Alex Winter: Is The YouTube Effect Good or Bad on Balance?

A new documentary film argues that the second-largest website on the planet is flooded with misinformation. Is that right?

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Alex Winter: Is The YouTube Effect Good or Bad on Balance?

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

The guest this week was actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, whose new documentary is The YouTube Effect, an in-depth look at the ways in which that video site has radically altered how we produce and consume politics, culture, and ideas. In past documentaries, Winter investigated Napster and its users; told the story of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road dark web site; and profiled the life and legacy of rock musician and free expression activist Frank Zappa.

In The YouTube Effect, Winter traces the rise of YouTube from its launch in 2005 to its status as the second-most-visited website on the planet, behind only its corporate owner, Google. My co-host Zach Weissmueller and I talk with him about his concerns about polarization and disinformation in a lively and spirited conversation about the future of free speech and creative expression.

Comments

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

No way!

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[Henry Krinkle]

Remind me to never listen to this commie putz about anything ever again. He is piss poor at hiding his obvious leftist agenda.

[Dillinger]

remember when I asked your mom to prom? shut up, Ted.

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[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Speaking of the Facebook Effect,

CNN:

There was no censorship.
Ok, there was censorship, but it's not as bad as you say.
Ok, there is censorship, it was directed by the Biden white house, and it needs to happen more.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

So, once again. Another Greenwald video that is even more slanted and more biased than the sources that he criticizes. This video is full of open editorializing and outright name-calling. How is this 'news'?

He could have cited this WSJ article on the matter (a friendly right-wing source for him):

https://archive.is/bO6zl

At least it has more background information and context about the whole process. Not just the one email from Jim Jordan.

[Mother's Lament]

And our resident establishment progressive shill slithers out to smear a left libertarian for the crime of not abandoning his principles and joining the fascist censorship jihad.

Fuck you, Jeff. Words can't express how much you repulse me. Fucking Nazi.

[Lawman45]

"FUJ". says it all. Why is the Left so fearful of the clash of ideas?
I have known since college (66 years ago) - vacuous ideas cannot stand a fair fight with substantive ideas.

[sarcasmic]

This video is full of open editorializing and outright name-calling. How is this ‘news’?

News means picking and choosing stories to further a political agenda. That's why when Reason chooses one story over another, the comments erupt with accusations of political bias.
"Reason reported on xyz instead of abc because they're leftists! Based upon them not saying anything about abc, they must think this, that and the other thing! They're all leftists!"

Of course the people saying that have no idea of what 'leftist' actually means, they obviously can't read minds so they're full of shit, and they're so stupid they believe what they are saying.

These comments aren't even entertaining anymore. Just tedious and dull.

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[Brandybuck]

People don't even read the article before they start shrieking that its fake noos bias. To the point that they accuse Reason of being for something when the article is clearly against it. Mindless commenters. They can't get halfway through an article title before they have to rage against the "Reason Leftist Indoctrination Machine".

I worry about these people in real life. Are they literally living in their mothers' basements? Do they really get all their information from Weekly World News and Prison Planet?

[Zeb]

There is abundant evidence that government and media have been colluding to control information, in some cases by outright censorship and in some cases by more subtle means. I think there's plenty of room for editorializing and outrage at this point. If it wasn't for the 10 other things that should be the biggest scandals of the 21st century, this would deserve to be treated as a major scandal.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Your Friday moment of zen.

Not sure if anyone saw the Munk debates between Douglas Murray, Matt Taibbi vs. Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg... I did. While I knew that Murray had cleaned Gladwell's clock, I found the most interesting exchange between Taibbi who got Goldberg so flustered she started re-defending the Steele Dossier.

I turns out that Gladwell had such a poor performance-- losing by the largest margin in the history of the Munk debates, it caused him to have a no-shit nervous breakdown. Apparently, he claimed that Murray was trained, military-style by the Oxford Union in rapier-wit debating tactics, and so it was all unfair.

I've always said: Debate Douglas Murray at your peril. I never thought it was literal peril. But for a Washington Post hack, it literally means your physical health.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

So, don't trust mainstream media then.
So, trust Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald? Who deliver "news" that is even more slanted than mainstream media?

You're not going to be well informed if you only listen to Taibbi and Greenwald.

[Mother's Lament]

You're not going to be informed at all if you don't, fifty-center.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

LOL, the cope in your post is off the charts.

For all your peacocking about "debating ideas," you give the game away with how worked up into a lather you get when your side gets its shit pushed in during an actual debate. Must suck seeing a situation where your sophistry and misdirection can't be brought to bear.

[Zeb]

What do you mean by "slanted" and why does it matter? Is their reporting incorrect? And who is only listening to Taibbi and Greenwald? You won't be informed at all if you only listen to the legacy media.

