YouTube Says Content Policing is Good for Business

While critics allege YouTube puts profits over public safety, product head Neal Mohan insists that the Google-owned video site is working to be a better content moderator in part because it is good for business. From a report: Users spend billions of hours watching videos on YouTube, and the site's content recommendations shape how that time is spent. Facebook and Twitter tend to get more attention on content moderation, but YouTube remains an equally important information battleground. YouTube is announcing Monday that it now has two million people in its programs that enable creators to get paid. Mohan said a huge part of his focus is trying to find ways to make sure those who play by the rules are rewarded.

"99.9% of creators are looking to do the right thing," Mohan told Axios, noting that YouTube has paid out $30 billion over the last three years. In addition to the 14-year-old program that shares ad money for popular videos, YouTube has also added ways for creators to sell merchandise or be directly compensated by users. YouTube still faces challenges in making sure it is the creators "doing the right thing" who are benefiting the most, rather than spreaders of viral misinformation. It's not just those getting paid by Google who can benefit from gaming the system. Creators with a large enough following can make money indirectly even if they've been "demonetized" -- removed from YouTube's own payment programs. In the "vast, vast majority of cases that's a good thing," Mohan said, though he acknowledges that it does create opportunities for some creators to profit from borderline content that doesn't meet YouTube's bar.

The road to Hell

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

is paved with "good intentions"

No, I don't have a solution to YouTube's moderation problem, I just like the phrase.

Re:

[Åke Malmgren]

This is not actually true. The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it.
- Terry Pratchett / Neil Gaiman

Re:The road to Hell

[AmiMoJo]

Every free speech based site ever built has failed to be a commercial success, so we know that moderation is good for business.

The issue is the "marginal" stuff, or really what they mean is stuff that some people get upset about but which other people get really happy about. Stuff like make-up tips for trans people who are transitioning get de-monetized. Engineers who are hot find their videos get hit for being too sexy. People making videos that criticise Prager """U""" get hit with bogus copyright claims and bombed with false content complaints.

At the moment YouTube is really bad at reviewing these issues and inconsistent at applying their policies.

Re:

[sinij]

Every free speech based site ever built has failed to be a commercial success, so we know that moderation is good for business.

While I don't expect you to be logical at all times, could you at least avoid stacking multiple fallacies in the opening sentence of your post? While posting on a site that doesn't moderate?

List of fallacies: a) correlation is not causation, b) shifting definitions, c) red herring.

Re:

[fafalone]

Should narrow it down more. Plain text is one thing, if Slashdot displayed images we'd be one gore thread and one child model thread away from at least some moderation of technically legal content. Also if you want to talk about fallacious, comparing the kind of commercial success we're talking about with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even MySpace back in the day, Slashdot is just a blip, not a major global success story.
Also, I've got this funny looking button that says "Moderate" at the bottom of most

Re:The road to Hell

[chispito]

You don't even have to look at polarizing or controversial content. People get dragged into turf wars and petty feuds within the same niche. There is a watch channel on YouTube that was recently deleted, without warning, for promoting counterfeit goods. The channel owner had just recently switched to YouTube being his full-time career. Problem was, of course, that he never had promoted counterfeit watches, but had posted several videos with side by side comparisons to educate his viewers on how to spot fakes. It's suspected that the same bad actor that had pulled similar stunts against others reported him. His channel was restored eventually.

And that's to say nothing of the heinous abuse their copyright strike system. There are some stupidly litigious copyright holders out there.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

You mean Just One More Watch? Fortunately he got is sorted out quite quickly but it's pretty horrendous that they did it.

https://youtu.be/kz5DMROTWOo [youtu.be]

Re:

[chispito]

Yes, exactly whom I was thinking of. I have a friend with a smaller channel that was really alarmed by it. I bring it up because all the tools and processes designed to keep people from harming others also get abused to intentionally harm others. And it's often not in any way ideological, it's a racket or out of simple spite.

Re:

[Archangel Michael]

Random person reports a channel falsely, YouTube demonetizes and or strikes the user, and the user is lucky if YouTube gives the exact reason. After that, user has to prove innocence where the reporting person doesn't have to prove anything, just claim. Getting it sorted after the fact IS the problem, largely because it isn't a guaranteed thing.

Some of the more well known channels dealing with this are reported every single day by some whiney butthurt victim "SQUEE" .

There Are Advertisers that WANT to adver

Lol forget which site you're on?

[raymorris]

> Every free speech based site ever built has failed to be a commercial success,

You're on Slashdot. You can post misinformation here all you want, as you occasionally have. I can point it out when you do. Free speech.

Slashdot managed to become one of the most popular sites on the entire internet. I would call that a success.

Of course when the people who own the site pretty much ignore it and just collect the checks for fifteen years, that success slowly dwindles.

Why S230 needs a "reasonable person" standard

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

tuff like make-up tips for trans people who are transitioning get de-monetized. Engineers who are hot find their videos get hit for being too sexy.

