How extremism came to thrive on YouTube
A system built to attract the maximum amount of user attention succeeds beyond all expectation, only to wind up promoting dangerous misinformation and hate speech around the world. It’s a story we have considered often in the context of Facebook, which has responded to the criticism with a promise to change the very nature of the company. And it’s a story we have not discussed nearly enough in the context of YouTube, which has promoted a similarly disturbing network of extremists and foreign propagandists and has tended to intervene cautiously and with underwhelming force.
Certainly YouTube has received its share of criticism since the broader reckoning over social networks began in 2016. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was compelled to answer…
