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Elon Musk Says He Wants To Send Two People Around The Moon By 2018

Gregg Newton / AFP / Getty Images

Two people have paid Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket firm an undisclosed amount to shoot them around the moon on a Falcon Heavy space rocket flight late in 2018.

Announced at a Monday briefing, the proposal to circle two unidentified customers around the moon follows past audacious moves by Musk, ranging from now standard landings of rocket stages to sending an unmanned “Red Dragon” crew vehicle to Mars.

“They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission,” according to a SpaceX statement. The Federal Aviation Administration created new rules allowing for US space tourism in 2016.

The trip would send the two people aboard a Dragon space capsule around the moon for a week. The capsule was developed with NASA to send astronauts to the International Space Station. The news comes as NASA contemplates a separate “EM-1″ crewed moon trip for its SLS rocket in 2018.

“By also flying privately crewed missions, which NASA has encouraged, long-term costs to the government decline and more flight reliability history is gained, benefiting both government and private missions,” SpaceX said.

“I&039;m skeptical,” space law expert Micheal Listner told BuzzFeed News, saying that SpaceX faced an uphill battle in getting a FAA license to pull off the lunar mission next year, even if it does develop its Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon capsule on schedule.

Despite being a private mission, the launch would also need tracking support from NASA&039;s Deep Space Network (DNS). “So, with all the hype about this being a private mission, it will require public resources,” Listner said by email. “That NASA is considering the same thing with EM-1 is sure to create political pressure from Congress as well, who won’t take kindly to NASA being upstaged.”

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, with the goal of making humanity “interplanetary,” and has spoken often of his hopes of colonizing Mars.

LINK: NASA Is Studying A Manned Trip Around The Moon On A $23 Billion Rocket

LINK: Ready To Die? Elon Musk Has A Plan To Send You To Mars

Quelle: <a href="Elon Musk Says He Wants To Send Two People Around The Moon By 2018“>BuzzFeed

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Azure Command Line 2.0 now generally available

Back in September, we announced Azure CLI 2.0 Preview. Today, we’re announcing the general availability of the vm, acs, storage and network commands in Azure CLI 2.0. These commands provide a rich interface for a large array of use cases, from disk and extension management to  container cluster creation.

Today’s announcement means that customers can now use these commands in production, with full support by Microsoft both through our Azure support channels or GitHub. We don’t expect breaking changes for these commands in new releases of Azure CLI 2.0.

This new version of Azure CLI should feel much more native to developers who are familiar with command line experiences in the bash enviornment for Linux and macOS with simple commands that have smart defaults for most common operations and that support tab completion and pipe-able outputs for interacting with other text-parsing tools like grep, cut, jq and the popular JMESpath query syntax​. It’s easy to install on the platform of your choice and learn.

During the preview period, we’ve received valuable feedback from early adopters and have added new features based on that input. The number of Azure services supported in Azure CLI 2.0 has grown and we now have command modules for sql, documentdb, redis, and many other services on Azure. We also have new features to make working with Azure CLI 2.0 more productive. For example, we’ve added the "–wait" and "–no-wait" capabilities that enable users to respond to external conditions or continue the script without waiting for a response.

We’re also very excited about some new features in Azure CLI 2.0, particularly the combination of Bash and CLI commands, and support for new platform features like Azure Managed Disks.

Here’s how to get started using Azure CLI 2.0.

Installing the Azure CLI

The CLI runs on Mac, Linux, and of course, Windows. Get started now by installing the CLI on whatever platform you use.  Also, review our documentation and samples for full details on getting started with the CLI, and how to access to services provided via Azure using the CLI in scripts.

Here’s an example of the features included with the "vm command":

 

Working with the Azure CLI

Accessing Azure and starting one or more VMs is easy. Here are two lines of code that will create a resource group (a way to group and Manage Azure resources) and a Linux VM using Azure’s latest Ubuntu VM Image in the westus2 region of Azure.

az group create -n MyResourceGroup -l westus2
az vm create -g MyResourceGroup -n MyLinuxVM –image ubuntults

Using the public IP address for the VM (which you get in the output of the vm create command or can look up separately using "az vm list-ip-addresses" command), connect directly to your VM from the command line:

ssh <public ip address>

For Windows VMs on Azure, you can connect using remote desktop ("mstsc <public ip address>" from Windows desktops).

