Where's YouTube's Line?

Are the YouTube Community Guidelines even worth it?

Originally published on September 25, 2017

As a person following YouTube site drama, I’d always felt like “it would never happen to me”. I’m not a big YouTuber by any means. I watched the Adpocalypse and heard about videos being demonetized and taken down left, right, and center, hitting the big people on the platform and threatening their livelihood.

So last Sunday I uploaded a video I had just spent six hours the night before finishing, a Game of Thrones edit I was incredibly proud of. Within a half hour, I went to check on if it had gotten any views and found it had disappeared. It had violated YouTube’s Community Guidelines (never said which one specifically, but I guessed it was the “violence” one) and had been removed from the site. I had one strike against my channel in the Community Guidelines section but it would drop in 3 months. From following other channels’ troubles, I knew I could appeal. So I did. Last Thursday it was back up.

From my research, I know it is often an algorithm that initially takes down videos. There’s no way a human could go through the thousands of minutes of video content uploaded to YouTube every minute. But no algorithm is perfect, and way too many videos have been dinged for things taken out of context. A robot doesn’t know the difference between comedy and reality, fantasy and journalism.

I understand why advertisers started getting snippy. No one at Wal-Mart wants a Wal-Mart ad playing next to a journalist being beheaded by the Taliban. In my experience, I know that does not mean Wal-Mart supports the Taliban, but that is what the advertisers think. So YouTube lost many sponsors and was pressured to crack down on content, creating their Community Guidelines.

Is YouTube getting too sensitive?

They are a company, and companies need to have policies that partners have to follow in order to be a part of it. If a partner violates the policies, they will no longer be a part of the company. And before I hear the argument of “free speech”, even though YouTube is based in the United States, it is a worldwide company with contributors from around the world. There is a line.

THAT BEING SAID there is a big difference between fantasy violence knowingly consumed by the viewer and very real journalism taking place in our very real world that needs to be spread to raise awareness of things that are sometimes just words and numbers.

Some of the Guidelines make sense. Threats, hateful content, and spam should be stopped in their paths. But the others make less sense. Language, violence, and dangerous content are things found in movies and TV shows and people have the choice to watch them. At the very least, I would recommend YouTube starts doing the thing Facebook has done and put before a video “this video has graphic content; would you like to proceed?”. Age-gating should work to an extent as well, if necessary.

I will be watching even more carefully in the future to see what YouTube is coming up with next. Will there be a solution, or will there be a new platform ready to take its place?