Zeynep Tufecki is one of the shrewdest writers on technology around. A while back, when researching an article on why — and how — then-presidential candidate Donald Trump appealed to those who supported him, she needed some direct quotes from the man himself, so turned to YouTube, which has a useful archive of videos of his campaign rallies. She then noticed something interesting.
“YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay’ videos for me,” she wrote.
If you think that this is all about politics, think again.
Tufecki tried watching videos on non-political topics such as vegetarianism, which led to videos about veganism, and jogging, which led to items about running ultramarathons.
“It seems as if you are never ‘hardcore’ enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes,” she said. “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
Tufecki is right. We know from the research of Jonathan Albright and others that YouTube has become the key disseminator of alt-right, conspiracy, white-supremacist and other unsavory propaganda.
In the old days, if you wanted to stage a coup, the first thing to do was to capture the TV station. Nowadays, all you have to do is to “weaponize” YouTube. After all, its first motto was “broadcast yourself.”
Accordingly, if governments of the Western world really wanted to cripple these disruptive forces, then shutting down YouTube would be a giant step forward. It would not prevent other such services springing up, of course, but none would have the power and reach that YouTube’s billion-strong network effect provides.
This does not mean that YouTube’s owner, Google, is hell-bent on furthering extremism of all stripes. It is not. All it is interested in is maximizing advertising revenue, and underpinning the implicit logic of its recommender algorithms is evidence that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with — or perhaps to incendiary content in general.
Watching social media executives trying to square this circle is like watching worms squirming on the head of a pin.
The latest hapless exhibit is YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki, who went to the South by Southwest conference in Texas last week to outline measures, all of which makes one wonder which planet Wojcicki inhabits.
For example, she clearly knows nothing of conspiracy theories and has a touching faith that those who hold such beliefs are susceptible to evidence that might refute them, nor does she understand that our crisis of disinformation and computational propaganda will not be resolved by just finding and publishing “the facts,” whatever they are.
Indeed, one of the most obvious implications of the proposed YouTube strategy is that it will turn Wikipedia into an even bigger epistemological battleground than it is at present.
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