The "create vm" command is a long running operation, and it may take some time for the VM to be created, deployed, and be available for use on Azure. In most automation scripting cases, waiting for this command to complete before running the next command may be fine, as the result of this command may be used in next command. However, in other cases, you may want to continue using other commands while a previous one is still running and waiting for the results from the server. Azure CLI 2.0 now supports a new "–no-wait" option for such scenarios.

az vm create -n MyLinuxVM2 -g MyResourceGroup –image UbuntuLTS –no-wait

As with Resource Groups and a Virtual Machines, you can use the Azure CLI 2.0 to create other resource types in Azure using the "az <resource type name> create" naming pattern.

For example, you can create managed resources on Azure like WebApps within Azure AppServices:

# Create an Azure AppService that we can use to host multiple web apps
az appservice plan create -n MyAppServicePlan -g MyResourceGroup

# Create two web apps within the appservice (note: name param must be a unique DNS entry)
az appservice web create -n MyWebApp43432 -g MyResourceGroup –plan MyAppServicePlan
az appservice web create -n MyWEbApp43433 -g MyResourceGroup –plan MyAppServicePlan

Read the CLI 2.0 reference docs to learn more about the create command options for various Azure resource types. The Azure CLI 2.0 lets you list your Azure resources and provides different output formats.

–output Description
json json string. json is the default. Best for integrating with query tools etc
jsonc colorized json string.
table table with column headings. Only shows a curated list of common properties for the selected resource type in human readable form.
tsv tab-separated values with no headers. optimized for piping to other tex-processing commands and tools like grep, awk, etc.

You can use the "–query" option with the list command to find specific resources, and to customize the properties that you want to see in the output. Here are a few examples:

# list all VMs in a given Resource Group
az vm list -g MyResourceGroup –output table

# list all VMs in a Resource Group whose name contains the string ‘My’
az vm list –query “[?contains(resourceGroup,’My’)]” –output tsv

# same as above but only show the &#039;VM name&039; and &039;osType&039; properties, instead of all default properties for selected VMs
az vm list –query “[?contains(resourceGroup,’My’)].{name:name, osType:storageProfile.osDisk.osType}” –output table

Azure CLI 2.0 supports management operations against SQL Server on Azure. You can use it to create servers, databases, data warehouses, and other data sources; and to show usage, manage administrative logins, and run other management operations.

# Create a new SQL Server on Azure
az sql server create -n MySqlServer -g MyResourceGroup –administrator-login <admin login> –administrator-login-password <admin password> -l westus2

# Create a new SQL Server database
az sql db create -n MySqlDB -g MyResourceGroup –server-name MySqlServer -l westus2

# list available SQL databases on Server within a Resource Group
az sql db list -g MyResourceGroup –server-name MySqlServer

Scripting with the new Azure CLI 2.0 features

The new ability to combine Bash and Azure CLI 2.0 commands in the same script can be a big time saver, especially if you’re already familiar with Linux command-line tools like grep, cut, jq and JMESpath queries.

Let’s start with a simple example that stops a VM in a resource group using a VM’s resource ID (or multiple IDs by spaces):

az vm stop –ids ‘<one or more ids>’

You can also stop a VM in a resource group using the VM’s name. Here’s how to stop the VM we created above:

az vm stop -g resourceGroup -n simpleVM

For a more complicated use case, let’s imagine we have a large number of VMs in a resource group, running Windows and Linux.  To stop all running Linux VMs in that resource group, we can use a JMESpath query, like this:

os="Linux"
rg="resourceGroup"
ps="VM running"
rvq="[].{resourceGroup: resourceGroup, osType: storageProfile.osDisk.osType, powerState: powerState, id:id}| [?osType==&039;$os&039;]|[?resourceGroup==&039;$rg&039;]| [?powerState==&039;$ps&039;]|[].id"
az vm stop –ids $(az vm list –show-details –query "$rvq" –output tsv)

This script issues an az vm stop command, but only for VMs that are returned in the JMESpath query results (as defined in the rvq variable). The osType, resourceGroup and powerState parameters are provided values. The resourceGroup parameter is compared to a VM’s resourceGroup property, and the osType parameter is compared to a VM’s storageProfile.osDisk.osType property, and all matching results are returned (in tsv format) for use by the "az vm stop" command.

