YouTube and Susan Wojcicki's War on Free Expression

[massspectrician]

SueTube

Susan Wojcicki has been the chief executive officer of YouTube since 2014. Her tenure as the company's boss has brought about a confusing and troublesome number of policy decisions.

Multiple rounds of demonetization of independent content creators, specifically targeting conservative or controversial voices.

Deprioritization of these voices in search results and algorithmic recommendations.

Promotion of mainstream news sources over independent journalists, seemingly spitting in the eye of what YouTube was created to be.

Various other shady practices such as shadow banning content.

Cui Bono?

These policies are designed to prop up far left voices. You will not find channels such as The Young Turks being affected by these decisions as they peddle a narrative that Wojcicki promotes. The so called "progressive" wing of the Democratic party is being given a pass while everyone else, including liberals who don't embrace postmodernism, gets the short end of the stick.

Mainstream sources have in recent months seen a great deal of favoritism paid to them by Alphabet Corp.'s subsidiary YouTube, despite being less popular (receiving less engagement on posts, lower like/dislike ratios, and significantly fewer overall views). This seems to indicate collusion between YouTube and garbage content creators like Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox and mainstream broadcast and cable media outlets.

Recourse

It seems that there is no real method to petition YouTube on the negative decisions they make. They operate in the shadows despite proclaiming a commitment to transparency. Multiple content creators regularly speak on YouTube's wall of silence regarding their grievances such as Sinatra_Says, Steven Crowder, and Tim Pool despite their large audiences.

What Can Be Done?

There are a few real things that content consumers can do to punish YouTube for their transgressions. Here are a few suggestions.

Use an adblocker on YouTube, the content creators you appreciate aren't getting any money from advertisements even if you are shown one, almost certainly.

Follow the creators you like on BitChute. Most of the creators I appreciate are there and YouTube won't get a red cent if you consume their media there instead.

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That said, fuck Susan Wokcicki. Thank you for reading.

Comments

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[massspectrician]

I recommended BitChute for two primary reasons:

Susan Wojkicki isn't the CEO and they have publicly stated a commitment to free expression.

Many creators have adopted the platform, while I agree that decentralized projects are a better option, they lack the level of adoption enjoyed by BitChute.

[massspectrician]

The fact that it is based in the United Kingdom is concerning given the UK's government seeming wanton zeal for censoring people (I'd include the despicable treatment visited upon Tommy Robinson among some of the other issues you've already identified).

BitChute is actually a peer-to-peer platform, it is based on WebTorrent.

I do support projects that are less centralized that BitChute, such as DTube, but I don't know of another platform that has enjoyed adoption by creators more than BitChute, which, while unfortunate, is key to functioning as a proper surrogate to YouTube.

Ultimately, with the censorship issue, it seems unlikely a truly decentralized platform is possible with today's internet infrastructure. Someone has to register a domain and host the website's code, which is always going to introduce a degree of centralization even in blockchain based projects.