This is why I said.... The advertising business model has incentivized them to have increasing automation and channels that are doing all this. They want to create an engagement box—it's a black box; they don't know what's inside it—where more users keep signing up, more videos keep getting uploaded, and more people keep watching videos. They want to see all those three numbers going up and up.
It's a problem of exponential complexity that they can't possibly hire trillions of staff to look at and monitor and moderate the—I forget what the number is—I think billions of hours or something like that are uploaded now every day. They can't do it.
They need to be responsible for the recommendations, because if you print something in a newspaper and you reach 10 million people, there's some threshold by which you're responsible for influencing that many people. YouTube does not have to have the right-hand side bar with recommendations. The world didn't have a problem before YouTube suddenly offered it. They just did it only because the business model of maximizing engagement asked them to do it. If you deal with the business model problem, and then you say they're responsible for those things, you're making that business model more expensive.
I think of this very much like coal or dirty-burning energy and clean-burning energy.
Right now we have dirty-burning technology companies that use this perverse business model that pollutes the social fabric. Just as with coal, we need to make that more expensive, so you're paying for the externalities that show up on society's balance sheet, whether those are polarization, disinformation, epistemic pollution, mental health issues, loneliness or alienation. That has to be on the balance sheets of companies.