Planet YouTube 50:07

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Google's mission may be to organize the world's information, but it doesn't stop there. Google also shapes the world's information. A lot of the stuff we find online wouldn't exist without Google, and there is no better story of that dynamic, of Google's hand in what we experience online, than the story of YouTube.

Sure.

Shereen, if you want to say I'm old and you want to bully me live on a podcast, that's fine. But yes, I have paid a lot of attention to YouTube since it's very early days. And I've talked to people who made it and ran it and bought it and worked in it and around it. And I have a lot to say about it. But let's start the story way, way back. So we're talking early, mid 2000s. And back then, if you wanted to watch a video on the internet, it was really hard. And then this video site showed up and it was full of

weird stuff. Is this real life? Yeah, this is real life. A lot of it was harmless and odd and often pretty funny. You didn't know you wanted to watch it, but if someone sent you an email with a link, you'd watch it.

That is the YouTube Jillian Peterson and her husband Kevin Hines remember. I feel like my experience with YouTube was like Kevin's best friend who would make us watch videos of like a newsman swallowing a fly. And then one day Jillian and Kevin became one of those videos that everyone made you watch. This is Jillian and Kevin's wedding ceremony from 2009. You probably recognize it.

If you don't remember, it's Jillian and Kevin and every member of their wedding party and they are dancing down the aisle to Forever by Chris Brown. It is not slick at all and they are definitely not professional dancers. They're just nice young people from St. Paul, Minnesota having some fun. It's impossible to watch this and not smile.

So Jillian and Kevin originally posted the video because they just needed an easy way to share it with friends and family. Tech was way clunkier back then. You couldn't send a file that big. A YouTube link was perfect. We jokingly sent it to people and said something like, make us famous.

And that's what happened. Jillian and Kevin's wedding entrance was one of the earliest viral hits of YouTube. It eventually racked up more than 100 million views. It became a national event. It eventually jumped from the internet to TV. Here it is on The Office, on the episode where Jim and Pam got married. Sorry for the spoiler. You're kidding. Did you see this? It was on YouTube. Signed.

This is the era of YouTube history I would call "Ernest Tube." If I send you a YouTube link today and tell you you gotta check it out, you might definitely have some questions before you click. But back then, the way I remember it, it probably meant you were gonna get something goofy or fun. This is when people had less complicated feelings about the internet in general. When Jillian saw that firsthand, she had created a special email address where fans of the video could write to her.

We got, I want to say, 10,000 emails within the first few months. I mean, people from, you know, like soldiers serving in Iraq and women in domestic violence situations. I mean, the emails would just pour in. But then things got complicated. Jillian and Kevin didn't write or perform forever, and they didn't have the rights to use the clip. Sony Music did. And when Sony realized one of its songs was the soundtrack for a giant hit video, it reached out to YouTube.

And Kevin said they were given a choice. They could let Sony monetize the video or they could take it down. They wanted to keep it up. So they handed it over and stood back and watched what happens when lots of people start watching your video. It's no longer just a video. It's part of the YouTube ecosystem. It's surrounded by ads and comments and other stuff, which can change the way people respond to your video and maybe makes it complicit in things you don't like.

I mean, I saw political ads on there and I was irate. In 2020, 11 years after they posted their wedding dance, Kevin checked in on their video and saw it next to an ad for Donald Trump's re-election campaign. You know, I'm an immigration lawyer. I represent asylum seekers and victims of domestic violence. So seeing ads that maybe, you know, run contrary to some of our

our morals was pretty upsetting. At the same time, you know, we just got an email like last week about how somebody was watching it for the first time and it was getting her through coronavirus alone. And that is just like...

You can't take it down then. I'm not taking that down. Just because there's some slime balls that want to make some money off of it. I think there's something about Julian and Kevin's experience that mirrors the way a lot of us experience YouTube now. It used to be useful and a lark, and it still can be, but it's also just a lot of other stuff. And it certainly isn't anything you can control. You click a link, you roll the dice. Who knows what you're going to get?

Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole. If the world is not a globe, but instead enclosed, then wars end.

YouTube used to be a side business for Google, but that's no longer true. Last year it did nearly $20 billion in ad revenue. But it's really much bigger than that. YouTube is so huge, 2 billion users huge, that it generates its own gravitational pull on society and culture. And much of YouTube's power in the world comes from the YouTube creators who've become famous on the platform.

