Marshall McLuhan was wrong: The moderation is the message. That, at least, is the message one gets from reading The New York Times’ story about the phenomenon of YouTube radicalization. The piece chronicles how YouTube sent a young man down a rabbit hole of increasingly extremist right-wing videos—all the better for YouTube, which kept him clicking, all the worse for society. It ends on the equivocal note that the man has “successfully climbed out of a right-wing YouTube rabbit hole, only to jump into a left-wing YouTube rabbit hole.”
Fears around such radicalization have led many to insist that YouTube should go beyond its current policy of only removing extreme content that crosses hard lines of malicious harassment, hate speech, or child endangerment. Felix Salmon in Axios argues for “principles-based” moderation, which would allow for ad hoc and non-precedential takedowns whenever it decides that a particular video is causing “significant harm.”
In practice, however, granting YouTube such wide latitude to police content would fail to address the underlying problem. No matter how much YouTube cracks down, it will still consider Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and even Steve Bannon to be uncensorable, authoritative sources, because, like it or not, society considers them to be authoritative sources. What many are asking of YouTube amounts to, “Please remove some of your harmful content, but only the unimportant stuff.” But lest we forget, YouTube is a profit maximizing corporation, not an organ of representative democracy or the public trust. In so far as YouTube responds to public concerns about its content, the company will be guided, not by the political conscience of its critics, but rather by a desire to limit liability while protecting its bottom line.
I’ve experienced the unpleasant caprices of YouTube recommendations. (I used to work for Google, but never got anywhere near YouTube or their algorithms.) While watching a thoughtful talk on the limits of machine learning, YouTube automatically queued up “THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AGENDA EXPOSED” by David Icke, the British former professional soccer player turned full time conspiracy theorist infamous for declaring that the Rothschilds were actually members of an alien lizard race that secretly runs the world. Icke describes how an unspecified “THEY” (possibly the lizards, or the Jews, or both) are getting youth addicted to technology so that they can later be connected to artificial intelligence and become AI.
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/286651/gentrification-of-youtube
Fears around such radicalization have led many to insist that YouTube should go beyond its current policy of only removing extreme content that crosses hard lines of malicious harassment, hate speech, or child endangerment. Felix Salmon in Axios argues for “principles-based” moderation, which would allow for ad hoc and non-precedential takedowns whenever it decides that a particular video is causing “significant harm.”
In practice, however, granting YouTube such wide latitude to police content would fail to address the underlying problem. No matter how much YouTube cracks down, it will still consider Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and even Steve Bannon to be uncensorable, authoritative sources, because, like it or not, society considers them to be authoritative sources. What many are asking of YouTube amounts to, “Please remove some of your harmful content, but only the unimportant stuff.” But lest we forget, YouTube is a profit maximizing corporation, not an organ of representative democracy or the public trust. In so far as YouTube responds to public concerns about its content, the company will be guided, not by the political conscience of its critics, but rather by a desire to limit liability while protecting its bottom line.
I’ve experienced the unpleasant caprices of YouTube recommendations. (I used to work for Google, but never got anywhere near YouTube or their algorithms.) While watching a thoughtful talk on the limits of machine learning, YouTube automatically queued up “THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AGENDA EXPOSED” by David Icke, the British former professional soccer player turned full time conspiracy theorist infamous for declaring that the Rothschilds were actually members of an alien lizard race that secretly runs the world. Icke describes how an unspecified “THEY” (possibly the lizards, or the Jews, or both) are getting youth addicted to technology so that they can later be connected to artificial intelligence and become AI.
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/286651/gentrification-of-youtube