Who Will Guard Us From The Guardians? YouTube “Protects” Users By Hiding “Conspiracy Theories”
Authored by Robert Bridge
ZeroHedge.com
Thu, 01/31/2019
Flat earth, 9/11 ‘inside job’, and the Kennedy assassination ‘cover-up’. These are just some of the ‘conspiracy theories’ that YouTube will baby proof going forward, hiding such content from users as if they were not cognitively thinking adults capable of making rational decisions.
This month, disgraced Buzzfeed performed yet another astonishing feat of shoddy, agenda-driven journalism by reporting that it took just nine mouse clicks on YouTube to go from a PBS report on the 116th Congress to a video entitled ‘A Day in the Life of an Arizona Rancher,’ produced by a Washington immigration reform group known as The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
The video that so enraged Buzzfeed details the story of Richard Humphries, an Arizona resident and former narcotics officer living just miles from the US-Mexico border. Humphries, increasingly concerned with the number of illegals traversing his 75-acre ranch, built a watchtower on his sprawling property to help him and federal border agents track illegal aliens. Considering the ‘extremist nature’ of the content, is it any surprise that the CIS was branded in 2016 a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group itself that has been portrayed as touting a leftist agenda, yet is quietly partnering with YouTube to flag ‘hate’ content?
The Buzzfeed article took exception with many other ‘right-wing’ videos that had the audacity to rear their racist heads in YouTube’s auto-select function. One of those channels is called PragerU, which hosts popular liberal bugbears, including Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, James Damore and Charlie Kirk. The channel, which filed a lawsuit to stop Google and YouTube from illegally censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech, operates on the principle of providing “knowledge and clarity on life’s biggest and most interesting topics… ranging from history and economics to science and happiness.”
Sounds pretty radical, yes? Well, only if you happen to be situated on the left of the political spectrum, as the overwhelming bulk of the IT undoubtedly is. Then yes, all that free right-wing speech may seem radical and worth tweaking the almighty algorithm to ensure they never see the light of day. Never mind that the original YouTube algorithm was built on a market-driven principle where the most popular videos shot to the top in the feeds, a phenomenon that presented a direct threat to the mainstream media message. Given the Left’s hot embrace of Cultural Marxist principles, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Silicon Valley shuns the free market when it works against its own interests.
Now YouTube, obeying the Buzzfeed dog whistle, has pledged to turn the screws even more on ‘conspiratorial’ (i.e. right-wing) creators by “taking a closer look” at how the “Up Next” videos that autoplay after each video ends can lead viewers astray into the dense field of conspiracy-theory, pockmarked as it is with rabbit holes of various sizes and shapes.
Google announced it will begin “reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”
Although Google said the changes will not affect “whether a video is available on YouTube,” judging by the personal experience of several popular YouTube commentators, for example, Mark Dice, the new algorithm is so effective that even when the exact title of one of his ‘controversial’ videos is entered into the channel’s search field it will not yield the correct result.
The Rest…HERE
