author: Barth Faryna
YouTube Considers Robot Fights as Animal Abuse?
YouTube has recently removed hundreds of videos depicting robot fights. However, the most interesting thing about this whole matter is the reason for the decision: the videos violated the rules on cruelty to animals.
Robot fights have been very popular for many years. There are even competitions and some TV stations spend the lion's share of their airtime on them. In the ring, two or more teams and their robots face each other. It is a rivalry to the death, usually lasting until the moment when one of the machines will be incapable of further action. YouTube recently found this discipline to be against its regulations and began to remove video from the channels of robotics enthusiasts.
Anthony Murney was the first to notice the whole problem when videos suddenly started to disappear from his channel. The man was quickly joined by many more people, and the whole thing became loud. All users whose videos were banned received the same notification, the content of which indicated that they had violated the rules of the service by "displaying deliberate infliction of animal suffering or the forcing of animals to fight".
The vast majority of the victims blamed a defective algorithm. Eventually, it turned out they were right. A similar opinion was expressed by the service spokesman in an interview with "The Independent":
“With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it. We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content."
The situation is slowly returning to normal, and the videos are appearing on the channels again.