I completely agree with your sentiment here, and having read the other sibling comments to mine, I'd like to note that I have dealt with high volume customer support, I work closely with YouTube so I know their reps/support/processes pretty well and I'm also a software engineer who thinks about these challenges quite a lot.
None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders.
All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.
None of that changes the fact that Google is indeed "treating it like a fun ML problem that they want to solve with magical algorithmic pixie dust". That's basically their MO, and they put wayyyy too much stock in the results. Saying that Google doesn't do this is crazy. This is why the Podcast Addict thing happened; they were trying to crack down on the misinformation from "plandemic" weirdos and Podcast Addict and many other apps were hit with the spray of the shotgun blast. Is their original intention worthwhile? Yes. Do I think a human "reviewed" Podcast Addict before they took it out for linking to content about literally the world's most talked about story while at the same time Google Podcasts did the exact same thing? Absolutely not. If a human reviewed that case and decided that Podcast Addict (the #1 podcast app on Android) needed to be suspended, then something is broken. Maybe someone needs to be fired, but there's no someone in the chair. You can't fire the AIs at this point- You can only tweak and rework them and hope they take out less innocent bystanders.
All this said, is it hard? Yes. Is there too much content to really do this right? Yes I believe there is. Could Google do a better, more efficient and transparent job of cleaning up the mess when their scripts misfire? Oh absolutely yes.