In the early years of YouTube only a few carefully chosen channels were monetized, but in 2012 they opened up the “Partner Program” as it’s called, to anyone, allowing them to monetize their videos no matter how many (or few) subscribers or total views they had. You could start a channel, and immediately begin earning ad revenue from your videos if people watched them, but that has all changed.
Now they manually review every channel before it’s allowed in the Partner Program, so their moderators look through the videos and see what kind of content someone is producing, and if they don’t like it, none of the videos on the channel will ever be monetized no matter how popular they are.
Some wonder if YouTube is harming themselves financially with all these new restrictions and the mass demonetization crusade they’ve engaged in, but the fact is there are plenty of other “brand friendly” or pro-liberal agenda channels that they can get revenue from. After all, being a YouTuber is the number one dream job for most kids today. It’s not being an astronaut, football player, or a movie star; it’s literally being a YouTuber.866
They’ve also been moving away from the monetized view business model entirely. In 2017 they began offering television packages similar to a cable provider but through an Internet connection, calling it YouTubeTV. It started off in just five U.S. markets, but then in January 2019 they massively expanded to 195 markets, making their service available to 98 percent of U.S. households.867
They have also been slowly morphing into another Netflix by producing original content like the popular Cobra Kai series which is a spinoff from the 1980s Karate Kid movies and stars Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka). They rent a large library of popular movies and TV shows on-demand too, for just a few dollars per stream.
As one online media outlet put it, “The golden age of YouTube is over,” and it will never be the same.868 “The platform was built on the backs of independent creators, but now YouTube is abandoning them for more traditional content.”869 Countless videos once regularly discovered by curious minds are now lost in limbo. Voices opposing certain aspects of the liberal agenda have been systematically silenced. And Leftist propaganda has been artificially amplified to give the impression that their view is the correct one.
For those of us who have seen the changes made in recent years, as we look back on what YouTube once was, it’s like returning to the location of your favorite dive bar to find that it’s been bulldozed and replaced by a strip mall filled with a bunch of trendy stores you would never step foot in.
Author’s Note: Once you finish this book, please take a moment to rate and review it on Amazon.com, or wherever you purchased it from if you’re reading the e-book, to let others know what you think. This also helps to offset the trolls who keep giving my books fake one-star reviews when they haven’t even read them.
Almost all of the one-star reviews on Amazon for my last two books “The True Story of Fake News” and “Liberalism: Find a Cure” are from NON-verified purchases which is a clear indication they are fraudulent hence me adding this note.
It’s just more proof that liberals are losers and can’t play fair, so if you could help me combat them once you’re finished with this book since you actually bought and read it, I would appreciate it very much!
Thank you!
The Future of Fake News
Once “fake news” consisted primarily of made-up stories posted on cheap websites nobody had ever heard of, or websites with similar URLs to brand name outlets publishing completely fake articles hoping they’ll go viral through social media and generate a bunch of ad revenue from all the clicks. I’m sure you’re familiar with people making fake screenshots on Photoshop and posting them on social media claiming they came from news articles, text messages, DMs, or someone’s “deleted” tweet, but we’re far beyond those primitive forms of fake news and are approaching something that was once only found in science fiction films.
In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 film The Running Man, he was an innocent police helicopter pilot who was framed for the massacre of civilians looting a grocery store after an economic collapse, and with the help of some doctored video that aired on national television, the general public thought that he had been caught red handed murdering the people, when in fact he had refused orders to open fire on them. His face was also digitally placed onto the body of someone else at another point in the film to further sell the lie to the public.
While deceptively edited video has been a problem and can cast people in a false light and twist their statements or place them out of context, the video tricks we’re now facing are far more sophisticated. They can make almost anyone appear to do or say almost anything—just like what happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man.
These fake videos are called “deepfakes” named after the deep learning of artificial intelligence algorithms that are used to create them. This same technology had been used dating back to the 1990s in order to make it appear that Forrest Gump shook hands with President John F. Kennedy, and made John Wayne look like he was handing off a six pack of Coors Light to someone in a commercial even though he had been dead for over ten years.870
More recently it was used to digitally impose Paul Walker’s face onto another actor’s body to finish Fast and the Furious part 7 after he died in a car accident before the film was done being shot.871 But unfortunately this technology isn’t just being used for entertainment anymore, and people are starting to realize that in the wrong hands it can pose a tremendous danger.
In April 2018 comedian Jordan Peele released a video showing Barack Obama appearing to warn that, “We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point at time — even if they would never say those things.” Obama went on to say, “So, for instance, they could have me say things like… President Trump is a total and complete dip shit.”872
The video then cut to a split screen showing Obama on one side and Jordan Peele on the other, revealing that he was doing the voice for Obama since he does a pretty good impression, and he was also using real-time face mimicking software in order to match his lips and facial expressions onto a digitally recreated version of Obama. It was a clever PSA to bring this kind of technology to people’s attention, since at the time most people hadn’t heard of deepfakes.
Two years earlier, in 2016, researchers at Stanford University posted a video demonstrating their “Face2Face Real-time Face Capture” technology, showing how by using their software and an ordinary webcam they could map a person’s facial expressions onto George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.873 This may have been the same software Jordan Peele used for his video.
The following year a different group of researchers from the University of Washington created another fake Obama video showing him saying things that he has actually said in the past, but the video was completely synthetic and showed him in a different setting while making the statements. They released a paper explaining how they were able to do it.874 Deepfakes like this could easily change someone’s reaction to seeing or hearing something, giving a false impression as to how they feel about a certain event or issue; but this is just the tip of the iceberg.