This is what sets YouTube apart from virtually every other Google product. YouTube has a personal face. Users are the people who make YouTube YouTube.

It's kind of like the internet itself. YouTube is filled with great stuff and dumb stuff and stuff you wish didn't exist. But, and this is an important but, YouTube is not the internet. The internet is just the internet. No one really owns it. YouTube is private property. It's enormous and sprawling, but it's a thing owned and maintained by Google and it has global influence. So decisions Google makes about YouTube, or decisions it doesn't make, shape what happens in the world.

Like a lot of Silicon Valley startups, YouTube has its own foundation myth. And there's a bit of a dispute over how it really got started. But that doesn't matter. For a lot of people, YouTube got its start from TV. Lazy Sunday, wake up in the late afternoon. Paul Parnell just deceased.

Lazy Sunday was a digital short that debuted on Saturday Night Live in December 2005. I guarantee that you've seen the video. If for some reason you're listening to this podcast and you haven't, it's about two dudes rapping about their wholesome Sunday plans. And after it aired, someone posted it to YouTube, and then it racked up 5 million views in just a few days, which for the Internet of 2005 was a lot. I prefer Mac Class. That's a good one, too. Google Maps is the best. True that. Double true.

Traffic to YouTube went up by 83% the week Lazy Sunday posted. And looking back, it's easy to see why. One, it's funny. And two, this was back when you either watched Saturday Night Live when it came out on Saturday night, or that was it. Watching the best parts on your computer at your desk days or weeks later, no one did that. YouTube old-timers don't like the narrative that Lazy Sunday put the platform on the map, but it did. Some people

especially for Micah Schaefer. The Lazy Sunday video on YouTube that took off is actually how I found out about YouTube. Lazy Sunday was made by The Lonely Island, a trio of SNL writers and performers, and... My brother is Akiva, who is in The Lonely Island. Akiva Schaefer, Andy Samberg, and Yorma Takoni formed The Lonely Island in 2001. They were lucky they had Micah around, the kid brother who was also a techie.

Micah says he helped the group post their early videos online on a site he made himself. Which was all good until Lazy Sunday popped and then a bunch of people wanted to know more about the Lonely Island and they went to a site Micah made and it crashed. He needed a new place to put those clips, some place with more power than his homegrown site. And so I sent a cold email, just like the business development email address for YouTube.

Say like, hey, see your users like our video, like our content. That's cool. Should we do some kind of like a partnership? Schaefer didn't realize he was sending the exact right email at the exact right time. YouTube was stressed about Lazy Sunday. They're sitting there. They're like, you

You know, this thing's on the front page of the New York Times art section. They're getting inbound media calls. They're worried because they don't want to have to take it down if they don't have to. But they're also concerned, right, of like, is this copyright infringement? Is this authorized? Is NBC mad at us? Schaefer thought he could help. So I told them, I was like, don't worry, I've got this one. Here's an email address for Saturday Night Live's publicist.

Send an email to him. And as Schaefer helped a nervous YouTube out, he saw an opening for himself. He emailed YouTube and asked if they, you know, maybe had a job for him. I was like, I'm not going to screw this up. I'm living in like, you know, living in a basement apartment. This is my shot. Good shot.

I joined YouTube right at the very beginning when it was still just under a dozen people above a pizza shop in San Mateo. Back then, things were loose. We didn't really have, we didn't even have in-house counsel yet. And in my first couple months, I didn't even really have a boss or a manager. And it was a little bit of like, what's this kid going to do? This, it turns out, is a recurring theme for YouTube, especially in its early days, but even now in present tense.

You try something, you see what happens, you figure it out as you go. It's a very internet-y way of being, very resistant to studious planning and plotting. And that experimental open culture worked really, really well.

Everyone in Silicon Valley, everyone around the world was trying to figure out how to do video on the internet and YouTube got it right, right away. So if you recall how you so many people consume their first YouTube video was through a link that typically you got through an email or something and you would click the link and you would immediately have the video open up because it was on flash.

That's David Ahn, who remembers paying attention to YouTube as soon as it popped up. That's because Ahn worked at Google and one of his jobs was working on Google's own video site, Google Video.

You don't remember Google Video now for a reason. Back in 2005, Google Video was focused on delivering high-quality content. A big part of Un's job was making deals with people who owned the rights to TV shows and movies and music videos. But Google Video wasn't nearly as easy to use as YouTube. YouTube was just a place to put up video, any kind of video, and share it with someone else. And as a result, the video itself and that experience became relatively, you know, social.

