I don’t usually “do drama,” especially not when that drama involves YouTubers and “influencers,” but the monumental shitstorm engulfing Linus Tech Tips has been all over my social media feeds this week and I feel compelled to add my two cents.
If you’ve missed the news somehow, popular tech-entertainment channel Linus Tech Tips – and its parent company, Linus Media Group – has been embroiled in controversy. What started with a video from another tech review channel, Gamers Nexus, has ballooned into accusations of ethical issues with LMG’s reviews, conflicts of interest, mistreatment of a small company and their prototype product, and even reports from at least one former employee of a work environment so toxic that she resulted to self-harm before being forced out.
Image: Gamers Nexus
For some background, I’ve been a long-time viewer of Linus Tech Tips. I’ve been a nerd since, well, forever, and when I first started really getting into YouTube, visiting the platform more regularly and doing more than just looking up occasional how-to videos, Linus Tech Tips was one of the first channels that I subscribed to and would regularly tune in to watch. The hosts – Linus included – usually do a good job at making tech and computing topics accessible to the layperson, and while some of the humour isn’t my cup of tea and veers into being cringeworthy for its own sake, more often than not I’d find myself cracking a smile.
When I decided I was going to build my own PC for the first time, Linus Tech Tips was one of the main resources I consulted. I purchased at least one component for my PC – a CPU cooler, which we’ll discuss in more detail in a moment – entirely because it was highly recommended by Linus. I felt the channel and its hosts were trustworthy – and as someone who doesn’t have a ton of knowledge about tech, components, and the like, I don’t really have the ability of an organisation like Gamers Nexus when it comes to fact-checking the content that Linus Media Group has been putting out.
We’ve talked before about ethics among reviewers, and I’ve made clear that I don’t believe there can ever be such a thing as a “paid review.” There are reviews, in which a reviewer shares their thoughts and opinions on a product as best they can, and there are advertisements. Anything paid for is an ad, regardless of the terminology used, and Linus Media Group has, in the past, come close to skirting that line in my opinion. Taking paid sponsorships or selling ad space in a video is one thing, but dedicating an entire video to selling (sorry, “showcasing”) a product on a channel that also does supposedly-independent reviews… that kind of thing has felt uncomfortable for a long time, and is certainly absolutely useless from a consumer standpoint.
But at least those videos are flagged up as such, and even if I just skimmed a title or clicked without really paying attention, it’s usually obvious within a minute or two that a product “showcase” is, in fact, little more than an overly-long advertisement.
What’s been surprising to learn, at least for me, over the past week or so, is the extent to which LMG has become tied up with multiple big tech companies – companies whose products they subsequently review, and whose competitors products they also review.
There is, as others have pointed out, a clear conflict of interest here. If Linus Tech Tips didn’t pretend to offer “reviews,” but rather stuck to product showcases, entertainment videos, and the kind of general mucking about that viewers have come to expect… I guess that would be okay. The deals between LMG and big companies like Intel and Noctua should still be stated up-front and not hidden, but at least there’d be less of an ethical minefield.
But Linus and co. seem to want to have it all.
In a small way, this has actually affected me. The PC cooler I mentioned, the one recommended so highly by Linus on his various channels, is manufactured by Noctua – a company that LMG has a financial relationship with. Now, I will state up-front that I’m not disappointed by the cooler’s performance in the PC that I built, but it’s made me stop to think. Would I have purchased that model, or even a model by that company, were it not for the strong recommendation from a tech influencer that I felt I could trust? And was Linus’ glowing praise for the Noctua cooler influenced in some way by his company’s financial ties to its manufacturer?
To be clear (and because Linus himself has been quick to accuse critics of “libel” in the past) I’m not suggesting that Linus, LTT, or LMG deliberately misled me, nor that they fraudulently or dishonestly recommended me a product. I’m responsible for my own purchasing decisions, and it’s on me to seek out multiple reviews and do my own due diligence before making a financial commitment. But what I am saying is that, when there’s any semblance of a conflict of interest or any reason for a reviewer to look more kindly on a product… that’s a serious problem.
Here on my website, I mostly review films, games, television shows, and episodes of Star Trek. But if I were approached by, say, Paramount Global, and entered into a financial arrangement with that company, there’d be some degree of pressure – real, implied, or just purely imaginary – to keep that relationship going and to, for want of a better term, placate Paramount by glossing over the negatives and accentuating the positives in any future “review.” My reviews of Paramount’s films and TV shows would become suspect as a result – and even if I wasn’t making a conscious choice to look upon their content more positively, there’s a strong chance it would happen anyway.
This is, for me, the crux of the Linus Tech Tips problem, and it’s one that LMG may find very difficult to overcome. Sure, the fact that some of their reviews were badly done or incompetently handled is a bad look – but that’s something that can be corrected, over time, with better quality control, enhanced video production procedures, and the like. And other tech channels, like Gamers Nexus, will be watching and will be ready to jump in and hold Linus’ feet to the fire if those kinds of mistakes and slip-ups happen again.
