BBC and YouTube get married – Social Media on trial in L.A. – MediaPolicy’s glitches

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February 14, 2025

Today’s post is a mash-up (remember those?).

MediaPolicy follows a number of themes and story lines in Canadian media. One of them is our public broadcaster, CBC Radio-Canada. Another is the surging audience growth of YouTube. 

The travails of the CBC always beg comparisons to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Earlier this month, the BBC announced a formal partnership with YouTube that, if the BBC follows through over the long term, will make it a YouTube-first broadcaster. 

So happy Valentine’s Day.

The BBC’s idea is to fish where the fish are, at least when it comes to the younger demographic whose media consumption leans very much into short-form video content on YouTube and social media apps. 

The BBC says it’s going all in on micro-drama series and verticals (so called because video clips are shot in portrait mode, the better to consume on phones).

That means the Beeb will invest more heavily in developing its supply chain into the digital “creator community” of video artists and studios. It also plans to launch far more BBC YouTube channels built around popular genres and local communities and feed them with digital-first content. 

The BBC isn’t completely reinventing itself. It’s going to keep using the YouTube platform as a marketing strategy to push audiences back to its main streaming services BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds. It would be reckless to do otherwise lest it put the BBC’s audience growth entirely within the grasp of a big US tech company that controls the discoverability of content through its algorithms (I mean, what could go wrong?).

A recent report in Britain marked the occasion of YouTube overtaking the once-dominant BBC as the UK’s market leader in video consumption. The early commentary on the YouTube-BBC partnership has been a mix of optimism and dread, here’s one insightful view. 

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A big trial just started in Los Angeles where a 20-year old woman is suing YouTube and Meta’s Instagram for degrading her mental health by feeding her harmful content through addictive content algorithms.

The plaintiff KGM’s lawsuit is hardly frivolous: TikTok and Snap already settled to escape trial.

Her lawyer found his Johnny Cochran stride when he told the jury that his case was “easy as ABC…addicting the brains of children.”

The US maintains a Congressional exemption of Internet companies, especially social media apps, from liability for content uploaded by third parties (incidentally that litigation shield pops up in the digital chapter of the CUSMA trade agreement). Given the exemption, KGM has to prove that YouTube and Meta are liable for creating addictive algorithms that push unhealthy content rather than paying a price for accepting the content in the first place. 

The US is a more litigious society than we are and lawsuits don’t create legislation: KGM may claim damages but it’s highly unlikely she will force Big Tech to do anything differently. 

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I’m concluding this weekend’s post with something boring: weird publishing things happening with this blog.

Last weekend’s post included a three paragraph quote of the European Union’s regulatory indictment of TikTok for addictive algorithms pushing harmful content with inadequate safety features. Due to a WordPress software glitch, the e-mailed version to subscribers dropped out two of the paragraphs, which made for a strange narrative flow. If you found it jarring, you can go back and read the more fulsome EU statement.

The other oddity was an unprecedented two-day surge in MediaPolicy viewing in the US which puzzled me given the Canadian focus of MediaPolicy posts. It coincided with a MediaPolicy reader receiving a scam e-mail with an embedded link to MediaPolicy.ca (offering a marketing opportunity). The e-mail was associated with the digital marketing website Blogger Tuesday and I have nothing to do with it.

Please let me know if you received one. 

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2026.