YouTube Unleashed a Conspiracy Theory Boom. Can It Be Contained?

It's amazing how "the US government successfully misled everyone to invade Iraq" now justifies the world being flat.

This seems to be being mentioned more and more these days, too. It's as if it's the only thing people learned from the war, and they blame the media for it.

I feel like you pivoted on your point.

Sure, I have an issue with YouTube being a near-monopoly too, and if the discussion came down to "YouTube is deleting videos for ideological reasons", I think your point would stand.

In this case, however, the issue came down to their recommendation engine. Even if you did view YouTube as a government entity, which I do not, I don't think it says anywhere in the constitution that the government has to give recommendation to every side of the argument, just that you're allowed to say it.

All that being said, I actually have been working on and off on a clone of YouTube using distributed hash tables, so maybe we'll be off of it soon enough :)

I definitely did pivot, but you did as well. You swapped between Google should censor to Google can censor. These are quite different issues, though they frequently end up intermingled, as in our chat.

Efforts at competition should not be neglected, but I think it will likely prove futile. There are already plenty of alternatives to YouTube, but that doesn't matter with a natural monopoly. Content producers want to go where viewers are. Viewers want to go where content producers are. Whoever becomes the 'big one' first, wins.

There's a fundamental problem. That is that content intended to be free by users is something that private companies then claim effective ownership of as a condition of being able to say anything. This is an interesting 'trick'. I call it a trick because let's say the average person posts something to e.g. Facebook or YouTube. Would they mind if another site, with attribution, also shared their content? In the vast majority of cases, the answer would be no. Most people are just posting things for enjoyment or to express themselves, they'd love if it got shared as much as possible. But other sites cannot share these users' content because e.g. YouTube or Facebook claim and defend exclusive ownership of what is posted on their site. You'd need to get a user's express permission to share their content, and that's not really viable.

Imagine for a second that we killed this trick. Companies that provide user generated content for free, or with a free account, could only publish content under non-free licenses if the content creator specifically opted in to that agreement. However, even if they chose to not opt-in the company would still be obligated to publish and treat their content identically to how they would have if the user had opted in. This would all go away if the company charged even $0.01 for access. The company could also incentivize users to opt-in, such as by paying them up front for their content.

The idea is to turn "free" into simply free. This would enable real competition since free access means somebody could simply start copying content created by users who wanted to post free content on e.g. YouTube or Facebook and share it in a different venue. The exact same would be true of comments and other such user generated content that was always intended to be free, and not "free", to begin with.

But so long as a monopoly is able to claim effective ownership of material users meant to be free, this system will likely only grow larger.

I've found it almost impossible to remove a specific feed or ideology from my YT recommendations. As an example I once watched Yanis Varoufakis speak at the Oxford Union. He has appeared on panels with Slavoj Zizek who is a person I personally can't stomach. Almost immediately after the Yanis video I had YT recommend me to watch a panel with Zizek and Varoufakis discuss in 2016. I didn't watch it - but since then I get Zizek constantly recommended in my feed. Note I don't use google for searches and my YT is running pretty much isolated in Chrome while I use Firefox/Tor for all other browsing. So google doesn't know me and YT knows me only via my handle that is otherwise not connected to anything (outside YT).

I have countless examples like this. YT keeps pushing me down a specific ideological path without any action on my part. Sometimes it's great but in those cases where it's not it's not just bad but outright dangerous. I don't think YT has the effect on my since I'm way past a point (age) where my behavior can easily be formed. But I can see how this sends somebody over the cliff who is still figuring out who they are.

People like rockstar2016 (aka the MAGA killer) or the woman who went into Youtube HQ and starting shooting the place up were probably a good examples of how social media can radicalize those that are the most vulnerable.

EDIT: “All but one of 30 Flat Earthers interviewed said they hadn't considered the Earth to be flat until watching videos promoting the theory on YouTube” https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/18/researchers-blame-youtub...