We didn't really talk about social networks back then, but YouTube was definitely a network with a social component. It was sort of a communal experience, and it was very different from watching videos anywhere else, like on TV. You didn't lean back and zone out to YouTube like you did in your living room. You leaned forward, you clicked, you shared, you engaged. YouTube was crushing it.

But it also had problems, two big problems. It had huge bandwidth bills because back then it cost a lot of money to let anyone watch videos anytime they wanted and YouTube didn't make any money.

And it was facing the specter of really big, really expensive copyright lawsuits because some of its users uploaded stuff like Lazy Sunday, stuff they'd ripped from TV and movies. TV and movie industries were especially nervous about YouTube. Some quick context here. YouTube was blowing up right after Napster and file sharing had destroyed the music business. All the big players in entertainment saw YouTube and they started putting their lawyers to work.

Susan Wojcicki was the executive in charge of Google Video. Her business had tons of resources and money and brains, and she was getting beaten badly by a one-year-old startup. This is how Wojcicki remembered the scenario years later when she delivered a commencement address at Johns Hopkins. We were scared and confused. Very quickly, I had to make a tough call.

Do we pretend that things are okay and try to fix them and continue to build out Google Video and hope we catch up? That was one option. Or do we admit our failure and look to acquire YouTube, a company with no revenue, lots of legal liability? It's not unusual for a big tech company to buy a competitor instead of building its own thing. But YouTube wasn't your average competitor. It was simultaneously winning the war for video

And it was on the precipice of collapse. I guess you can call me a moron. But I had to go to our founders and our board and tell them the product that we'd spent so much time building, Google Video, was losing. And we would have to spend over a billion and a half to fix the mistake. Sold! In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

- Hi YouTube, this is Chad and Steve. We're the co-founders of the site and we just wanted to say thank you. Today we have some exciting news for you. We've been acquired by Google. - This video announcing the deal is quite the time capsule. You have YouTube co-founders, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, standing outside a generic office building, maybe at TGI Fridays, it's hard to tell.

They're in their late 20s, but they look like kids dressing up for high school graduation. And as they talk, they giggle to someone behind the camera. By the end of this thing, Hurley can't keep a straight face. Back at Google, there was less glee about this. In the eyes of the Google video team, acquiring YouTube wasn't a victory, it was a failure.

Google Video eventually went away, and when the acquisition happened, the people who worked on it were absorbed by YouTube. And some of the Googlers working on it moved from the main Googleplex in Mountain View, that's the heart of Silicon Valley, to YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, which is near the airport, and that's about it. Here's Wojcicki again. It was painful. It was public. It was one of the hardest decisions that I've had to make. People on my team quit and revolted.

In Silicon Valley back then, this was considered a wild deal and easy to make fun of. When you look back though, it's one of the best deals anyone's ever made. In 2006, YouTube didn't really make any money. In 2020, it did nearly $20 billion. YouTube would be worth tens of billions of dollars if Google ever sold it. This was also in hindsight, a very Googley deal. Google knew it wanted to be in video, so it picked the fastest path to get there. Here's David On again. - I'd never seen a company

move and make a deal like this with that kind of vision. And what they bet on, rightfully, was the space and where consumer behavior was shifting and what it would ultimately become. Google would put YouTube on a sort of hyperdrive. Platform got to improve its tech and introduce new features. And some of those features would change the fabric of the internet. They would make YouTube a force of its own with power even Google can't quite control.

But in the early years after the acquisition, when YouTube was still a quirky site run by 20-somethings, Google gave it one mission. Grow. Micah Schaefer remembers the message coming straight from the top. The day of the acquisition, Eric Schmidt and I think it was Sergey came by. Kind of a welcome to Google kind of a thing. That's Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, and Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders. The main message from Eric was always,

give us lots of happy users. There was a sense of, you know, they didn't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, right? Google Video, they tried that. YouTube won, and they wanted us to keep doing what we were doing with more resources. David Unn, who'd been working on cutting deals for Google Video, now started working cutting deals for YouTube. He was mostly focused on big media and entertainment companies.

