- Dumpster fire: In a piece about the repeated harassment he has faced from Crowder and the lack of action by YouTube, Maza tells CJR’s Justin Ray the video-sharing network’s participation in events like Pride Month makes its inaction even more indefensible. “YouTube is making money off of pretending to give a shit about this, because they don’t,” says Maza. “They care about looking like they give a shit so corporate brands don’t realize what a dumpster fire YouTube really is.”
- Uber-like: Guardian technology writer Julia Carrie Wong argues that while YouTube is often compared to Facebook and Twitter, it is actually a lot more like Uber. YouTube creators or “stars” like Crowder aren’t just users who post things randomly on the platform, she says—in a very real sense they are employed by YouTube, which partners with them to host their content in return for ad revenue and other benefits. And yet YouTube doesn’t take any responsibility for the content that it hosts.
- A PR gambit: Rebecca Lewis, a PhD student at Stanford and a former researcher at Data & Society who has written about the problem of extremist content on YouTube, said on Twitter she is skeptical about whether the company will actually follow through on its new commitment to crack down on hate speech. “It is extremely difficult not to see the new YouTube policies in part as a way to change a negative PR narrative after refusing to address the harassment faced by [Maza],” she said. “The platforms have become very good at issuing PR statements about proposed changes that don’t ultimately have much effect.”
- Caught in the net: Within minutes of YouTube’s announcement about a crackdown on extremist content, independent journalist Ford Fischer said that his YouTube channel—which documents extremism and activism—was demonetized. Fischer, who says his work has appeared in dozens of documentaries, said he got an email notice from YouTube that said “a significant portion” of his channel was not in line with its partner policies and therefore he was being was cut off from ad-revenue sharing.
- Craigslist founder Craig Newmark announced that his charitable foundation is giving Consumer Reports magazine $6 million to create a research lab that will focus on consumers’ rights in the digital era (Newmark is on CJR’s board of overseers and has given Columbia Journalism School $10 million for a new ethics center). The magazine says its new lab will “shine a light on the data privacy and security issues that consumers increasingly face, as well as examining the broader topics of fair market competition, transparency and consumer choice.”
- Daniel Dale, a reporter who gained a reputation for challenging (and counting) the numerous lies told by Donald Trump for The Toronto Star, is joining CNN as a reporter in the network’s Washington bureau, where he says he will be “on the truth beat full-time starting June 17, dissecting dishonesty from Trump, Democratic candidates, and others.” Dale says he started fact-checking the president in September 2016 “because I was frustrated that much of the campaign coverage didn’t seem very interested in talking about what was true and not true.”
- The LA Times writes about how a number of former family-owned newspapers in California are being snapped up by a little-known Canadian company called Alberta Newspaper Group. The firm is run by David Radler, a man who was the second-in-command to former media baron Conrad Black before becoming a star witness for the prosecution in the fraud case against his former boss (Black was recently pardoned by Donald Trump, about whom Black wrote a book).
- More Americans say they believe fake news is a problem than say climate change is, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. Fake news was rated as a serious problem by 50 percent of those who answered the survey, compared with 46 percent who said climate change was a problem. Republicans expressed far greater concern than Democrats did about the issue, and also placed far more blame on journalists for creating the problem than Democrats did.
- Naomi O’Leary, a reporter with Politico Europe, pointed out in a Twitter thread that a number of mainstream media outlets spread a false story about a Dutch teenager who was allegedly euthanized as part of that country’s legal euthanasia program. O’Leary said she was able to determine with just 10 minutes of fact-checking with a local reporter that the teen sought legal euthanasia and was refused, and later died at her home after refusing food and water for weeks.
- Matthew Kassel writes for CJR about journalists who have returned to work in their home towns after building a career elsewhere, including Caitlin Dewey — who returned to work for The Buffalo News after writing about digital culture and food policy at The Washington Post — and Christopher Rickett, who is now a government and politics editor at his hometown paper, The Indianapolis Star, after years working for publications in Baltimore, Chicago, and Denver.
- Herb Sandler, a former mortgage broker and philanthropist who provided the first investment in ProPublica, has died at the age of 88. Paul Steiger, who co-founded the company, talked about how in 2006, when he was managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, he got a phone call from Sandler, who had just sold his company Golden West Financial to Wachovia for $25 billion. The financier said he wanted to fund a new journalism venture, and was prepared to spend $10 million a year, and Steiger put together the proposal that eventually became ProPublica.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new report that shows over-zealous content moderation techniques used by social platforms like Facebook are removing pages, accounts and posts that are not extremist in nature but involve contentious political issues, including speech advocating for Chechen and Kurdish self-determination; satirical speech about a key Hezbollah figure; and documentation of the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine.
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