Week in Review - Where is YouTube's eternal backlash?

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review!

Last week, we talked about DAOs and crypto democracies. This week, I’m looking at YouTube and wondering why it spends so little time in the hot seat.

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the big thing

This week hosted a lovely little microcosm of the debate around internet platform responsibility.

As is so often the case, the case study centered around bad things that Facebook did. The Wall Street Journal has had a series of well-packaged reports lambasting the social media company for essentially acting with disregard for problems that its own research indicates that it creates for teens. The big figure was that 1 in 3 teen girls said the platform made their issues with body image worse. Clearly, not a great soundbite for Facebook.

The conversation that swelled was predictable enough, Facebook PR did their best to rebut the backlash especially since this time it was impacting their crown jewel — Instagram, but Facebook — the corporation — doesn’t seem to have that many fans these days who aren’t shareholders or getting biweekly checks from the company.

Facebook and Instagram aren’t getting criticized unfairly but it sometimes feels odd just how much more attention is placed on the house that Zuckerberg built, when just down the road YouTube seems to be facing many of the same challenges and failing in many of the same ways, but is doing so with a fraction of public scrutiny and user ire. Not that I’m particularly tired of seeing Facebook executives get hauled to congressional hearings, but I wouldn’t mind seeing YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki being forced to address more of the issues with radicalization that are happening on her platform.

YouTube was in the headlines this week for platform safety, but they received positive coverage for seemingly being proactive instead of reactive.

The Alphabet-owned video platform announced that they were now removing previously-allowed anti-vaccine content on their site. They already had policies in place to remove anti-vax content related specifically to Covid-19, and says that they had already taken down 130,000 videos from the platform that violated this policy. That’s a big number but their enforcement of this has been far from flawless, it takes about 30 seconds of searching to find disinformation about Covid on YouTube with endless comments underneath doubling down on them — often with a few algorithmically suggested videos to take you deeper down the rabbit hole.

The platform clearly could have been doing worse, but it’s a little odd that we’re supposed to see the announcement of anti-vaccine content being abolished from their platform as a proactive move after 2 years of Covid-19 and 16 years of YouTube.

Here’s the company’s note on what types of content they’re removing as of this week:

Specifically, content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed. This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that substances in vaccines can track those who receive them. Our policies not only cover specific routine immunizations like for measles or Hepatitis B, but also apply to general statements about vaccines.

YouTube is a very large media platform that has made plenty of choices solely designed around pushing engagement, and — like Facebook — that hasn’t been much of a problem for the vast majority of topics. But — like Facebook — it’s also apparent that the company has over-indexed for driving views in areas where it should be keeping an eye out for vulnerable users on the path towards radicalization. The company’s suggested videos sidebar has grown more powerful over the years and it’s clear that YouTube should probably be killing algorithmic suggestions on potentially dangerous topics long before they take the plunge to ban topics entirely. While Facebook has been releasing engagement data for their top posts and sharing some ugly truths at times, this data isn’t nearly as accessible for YouTube, leaving many important questions unanswered.

YouTube often seems to be less scrutinized because its effects on individuals in each of our orbits are often harder to track. People can see a live feed of their friends’ or family members’ radicalization on Facebook, tracking misinformation they’ve shared over the years or seeing comments on videos from problematic pages they’ve followed. YouTube is a much less social experience and generally the only way to get a full picture of the rabbit hole someone is heading down is to talk to them directly or see their web history. Meanwhile, users’ actions are tied to user names rather than real names so the whole platform feels like an anonymized pool of “internet users” rather than personas tied to very real people in the world we live in.

YouTube is struggling with very modern problems and has been taking appropriate actions at times for the sake of user safety, doing so without quite as many public letters from government officials, user backlashes or editorial columns, but it also feels like the company hasn’t been held accountable for their share of the disinformation/ online radicalization scramble. Perhaps they’ve been given a bit too much breathing room to handle these issues at their own leisure and perhaps that shouldn’t be the case going forward.

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other things

Here are the TechCrunch news stories that especially caught my eye this week:

Facebook re-spins its own Instagram research
Facebook laid out some “further context” for its controversy-generating internal presentation on Instagram’s teenage effects, publishing the deck publicly with some notes on its own notes.

Facebook delays kids version of Instagram
Facebook knows that it took a reputation hit this week, especially among lawmakers and that this probably isn’t the best time to release its long-detailed Instagram Kids app. It announced this week that the launch of the app was being put “on ice” presumedly as they wait for the negative headlines surrounding them to die down.

Amazon debuts a rolling robot
Amazon loves their surprise hardware drops, this week we saw plenty of new announcements from the company including a little rolling robot called Astro, a $999 bot designed for home monitoring, elder care and a portable Alexa experience.

TikTok expands its commerce ambitions
TikTok hit a whopping 1 billion users this week and is looking to catch up with Instagram when it comes to building commerce experiences into the app. They announced a series of partnerships and new features pushing users to bust out the credit cards.

Spotify rolls out new creator tools
Spotify wants to redefine what a music platforms looks like and it shipping features to bring artists and fans closer together, side-stepping external social platforms. This week, they rolled out more tools designed around fostering these communications, including Q&A tools and podcast polls.

added things

Some of my favorite reads from our TechCrunch+ subscription service this week:

Scaling across Series A to C
“…Typically, for a seed-stage company, everything is developed in a more or less ad-hoc manner. At the Series A stage, it’s more about developing repeatable processes. Series B and C are about predictability of outcomes. Beyond Series C, it’s about doing everything at scale….”

Ben Rubin explains why the Web3 era of social media will get everyone paid
“…Content creators (arguably either a special echelon of influencers or anyone who posts online) are slowly siphoning off some of the power that social media companies have wielded for years. Meanwhile, decentralization is sweeping worlds like finance and art, threatening existing orders and pointing toward a future defined by alternative currencies and digital collectibles. Those trends are bound to converge sooner rather than later, and in some corners of the social internet, it’s already beginning to show….“

5 questions for venture capital in Q3
“…Recent regulatory shifts have remade China’s technology landscape. Tech giants have been brought to heel, and rule changes to edtech, social media, gaming and other varietals have shaken both tech companies and other industries in the country….”

• Chief Technology Officer at NYC Department of Transportation (New York, NY, USA)
• Systems Analyst at Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group (Rockville, MD 20852, USA)
• WEB DEVELOPER II at The Humane League (United States)
• Data Engineer at Brivo (Bethesda, MD, USA)
• Director, Systems and Networks at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA, USA)

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