But YouTube had a hunch that the key to YouTube's success wouldn't come from the NBCs of the world, no matter how big their stuff was on TV. What YouTube got right from the start, when we look back, is they were very focused on user-generated content, right? UGC. The key to YouTube's growth would come from amateurs, not pros. It would come from users. People like Smosh. ♪ Check it, this is how it up, I was chillin' ♪ ♪ Eatin' some Raisin Bran, I decided ♪

Smosh was a very popular YouTube channel created by Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox. They got to YouTube even before Google did. Our main reason for uploading on YouTube was, hey, we don't have to pay for these hosting fees. Hecox and Padilla were high school friends who liked filming silly skits together. Before YouTube, they posted that stuff on their own website, and that cost them money. So as more people started to watch our videos...

the more we had to pay out of our pockets, out of our minimum wage jobs, essentially. Hecox paid dearly for that bandwidth. I was working part-time at Chuck E. Cheese as the big mouse. So, you know, not exactly... I got in trouble once for hitting the mouse in the back of the head. Yeah, I got hit, punched, kicked...

feet stepped on. So yeah, that was my first foray into the entertainment business. - Hickox's next foray with the entertainment business went a lot better.

Smosh would go on to be the top subscribed channel on YouTube for a chunk of 2006 and then for a few months in 2007 and also 2008 and 2013. At first, the Smosh dudes didn't really know what they were doing, but they were definitely trying to do something. Not Hollywood, not exactly home movies, something in between. Something YouTube viewers liked a lot.

YouTube hit us up and said, "Hey, we want you to be part of this thing called the Partnership Program." In 2007, YouTube asked Smosh to be part of an experiment that would stick and fundamentally change the platform. It's going to be you and nine other channels. We're going to pay you sort of a base sum.

and you just put out videos and we're gonna put ads on your videos. This is when YouTube started sharing revenue with creators. The idea was to make YouTube a place where you not only uploaded content, it's a place where you might make money doing it. This was another very Googley idea. It's a mix of nerdy altruism, because why shouldn't the people using the internet decide what's on the internet?

And it's a clever business plan. The Ians and Anthonys of the world could make popular stuff for way less money than studios and networks in LA and New York. And they were a lot easier to deal with.

But it was also a significant shift for Google. By giving YouTubers a place to play and money to play with, it was no longer just organizing the world's information. It wasn't even just shaping that information. It was giving creators like Hecox and Padilla careers, money from YouTube that they used to make more YouTube. And they got ambitious and they hired people and they experimented because YouTube gave them an incentive to do all of that.

YouTube wasn't just a place to upload your video anymore. YouTube could also make you a star. You remember Soulja Boy the dance? David Unn remembers Soulja Boy's breakout moment. It happened on YouTube. So it wasn't a music video from, you know, Sony Music, right? It was UGC and it became super popular and, you know, it spawned a dance movement.

So YouTube invited Soulja Boy to an event for advertisers. This was a light bulb moment for An. He saw all those buttoned up folks, the ones who were used to seeing TV stars when they went to events where people wanted their money. They were stoked to see Soulja Boy. A lot of people were treating him almost as like a semi-celebrity at that point.

And I remember that very distinctly in saying, it's happening. It's like these YouTube stars will one day be as or even more popular than the stars that the movie studios and television networks anoint and present to us as the stars. The users are going to decide and they're going to find their own stars and anoint them.

Other YouTubers eventually crossed over into mainstream entertainment too. Alana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson started out doing comedy skits on YouTube, and eventually they were doing Broad City, their long-running hit show on Comedy Central. Justin Bieber went from YouTube star to megastar. And Issa Rae started making up the misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Am I the only one who pretends I'm in a music video when I'm by myself? That series eventually got her to HBO and the hit series Insecure. Now she's a movie star.

But most YouTube stars don't cross over to big time TV shows or movies or music labels. They stay YouTube stars, which appears to be fine with them. And it is definitely fine with YouTube. You know, honestly, the way I think about my job is YouTube in many ways really is

the stage or the theater, if you will. That's Neil Mohan, who's YouTube's chief product officer and its number two executive, who works for CEO Susan Wojcicki. That's right, Susan Wojcicki, the woman who used to run Google Video, now runs the company that beat her. And my job, my team's job, is to create the world's best stage, you know, with the best lighting, perhaps the most comfortable seats, the best way for the person on the stage to connect with their audience.

What happens on the platform really is the magic of the connection between creators and users. The magic of YouTube, though, can also be a curse. After the break, I'm going to pass the story back to Shireen for a bit. She's going to tell you about the unintended consequences of the YouTube star and Google's attempts to steer its virtually unsteerable platform.

