We need to talk about YouTube
Jordan Guiao, a research fellow at The Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology, suggests it might be time to hit Pause on YouTube and smash that subscribe button on scrutiny.
YouTube is a huge deal. Consumers love it, kids love watching random toy unboxings in it, brands love the reach it gives. But it’s also full of crap, ranging from the wasted ad spend on irrelevant videos, to the serious, really disturbing crap, like terrorist content and violent mob glorification, to conspiracy theorists and medical misinformation.
I get it. We would really rather prefer to ignore the bad stuff. We love the easy reach, the potential for virality, and the fact that it’s the most easily embeddable video player in the whole Internet. YouTube is after all the second most popular social network after Facebook. It’s also the second largest search engine after Google. So where the audience goes, we go.
But things are about to change.
