When two robots compete in a concrete ring to combat their brutal and oily death, no animal is injured in the process. But YouTube has removed videos from Battlebots and introduced movements opposed to its creators, bringing up cruelty to animals.
As YouTuber Maker’s Muse, first discovered, YouTube has removed videos of fighting robots after they appeared as “the planned imposition of animal suffering.” f YouTube showed Motherboard that it had deleted the videos by mistake, that the videos had already been restored and that YouTube did not have a policy contrary to robot fight videos.
YouTube bans videos “in which animals are encouraged or forced to fight through humans,” in accordance with its limited content policy, which appears to have implemented robot videos by scratching in a ring.
Jamison Go, from the Battlebots SawBlaze team, the email he won by 8 of his videos:
Sarah Pohorecky, a member of this season’s Battlebots Uppercut team, also removed one of her videos. “I would say bluntly that at least 10 to 15 brands have been affected,” he told me in a Facebook post. “Some videos have deleted several videos, while others have had one or two in many robot videos on their [deleted] channels.”
She said that in addition to being videos of fighting robots, the eliminations adhered to a trend in the name of the video or the names of the robots, but some of the videos had animal names in the names because they were robot names.
Other robot brands on Facebook said they won YouTube notifications about their videos.
“With the sheer volume of videos on our site, we made the wrong decision,” a YouTube spokesperson told Motherboard. “When we report that a video has been deleted by mistake, we act temporarily to reactivate it. We also offer users the ability to appeal deletions and review content.”
One of those taken for animal cruelty.
YouTube’s moderation efforts, a task its own CEO has called, have been criticized for relying too heavily on inconsistent and flawed algorithmic systems to capture limited content.
Pohorecky said that after deleting his video, there was no transparent option to protest the resolution, and as a beta user of the new Studio for YouTube Creators, he discovered that the appeal procedure was more confusing than the previous interface. He said the new YouTube Studio removes the “Call” button from the interface next to deleted videos and now forces creators to browse video data screens to find the option to appeal.
His videos are back online, as are other Battlebots videos that were removed by mistake, but Pohorecky fears that the old fight videos will not recover or recover. “I just think it’s unhappy that other people end up wasting old video clips from a laughing hobthrough because an artificial intelligence engineer on YouTube didn’t do his job properly,” he said.
Update 21/08/19, 8:20 p.m.: After this story was published, Sarah Pohorecky contacted Motherboard to explain that her video had been deleted, but that her channel had not gained a warning. We’ve updated the story to reflect that.