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

Hi, my name is Kat Black and I am a YouTuber. Kat Black joined YouTube when she was 15 years old. Actually, around the same time Ian Hecox of Smosh did. And like Hecox, Kat didn't necessarily join YouTube for a career. She joined YouTube because it was simply the place to be. At first, her channel was like an extension of her teenage MySpace blog, a kind of video diary and placed event about trying to get into art school for college.

Then eventually, Kat started to post hybrid video essays slash explainers. Hey guys, it's Kat, and I'm here today to talk to you guys about blackface.

Kat's channel reached more and more people, in part because a lot of the stories she told weren't as available in mainstream media. And in turn, Kat started to take her YouTube channel more seriously. I make a lot of content about basically all of the things that I embody as a Black person who is also trans, who is also a woman, who is also polyamorous, who is also a feminist.

Kat is the kind of YouTube star YouTube the company loves to talk about. YouTube does a lot of presenting itself to the world sort of events. And the biggest one is called Brandcast for advertisers. It's a really good representation of what YouTube likes to think it is. The company rents out venues like Radio City Music Hall and showers ad folks with food and drink. Literally a couple of years ago, they did a stunt where they dropped bags of sweets from the ceiling.

YouTube also brings some creator on stage who represents the good YouTube star, the kind of star anointed by YouTube's engaged community. Someone like Tyler Oakley. I realized that in addition to doing funny videos and entertaining videos, I could also use this global stage for good, to raise awareness for causes and maybe even empower LGBTQ+ voices.

If all your understanding of YouTube came from Brandcast, you'd have a fantasy view of the platform. You'd think that YouTube was only filled with creative, funny, smart people making stuff from their own homes and connecting with the world. And you'd miss an entirely different kind of YouTuber. You'd miss the extremist YouTube star. So I've been on YouTube. I was like user number four because it was pretty clear to me what a powerful platform that was going to be.

Stefan Molyneux is a self-described philosopher who's been widely criticized for amplifying eugenics and white supremacist ideas. This is from an interview he did with the YouTube channel Modern Wisdom. You can only find Molyneux on YouTube now if he shows up in other people's videos because his channel was banned from the platform in 2020. We'll get to that.

The thing about Molyneux's story is he wasn't always so extreme. He didn't show up on YouTube as, quote, user number four spewing white supremacist ideas. Those ideas surfaced over time on YouTube. From 2006 to 2016, man, that was one glorious Wild West decade. I'm telling you.

Molyneux is a former tech entrepreneur. In the mid-2000s, he started a call-in talk show called Free Domain Radio, focused, in his words, on freedom and what it means in our lives. Molyneux liked to talk about lofty topics like theism, political theory, and morality. But mixed in with all that theoretical stuff was also practical advice. In particular, dating advice, which was one of the things that made Molyneux popular with young men. You need to not focus on the whole wooing thing.

I don't view humanity...

as a single species. This is from an episode of his Free Domain podcast in 2014. It represents who Molyneux was on YouTube by that point. That is, he was increasingly focused on biological determinism, the idea that most human characteristics are wholly determined at birth. And he used that idea to explicitly argue that white people are genetically superior to certain non-white people.

By the time Molyneux had morphed from an armchair philosopher who doled out dating advice to a guy advancing white supremacist theories, he was a famous YouTube star. In early 2020, he had nearly 1 million subscribers. And Molyneux wasn't just spreading his ideas on his channel anymore. He had joined a network on YouTube. What is The Rubin Report? It's a place for free thinkers and those of every walk of life to discuss the most important topics and controversial issues of the day.

The Rubin Report is a YouTube talk show hosted by Dave Rubin. Rubin is a former comedian who built his own media fame as an online host and commentator. He tends to book conservative guests, but not exclusively so. They range from Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson to Andrew Yang and Larry King. And in November 2017, Rubin interviewed Stefan Molyneux. So I don't want to put any words in your mouth. So do you want to make your basic argument around race and IQ? So the U.S. Army, for over 100 years, has been giving...

More or less IQ tests. Molino falsely claims black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, that Jewish people have lower spatial reasoning abilities but higher abilities in other kinds of intelligence, and also that black people's brains are smaller than white people's brains. This is the debunked junk non-science of the eugenics movement. These claims have been used to justify genocide and some of the darkest moments in modern history.

But Rubin doesn't push back on Molyneux. Instead, he opens the door to more scientifically untrue, racist claims. "I mean, if we took the brain of a 25-year-old black man and the brain of a 25-year-old white man, what is it that they're doing that..." "Different sizes." "Yeah." This moment, this crossover event between two big YouTube creators, is a gateway into a far-right network that thrives on YouTube, a network that Becca Lewis has studied closely.

