YouTube vs. The Tin Hats
It may sound like an odd crossover, but YouTube will be employing the help of Wikipedia articles to provide context around popular conspiracy videos posted to the platform. While YouTube purports itself as a content platform, “not a news organization,” there’s no doubting the damage the brand’s sustained over the past year: from Russian scandal to content moderation issues.While YouTube hasn’t specified just how the context effort will be enacted—via pop-up context blurbs or video descriptions—there’s incentive to help clear up the platform. On average YouTube view time exceeds 1 billion hours per day. Whether creators like it, there’s a degree of responsibility that YouTube must take for the content posted to its platform. The days of Flat Earther channels may be numbered.
How’s Wikipedia feel about the move? Well, aside from the fact that they weren’t aware of the video giant’s plans, there’s concern about the ethical impact of leveraging a user-contributor encyclopedia to support a platform which generated an estimated $5 billion in 2015.
Disney Duels Netflix in 2019
In a bold turn of events, Disney has begun a company-wide restructure in anticipation of its rival Netflix service set to
rollout in 2019. The media giant is segmenting its current brand into three divisions: Walt Disney Parks & Resorts,
Studio Entertainment and Media Networks, and the Disney|ABC Television Group.
The reorg effort comes on the heels of the corporation’s acquisition of BAMTech, a direct-to-consumer media service that provides Disney with a scalable framework for their streaming effort. While Netflix’s 2017 earning statement exceeded revenue expectations, competition from Disney could eat into their subscriber count, which fell short of their estimated 98.93 million.
SXSW 2018 Tackles Social Media
SXSW has long been associated with cutting-edge technology, responsible for catapulting apps like Twitter and FourSquare to fame among influencers and early adopters. And while there’ve been great experiential exhibits—the Westworld mini theme park was the darling of the festival—the focus of this year’s panels was the ramifications of social media on the world stage.
Top execs from Reddit, Medium and Twitter came to chat about the ugly side of constant connection, citing the Russian propaganda campaigns that were uncovered as meddling in the 2016 election, hate groups that congregate on sites like Reddit, and troll Twitter bots. The theme of responsibility reigned as Ev Williams, CEO of Medium admits: “When we built Twitter, we weren’t thinking about [malicious users]. We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior. And now we’re catching on to that.”
It’s an important conversation to have, now more than ever as social platforms reach critical saturation.
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