This is not a new discussion, though. People like Eli Pariser have been talking about the bubbles caused by social media algorithms for YEARS at this point, as well as how letting your entire industry be dominated by privileged white men is going to give you technologies that reinforce their privileges. My husband gets Communications of the ACM, which I sometimes flip through, so I KNOW they’ve been having these conversations for years, too. People KNOW this shit. It’s not some huge mystery.
There is not a single fucking excuse anymore for this kind of shit that continually benefits the far right, other than it’s purposeful. They’ve had years to figure this shit out. Wrecking democracy means nothing to them, so long as they are profitable.
Archive.org DOES do that work of archiving and making sense of the internet. The National Archive has also started to think about archiving online the discourse of our public officials.
People seem to be confusing one for the other. An archive is a curated collection usually for the purposes of helping historians gain access to materials in a coherent way. As you say, RWW is an advocacy group, not an archive.
Because it takes ages to get them to take action and they err on the side of letting violent, racist, misogynistic rhetoric stand, when groups on the left are more often taken down when conservatives complain.
It literally took a god damn attempt at mass murder of elected officials to get that to happen!!! If he had won the election or the attempted insurrection had not happened, he would still be on twitter, despite regularly engaging in hate speech.
To people like you and me, sure. To the average person who happily and obliviously uses Facebook, Twitter etc. with no reservations whatsoever, which unfortunately appears to be most people, not so much. They know that social media platforms are incompetent and inconsistent because they’ve had their private information leaked, or had a benign post taken down or gotten banned for no actual reason for a time, or at least had it happen to a friend. They DON’T know about the alt-right bias because they aren’t politically active, or don’t want to think about it, or aren’t particularly invested in doing what’s right. So when somebody brings up an incident like this, they shrug their shoulders and say “Oh, those wacky algorithms, oh well, it’s out of the corporation’s hands and they can’t be blamed, it’s just random” because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to do by social media’s “apologize, then do nothing to fix the problem” response to every blunder and injustice the platforms have ever perpetrated. Is that ignorance and apathy an excuse? Not really. But the fact that they STILL treat these platforms as benign time-wasters instead of a threat to democracy shows that they don’t know as much as they need to, and aren’t taking the alt-right glad-handing seriously.
Of course, I am not saying that RWW (or anyone else) should not post on YT. As you point out, it has a really wide reach - and I for one spend way too much time on it, ahem.
It simply should not, in my opinion, be used as primary repository. Keep your video elsewhere safe and post them on YT knowing that it is an unstable, capricious platform, and that whatever you have on it can disappear in the blink of an eye for no reason at all.
Like many posters here point out, it is chaotically managed and we have come to see that ineffectiveness as a native feature, baked into the product. A symbol of the times if you will…
I think my complaint is more nuanced than this reduction of it.
the systems they create to streamline and expedite content moderation (human, algorithmic and otherwise) tend to serve conservative interests.
What I think happened here was the moderation algo (or botlike policy enforcement) served the conservative interest, then upper-management humans reacted when it became a PR crisis.
People stay because they don’t have an alternative. There is no alternative to facebook to keep in touch with family, especially older folks who aren’t tech-savvy. If you want to keep up with your friends and relatives, you get on facebook and deal with the problems, or you get left out of the loop.
You’re right that PEOPLE don’t know this, but the companies that make these products sure as shit did. THEY know and THEY are responsible for cleaning their shit up. It’s not on the end user.
Most people don’t have the cash for space to have tons of videos on their home computers. RWW might, since it’s attached to a larger non-profit, but not necessarily.
We like to think this stuff doesn’t take up room, but it absolutely does.
Cool, so a point for Beschizza. I’m not sure how the game works…is it your turn to provide some references now, or is it still up to the other side to find your new goalposts?
The reason RWW was banned was because the clips they posted from actual, other, right wing youtube channels were content that crossed the lines. That was the mistake.
Now the kicker?
The content that got them banned… the right wing nutjob content… is still very much available AND promoted by algos on the channels that RWW cited.
