Eight Bit Alien wrote: ↑Thu Jun 06, 2019 7:16 pm
It's because they are responsible for a MASSIVE cultural shift towards conspiracy theory in general, working constantly to balkanize consensus reality.
I seriously doubt that's the reason.
We really need to stop buying into this fucktarded right-wing narrative that Google, Facebook and Twitter have some sort of left-wing political agenda or even any concern for their social responsibility in and of itself. They don't. They're multi-national media corporations, and like all such entities, their only purpose is to make money, and the money comes primarily from advertising. This has been true for as long as there have been newspapers. When the social media companies restrict any kind of content, it's because for whatever reason, they believe that it makes them less attractive to advertisers.
This is why the first "punishment" Youtube has for undesirable content is "demonetization" - this isn't them punishing people for saying things they disagree with, it's a tool for them to tell their advertisers, look, we're going to keep allowing people to say crazy shit on our service because we have to maintain our public image as a free speech platform, but don't worry, your ads aren't going to be shown in those videos.
Right-wingers don't want to talk about this because they prefer to paint themselves as the victims of some global cabal that wants to silence their viewpoint (variously either as an antisemitic dogwhistle or outright accusing the Jews of doing this) and no doubt also because it looks bad for their beloved idea that private business somehow always does everything better. If all of this proves anything, it's that private business is
terrible at providing free speech platforms and these companies need to be regulated. Youtube fucked this latest thing up too - they implemented it so lazily that videos and channels that use Nazi imagery for the purpose of criticizing or analyzing it have now been banned or demonetized as well, and now they have to beg for their content to be allowed again one at a time.
None of this is particularly interesting, though. What really interests me is why the social media companies have this perception that right-wing conspiracy content is bad for business. Do they just assume their advertisers don't want to be seen near this stuff? Do their advertisers outright tell them, either delete this shit or make sure we're not associated with it? If so, who are these advertisers, and why do they think being associated with this sort of thing is bad for
their business? Have they done focus group research? Are they reacting to media reports depicting Youtube as a place where radicalization happens? This is what I want to know, and we'll probably never find out.