Alli Adams
Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
“It all started with a single idea: to create a movement of empathy for human good,” said Jason Y. Lee, the founder of Jubilee, a media company that has generated billions of views on its YouTube channel.
This is a bold mission statement, especially coming from a company that leads spaces of hate by platforming extreme voices in a faulty and problematic debate system, perfectly formatted to exploit vulnerability and, thus, to produce viral conflict. With a whopping 10.5 million subscribers on YouTube and videos with up to 38 million views, Jubilee’s scope of influence is undoubtedly vast.
In our increasingly complicated digital age, it’s harder to identify the range of viewers reached when platforms like TikTok and Instagram generate large audiences by clipping viral moments. This art of clip-farming viral moments is the leading force in driving engagement, and it has become so profitable for Jubilee that what started as a mission for empathy and human good has completely lost itself in commodifying hate, polarization and clickbait.
Jubilee’s videos feature multiple series that consist of different social settings and ground rules, each fostering various types of debate. One of its most popular is the recurring series Surrounded, which usually features popular political influencers or other “experts” in their area arguing roughly 25 people from the opposing viewpoint. This concept has a multitude of deep-seated issues, especially in its framing, like using the term “versus” in their thumbnail to emphasize division and uneven debating grounds.
In addition, Jubilee often platforms polarizing voices from both sides — people who just like to hear themselves talk — like Ben Shapiro or Dean Withers, and selects all the more radical or uneducated to debate them. Thus, the videos published under the claim of “(provoking) understanding and (creating) human connection” actually produce a larger breeding ground for ineffective and thwarting political nonsense.
“There are enough sources of hatred and idiocracy on the internet; it would be much more revolutionary to reclaim their purpose, abandon their antagonizing structure and descend into a space of connection, understanding and unification.”
Watching a clip or a full-length video of Surrounded is infuriating. The people cast and featured as popular voices are entirely exhausting to listen to. There is no room for decorum and civility in the environment, and they spend the majority of their time yelling over each other, avoiding questions, attempting to get a rise out of their opponent or interrupting and feeding into egos and agendas. This channel may hide under the veil of bipartisanship and dialogue by representing both parties; however, in reality, it has become a platform for amplifying hostility and extremist ideologies.
A recent example of this is from a video published July 20, titled “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan).” The British-American broadcaster was pitted against 20 radical conservatives. One of the 20 debaters challenged Hasan’s claim that Donald Trump is defying the U.S. Constitution by claiming to support Francisco Franco, former dictator of Spain, and openly admitting to identifying as a fascist.
In what world should an American company enable a soapbox for a full-fledged fascist? It is completely backwards and frustrating to watch this company normalize and thrive off sources of hate, bigotry and literal Nazism. The company is well within its rights to platform whomever they choose, but it is truly ridiculous to claim to be pro-human good and empathy when you cast fascists to spew their rhetoric to millions of consumers.
Most Americans have access to YouTube. As a human, how could you expose such rhetoric and ideology so blatantly on such an accessible platform? It is dangerous and damaging to our country, and it’s a huge proponent to the growing estrangement across all sides of the political compass.
While the initial structure of Jubilee’s debate style was not inherently corrupt and had potential to reach its mission, in the era of short-form content and clip farming, the company has diverted away from human understanding and gap-bridging, instead moving toward a nihilistic, capitalist business model — one that prioritizes profit and market value in place of meaning and ethics.
The framework and context Jubilee lives in is one that evades moral values and social responsibility by taking advantage of increasingly short attention spans to get more clicks and optimize engagement. It is genius; moments of anger, bursts of political outrage and gotcha moments are what have swayed entire elections, therefore the range of economic success for a company that spews out this type of content can only be imagined. Other channels and political content creators like Turning Point USA and Unfuck America follow this exact model, shifting their goals from exposing viewers to differing perspectives to running ego-driven races for attention, clicks and influence.
If Jubilee and other platforms want to live up to their mission of empathy and human connection, they must shift toward a more deliberative model rooted in solution-focused conversations. There are enough sources of hatred and idiocracy on the internet; it would be much more revolutionary to reclaim their purpose, abandon their antagonizing structure and descend into a space of connection, understanding and unification.
In order to support and uplift the idealized goal of empathy in media, boycott and avoid this type of content. Do not desert your own critical thinking by continuing to be a ploy and a not-so-innocent bystander to this dangerous algorithm that further divides and weakens this country.
Reach Caroline Studdert at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.