YouTube‘s bizarre love affair with its most unhinged lunatic users is truly something to behold. Conspiracy theorists and wild crackpot bullshitting comprised the bulk of its early success, and nowadays huffing outright lies online is a big money spinner for the video platform.
Only problem with that, as YouTube is rapidly finding out, is that leaving conspiracy content unchecked on your large global platform for long enough will – would you even believe – have unwanted and adverse real-life consequences. The mind boggles.
As the story goes, YouTube bosses recently decided to try and tackle this problem they created for themselves by getting Wikipedia to cross-check content posted by YouTubers.
The plan, announced by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki at SXSW, goes like this: searching and viewing videos about common conspiracy theories – ones debunked time and time again – would also see a Wikipedia link placed prominently on the page with the video.
For example, if you watched a video featuring a man in his 40s ranting in his Warhammer figure-dotted basement about how fluoridation of water is a Government plan to enact mass-mind control, a Wiki link about fluoride therapy for dental work would appear alongside. A video about Pizzagate posted by some dumbass drinking InfoWars brain juice would be accompanied by the accompanying Wikipedia page and its lengthy and verified debunking section. And so on and so forth.
“Information cues,” Wojcicki calls them. And it sounds like a solid plan. Except for the fact that YouTube apparently didn’t bother to tell anyone at Wikipedia, and now there’s beef.
The problem, which Wikimedia very professionally hinted at in a series of tweets this morning, is that Wikipedia is tirelessly moderated by a hoard of volunteers, all of whom have dedicated countless hours to weeding out bad edits and dodgy citations. In essence, determining what’s verifiably real and what’s pure horseshit. These are the people that have to erase “poo bum dicky wee wee” from pages every time some bored Liberal staffer in Canberra decides to childishly grind an axe. Temporarily funny for all of us, but added work for someone else.
Adding Wiki links directly to YouTube pages would add huge amounts of work for the already stretched-thin moderating population, with conspiracy theory supports or outright-trolls likely to bombard pages with bad edits, bung citations, and straight-up graffiti.
As @krmaher says, “The Wikipedia editors are often on the front lines of challenging conversations about truth and facts.” https://t.co/PExyT2j3yb
— Wikimedia Foundation (@Wikimedia) March 14, 2018
And community member @phoebe_ayers: “It’s not polite to treat Wikipedia like an endlessly renewable resource with infinite free labor; what’s the impact?” https://t.co/AFL3nC391R
— Wikimedia Foundation (@Wikimedia) March 14, 2018
In essence, YouTube’s strategy to weed out legitimately fake news is to rely on someone else to do it for them; they’re not taking any real direct action themselves, they’re just kinda passing the buck off to Wikipedia without telling them.
That isn’t so much a moderation and content policy as it is more giving a nerd a wedgie until they do your homework for you.
Either way, Alex Jones‘ brain-poisoned nonsense continues to get millions of hits, and YouTube’s ad dollars keep rolling in.
Business as usual.
