Two years after #Pizzagate showed the dangers of hateful conspiracies, they're still rampant on YouT

Source: Washington Post

Two years after #Pizzagate showed the dangers of hateful conspiracies, they’re still rampant on YouTube

By Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Tony Romm and Andrew Ba Tran December 10 at 9:15 PM

A year after YouTube’s chief executive promised to curb “problematic” videos, it continues to harbor and even recommend hateful, conspiratorial videos, allowing racists, anti-Semites and proponents of other extremist views to use the platform as an online library for spreading their ideas.

YouTube is particularly valuable to users of Gab.ai and 4chan, social media sites that are popular among hate groups but have scant video capacity of their own. Users on these sites link to YouTube more than to any other website, thousands of times a day, according to the recent work of Data and Society and the Network Contagion Research Institute, both of which track the spread of hate speech.

The platform routinely serves videos espousing neo-Nazi propaganda, phony reports portraying dark-skinned people as violent savages and conspiracy theories claiming that large numbers of leading politicians and celebrities molested children. Critics say that even though YouTube removes millions of videos on average each month, it is slow to identify troubling content and, when it does, is too permissive in what it allows to remain.

The struggle to control the spread of such content poses ethical and political challenges to YouTube and its embattled parent company, Google, whose chief executive, Sundar Pichai, is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill on Tuesday amid several controversies. Even on the House of Representatives YouTube channel that is due to broadcast the hearing, viewers on Monday could see several videos peddling conspiracy theories recommended by the site’s algorithm.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/hateful-conspiracies-thrive-on-youtube-despite-pledge-to-clean-up-problematic-videos/2018/12/10/625730a8-f3f8-11e8-9240-e8028a62c722_story.html