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YouTube Marks Notre Dame Fire As Conspiracy

An interesting story out of Bloomberg: Youtube accidentally marked a livestream on yesterday’s Notre Dame fire as a 9/11 conspiracy.

Bloomberg Twitter post with screenshot of Notre Dame fire.

The article is here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-15/youtube-flags-notre-dame-fire-as-9-11-conspiracy-in-wrong-call – it comments that YouTube’s automated anti-hoax systems mislabeled the video.

It’s an interesting and difficult problem to algorithmically categorize videos – in this case, it’s easy to see how the Google AI fouled up: both 9/11 and Notre Dame fires were in tall buildings, with a cityscape surrounding them – from an AI perspective both look very similar. YouTube is such an important source for fresh news, I almost think that they should have people on 24/7 monitoring popular livestreams.

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Notre Dame Fire

During today’s Notre Dame fire, Google updated the search results for Notre Dame to indicate the emergency. Here is what Google Maps showed (note the little fire icon above the cathedral):

Screenshot of Notre Dame on Google Maps.
Screenshot of the Notre Dame on Google Maps. Note the little fire icon above the Notre Dame cathedral itself.

If you Google searched for the fire, or clicked the link from Maps, you’ll see the following screenshot. Note the emergency alert at the top, and the map of the fire’s affected area underneath the news section.

Google search for Notre Dame fire.
A Google search for Notre Dame fire.