YouTube and the problem of veracity in the news

Just this morning I finished a conversation that had started the day before. It was about an allegation that children in the Democratic Republic of Congo were being used for mining cobalt, a metal used in the manufacture of batteries. Obviously such a resource would these days be worth a lot of money, and with some evidence – from one video that had been loaded to YouTube – that Chinese companies were involved, I took interest. 

The statistic that had been bandied about by one person was 40,000. In other words there were – allegedly, mind you – 40,000 children according to UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund) in an unsourced clip that started to infect the conversation I was having with two people overseas who might be expected – living as they do in developed countries – to be outraged by a fact of this nature. If it were established unquestionably to be true it would be a human rights violation of the first order. 

So why had no-one declared it publicly to the world? One “documentary” which had ostensibly been put up by Sky News (one man was confused about nomenclature because he’s unused to the media industry – with YouTube you get an odd assortment of real and unreal, or reliable and bogus, but the platform doesn’t tell you which is which) contained inconclusive evidence. The footage just didn’t seem accurate. A 4-year-old girl being used to sort through rocks? In other parts of this and other clips the soil was just being loaded into sandbags. The Sky News clip also showed a mine shaft with holes dug into the sides to allow people to descend into the bowels of the earth. Evocative footage – but was it real? – in other videos mining was done in open-cut fashion, a hole in the earth being occupied by workers putting ore into containers. And in the Sky News clip the children sounded like they were speaking Portuguese – instead of French.

All suspicious, but the two men who’d decided that I was a good candidate for well-intentioned indoctrination had by this time turned to sarcasm, a favoured method people use when they are unable to get other types of persuasion to convince you of whatever cackhanded idea they’ve got in their heads. I told one of the men who’d suggested – being a journalist – I should make my own story:

I'll buy a ticket to DRC tomorrow and pay $20000 to make a story in a dangerous country where there's no rule of law and where the virus is doing how much damage? Anyway too old for that sort of thing. I'll wait until someone younger and better resourced makes a credible story.

A credible story would be one that would get the global news industry motivated to fix a problem that – being so outrageous and manifestly unjust (40,000 children?) – engaged the world. If the Guardian or the New York Times were able to get a team of reporters and a photographer to Africa and make one story that verified that even 100 children were being used to mine cobalt. If the Sydney Morning Herald were to syndicate such a story on its website for subscribers such as myself to read. If a hashtag were to start up that promoted this single, reliable story instead of a few random mouth-breathers rigid with indignation at me – not the exploiters of said alleged child miners – for daring to disbelieve what they were privileged and – hear the heavenly choirs! – chosen to share with their grateful followers.

But no, not one story. Just a United Nations allegation and a random number (40,000!) picked out of the air by some functionary in order to shock the comfortable Western middle class into feeling guilty about using a mobile phone to message family and friends. You can see how potentially irresistible such a story would be to millions of social media users. Everyone in the world who uses a mobile phone – billions of people – could collectively suck in a mouthful of air, immediately killing all wildlife. The combined exhalation of human-produced CO2 – not produced by those wretched child miners, mind you! – could fuel the growth a trillion righteous saplings. 

The tweets of course didn’t stop even after I’d stopped talking on Twitter, with a Canadian with an Indian name triumphantly posting a link to a story from the UN’s website detailing the hideous crime. 

It was time to stop. Time to put this baby to bed. The misinformation industry is legion. Even politics is infected by the disease. What the above shows is not a crime being perpetrated against children in Africa. We’re dealing with a Wild West of global proportions, where any bad actor or any fool can use completely fabricated and false information to achieve diverse ends. We saw it in the 2016 US presidential election where thousands of dedicated Russian trolls manufactured stories designed to bring about a planned result. The media is not just under attack from thieves who purloin stories and repurpose them, publishing the rewritten article on a new web page alongside their own chosen ads. It’s being eroded by the internet itself. What people once thought of as a liberating influence is turning out to be a prison for the gullible.

A challenge for culture warriors is keeping the community engaged

American broadcaster NBC has said it won’t screen the Golden Globes Awards for a while because of underrepresentation of minorities in the voting panel. This comes on the back of revelations that the number of people watching the Oscars had halved in the last year. Just as Netflix had started to capture a quantity of gongs commensurate with its reach, people had started to abandon awards nights, and even traditional allies had turned sour.

This reflects a wider problem with awards of all kinds. I’ve written before elsewhere about how, in literature, there’s a too-small pool of talent choosing who wins prizes. Everyone knows everyone else and no-one’s honest so the same people keep getting accolades. We need to make sure the pool of talent used is as wide as possible, but we should be careful not to be complacent and just award prizes to the products that tick all the right ideological boxes but that are otherwise ordinary.

When Elon Musk came out with his “Aspergers” revelation we saw the community respond mostly with positive comments. Some people were not happy but most people said nice things about the billionaire, and whatever you might think about moneybags like Musk taking credit for being a little different the episode showed us how important identity is for the way that people value cultural products. 

If Musk is anything, he’s part of popular culture. If Andy Warhol were alive the artist would make a screenprint of Musk’s face for use on T-shirts. Responses from RW culture warriors to the NBC story, however, show that a backlash has already started – even before the project has fully worked itself out. Many people are unhappy with the “woke” factory that parts of the industry have become. This path is still unrolling itself along time’s bright axis so it’s too early, now, to give a definitive answer based on evidence, but I predict that the two sides will continue to bicker online until someone sets up a “Just Art” award committee somewhere that has as its overt focus the ignoring of ideology as a criterion for valuing such things as books or movies. 

“The Purelys” might be given each year to TV shows that are good despite the use of a wide range of gender-identifying types from many ethnic backgrounds, but who will be on the panel of judges? A random cohort of Twitter users, chosen on the basis of their visibility on the Netflix hashtag, perhaps. Or else a committee of university academics, following the Nobel’s methodology. Who gets to choose what is “good” and what is merely pedestrian? Do we allocate value on the basis of dollars alone, or do we wait, like patient children, until posterity tells us what is worth caring about?