YouTube
Policy Decisions
Wtf...YouTube published a blog post talking about all the creepy steps they will start taking in order to be more “inclusive.” For example, the article detailed how YouTube would be asking creators to, on “a voluntary basis”, provide personal details (gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity) so YouTube can better fight hate and harassment.
Today, we’re announcing a new effort to help us more proactively identify potential gaps in our systems that might impact a creator’s opportunity to reach their full potential. Starting in 2021, YouTube will ask creators on a voluntary basis to provide us with their gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity. We’ll then look closely at how content from different communities is treated in our search and discovery and monetization systems. We’ll also be looking for possible patterns of hate, harassment, and discrimination that may affect some communities more than others.
The most ridiculous thing here might actually be that we’re all supposed to pretend that Google and YouTube don’t already know this (and much, much more) about every single one of their users.
Additionally, the article talked about a filter that YouTube is testing out to help combat “hateful and harmful comments” by prompting users about “potentially offensive” comments before they post them:
New reminders will give people the option to reflect before posting potentially offensive comments.
Finally, the article also mentioned a pretty disturbing statistic: YouTube terminated 1.8 million channels in Q3 alone, more than 54,000 of which were for “hate speech”:
And in the last quarter, of the more than 1.8 million channels we terminated for violating our policies, more than 54,000 terminations were for hate speech.