“YouTube: How the Most Popular Video Hosting Site Conquered the World?” by Mark Bergen

Today's section features a book about video hosting, which is currently working slowly but surely in Russia, but still quickly in most countries. Get comfortable while your videos are loading — we present to you a book recommendation on the topic.

Mark Bergen is an author and business journalist. He writes for Bloomberg Technology and Businessweek. In his book about YouTube, he covers the history of the creation and rise of the popular video hosting service, interspersed with details about the difficulties that had to be overcome at various stages. Everything he wrote was obtained personally through many hours of interviews, correspondence, and public reports, and the editors of the book helped to conduct fact-checking.

We will not retell the chronicle. All the events that the author writes about have already been covered in one way or another on the Internet and in the media. For example, which video was uploaded first or how exactly a shooting occurred in the company's office one day. But if you have not followed YouTube news at all before, then Mark Bergen's work will become a guide for you and will put the disparate facts in order. We will focus on the questions that the author raises as a journalist.

One of the first problems that the YouTube team faced at the start (and continues to struggle with to this day) is content moderation. Unfortunately, we are talking about videos that do not reach a wide audience, but which the specialists who have viewed them cannot forget. Extreme violence, videos with explicit content, fetish content – all that is called the seamy side of the Internet and is subject to removal. When hiring the first team of moderators for the office, it was necessary to buy a lot of protective film to hide computer screens from casual viewers. As the author writes, although this work was traumatic, the employees on the “front lines” felt pride in the sanitary cleaning of content and the protection of the web community. However, content moderation has also been criticized throughout the existence of the platform. For example, from human rights activists regarding content recording war crimes. That is, such materials that could serve as evidence in the event of investigations and proceedings. Either way, behind the scenes, the office always had its finger on the pulse and tried to do everything necessary to immediately process viewer complaints. In the book, Mark Bergen talks about how the guidelines were laid down and what made the moderators' blood run cold.

The second problem that YouTube users themselves got involved in was the transformation of the video hosting service into a mass media outlet. Considering that the founders did not intend their brainchild to be like that, this added certain difficulties in many countries. At first, a huge amount of content was coming from the Middle East, which raised the issue of editorial control — in contrast to this, the argument was made about freedom of speech. YouTube sought to open its offices in different countries — in some countries, the video hosting service was blocked. The author also highlights YouTube’s alarming trends regarding its presence in Russia, noting that government officials are demanding the removal of videos that are considered fake and extremist. In general, the book is worth reading if you want to trace how the video hosting service expanded its influence on users and what the downside is.

The third problem, which the author writes about in almost every chapter, is the legal regulation of the video hosting service. This includes literally everything: from the rights of authors to interaction with governments of different countries. After all, it is necessary to comply with legislation from different industries, and in general to protect the rights of people and, in particular, children. And here we return to what was discussed in the article a couple of paragraphs above. Be that as it may, YouTube lawyers have always had and still have a lot of work. It will be interesting to read the chapters about litigation with Viacom, and in general, the competition of companies since the emergence of YouTube.

The author of the book writes about many things from the “ground floor”: about the spread of ideas of various conspiracies and videos about vaccines, calling it a threat to science. In general, everything that can be found on social networks and YouTube in opposition to common sense. It is possible to understand the layers of such events, perhaps, only by training critical thinking – then no algorithms will confuse you.

For reference: in addition to the above, in his book Mark Berger talked about the founders of YouTube – Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, as well as about the key employees of the video hosting service, the role of Google in the history of the company and the bloggers who forever inscribed their names in the latter.