YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant (bloomberg.com)

Proposals to change recommendations and curb conspiracies on YouTube were sacrificed for engagement, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing Google employees. From the report: In recent years, scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner, raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that the world's largest video site surfaced and spread. One employee wanted to flag troubling videos, which fell just short of the hate speech rules, and stop recommending them to viewers. Another wanted to track these videos in a spreadsheet to chart their popularity. A third, fretful of the spread of "alt-right" video bloggers, created an internal vertical that showed just how popular they were. Each time they got the same basic response: Don't rock the boat.

The company spent years chasing one business goal above others: "Engagement," a measure of the views, time spent and interactions with online videos. Conversations with over twenty people who work at, or recently left, YouTube reveal a corporate leadership unable or unwilling to act on these internal alarms for fear of throttling engagement. Wojcicki would "never put her fingers on the scale," said one person who worked for her. "Her view was, 'My job is to run the company, not deal with this.'"

Comments

um

[cascadingstylesheet]

Beheading videos from the worldview that must not be named, of course, are fine.

Videos talking (negatively) about beheading videos and the culture that makes them, however, are "alt right" and we can't tolerate that.

Personpower

[Z80a]

Even if this was a good idea at all, i don't think youtube can even find the massive number of social justice advocates that checking every video posted would require, or build the social justice skynet able to perfectly understand the "context" and "dog whistles" and catch every video.

I know it when I see it

[rsilvergun]

I can't say I've done a comprehensive enough study of the art of shit posting, but I know it when it see it.

That said, a YouTuber who goes by Shaun has done a pretty good job of calmly and rationally calling out the current crop of shit posters. Here's a good example. He's got plenty more.

For a good explanation of why this kind of shit posting is a problem see Noncompete's video here. The TL;DR; is that is a radicalization pipeline.

As for me, most of these YouTube agitators can be traced back to right wing think tanks like the ones run by the Kock brothers. The reason you're seeing them explode isn't just YouTube ignoring them, it's because they're going to conventions run by those think tanks where they're being taught how to grow and control a large audience. Seriously, pay attention to the venues and trips guys like Sargon of Arkad and Ben Shapiro attend. They're getting a huge amount of extremely valuable advice and training at the larger of those events. This isn't the help and advice you get from a grass roots org like "Justice Democrats". These are decades old professional PR firms that exit to push a right wing agenda.

These guys are basically propaganda for billionaires. They're not just shit posting, they're pushing a very specific right wing, pro-corporate agenda (low taxes, low regulation, anti-Union, etc). Spend a bit of time on the YouTube channels I linked above and you can confirm this for yourself.

What I'm saying is this: These guys are not your friends and they're not just randos on the net. There is a very specific purpose behind them. I just wish more folks were aware of it. I don't think they'd like it if they knew.

Re:Good

[PopeRatzo]

A society that can't take edgelords in stride is pretty damn useless.

Oh, society can "take" the edgelords in stride, alright. It strides right over them. Historically, it's been done on a regular basis. It was done in the 1940s, and again to the KKK in the 1960s. And now it's your turn in the barrel.

Society interprets hateful edgelords as damage and routes around them.