In 2018, Lewis was doing research at the Institute Data and Society. She was studying the connections between the spread of extremism and conspiracy theories from the internet to mainstream media like cable news. The more and more I looked, the clearer it became that actually there was an entire kind of media ecosystem functioning on YouTube itself.

An ecosystem that didn't need mainstream media to thrive. Lewis was intrigued, so she ventured in. And she ended up writing a report called Alternative Influence that breaks down how extremist ideas develop and spread on YouTube.

Lewis published her report in 2018, which notably was a rough PR year for YouTube. Because at the time, serious scholars were raising questions about YouTube's recommendation algorithm as a powerful tool for radicalization. So, that algorithm that dictates what's in your up-next queue? Critics argue that AI was leading users to more and more extreme content. YouTube denies this, but the truth is, without a full dataset, we can't really know.

And anyway, according to Lewis, focusing on the recommendation algorithm alone could distract you from another critical story about how radicalization happens on YouTube. And so I think that a lot of it has to do with this culture of celebrity.

Lewis's report is about a system of incentives set up for YouTube stars that pushes those stars toward extremist content. You know, any creator on YouTube will tell you that it's good business and good marketing to do collaborations with other YouTubers. Lewis took a deep dive on 81 influential YouTube channels, all the way from middle-of-the-road centrist conservatives to white supremacists because she was curious about how they were talking to each other.

And she found many instances of the more middle-of-the-road creators inviting fringe creators onto their shows. Lewis made a complicated literal map charting those connections. One thing that became so fascinating and troubling to me throughout my research was actually that it is impossible to know from the outside whether they genuinely believe what they're espousing or whether it's kind of a strategic ploy for more viewership.

That conversation between Dave Rubin and Stefan Molyneux, littered with racism, has over 1.3 million views. Out of Rubin's hundreds of YouTube videos, it's one of his most viewed to date. So are his interviews with other far-right provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos.

To be clear, this phenomenon of the guest star isn't unique to YouTube. People who are popular on a TV show also appear on other TV shows. Podcast hosts appear on other people's podcasts. But YouTube has something other platforms don't have, at least not to the same extent. As Peter said earlier, YouTube has that audience that leans forward.

Audiences on YouTube are so powerful that the standard operating model for successful YouTube creators is to be in conversation with their fans. I mean, you heard that from Neil Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer. You hear that even if you're on YouTube casually in the regular refrain, remember to like and subscribe.

In her report, Becca Lewis captured an audience leaning in to extremist content on YouTube. She saw comments under videos from channels like Rubin's congratulating centrists on interviewing extremists. She saw comments that asked for more extreme content. YouTubers would...

And that feedback loop can have real-world consequences.

One of Molyneux's followers was Brenton Tarrant, the man who murdered 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 and livestreamed the atrocity. In December 2020, a New Zealand government report revealed that Tarrant had donated money to Molyneux's Free Domain Radio.

Through interviews with Tarrant, the report concluded that YouTube was a, quote, far more significant source of information and inspiration for him than right-wing discussion boards, which you could tell because as Tarrant live-streamed his attack, he gave a shout-out to PewDiePie, one of the biggest YouTube stars of all time.

PewDiePie is famous on YouTube for gaming, but he's been embroiled in his own controversies, particularly for videos featuring anti-Semitic images. The point is, by referencing PewDiePie, Tarrant was making it clear he was fluent in YouTube. YouTube was the ecosystem he was speaking to.

Of course, people have always been radicalized by the culture around them. Stuff they pick up like books, movies, video games, cable news. But there's no denying that YouTube plays a significant role in the media ecosystem of extremism around the world.

You can even see YouTube acknowledging that role over the last couple of years. Like in June 2020, when YouTube kicked Molyneux off the platform in a sort of batch ban, along with several other controversial channels, including one run by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and another by a former grand wizard of the KKK, David Duke. So, Peter. Yes. What did YouTube say about why it banned those channels and why then?

YouTube's almost always vague about these kind of decisions. In this case, it was a little more descriptive than it normally is. It's still pretty obtuse though. Here is their official comment at the time. Quote, we have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies.

