Blog Post #6
Youtube-
Youtube started off as tech startup by the creators of PayPal to be able to share "home videos" with your family and friends. "YouTube, social media platform and website for sharing videos. It was registered on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal. They had the idea that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their “home videos.” The company is headquartered in San Bruno, California." (Britannica) It started off being run in a garage but it gained popularity pretty quickly. The website gained over 25 million views in only the second month of being available to the public. It officially launched in December of 2005 and quickly gained users. The first video ever published to the website "Me at the Zoo" was a video of one of the founders showing his day at the San Diego Zoo.
One of the first major issues they ran into was with copyright and privacy. Since anyone could upload any video they wanted to they needed to figure out a way to deal with the copyright issues that started to arise. There were also videos being posted that went against someone's privacy and could hurt somebody without their knowledge. Another issue with the fast popularity of the website was that they needed better software to be able to run everything. They had to look for a buyer to deal with these big problems and eventually they were bought by Google for $1.56 billion around a year after their launch. Google helped fix the problems with copyright and privacy and with the larger company they could fix the tech problems as well. (Britannica) Today there are still some copyright issues but it is improved a lot and there are a lot more rules now for what can and cant be posted.
Youtube has had an incredibly large impact on everyone's lives since its release over twenty years ago. Almost everyone uses Youtube a lot and it is even used in classrooms and for learning information. People can find tutorial videos on how to do almost anything they can think of and there are millions of videos on the website for almost any topic. The original purpose of the website was soon taken over by people just posting fun videos of themselves and friends and now has even grown to people creating jobs for themselves using the platform and making money off of the videos they post.
Recently there was a lawsuit against many big tech companies and social media sites about spreading COVID misinformation. Since anyone can post anything some were worried that misinformation would be spread because of this. "At the core of the lawsuit is whether the federal government’s requests for social media and search giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to moderate Covid-19 misinformation violated users’ First Amendment rights." (Stat News) This is similar to what we have been learning in class with the First Amendment rights and what counts under the law. During COVID Youtube only became bigger because everyone was stuck in their rooms and it was one of the easiest options to watch something on and be entertained. Overall, the impact of Youtube is unlike any other social media platform and millions of people still use the website every day to learn and be entertained.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/YouTube
https://www.officetimeline.com/blog/youtube-history-timeline
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/youtubes-history-and-its-impact-on-the-internet
https://www.statnews.com/2024/01/29/covid-misinformation-supreme-court/
No comments:
Post a Comment