YouTube seeks 'responsibility'
latimes.com
latimes.com
It's a fantastic service, and I am awestruck by its potential, but letting one corporation that's only interested in its own profit control all this information is a mistake. Its curational snafus and conflicts of interest are just symptoms of this.
Nope. Youtube host currently around 6B videos (adds around 1.2B a year). Facebook is currently around 3.5B, Instagram around the same, Twitter around 2.5B, Tiktok close to 1B etc. The general internet is around 26B videos and counting.
What makes Youtube important is the fact that most users think of it as a search engine. You can always find it on YouTube, while it's "impossible" to search for videos on Twitter or Facebook.
Instagram / Tiktok content is pure garbage unless you're into the teen / faux-celebrity type videos.
Twitter has some interesting content but it's really hit or miss.
Not true. Youtube host around 3% of unique videos and everything else are copies, or from somewhere else or each other. Same applies to many platforms, but Tiktok and Instagram. Surprisingly, those are the two most innovative platforms when it comes to new content.
I'm not saying you have to like it, just that their content is unique.
42.98% of content on Twitter is reactionary (gifs/memes) and is under 5s. No other platform has these kind of number. For instance on Tiktok, only 0.59% is under 5s and 4.81% for Instagram.
If YouTube wants to be a carrier, great! Then it can't run ads or track people. Anything it monetizes should incur liability.
As an analog example, imagine you could open an e-commerce business and get a cut out of each transaction - but are not responsible to check which products are sold on your platform. An obvious strategy to make money would be to allow drugs on your platform: You'd be able to profit off the "reliable customer base" provided by addiction without having any risk of getting in legal trouble.
They know exactly what kind of people (personality trait wise) will keep clicking the next vid recommended. They actively seek out these personality trait combos and hit them with the right vids. And then ads.
It's very sophisticated because their player is embedded on so many sites spanning so much different type of content that profiling people becomes almost automatic. And also hooked into all the ad networks which have their own profiling data. The only reason we haven't reached mind control abilities yet is Psychology/Neuroscience as fields are still very young and are playing catch up - as in what do you do after you identify an addict, a sociopath, a psychopath? It's easier to identify (and trigger certain behaviors) than it is known what should be done, that is in the interest of the individual and society in all cases.
Its much more clear what benefits the corporation. "Keep showing the person with issues stuff because hey its free revenue"
For example, they know triggering/negative content energizes people more than positive content. And the most "energized" people will keep producing more content to feed into the machine that keeps the addicts coming back. So the system automatically has a selection bias for certain content producers and content types.
In many cases, in different parts of the world, what can be done even after you identify bad actors/people with issues etc is limited because capacity to do it doesn't exist. There are more cops per 100K people than there are shrinks by a large factor. So the response of society to negative content that triggers misguided behavior is almost always Violence or some form of taking away peoples rights.
Monetization also sets up this game, where if you (content producer/advertiser/distributor etc) don't cash in on a money making pattern some one else will. So lots of people in the ecosystem get trapped there and don't see ways out.
But as the public begins to realize the consequences of all this targeting/profiling, on kids, on the workforce, on consumers, on the defense establishment, on politics, on journalism etc liability questions are snowballing.
Or can it not include targeted ads at all? And how does that compare with cable where the ads are matched with the content by people manually to target demographics who watch certain shows?
Then, you can rely entirely on other social media outlets or a indexing service (that can preferably index video from multiple services, like TiVo used to do and Apple is trying to do right now. Or how torrent trackers work.) to give you access to it. If you think this video curation system isn’t to your standards, you could just change to another one or build one yourself.
But Google don't want to be responsible for "recommendations" their own algorithms generate.
So they need to figure out a way to make responsibility for the actual content somebody else's problem while still being able to "optimise for engagement" a.k.a direct the click stream.
Do you really think that this is going to be even remotely feasible for 99.999% of the population? I'm a computer scientist and I wouldn't know where to start. Sure, it's easier than "build your own YouTube", but that's not much of a comparison.
Besides, surely the host would be incentivised if not obligated to provide recommendation features of their own?
Youtube works because Google has a printing press for money, and the same sort of general content analysis that powers recommendations also powers advertisements, and ads pay some of the bills.
If YouTube is around, uploader pays and viewer pays aren't going to compete. Recommender pays (and inserts ads?) could work, but is a hard sell unless you have content to recommend.
While freedom of speech and freedom of enterprise are important, we expect there to be clear responsibilities and basic safety rules in any other part of society. Yet, the "neutral platform" concept seems a tool designed to do away with responsibility altogether:
E.g., in case of disturbing videos available to minors, YouTube is not responsible because they are a neutral platform, users are not responsible because they are minors and uploaders, while responsible in theory, can easily stay anonymous and unreachable for anyone. It seems pretty clear to me that a system like this is easy to exploit.
Surely there’s a scale by which liability can be applied. Suppose this principle could be achieved: The more a company intervenes into a neutral platform, the more that intervention is subject to regulation or liability.
When applied to the YouTube situation, it could be that YouTube faces no responsibility in policing user uploads, but YouTube does face some responsibility in policing the output of the recommendation algorithm
The only reason a question of "censorship" matters is because the safe harbor legal protections American content providers enjoy include a certain (poorly-defined) objectivity regarding their hosting decisions.
If Google just turns YouTube off completely, that's not really a free speech issue. Sure, your speech is impaired, but businesses shut down. If Google turns off your videos, but leaves up others, it could be a free speech issue.
In California, there is case law establishing free speech rights in privately owned, but generally public spaces[1]. I don't know that this applies to YouTube, but it's not that far of a stretch, and it shows that free speech rights do constrain actions by private owners on their properties. I believe, but have not verified, that YouTube has a choice of venue clause prefering California jurisdiction (likely in one of San Mateo or Santa Clara counties).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
People always say this when this topic is brought up. But nobody is talking about the constitutional right to free speech. We all understand that Google is allowed to do whatever it wants on its own platforms.
Free speech, however, is not only a right. It is an ideal. It is something some people value independent of the constitution and law.
But it can also hinder those efforts, and speech in that direction is no ideal to be upheld.
the right to free speech doesn't protect the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Even the nations with the most liberal interpretations of the meaning of free speech have put constraints on it.
If Google wants to turn YouTube into a Hulu/Netflix competitor, it should concentrate on it's Google play video brand, and simply drive YouTube searches there for certain mainstream-studio content