60 Minutes: Is YouTube Doing Enough To Censor The Far Right?

YouTube makes money off political ads – controversial because of social media’s unique ability to spread lies; fears of deep fakes; and Russian disinformation. Russian trolls posted 1,100 videos on YouTube in the 2016 election cycle. https://t.co/kTzvD3pHAo pic.twitter.com/TTQynKFGeR

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) December 2, 2019

An army of people and computers remove content that violates YouTube’s policies. But the site was overwhelmed after the Christchurch massacre when gory videos of the attack were uploaded every second. https://t.co/vnfqyfNQG0 pic.twitter.com/VpwPpubZGg

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) December 2, 2019

How does YouTube determine what videos are too hateful or violent for the site? The company’s CEO showed 60 Minutes some examples. https://t.co/s6KtiDF9qF pic.twitter.com/uJVYfNXptU

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) December 2, 2019

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki tries to police the site while maintaining an open platform. But the company’s commitment to free speech can lead to a narrow definition of what videos are considered harmful. https://t.co/xdCP0J2y46 pic.twitter.com/zzvhESxZ2i

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) December 2, 2019

No matter how harmful the videos it hosts, YouTube can’t be held responsible for any user-generated content because of an increasingly controversial legal protection called Section 230. https://t.co/ttUsRg51Hh pic.twitter.com/k3tPYF5m3E

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) December 2, 2019

NEW: 75% of Republicans think that social media companies have too much control over the mix of news that people see, compared w/ 53% of Democrats. https://t.co/C8wYHO2UCY pic.twitter.com/Gbjt4YVla1

— Jeff Gottfried (@gottfriedjeff) October 3, 2019

Roughly a quarter of U.S. newspapers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs in 2018. https://t.co/EbSX0mYrSg

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 4, 2019

Republicans are more likely to see censorship of the news as a very big problem on social media than Democrats (43% vs. 30%). Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to say that harassment of journalists is a very big problem (36% vs. 17%). https://t.co/trNsjrjl52

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 4, 2019

Of the seven issues asked about, about half of U.S. adults say that one-sided news (53%) and inaccurate news (51%) are very big problems when it comes to news on social media. https://t.co/trNsjrjl52 pic.twitter.com/4s1Ly1kuLY

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 3, 2019

The American public hates “journalists” and gatekeepers.

CBS News:

“To grasp the phenomenal scale of YouTube: consider that people spend 1 billion hours watching videos on it, every day. It is the most used social network in the U.S. More queries are typed into the website’s search bar than anywhere online except Google, which owns YouTube.

But the site has come under increasing scrutiny, accused of propagating white supremacy, peddling conspiracies and profiting from it all. They recently agreed to pay a record $170 million dollars to settle allegations that they targeted children with ads. YouTube is being forced to concentrate on cleansing the site.

We visited the company’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, to meet Susan Wojcicki, the 51-year-old CEO in charge of nurturing the site’s creativity, taming the hate and handling the chaos. …”

Doubling down on censorship might inconvenience us in the short term but it will only further erode the legitimacy of the mainstream media. Weimar Germany had hate speech laws. The European Union currently has all kinds of “hate speech” laws and liberalism is still collapsing there.