Azure Container Services in the CLI

Azure Container Service (ACS) simplifies the creation, configuration, and management of a cluster of virtual machines that are preconfigured to run container applications. You can use Docker images with DC/OS (powered by Apache Mesos), Docker Swarm or Kubernetes for orchestration.

The Azure CLI supports the creation and scaling of ACS clusters via the az acs command. You can discover full documentation for Azure Container Services, as well as a tutorial for deploying an ACS DC/OS cluster with Azure CLI commands.

Scale with Azure Managed Disks using the CLI

Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Azure Managed Disks to simplify the management and scaling of Virtual Machines. You can create a Virtual Machine with an implicit Managed Disk for a specific disk image, and also create managed disks from blob storage or standalone with the az vm disk command. Updates and snapshots are easy as well — check out what you can do with Managed dDisks from the CLI.

Start using Azure CLI 2.0 today!

Whether you are an existing CLI user or starting a new Azure project, it’s easy to get started with the CLI at http://aka.ms/CLI and master the command line with our updated docs and samples. Check out topics like installing and updating the CLI, working with Virtual Machines, creating a complete Linux environment including VMs, Scale Sets, Storage, and network, and deploying Azure Web Apps – and let us know what you think!

Azure CLI 2.0 is open source and on GitHub.

In the next few months, we’ll provide more updates. As ever, we want your ongoing feedback! Customers using the vm, storage and network commands in production can contact Azure Support for any issues, reach out via StackOverflow using the azure-cli tag, or email us directly at azfeedback@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure

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The Iconic Nokia Brick Phone Is Back

If you were around in the early 2000s, you probably remember this:

If you were around in the early 2000s, you probably remember this:

A total 126 million 3310s were sold since the phone&#039;s launch in September 2000.

Nokia

Well, it’s back (kind of).

Well, it's back (kind of).

Paul Hanna / Reuters

On Sunday — 17 years after the phone was first introduced — Nokia announced it would be reintroducing the 3310.

The reimagined phone comes with the classic game Snake, and is said to have a standby battery life of a month. It also has a 2-megapixel camera, a microSD slot, and a color screen. It comes in four colors — red, yellow, blue, and gray — and is expected to cost around $52 when it becomes available sometime in the second quarter of the year.

“The love for the brand is immense. It gets a lot of affection from millions and millions of people,” said Nokia&039;s Chief Executive Rajeev Suri in a press conference on Sunday.

Quelle: <a href="The Iconic Nokia Brick Phone Is Back“>BuzzFeed

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Girl Scouts Are Taking Credit Card Payments For Cookies And It’s Diabolical

It&#039;s Girl Scout cookie season, which means our wallets are getting smaller and our pant sizes are getting bigger.

Seasons vary by place. Here&039;s how to find yours.

But in these hip modern times, how can you get your Thin Mint fix if you don&039;t carry cash?

According to a 2014 report by Bankrate and Princeton Survey Research Associates International, 50% of Americans carry $20 or less every day, and 9% don&039;t carry cash at all. Retailers are adapting at varying speeds.

Oh, the burnt caramel taste of sorrow&#033;

Giphy

The Scouts know this is a problem, though, and they&039;re trying something new: mobile credit card readers.

Giphy

That&039;s right. Some Girl Scouts have started using Square to take payments, and people around the country have taken notice.

Square doesn&039;t have any official data on the prevalence of its readers among the Scouts, and Troop 87 didn&039;t respond to requests for comment about why they decided to try the mobile card readers.

Square did say it has seen a trend of more parents telling the company they&039;ve started using readers, as well as more social media chatter about scouts around the country using them in 2017 than in 2016.

The readers didn&039;t come from an official Girl Scout partnership with Square, and there probably won&039;t be one in the future.

