People have been talking about how Youtube‘s reliance on traffic-driving recommendation algorithms has turned the site into an engine for extreme right wing recruitment.  We’ve been talking about it, but this looks like the perfect moment to really press the issue.

The latest white supremacist terrorist name dropped a youtube goon right before killing people. It may seem venal to use a moment like this to push a political agenda, but that’s only if your brain is back in 1995 treating politics like opinions. This is life and death. Breaking this messed up machine can save your children from becoming killers, or from being killed.

Youtube. I can tell you exactly why this happened. Hate sells. It drives excitement, which drives clicks and page views and view time. So your blind robots see a neo-nazi channel and it just looks popular, looks commercially successful, and tries to send as many people that way as possible. I see less of that stuff on your front page than I used to, so I suspect you’re doing a little damage control. But it isn’t enough.

You need to de-platform these people. Anyone who talks about white genocide, about immigrants as invaders, and so on. If you can program robots to copyright block anyone who accidentally produces the wrong chord progression, you can figure out a way to block hate speech.

You built the nerd-to-nazi pipeline. It’s high time you tore it down.

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