Before you read the rest of this comment: how many channels do you expect that YouTube removes in year, or a day, or an hour?

My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument. The data happen to be readily available online for anyone bothering to look.

The problem with both the original comment and your reply here is the denominator is ignored:

- How many accounts exist?

- How many are removed?

- How many of those removals are appealed?

I happened to look up the numbers for Facebook a few days ago when similar complaints were lodged against them. And again: I believe in large part that the power and influence of these platforms requires an extraordinary level of care.

That said, Facebook blocked 99.8% of fake accounts preemptively before they were flagged by user, in 2021Q3. For a total of 1.8 billion accounts removed. Whatever experience ordinary users of the system had of fake accounts was after that removal of 1.8 billion accounts, nearly 8 billion per year.

https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforce...

I'm looking up Google's own transparency report based on your comment. The YouTube Community Standards report is here:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removal...

The headline number is that in 2021Q3, YouTube removed 2.4 million channels. That's an annualised rate of nearly 20 million, and the quarterly removal rate roughly doubled from the 2020Q4 & 2021Q1 rate begining in 2021Q2. The cadence is 55,000 channels per day, or about 2,300 per hour.

For comparison, manual reviewers at maximum capacity can moderation about 700--800 items in a day, leaving roughly 30 seconds per item, based on the New York Times comment moderation desk.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv...

I've discussed content moderation in terms to total personal media capacity a few years ago here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53qbx3/estimat...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa...

Note that we're taking both FB and YT accounts at face value, that the removals were legitimate. Facebook offers information on appeals, Google (so far as I can tell) does not. But at a first approximation the removals seem to be mostly valid.

A huge problem is that a small fraction of a very large number ... is still a large number. A 1% misclassification rate of 20 million channels is 200,000 channels/year. A 99.99% accurate classification is still 2,000 channels year. For Facebook, with 5 billion removals/year, a 99.99% accurate rate is 500,000 erroniously banned profiles.

And the risk profiles are asymmetric. For the platform. 99.99% success is ... well, pretty good. But for each individual who's erroneously classified, the consequences range from a major annoyance to catastrophic.

And lest you think I'm making the case that this is "good enough" or "acceptable losses", I'm not. I think it would be fairly straightforward to make a strong argument for the heavy regulation or break-up of these services strictly on this basis. They have too much control and influence, both at the macro and micro scales, and even near-perfect operations, management, and policies are not nearly good enough.

You might also want to think about your own actions, and those of formal and informal institutions in which you believe and/or rely, and consider what their own failure rates in judgement and adjudication are. How many false arrests, or evictions, or debt collections, or sentencings, or executions are you willing to live with, transacted in the name of society?