From James Bridle, a very disturbing look at the absolute minefield that YouTube has become, thanks to a combination of trolls, automation and algorithms. I’m finding it hard choosing a paragraph to quote, here — you really need to read the whole thing.
Something is wrong on the internet
What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.
This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse. […]
What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.
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