Alex Winter on The YouTube Effect

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

At Tech Policy Press, we try to keep a close eye on YouTube, aware of the phenomenon of what legal scholar Evelyn Douek calls “magic dust,” the platform’s ability to fly under the radar vis a vis the other technology platforms, which draw far more scrutiny from academic researchers, journalists, and lawmakers. For instance, last year, I worked with NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights deputy director Paul Barrett on a report on YouTube titled "How YouTube Spreads Harmful Content—And What Can Be Done About It." And on the Tech Policy Press podcast we recently hosted Bloomberg journalist Mark Bergen, whose book, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination, chronicles the history of the platform from its birth 18 years ago through today.

In today’s podcast, I speak with director, writer and actor Alex Winter, whose new documentary, The YouTube Effect, is in select theaters now and will be available on streaming platforms on August 8th. The film's creators assert that "the story of YouTube is the great dilemma of our times; the technology revolution has made our lives easier and more enriched, while also presenting dangers and challenges that make the world a more perilous place."

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Alex Winter:

This is Alex Winter. I'm the director of the new documentary The YouTube Effect, which is out in theaters now and coming, just streaming on August 8th.

Justin Hendrix:

Alex, can you describe how this film fits alongside your other works? You've been concerned about technology issues for some time. How do you see this as sort of extension of your efforts to investigate this space?

Alex Winter :

I think it on a couple of fronts, I've been looking into the rise of online community for a very long time, since I first got online in the mid-80s back in the BBS era, and my first documentary was about the rise and fall of Napster, which while certainly was significant in terms of what it did to the record industry and the media component, to many of us was mostly significant because of this, the first time we had put a hundred million people online at the same time in history and during the dial-up era, which is crazy to think about now and the implications of that. Once you start putting lots of people together without guardrails, without gatekeepers, kind of democratization of culture, a lot happens. There's a lot of implications. A lot of those are positive, I would say up till very recently, most of those changes were positive.

Look at what happened to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement and the ability for marginalized voices to be heard. But I was seeing the rise of YouTube, which is really Google's media front end and not really seeing much in the way of discourse, not seeing much in the way of discourse around its rise and the implications of it. It was often being talked about as a social media platform and it's way more than a social media platform. So that was made, what made me want to look at it. Gale Anne Hurd, the producer actually came to me, she'd seen some of my other tech docs in this area and asked me if I wanted to collaborate with her and I'd been looking at Google for a long time, so it felt like a good time to do that.

Justin Hendrix:

I understand you focus on the kind of business machinations of Google. It's profit incentive, how this company has come to dominate the space. How do you situate that in the kind of broader internet ecosystem? What has YouTube become as a kind of corporate force?

Alex Winter :

I think that it gets mischaracterized as a social media platform and I think often left out of the conversations around the implications around media and social media platforms because it has grown to be so vast and so all encompassing, unlike really any... I think it's without precedent. I don't think we've ever had in modern history a single place that captured most of the world's eyeballs and ears that was almost all of humanity's recorded content, all of our news, all of our media, all of our entertainment, and then add to that a kind of a collective communal social media component. So I think that it has grown from being... I think the hint of this happened from the beginning, and I think to credit Susan Wojcicki and other people at Google, I think back at the beginning when they were looking to buy this company, I think they saw its potential, genuinely, and I think it was a good thing.

I think that their vision of what this could be and how it could bring people together and how it could give voice to a lot of people who currently did not have one... I think those are all very, certainly they were monetary. It was like this could make a fortune. Sure. So there were business incentives, but I think there was a genuine excitement to make something that would do, bring about positive change. I don't think anyone really foresaw because nothing like this has ever been attempted before. Anyone saw the massive level of influence it would have on the planet cutting to like 2015, 2016, and I would say personally, culminating with the Christchurch shooting in 2019 where you literally had a shooter who committed murderous acts of violence specifically influenced by this specific platform. And I think it was kind of a watershed moment that showed, that sort of proved to many of us who were beginning to have issues with some of the content that there would be real world harms and that there would be significant harms.

Justin Hendrix:

As you think about YouTube and its global reach at this moment, having conducted this investigation and produced this documentary, are there solutions, are there reforms? Are there things that you think could happen that would potentially address some of the harms that you see?

Alex Winter :

Yeah, I think that there are broad things that can be done. I think that while content moderation is hard, and I don't have any illusions about the difficulty of it, it is doable. For instance, they were not allowing content that was pushing the Stop the Steal Movement until about 10 days ago, and then they literally turned that button off and allowed it all back on again. They said they weren't going to silence that content anymore just as we head into an election year. So better content moderation is, despite all claims to the contrary, doable and should be done. People suing, I think we get into this with Carrie Goldberg for harms is doable and I think actually very effective. Reforming Section 230 is... I probably, I have a lot of respect for Hany Farid and people who are way smarter than me who are talking about reforming 230.

