Origin Story
In April 2016, there were a string of public suicides in the media. We started wondering about
how these are represented on neo-news outlets like YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram.
We learned about the strategic quarantining of information from research at Data & Society,
and we wondered how content related to self-harm is regulated on YouTube. We started reading about it.
We learned that YouTube’s content moderation tools, which are well-suited for detecting things like nudity,
are insufficient for monitoring certain types of content within lengthy live-stream videos.
We wondered how automated content regulation works on YouTube. We read YouTube’s
official documentation,
but we still had questions! We realized that we needed more time and resources to dedicate to this question.
Creators
Raq and Hope are both artists invested in gaining a deeper understanding of
how AI and ML techniques are used the wild. In order to explain the complexities
of how an automated content regulation tool works in practice, we first must
understand it in great detail, ourselves.
In both her professional and personal projects,
Hope
is working towards a more humble
public perception of what AI and ML techniques afford our society.
As a data scientist who utilizes AI and ML for social policy research,
Hope is discouraging the notion of a future that is scientifically perfectible.
Raq
is a working towards integrating STEM and Art to fight economic inequity across sectors.
Code
We believe in an open, free, and democratic internet. Our intention with this
project is to contribute to this ecosystem. PP:404 will never use your data
for commercial purposes as user data is kept in a secure database.
You can check out our code at our GitHub account.
Funding
We are currently looking for funding! Contact us if you can help out with that.