Square was excited about the scouts, though: “We love when sellers use Square in creative ways. As you can imagine, their customers are equally as excited that they don&039;t have to carry cash anymore.”

There&039;s an expense for the convenience, though: the company takes a 2.75% transaction fee for all credit and debit card transactions.

Who are these scouts of the future?

Meet Ava Burns. She&039;s a seven-year-old Girl Scout and is in the first grade in Austin, Texas. She&039;s sold 720 boxes of Girl Scout cookies this year, the most of anyone in Troop 87.

It&039;s only her second year in Girl Scouts, and last year she sold 500 boxes.

Her goal for 2017 was 650, which she&039;s obviously already beaten. Her mom, Briana Burns, attributes the increase to one big change: a Square credit card reader.

“I think 90% of the people who weren&039;t carrying cash, which were mostly young people, turned around and bought something when they heard we took credit cards,” she told BuzzFeed News.

Briana Burns

Last year, Ava and her mom had some trouble. Several potential cookie buyers walked away empty-handed, saying, “Ah, I want to buy some, but I don&039;t have any cash.”

The same thing started happening when cookie season started again on January 18 this year. But two days into the season, Troop 87 offered its members the chance to use Square readers to process payments for cookies. Ava wanted to try it out, so she brought the reader with her when she was selling door-to-door after school and when setting up cookie sales booths at Walmart or Walgreens on weekends.

Sales end this Sunday, and Ava is currently the top seller in her troop. Briana said that the other scout with a Square reader is among the top three as well. Briana predicts more people will use the readers in 2018 because of how successful they were this year.

“Ava asked me last week if we had met our goal, and I looked, and we were already 70 boxes past it,” Briana said.

It wasn&039;t just Ava&039;s mom using the reader to take payments, either.

Ava herself became well-versed in using Square to take credit card payments. The two had set up shop outside a Walmart one day when Briana started having trouble getting the reader to scan a card — “They&039;re easy to use, but a bit touchy,” she said — when Ava snatched the iPhone and the reader with a quick “Ugh, mom, just let me do it,” and swiped the card herself.

“It really empowered her to see technology as a means to achieving her goals rather than a spare time thing,” Briana said. “She&039;s my little entrepreneur.”

The reader had other benefits, too.

The troop had instituted a two-box minimum for transactions using the Square reader, so all the customers who didn&039;t have cash had to buy more cookies by default. What a burden to have ~two~ boxes of Samoas instead of one.

It was also safer. After a successful day of sales, Girl Scouts can be carrying plenty of cash. In the California Bay Area this year, a Girl Scout and her mother were allegedly robbed at gunpoint for the cash they&039;d collected from cookie sales.

“Having the reader at the booths, especially when it&039;s just me and Ava, makes me feel like we&039;re less likely to be targeted because there&039;s less cash on hand. And we don&039;t have to run into Walmart to make change or go to the bank to deposit all this money,” Briana said.

On one of her Saturday shifts from 11-1 outside of a Walmart, Ava sold 130 boxes of cookies, beating even the iconic San Francisco Girl Scout Danielle Lei who set up shop outside of a marijuana dispensary in 2014 and sold 117 boxes in two hours.

Bottom line: Ava&039;s a champ.

Ava is hoping to use the rewards from her cookie sales to go to Girl Scout riding camp, as her mom did when she was a scout. Her favorite cookie is the Samoa, also known as the Caramel Delight. Briana&039;s is the S&039;More, the new cookie for 2017 that became one of this year&039;s top sellers.

Quelle: <a href="Girl Scouts Are Taking Credit Card Payments For Cookies And It’s Diabolical“>BuzzFeed

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What’s Up With David Beckham Casually Posing With Lotion?

Welcome to “Is This an Ad?,” a column in which we take a celebrity social media post about a brand or product and find out if they’re getting paid to post about it or what. Because even though the FTC recently came out with rules on this, it’s not always clear. Send a tip for ambiguous tweets or ‘grams to katie@buzzfeed.com.

