COMMENTARY: YouTube Algorithm Blocked Chess Vlogger for Talk About White and Black Game Pieces: Report

It sounds like a humorous made-up cautionary tale about the hypersensitivity surrounding race relations today — except that it’s completely true.

According to the Independent, chess champion Antonio Radic believes his chess channel was temporarily barred from YouTube because of a “glitch” in the algorithm that picked up the “black against white” chess terminology and flagged it as racist content.

Radic, a Croatian chess player who is known as Agadmator to his more than 1 million channel subscribers, was suspended June 28 for supposed “harmful and dangerous” content during a premiere viewing of an interview with grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura.

In a video recounting the shutdown of his channel, Radic explained that his electronic request for appeal after his suspension was almost instantaneously denied, leading him to believe “it was done by an algorithm that maybe heard some keywords that are not appropriate for the current situation in the world and decided to take down the video.”

He theorized that it might have been because of his explanation that “white will always be better” when discussing specific technical moves, and said that of his over 1800 uploads, “it’s pretty much black against white to the death in every video.”

At the time of his suspension, several major cities were dealing with race riots sparked by the death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis police custody.

Although the Google video platform didn’t specify what caused the suspension and got the channel up and running again within 24 hours, computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University tested Radic’s overzealous-algorithm theory — and the results were instructive.