考研英语阅读理解中的文章,很多来自一些外刊杂志方面的题材。接下来,北京文都考研网为扩宽2020考研学子的知识面,整理了考研英语经济学人外刊:YouTube的难题,供考生参考。
2020考研英语经济学人外刊:YouTube的难题
How to clean up the world’s biggest video-sharing site
如何对世界上最大的视频分享网站进行清理
Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, received the first message about the massacre in New Zealand at around 8pm. Assaults on two mosques in Christchurch had begun minutes earlier. The shooter had live-streamed the killings on Facebook and the footage from the social-media site was being shared on YouTube as the killer had clearly hoped.
晚上8点左右,YouTube 的首席执行官苏珊·沃西基收到了第一条关于新西兰大屠杀的消息。就在几分钟前,克赖斯特彻奇市的两座清真寺遭遇了袭击。枪手在 Facebook 上对这场屠杀进行了现场直播,而来自社交媒体网站的视频也被分享至 YouTube,这显然正中凶手下怀。
Ms Wojcicki checked in with her team. Executives and software engineers were looking for different versions of the video so that machine-learning programs could be trained to hunt for them.
沃西基和她的团队立即(对 YouTube 上的视频)进行了检查。管理人员和软件工程师都在寻找不同版本的屠杀视频,从而让机器学习程序经过训练后能够找到这些视频。
Thousands of human reviewers were scouring through videos that had been automatically tagged, sorting news reports and the like from the offending footage. The world’s largest video platform—owned by Google, the world’s most powerful search engine—was mobilised to cleanse itself of the horrific clip.
成千上万的用户正在快速浏览这些被自动贴上了标签的视频,它们本是违规视频却被分类至新闻报道等频道。这个全球最大的视频分享网站(YouTube 是全球最强大的搜索引擎谷歌旗下的一个视频网站)正在被动员起来清除其中的恐怖视频片段。
It failed. Before she went to bed at 1am Ms Wojcicki was still able to find the video (she chose not to watch it). In the morning copies of the video continued to be accessible using generic keyword searches. New versions were being uploaded more quickly than they could be identified and taken down.
她们最终还是失败了。在凌晨1点睡觉前,沃西基还能找到相关的视频(当然她选择不看)。到了早上,仍然可以利用关键词搜索找到屠杀视频的副本。新版本屠杀视频的上传速度远远快于它们被识别和删除的速度。
Finally, at 6am, Ms Wojcicki decided to remove all videos flagged as suspect, without waiting for a human review—a first for YouTube. Hours later, the site also blocked users from filtering searches by new uploads, another first. “We don’t want to be the place where people are finding that,” says Ms Wojcicki.
到了早上6点,沃西基最终决定不再等待人工审核而直接删除所有被标记的可疑视频,这在 YouTube 历史上还是第一次。几个小时后,YouTube 还首次阻止用户上传被过滤搜索结果的内容。沃西基说:“我们不想让人们从 YouTube 上找到那些视频内容。”
The company is not alone in its interest in policing what people upload to it. An increasing number of governments and regulators around the world think social-media firms must change their ways.
YouTube 并不是唯一一家乐此不疲地监管用户上传内容的公司。越来越多的政府和监管机构认为社交媒体公司必须改变他们的监管方式。
Facebook takes most of the flak but YouTube’s problems are particularly tricky because videos are difficult to monitor at such scale—500 hours of new ones are uploaded every minute. Children and teens consume it in their masses. And its videos are increasingly viewed as an important source of news and information as well as entertainment.
Facebook 承受了诸多指责,但 YouTube 的问题更为棘手,因为在 YouTube 这样的规模下很难对视频进行监管——平均每分钟有500个小时时长的新视频被上传。而 YouTube 的用户主要以儿童和青少年为主。越来越多的人将 YouTube 上的视频视为获取新闻、信息和娱乐的重要来源。
Ms Wojcicki is confident that she can sort out policing YouTube. “I actually think I can solve it or at least I think I can provide a blueprint about how to address these issues that no one else has figured out.” Thus far such confidence is difficult to credit.
沃西基相信她能够解决 YouTube 的监管问题。“实际上,我认为我可以解决这个问题,或者说至少我认为我可以提供一个关于如何解决这些问题的思路,这是其他人所想不到的。”到目前为止,几乎没人相信她能够做到。
But how YouTube chooses to moderate its content, and how governments compel it to do so, will affect not only the world’s most popular video service. It will also help shape the acceptable contours of free speech online, and the lives of the people who produce, consume or are otherwise affected by digital content.
但 YouTube 选择如何调整其内容以及政府如何强制其这么做,不仅会对这个全球最受欢迎的视频分享网站产生影响。它还将有助于塑造线上言论自由的可接受范围,以及改变那些生产、消费数字内容或受数字内容影响的人们的生活。
[重难点词汇]
tricky ['trɪkɪ] adj. 狡猾的;机警的;棘手的
massacre ['mæsəkɚ] n. 大屠杀;惨败;彻底破坏 v. 屠杀;彻底击败;彻底破坏;搞砸
scour [skaʊr] vi. 冲刷;擦;腹泻 vt. 擦亮,洗涤;冲洗,清除 n. 擦,冲刷;洗涤剂
offend [ə'fɛnd] vt. 冒犯;使…不愉快 vi. 违反;进攻;引起不舒服
mobilise ['məʊbɪlaɪz] vt. 动员;调动;使流通 vi. 动员起来
horrific [hə'rɪfɪk] adj. 可怕的;令人毛骨悚然的
accessible [ək'sɛsəbl] adj. 易接近的;可进入的;可理解的
compel [kəm'pɛl] vt. 强迫,迫使;强使发生
contour ['kɑntʊr] n. 轮廓;等高线;周线;电路;概要 vt. 画轮廓;画等高线
以上是北京文都考研网给出的“2020考研英语经济学人外刊:YouTube的难题”,希望对备考2020考研英语的考生有所帮助!祝2020考研顺利!
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