Cleaning Up YouTube.

It’s become a regular feature of modern life to read about pressure being brought to bear on the operators of social media platforms to remove not only hate speech, but also the malicious spreading of misinformation. And there are laws – in the UK at least, and I should imagine in other countries too – which provide for the forced removal of adverts which make false claims.

So what about YouTube, which to many people has become a major source of information and erudition? YouTube is awash with uploads appearing on the recommendations page which make idiotically sensational claims accompanied by transparently fake thumbnail photographs. And when you look at the statistics underneath you discover that they’ve had hundreds of thousands of views. No doubt it makes lots of money for the channel operator, so isn’t that clearly fraud? It certainly is as I understand the term.

Why doesn’t anybody put pressure on YouTube to remove such abject fakery from the gullible gaze of hundreds of thousands of simpletons who are taken in by it? Better still, why doesn’t Google have the good sense and social responsibility to take care of the matter itself without needing to be pressured?

Well, I think we all know the answer to that one. No doubt Google wants as many videos as possible up on its platform because videos attract adverts and Google gets a share of the revenue. And the issue of whether videos are genuine or fake pales into insignificance wherever the profit motive holds sway. That fact is plain to see, and apparently unchallenged, in a culture utterly dominated by the capitalist ethos.

But should we tolerate it? I don’t think so, which why I jotted this post. What else can I do?