• It’s interesting to investigate… but also more interesting to me are the scale of the numbers. “It was first uploaded on YouTube by RadioWV on August 9 and earned over 10 million views in less than a week and currently has over 1.2 million likes.”

    YouTube: radiowv 355K subscribers 94 videos, that’s right now. It’s got 41 million views today… and most of the stuff on their channel seems a couple uploads a month going back years, many getting only 5000 views, some getting 1.1 million. To me, it would be pretty earth-shattering if Google’s view/like farming logic wasn’t top notch and they could let 41 million views happen in just a couple weeks… without detecting it / flagging it.

    I think there is a rabid audience and they are casting out media content from all kinds of directions and feeding the flames of whatever takes off. It’s getting people into a frenzy that’s the goal. And we are 10 years since the tools of Cambridge Analytica were brought into their scope… Chasing trending and riding the coat-tails of media I think is a core strategy of their attempts to wrap themselves in voting success. Specacle.

    • Goog, meta, et al are not infallible, they’re good in a lot of places (in technical things, not privacy) but things like this where they take the approach of we can fix it later, they’re not really doing their best.