There was also an episode of The Office (US) about this. Dwight suggests to Jim he starts an employee-of-the-month award, then rigs it so Jim wins so that everyone turns on Jim. Jim at least had the good sense to decline the award.
We can't really tell what is going on behind the curtain but my optimistic view is that no one in the room realized that receiving this award would have some terrible optics and that the awarders chose YouTube genuinely - if you have a narrow view of the content on there (and nobody sees everything) there are some segments where youtube does try to reinforce free speech sorta... maybe I'm being too charitable though.
My cynical hope though is that Youtube pressured the award committee to give them one for hosting it - please someone in Youtube leak a memo about putting pressure on the committee it would be so absolutely delicious.
I thought this was the unwritten rule of how industry awards work. You sponsor them and then they give you an award. The people running the awards get money, and the people sponsoring them get something they can impress prospective clients with. Everyone wins!
Crazy. Now that you say that, I honestly thought it was a parody even showing up here in HN. Took me a few seconds to realize it was not when reading the article, and had to watch part of the video to convince myself. But then again, most news these days read like an Onion article of yesteryears. Just sad, not funny anymore.
