Posts about youtube

Congratulations, America. Victory against Infowars!

 

You did it, O, you denizens of social media, you sharers of cats, you time-wasters, you. With every appalled tweet and retweet and angry emoji on Facebook, you vanquished the foe, Infowars. You got it banished from Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify. Congratulations.

I have no inside information to know what made the platforms finally come to their senses. But I will bet that it was the cover provided by the public on social media that gave them the courage to do the right thing.

Consider what Sleeping Giants and Shannon Coulter’s #GrabYourWallet did to get thousands of advertisers to drop Breitbart. After Kellogg dropped Breitbart back in 2016, right-wingers tried to declare a cereal boycott. It fizzled like stale Rice Crispies. Then the social pressure started on every advertiser that appeared on Breitbart and by the hundreds they flew away. I spoke with advertisers who did not resent Sleeping Giants for this. No, they were grateful for the cover.

Meanwhile, #GrabYourWallet also put pressure on retailers to stop carrying the merchandise of the enabler-in-chief and éminence greed, Ivanka Trump, and she killed her company. Last week, many of us brought a shitstorm down on the Newseum for selling fake news T-shirts and they relented. Many of us keep screaming about cable news shows inviting on Trump’s liars and at least a few listened as Morning Joe stopped inviting Kellyanne Conway and Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, and Rachel Maddow stopped giving free airtime unencumbered with context to Trump rallies, press briefings, and tweets.

So that is your job, America: Keep demanding the best of platforms when it comes to distributing extremist bile. Demand the best of brands, ad networks, ad agencies, and retailers when it comes to supporting their shit. And demand the best of media — I’m looking at you, cable news — when it comes to inviting pathological liars and extremist nut jobs on your air to amplify their hate and disinformation.

Now it would be nice if the companies that run the internet had long since shown the decency, good sense, and courage to do this on their own. But it seems they feared blowback from the other side, the indecent side, the allies of Infowars and you-know-who. Well, we showed them who is more powerful.

Now I know there’s a risk here. A tool is a tool and bad guys can use them just as well as good guys. Indeed, it was the far right that first went after Facebook with accusations that it was disadvantaging conservative news in its (now gone, thank you) Trending feature. Facebook caved and then cowered — until now. I don’t want to see mobs going after voices because of disagreement. But that’s not what happened here. Citizens went after companies to uphold basic standards of decency. Big difference.

 

My message here is simple: Keep it up, social media. Keep it up, America. Demand the best of ourselves, our technology companies and media companies and their advertisers. Then come November, demand the best of the women and men who represent you in government.

What you’re seeing is democracy and civilization in action — and civilization is winning. At last.

 

New video powerhouse

mode

The amazing Samir Arora, CEO of Mode (nĂ©e Glam), called with some impressive numbers on his company’s new platform and aggressive push into video.

A two-minute video illustrating 100 years of fashion gained 1 million views in six days, 10 million in 21, and now — a bit more than eight weeks out — has 58 million views. Almost three-quarters of those views came on Mode’s own network — where they can prioritize users based on relevance and influence; the rest on Facebook, YouTube, et al.

In two months, Mode is now the 13th video property according to ComScore; it was already the 7th web property.

Through this, Mode is building two big video revenues streams: half from prerolls (YouTube’s territory), the other half from distributing brands’ video content and from sponsorship of its own video content. Video, of course, has enviable CPMs running $20-$45 for this kind of content.

Note well that with Mode, creators always get paid for their content — whether as revenue share or for hire. Importantly, under certain circumstances, distributors also get paid.

Glam started as a network; that is what brought Samir and me together. It then set about building tools for content creation, curation, and distribution. Samir’s big lesson, he said, is that an ecosystem needs a platform.

Mode still is under the radar for many in media. I’d reset your radar.

Here’s VentureBeat on the these numbers; and Scoble, too.

Advice to media & Muslims: Don’t feed the trolls

The jerk who made that video, the one that supposedly incited rioting and murder in Egypt and Libya, is the very definition of a troll: He made it to elicit the reaction he was sure he’d cause. That is what trolls do.

Those who reacted are trolls, too, but of course worse: murderers. They exploited just any excuse — an obviously cheesy, fake movie seen by no one — to stir up their band of fanatics into visible outrage and violence.

The media who cover these trolls — the trolls who make the bait and the trolls who look for bait — are dupes themselves, just continuing a cycle that will only rev faster and faster until someone says: Stop. Stop feeding the trolls.

We’ve learned that online, haven’t we all? Oh, I sometimes have to relearn the lesson when one of my trolls dangles some shiny object in front of me and I snap. I just pulled the food bowl away from one troll: no reaction for you. I was just delighted to see another troll get his comeuppance and said so. But as a rule, a good rule, one should never, never feed the trolls. They only spit it up on you. Starving them of the attention they crave and the upset they hunger for and feed on is the only answer.

