9 ms·

The media’s part in this: For whatever reason they started scouring youtube for “controversial” videos checking if they had ads (no matter how little views the

• hliyan 9y ago
  The irony is that reporters themselves are driven by advertising pressure. I'm fond of saying that "any premise that can attract eyeballs will eventually appear as an article on an ad-revenue-driven website".
  • NetOpWibby 9y ago
    Hah! Ain’t that the truth.
  • amelius 9y ago
    > The irony is that reporters themselves are driven by advertising pressure. I don't see the irony. Perhaps they are just saying "my content is better, that ad-money belongs to me!"
  • Kattywumpus 9y ago
    I will cite this as "Hliyan's Law" from now on.
  • tootie 9y ago
    That law is not absolute since reporter's value is ostensibly tied to their reputation and credibility.
• Simulacra 9y ago
  That's a very good analysis. You could apply that to just about anything in the news these days. What would you say are the worst organizations at manufacturing news?
  • guelo 9y ago
    Breitbart, Infowars, The Blaze, Fox News, Drudge.
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      You forgot the Whitehouse.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • bmarquez 9y ago
      Drudge is simply an aggregator that links to sites like CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox, AP, etc. Better to name the individual sites directly.
    • NeonVice 9y ago
      The bad actors are only on one side of the political debate?
  • banned1 9y ago
    CNN, MSNBC, mainly
    • timkpaine 9y ago
      that sweet, sweet koolaid
      • nailer 9y ago
        I dislike Donald Trump, but, for example the CNN fish feeding story (CNN zoomed into an existing video, to obscure the Japanese president dumping their box of fish food, then zoomed out to show Trump dumping his, and made up a story about Trump commiting a faux pas by dumping his first) is provably false, and still up on CNN's site with no retraction or apology. Likewise The Gaurdian's headline about the 'unarmed' guy with a gun is his car, which they were forced to retract by the PCC.
• Klathmon 9y ago
  This is absolutely a "no-win" situation in my mind. Everyone is acting in their best interests, and in many cases are acting benevolently, but the outcome is still awful. Obviously YouTube is going to cave to advertiser pressure and start to restrict what videos can have ads, their whole existence depends on it, and if I worked at YouTube i'd see demonetizing some videos as a welcome alternative to closing the whole thing down. I don't blame the advertisers one bit from wanting to remove their ads from many videos. Once the media starts playing the game that "an ad on the video == the advertiser agrees with the message" I too would want to do everything I can to ensure that I'm not associated with bad things. Media outlets are (in many cases) just trying to report on things. They are (correctly) pointing out how many users and creators are upset with YouTube's moves in this case, and how many advertisers are upset about being associated with "bad" videos. Obviously there are things that each group can do better (YouTube could stand up to the Advertisers a bit more, Advertisers could push back on the notion that "an ad == approval", and the media could stop trying to "stir up" controversy), but in each case the thing that is better for society is worse for that group (at least in the short term). I can absolutely see an alternate universe where people are boycotting Coke because they allow their ads to run on gun videos, or where YouTube ends up losing out to even more money because they won't enact more strict rules about which videos can have ads. I don't know the answer here, but it's obvious that the current "solutions" aren't working.
  • DanAndersen 9y ago
    Scott Alexander's essay "Meditations on Moloch" is relevant here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ The no-win situation you describe is a prime example of "Moloch."
    • hvass 9y ago
      This is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.
  • ep103 9y ago
    Everyone is acting in their best interest, except youtube. Youtube has a product team, its their job to come up with solutions to problems like these. If they haven't found a solution, they haven't done their job. Full stop.
• SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
  >For whatever reason Anyone that’s been paying attention knows the reason. If you can’t attack free speech, make that speech too expensive. All of the recent controversial issues have one side scrambling to publicly list advertisers - see the March Against Guns tweets about who has deals with NRA or advertises on Fox News. It’s a horrible tactic that’s very much mob censorship.
  • rhcom2 9y ago
    They don't have the right to talk about who is supporting groups they disagree with?
    • twoodfin 9y ago
      Of course they have the right to, but they also should value the open exchange of ideas in society, regardless of what's written in the Federal constitution. That open exchange is hard to have when folks on one side attempt to destroy the livelihood of the folks on the other side rather than argue their ideas directly.
    • bilbo0s 9y ago
      It's a little humorous, as it really does indicate that the people who are complaining that their free speech is being attacked, are themselves, attacking free speech. I'm not sure any of the people arguing points and counterpoints in our society's current free speech debate really value free speech? I think it'd be a bit more accurate to say that these people value THEIR speech and freedom, not really the speech and freedom of others.
      • banned1 9y ago
        Bingo! Think Antifa or the students protesting someone at school and not letting them speak.
        • bilbo0s 9y ago
          Your comment does illustrate my point. YOU value the free speech of whoever is speaking, but not that of the counter protesters. Who themselves value THEIR free speech, but not that of whoever is speaking. It's an intractable problem really.