I am a little nervous about tampering with 230. I think it's an extremely important set of protections that keeps the internet functioning and mostly keeps, prevents sort of more censorship from happening on a larger scale. But there's probably reform around 230 that would help.

The big ticket item, in my opinion, is antitrust and eventually probably breaking up monopolies. And I think that that is, while in my view, what will probably be the most effective tool, it is the most difficult and I don't see that happening anytime soon and I don't see any movement of any significance in that direction at all currently.

Justin Hendrix:

You did interview a number of folks whose names have appeared across tech policy presses, pages, and of course in this podcast in the past, Hany Farid is one, Carrie Goldberg is another. Brianna Wu is another. Is there a particular story in this documentary that you feel like is, I suppose, exemplifies its message, one that you are most excited to see reach the public?

Alex Winter :

There's a few. I think that depending on what issue you're talking about. There is Caleb Kane kind of looking at the world post the YouTube recommender algorithm, post the kind of world of the rabbit hole, to what are the harms that are happening now? How do we help each other? What sort of parasocial relationships actually cause damage and that are beyond an algorithm? I think that was really significant for me because it showed me a lot about how we should be talking less about algorithmic issues and more about very specific human business model decisions that are being made that are causing harms. So for that reason, I think Caleb's story and how it intersects with Natalie Wynn's story is very significant to me.

But in the scope of what we're discussing, because all the stories kind of point to this, I think Carrie Goldberg and her, in my view, very noble and courageous and relentless attacks on these platforms for causing specific and individual harms, I think kind of lies at the heart of the story in terms of once you get past an algorithm, once you get past looking at this stuff in this kind of technological way, once you get over the fact that whether you like it or not, these platforms and new technology's not going anywhere, you can't just put your iPad down and go outside.

It's not going to solve anything, you're just complicit in making things worse. I think what Carrie is doing and the story of someone who's going up against such a Goliath is very impressive because I think it will actually help to cause change.

Justin Hendrix:

Can you speak a little more about what Carrie's doing?

Alex Winter :

Sure. I mean the example that we have in the film is her, she's actually been assisting Andy Parker. I don't know if they're actually currently working together on the case, so I don't want to misrepresent it. Andy Parker's daughter, Allison was a newscaster who was shot on camera and killed, and that video ended up all over YouTube and Andy's been trying to get that content taken down. So Carrie, we sort of cover Carrie working on harms based on these platforms to individuals.

And what Carrie, I think the best way to characterize what she's doing as a layman is she's looking past Section 230. She's looking past these technologies and she's looking at them more as products that are capable of causing harm. And so she's suing them in that regard and I think it's brilliant. I think that the current discourse around both AI and social media and media, online media platforms that makes them seem like these, it's kind of like the Wizard of Oz, right? These sort of magic boxes that AI's just going to come and kill us all and it's a sentient code that's impenetrable and unstoppable and the algorithm is this thing that will turn you into a Nazi just by gazing into the light. And I think Carrie's doing a very good job of getting past that and just saying, "Look, these are human beings behind systems that are technological, but they are created and run by people with incentives and when they cause harms, we should be going after those people." And I think that's right.

Justin Hendrix:

Was YouTube itself or Google helpful to you in the production of this documentary? Do you feel that they were reasonably transparent?

Alex Winter :

I do. I think to be fair to them that they are swept up in the radical and seismic expansion of their company, meaning Google because YouTube is owned by Google and it's influence and I think that they're a publicly traded company. They have share shareholders, they have people running the company who don't want to cripple it from a profit standpoint and don't want to slow its growth and don't want to give up the prominence that they have in terms of users. Not in terms of market cap, but in terms of users Google is the largest tech company on the planet. They have more people engaging with their product than any other tech company because of the users and the reach of Google being the number one most visited site and YouTube being the number two in the world. So they were very accessible to me.

I think they were as cautious as I expected them to be. I'm not really a got you doc filmmaker, so I had no interest in wagging my finger in anyone's face. I think the facts speak for themselves and people speak for themselves. But they were... I have to say I encountered no pushback from them and I was very clear about what we were doing, but if Brianna Wu says it in the film after Christchurch and other crises, Google has been very quick to put together task forces to try to deal with some of this stuff. They often do due to a number of reasons, go nowhere. So I wasn't really expecting Google to be obstructive.

