Tag: social media

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Making YouTube Safe for Advertisers

With 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, YouTube has an enormous problem. How do you monitor that much content to ensure that it meets company guidelines and policies, and protects users and advertisers? Let’s be honest, for a company that makes $$$ on digital advertising any threat to that income stream is going to receive their full attention.

Recent concerns about threats to the welfare of children surfing YouTube have caused some companies to pull their advertising. AT&T, Epic Games (publisher of Fortnite) and others have stepped away to protect their brands from being linked to content, or comments, that cross the line. According to an article in Wired magazine, YouTube is an unwitting accomplice to some pretty awful exploitation. “It’s yet another example [of] YouTube’s algorithm doing what it’s designed to in order to show viewers what it thinks they’ll want, and in this case, it’s actively enabling the production and distribution of paedophilic content.”

The image of Momo was created by a Japanese special effects company called Link Factory.

While much of the concern is justified, the Momo Challenge hoax* has resurfaced prompting YouTube to pull all advertising from certain videos that contain reference to the creepy image that is apparently linked to messages of self-harm. According to The Verge, YouTube is applying their Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines to justify pulling ads from these videos.

And that brings us back to the real threat here. It is not just a threat of pedophilia, or promotion of self-harm…but the threat to a financial machine that must be protected and kept safe from existential threats in the form of advertiser boycotts. Now that’s scary!

*For more about the viral hoax associated with Momo, see this article from Nieman Lab.

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Fyre Festival Torch Job

I once knew an old fire chief and he used to describe arson as, “a New York torch job”…no matter where it happened. Arson, as you well know, is a crime committed to defraud an insurance company and make off with the cash. Of course insurance companies and law enforcement are pretty good at sniffing out circumstances when arson is likely to have occurred, and when they do the guy playing with fire is the one who gets burned.

According to Wikipedia, the Fyre Festival was “a failed ‘luxury music festival’ founded by Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media Inc, and rapper Ja Rule. It was created with the intent of promoting the company’s Fyre app for booking music talent.”

Here’s the promo video…

Slick promotional video

Two documentaries (one from Hulu and the other from Netflix) were released a couple of weeks ago. According to The New Republic website, “Both documentaries purport to tell the ‘real’ story behind the Fyre Festival debacle of 2017, in which the charlatan Billy McFarland ripped off customers who had bought into an Instagram-fueled dream of partying with supermodels in the Bahamas. The dream never materialized—instead of champagne and concerts and luxury villas, ticket-holders encountered FEMA tents, empty beaches, and a transportation crisis. McFarland left behind a trail of unpaid debts, notably to the residents of Great Exuma itself, and ended up in jail for wire fraud.”

But this is where things really get interesting. According to The New Republic, the Netflix version of the story may be an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the festival’s much maligned promoter. The full article is worth the read and contains fascinating information about how this scam materialized. For example, Kendall Jenner was paid $250,000 for one Instagram tweet promoting the festival. As MCCNM student Monique Cousin observed, “it was Instagram that created the buzz for the festival, and one tweet of a cheese sandwich that brought it down.”

The infamous cheese sandwich pic

The article concludes with this caution…”Fyre Festival is a story about insidious digital marketing, corporate irresponsibility, and the misdeeds of a handful of men who control the images that appear on your social media and shape your opinions.”

The event billed as “the cultural experience of the decade” turns out to be just another warning of eminent danger ahead for those who can’t read the signs of the times.

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A Teachable Moment at the Lincoln Memorial

Last week in class we spent some time laying the groundwork for our study of mass media and the societal effects of modern communications technologies. To understand media you have to understand communication and that begins with the ancient art of rhetoric and the modern study of semiotics and how we share and process symbols.

We discussed how we, as human beings, are born communicators. We like to connect with others and share our experiences. We are constantly communicating even when we’re not aware of it. We cannot NOT communicate. We discussed how everything that we SAY (or don’t say) and DO communicates…including our choice of clothing, our body language, and our use of space.

Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann and Native American Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial

These points were illustrated and driven home in a video that circulated over the weekend. You might recognize this frame from a video clip that went viral on social media. The students had participated in the March for Life demonstration earlier in the day and were waiting for their buses to arrive to take them home. As you can see, some of the students (including Sandmann) are wearing MAGA hats. Phillips, an activist and Omaha tribal elder, had participated in The Indigenous Peoples March earlier in the day. A third group, members of the Black Hebrew Israelites sect, were also present and a factor in what transpired.

A real problem here is that many made up their minds about what happened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday based on very little evidence…and evidence that may have been carefully selected to present a particular narrative. If you are willing to invest a bit of time to dig a little deeper, and are willing to keep an open mind, you may find out that your initial gut reaction is not entirely supported. In fact major news organizations are updating their initial posts and writing new commentaries to include evidence that became available in a number of long, unedited, videos posted to YouTube. You can find links to these videos in a commentary posted at the Reason.com website.

This week we’ll explore issues related to social media including: viral videos, manufactured outrage, public shaming, and doxing. This weekend’s events contains all of these and more. Later in the semester we’ll explore “fake news” and how confirmation bias and uncritical thinking are key factors in how so many are so easily misled by propaganda and biased reporting.

The screen shot on the left includes a tweet from Michael Green, a film and television screen writer. The commentary before and after the tweet is by Rod Dreher, an author and writer. You might consider the fact that Green and Dreher are modern-day storytellers and mass media heavyweights. They are shaping our culture and telling us how to think about the issues of the day. But they clearly see things from very different perspectives.

Former CNN host Reza Aslan appears to be endorsing violence as an appropriate response

On this day set aside to honor the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., it is important to remember that racial bigotry remains and must be confronted at every opportunity. But as Reverend King reminded us repeatedly, only love drives out hate. Hatred is easy, fast, and decisive. Love is hard, slow, and often unsure. The choice is ours.

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