But still, there’s no controlling the trolls. Some still think the trolls can be stopped. An Australian newspaper just started a #stopthetrolls campaign to bring the ride miscreants to justice and silence. Good luck with that. In a sense, the rioters and murderers in Libya and Egypt and now elsewhere are demanding that someone stop the trolls they are choosing to get heated up about.

But, of course, there is no stopping them. Neither do I want to stop them. I believe in protecting free speech, which must include protecting even bad, even noxious speech.

Zeynep Tufecki, a brilliant observer of matters media, digital, and social, cautioned on Twitter that we must understand a key difference in attitudes toward speech here and elsewhere in the world: “Forget Middle East, in most of Europe you could not convince most people that *all* speech should be protected. That is uniquely American,” she tweeted yesterday. “In most places, including Europe, ‘hate-speech’ –however defined — is regulated, prosecuted. Hence, folks assume not prosecuted=promoted…. US free speech absolutism already hard to comprehend for many. Add citizen media to mix, it gets messy. Then, killers exploit this vagueness.” Excellent points and important perspective for the current situation.

But the internet is built to American specifications of speech: anyone can speak and it is difficult unto impossible to stop them as bits and the messages they carry are designed to go around blocks and detours. The internet *is* the First Amendment. We can argue about whether that is the right architecture — as an American free-speech absolutist, I think it is — but that wouldn’t change the fact that we are going to hear more and more speech, including brilliance and including bile. There’s no stopping it. Indeed, I want to protect it.

So we’d best understand how to adapt society to that new reality. We’ve done it before. This from Public Parts about the introduction of the printing press:

“This cultural outlook of openness in printing’s early days could just as easily have gone the other way. The explosion of the printed word — and the lack of control over it — disturbed the elite, including Catholic theologian Desiderius Erasmus. ‘To what corner of the world do they not fly, these swarms of new books?’ he complained. ‘[T]he very multitude of them is hurtful to scholarship, because it creates a glut and even in good things satiety is most harmful.’ He feared, according to [Elizabeth] Eisenstein, that the minds of men ‘flighty and curious of anything new’ would be distracted from ‘the study of old authors.’ After the English Civil War, Richard Atkyns, an early writer on printing, longed for the days of royal control over presses. Printers, he lamented, had ‘filled the Kingdom with so many Books, and the Brains of the People with so many contrary Opinions, that these Paper-pellets become as dangerous as Bullets.’ In the early modern period a few ‘humanists called for a system of censorship, never implemented, to guarantee that only high-quality editions be printed,’ Ann Blair writes in Agent of Change. Often today I hear publishers, editors, and academics long for a way to ensure standards of quality on the internet, as if it were a medium like theirs rather than a public space for open conversation.”

There is a desire to *control* conversation, to *civilize* it, to *cleanse* it. God help us, I don’t want anyone cleaning my mouth out. I don’t want anyone telling me what I cannot say. I don’t want a society that silences anything that could offend anyone.

I understand why Google decided to take down That Video from YouTube in Libya and Egypt, given how it is being used, while also arguing that it meets YouTube’s standards and will stay up elsewhere. But YouTube thus gives itself a dangerous precedent as some will expect it to cleanse other bad speech from its platform. YouTube is in a better position in Afghanistan, where the government blocked all of YouTube but then it’s the government that is acting as the censor and it’s the government that must be answerable to its people.

But in any case, blocking this video is no more the answer than rioting and murdering over it. All this will only egg on the trolls to make more bad speech and in turn egg on trolls on the other side to exploit it.

The only answer is to learn how to deal with speech and to value it sufficiently to acknowledge that good speech will come with bad. What we have to learn is how to ignore the bad. We have to learn that every sane and civilized human knows that bad speech is bad. We don’t need nannies to tell us that. We don’t need censors to protect it from us. We certainly don’t need fanatics to fight us for it. We need the respect of our fellow man to believe that we as civilized men and women know the difference. We need to grow up.

The responsibility of knowledge in news

I tweeted a few minutes that I wish YouTube itself would be curating and featuring video from Iran because only it is in the position to know whether the video came from Iran and whether it is a duplicate. I said that YouTube has a responsibility in the news ecosystem. Andy Scheurer questioned that: responsibility? Good question. Isn’t YouTube just a host? Can’t it be agnostic as to interests? No, I don’t think so, because YouTube has unique knowledge it can add to inform the discussion (e.g., this video isn’t from Iran or it’s a year old or this video is unique from Iran today) and to not add that knowledge becomes irresponsible, no? YouTube can’t just make the information transparent so we can figure it out because it also has a moral responsibility to protect the identity of those who are putting themselves in danger by uploading the videos to inform the world. That means they are the only ones who can verify at least some information about the videos for our benefit. So shouldn’t they?

Oy

The great cultural anomaly of the age is Jackie Mason’s popularity on YouTube. YouTube’s Steve Grove asks him questions and we see the problems with the asynch interview (questions asked separately answers given). Mason goes on about the sick, sadistic, lunatic people on YouTube and we don’t see Grove react at all. Mason also says he wouldn’t walk on the same street with Barack Obama.