Youtube: Cracking down on crackpots
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does the video-sharing site needs to do in order to stop inadvertently promoting dangerous conspiracy theories and extremist content?
Alex Jones's InfoWars channel (pictured) - which among other things propagated the lie that the Sandy Hook school shooting in the US was faked - has already been banned from YouTube, although his videos still find their way onto the site. Meanwhile the social media platform has also been clamping down on the vaccination conspiracists blamed for causing the current measles epidemic, as well as the far right extremists said to have inspired terrorists such as the New Zealand mosque shooter.
But is the tougher curating of content enough? Or does YouTube's very business model depend on the promotion of sensationalism and extremism by its algorithms? Ed Butler speaks to Mike Caulfield of the American Democracy Project, former Youtube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, and Joan Donovan, who researches the Alt Right at Harvard.
(Picture: Screenshot of an Alex Jones InfoWars video on YouTube, taken on 29 April 2019, despite the banning of his channel by YouTube)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Eagle Houston, here. |
| 0:01.3 | Go for landing, over. |
| 0:02.4 | We were getting very, very short to minimum fuel. |
| 0:05.5 | Then it was 60 seconds. |
| 0:07.4 | 60 seconds. |
| 0:07.5 | Which meant he had 60 seconds to land. |
| 0:10.6 | 60 seconds. |
| 0:11.2 | It was dead silence in mission control. |
| 0:14.1 | 13 minutes to the moon from the BBC World Service coming soon. |
| 0:24.6 | Thank you. from the BBC World Service coming soon. Hello there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, we're asking in |
| 0:30.7 | the wake of horrendous extremist terror attacks around the world, what role do social media |
| 0:36.2 | platforms play in promoting the hateful ideology behind |
| 0:39.8 | them? The need to eradicate different races or global anti-Semitic conspiracies. Those are the |
| 0:46.4 | kinds of things that are trafficked in these spaces. And despite the promises to stamp out extremism |
| 0:53.1 | from companies like YouTube, is that really in their business interests? |
| 0:57.0 | The biggest good is that you click through to more content. |
| 1:01.7 | It's a deep problem that deals with the fundamental economic incentives of these platforms. |
| 1:09.3 | Fixing YouTube. That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:15.5 | There has been a fair bit around in the news in recent weeks from the big social media platforms. |
| 1:20.5 | Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has called for more government help to regulate networks like his and their output. |
| 1:26.2 | Jack Dorsey of Twitter has stood up to again |
| 1:28.6 | acknowledge the scale of the fake news challenge that he's facing. Critics say they're still not |
... |
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