There are a number of reasons YouTube is an effective conduit for sharing hateful political positions. But none of these articles touch on one key reason video is so useful: There are no transcriptions of what was said.

As anyone who’s ever needed a written record of something that was said in a video or out loud can tell you, transcription is a clunky, difficult process. There are automated tools that perform the work, including one that generates closed-captioning for YouTube videos. Those systems are quite buggy, though, and can have difficulty differentiating between multiple voices — which is in part why YouTube doesn’t automatically transcribe everything that’s uploaded. For the most part, the only format in which the content of a video exists is just that: the video.

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Hateful rhetoric thrives in darkness, if I may be a bit on-the-nose here at The Washington Post. We saw this broadly in the wake of Charlottesville, as the Internet tools that had allowed neo-Nazis to congregate and talk online were shut off: servers, domain name registrations, chat rooms. Isolated from the rest of the Internet (though not hidden, as such), Nazis and white supremacists shared memes and political ideas without the intervention of the real world. The spaces they occupied were safe. When they emerged into the light of day, though, they cast a light on where they’d been congregating, and the businesses they’d been relying on cracked down.

Using video, though, makes unearthing hateful or violent rhetoric more difficult. While personalities who intentionally agitate, such as the stars at Infowars, aren’t shy about the points they’re making, a regular commentator who names his video something demure — “My thoughts on Charlottesville,” for example — will escape much scrutiny from anyone except people who watch the whole thing.

This, more broadly, is part of the challenge in the current push to move to video content online. Many sites have announced that they will “pivot to video,” a result of broken Internet advertising models that, for now, are still generating cash for video ads. There’s utility to video as a storytelling tool, of course, but because advertisers favor video, it’s also been used to tell stories for which it’s not necessarily well-suited. One of the advantages of print over video has always been that it’s scannable; you can skim through a block of text and read as much or as little as you want. That’s valuable in an age when we’re choked with information. It’s much trickier to do this with video, which demands much more of a person’s time to make its point.

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(This is, not coincidentally, one reason advertisers like it. That, along with the fact that people are used to not being able to see all of a video at once, so adding an ad before a video is less irritating than blocking the content of a news article before it can be read.)

In a technical sense, scannability has another feature: searchability. If you want to know if I’ve ever written about how Nazis are good (I haven’t), you can just search Google. (It’s not quite that easy, but it’s close.) If you’re curious about whether the host of a video — or, for that matter, a podcast — ever said Nazis are good, it’s not as simple to find out. This can be a boon to the video or podcast stylistically; it can be edgier than something written for the Web simply because there’s less attention paid to what it says. The offensiveness happens out of sight.

Uncovering hateful or racist rhetoric from someone who works mostly in video depends largely on either stumbling across it accidentally or a follower tipping off the world. The more popular the personality, of course, the more viewers and the more likely it is that someone might take offense. But generally video is a place to talk to those who agree with you without facing too many consequences.

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There is value in having a place to hold a conversation without the world watching, of course. We’ll never eradicate communities in which racism can spread without eradicating places where anyone can have a private conversation, and we shouldn’t hold that as a goal. What we’re talking about here, though, isn’t a private conversation — it’s a conversation happening in public with a particular audience and without the ability of anyone else to easily get a sense of what’s being discussed.