Justin Hendrix:

Were you able, you think, to get a sense of the sort of international scale of some of these effects that you're talking about? I mean, one of the things that constantly is a concern in the accountability community that I talk to most often is that any of the harms that you might identify around YouTube in English language or in Western countries is magnified or amplified in non-English language countries. And the company itself puts far fewer resources against those issues.

Alex Winter :

That I agree with. I think that... I don't know, again, I don't, I'm not coming on here as the expert of all experts, but in my experience, I don't know if I would say that that YouTube's issues are amplified elsewhere to a degree larger than they are amplified here at home. If they are American based content, obviously YouTube is a global platform other than China where it's basically turned off. And so yes, if you have influencers or content that's related to those areas...

But it's true, it's absolutely true, they have less resources elsewhere and I don't know, I would expect to some degree for that to change because they are growing radically as an international entity and they are making huge inroads around the world, even just in terms of their data centers and things like that. But I do think that the scale of YouTube, the sheer staggering number of people outside of the US, their home base that have eyes on this content makes its influence very, very worthy of scrutiny internationally. And that was something that we were interested in doing and they were stats that we were interested in looking at.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm speaking to you on the day that Donald Trump has announced that he has received a target letter in special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into his role in January 6th. And I know that you at least briefly discussed this in the film, the role of YouTube in election misinformation. You've just mentioned of course that YouTube as a policy matter, has decided no longer to remove videos related to the 2020 election. Is there something that you think about with regard to 2024 as you kind of look ahead, what are you looking for around YouTube's behavior, how it will kind of position itself going into this next election cycle?

Alex Winter :

I am not highly optimistic, but if they were to do the right thing, the right thing would be the type of content moderation they were already doing that they stopped doing around preventing Stop the Steal propaganda from disseminating, as we, as campaigns are literally beginning and have begun. So we are already in an election cycle, as we all know, heading into 2024. It's going to be coupled with the rise of AI deep fakes, which while they are often, they can be very easily, often very easily rejected or dismissed, sometimes they're not and they've gotten more significant. So that's, and YouTube is a visual platform, so that's going to be an issue to add on top of it. So better content moderation, which while they claim they can't do it, they've already done it and undone it so we know they can do it. De-platforming extremely provocative and I would say violence inciting channels despite highly, being highly monetizable.

Like Stephen Crowder who after the FBI first went to Mar-a-Lago to investigate Trump's cache of classified documents, Crowder went on to his millions and millions of followers and called for civil war, and that's a heavily monetized channel by YouTube with enormous probably dark money funding behind it. So they should not be allowing that kind of content. Just, I think, they really need to start looking at themselves, which I don't believe they're going to do this... They want to have their cake, and eat it, too. If they want to function on a business model that's basically was created during the newspaper era and then rose up during radio and TV, which is an ad-based model, attaching ads to content that's then pushed forward by algorithms and advertising and everything else, then they have to have standards and practices like any media company that does that.

And so during an election year, you shouldn't be letting somebody who's obviously funded by the far right to be calling for civil war against the left. That's kind of basic standards and practices, and they don't do that. So they want to have their cake and eat it, too, which I understand, their shareholders want to continue to make lots of money. But I think that sort of looking globally, because there's lots of little things you could do, looking globally at YouTube, I'd say moving in 2024, having some set guidelines for standards and practices and a more aggressive approach to preventing that type of content because people... Look, I'm not being hyperbolic... People are going to get killed. They are. Someone's going to get, if not several people, if not many people are going to get killed because of this stuff going all the way through the 2024 election. And it is avoidable.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask you about another topic which is not covered in the film, but of course, which you and others in your vocation are dealing with at the moment, which is the strikes in Hollywood and the extent to which streaming, of course is a major point of contention. How does YouTube play into the current situation?

Alex Winter :

Well, Google and YouTube are, they are the front runner in the rise of new technologies that have completely upended the entertainment industry as well as many other industries. Some of that disruption has been positive. YouTube's early and determined approach to giving voice to marginalized communities, to people in other countries, to LGBTQ. There were really big and successful trans influencers on YouTube long before the entertainment industry woke up and started giving them roles in TV shows and any attention. So I think that you can credit YouTube in a lot of ways for the diversity pushes that began to take hold several years ago before our industry did it. And I think our industry did it because unfortunately, not due to nobility, but due to a fear that they were going to lose a lot more industry to YouTube and other platforms like that.

