đŁRun out the clock
Last week, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki took the stage at the Recode conference for a sit-down interview with Peter Kafka. The timing was interesting, as it was shortly after the company was in a bit of an ⌠internet controversy.
Reading the transcript of Wojcicki and Kafka I was struck by how⌠familiar these interviews are becoming. In the same way that we have a template for something like a politician admitting moral wrongdoing, weâre also starting to get a templated version of the âweâre listening but this is hard!â tech CEO interview. And the pattern is revealing something troubling.
Letâs look at Wojcickiâs answers.
Step one usually starts with pointing out the scale these companies operate under:
âI want to just be clear that, again, itâs this 99 fractional 1 percent problem.â
âAnd so itâs really all the good, itâs the 99 percent of good, valuable content that Iâm really encouraged, that keeps me motivated and passionate about what I do.â
And then, they touch on how âseriouslyâ the company takes the issue they are being grilled about. This is often done while hinting at some technological solution that is just around the corner:
âWe need to think about it in a very thoughtful way be able to speak with everyone.â
ââŚjust to be clear ⌠weâve been making lots of different policy changes on YouTube. We have made about 30 changes in the last 12 months, and this past week, we made a change in how we handle hate speech.
And then how complex and messy this whole thing is:
âWeâre a global company, of course.â
âThat took months and months of work, and hundreds of people we had working on that. That was a very significant launch, and a really important one.â
Every. Single. Time.
Jay Rosen: An edit button would be one. I know thatâs hard. I know thereâs all kinds of issues, but thatâs âŚ
Jack Dorsey: Itâs not that itâs hard. Itâs that if you asked a hundred different people what they intend by âedit,â youâll get a hundred different answers.
(Great, so pick one.)
Jay Rosen: âWhy arenât the values of Twitter what it takes to have a healthy public sphere?
Jack Dorsey: âI guess it depends on what you mean by value.â
(We just want consistency, man.)
Jack Dorsey: ââŚThe organizing principles of the past are not going to serve us in the same way that we need to organize to face the challenges that are present today. Like the existential crises before us of economic inequality and the growing wealth gap, especially a racial wealth gap, the environment, and the displacement of work from artificial intelligence, those are things that an organizing principle of a nation state will not be able to solve because theyâre global and they face all of us.â
(Yes there is a wealth gap, but weâre not asking you to solve poverty.)
If you were these CEOs what would you do? If you remove content from your platform, youâre picking favorites. Do nothing and you can be complicit in some terrible people doing terrible things. Change some feature and people could leave in droves. This is complicated stuff, Iâm not pretending otherwise.
Thereâs only one real strategy here and itâs the one they are taking: run out the clock on every single controversy. Do nothing. Speak as if the platform was thing happening to you and not a thing you are in control of. And only act if the pressure becomes so undeniable. (Carlos Maza works for one of the most influential media companies on the web. What if he hadnât?)
It is a CEOâs job to make hard choices. And they arenât.
The âhardâ choice they have made is to maintain the status quo. To say the right things and sit and smile when they get called out. As users and observers, we are clamoring for Jack Dorseys, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Susan Wojcickis to make hard choices to make the platform better on our behalf.
Ask yourself: Do YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook behave in fundamentally different ways since this issue came to the forefront in 2015 and 2016?
