“If you think about the DNA of any organization, it’s very difficult to stop an organization from following the money. And as a non-profit we could run ads, no legal prohibition on a non-profit running ads as a means of support, yet because organizations tend to follow the money then suddenly inside the organization people would start caring a lot more about our traffic in highly developed advertising markets. We would begin to care more about which pages you’re reading”
This was said by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia when asked why he didn’t decide to move forward on any types of advertising on the site. And I believe this is true for all organizations as well; although I’m not suggesting this is necessarily bad I do believe that for-profit companies do have an obligation to return value to shareholders, and this need to return value drives the product development. In the case of other internet sites, however, this has largely lead to appeasing advertisers and in some regard, disregarding content creators and consumers. It’s being made even worse as sites like YouTube and more publicly Facebook are being pushed to not view themselves as platforms but rather media distribution companies. In a sense the government and public are asking them to take on more power and responsibility to regulate what people see everyday, and what they are exposed to.
In this essay, however, I want to look at YouTube in particular and how it’s been handling this transition into a distribution company where it now is expected to have more control over what you see, and pose questions as to how this may impact us.
More so recently, YouTube has been under pressure to improve its communication with content creators, especially by the likes of those such as Casey Neistat who’ve accused YouTube of being dissonant. In other situations, people have expressed disappointment in the failure of the company to catch distasteful content from being on trending, such as the Logan Paul incident. People have responded by saying that YouTube should block, censor or demonetize more content creators, but I think this is the wrong reaction. I believe people are viewing YouTube as a distribution company, and I think this is dangerous. Giving them this power means they’ll have to censor an increasing amount of content, and in a world where the only platform to distribute media in this fashion is YouTube we’re putting ourselves in a serious bind.
Take for example some of the recent school shootings. As a response, YouTube is demonetizing a number of videos that show people using and shooting firearms, essentially removing their pay and pushing them off the platform. Now there are some other possibilities for them to make income through third parties, but not being able to use Adsense is a huge hit to their ability to make money and raises the bar for anyone trying to enter the market, since they need a large following or viewers dedicated enough to donate to continue the program. I’m deeply concerned that expecting YouTube to block certain content would essentially silence certain views and entire subjects.
It might be hard to understand why this is threatening if you don’t particularly care for guns or want to see your favorite Call of Duty gun shot in real life, but what about political subjects? There was a long period of time where there was no evidence to support the Trump-Russian scandal, should YouTube have blocked videos then? At what point does saying you don’t believe in abortion turn from a political opinion to discrimination against women? It’s also feasible to consider a world where YouTube provides more support in the form of larger ad revenue percentages to content it likes, or content made by minorities that it wants to support.
I believe this is a very difficult catch-22 YouTube and other tech giants are caught in, and although it may seem like the easiest answer is to stop considering them morally ambiguous platforms I think we may be willingly giving up too much power to them. YouTube is great at sharing videos and I believe if we try to make them the moral arbiter of the internet it won’t reduce fake news but will simply suppress viewpoints.
Thanks for reading this article, and if you have any comments or concerns please let contact me at [mailto] or on my linked in.