I wouldn’t call this a “what a week in entertainment!” media week, but at least one outlet ran an “special emergency” newsletter, so clearly we had news. Instead of that big story–or the continued musical chairs at Warner Media–I’ve had my eye on a few stories that add up to a bigger one.

Most Important Story of the Week – Youtube Battles Child Pornography/Predators

This was a contender for the most important story last week, but got bumped since it isn’t really a “one-time’ story. It’s slightly evergreen. Since we invented video on the internet, we’ve had these problems. Slate had an article on Periscope and child predators back in 2017. So I’m not just picking on Youtube even though I put them in the headline; any social media platform (with video/images) eventually has to deal with predators targeting teenagers and children.

Let’s stick on that for one quick moment.

“Predators”

“Targeting”

“Children”

I just paused to think, “Is that too strong?” It really isn’t. It just describes what is happening. If you doubt this, read the excellent article that set off the furor on Wired. Clearly, this is a problem. (Again, pair it with the Slate article above and doubtless this problem happens on multiple social platforms.)

The best defense of Youtube (and others) has been something along the lines of, “Well, you know they do have to handle billions of videos and trillions of interactions. This is fair, yet I feel like I need a Matt Levine-esque analogy to explain why this isn’t really a defense.

Let’s say you owned a park. For some reason, you were able to monetize parks and turn the parks into private places. And since this is the tech age, say I turned one park into 10,000 parks. All sorts of kids started playing there, mostly with their parents, but sometimes you convinced parents the kids were safe in the parks without them. Then all of a sudden a bunch of creepy dudes in the forties started hanging out at the park without kids. And then they talked to the kids and eventually asked the young girls to expose themselves. If I was making money off that enterprise, is saying, “Well, I own 10,000 parks, I can’t keep child predators out of all of them!” The answer would be, “Well you better damn well try.”

See running safe parks is part of the requirement to run parks. And with video, running a service where people can’t target children should be part of the requirement.

The problem with Youtube, Periscope and others (who likely have the same problems) is that my 10,000 parks doesn’t even capture the scale. I’d need 1,000,000,000 parks! This is the challenge of social video, in that content is no longer curated by executives in Hollywood offices working by the dozens, but by engineers optimizing equations on computers anywhere around the globe.

Like I said above, what makes it work is also what creates this shady underbellies, as Slate called them. This is where I concede the very eloquent defense of the tech companies. Tyler Cowen (who I saw linked to by Kevin Drum) makes the case that when it comes to social media, we have a trade-off of three forces: the scale we want to achieve, the costs to review all the content, and the consistency to treat only get rid of bad content. Cowen and Drum argue you can only have two of the three. That’s hard to disagree with.

This view was echoed recently in Dylan Byer’s newsletter too, who linked to Wired writer, Antonia Garcia Martinez. To summarize the challenge facing Youtube and others, “All detractors have to do is point to one bad piece of content, whereas Youtube is hosting billions of videos.” That’s a hard point to disagree with. If you want Youtube to exist–meaning you think it is valuable–you have to accept it is huge, so hard to police perfectly. Further, it isn’t like Youtube is doing nothing to combat these issues.

Ultimately, while I understand the scale of the problem, I don’t think those defenses get it quite right. And I have a few counters for today. Basically, regulators should demand Youtube (and other social platforms with video or images) do better when it comes to children, and not just reactively to bad press:

First, this isn’t about all content, but clearly illegal/evil content.

The counter is summarized in this Chris Mim’s tweet, which doesn’t mention the child pornography issue, but is in the same family.

https://twitter.com/mims/status/1101134318989164550

My “synthesis” is that we can’t control all content, but can try to control content that is clearly evil, for lack of a better word. Promoting genocide? Yep. Interfering with democracy? Yep. And content that hurts children. (Vaccines are a tougher call, but given that kids can die when they contract illnesses, it merits solutions too.) The fact is, as compelling as the “This isn’t a huge problem” argument is, if a social platform helped cause a genocide or creepy young men flock to teen videos, that’s a problem. And illegal. Even more so if you’re monetizing that interaction. One of the costs of running a video platform is finding this content and banning it.

Second, these companies are WILDLY profitable.

Read MoreYoutube (And all Social Platforms) Deal with Child Predators