I’m sure everyone is aware of the recent YouTube demonetization controversy. Although YouTube has been censoring, terminating, and demonetizing right-wing channels for a long time, YouTube’s practices recently made headlines all over the world after Vox journalist Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) demanded that YouTube disable Steven Crowder’s channel for purportedly making anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs, but YouTube, rather than deleting the channel, responded by only demonetizing it, which angered the left and sparked all this controversy. This occurred about a week ago but is still making headlines, and is a big deal because Vox was effectively trying to wield its power to force a tech company to do its bidding, which many free speech advocates on either side of the political aisle saw as an overreach of power, and also because YouTube’s policies are opaque and Kafkaesque and leave content creators at the mercy of fickle algorithms and politically biased content review moderators. That’s the rundown of the situation.
Scott Adams recently put out a video about how this controversy will be the undoing of Vox Media and The Daily Beat, by his estimates within 12 months. I’m holding him accountable for this prediction and have archived the link so he cannot memory hole it when in a year from now Vox has not gone anywhere.
This is a pretty dumb thing to say. By his logic, CNN and MSNBC (or any major left-wing media network) shouldn’t exist. Vox doesn’t even pretend to be impartial anymore, assuming they ever were. And as bad as Maza is, how much worse is he than someone like Don Lemon, who is probably even more partisan and much more influential. Or someone like Rachel Maddow.
Media companies, unlike most failed businesses, don’t go away entirely, but rather are acquired and repackaged because there is still value in the brand and the readership for propaganda purposes even if the business operation itself is unprofitable. That’s why billionaires have an affinity for money-losing newspapers, whether it’s Carlos Slim and the New York Times or Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post.
The Daily Beast used to be Newsweek, which in 2010 was acquired by Interactive Corporation. Audio pioneer Sidney Harman originally purchased the ailing publication in 2010 for $1 (plus liabilities), which was later merged into The Daily Beast.
Unfortunately, I don’t see the censorship issue getting any better. Someone on RooshV forum asks “So now Youtube is shutting down anyone to the right of CNN it appears. Mass account removals and videos being taking down of right wing political speech for ‘hate’ speech. Trump is supposed to already be monitoring this situation. Will Trump and the GOP actually do anything or just keep “monitoring” the situation?” to which my answer is “no.” Tech companies are not losing sleep over twitter threats and unfulfilled promises of action.