So the updated guidelines YouTube is talking about here come from 2019. That's when they said that videos that argued for supremacy of a certain group were not allowed, which I don't know, maybe was the moment it should have taken a closer look at David Duke, who again was a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. And yeah, let's remember what was happening when YouTube finally took action in June 2020. That was when Black Lives Matter protests were at their peak around the U.S., when we were experiencing a national reckoning around race.

And that made it even more untenable for YouTube to keep Molyneux, Richard Spencer, and David Duke on its platform. To that point, YouTube told us, quote, I'm glad YouTube has decided it doesn't have room for Stefan Molyneux anymore.

But here's the thing. YouTube is always going to have a lot of stuff on Molyneux's because YouTube is a global platform that reaches 2 billion people. And if you're anyone who wants to reach a lot of people, you're going to go to YouTube.

YouTube says it's managing those melanotypes and people who make other insidious content in a bunch of ways. There's policy. It keeps content guidelines nimble so it can keep updating them frequently whenever it finds a new thing it needs to crack down on. It also uses technology. It's training AIs and computers to crack down on thousands and millions of videos that have objectionable content before anyone can even see them. And it's hiring thousands of humans to help those computers do that work.

YouTube is spending a ton of time and energy on this. YouTube is also fine-tuning what it can do with people who edge into violating its guidelines without completely shutting them down. YouTube can demonetize creators by taking away their ability to run ads against their videos.

It can make certain videos hard to find. For instance, YouTube says that its recommendation algorithm doesn't recommend borderline content, meaning content that has been flagged as almost breaking the rules. And, and you may have noticed this a lot, in 2020, YouTube can attach labels and cautions next to videos that could have misinformation. This became a go-to tool when YouTube dealt with misleading COVID claims and then misleading claims about the presidential election.

It's sort of exhausting to hear that laundry list of all the things YouTube management has to do to manage the platform, right? Or maybe you heard it and thought, like a lot of critics do, that whatever YouTube is doing is not nearly enough. I think all the debate about YouTube's approach to policing its site and frankly a lot of the effort YouTube spends policing its site misses the point. It's arguing over the color of a paint on a house with a rotten foundation. I think YouTube has a structural problem.

That's because YouTube is a proudly and doggedly open platform. It lets users decide what they want to put up, and it makes it easy for them to get their stuff in front of as many people as possible. This is a feature, not a bug. Silicon Valley loves open platforms. It's the model for some of their biggest success stories in the last couple decades. Facebook, Twitter, even Airbnb. And open platforms scale really well and really fast. They run on software and the power their users provide. When Google bought YouTube, it was already an open platform.

The thing about open platforms is that users are always going to be putting stuff up that causes problems to try to take advantage of that openness. Tracking down that bad content, those problems, that's a whack-a-mole game that's never going to end. The people who run YouTube disagree with me. They want to stay in the game.

I know this because every time I talk to them, I ask them if YouTube really needs to be open. And every time they tell me the same thing. YouTube wouldn't be YouTube if it wasn't an open platform. That's Neil Mohan. And here's his boss, Susan Wojcicki, when I interviewed her a couple years ago. What if YouTube wasn't open? I don't think that's the right answer because we would lose a lot of voices and a lot of people who share content.

Even though I get the same answer every time, I still find the question worth asking. Because it strikes me that YouTube would solve a lot of its problems and would still be really useful to Google and its users if it wasn't completely open. Like, maybe a lot of verified users get to put their videos up immediately, but other folks have to wait in a queue to be approved. Like, if there was just a little bit of friction. For sure, it would make it easier.

That's Robert Kinsel who runs all of YouTube's business operations. He's the guy who has to keep creators happy and bring traditional media companies on the platform and a million other things. This is actually a topic that I'm quite passionate about because I grew up in a communist country in Czechoslovakia. Not just in the world without the internet, but in a truly closed society and without freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of information, any of those things.

So for me to work on a platform that brings those things to the world is very personal. And I actually do believe it can work. I do believe the people who are on YouTube really do believe what they're saying.

I think they want users deciding what they want YouTube to be, even if some of that is unpleasant or much worse. There is a cynical interpretation of this, that YouTube wants an open platform because they want odious stuff there because there's an audience for it and audience equals ads. But I don't really think that's true. I want to make sure I'm summarizing what you're telling me. It's something I think that a lot of people at YouTube and more broadly in the Valley think, which is,

Yeah, there's a lot of unintended consequences and downsides to what we're doing. But we would still rather be doing it because we think the net positives outweigh the negatives. Is that a fair summary? It's a very fair summary. And I just want to make sure it doesn't come off glib or as not caring. We care tremendously about every single piece of negative impact that we could have.

