I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I’ve long been frustrated that there isn’t a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask “what the hell was GG anyway?” they often get referred to my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren’t there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I’ve only been able to direct them to RationalWiki’s timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it’s likely to scare off first-timers.
I realize an hourlong lecture isn’t necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.
This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.
Great Tom Scott presentation covering youtube algorithm radicalization, parasocial relationships, misinformation, machine learning bias, and a lot of other neat and relevant things! Subtitles in English.
I don’t imagine this is going to make a huge difference to anyone’s opinions, but there’s a lot of pretty profound misunderstanding going around about the whole YouTube/COPPA thing, and a lot of it seems to be aimed at making Google look less culpable than they really are, especially in a way that paints the FTC as the bad guy – when the fact of the matter is that the FTC is basically in the right for once.
The first misunderstanding has to do with the term “targeted advertising”. This doesn’t mean targeted based on the nature of the video it’s being run on. It means targeted based on the identity of the person watching the video. Basically, Google wants to show ads tailored as precisely as possible to your specific interests in order to maximise the odds that you’ll buy what they’re selling. They do this by analysing your online activity and building a profile – and here’s the trick: you do not need a Google account for them to do this.
How does that work? Well, every piece of hardware that’s directly connected to an Internet service provider – like, say, your home’s wireless router – has a uniquely identifiable network address assigned to it. This network address is exposed to every content provider you interact with, so that they know where to send the data you’ve requested. So when you view a YouTube video, Google may not have a name to put to that data, but they know the physical network location of the wireless router that was used to access it, and that’s enough to start building a profile.
And this doesn’t just apply to activity on YouTube. Google is also operates the world’s largest ad network. Whenever you visit a site that’s running ads, there’s a very good chance those ads are being served by Google’s ad network – which means that even if the site itself has nothing to do with Google, Google knows what pages on that site you visited and when, based on which ad slots you triggered as you navigated about. And again, even if you don’t have a Google account, they can still build a profile based on recognising your router’s network address in their activity logs.
Oh, but you block your ads? Too bad – Google is also the world’s largest web analytics provider, which means that literally millions of sites are just straight up handing their activity logs over to Google, so that Google can crunch numbers and generate statistics about their visitors for them. Did you visit a site that’s using Google’s analytics services? Google is gonna recognise your router’s network address in that site’s logs, and into the profile your activity goes.
In this way, Google is able to build a profile of your online activity without you ever having to sign up or opt in to anything. Certainly, having a Google account makes it easier for them, because now they can snoop your inbox for keywords and such, but that’s all supplementary: your network activity alone is enough to guess at most facets of your identity with startling accuracy, even to the point of cleanly identifying specific individuals in a home whose router has more than one regular user. When you watch a YouTube video, Google thus has a pretty good idea whose eyes are on that content, and can advertise accordingly.
So, here’s the trouble: collecting this sort of identifying information about minors (strictly speaking, kids under 13) is against the law. This isn’t a new law – it’s been on the books for over twenty years. It’s historically been the position of content networks like Google that it’s impossible not to build profiles on minors, because unless they register for an account with that specific network and voluntarily disclose their ages, there’s no way to know for sure that they’re actually minors. For the last couple of decades, the FTC has been inclined to accept this rationale; however, this is no longer the case. Google’s basically been told that now the onus is on them to put forth a reasonable effort to ensure that they’re not building detailed profiles of minors – which, one must bear in mind, is how it should have been to start with.
(Of course, in a perfect world, this sort of profile-based targeting would be prohibited for everyone who hasn’t explicitly opted into it, regardless of age, but that’s neither here not there.)
From a technical standpoint, full compliance would be trivial: Google would simply have to ensure that they only build profiles for individuals who’ve signed up for a Google account, voluntarily disclosed their ages, and explicitly opted in to have their online activity tracked. Running targeted ads on child-friendly content would pose no compliance problems as long as the targeted ads themselves were only displayed to verified adults. Of course, Google’s never actually going to do that, because it would torpedo their advertising empire. Instead, they’ve dreamed up a frankly bizarre argument:
1. That it’s okay for them to build detailed profiles of individuals who are probably minors as long as they never actually use those profiles to serve targeted ads to a child; and
2. It’s the responsibility of individual YouTube content producers to ensure that inappropriate use of targeted advertising does not occur, by voluntarily opting out of participating in targeted advertising if they have reason to believe that their videos are likely to be viewed by minors.
These are not new laws the FTC conjured into existence; these are the terms of a settlement that Google themselves proposed to an ongoing lawsuit with the FTC concerning their flagrant harvesting of minors’ personal data, and which the FTC accepted. Should the FTC have accepted Google’s proposal? That’s something that can be argued – but the fact remains that none of this would have been necessary in the first place if Google had been willing to back off on the Big Brother bullshit even the tiniest bit.
A’ight, so I’m kind of tipsy and I got into a wikipedia hole and discovered amusia, and since I’m a musician, I was fascinated and wanted to see if there were any videos on youtube of amusical folks engaging with musical things.
Turns out youtube doesn’t have much–most of the first page of results are just some Spanish band? or something? Music artist idfk (actually, I dug further and it turns out it’s a music critic)
But out of the videos I found about the actual phenomenon, the ones in Spanish (which are not music) turned out to be the most enlightening.
The relevant videos from the first page of youtube results are
Please stop adding comments, jokes etc. to captions on YouTube videos.
I’m looking at you Markiplier and Jacksepticeye fans.
Please stop. It makes them less accessible.
Also, please contribute and review captions if you can.
Try to make the captions not too long over a long period of time or too short for people to be able to read and in the right place in the video.
Please don’t phonetically spell out words Jack says in his natural accent to show his accent. There’s no need to, and it makes it harder to read.
Please don’t jump back and forth between all caps and lower case a lot. You can use exclamation points to show excitement or do things like [yelling] [screaming] [louder].
Please don’t add keysmashes or excessively long lines of letters like “soooooooooooooooooo”, especially if it’s part of a longer caption.
Type what they say, not what they should have/meant to say. AKA don’t correct grammar, stutters, etc.
Be descriptive of non-words, sound effects (especially ones they react to or comment on) or what accent/tone they are speaking in. e.g. [Southern accent] and welcome to Turmoil! / [clap], [thump], [ticking], [ring ring], etc. [laughs]
But please don’t add descriptive captions for visual cues like what kind of face Mark or Jack are making or overly wordy and subjective descriptive captions e.g. [really happy cute little kid voice]
Um. Maybe signal boost this please??
There’s a new ad on youtube for a movie called “scream” i believe
The audio, right before you are able to press the skip button, repeats over and over, “click skip and die” in a creepy whisper
As someone who cant tell reality from hallucinations, and is triggered by repetition, I threw my phone to the wall and had a break down.
Just a fair warning to all my mentally ill pll out there, try and avoid mobile youtube where you can’t skip ads, and use adblocker on your computer.
if you can’t do those things for whatever reason and you see the ad, remember this post, you are not hallucinating, you will not die for skipping this ad.
Also if you think making ads like that are okay you’re the one who needs to die tbhhhhh
Also please don’t tag this with triggers so people who are triggered by the things in this ad can see this post!
