Sam Oh, the Vice President of Marketing at Ahrefs, recently shed light on this capability. Oh disclosed that a video posted by Ahrefs was flagged by YouTube for a rather unexpected reason. The video in question displayed a snippet from a book, and within that snippet was the name “Donald Trump.”.
Following this, YouTube flagged the video under its “Election advertising in the United States” clause. Ahrefs was subsequently prompted to “Review and fix ads that violate ads policy to update the status of your campaign.”
It’s not a secret; they’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s why you see a lot of YouTubers who cover news stories black out certain words if they share snippets of a news article.
What’s weird about it is that the policy doesn’t seem to be the same for text as it is for audio. For instance, Philip DeFranco has to censor out words like “rape” from articles he puts up graphics of, but doesn’t have to censor it out as he narrates the article verbally.
Semi-related but it drives me crazy that there can be non-censored swearing in a video but the subtitles have it censored. Imagine being punished for being deaf
I wonder if the scenario with spoken vs printed words getting treated differently is due to the differences in accuracy of google’s audio and ocr technology. Hi-res text images makes ocr very good at deciphering between grape and rape but with audio it may not be as good.
Similarly, I wonder if the fact that google is autogenerating subtitles for videos makes a difference. When it’s spoken in a video it’s not something they’ve produced but when it’s in subtitles they have generated it is something they produced and could somehow open themselves up to legal issues? Regardless it’s still unfortunate that YouTube is forcibly censoring subtitles.