Analysis: YouTube can only blame itself for finding itself in a muddy ditch, flipped over, wheels spinning
New York TimesRight-wingers are angry that YouTube is taking their content down. Liberals are in a moral panic over whether the site exists at all. YouTube really is a cesspit, and Google’s efforts to rein it in are often ham-handed. But it’s also a colossally important public square and an underappreciated miracle of the internet. There’s good reason to keep its freewheeling spirit alive, as unpleasant as that may feel this week.
Why does YouTube draw Nazis like an invitation to a goose-stepping contest, while traditional video providers such as HBO, ESPN, CBS, WGN and the rest do not? Volume. As Bergen notes, YouTube committed itself early on to hosting astronomically huge numbers of videos against which it could sell lots of ads. Anybody can post a video to YouTube for free, and it seems like almost everybody has! Users uploadof video each minute.
Traditional video providers don’t have this problem because they pride themselves on being gatekeepers. YouTube leaves the gate open. Traditional video providers air relatively tiny amounts of content that they commission, and they also have the luxury of time to vet it all for naughtiness before airing . If racism, porn, or drug advocacy leaks through to a traditional video provider’s screens, it’s by design, not accident.
YouTube’s periodic purges of “offensive” content reflect less of a desire to censor reprobates than to placate the advertisers who have made it a $16 billion a year business. Advertisers don’t want their ads associated in any way with child pornography, or claims that Sandy Hook was a hoax, or that the Holocaust never happened, and to keep those ad dollars flowing YouTube must make a steady show of vigilance.
Clever white supremacists and other offenders will always find a way to navigate around YouTube’s ever-changing rules, making its efforts look a lot like the security theater that TSA subjects us to at the airport. So what should the company do? Any discussion of YouTube that neglects to note that in addition to offending people, the site has also been a boon to mankind is incomplete.
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