Buzzfeed sells YouTube on censorship

PewDiePie is a Nazi! Jordan Peterson is anti-feminist! Ben Shapiro is alt-right!

Also, the moon landing never happened, and the earth is flat, Bush did 9/11, all memes are highly organized hate campaigns from 4chan, and the frogs are turning gay.

Now that we’re clear on all that, we need to talk about just how horrible the mainstream media has been lately. In a crazy new article that apparently took all of their remaining staff to write, Buzzfeed comes out swinging at YouTube for spreading misinformation, blaming their algorithm.

Running its own experiments and citing an already debunked report from the Data and Society Research Institute and classifications from the embarrassingly partisan Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)— an organization so biased that had to pay Majiid Nawaz over 3 million dollars for slandering him as an anti-Muslim extremist—Buzzfeed claims that YouTube’s algorithm can “lead viewers searching for news into a partisan morass of shock jocks and videos touting misinformation.”

In the article, Buzzfeed basically complains that YouTube’s algorithm leads people to watch videos featuring people such as Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Dinesh D’Souza, and Bill O’Reilly. They bemoan the fact that people are currently free to watch what they term “anti–social justice warrior or misogynist clips” and “conspiracies and hate group content” on YouTube.

Note that this is the same Buzzfeed that was recently rebuked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for spreading misinformation.

Even crazier than the article that Buzzfeed ran is the fact that YouTube took its recommendations seriously and is implementing changes to its algorithm, pledging to remove “content that could misinform users in harmful ways.”

One of the authors of the article, Charlie Werzel, took to Twitter to boast about it.

Other mainstream media sources trumpeted this as a much needed change.

While it is true that there is conspiracy theory content on YouTube, it’s hardly the crisis that Buzzfeed is suggesting it is. YouTube itself claims that the problematic content in question is less than 1% of its overall content.

So what is this all about? It’s simple. By creating a false “misinformation crisis,” Buzzfeed and the rest of the mainstream media can boost their own content.

You see, alternative media sources are expanding at the very same time that Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post are contracting. Ordinary, independent, non-corporate content creators are more influential than major media outlets. People are turning to individuals like Jordan Peterson, Philip DeFranco, Christina Hoff Sommers, Tim Pool, and Joe Rogan to get their information for a reason.

Unlike the mainstream media, these content creators have established trust with their viewers and readers. They don’t lie, and when they make mistakes, they own them.

Take the recent example of the Covington Boys story. We would not have known the truth if it weren’t for the diligence and hard work of independent content creators Tim Pool and Nick Monroe. I have every reason to believe that Buzzfeed would have been perfectly happy to let the false narrative stand.

By convincing YouTube to fix its “misinformation” problem, Buzzfeed has convinced YouTube to decrease its promotion of ordinary, independent creators, and exaggerate the importance and prominence of the mainstream media instead. Like so many other recent gambits in the culture wars, it’s corporate censorship dressed up as progress.

But here’s the good news: it’s not going to work. The more that woke corporate interests try to conceal alternative voices, the more people will seek them out. It’s why individuals like Peterson and PewDiePie keep growing in popularity. It’s why venues like Quillette keep growing in popularity. Here at The Post Millennial, we’ve tripled our readership in the last three months.

It’s almost as if people hate being told what to do and how to think. How about that.