The labor issues that we have in the industry right now are directly related to changes in distribution and exhibition and production to a degree that have come from the rise of new technologies. And like any change in industry, whenever there are sweeping changes, the workers are left behind and the new oligarchs or the new owners of these platforms or ways forward are very quick to try to cement business practices that put as much money in their pocket and keep as much money away from everyone else's pocket as possible. And it's a very clear cut battle that we're in and it's existential.

And due to the strike which was necessary and the work shutdown, which was really caused by the AMPTP refusing to come to the table, a lot of people are going to leave this industry and not come back. I mean, it is going to be a seismic change to the way our industry works and a lot of people can't afford to continue to work in this business. And honestly, even with whatever negotiating terms come along, they're going to still be unable to work in this business. So there's going to be, I would assume there's going to be huge shrinkage across our industry in every area. And as you well know, because this is not rocket science, this is a labor crisis. This is going to be the case with many people in many areas of business over the next five to 10 years.

Justin Hendrix:

How has YouTube changed the way you make films? I mean, preparing for this interview, I watched the trailer on YouTube, I listened to you give a keynote address on YouTube. I watched other artifacts of your talks at various openings on YouTube. How has it changed the way you literally do what you do?

Alex Winter :

I mean, the positives have been profound and continue to be. I'm a tech agnostic. I really don't believe we should get off these platforms. I think we should continue to engage with them. We should just understand how they work and be discerning about what we're doing on them, and we should fight to make them more accountable. But I use Google all the time, and I use YouTube all the time, and YouTube has completely democratized the way... I mean, the gates were so high to get into this industry when I came up in it, and it still requires a certain amount of privilege. You still need to be able to afford an iPhone, afford internet, afford basic editing equipment. So I'm not going to be flippant and say that anyone can do this now. But certainly tens of millions of more people have access to the means of production than they did before YouTube.

And YouTube has been very fair about monetizing that for the most part with the creators. So for me, it has changed the people who work for me and with me, the culture of all of my staff and for my documentaries. Most of our research starts there and a lot of the good stuff we find exists there. It connects us to other filmmakers around the world. So it's sort of the way Twitter used to work before Elon Musk ruined it, was you could make a connection with a filmmaker via YouTube, and then you reach out to that filmmaker or reporter or content creator or whoever, maybe it's a kid in Ohio who happened to capture a piece of the story that you need.

I can find them just with a simple search on YouTube now and then I can connect to them immediately and I can monetize them. And we do that in our docs all the time. I'll find material that I was unable to get, we'll find that filmmaker or that person and we'll pay them, we'll credit them and we'll use their material. It's kind of, it's so big, it's almost hard to overstate how much it's changed what we do. We're on it all day long.

Justin Hendrix:

I guess I have a final question for you, which is really about sort of trajectory of media and content on the internet. You know, you've mentioned Napster, you mentioned BBSs, you mentioned the old internet that I also still remember. Of course, we're in the moment we're in. Are you able to cast your mind forward 10, 20 years? Of course, generative AI's in the news at the moment, lots of interest in synthetic content and automated methods of producing material. Are you able to cast your mind forward 10, 20 years? What do you think things will look like for people in your line of work?

Alex Winter :

I hope that the human desire for story by other humans and with all its idiosyncrasies and its flaws will still, as it has been since the beginning of recorded time, be a paramount importance to the average public. In which case movies and TV shows and whatever that the identity of that media is by then is will be okay. And there will be a mixed bag of stories and films and TV shows that are written by people and material that is more synthetically generated that has its own purpose.

But I do hope that there is, that there continues to be that, and I do believe there will be. Otherwise, you will find me treading the boards back on stage, which is where I started in show business many years ago, because that's not going anywhere. But where YouTube will be and where these companies will be and what the world looks like in 10 or 20 years... Well, in 10 years, I'm not sure how much different something like YouTube will be, because I don't think regulation is going to move quickly enough to actually do much to YouTube or whatever its competitors are by then. But 20 years, I think we'll be making inroads into hopefully breaking some of these companies up and having a more equitable and accountable landscape.

Justin Hendrix:

Where can listeners of this podcast see this film?

Alex Winter :

Well, we are out in theaters. I'm touring with the film all over the country and the world. I'm actually going to England with it next week. And on August 8th we will be streaming worldwide. So you'll be able to find us almost anywhere online, but we will be posting about that at the time. But in two weeks, we'll basically be available everywhere.

Justin Hendrix:

I assume that will also mean on YouTube.

Alex Winter :

I very much hope they don't block us there. I think it would be great if we end up on YouTube.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, we'll look for it there or elsewhere. Alex Winter, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Alex Winter :

Yeah, Justin, it was really great. Thanks so much for having me.