Google and YouTube executives ignored warnings on toxic video content, now we're all paying the price

[Headache]

It’s not something I believe, it’s part of their business model. Writers get a bonus if they manage to move the market.

Bloomberg News Pays Reporters More If Their Stories Move Markets

[longbelly]

Do you think they’re shorting Alphabet and then publishing this story in hopes of moving the market in order to profit from their short position?

[Headache]

I have no idea.

[anon50609448]

@tlwest

I hope I’m being pessimistic, but I think there’s a decent chance that the awful practices of most social media success stories may be the result of the fact that “good” companies cannot exist for long, so “bad” companies are the only ones we see.

I guess I’m not so sure that the bad companies have a viable business model either, depending on what your idea of a viable business model is. There’s this massive financial economy that just sort of plays games with numbers rather than producing anything, and I think a lot of tech startups are pretty much just in the business of grifting venture capitalists, not producing anything.

The “old saying” about Facebook is that if you aren’t paying you aren’t the customer, you’re the product. But recently I’ve been wondering if the entire business isn’t basically a “Big Store” con on investors. I mean that sort of metaphorically, not that I think Zuckerberg was intentionally pulling a con. It just feels like one day Facebook is simply going to collapse and Zuckerberg will walk away fantastically wealthy.

[sarc]

[gracchus]

@tlwest

This leads me to wonder, what if you can’t actually have what I consider a decent social media? What if business practices that are compatible with a healthy society mean that all social media beyond a thousand or so people die in bankruptcy?

You can. Social media isn’t necessarily dependent on either a for-profit business model or a centralised and proprietary system.

A de-centralised, federated, not-for-profit social media platform doesn’t eliminate all problems, but it goes a long way toward mitigating ones like this.

[VenTatsu]

@NickyG

Toxic user-generated content, mind you.

The user-generated is just a bit of the theft business model with a dash of slavery labor model added in.

[NickyG]

Honestly, at their core I have no problem with sites like YouTube. They provide a service, including (for some classes of content) a monetization model for people using the service.

The problem is, the service they are providing is a publishing service, and our society has chosen to not treat these entities like publishers, giving them the responsibilities that position entails.

shrug

[jtiii]

New figures here the millions that see its information panels on conspiracies and take satisfaction surveys. But as good @kevinroose invu shows, this change is hard to grok

So is this sentence!

[jtiii]

“savory” really takes slave labor to a whole different level…

[dave_t]

I’m reading “The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff. The first idea I really like is that the idea that “you are the product” gives the data companies too much credit, and makes you sound more important to them than you are in reality. Your DATA (separate from you, the person) is the product that the companies sell for profit. You (the actual, living breathing person) are the irrelevant byproduct of the data extraction. I like to think of it like this: Sunkist sells orange juice. The juice is the product. You + your private data are an orange. Once Facebook is done extracting your data for sale, you and what’s left of your privacy are an orange rind, to be discarded.

[NickyG]

looks at the orange on his desk 12 inches away

I’m a gonna eat you now!

[Ratel]

@tlwest

This leads me to wonder, what if you can’t actually have what I consider a decent social media? What if business practices that are compatible with a healthy society mean that all social media beyond a thousand or so people die in bankruptcy?

<cough>

Google and YouTube executives ignored warnings on toxic video content, now we're all paying the price

Need to update my core economic principles: Theft is the most profitable business model. Slavery is the most profitable labor model. Toxic content is the most profitable media model.

[Juci_Shockwave]

From racism to sexism to classism to everything else under the sun… The worse part of it all is if people take it seriously and believes it… oh my! It will cause a backlash of everything all those human rights movements worked so hard for us to get now.

[Juci_Shockwave]

Little by little our rights/liberties are taken away due to morons in the internet. I recall in the 1990s, when the internet was at its infancy, that only the truly intelligent and savvy group of people would use the internet. Now it is a free for all and we get are massive groups of the nastiest, trashiest group of people on Earth in there. There aren’t anymore polite debates or discussions… just sexist/racist/classist middle school nonsense. The hashtag movement made it even worse with undermining, trivializing crimes against humanity and civil rights movements of the past. People today don’t know what true oppression and suppression really looks and feels like. >_> Youtube is infamous for allowing such toxic videos to run rampant. … oh but they will censor Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood (the least toxic content you could find anywhere on Earth), while allowing Radical Militant Feminism and MGTOW garbage to overrun the site.