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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.'"
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.'"
Indeed. Which standard do you, gentle Slashdot read, want:
* Videos that people want to put up, and that people want to see; or
* A curated selection of videos that are best for you, as judged by your betters
We know that oppressive governments the world round demand the second option. Which should you demand?
"To know who rules you, ask: who am I not allowed to criticize in public? Those are your rulers."
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
YouTube could break the echo chamber effect by recommending good quality videos on the same topic. If someone is interested in vaccinations, there's no reason to just recommend conspiracy videos on the topic.
So they admit the videos didn't break the rules, but our feelings were hurt/we disagreed with their political views so we should censor them. Got it.
Notice the use of emotionally charged rhetoric.
"incendiary and toxic content" - subjective and not objective, specifically used to rally people to their viewpoint without questioning the author. After all, you don't want to be toxic, do you?
It seems to be less "don't rock the boat" and more "they're not breaking the rules, tough shit"
I have been watching cat videos on YouTube for 10 years now and it has been a good run. But not they have stated to show the odd dog video now and then.
Thatâ(TM)s extremely offensive and now I am afraid to open the browser because with no warning what so ever, BANG, there it is. A DOG video in my recommended feed.
Meow.
L'Idiot
As an actual Marxist, I fucking wish Marxism was spreading throughout universities, but alas it isn't at all.
What is spreading though universities is consumer ideology. People treating their degrees as commodities, demanding "consumer satisfaction" from their time at university.
Institutes of learning have been invaded by the market, with everything valuable worthy and fun driven out.
All that shit you wrote has no basis in reality, and shows you've never been within 10km of a university ever, but as a Marxist I want everyone to have that opportunity. We should be spending the surplus of society on enabling everyone to reach their highest potential, regardless of economic background. Even you.
See, but here's the thing. Irresponsible speech that promotes violence will always lead to suppression. You 4chan jackoffs knew this a long time ago, but thought that it was more important to be edgelords and have lulz than it was to be responsible. So now, you reap the whirlwind and spoil it for everyone. You think it's fun to talk about kids who are slaughtered being "crisis actors" and the height of irony to wear nazi uniforms and then you're shocked...shocked, I tell you...when society comes and slaps you the fuck down and tells you to sit down and shut up. Then, you feign surprise when the real sickos shout out your vidya heroes when they shoot up a church or murder a bunch of school kids like you didn't know it was coming.
Thanks for fucking it up for everyone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is an issue of scope, profit margin, and market evaluations.
You know why Steam doesn't hand-pick games to be on their marketplace? Scope of the task. They clean up the biggest disasters, but basically filter feed on whatever pops out of that ecosystem.
Same thing for the Microsoft store, the android marketplace, and large parts of the Apple marketplace.
And those are marketplaces where the profit margins are relatively large.
Well, relatively large, compared to Youtube.
In setting any standards involving an expectation of paid human oversight - including just managing a bunch of volunteers - even at some absurdly low 1 to 1 million ratio, they risk the value they hold in the primary underlying motivation of their bosses: The market value of their platform.
That's the real issue - business stuff like staff responding to DMCA complaints is also expensive, but the market isn't going to lower their stock for that. But having to hire and maintain staff to stand in as referees in effectively political contests... that's going to generate blowback they can't shuffle under some easy cost line in a report.
That's kind of the problem with being a public traded company. The pressures aren't just financial - they are also largely the political fashion sense of the market pushing everyone to play a game of taking the most they can from contracts (customer and employee alike), and then providing that value back as maximal perceived market value.
The irony is that we call it being 'publicly traded' - where it functions mostly to funnel wealth into fewer and fewer private hands in the end.
In the end, our shared retirement accounts get regularly raided and scammed, and the entire market is expected to crash, as if it was a force of nature - because minimal oversight is seen as more expensive and odious than frequent disaster.
That's the shape of the system we make for ourselves.
Ryan Fenton
Really? Fewer than 8K hate crimes per year in a country of 330M people, and you see a problem? Out of ~1.1M violent crimes, mind you....
It should also be noted that violent crime rates have fallen by ~1/3 over the last three decades.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"