![]() In one experiment, he and his researchers reviewed thousands of TikToks about the recent German federal election to see how well TikTok had filtered out bad information. Hickey has recently sought to test the effectiveness of TikTok’s dectective work. What’s powering those take-downs? A combined effort of man and machine: human moderators reviewing videos and some internal software to catch bad posts. In its latest transparency report, the company said it removed 81.5 million pieces of offending content during the first half of 2021. Like YouTube, TikTok has gone public with efforts to combat misinformation. (TikTok couldn’t be reached to comment for this story.) The company has said its Chinese headquarters holds no sway over the videos served up to American viewers, a claim likely holding little weight with Republican senators several within the GOP, including Texas’ Ted Cruz and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, have long voiced strident opposition to TikTok, declaring it a risk a national security and fearing China’s community government could manipulate it. “That’s very different from watching 60 videos every hour” on TikTok, where a user would then find an even wider range of “potentially harmful or damaging concepts.”Ĭomplicating matters further for TikTok: its Chinese owner, the billionaire Zhang Yiming, and Asia-based CEO, Shouzi Chew. “On YouTube, maybe you watch 24 one-hour videos, and one of those videos is made by an anti-vax crackpot,” he says. This lets users see more TikTok videos more quickly, a rate of increased consumption that then carries an increased risk of landing on sludgy content, says Cameron Hickey, the project director for algorithmic transparency at the National Conference on Citizenship. TikTok videos are shorter than a typical one on YouTube, usually a minute or less. But its popularity revolves entirely around its recommendation algorithm, the For You feed, perhaps making it a more tempting target for lawmakers. TikTok also dispenses great quantities of video-to 1 billion or so users on Earth. It’s much easier to search text or read than it is to search in video, particularly content in a long video.” There’s another more fundamental reason YouTube has avoided the heaviest backlashes, she says: “Video by its nature is harder to study. ![]() Some of it, she believes, comes from the fact that many politicians don’t use YouTube as much as Facebook or Twitter, making them less attuned to its problems. ![]() Douek, the Harvard lecturer, has recently spent a good deal of time thinking about why YouTube has seemed to skate by. YouTube has largely escaped the same scrutiny put on Facebook (and to a lesser degree, Twitter). (YouTube wouldn’t comment for this story beyond identifying the executive it is sending to Washington: Leslie Miller, vice president of government affairs and public policy.) In August, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending her company’s policies and signaling YouTube would welcome new regulations. More recently, YouTube has imposed some degree of greater self-control over itself, cracking down on things like right-wing hate speech and vaccine misinformation. It is partly but not entirely built around a recommendation algorithm, a feature that can lead users to increasingly radicalized content and has drawn the attention of lawmakers looking to latch onto possible areas for reform. Several years ago, for instance, it was allowing some Neo-Nazis on its site but later banned one group, Atomwaffen, amid pressure from the Anti-Defamation League. In some moments, YouTube has seemed to act inconsistently in taking down content, sometimes flip-flopping on decisions. One famous debacle came in 2018, when the influencer Logan Paul posted a video that went viral featuring a dead body in a Japanese forest tragically popular as a suicide site. The site has a checkered past with content moderation. teens watch YouTube videos, according to data from Statista, a statistics research firm, and close to 70% of all Americans spend time there. In the trio, YouTube is the biggest, oldest and most well known, having grown to over 2 billion users worldwide over 16 years. The similarities mainly end there, though, and their exact fates in Congress on Tuesday and beyond will differ based on their varying stances on content moderation and corporate histories, as well as the nuances around how each app works. And none of them will probably face the frosty hostility that Facebook received. On Tuesday, each will need to reckon with the same broad topics: content moderation and protections for young users. They’re widely used by pre-teens and teenagers and count their users by the hundreds of millions. The three companies share some basic DNA.
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