[Longtobefree]

That what you deserve if you engage in a battle of wits when unarmed.

[SRG]

Thanks for pointing me to that debate. Murray is bloody good as a debater. Not quite Hitchens – he doesn’t have the erudition – but still excellent.

However, I take issue with the question. Instead, there are two questions. What is the probability that MSM will report an important story? and what is the rate of inclusion of salient facts with accuracy? Trust thence becomes relative - if WaPo, for example, reports 80% of such stories with 90% accuracy, that may make them more trustworthy than say Freakazoid Press which reports 40% of such stories and manages only 50% accuracy. But that is far from saying, "trust WaPo" - or "don't trust WaPo" - because everyone may have different percentages at which thet deem a source trustworthy or not.

This approach will, naturally, be rejected by partisans who say they don't trust MSM but will trust alternative media left or right with lower reporting and accuracy rates. But fuck 'em.

[Zeb]

No, you shouldn't trust any of them implicitly. I think legacy media has lost all credibility. The best we can do at this point is look to diverse sources of information and hope that somewhere in there is some reflection of reality.

[Eeyore]

How do I know YouTube is evil? If I don't disable autoplay it always navigates to MSNBC. EVIL!

[Public Entelectual]

"A new documentary film argues that the second-largest website on the planet is flooded with misinformation. Is that right?"

Not if you watch the There Are Giants Among Us and Hollow Earth videos.

[Ty Gold]

I may have misunderstood so someone feel free to correct me. This interview essentially boiled down to "disinformation is any right-,wing MAGA stuff that Alex Winter disagrees with".

Waiting for Keanu Reeves to weigh in

[MasterThief]

Couldn't be bothered to watch because I know how they

[Mother's Lament]

Pretty much.
These guys would've loved the 30's.

[Mother's Lament]

37:33
The little Nazi wants to ban "fighting words".

You could handwave these guys away as clowns if they weren't so dangerous to free speech.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

Yeah, his whole pretense is the same old marxist repressive tolerance.

[Longtobefree]

You tube has true stuff and false stuff; but the real problem is true stuff you don't like and can't refute.
Maybe you should stick to the cat videos and music clips.

[Sequel]

The intriguing variety of ultra-left and ultra-right that YouTube fills my menus with appeals to me.

It helps to clarify how easy it is in polarized times to be both libertarian and liberal, how easy it is for government to wrest control of information from non-governmental sources, and how difficult it is for many people to confront the task of listening to viewpoints one disagrees with.

I only wish that YouTube would cast off more of its restrictions.

[Brandybuck]

YouTube is rife with false videos. Don't know about political videos, as I don't watch them. But it's a huge problem with "hacks" vidoes. Craft hacks and cooking hacks, being churned out of content mills. Mostly just repetitive shit meant to farm clicks, but a many are misleading and some are downright dangerous. YouTube refuses to take them down. People have died from a series of videos telling people how to use a microwave transformer to etch patterns in wood with electricity. Others have then eating bleach soaked strawberries. It's crazy, and YouTube won't do anything.

A new trend is the fake science videos. Same kind of content farms. Mostly just copying stories from legit science content, but some just making outright shit up, and misquoting scientists and whatever they can to ride a current trend while clicks are high. YouTube doesn't care.

The solution is to get your critical thinking skills together and look at the sources the content is coming from. Don't just watch random videos, because as Sturgeon's Law states, 95% of everything is crap. And avoid falling into a confirmation bubble, which is the hard part. A lot of good nuclear power content, but also a shit load that is outright lying about it with outrageous claims.

So what's happening with political videos? I dunno, I don't watch them. But I imagine it's in the same boat. Clickbait farms are going to feed the Left what they want to hear, and feed the Right what they want to hear, and who cares if it's true or not? It's the clicks that matter.

Fake news is bad enough, but backing it up with clickbait makes it worse. I have to read stories from three different sources from three different political perspective, just to make sense of what really happened. (Did Trump really kick an old lady in the shins? Did Biden really shoplift a Snickers bar?)

Of course, YouTube is not going to fix this. They get their money from advertisers, and advertisers only pay for clicks. So the clickbait is here to stay.

[Zeb]

Of course it is. And that's good. If they want to be a free speech oriented, more or less open platform, what else would you expect? People need to expect that they will be exposed to lots of bullshit and learn to think critically and find multiple sources.

[Lawman45]

Read snippits of it all then make up YOUR OWN mind.

[Religion and Politics, my life]

YouTube is where lonely self-hating atheists go to tell each other how hard it is to be so loving and wise while all those Jews and Christians keep standing in the way of great people like Hitler and Stalin and Mao. They often point to Thomas Jefferson, whose biographer said of him: He resembled Pol Pot and Timothy McVeigh

Here it is at the 31’40 markhttps://www.c-span.org/video/?75932-1/the-long-affair