Wojcicki and her deputies know this. In recent years, scores of people inside YouTube
and Google, its owner, raised concerns about the mass of false,
incendiary and toxic content that the world’s largest video site
surfaced and spread. One employee wanted to flag troubling videos, which
fell just short of the hate speech rules, and stop recommending them to
viewers. Another wanted to track these videos in a spreadsheet to chart
their popularity. A third, fretful of the spread of “alt-right” video
bloggers, created an internal vertical that showed just how popular they
were. Each time they got the same basic response: Don’t rock the boat.
The
company spent years chasing one business goal above others:
“Engagement,” a measure of the views, time spent and interactions with
online videos. Conversations with over twenty people who work at, or
recently left, YouTube reveal a corporate leadership unable or unwilling
to act on these internal alarms for fear of throttling engagement.
Wojcicki
would “never put her fingers on the scale,” said one person who worked
for her. “Her view was, ‘My job is to run the company, not deal with
this.’” This person, like others who spoke to Bloomberg News, asked not
to be identified because of a worry of retaliation.
More journalism on youtube
An example of how profit-centered culture grows fascists like mold on bread
This abandoned “chicken church” was built by Daniel Alamsjah when he suddenly got a divine message from god to build a place of worhsip in the form of a dove. It is located in Indonesia.
