Radicalization and anti-science cult-think has always been around. Whether it’s parents teaching their kids homophobia and racism and religion or it’s the weird kid in the basement publishing zines and spiraling inwards on Nazi propaganda – humans always Love a good conspiracy theory to make sense of the world. But Facebook and YouTube built algorithms around silos and anger, incentivized reactionary thinking and built an interface designed to keep you thinking about what you’re thinking about and very quietly, and very quickly, ruined the world.
I’m not sure if that’s hyperbole.
It’s one thing when free speech is about shouting something on the street corner or a conversation in a coffeehouse. It’s another when you’ve got a hundred thousand or a million people to shout to. And it’s another thing again when, if I’ve shown that I’ve listened to what one street corner preacher yells I’m then surrounded by nothing but street preachers.
Like – I absolutely get why YouTube built what they built. And I really do understand why Facebook built what THEY built – but when you’ve got a reach that outstrips the world’s biggest religion (2.2 billion Christians, Facebook has 2.7 billion subscribers) there’s another level of responsibility that should be levied onto your company.
Facebook is bigger than God. Literally.
(YouTube comes in slightly lower at only 2 billion monthly users)
“It turns out that human nature is awful and the algorithms have figured that out”
This is a great article about how YouTube FINALLY realized what they were doing and tweaked their algorithm… too little too late…
In the last ten years we’ve ruined our own education and raised a generation that doesn’t believe in it. And democracy depends on us being able to make decisions based on some coherent view of the world. And we’ve willingly passed the torch on comprehending the universe to for-profit companies that are only now realizing that they’ve got some responsibility for the burning of the world.
These things are bigger than God. They shouldn’t be allowed. But that means they’re bigger than the government. And they’ll make their own rules. I worry that I don’t see a way back. Now that YouTube is “smashing down on conspiracies” well – they were advocating these things a year and a half ago, it doesn’t take much for anyone who’s already gone down the rabbit hole to drawn their own conclusions about that.
Later in the article a former YouTube employee says what I’ve been thinking for a long time “At some point, if you can’t do this responsibly, you need to not do it”. Good luck with that. See above. With only a net worth of $160 billion YouTube’s not buying and selling America per se – but it can probably put a worthy bid on any individual American. Their abject failure at controlling pandemic disinformation screams this to the world.
It’s cool though. They made their pile. There’s nothing to see here.
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