Everything in moderation: YouTube

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. While gun deaths have dropped dramatically in big American cities such as New York and Los Angeles, the murder rate in Chicago has remained stubbornly high, spiking in 2016, a new program is working to reduce the violence by drawing lessons from West African research. And once upon a time, in lands far, far away, there lived kings and queens, lots of them. These days, there are far fewer monarchies in the world, but stories like this weekend's coronation of Thailand's new king are big news. What made so many monarchies disappear? And what's to be learned from those that are? But first, in 2005, when YouTube was new, there wasn't much to see. Mostly home videos, pratfalls, and a few intrepid video bloggers. Since then, it's become the free television service for much of the world. Now it's owned by Google, and more than 2 billion people visit the site at least once a month. The volume on offer of entertainment, education, information, and, well, wasted time is hard to fathom. It would take 100,000 years to watch all of it. But with YouTube's incredible growth have come the challenges of moderating the dark side of its content.

Susan Wojcicki got the first message about the New Zealand massacre not long after it began, around 8pm at her home in Northern California.

Gaudy Epstein is our media editor.

So the assaults on two mosques in Christchurch had begun maybe 15, 20 minutes earlier. The shooter had live streamed the killings on Facebook. And footage from Facebook was being shared on YouTube, as the killer had clearly hoped. Ms. Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube. So she checked in with her team. She had an incident commander that was already at work at the time. Content reviewers around the world, the world's largest video platform, was mobilized to cleanse itself of this horrific shooting video. But they failed. Before she went to bed at 1am, Ms. Wojcicki was still able to find the video. New versions were being uploaded more quickly than they could be identified and taken down. And finally, at 6:00 clock in the morning, she decided to remove all videos flagged as suspect without waiting for a human to look at it. That was a first for YouTube.

So, Gotti, tell us about meeting her.

I met Susan Wojcicki at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno two times over the course of a week.

I've been very busy, as you can probably imagine.

Yeah.

And I just came back from Asia.

What were you doing there?

I was in Korea, Japan, to talk.

About how YouTube is confronting these issues with content moderation.

And so what was the response to that? I mean, how confident is Ms. Wojcicki that YouTube can handle the challenge?

She expressed a surprising amount of confidence.

I think in some ways, I've trained for this my whole career.

And I say surprising because I certainly don't think that that confidence is justified by recent performance. In the last couple years, they seem to have been responding and reacting to problems that come up that are pointed out by journalists, by activists, and exposed first by outsiders. And the platform has just grown way too big and unwieldy. There's 500 hours of new video uploaded every minute in all languages around the world that they need to have people who can speak the language in, who can review videos that last for not just minutes, but sometimes hours. And then they have to shape rules around what kind of content they should allow and shouldn't. All of that is such a massive challenge at this kind of scale that it strikes me that it's a bit foolhardy to be confident that you can solve this problem.

At least I think I can provide a blueprint about how to address these issues that no one else has figured out.

And she uses the word solve.

I will solve it. And that would be a great legacy to leave. So I'm in a situation where I have to solve it.

Well, why and how particularly does she think that she can solve it then, if it is this problem of such an enormous scale?

I think the rhetoric that she uses is worryingly familiar. If you've heard mark Zuckerberg maybe 18 months ago, expressed similar confidence about Facebook's ability to tackle this problem, that it's going to take AI, it will take time, but that this kind of thing can be solved. Now, Mark Zuckerberg has backed off of that kind of rhetoric, and he has now decided to basically embrace government regulation and say, give me rules of the road to play by.

How does Ms. Wojcicki feel about regulation herself?

She says that she will comply, and they do comply with whatever regulations governments come up with.

And who would say otherwise?

Right. What she says, though, is she's not waiting for regulators to fix this problem.

We're trying to solve it now. And if regulation comes in and they want to be specific about how they want to solve, like, we'll comply. We'll do our best to consult, tell them what we've already done, and comply.

She also says they don't understand these companies and how they operate the way people inside these companies do. They just don't have the know how, so they wouldn't know precisely where to look and what to ask for.