Like, we have so many people focused on that. But we know that the net positive is greater. I talked to Kinsel a few weeks after the Capitol riots, when Trump supporters, egged on by the President of the United States and a media ecosystem that lied to them about election results, stormed Congress and killed a police officer. YouTube didn't cause the riot. No single media outlet or social network caused the riot.

But it was one of the places extremists could go to whip each other up and sow doubt. It used to be that when you saw something terrible on the internet, you could console yourself by telling yourself that it's just something terrible on the internet. Someone horrible doing something on a laptop. Not real life. Now you can't say that anymore. Some of those people show up with guns at churches or mosques or synagogues. Or they ransack the Capitol.

My interview with Kat Black was also in the aftermath of the insurrection. It was one of the first things Kat mentioned when we talked about what's wrong with YouTube. She was connecting the dots, and I could hear her working through her own trade-offs with the platform. Because on the one hand, through YouTube, Kat built a career. She started getting invited to speak at events, to go to colleges, and share her experiences. Her YouTube channel really did change her life. I remember I gave a speech at UC Boulder, and

And this kid came up to me and said that he had seen a video that I'd done with BuzzFeed and that that helped him understand that he was transgender. And it like it warmed my heart. It really did. And I've seen parents bring their trans children to the audience of my talks. And it's just like, wow. But as she changed on YouTube, as Kat grew, she watched YouTube change, too.

Kat noticed the rise in extremist content, and she worried about it. It's been a little baffling for me to...

you know, be the sort of creator that I am and and struggle in the way that I've struggled and have them sort of seem like they're taking a position of supporting my content and the content of other people of color, da da da da. But then also do so many things that make it seem like they aren't here for us at all. You know, to me, not taking a stance against white nationalism was a clear statement that their money is just as green as ours.

Kat relies on YouTube in a lot of ways. It has done all the things Google idealistically designed YouTube to do. It gave her a stage, a community. But now she feels ambivalent about standing on that stage. Because right along there with her are creators whose ideas are abhorrent and threatening to her, to her whole being.

You know, I look at YouTube and I see that there's a lot of people there that work there that I love, who I totally support and love. But at the end of the day, YouTube will continue in their own ways to support people who, in my opinion, create content that is racist, that encourages some of the stuff that we saw at the Capitol building. And that's just going to be sort of the reality of it.

You hear that, right? That resignation? I feel the resignation too. That sense of needing to sit with open YouTube, even when the trade-off stings. Because YouTube is a useful thing to have in the world. It does organize information. Globally, YouTube is basically a search engine.

It's how you can look up recipes, DIY stuff, news. Yeah. So my kids are now 10 and 12 and they're on YouTube all the time and it's often for the better. It's their entertainment, it's their education, it's their social network, it's a way to waste time. But I still have that resignation too and we treat it like it's inevitable. Cat feels like it just has to be this way. YouTube says basically that it has to be this way, that the bad will come with the good.

Because of course you can't fundamentally change how humans work. A lot of humans are going to be terrible. And those humans get to be on the internet. But again, YouTube is not the internet. Google isn't the internet. This is a private company that chooses to operate the way that it does. It chooses to be open. It chooses to be so big it might as well be the internet itself. And that's how we experience it. But Google could always make a different choice.

Thanks to Peter Kafka for leading us through the story of YouTube this week. So, let's take stock of where Google was by the mid-2000s. It had under its control the world's dominant search engine, a desktop browser and mobile operating system, and the internet's most successful video site. Larry Sergei had come a long way from the hallways of Stanford's campus. Now these rollerblading geniuses had the resources of an empire at their disposal. And so the question was, what's next?

How do you feel when you hear about Google Glass today? It's certainly something that I made mistakes. Next week, Google makes a big bet and fails. We will tell the story of Glass and the story of another bet that might actually pay off this time.

Megan Cunane is the show's lead producer.

Lisa Soeb is our editor. Nathan Miller is our associate producer and engineer this episode. Emily Sen is our fact checker. Our theme song was composed by Gautam Shrikashen. Sam Oltman is Recode's editor-in-chief. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Kantrowitz. You can check out my weekly interview series, Big Technology Podcast, on your favorite podcast app.

And I'm Shereen Ghaffari. If you like this episode, please lean forward as an audience and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. We'd really love to know what you think of the show and subscribe to hear our next episode when it drops.