There is a lot of scuttlebutt in the past two days
about the ambiguity of YouTube’s expanded “anti-harassment” policy, on its own creators blog.
Hoeg Law has the most expanded discussion of the
problems with this post. Note the thumbnails of Stephen Crowder and Carlos Maza, whose dispute last spring YouTube handled so badly, leading to "Vox Adpocalypse".
The basic problem with all this, is the “compound
interest” idea, and its retroactivity to previously posted content, which
confronts the poster with the idea that a video acceptable today might be taken
down later because of some larger group context.
I presume the same ideas could apply to Blogger, which
this post is on.
One idea is that a pattern of many individually
acceptable videos (or blog posts with embeds) about an otherwise not so famous
individual (like a smaller Youtube channel) could turn out to draw unwanted
attention to “them”. I often use “independent
channels”, but I notice that there is a difference between how the large independent
channels (Pakman is an example, of a “Youtuber” who can make a living off the
channel and who hires employees – obviously, also, Pewdiepie) and some of the
smaller personal ones that don’t ask for memberships or donations, feel about
the practice.
This issue has come up
before with the fact that I put the text of my three DADT books online, making
a few people less obscure (because of search engines) than they might otherwise have remained.
Bostwiki has a summary video this morning (8 min)
where he also mentions Gab’s sudden no pornography policy – because its payment
processor otherwise would view it as “high risk”.
There is a big article in Wired (paywall), by Paris
Martineau, Oct. 23, 2019, “Maybe it’s not YouTube’s algorithm that radicalizes
people”, link. Read it now.
It is based on a study at Penn State; remember there had been some
controversy from another study at Cornell.
I’ll come back to this later.
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