Samantha Cole* reports that several Battlebots videos have been taken down by YouTube with the channel citing animal cruelty policies.
When two robots face off in a concrete ring to battle to their brutal, oily deaths, no animals are harmed in the process.
Yet YouTube has been taking down videos of these Battlebots and issuing strikes against their creators, citing animal cruelty.
As first spotted by YouTuber Maker’s Muse, YouTube has taken down videos of robots doing combat after mistaking them for videos that show “deliberate infliction of animal suffering”.
YouTube has confirmed to Motherboard that it removed the videos in error and the videos have already been restored.
It said YouTube had no policy against videos of robots fighting.
YouTube prohibits videos “where animals are encouraged or coerced to fight by humans,” according to its restricted content policies — which it seems to have applied to videos of bots scraping in a ring.
Sarah Pohorecky, a member of Team Uppercut on this season of Battlebots, had one of her videos taken down.
“I’d say off my head that at least 10-to-15 builders have been affected,” she said.
“Some had a number of videos removed, while others only had one or two out of many robot videos on their channels removed.”
She said that beyond being battle robot videos, the removals didn’t follow a pattern in video title or robot names.
However, some of the videos did have animal names in the titles, because they were names of the robots.
Other robot makers on Facebook have said that they’ve also received notices from YouTube about their videos.
A spokesperson for YouTube said that with the massive volume of videos on its 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,” the spokesperson said.
“We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content.”
YouTube’s moderation efforts — a task its own chief executive has called impossible — have been criticised for relying too heavily on inconsistent, flawed algorithmic systems to catch restricted content.
Pohorecky said that after her video was removed and her account was given a strike, there wasn’t a clear option to protest the decision.
She found the appeal process to be more convoluted than the old interface.
The YouTube Studio removes the ‘appeal’ button from the interface next to removed videos.
It forces creators to navigate through several screens of video information to find the option to appeal.
Her videos are back online now, as are others’ Battlebots videos that were removed mistakenly.
However, Pohorecky is concerned that older battle videos might not get appealed or reinstated.
“I just think that it’s sad that some people may end up losing old fight videos from a fun hobby because a YouTube AI engineer didn’t do their job properly,” she said.
*Samantha Cole is an assistant editor at Vice. She can be contacted at [email protected].
This article first appeared at Vice’s Motherboard page.