THE CASE:

Soccer star David Beckham posted an Instagram where he’s awkwardly sitting in front of a strange desk or table in front of a blank wall. I’m guessing it’s a hotel room of sorts – he has a Goyard toiletries-sized bag and a copy of Widow Basquiat, a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s girlfriend, propped up on some brown thing (the hotel room service menu, perhaps?). And quite noticeably… you can see a bottle of green lotion with the label turned sideways, too small to read. Whatever that bottle is… is this an ad for it?

Note the green bottle. Is this a low-key ad?

Note the green bottle. Is this a low-key ad?

At least one person in Beckham&#039;s comments noticed the conspicuous lotion placement and wrote, “along with some carefully positioned props Sir David.”

Via instagram.com

THE EVIDENCE:

David Beckham is no stranger to endorsement deals. He’s a soccer star, and athlete endorsements for sports apparel or sneakers is completely normal to most people – nobody bats an eye or thinks a player is a “sell out” if they’re in a Nike ad.

Beckham is one of the most famous athletes ever, and he’s done endorsement deals for many, many brands, including Adidas, H&M, Burger King, Gillette, and Motorola, and lots more. He does TV and print ads for these things, very classic and recognizable advertising. He doesn’t do sneaky or lame diet tea ads.

A HINT:

Ok, you should know this: David Beckham is the ambassador of the Biotherm Homme skincare line, and the lotion pictured in his instagram (even if it’s hard to tell) is their Aquapower Gel moisturizer.

But that doesn’t make the answer totally clear either, right? Is this meant to be an ad, or does he just happen to randomly have his bottle of moisturizer (let’s assume he truly uses the stuff) on his hotel nightstand next to his book before he goes to bed? It’s not so unreasonable you or I would randomly have moisturizer and a toiletries bag in the background of a hotel selfie, right?

Plus, he doesn’t mention the name of the moisturizer in his caption, it just appears in the background, so small you can’t even read the label.

There’s one other piece of information you should know: PR for L’Oréal sent BuzzFeed a press alert about this particular Instagram, touting how the brand’s ambassador uses the cream in his relaxing nightly routine. Again, that doesn’t mean that they paid him to post that instagram, but he does have an endorsement deal with them.

I asked L’Oréal what “ambassador” means, and they explained that he has a longstanding relationship with the company, is the face of Biotherm Homme, and has a deal to develop his own product line in the future.

So basically, Beckham has some skin in the game (heh) – he’s not just getting paid a lump sum to do one TV ad. The better this product sells, the better for him.

THE VERDICT:

Here’s what L’Oréal told me:

L’Oréal’s policy is to respect all disclosure obligations for endorsements. David Beckham is the global face of Biotherm Homme, appearing in all media, but while Beckham’s Instagram post shows a Biotherm product on his desk behind him in the background, this appearance was not obligated.

According to them, this isn’t an “ad” per se, because they didn’t ASK him to post it.

Then I asked Bonnie Patton, a lawyer and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Truth In Advertising. “The FTC law is quite clear,” Patton said. “If there is a material connection between the endorser and the product, then that needs to be disclosed.”

Ok, but what about this particular post? Patton said: “we would look at an Instagram post like this and say it’s Mr. Beckham&039;s responsibility and the responsibility of the company to make sure that consumers are informed that he has a material connection to this product.”

So according to an industry watchdog group, it’s an ad and should be disclosed. In this case, I’m giving a ruling to the watchdog group instead of the brand. It’s an ad.

Ironically, I asked a friend to help identify the book in the photo, and he had read it and recommended it highly, so I ordered it on Amazon. This was a tremendously effective ad, but for the book instead of the men’s moisturizer.

Quelle: <a href="What’s Up With David Beckham Casually Posing With Lotion?“>BuzzFeed

How YouTube Serves As The Content Engine Of The Internet's Dark Side

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How YouTube Serves As The Content Engine Of The Internet's Dark Side

YouTube

David Seaman is the #Pizzagate King of the Internet.

On Twitter, Seaman posts dozens of messages a day to his 66,000 followers, often about the secret cabal — including Rothschilds, Satanists, and the other nabobs of the New World Order — behind the nation’s best-known, super-duper-secret child sex ring under a DC pizza parlor.