• alexc05 9y ago
  > Be sure to remind youtube of their power and responsibility after tragedy strikes. To be clear - they aren't actually responsible for an active shooter showing up on campus. It sounds like you're saying they could have some responsibility in someone coming to their office with a gun.
  • ivl 9y ago
    I'm fairly certain they were including that in the media's reaction and participation in this.
  • sqdbps 9y ago
    Of course not. I'm referring to hints of victim blaming in the media: https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/17196704/youtube-susan-wojcicki-controversial-monetization-changes-shooter https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/17196704/youtube-susan-wojci...
  • deftnerd 9y ago
    While they're not directly responsible, the problem was entirely of their making. They created a whole new profession (even my 8-year-old son wants to grow up to be a "professional youtubber") and then arbitrarily destroy careers. The created an environment where people could work hard to create their own destiny while giving themselves the ability to destroy those destinies without cause or recourse. It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge.
    • tclancy 9y ago
      >It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge. [citation needed, God help us all]
    • danso 9y ago
      So basically every company who has ever laid off or fired an employee should expect at some point to fall victim to a mass shooting?
• bertil 9y ago
  I get how that gets some channel into trouble: politics, guns. Than channel was apparently a Iranian-American vegan animal rights activist. I’m not a vegan, but I don’t see the point in opposing them. Other than the banter about how in-your-face they can be, do people violently oppose vegans, or animal rights activists? She was upset over a workout video being age-gated: who would oppose that video?
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    There is something very ironic about a person that is supposedly so careful about animal rights that they will change their diet to relieve the pressure who at the same time has no problems in bringing a gun into the offices of a free service and shooting random strangers.
    • patcheudor 9y ago
      Not really. It's common to support animal rights while despising humans. This is especially true amongst those who subscribe to the more fringe animal activism groups that as an example free animals used for medical or cosmetic testing from their 'evil human captors'.
      • jacquesm 9y ago
        They'll be shocked when they realize we too are animals.
        • gowld 9y ago
          Jacques, you are smarter than that. WWII Allies killed Nazis to save humans. They weren't shocked to realize that Nazis were humans.
          • jacquesm 9y ago
            The de-humanization of both Nazi's from the allied perspective and the Jews from the Nazi perspective is well documented. So yes, that's exactly how it was.
• frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Sure the media played some part but really it seems to fall more on youtube to me. Youtube used to be a steady source of basically reliable income if you had 'made it.' So people flock to the platform, start producing tons of content and basically link their lives not just to the platform of youtube but to the job of video maker. This works out great for youtube, no real competition ever rises up because it can't buy away the big hitters, then once youtube has true, lasting dominance they begin to squeeze the people that got them there, they pay less, they start restricting content and worse as a content creator you can see other big channels getting away with what is prohibited to you. Youtube basically becomes the worst, most arbitrary boss at a piece work, gig economy crap job. And the creators have nowhere to go because all the competition was crushed long ago. That type of systematic degradation always pushes some people beyond the edge but because internet companies are disconnected from their users/workers they've mostly been able to ignore these side effects. This woman's act is horrific but it's also illustrative of the effects these companies actually have on people's lives.
• watwut 9y ago
  > Be sure to remind youtube of their power and responsibility after tragedy strikes. I don't think they have any responsibility for the shooting. None at all. Whether the videos were demonetized rightfully or not.
• clairity 9y ago
  that's a plausible narrative but where is the research thst shows this is an actual problem?
• DanAndersen 9y ago
  One possible way out of the trap is for regulation to acknowledge and classify these massive social media and content delivery platforms like YouTube and Facebook as the new version of the public square. One of the big issues with the demonetization on YouTube is that it's a binary flag -- either "acceptable content for advertisers" or "unacceptable for advertisers." As if advertisers were a single block with a single set of values! When YouTube is not under an obligation to act as the virtual-public-square (because "they're a private company"), then they are especially vulnerable to defining that "acceptability" either by internal ideological conformity, or by external ideological pressure. Part of the concept of "free speech" (as a doctrine, not just as 1A legal structure) is that it allows for a society where the distinction of "I don't agree with this but someone out there might and so it's OK for it to exist" is a distinction that is possible. Without that, we're left with a world in which expression has to be mediated by the approval/whims of external forces for it to be present. Whatever strange, fringe things this person was having as YouTube videos, I'd be willing to guess there's some fringe company out there who wouldn't care if they were advertised on those videos. Think of the kinds of advertisers 4chan, Infowars, or adult websites get. Their standards don't fit into a generic mold of "acceptability." But if someone was a video creator who wanted to court such advertisers, what kind of audience would they even be able to build without access to the de-facto public-square that YouTube is? I don't know how to get there from here. But I think a more healthy ad-revenue model would somehow have YouTube saying "OK, these mainstream videos are able to be monetized by mainstream ads from companies A B and C, while these fringe/controversial videos can be monetized by whatever companies X Y and Z want to."
