I don't know if YouTube's problems are so bad that the argument applies in this case, but in general, "We can't comply with this regulation, it would be too difficult at our scale" is not considered a valid defense. Just as banks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that they can't fail without wreaking havoc on the economy, if algorithmic recommendation and moderation can't work, then maybe social networks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that human moderation is not possible.
That is an apples to oranges comparison, Youtube is a platform not an institution. It is open to all videos, provided they meet certain agreed upon guidelines, and should not be responsible for censoring content based on individual opinions.
I don't think that the recommendation is broken at all, in fact it works astonishingly well for the vast majority of people. The fact that there are a few bad actors is also present in the banking industry, (Wells Fargo for instance), to use your own bad comparison.
YouTube is asserting editorial and publishing rights when it promotes certain videos, if it were a pure video hosting site (providing a link to uploaded videos for people to do with as they please) then I'd agree they were just a platform, but a newspaper isn't a platform and neither is YouTube.
Youtube is asserting on behalf of people who own the publishing rights and not on behalf of themselves. This is an important distinction. Youtube is not the same as a Newspaper in any way shape or form, I don't really understand your comparison.
The queue for getting your video posted on YouTube would grow infinitely. (Or, more realistically, people would give up and not bother once it takes years.)
But I guess they could charge money to get to the head of the line?
The queue for having your video uploaded and public does not at all have to be the same queue for getting your video included in others' recommendations.
I can just see the outrage now: "YouTube running a pay-to-play scheme for exposure. Anyone can upload their video, but only the rich can get an audience!"
Come to think of it, this is basically the complaint against AdWords and the gradual takeover of the search result page by paid results.
This is exactly what happens. Prager U and Ben Shapiro advertise heavily on content adjacent to them (gaming) and their views go up, up they go in the algorithm.
That's not true you can upload a video and not allow it to be recommended until some human review was done. Most youtube channels don't need the recommendation engine.
That just isn't feasible. Videos would literally take years to get into the recommended status - another comment pointed out there are 500 new videos uploaded per SECOND.
If there was one dude, sure. But apparently YouTube is in the business of supporting the upload of 500 videos/second so they need to deal with the consequences of it. It's not like there's any regulation forcing them to be the place everyone uploads videos to and there are some valid competitors (though they're far less into the publishing/editorializing facet - vimeo is much more often direct linked for instance)
To be clear, I am not speaking for anybody in this thread but myself.
But I will unapologetically and forthrightedly say that, yes, if we're going to assert that YouTube has certain responsibilities for the nature of the videos that it hosts, and that it turns out that the nature of those responsibilities is such that YouTube can't possible meet them, then, yes, YouTube as we know it should be essentially shut down, at least going forward.
I am NOT going to say we should deliberately craft the responsibilities in such a way that YouTube is deliberately shut down. However, if it turns out that they are incapable of applying even the bare minimum effort that we as a society deem it necessary for them to apply, then, yes, it is absolutely a consequence that YouTube as we know it today may have to be so radically altered as to be a different site entirely.
In the general case, when the law requires certain obligations of you as a business, and you as a business can not meet them, that does not mean that suddenly those obligations are not applied to you. It means that your business is not legally viable, and needs to change until it is. It may be the case that there is no solution to being legally viable and being profitable, in which case, your business will cease to exist. Just as there is, for instance, no solution to being a business built around selling torrent files containing unlicensed commercial content to people. You can't defend yourself by saying you can't afford to get the licenses; your suitable legal remedy was to never have started this business in the first place. There's some concerns around grandfathering here to deal with, certainly, but they can still be affected going forward.
There is no guarantee that there is a solution where a company exerting whatever minimal control they are obligated to assert by society is capable of growing to the size of YouTube. If that is the case, so be it. The solution is not to just let them go because they happened to grow fast first.