You know, they're not also experts. They're not experts in these systems either. And so it's hard for them to know exactly what to tell us to do. They can only say things like have the content down within one hour or don't be in this category. Right. But there's a lot in between that is really useful for us to do, and we're doing that.

So she feels that the companies are best situated to fix the problem themselves, that they have the know how, and that what they just have to do is build up the policies, consult with experts, tighten their restrictions wisely, and then enforce it, as she says, fairly and consistently across the entire platform. And that, of course, would have to be with the help of artificial intelligence. And that's where I think there's reason to question whether that's really even possible.

Another one of the sticking points in discussions around this stuff has always been the degree to which who gets to make decisions on what's allowed and what's not and how that sometimes crashes hard up against issues. Free speech. What's Ms. Wojcicki's feeling on that?

Ms. Wojcicki and the. And the other major tech CEOs in Silicon Valley take a view that the First Amendment basically applies to their platforms. I mean, it doesn't literally do so, but they believe that their platform should be open for free expression. So and then they work backwards from there, you know, imposing restrictions on certain voices, especially as they become quite controversial. Just last week, Facebook and Instagram took this pretty big step of banning several big voices of the alt right, which is a step that they would have said a year ago that they don't want to take because they want to allow free speech on their platforms. Ms. Wojcicki is in the position now of having to decide whether to match that kind of decision.

What's your view then? What do you think YouTube should be doing to sort of address these problems or get out ahead of these problems?

One of the reasons I really wanted to talk with these executives, I talked to Susan Wojcicki and I also talked to five other YouTube executives, was to get a sense of whether they really were want to rethink fundamentally their platform because of the fact that it's so difficult to manage it at scale. Do you allow everything to be uploaded by default and viewable by default by billions of people around the world and spread it algorithmically via recommendations the way they do? And it's quite clear that they have no intention of altering that fundamental business model, which of course generates quite a lot of revenue. They're estimated to have taken in maybe close to $17 billion last year. You know, there are questions that critics raise, like should content be reviewed before it's uploaded directly to the platform. That kind of call would really change how YouTube and these other platforms work in a fundamental way that we have not confronted. And I'm not suggesting that that's the solution, but we should be open to the idea that maybe we haven't gone about this the right way.

Gotti, thank you very much for joining us.

Great to be with you.

Policy responses to social problems can sometimes come from unexpected places. Recently, the city of Chicago has been taking some lessons from war torn Africa on how to deal with violent crime.

Watch out, I'm going to move. Let the ambulance come through.

Chicago has seen some of the worst gun violence in America. In the past 20 years alone, over 14,000 people have been murdered.

Adam Roberts is our Midwest correspondent.

As a big city, there is no place in America that has quite the level of violence that you see in Chicago. Last year, for example, more people were killed in Chicago than in Los Angeles and New York combined.

We're in a state of emergency in my community, we got our babies dying every day. It's a norm to hear gunfire. It's a norm to hear sirens, because there's nothing else for them to do.

The rate of shooting in this city can go through the roof. And in 2016, it was especially bad.

In 2016, Chicago saw a huge upsurge in gun violence. There were 762 murders that year, an increase of 58% on the prior year. The reasons remain unclear.

In the aftermath of that terrible year, the city experts, non profit groups, they got together to try to think, what can the city do to bring the violence down? And one idea that academics and experts put forward was to take a lesson from the west African state of Liberia, which had suffered from 15 years of civil war, and to say, is there something you can learn from the young men who came out of that war and who were taught to be less violent?

So tell me about the research that came out of Liberia.

Well, the Liberian scheme began organically. It was an effort by young activists to work with these former soldiers and to give them some training in how to live a normal life. That evolved into an academic study where about 1,000 young men were recruited. Some of them were given cash, Some of them were given training and skills, and others were given both. And then they were studied for a year. And the researchers found that those who'd been given a little bit of cash and some training were the least likely to be involved in crime a year later.

And so how does that manifest, then, in the Chicago program?

