YouTube CEO on Facebook’s video ambitions: ‘They should get back to baby pictures’
And, really, inciting her to create fake news?
Swisher: What would you be worried about if they did?
Wojcicki: Well I’m not sure I would tell you because then they would read it and then maybe do it… But I mean…
Swisher: Make something up!
Wojcicki: I mean, I think they should focus on what they’re focused on. I think they should get back to baby pictures and sharing.
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
YouTube’s CEO explains why the site hasn’t banned Logan Paul over his recent controversies
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki explained at Recode’s Code Media conference on Monday that the controversial YouTube star Logan Paul hasn’t violated enough of the site’s policies to get banned from the platform.
“When someone violates our policies three times, we terminate. We terminate accounts all the time,” Wojcicki said. “He hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes.”
That’s not a line YouTube can hold forever. Eventually their service will degrade to being derisively called DICKTube.
YouTube Revamped Its Ad System. AT&T Still Hasn’t Returned.
But that has not been enough for AT&T, which wants YouTube to get “as close to zero tolerance for this issue as possible,” Fiona Carter, the company’s chief brand officer, said in a recent interview.
“It became apparent to us as we worked through this that too much of the content our advertising could appear against was not brand safe — it was objectionable by any measure,” Ms. Carter said. “You really have an epiphany when you see some of that content.”
She added, “Our findings are that no matter the algorithm or the filters or the formula that you currently apply, nothing beats human review.”
That depends on the human doing the reviewing. How many times have we seen uneducated idiots block something on a large service that causes an uproar among the educated? I can’t even count anymore. How do they even get their jobs when they’re culturally illiterate?
Do Big Advertisers Even Matter to the Platforms?
For every $100 million a major advertiser like Unilever or P&G is willing to move off the platforms, there are another million advertisers eager to replace them with much smaller buys. This is the power of self service platforms. In March of 2016, Facebook announced it had 3 million advertisers. One year later, that number was 5 million. The vast majority of those were individuals and small businesses spending $20 or $30 a pop promoting pages they created themselves (you know, kind of like the Russians did).
I’ve yet to see any small advertisers on YouTube. Anyone?
Also:
Major advertisers may not be able to throw their weight around like they used to, but they do have a shot at the moral high ground. The key to today’s story is the qualifier: Weed is threatening to cut off all marketing spend on platforms which fail to “create a positive impact in society.”
So who determines “positive impact”? If there’s one clear takeaway from the mess that the platforms have found themselves in since the election, it’s this: Google and Facebook are genetically incapable of taking responsibility for the content on their platforms. Doing so would quite literally destroy the core of their business model as “neutral tech platforms.” As Sheryl Sandberg puts it: “We are not a media company.” She may as well have added: “And we don’t intend to become one.”
Two things: That “positive impact” stuff. Who judges? If it was up to a certain shrieking minority, I’m certain Jordan Peterson’s videos would have been banned as “divisive.”
And second, that whole “we’re not a media business” is so disingenuous. Every tech firm wants to be a media company. Amazon and Apple are financing movies and TV shows. Do we have to wait for Facebook Films for them to admit their goal? Please!
Previously here:
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