Homebrew VC Hunter Walk Talks Twitter, TikTok, and Tech in the Time of Biden

When we talked about citizen journalism at YouTube, 2007, 2008, 2009, we were thinking Arab Spring—the idea that citizens with camera phones would be able to tell you a truth and give you opinions and access to realities that were often ignored or censored by government, the handful of media outlets that got most of the distribution and establishme... See more

It’s much easier to be clear in your principles and then continue to evolve your policy to meet the needs of the times rather than believe that if you don’t get the wording exactly right on the first attempt you’re somehow then unable to enforce it going forward.

I tend to be a believer that platforms do create policies. The idea that they are just “enforcing laws” is kind of BS. If that was the case, there’s a very narrow definition of content that’s actually illegal, and there’d be a whole bunch of things that they would allow.

Now you look 10, 15 years later, and the content moderation debates aren’t about should you have nipples or not in videos and nudity or things like that — it’s about truthiness. It’s about what happens when everybody is allowed to upload content that essentially shows their version of reality versus a consensus version of reality.

These platforms have traditionally been built towards, let’s call it, “web two metrics.” Remember back in the web two days, we would talk about engagement, and we assumed that more clicks, more playback, more discussion was all positive. If those went up and to the right, our business model worked, and it meant people were happy. I think that it’s ... See more