The line between us, YouTube, and censorship

Congress periodically flirts with the idea of imposing controls on social media. Google and Facebook have taken the hint, by hiring thousands of real live human content monitors who decide which content to kill.

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And of course, the moment they started killing off stuff they were accused of censorship. But the real problem was revealed in an offhand comment from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai about how the company monitors YouTube videos.

“We have to look at it on a video-by-video basis,” Pichai said. “And we do strive to do it, for the volume of content we get (it’s) 400 hours of video every minute.”

YouTube gets 400 hours of video every minute! That’s a video volcano. That’s 576,000 hours of video every day. To evaluate all of that video, each of Google’s 10,000 content monitors would have to be monitoring content for 57 hours and 36 minutes each day. Which would require a radical slowing of the earth’s rotation.

And if Congress can’t even approve a wall, I see almost no chance of them approving a rotational slowdown.

Which means that we are all just going to personally have to think about what we watch and consider the possibility that the stuff that gets us really angry was designed that way on purpose by somebody who concluded we were gullible enough to fall for it.

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