YouTube has had for some years now some kind of AI automoderation of comments, where it will automatically remove comments that, I assume, are deemed "breaking community guidelines" or otherwise inappropriate.
Having some kind of automated moderation system kind of makes sense given that people probably write literally and without exaggeration millions of comments every single day. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is millions of comments every hour.
The automoderation system has many, many problems, though.
For starters, the user is not notified in any way, shape or form if his or her comment was automatically removed. The comment just disappears silently. The only way you can see if your comment has been autoremoved is to reload the page, or try to edit your own comment (in which case it will give an error message when you try to submit the edited message). At no point do you get any notification or any indication that this has been done; you can only find out by seeing that your comment isn't there anymore.
Moreover, if you write too many comments within a period of time that all get autoremoved, you'll get shadow-banned for 24 hours (again, with zero notifications or indication that this is so). In this mode every single comment you write, no matter what it contains or which video you are posting it to, will be immediately autoremoved. You have no recourse against this. You cannot write comments for 24h, there's nothing you can do about it, and YouTube won't even tell you that you are in this mode. It will happily allow you to write comments, only to immediately remove them, without telling you.
However, by far the major problem with YouTube's automoderation system is the sheer amount of false positives. By this point most people have found out that a good portion of their comments, very much including those that are 100% non-infringing and contain absolutely nothing objectionable, are being randomly removed.
The funny thing is that YouTube (at least as of writing this) kind of "leaks" the fact that someone has written a comment, which was then removed by the automoderation AI: If someone writes a response to a comment I have written, I get a notification about it (which can be seen under the "bell" icon on the top right of the page) and can even read what the comment was: However, more and more frequently when I go to the comment thread itself, the comment is nowhere to be found.
I have noticed that this has been happening more and more frequently in recent months, and the amounts are just staggering. I would estimate that about 30-40% of all the comments written as response to some comment of mine have been removed by the automoderator AI. The vast, vast majority of those contained absolutely nothing even resembling something objectionable. That's literally dozens of removed comments every single day, from the responses to my comments alone, almost all of them completely false positives.
It also completely breaks conversation threads in the comment section of videos: You can see all the time people responding to comments that aren't there anymore.
There's also another way in which YouTube (still as of writing this) kind of "leaks" the information about it having autoremoved comments: Each comment has a number of replies below it.
Yet, open almost any such comment thread and you'll find that the actual number of comments is significantly smaller than that number. For example I am right now looking at the comment section of a video: A comment has "49 replies" under it, but counting the actual replies is 37. Quite clearly 12 of them have been nuked. Another comment has "11 replies", but the actual number of replies is 7. A third comment has "28 replies", but only 17 remain. One comment has "1 reply"... which has been removed.
And this goes on and on and on. Pretty much any comment with a significantly number of alleged replies has significantly less actual replies. It's quite clear that the automoderation AI has removed the rest.
It's literally out of control. It's literally removing something like 20-30% of all comments that people are posting, and I would surmise that the vast, vast majority of them have absolutely nothing objectionable to them (something I can see from removed comments written as replies to a comment of mine). The amount of false positives is just staggering.
This makes the YouTube comment section completely useless if you want to have any sort of conversation with people. It's impossible. About a third (sometimes more) of your comments will just be removed, no matter what they contain, so it's literally impossible to have any sort of conversation with anybody. A good portion of your comments will be removed, and likewise from the people you are conversing with.
It also disincentivizes writing any feedback or any useful information for people watching the video, because there's a very high chance that the automoderation system will just unceremoniously nuke it, regardless of what it contains and how it's worded. It's a complete gamble.
Update, 5th of April: I have been lately noticing that my comments, particularly responses to other people's comments, aren't disappearing anymore. Almost all, perhaps even all, comments I have written during the past couple of weeks have remained, without being removed.
It's possible that YouTube has fixed the problem.
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