Are there algorithms down ranking YouTube videos by words said in them?
I have been hearing a lot of content creators speak in a sort of code when it comes to the pandemic and vaccines in an effort to evade the "Algorithms" from catching them. First is there any truth to this concept and second wouldn't saying the word algorithm be at the top of any such keyword lists?
I created a YouTube ad to promote home battery storage systems. In the ad was approx 3 seconds of a screenshot of a BBC news article about rising energy prices.
On the sidebar of BBC news in fairly small text was the word ‘coronavirus’.
Google banned my ad because of this.
Are you discussing the current public health emergency?
YouTube auto-generates transcripts, and is owned by an organization well versed in search... it would be quite surprising if they didn't weight things based on words spoken during the videos.
Given that something like Content ID existing and the fact that YouTube's parent company has developed the capability of detecting and recognising 'speech', 'music' and 'sounds' on an automated and mass scale and both YouTube and Google being very secretive about algorithm changes, I would not be surprised to see an algorithm change that detects several keywords spoken in a video which automatically flags / down-ranks or removes the offending video.
After all, the moderation in YouTube is automated: [0]
> Our systems don't always get it right, but you can request human review of decisions made by our automated systems.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=6...
Probably. Mr. Beast is a fairly popular YouTube channel and he transitioned from cursing to not cursing in the past few years. Since he’s dedicated to getting more views and likes perhaps more so than any other human in history, if it helped at all, he would be dropping curse words every other minute.
When I was at Google in 2013, they were most certainly using the transcriptions (Mostly human at the time, though autotranscription was available) as a content signal. I would be terribly surprised if they are not doing so today.
I think it’s not downrankng so much as monetisation in most cases. Advertisers don’t want their ads shown alongside videos covering certain sensitive topics so YouTube “demonetises” these videos and the creators don’t get any revenue from them. It seems generally understood that demonetisation is based on automatic transcription of the video and then searching for certain keywords.
I don’t have any inside info, this is just from listening to a few youtubers talk about it
Google uses both OCR and automatic subtitles when returning YT search results, so most likely they also use it for censoring.