Facts Should Matter. Yet...

Step one, get your facts straight. Yet another example of media not understanding how technology works or simply ignoring the facts to build on the fear and hate narrative.

Vice News Ep 521: April 9, 2019

"YouTube inadvertently demonstrated just how pervasive hate speech is on social media. 20 minutes into the hearing's official live stream YouTube shut down the comments section which had been overrun by racists."

Wrong. So wrong. So very very wrong.

YouTube wasn't "overrun" by racists. Well, at least not human ones. Chat bots and trolls are really what's pervasive. YouTube shut it down because there was no healthy discourse and the trolling doesn't do much except feed the wrong machine and suck up bandwidth.

There is no winning for YouTube on this, if they had locked down comments from the get go, they would have been accused of censorship. So they launch it and wait for the inevitable cacophony of nonsense.

The bot and troll "attacks" are a vulgar version of exactly what media outlets and specifically Vice News in this instance do on a daily basis. Trolling and botting benefit the bad actors by falsely inflating engagement numbers and in a variety of other ways. So if Vice and other media outlets reporting this are garnering traffic and engagement with misinformation, how are they any different than the trolls?

Of course, Vice muted Candace Owens while exploiting video footage of her in favor of its factually bankrupt voice over.

This is not helping anyone, least of all the people actually suffering at the hands of actual racist actions.