Inside Political Conventions – How They’re Changing, Why They Matter | Election 2020

The Democrats planned a raucous bash in Milwaukee for July. The Republicans dreamed of a packed house in North Carolina for August. Their plans may have changed, but you can still spend a summer night with The Times. Gather your favorite delegates and join us as we talk politics, share a laugh (yes, it’s still possible) and dive deep into the world of conventions — how they’re changing, why they matter and what it feels like to give a speech that can make or break your political career.

Hosted by Rachel Dry, New York Times deputy politics editor. Guests include reporters Katie Glueck, Annie Karni, Lisa Lerer and Jenny Medina.

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This is an awesome chat! Thank you New York Times for allowing us to listen in, and thank you Julian for illustrating the methods by which institutional change can be brought about, and for offering a hopeful vision of the future!

Side note: there are no other comments here as of yet… and isn’t that nice? I wish you, and other journalistic channels, would consider keeping your YouTube comments entirely CLOSED — at least until YouTube figures out a better filtering/moderation system.

As of now, although it hasn’t happened to this video yet, what usually happens is coordinated troll/bot armies, seizing on the popularity and trustworthiness associated with a journalistic outlet’s name, will commandeer and then redeploy that outlet’s platform by using comments to spread disinformation and propaganda from it.

For example, people looking for COVID-19 information will find a video, ranked as having “high relevance” owing to the the video-makers‘ diligence in producing it, and owing to the video-makers’ trustworthy name earned by their stellar past work… but then the searchers will also face a coordinated barrage of misleading comments, posted there by hostile actors intent on harming them, encouraging them to drink bleach!

And the least-sophisticated searchers will not easily untangle the trustworthy video from the coordinated barrage of identical and mutually-reinforcing misleading comments.

In other words, all the technology YouTube built, and all the money Google spent developing it, and all the decades New York Times’ journalists and editors spent building their brand into a popular and a trusted one… in a trice and for mere pennies can be seized by hostile actors, and then leveraged and repurposed into a propaganda platform, from which one voice with a million mouths can attempt to dismantle entire democracies.

Perhaps some marketing team has told you “Engagement drives revenue!” or some bromide of that sort… but I think you’ll find in actuality toxic comment sections have at best a mixed result on a channel-owner’s bottom line, and of course providing a free platform for hostile powers to target our least-informed citizens from carries with it a very steep civic cost.

So until YouTube provides better moderation tools, you’d do the world a greater service by keeping comments closed than by giving bots and trolls free rein within them!