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"What is Google going to do about it?"

Absolutely nothing, unless diverting attention counts. A few product announcements, something something net neutrality, a little more "juice" for every possible news item with an anti-Facebook or anti-Twitter vibe, and voila! Nobody's talking about YouTube any more. They're in the attention business, after all. They know that letting attention dissipate is their best strategy in this case.

In a better world, they'd be using some of those vast resources and ML expertise to detect the kinds of vote/comment clustering that signal both commercial and political manipulation. Others have done it already. The fact that the self-styled "best and the brightest" are way behind on this says that they don't have the interest.



"Others have done it already."

Others with the same number of accounts and daily visits? With the same flowrate of publications and comments?


Yes. Facebook has been doing this for spam for ages, for Russian and Chinese and Iranian political influence rings more recently. It's sure not easy at that scale, but it's not beyond Google's capabilities.

Disclaimer: I work at Facebook, though I'm only involved in those efforts to the extent that I work on the data-storage systems that support the data scientists.




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