(My solution to freedom of expression is an explosion of video sites, where each of them has ways of holding the videos to the societally-mandated minimum standard, and no one site can do it all because they simply can't muster the resources to be The One Site, because as they grow larger they encounter anti-scaling effects. Given how increasingly censorious Silicon Valley is becoming, as we are now into censoring the discussions about censoring discussions like the recent removal of Project Veritas from Twitter for its discussion of Pinterest censoring pro-life films, I expect this to increase the range of expression, not diminish it.)
Not speaking on behalf of what I want, but on behalf of what is true:
> It may be the case that there is no solution to being legally viable and being profitable, in which case, your business will cease to exist.
Or your business will exist illegally.
There's this interesting interplay between law and economics, where law is generally taken as a prerequisite for frictionless commerce, and yet at the same time if activities that large groups of people wish to partake in are made illegal, the market just routes around them and black markets spring up to provide them. Prohibition. The War on Drugs. Filesharing. Gambling. Employing illegal immigrants. Usury. Short-term rentals. Taxi medallions. Large swaths of the economy under communism.
There are a couple other interesting phenomena related to this: the very illegality of the activity tends to create large profits around it (because it creates barriers to entry, such that the market often ends up monopolized by a small cartel), and the existence of widespread black markets erodes respect for rule of law itself. When people see people around them getting very rich or otherwise deriving benefit from flouting the law, why should they follow it?
Switching to editorializing mode, I think that this gradual erosion of respect for law to be quite troubling, and I also think that the solution to it needs to be two-fold: stop trying to outlaw behaviors that are offensive to some but beloved by others, and start enforcing laws that if neglected really will result in the destruction of the system.
In the context of this particular case, I was assuming that nothing the current size of YouTube could exist illegally, as that would imply that whatever authority was declaring them "illegal", but not capable of doing anything about it despite it nominally living in its jurisdiction, must be anemic and impotent to the point of being nearly non-existent.
There's already an underground proliferation of video sites, spreading copyrighted content out of the bounds of what the rightsholders want, so it's pretty much assured we'd end up with illegal alternatives. :)
>A service just hosting videos (without recommending some of them) would be just fine.
It might be "just fine" in an abstract principle kind of way. However, reality would not support such a site because of human preferences.
The problem is that viewers want recommendations (both in search results and followup related videos) and content creators want to be promoted (to get views and ad revenue or sponsorships).
This means a video site with recommendations will outcompete a "dumb storage" video site where surfers must know the url for each video they want to play.
Perhaps it means that editorializing as a service is necessarily a business that needs to be kept separate from the hosting of videos - sort of like the older style of curated link lists that directed users to particularly interesting content existing beside the DNS service that stored an unbiased record of all content.
Some of that can be alleviated by trusted publishers, ie fox,cbs,abc... Won't need a review. Introduction of a paid queue. Just because they don't want to do it today doesn't mean it's an impossible solution just a hard one.
> Most youtube channels don't need the recommendation engine.
This is just not true. A massive part of the views originate from recommended/up next. Ask pretty much any creator. Only the core audience of a channel will have the notification bell on for a specific channel. Many users don't check the Subscription section and either link in from an external source, know beforehand what they want to search for or just watch what pops up in recommended.
> but in general, "We can't comply with this regulation, it would be too difficult at our scale" is not considered a valid defense
This is a great point that I was going to phrase slightly differently: if YouTube is too large to be able to prevent harm, YouTube needs to be regulated. YouTube get the benefit of being so large, so they should also get the cost.
Disclaimer: I work for YouTube, my personal view on the situation is this:
Bear in mind that YouTube does not operate only in the US with unhinged free speech laws. Many countries have stricter laws and YouTube definitely needs to comply with them.
Other than that, adpocalypse happened because of bad videos being surfaced by the algorithm so another responsibility is to the creators. (And shareholders)
There is nothing to be gained by having crap in your backyard.
YouTube needs no defense in this case because video recommendations are protected free speech. In the US at least it would be impossible to outlaw video recommendations in a way that would pass Constitutional review.
