success]…So it's our goal is to break [the debate] into two different conversations - first what the policies should be, and then do we do a good job enforcing them once we have those policies?”

[OCS: Wojcicki is delusional or self-serving. Given bots and automated content injection mechanisms, there is no legitimate way to stop the flood of content.

Want to bypass the textual analysis of messages, place the message within a graphic with odd spacing – much like a Captcha “I’m Not A Robot” challenge.]

“We have been asked many times by governments, by press, by advertising, by the creator community, about this violative rate and we were able to show exactly how good we are at enforcement of our policies. We were able to show that we have a very high ability to find this content and show exactly what that number was. We were also able to show that we were able to reduce it significantly over time.”

“The machines are good, we can find content across the board, but something like hate speech, or something that has a lot of context, would be something that would be harder from a machine standpoint to be able to detect. We've been able to really fine tune our machine so that we can find a lot of this content and it is flagged, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's removed. So what happens is the machines will flag it and then it will be sent to human reviewers who will determine whether or not this is in fact violative or not.”

[OCS: The question that is not often asked and very rarely answered is, how many humans or organizations are fact-checking and manipulating the content? And, of some concern, how much of this manipulation occurs at the behest of  the tech tyrants, government, special interests, and paying clients?]

“If you're looking for COVID information, we actually can say, 'Look, your local health authority, the CDC or whatever [the equivalent in whatever] country you're in, or the World Health Organization, those are all organizations that we can trust, as opposed to some channel that just showed up that we don't have any kind of authoritative information about. So we definitely have a concept with information about authoritative sources and we make sure that when people are looking for information that is sensitive, we show those authoritative sources. But if you're in the entertainment area or you're looking to how to fix something or how to learn something about some obscure topic, it's really hard to put some judgment about what is the best content that's out there.”

[OCS: There is little or no doubt that the Chinese Communist Party compromised the leadership of the World Health Organization.

The WHO was not telling the truth about the Chinese Communist Party virus, they were passing along Chinese Communist propaganda that downplayed China’s role in creating the global pandemic and worsening its effects on innocent people.

Chinese individuals trying to warn the world were suppressed by China’s tech platforms and subsequently by  American tech platforms. None of the tech tyrants had a clue as to the truth, continuing to infantilize their audience as if they were mommy and daddy explaining something bad to a child.]

“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we're recommending are authoritative - news, medical science, etc. We also have created a category of more borderline content, where sometimes we'll see people looking at content or there'll be content that's lower quality and borderline, so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. That's content that stays on the platform, but it's not something that we're going to recommend.”

[OCS: Most technology-based platforms wrongly assume that the large mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, etc., are sources of authoritative information.

These media outlets are clearly not objective as they present a politically tinged narrative, use the work from many authors with various degrees of fact-checking, and rarely report first-hand scientific results.

They report scientific findings -- as interpreted by narrative-crafting journalists, first as a source of a news release itself that purports to interpret scientific findings, and then through their own journalists. The simple fact is they are reporting mostly what they are told and lack the credentials, time, and money, to locate and report on similarly authoritative, but contrarian positions.

Even worse, reporting what the self-serving, hyper-politicized government is handing out is foolish.

We have encountered fake news in both instances, which resulted in the censorship, automated or manual, of accurate information.

One need only consider the censorship of legitimate news coming from a major newspaper – where information stored on Hunter Biden's laptop was labeled as “Russian Disinformation” before the election and was suppressed, thus depriving Americans of an informed choice. Or, consider the number of contradictory government positions on pandemic-related issues like masks, distancing, and lockdowns. Or the suppression of a panel of highly-credentialed experts speaking about contrarian views of "the science." ]

“Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who were uploading content that was not factual, that was not correct. It's much easier to just make up content and post it from your basement than it is to actually go to the site and have high quality journalistic reporting. That was just an example of what happens if you don't have that kind of ranking. So, we want to enable 'citizen journalism' to be able to report and other people to be able to share information and new channels, but when we're dealing with a sensitive topic, we have to have that information coming from authoritative sources, so that the right and accurate information is viewed by our users first.”

[OCS: Not to mention state actors working on behalf of governments to promote propaganda. Unfortunately, these sources may automatically be deemed authentic and credible – even if the content being presented is misinformation or disinformation. 

How do you determine authoritative sources in a day when there is little or no real journalism being practiced – especially at corporate-owned media where profits and partisan allegiances drive the narrative?]

My conclusion…

Bottom line…

Nobody is inviting me to the Davos World Economic Forum Global Technology Governance Summit. I wouldn’t pay them thousands of dollars for travel (private jet, of course), lodging, food, and incidentals. So my opinion appears on my blog – and at the mercy of the tech titans who control my platform, and by extension, my content. I could be shuffled off to the “bit bin” should my content displease the powers that be. My voice lost in the ether no matter how cogent my insights or brilliant my exposition.

And therein is the essential issue of technological censorship. I am paying for the right to be heard, not the right to be censored. You have the right to determine your own version of the truth based on your upbringing, education, experience, and environment.

We are so screwed when free speech is compromised by a cadre of elites who believe that their wealth, position, education, credentials give them the moral superiority to tell me what to think, say, or do.

-- steve