Blackwashing, Policy, And Social Media

June 23, 2020 4:10 PM

Writing for the New York Times, columnist Kevin Roose discusses how social media companies make public proclamations about support for movements like Black Lives Matter while refusing to address the weaponization of their platforms to attack and undermine those movements. (SLNYT)
posted by NoxAeternum (5 comments total)

YouTube, too, has struggled to square its corporate values with the way its products actually operate.

YT doesn't have any values that don't have a currency symbol in front of it. There are some people who work there who have convinced themselves that their personal values have some relationship to what their corporation that pays them will do. Some of them wise up. Some of them go for self-gaslighting. None of them change what the company does. Few of them change what they do.

Nice piece, thanks for bringing it here
posted by PMdixon at 7:39 PM on June 23, 2020 [3 favorites]

"YT doesn't have any values that don't have a currency symbol in front of it. "

Yeah, they are a large publicly traded company. But plenty of other companies have done a great job purporting to have values.
posted by el io at 10:00 PM on June 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

Accidently posted too quickly, so I'll continue as to not abuse the edit window more than I allready did.

IMHO every major sponsor of pride doesn't actually give a fuck about the LGBT community, they just decided it'd be more profitable (and help them hire talent) to pretend to. Hopefully one day social media companies will pretend as hard as brands like Budweiser.
posted by el io at 10:03 PM on June 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

The way Facebook's complicity in the Rohingya genocide is forgotten even by well-meaning journalists like this one is sad.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 7:26 AM on June 24, 2020 [6 favorites]

YT doesn't have any values that don't have a currency symbol in front of it.

I think this article points to how white supremacy is a value of the founders and leaders of Google, Facebook, etc., and not because capitalism is forcing them into it. They value white supremacy because it's the system under which they have gained and maintain vast amounts of power. At this point the "structural forces that are empowering racists on the internet" mentioned in the article can no longer be considered a bug; they are features integrated into these companies business models.
posted by soy bean at 2:56 PM on June 24, 2020 [1 favorite]