Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Will Add Information From Wikipedia To Videos About Conspiracies (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: YouTube will add information from Wikipedia to videos about popular conspiracy theories to provide alternative viewpoints on controversial subjects, its CEO said today. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said that these text boxes, which the company is calling "information cues," would begin appearing on conspiracy-related videos within the next couple of weeks. Wojcicki, who spoke Tuesday evening at a panel at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, showed examples of information cues for videos about the moon landing and chemtrails. "When there are videos that are focused around something that's a conspiracy -- and we're using a list of well-known internet conspiracies from Wikipedia -- then we will show a companion unit of information from Wikipedia showing that here is information about the event," Wojcicki said. The information cues that Wojcicki demonstrated appeared directly below the video as a short block of text, with a link to Wikipedia for more information. Wikipedia -- a crowdsourced encyclopedia written by volunteers -- is an imperfect source of information, one which most college students are still forbidden from citing in their papers. But it generally provides a more neutral, empirical approach to understanding conspiracies than the more sensationalist videos that appear on YouTube.
I'm all in favor of this, so long as it's expanded to creationism, fundamentalism, or any other extremist video predicated on a faulty premise. Heck, take it further and add opposing viewpoints to ANY video presenting only one side to a contentious issue, like abortion or gun control/rights.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It won't change any minds, but it might prevent people from falling for it to begin with.
I remember when I first discovered moon landing conspiracy sites. I was fascinated and went down that rabbit hole until I stumbled onto a debunking site.
Since I was just looking into it for the first time, I had no commitment to it, and I was able to see that the debunkers has much simpler, more plausible arguments.
But if I had found the debunkers after telling people about it for a year, I might not have had the strength to admit I was wrong. So thanks, Internet debunkers. You do good work.
Yeah I read about 9/11 conspiracy theories on Digg for a couple years before a friend linked me to a debunking site. It cleared up pretty much every incongruity that looked suspicious.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The greatest conspiracy theory of our time (and the dumbest of all time) is Russiagate. Mueller - one of the people who lied you into Iraq has had more than a year but has gotten nothing more than twitter trolls and indictments that have nothing to do with Trump or Russia.
Pointing this out always results in butthurt from people who have been eager to get punked a second time by the people who lied to world about Saddam planning 911 and having WMD's. Feel free to put up or STFU with some evidence, guys. Protip: assertions are not evidence.