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When congressional leaders grilled social media executives last year about spreading misinformation on the 2020 election and COVID-19, most of the heat was on Facebook, Twitter and the search engine Google. Far less attention is focused on YouTube, which last year earned $28 billion in ad revenue and which has over 2 billion viewers around the world.
In a new book, technology and business journalist, Mark
Bergen writes that YouTube has ushered
in a world of abundant content and creativity of influencers and online
hustlers while also driving up information overload and fomenting culture wars.
“Almost every day, YouTube’s engineers experiment on us
without our knowledge,” Bergen writes in ‘Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside
YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination’ (reprinted excerpts of which are at
Observer). “They tweak video recommendations for subsets of users, review the
results, and tweak again.”
Such a reveal is hardly new. We know that social media
platforms deploy algorithms to feed us more of what they think will keep us
engaged (and a big part of that is feeding us content that gets our blood up).
Bergen says YouTube was the first to do this and details how its desire to get
its users to spend more time on videos, got out of hand in ways they didn’t
anticipate or could manage.
It started out with a utopian ideal to do no evil. In
Silicon Valley at the time of the company’s founding in 2005 there was a belief that information should be free and
be accessible, and broadcast and video should be free and accessible,
Bergen says.
“YouTube was one of
many [such projects] but early
on leapfrogged its competitors
in part because it was so accessible and easy to use,” he tells Dave Davies at NPR. “The founders talked about this as something that their mom should be able to
use. And I think, to their credit, that's one of the reasons for its success.”
Bergen reports that a decade ago YouTube strove to treat all
videos equally. If footage didn’t break copyright or graphic violence rules,
YouTube thought it belonged on its site and in its promotional machine.
“YouTube didn’t love clickbait—videos that lured viewers in
under false pretences or sent them away quickly. So in 2012 it changed the way
it recommended videos, moving from a system that favored clicks (or views) to
one that favored time spent or watchtime. Clickbait soon went away. And huge
new content categories emerged—gaming, beauty, vlogging—while YouTube’s ads
business took off.”
One particular category exploded out of nowhere after the
algorithmic switch: toy unboxing. The videos were enthralling for young
viewers, but didn’t seem that educational.
YouTube considered toy unboxing videos the equivalent of sugary snacks,
writes Bergen. “Best in moderation. YouTube was worried that gorging on them
might make viewers (or their parents) abandon YouTube.”
So later in 2012, YouTube began an initiative internally
dubbed ‘Nutritious and Delicious.’ The idea was to assign a ‘goodness score’ to
certain videos or channels, giving them more weight in rankings. But it never
got off the ground.
According to Bergen, YouTube was preoccupied with Facebook’s
rising threat, “making it worry more about its survival than your nutrition.
Staff also got stuck on certain questions: What exactly is nutritious? How
do we decide? Can we program quality into algorithms? Should we? No
company-wide metrics were set.”
So overall watchtime, YouTube’s gold standard for time spent
on its videos, stuck. More recently of course the company has had to revisit
those questions of a content’s qualitative equivalence once more – this time
forced to do so to keep on the right side of regulators.
“Since 2019, its recommendation algorithm now demotes
‘borderline’ videos, those that get uncomfortably close to being harmful.
YouTube has also done more to disclose how it decides what’s
borderline and how it scores the ‘authoritativeness’ of publishers, key
components of its responsibility push.”
The corporate conundrum, arguably faced by Facebook and
other social media platforms, is that so-called ‘valued watchtime’ – content
judged to be suitable for consumption – bunches up against the demand to
increase total viewing time.
Bergen is prepared to cut YouTube some slack. Partly, it has
been hard to change direction because the company doesn’t even understand its
own algorithm. The sheer scale of the data it absorbs everyday makes the task a
titanic one.
“YouTube has more
monthly users in India than Twitter has globally,” he tells The Verge. “It is
just so big. I think that Google tends to make every decision at scale and as
consistently across the board as possible. Philosophically, it really struggles
with, “We are going to act on one creator this way and another one this way. We
are going to act on one misinformation case this way and then treat another one
differently.” It wants to do as much as it can, across the board, at scale.”
It is unique in
some ways, because it is the only social network that hasn’t really had one
founder there the entire time. There is no Zuckerberg, Dorsey, or Spiegel,
Bergen notes. It effectively had three
different eras as chief executives that are stewards of this platform that is
like its own beast.
Unlike Facebook in particular Google/YouTube also has no
obvious figurehead to attack. Turns out that the CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki wouldn’t talk to Bergen.
Nor would the founders of Google (although by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
haven’t spoken to anyone on the
record since 2015.
“I think they're
aware of the criticism of the
platform. [Former CEO Google]
Eric Schmidt has criticized social media publicly. I believe he called it a megaphone for idiots.
Though he’s talked about how YouTube is different.”
Bergen did interview more than 150 current and former employees across YouTube and Google and found most of them see YouTube as a positive force.
“Most people feel that it has had a positive impact on the world,” he reports. “People inside YouTube do genuinely believe that they’ve created a chance for people who have been marginalized in conventional media to have a platform. Even people that are supercritical of the company celebrate the creator economy and have favorite YouTubers.”
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