Today You Can Help

Who can you trust these days? If you’ve been paying attention to our blog lately, you might be feeling like the answer is “no one.”

We’ve been digging into the problems around online manipulation, especially on platforms like YouTube. From the baker who showed us how laughably bad baking videos are being used by companies to make money, to the mother of the teenage son who got sucked into the online alt-right world, and the stories of YouTube regrets the Mozilla community shared, we see the algorithms of our digital world giving power and profit to people with malicious intentions.

We believe companies like YouTube can do better. Which is why we met recently with leaders at YouTube who are working to address misinformation and manipulation on the platform. We asked them to make a serious, public commitment to fix the problem of harmful content amplified by their recommendation algorithm.

We get that these problems aren’t simple. At the same time, we think YouTube has gotten away with “trust us, we’re working on it” for too long. Now it’s time to push them to be better. We’ve shared a series of concrete, practical suggestions with them about how they can reduce manipulation and misinformation on YouTube, without censoring content. Now, it’s time for them to show, not tell, the world they're going to fix this problem.

I know you hear this all the time, yet it is true: We can’t do this work without you. So, today we're asking you for money to help us do the work only Mozilla can do -- put pressure on big tech companies like YouTube, drawing on our role as a non-profit foundation embedded in the tech world.

We will keep you posted on future actions you can take to put more pressure on YouTube.

Thanks to your donation today, we’ll be ready to move forward.

Thank you,

Will & the Team at Mozilla