So in Chicago, these nonprofits launched a program called ready and ready works, as in Liberia, with the young men seen to be the most at risk of turning to violence. And they were approached and asked, do you want to have the chance to learn some basic skills and to have a job? And a thousand of them, roughly, were brought in. 700 became participants. And for the past 18 months, Reddy has been working with these young men to try to teach them how to resist when someone provokes them, the sort of basic skills that will get them to move away from pulling triggers.

And you met some of the participants in the program. What did they tell you about their lives before the program?

So I spent time on the south side of Chicago in the basement of a YMCA where these guys meet, and I sat down with some of them. One young man told me about the terrifying violence that is just a daily occurrence in his life.

I'd have been shot. I got out the hospital, got robbed, beat in the face with a gun. Two days later, you Know what I'm saying? I got shot. My daughter was finna be born in two months. All type of shit. We got shot at 100 times in the e wake.

In one incident. He told me about how he was shot and he even died and was brought back to life by medics.

My mother said I died like she saw I was dead. But they kept working. I still got a bullet enlarged in my liver right now.

And they still live in constant fear for their lives. One young man told me he was so concerned about being shot that he even brings two guns to bed with him at night.

You going to sleep with it on you? What the two guns?

Two.

You got two guns on you, man. Two guns on you. You in the bed.

And so what do these. These men want for their lives now?

Many talk about just wanting to have a peaceful life, to have a normal, functioning life, man.

I just want to wake up a level of peace, man. You know, wake up seeing my family smile. Actually, they actually happen, you know, they happy. You know what I'm saying? You know, just, hey, just. I just want to see it change, man. I just want to do something good. That's it.

One of the big attractions of the READY scheme is the chance for them to get a regular, honest income. And the opportunities they're getting really inspire some of them. They're really hopeful that they can move out.

And so it seems clear to you that the READY program is making a difference for them.

Well, the anecdotes they give me suggest that they are finding new ways to function on the streets and new opportunities that take them beyond this violent path. One of the techniques is really about controlling their temper. This is summed up as something called CAD or cad, which stands for control alt delete, which is control your temper and. And essentially alter your behavior. And one man I spoke to gave me a great example of how he used the technique of CAD when he was robbed by some gunmen.

At that moment, CAD just popped into my head like, no. Like, no bullshit. Like, control, alt, delete. Control, alt, delete. And I'm like, all right, I'm finna evaluate the situation real fast. And I did. And I'm just like, it worked. It worked. It worked. It saved my life, though. Like, not only did it save my life, it probably saved theirs too. You know what I'm saying? So this is how I think of it.

He was amazingly excited that he had saved his life and he had been able to get beyond violence as a tool for dealing with confrontation.

I mean, it seems clear that the program's made a difference, at least for some of these people that you've spoken to. But what about more broadly? What do we know about the program's sort of overall success?

What we don't know, and we won't know until the end of this year, is statistically whether it has made them safer and made the city safer than it otherwise would have been. Already within the ready group, five young men have been killed in the past 18 months. There's a control group of young men who are also being monitored who are not part of the READY program. And there'll be a comparison drawn to see who has the best outcomes at the end of the year.

And what about the surge in murders from 2016? Has the homicide rate stayed high? Has it changed at all?

Well, luckily for Chicago, the homicide rate has fallen in the last two years, and nobody's exactly sure why. That might partly be because of efforts like READY to bring down the rate. There are all sorts of other possible explanations, but the trends are getting better in Chicago, but nowhere near as good as big cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Well, why is that, though? I mean, that seems like a problem that has been more directly addressed and successfully so in places like New York and Los Angeles. Why is it still such a problem in Chicago?

The problem for Chicago depends on who you ask. When I talk to Rahm Emanuel, the outgoing mayor, he blames it all on the availability of guns that come in from the rest of Illinois and from neighbouring states. But others say, in fact, the greater problem is that the city just hasn't taken violence seriously enough. One crucial example of this is that Chicago only very recently set up a dedicated office to bring the violence down. Whereas New York and Los Angeles for many years have had a centralized system, Chicago has neglected that. And people say the reason is it's such a segregated city and the violence mostly affects African Americans. And if you look at the statistics, Chicago has lost over 200,000 African Americans who have fled this city since the beginning of the century. And mostly they're fleeing the violence. And the accusation against people like Rahm Emanuel is he didn't take their concerns seriously enough.