But the issue of trust is a much trickier and more nebulous one to resolve. Trust has been strained to breaking-point between Linus Tech Tips and many folks in its audience, and revelations of close partnerships and financial ties to big tech companies isn’t something that can be hand-waved away nor fixed in short order by internal changes at LMG. This is something that cuts to the very core of Linus Tech Tips’ content: can viewers trust what Linus and his co-hosts are saying about, well, anything?
No review is ever “entirely objective,” because that’s not how reviews work. There’s always a certain amount of one’s own thoughts, impressions, and biases present, even in reviews that promote stats and data above all else. So I don’t want to come across as asking for the impossible, because I know from my own experience that there simply isn’t such a thing as an “objective” review.
What makes a review valuable is the trust audiences have with the reviewer. I like to think that folks who come to Trekking with Dennis to read my film reviews or Star Trek episode reviews trust me to share my honest thoughts on what I’m seeing or playing, and trust that I have enough basic knowledge of the subject matter at hand to write something that’s at least worth their while. I also state in many of my pieces all over the website that I have no “insider information” or special access, and that I’m sharing my thoughts as openly as I can. That’s not to say I’m in any way free from bias, but I am independent. I don’t have financial ties to any of the companies whose films, games, or TV shows I review.
Linus Tech Tips can’t make that claim – and whether the hosts are “reviewing” a product from a company they work with or a product from one of that company’s competitors… there’s a very real danger of unconscious bias seeping into their content, making their reviews functionally worthless to consumers. If viewers are tuning in to watch Linus goof about, that’s fine and I guess no real harm was done. But for someone in the position I was in last year, looking for genuine product recommendations… there’s a pretty massive red flag being waved.
Linus Media Group can and should take on board the feedback provided by Gamers Nexus and their community. Slowing down their output, prioritising quality over quantity, and being willing to go back and edit videos or even re-film whole segments if mistakes were made are all pretty easy fixes; low-hanging fruit that should see significant improvements to the quality and accuracy of their videos going forward. For a company of LMG’s size and financial means, if making those kinds of commitments means either reducing their output or hiring additional staff, that won’t be an issue. The company is, quite remarkably for a YouTube outfit, worth tens of millions of dollars, in case you didn’t know.
But those changes are surface-level at best. The real issue of trust, and whether viewers can have faith in a review published by a company with such significant investments all over the tech space… that’s a whole different matter. And there’s no easy fix here – LMG has to decide what kind of company it wants to be and what kind of content it intends to create. If they’re going to stick to geeking out and mucking around, doing little more than playing with some of the fancy pieces of kit that they spend vast sums of money on, then I think they’ll be okay. But if they want to play at being reviewers and journalists, offering honest advice to consumers… the changes required to win back that kind of trust are much greater, and the will to make them simply may not be present.
How Linus Media Group responds to these criticisms in the days ahead will be telling, and I think it’s not unfair to say that Linus’ initial reaction to Gamers Nexus was poor – so catastrophically poor, in fact, that it fuelled the fire and made the situation noticeably worse. For me, this isn’t an issue of a simple inaccuracy, a mistake, waiting too long to correct a misstatement, or even that LMG is clearly running too hot and with the wrong priorities. My biggest takeaway from this whole sorry saga is that, at its core, LMG is too heavily involved with too many of the companies in the tech space whose products it purports to review. Whether intentional or not, those relationships are going to lead to bias, to conflicts of interest, and to making a review from LTT worthless.
It goes without saying that a company should treat its employees with dignity and respect at a bare minimum, and I don’t want to ignore nor make light of the very serious accusations levelled at LMG by at least one former member of staff. Those accusations are, at time of writing, being looked into, and if they prove even close to true… LMG is going to be in for another huge wave of trouble to say the least. We’ve all had the misfortune of working for a toxic manager or boss at one time or another, and I extend my sympathies to the ex-employee in question.
Linus’ on-screen persona seems a million miles away from the accusations of sexism, ableism, and toxicity that have been levelled at managers within LMG… but if those accusations are borne out, quite frankly it could be a far worse situation for the company. Other famous YouTubers have been “cancelled” for comparably toxic behaviour, so no one, no matter how big of a fish they may be in their small pond, should consider themselves to be immune from consequences. These allegations from a former employee could prove far worse than anything Gamers Nexus presented and any of the trust issues I’ve been discussing above.
So that’s about all I have to say, really. This is a disappointing situation, but one that, if I’m being honest, I should’ve seen coming. There have been so many “showcases” and sponsored segments in LTT videos over the years that of course the company must have those deep relationships and financial entanglements. It’s on me that I didn’t really put two and two together until now.
Going forward, I’m not sure what I plan to do. Linus Tech Tips has given me a lot of enjoyment over the last few years, and even if there are conflicts of interest and financial arrangements that now make me question the usefulness of LTT’s reviews on a practical level, some of the channel’s other content – the videos focused more on entertainment and fun – may still be worth watching. However, I will be keeping my ear to the ground to see what comes of the investigation into the complaints raised by at least one ex-employee of LMG. If the accusations levied at LMG are even close to true, then I think I’ll be unsubscribing. There’s no place for such awful treatment of a fellow human being, no matter how “big” and untouchable you think you are.
This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 