2. The number of people to whom these ideas seem plausible has grown and/or Youtube has made it more efficient to reach those people. I think it's 2. I think that the rise of conspiratorial thinking is connected most closely to a rise in actual conspiracies. 11/
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Just think of the spectacle of official inaction, combined with official calls for all the old people to die, combined with the annihilation of huge swathes of the economy, combined with a stream of revelations about corruption and profiteering in the response. 22/
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No wonder so many people are primed to believe in conspiracies at this moment, and so maddened with grief and anxiety that they take rash - and foolish - action. Which brings me back to what Youtube is doing. 23/
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Youtube is not a mind-control ray, it's a people-finding machine. That's because advertisers need people-finding machines. The median person buys <1 fridge/lifetime, so it's really hard to find people thinking of buying fridges. 24/
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That's why fridge ads appear on highways near airports: "People who fly have money, people need money to buy fridges." Those ads have 0.00000000000000000001% conversion rates. 25/
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Targeting ads to people who've searched for refrigerator reviews can make them thousands of times more effective, and even if the new rate is only 0.000000000001%, that's massive improvement for fridge advertisers. YT is ad-supported so it is good at finding people. 26/
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Ad-tech companies make two claims, though: the first is that they know where to find your customers. The second is that they can convince them of things that are otherwise unsupportable. 27/
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This was Cambridge Analytica's pitch: not that they would find racists and tell them about Trump, but that they would make decent people into Trump voters. There's some narrow truth to this Running ads that tell lies (especially harmful ones) is often illegal. 28/
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At the very least, it can mire you in scandal. Targeting allows you to place secret ads: ads whose content is only seen by people who won't narc you out. That gives targeted ads a persuasive advantage that billboards can't have. 29/
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Finding people who want to believe lies and lying to them is not mind-control. It's fraud. Because everyone in the entire history of the world who'd claimed to have invented a mind-control ray was a fraud, from NLPers and PUAs, to Mkultra and the Cultural Revolution. 30/
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Back to conspiracies, Youtube, secrecy and people-finding. There are lots of things wrong with Youtube (spying, monopolization, and its hospitality to copyfraud and censorship), but people-finding and spying are both double-edged swords. 31/
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People-finding is how fringe ideas accumulate adherents, yes. Some of those are terrible, like "scientific racism." Some are laudable, like the rise of trans identity. Privacy is how lies are spun, but it's also how truths are whispered before they can be spoken aloud. 32/
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Secrets like "I believe interracial marriage should be legal" or "cannabis isn't harmful" or "gender is not a binary." There are lots of things we should do to fix Youtube and tech, but on balance, finding people who share your ideas is a force for good. 33/
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Debunking false conspiratorial beliefs is important, but not as important as ending actual conspiracies among wealthy and powerful people to corrupt our political and economic system to enrich themselves regardless of the consequences to the rest of us. 34/
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Fighting conspiracism is like fighting a wildfire. When the town is on fire, you have to put it out. But if you want to keep your town from catching fire again, you have to eliminate the fuel that causes it to burn, clear out the brush. 35/
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The problem with locating the problem with Youtube - instead of seeing Youtube and its monopoly as a consequence of policies that promote inequality and monopolism - is that it's just fighting blazes, not preventing them. eof/
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