But it’s on YouTube where he really goes to work. Since Nov. 4, four days before the election, Seaman has uploaded 136 videos, more than one a day. Of those, at least 42 are about Pizzagate. The videos, which tend to run about eight to fifteen minutes, typically consist of Seaman, a young, brown-haired man with glasses and a short beard, speaking directly into a camera in front of a white wall. He doesn’t equivocate: Recent videos are titled “Pizzagate Will Dominate 2017, Because It Is Real” and “PizzaGate New Info 12/6/16: Link To Pagan God of Pedophilia/Rape.”

Seaman has more than 150,000 subscribers. His videos, usually preceded by preroll ads for major brands like Quaker Oats and Uber, have been watched almost 18 million times, which is roughly the number of people who tuned in to last year’s season finale of NCIS, the most popular show on television.

His biography reads, in part, “I report the truth.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the major social platforms, most notably Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, have been forced to undergo painful, often public reckonings with the role they play in spreading bad information. How do services that have become windows onto the world for hundreds of millions of people square their desire to grow with the damage that viral false information, “alternative facts,” and filter bubbles do to a democracy?

And yet there is a mammoth social platform, a cornerstone of the modern internet with more than a billion active users every month, which hosts and even pays for a fathomless stock of bad information, including viral fake news, conspiracy theories, and hate speech of every kind — and it’s been held up to virtually no scrutiny: YouTube.

The entire contemporary conspiracy-industrial complex of internet investigation and social media promulgation, which has become a defining feature of media and politics in the Trump era, would be a very small fraction of itself without YouTube. Yes, the site most people associate with “Gangnam Style,” pirated music, and compilations of dachshunds sneezing is also the central content engine of the unruliest segments of the ascendant right-wing internet, and sometimes its enabler.

To wit, the conspiracy-news internet’s biggest stars, some of whom now enjoy New Yorker profiles and presidential influence, largely live on YouTube. Infowars — whose founder and host, Alex Jones, claims Sandy Hook didn’t happen, Michelle Obama is a man, and 9/11 was an inside job — broadcasts to 2 million subscribers on YouTube. So does Michael “Gorilla Mindset” Cernovich. So too do a whole genre of lesser-known but still wildly popular YouTubers, people like Seaman and Stefan Molyneux (an Irishman closely associated with the popular “Truth About” format). As do a related breed of prolific political-correctness watchdogs like Paul Joseph Watson and Sargon of Akkad (real name: Carl Benjamin), whose videos focus on the supposed hypocrisies of modern liberal culture and the ways they leave Western democracy open to a hostile Islamic takeover. As do a related group of conspiratorial white-identity vloggers like Red Ice TV, which regularly hosts neo-Nazis in its videos.

“The internet provides people with access to more points of view than ever before,” YouTube wrote in a statement. “We&#039;re always taking feedback so we can continue to improve and present as many perspectives at a given moment in time as possible.”

YouTube

All this is a far cry from the platform’s halcyon days of 2006 and George Allen’s infamous “Macaca” gaffe. Back then, it felt reasonable to hope the site would change politics by bypassing a rose-tinted broadcast media filter to hold politicians accountable. As recently as 2012, Mother Jones posted to YouTube hidden footage of Mitt Romney discussing the “47%” of the electorate who would never vote for him, a video that may have swung the election. But by the time the 2016 campaign hit its stride, and a series of widely broadcast, ugly comments by then-candidate Trump didn’t keep him out of office, YouTube’s relationship to politics had changed.

Today, it fills the enormous trough of right-leaning conspiracy and revisionist historical content into which the vast, ravening right-wing social internet lowers its jaws to drink. Shared widely everywhere from white supremacist message boards to chans to Facebook groups, these videos constitute a kind of crowdsourced, predigested ideological education, offering the “Truth” about everything from Michelle Obama’s real biological sex (760,000 views&#033;) to why medieval Islamic civilization wasn’t actually advanced.

