Welcome to Axis ProRata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

Sponsored by Bridge Bank, Be Bold, venture wisely. I'm Danper Mac. On today's show, Elizabeth Warren's

plan to jail CEOs and an upstart football league falls down. But first, YouTube's

House of Horrors. So for years now, tech critics and politicians have been piling on Facebook

for its inability to appropriately monitor content, particularly things like hate speech or

false information that could be harmful to either individuals or society at large. But Google-owned YouTube,

the world's top video streaming site, has somehow skated largely under the radar. Well, at least

until now, following a deep investigation by Bloomberg, that finds the company not only turned

a blind eye to problematic videos, but actually created an algorithm that encouraged users to view them.

So, to be clear, we're not talking here about somebody criticizing Trump or Hillary, even with

false information, or about how they caught the biggest fish. No, we're talking about things like

anti-vaccination videos using scientifically debunked information in the midst of a measles outbreak,

or videos calling the parkland shooting a hoax and the students, quote, crisis actors.

We're even talking about sexually explicit videos that get recommended to kids who are watching

cartoons.

And again, this isn't by accident or the unintentional byproduct of what happens when a video platform scales so big, so fast, that it can't keep up with the uploads.

No, this was intentional, a program, an algorithm, to increase engagement for the purpose of hitting viewership goals.

But CEO, Susan Wajicki, hesitant to, in the words of one former employee, quote, put her fingers on the scale.

And little was more engaging than outrage, except perhaps for being recommended a video that

promised to outrage you even more. It's the sort of artificial intelligence that only a calculator

could love. In 20 seconds, we'll go deeper with the author of that Bloomberg piece, Mark Bergen.

But first, this. The Equity Fund Resources Group at Bridgebank is a central hub for the venture

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