Con mắc lỗi trên mạng: Cuộc sống số của cha mẹ bị hủy hoại

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When Jennifer Watkins got a message from YouTube saying her channel was being shut down, she wasn’t initially (ban đầu) worried. She didn’t use YouTube, after all (rốt cuộc, sau cùng).

Her 7-year-old twin sons, though, used a Samsung tablet logged into her Google account to watch content for children and to make YouTube videos of themselves doing silly dances (điệu nhảy ngớ ngẩn). Few of the videos had more than five views. But the video that got Ms. Watkins in trouble, which one son made, was different.

“Apparently it was a video of his bottom (mông),” said Ms. Watkins, who has never seen it. “He’d been dared by a classmate to do a nudie video.”

Google-owned YouTube has A.I.-powered systems that review the hundreds of hours of video that are uploaded to the service every minute. The scanning process can sometimes go awry (trục trặc) and tar innocent individuals as child abusers (kẻ lạm dụng trẻ em).

parents’ digital lives were upended by naked photos and videos of their children that Google’s A.I. systems flagged (gắn cờ) and that human reviewers determined to be illicit (bất hợp pháp). Some parents have been investigated by the police as a result.

The “nudie video” in Ms. Watkins’s case, uploaded in September, was flagged within minutes as possible sexual exploitation (bóc lột tình dục) of a child, a violation of Google’s terms of service with very serious consequences (hậu quả nghiêm trọng).

Ms. Watkins, a medical worker who lives in New South Wales, Australia, soon discovered that she was locked out of not just YouTube but all her accounts with Google. She lost access to her photos, documents and email, she said, meaning she couldn’t get messages about her work schedule, review her bank statements (bảng sao kê ngân hàng) or “order a thickshake” via her McDonald’s app — which she logs into using her Google account.

Her account would eventually be deleted, a Google login page informed her, but she could appeal (kháng cáo) the decision. She clicked a Start Appeal button and wrote in a text box that her 7-year-old sons thought “butts are funny” and were responsible for uploading the video.

“This is harming me financially (gây tổn hại cho tôi về mặt tài chính),” she added.

... Google is one of the top reporters of “apparent child pornography,” according to statistics from the national center. Google filed more than two million reports last year, far more than most digital communications (truyền thông kỹ thuật số) companies, though fewer than the number filed by Meta.

source: nytimes,