Frequently, the videos consist of little more than screenshots of a Reddit “investigation” laid out chronologically, set to ominous music. Other times, they’re very simple, featuring a man in a sparse room speaking directly into his webcam, or a very fast monotone narration over a series of photographs with effects straight out of iMovie. There’s a financial incentive for vloggers to make as many videos as cheaply they can; the more videos you make, the more likely one is to go viral. David Seaman’s videos typically garner more than 50,000 views and often exceed 100,000. Many of Seaman’s videos adjoin ads for major brands. A preroll ad for Asana, the productivity software, precedes a video entitled “WIKILEAKS: Illuminati Rothschild Influence & Simulation Theory”; before “Pizzagate: Do We Know the Full Scope Yet?&033;” it’s an ad for Uber, and before “HILLARY CLINTON&039;S HORROR SHOW,” one for a new Fox comedy. (Most YouTubers have no direct control over which brands&039; ads run next to their videos, and vice versa.)

This trough isn’t just wide, it’s deep. A YouTube search for the term “The Truth About the Holocaust” returns half a million results. The top 10 are all Holocaust-denying or Holocaust-skeptical. (Sample titles: “The Greatest Lie Ever Told,” which has 500,000 views; “The Great Jewish Lie”; “The Sick Lies of a Holocaust™ &039;Survivor.&039;”) Say the half million videos average about 10 minutes. That works out to 5 million minutes, or about 10 years, of “Truth About the Holocaust.”

Meanwhile, “The Truth About Pizzagate” returns a quarter of a million results, including “PizzaGate Definitive Factcheck: Oh My God” (620,000 views and counting) and “The Men Who Knew Too Much About PizzaGate” (who, per a teaser image, include retired Gen. Michael Flynn and Andrew Breitbart).

Sometimes, these videos go hugely viral. “With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations” — an alarming 20-minute video about Muslim immigration to Europe featuring deceptive editing and debunked footage — received some 4 million views in late 2015 before being taken down by YouTube over a copyright claim. (Infowars: “YouTube Scrambles to Censor Viral Video Exposing Migrant Invasion.”) That’s roughly as many people as watched the Game of Thrones Season 3 premiere. It’s since been scrubbed of the copyrighted music and reuploaded dozens of times.

First circulated by white supremacist blogs and chans, “With Gates Wide Open” gained social steam until it was picked up by Breitbart, at which point it exploded, blazing the viral trail by which conspiracy-right “Truth” videos now travel. Last week, President Trump incensed the nation of Sweden by falsely implying that it had recently suffered a terrorist attack. Later, he clarified in a tweet that he was referring to a Fox News segment. That segment featured footage from a viral YouTube documentary, Stockholm Syndrome, about the dangers of Muslim immigration into Europe. Sources featured in the documentary have since accused its director, Ami Horowitz, of “bad journalism” for taking their answers out of context.

So what responsibility, if any, does YouTube bear for the universe of often conspiratorial, sometimes bigoted, frequently incorrect information that it pays its creators to host, and that is now being filtered up to the most powerful person in the world? Legally, per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which absolves service providers of liability for content they host, none. But morally and ethically, shouldn’t YouTube be asking itself the same hard questions as Facebook and Twitter about the role it plays in a representative democracy? How do those questions change because YouTube is literally paying people to upload bad information?

And practically, if YouTube decided to crack down, could it really do anything?

YouTube does “demonitize” videos that it deems “not advertiser-friendly,” and last week, following a report in the Wall Street Journal that Disney had nixed a sponsorship deal with the YouTube superstar PewDiePie over anti-Semitic content in his videos, YouTube pulled his channel from its premium ad network. But such steps have tended to follow public pressure and have only affected extremely famous YouTubers. And it’s not like PewDiePie will go hungry; he can still run ads on his videos, which regularly do millions of views.

Ultimately, the platform may be so huge as to be ungovernable: Users upload 400 hours of video to YouTube every minute. One possibility is drawing a firmer line between content the company officially designates as news and everything else; YouTube has a dedicated News vertical that pulls in videos from publishers approved by Google News.

Even there, though, YouTube has its work cut out for it. On a recent evening, the first result I saw under the “Live Now – News” subsection of youtube.com/news was the Infowars “Defense of Liberty 13 Hour Special Broadcast.” Alex Jones was staring into the camera.

Quelle: <a href="How YouTube Serves As The Content Engine Of The Internet&039;s Dark Side“>BuzzFeed