  • speeder 9y ago
    This person videos weren't even strange or fringe... The attacker videos seemly were mostly about exercising, vegan diet, and some lighthearted videos... AFTER demonetization, seemly some videos with criticism about Youtube and US, saying that Iran (her home country) had more free speech than US, showed up.
    • wwwdonohue 9y ago
      From saved screenshots of her YouTube channel, she'd put up/shared videos of really violent animal cruelty. Animals being skinned alive/boiled, etc. Somehow I don't think it was the workout videos that were the most offensive to YouTube.
• simion314 9y ago
  YouTube is not transparent about it's algorithm, this produces a lot of frustration because of uncertainty. The algorithm also seems very poor implemented, like it should give the benefit of the doubt, like if I have 10 wrongly flagged videos that a human decided it is advertising friendly then mark my channel as "trusted" and don't allow the AI to de-monitize the video , flag it and have a human check it. In the present the algorithm is favorable to YouTube and advertisers and creators suffer.
• amelius 9y ago
  The words "demonetize" and "demonize" look remarkably similar.
• meddlepal 9y ago
  21st century reporters or "journalists" as they like to be called seem to be the equivalent of schoolyard tattletales. The death of traditional media and "news" cannot happen soon enough.
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    Be careful what you wish for.
• blarneystun 9y ago
  It's interesting how algorithmic the process of fabricating ( real or fake ) news has become.
• rdtsc 9y ago
  At the end of the day it is still a private company and if it wants to censor or otherwise supress certain types of content it is free to do so. Everyone is also free of course to criticize it for bias and/or use another video sharing site. Also I don't see the last part about their responsibility in the shooting. Had this been a gun (2nd Amendment) fanatic whose gun demo videos were banned, like many on Reddit prematurely guessed, I don't think anyone would be saying " youtube is responsible for this". Now that it is a woman and she was pro-animal rights suddenly the blame is starting to shift towards YouTube, gun laws, society in general.
• orasis 9y ago
  What’s with all of the conspiracy theory type comments on HN lately?
• nullifidian 9y ago
  I'm not an American. The fact that a targeted online advertisement shown before the video is associated with the video and not with the platform, and requires damage control is perplexing and unexplainable to me... "There is no direct relationship between the video and the ad - It's matched by the machinery to the viewer, not to the video." should be the official answer and the end of the story. Is an ad exposure before a "controversial" video any different in its effect compared to "acceptable" video exposure? It shouldn't be. I presume ad-to-video strong association is some kind of established US norm, where you pressure companies to "pull ads" when something offends you. Not being able to pull ads in a targeted manner is unacceptable I suppose, and that great American institution of pulling ads is "ought to be preserved". Also I don't understand why Youtube went with advertisers' demands -- they have near-monopoly, big coffers and can impose their own rules. Like "You can't dictate at the start of which particular video your ads are shown, only the demographics and some keywords". The current set of rules is giving advertizers the power they shouldn't really have. It's as if the ogranization is willing to implement what equals to advertizers moralistic/political policing of content.
  • jmull 9y ago
    Here's the rationale: The advertisement pays for the video. Without the ads to provide money for a given type of video, there will be less of them and they will be less sophisticated. Thus, whether an advertiser likes it or not, they are supporting the video content, albeit indirectly. Also, I don't think advertisers care at all to engage in moralistic or political policing of content. They just want to sell stuff. Being associated with controversial content offends people, which drives away what could otherwise be good paying customers. So they just want to avoid it.
    • nullifidian 9y ago
      >The advertisement pays for the video. Advertisers pay for ad exposures on this platfrom, not for the video. The fact that some money goes not only for infrastructure but also to the creators, should be considered just a side effect of the need to increase viewcounts, and as a result ad exposures. Any attempt to associate particuilar algorithmically matched ads to videos and vice versa should be considered as a powergrab and an attempt at speech policing, IMO. Which is exactly what media fishing for unsightly associations is doing. >Being associated with controversial content offends people, which drives away what could otherwise be good paying customers. I doubt that a controversial video after youtube ads has any significant effect on driving away or attracting paying customers. Your statement requires proof. If viewers willingly choose to watch a video with a controversial topic, it's their choice, and their taste. As for media fishing expeditions "this company's algorithmically matched ad was shown before this controversial video" -- I doubt anyone reads or takes this seriously. At least at youtube video scale. >Also, I don't think advertisers care at all to engage in moralistic or political policing of content. Are you telling me people don't want power? Are you telling me ad and silicon valley companies workforce are not all elite college educated and espause particular political views? Are you telling me humanities departments are not basically training political activists?
• ensignro2340 9y ago
  It’s not the media’s fault. If you’re going to blame anyone - blame the advertisers. They are the ones with the money everyone (YouTube and YouTubers alike) is trying to get their hands on. Unfortunately they are the ones who hold the cards at the end of the day when it comes to their money.
• jacquesm 9y ago
  It wasn't the media that pulled the trigger.
• untog 9y ago
  I guess I'm not seeing where the media's part in this is bad. They're raising legitimate questions about programmatic advertising.