It used to be that if you wanted to give your ideas the best chance of living on after you, you would write them down and publish them in a book. Today, you might have good reason to believe that your ideas will last longer if you speak them into a video recording and publish them on YouTube. This revolutionary change in human communication was in large part made possible by Susan Wojcicki, the Google executive who guided the tech giant during its video platform’s period of remarkable growth. Without Wojcicki, who died on Aug. 9 of lung cancer at the age of 56, we may not have YouTube today as we currently know it and enjoy it. At the same time, during her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki was behind some of the platform’s troubling forays into censorship and content suppression that have been so disconcerting to many of us who are concerned about the state of freedom of speech in America.
Wojcicki, who was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, grew up in an academic family — her father was a particle physics professor at Stanford — and continued in that direction at Harvard. But after taking a temporary job at a startup tech company during one school break, she developed an interest in computers and tech, fields that were burgeoning by the time she received her B.A. in the early ’90s and that would be positively booming by the time she began to devote herself completely to the field in the late ’90s. In between that time, she continued her education at U.C. Santa Clara, where she received an M.S. in economics in 1993, and at UCLA, where she earned an M.B.A. in 1998. Convinced that tech was the future, not only for the world at large but also for herself, she took a job at Intel, one of the darlings of the mid-to-late ’90s tech world. But with the position being a rather low-paying one, and while being several months pregnant and knowing that she would need to look for ways to supplement her income to support her soon-to-be-born child, Wojcicki decided to rent out some rooms in her house. The tenants who signed on to rent her Menlo Park, California, garage were two young tech entrepreneurs named Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Page and Brin had recently founded a new tech company called Google. (You may have heard of it.) But their tech startup, which was then only a search engine, had yet to turn a profit. They were looking for cheap office space in which they could try to continue to develop their small little internet company into something that they might one day actually be able to make a living off of. They found this much-needed cheap office space in Wojcicki’s garage — and, even more importantly, found Wojcicki. After she caught wind of what these two tech nerds were up to in her garage, and after Brin and Page found out about Wojcicki’s expertise in business and marketing, it wouldn’t take long for chocolate to get together with peanut butter to form something new and rather fantastic. Wojcicki left her secure job at Intel to work with Brin and Page on their precarious startup, a decision that appeared to be reckless and senseless in 1998 but now looks to be not too different from a bassist quitting the London Symphony Orchestra in 1957 to start playing music in a Liverpool garage with a fledgling band that was calling itself the Beatles.
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Within a few years, Wojcicki helped Brin and Page begin making those elusive first profits after she assisted in Google’s development of its first internet search-related advertising products — first AdSense and then AdWords. She also had a hand in the company’s creation of its now-iconic logo, as well as its introduction of image-search capabilities. It wasn’t until 2006, though, that she would truly transform the company and, with it, much of our current media and cultural landscape. She advised Brin and Page to acquire YouTube, a then-small internet video startup that was popular with college-age adults at the time like myself who used it mostly to watch random Family Guy clips but was otherwise not well known to most non-millennials. People laughed at the $1.6 billion that Google paid for a 1-year-old internet video platform, but with the over $30 billion in annual revenue that YouTube now generates for Google, I don’t think anyone’s laughing now — especially the folks at the Justice Department, who have reportedly begun looking into ways to break up the now-gargantuan tech behemoth.
During her tenure as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki presided over the platform’s rise into one of the most-visited sites on the internet. Wojcicki, however, also introduced unsettling content suppression practices into the platform, particularly after 2020, buckling to governmental and commercial pressures to limit the reach of videos that were purportedly spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 and “vaccine hesitancy” about the Pfizer and Moderna inoculations. Demonetization, shadowbanning, algorithm manipulation, and other attacks on creators’ freedoms of expression, including outright censorship and de-platforming, were also implemented, and continue to be used, to suppress other videos that Wojcicki and her content moderators deemed to be overly controversial. YouTube may have taken humanity one giant leap forward in our video-sharing capabilities, but in the past few years, it has also taken us a sizable step back regarding our First Amendment rights.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.
