Ask HN: YouTube is the cutting edge of fake news, why don't Google fix it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: YouTube is the cutting edge of fake news, why don't Google fix it?

8 pointsandrewstuart8 comments

I watch news on Youtube every night. I watch CNN, MSNBC, Fox and others.

And Youtube constantly suggests that I watch what is apparently those same newscasts, but often the news clips presented are not from the original news organisation, they are published by some no-name Youtube accounts.

So essentially Youtube is full of accounts that take the news from the major outlets, and recut it, and then it gets re-presented back to Youtube viewers.

This seems to me to be blatant "fake news" and provides massive opportunity for bad actors to cut the news how they want it cut.

Youtube is a seething mass of corrupted news re-cutters and surely an obvious target for foreign influencers who want to present the news in ways that are meaningful to them

Why isn't Youtube onto this, when fake news is such a huge issue for technology companies?

View on HN

Money. YouTube revenue is via advertising, they want to keep your eyeballs on their videos. They probably have search/google history of you going to CNN or something and then present suggested videos from "there". They don't care what the content is, just that you are watching ads before the videos and stay on their site.

You can probably read faster than watching a video stream. Go to places like BBC news to get a feel for what is happening on our planet. Or buy a major city newspaper and read it. Video hardly will have the depth of a properly written piece of journalism. If you think major papers are biased, read a few different ones about the same topic to get a sense of what you think is going on. A lot of the bias in TV news is what stories they decide to run or not run, not necessarily the 30-60 second content.

Everyone else says money. The real reason is darker.

When the first broadcast media came out, radio and later TV, there was very limited bandwidth. The FCC had to apportion out a finite spectrum, and the powers there decided to make sure the public got their money's worth (because spectrum is a public good). Remember when government did that?

That ensured that building a transmitter and beaming out programming was expensive not only from a physical hardware perspective, but also from a licensing and compliance perspective. If the FCC thought your approved use of public airwaves was a little too raunchy or biased, you'd lose that approval.

Now with ubiquitous internet, bandwidth is essentially free. Net neutrality aside, there's no public interest in governmental involvement in bandwidth from a scarcity perspective, and we've yet to reach an agreed-upon point where there is any other reason for governmental involvement.

Imagine the heady days of TV with the lineup of talking heads, push polling, personal branding, backroom deals, astroturfing, sockpuppetry, and exogovernmental involvement we have today.

To answer the question, Google won't fix it because no government forces them to.

Fake news creators pay to promote their clickbait content. Content that plays on people’s fears. Of course people are going to click on it. Then it reinforces the algorithms that are designed to show it more often. It becomes a feedback loop driving crap to the surface. This is happening everywhere. It’s the evolution of social media driven by algorithms to maximize profit.

The better question is: why doesn’t everyone leave these platforms?

YouTube is also still full of ElsaGate predatory pedo accounts and YouTube is happy to play ads to the millions of views each video gets. But Alex Jones? Sorry, can't have him or a few other conservative loud voices on the platform.

The core of the problem is that fake news is much more interesting than real news. "Laughing Swedish PM seen kicking puppies!" will net you many, many more views than "Swedish PM presents new tax reform!"

Seen this a lot too.

I guess it spells "money", simple as that.

While the monetary benefit aren't big enough, or even positive, it's not worth doing. What is worth doing is getting ad impression revenue on clickbaity things.

>> I guess it spells "money", simple as that.

I would have thought with the political stakes so high that Youtube/Google would care about more than just the money.

I can see the heads of Google sitting in front of congress trying to explain Youtube as the most obvious fake news platform. You'd think they might want to avoid that.

I've been looking for an answer to this for a while now. What would be a good way to fix it, other than youtube have its own moderators to filter the content out?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com