Back to episode — Episode 571 Scott Adams - Hacking the Algorithm and Other Stuff
Context —
Well, I was just sending out a humorous tweet, which made me a little late here. I couldn't quite get the wording right. But I was watching a video of what looks like Jerry Nadler walking in for his hearings with Hope Hicks. You have to see this tweet because the contrast, as Alexander just pointed out, is the funniest contrast. Normally I don't like to talk about people's appearances because it'…
← Previous segment →All right, let's talk about some other interesting news. So both Joe Biden and Don Lemon have once again in public, once again, been spreading the FPH. Now if you don't know what the FPH is, there's a reason I'm using the letters instead of the words. Because I did a little test yesterday to see if YouTube would demonetize me for a certain word or a certain set of words. Those words start with F, P, and H.
What do you think? Do you think? And I did the test so I would say nothing else that could possibly be over the line. So I was very clear it was a single purpose periscope and just a test, which then got loaded onto YouTube.
What do you think happened? Demonetized instantly. Demonetized. No curse words, no incorrect information. So there were no curses, no incorrect information. It was not offensive in any way. There was no offensive material. The only thing in it was the three words that start with F, P, and H.
Those of you who are on Periscope watching this, you can see what that means. Those of you who are watching this later on YouTube will not see those words, but you can figure it out by context.
Now somebody here is asking me if it might be because of another word, another word that sometimes is used to refer to bad people who have a certain belief system. And if I were to spell it backwards it would be I Z A M. So I made sure that I didn't use that word. I used the word correctly in my test. Now it did get demonetized fairly quickly. So it was instantly demonetized on YouTube.
So the test worked. There was nothing offensive in it. It was just content. Then apparently somebody doesn't want to monetize it. And I do understand that you would not want to pair advertisements with any conversation on that topic because most people talking about that topic are going to say something that the advertisers wouldn't want to associate with. I don't.
But here's the problem. Even if you get demonetized temporarily and then remonetized, it doesn't help at all. Because all of your monetization happens in the first 24 hours. So pretty much, at least in my case, the viewership is 80 percent of the first day. So if they demonetize the first day and then say, oops, that was an overreach, we'll remonetize you, it doesn't help at all. It doesn't help at all because you've already lost all of your monetization.
So this was shocking, just shocking, that content that was completely clean and appropriate and not controversial, even not controversial. Some people might disagree with it, but it wouldn't be controversial in the normal sense.
So anyway, it seems to me that I put a little more work into how we could determine what the algorithm is doing without being the holders of the algorithm. And here's how I do it. What you do is you take a bunch of different accounts, YouTube accounts, and you'd ask them to report their experience. So if they got demonetized they would report to this central site or something when they got demonetized and what was demonetized. Then that central site can do the same thing that I assume YouTube does, which is do a speech-to-text and then look for text that may have been the problem text.
Now in the case of YouTube, they're looking for text that they've already banned or they want to throttle, and then it does its thing. Presumably. I'm presuming that's how it happens. I might be wrong.
So if you wanted to find out what keywords they were looking for without them telling you, because they won't, you could have a number of accounts that volunteer to tell you when they get demonetized. And then once somebody reports they've been demonetized, this central site that's sort of a monitoring site could check their speech-to-text only if they get demonetized and then run it against other people who are demonetized and find the correlations.
So if every time somebody says "orange" it gets demonetized, you would notice that because it would happen to a variety of accounts. There wouldn't be much of anything else in common. So if you had enough accounts who were willing to report when they got demonetized to a central monitoring organization or a person, I think you could work backwards. I think you could work backwards to figure out what the keywords were and why you got banned. And that would have been very helpful in this situation.
Context —
All right. Sorry. I saw that Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton, who are on opposite sides of politics, are combining to do some kind of a fentanyl sanctions bill against China. So in other words, if Congress is working across the aisle, thank you Congress. Thank you, Chuck Schumer. I'm gonna always call out when the people I don't agree with do something I like. Chuck Schumer is doing something I like…
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