Adam, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

This weekend, Thailand coronated King Maha Vajira Longkorn. But it wasn't just a celebration. It's also potentially a turning point for the monarchy. The king's father was known for his thoughtful, quiet leadership. King Vijay Longkorn, by contrast, has had a lurid personal life and quirky rule. As crown prince, he made his poodle Fufu, an air chief Marshal. Meanwhile, in Britain, the Duchess of Sussex, previously known as Meghan Markle, and her husband, Prince Harry, will have their first child any day now. The British and Thai royal families are changing each in its own way.

Nobody would invent monarchy today. I mean, it's a pretty absurd system.

Emma Duncan is social policy editor at the Economist.

At the core of it, you've got succession through inheritance, through the family. And that's a system that really seems more likely to produce people with congenital defects than intelligent figureheads for the nation. I mean, after all, monarchy is sexist. You know, many monarchies will only have male heirs. It's classist and it's pretty racist because most of the monarchies in Western countries are white families. So it's not a system that is in tune with the modern times at all.

And given all that, how did monarchy as an institution make it through the 20th century with the world changing around it?

Well, I suppose one answer is only just because monarchies, particularly throughout Europe, crumbled as a result of revolutions and wars throughout the 20th century.

So that's it then. There will always be fewer and fewer monarchies until there are none, you think?

No, because something interesting happened this century, which is the decline has, has stalled. So through the 20th century you get this collapse and then it bottoms out. So there's a couple that go this century, Samoa, nobody noticed. Nepal, there was a murderous prince who killed nine members of his family and the whole thing collapsed after that. But aside from that, we seem to have, we seem to have reached a stable point where we have 44 monarchies left in the world.

And so how did those monarchies manage to survive?

Mostly by giving up power. So in developed countries, the monarchies that survive are constitutional monarchies that are almost entirely powerless. And then some others clung on in the Gulf, for instance, because they had lots of money and they could pay, they could pay their populations generous welfare handouts to the population to keep them happy. And they could pay for, you know, hefty, well paid security forces to keep the protests down. And one of the reasons that we don't see any further decline, I believe, is that democracy has, has hit a rocky patch. So through the 20th century, it seemed that democracy was the end of history, if you like, as Francis Fukuyama put it. But as we know in many parts of the world, democracy has encountered difficulties and monarchies are looking kind of not such bad option in those circles. I mean, for instance, in the Arab Spring, the monarchies did better than the republics, not just the rich ones in the Gulf, but also Morocco and Jordan.

You say skilled people, but must it necessarily be sort of benevolent people, benevolent rulers?

Yeah. The character of the monarchs and their attitude towards the role, I think is pretty crucial. So if you look at Japan and Britain, you've got two monarchs who have been on the throne for decades and who, if you like, subsumed their own interests very clearly into those of the insurance institution and their nation. And indeed, the late Thai king, who, although his political position was more powerful because of the strange relationship with the military and therefore more contentious, if you like, he, as an individual was revered by his people. He was very religious, very moral guy, and would go around the country, so inspecting rural development programs. And he was widely adored by the people. And that's not something that you see in his successor, who is to be crowned shortly, who doesn't even live in Thailand. He lives in Germany. He has mistresses and illegitimate children scattered around the world. And his exploits have been shared on social media. And very quietly, because Thais are understandably scared of the Lese Majeste laws, which often lead to jail sentences. Very quietly. There is discontent muttered in Thailand about his behavior and questions really being raised about how long this institution will survive in the charge of somebody like him rather than like his father.

Well, what about the broader question then of how many monarchies the world will see? The sort of the decline has stalled. Do you think. Do you think that's the sort of the baseline amount of monarchy in the world?

I think it's the baseline amount of monarchy in the world if the incumbent monarchs manage their positions well. It's an incredibly difficult job to do. We've had some people who really knew their business, and those who don't know their business, they will lose their jobs and the institutions will crumble.

Emma, thank you very much for joining us.

You're very welcome.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the Economist at economist. Com Radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.