S230 allows them to nuke content, slap a reason on it and then have no authority review whether or not that made sense. For example, S230 could successfully defend Facebook from being sued by the Babylon Bee when Facebook took action against them for a post that clearly riffed on Monty Python and Facebook with a straight face, after an appeal, argued it was an "i

Re:

[fafalone]

I'd support such a law that required reasonable readings of the rules, a right to speak to a human about the issue who has the authority to reinstate, and ability to file for arbitration in a dispute and potentially punitive damages on appeal in a real court from that, when it comes to situations like YouTube where money is involved. If no payments are being exchanged, no duty is owed. However once you're making money or paying money, more protections should come into play.

Re:

[Cyryathorn]

S230 allows them to nuke content, slap a reason on it and then have no authority review whether or not that made sense.

If S230 didn't exist, YouTube would still have the right to nuke content. For any reason or for no reason. (If S230 was repealed, the exposure to liability would incentivize YouTube to do even /more/ aggressive nuking.)

Re:

[fred911]

"Every free speech based site ever built has failed to be a commercial success, so we know that moderation is good for business."

It's easy for an algorithm, or people to know what is high or exceptional quality. Is just as easy to know what is normal quality.

The real difficult part for both machines and humans is to properly identify the low quality and shit. There are many things that look like shit that actually aren't.

But mostly if it looks and smells like shit....it's shit.

Re:

[shentino]

The cement keeping those pavings together though is when good intentions are maligned or taken advantage of.

Re:

[alexgieg]

Odysee and Bitchute are much better alternatives.

Really? I haven't checked this Odysee, but whenever I open Bitchute I'm greeted with a wall of recommended videos composed mostly of conspiracy theories. Let's see if things changed:

a) Top 10 at Bitchute right now: anti-vax conspiracy; anti-vax conspiracy; anti-government conspiracy; anti-government conspiracy; anti-transgender bigotry; black pill advocacy; generic right-wing conspiracy; anti-vax conspiracy; anti-vax conspiracy; and an evangelical tour promo.

Yeah, no, it continues the same. Now let me check

Re:

[omibus]

Personally I like "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" better.

Don't moderate content? Bad shit happens on your site and people will sue you.
Do moderate content? Then you are the bad shit and people will sue you.

Re:

[farrellj]

Of course, it is good for business! Think of all the money they make when they retroactively demonetize a video, before they pay the content creator, and thus keep all the ad revenue that had accumulated on that video.

Lol. Look up the Ad-pocalypse.

[waspleg]

YT drastically cutting payments and trying to pit channels against each other while doing stupid shit no one asked for like YT Music and YT TV is the reason for a lot of quality decline.

It's arguably worse than regular TV at this point as far as ads per second goes - embedded "sponsor" videos, Patreon begging, and "OMG MERCH" shilling are the direct result of YT stealing the lion's share of other people's efforts and got a great feedback loop of forcing "creators" to be there or no one will ever find them (like, on Odysee).

Re:

[timeOday]

No, I think content producers would still be doing embedded ads, patreon, and merch, even if google paid more per view. Sellers in a market seek to maximize income. The concept of "enough" isn't really relevant. The content producers plus youtube itself are destined to increase the spam load until it reduces net income by reducing the viewership by more than it increases revenue per viewer.

That's not to say youtube's payout rate doesn't come at the cost of their content producers. It's a mutual symbi

Re:

[fuzznutz]

It's arguably worse than regular TV at this point as far as ads per second goes

Sadly, this is true. I was finally motivated to install extensions to block ads on YouTube. The final straw was while watching a technical video and it was interrupted every couple minutes in the middle of a sentence by an ad.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Try SponsorBlock. It's supported in YouTube Vanced (Android), Smart YouTube Next (Android TV) and in your browser.

You can select what you want to block - sponsors, self promotion, intro sequences, like+subscribe reminders etc.

Re:

[dinfinity]

Seconding this. SponsorBlock is fantastic.

The Ad-pocalypse wasn't YouTube being evil

[rsilvergun]

What happened was a bunch of neo-Nazi and white supremacist channels were getting ads for major brands like Coca-Cola and Toyota. That scared the hell out of the brands because they were afraid of being associated with or accused of promoting neo-nazis, and they pulled all their advertising immediately. That's where all the draconian rules came from.

The lower payouts are just because around that time YouTube was established as the dominant platform. Before they were heavily incentivizing content creatio

Re:

[OhPlz]

That might have been the beginning, but now their automation is demonetizing things for no good reason. People posting videos have to be extremely cautious of what words they use or if there's anything vaguely violent or adult going on, even if they're just reporting on something. It's pretty bad. So now you get ads in the their videos that aren't part of Youtube's monetization, which is hilarious because it proves that advertisers are actually willing to run their ads on that content. People that pay f

Yes, police me more.

[sinij]

Clearly, I don't know what is good for me, can't make up my mind on any issue without being told what to think, and completely incapable of fact-based analysis. Thankfully, I have YouTube saving me from myself, for my own good. For that, I am eternally grateful to our benevolent technocratic overlords.

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

Clearly, I don't know what is good for me

There is data that show that a significant percentage of Americans clearly do not. The problem is, they put the rest of us at risk.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe... [fivethirtyeight.com]

I mean, you have government officials in Mississippi having to tell their people not to take a livestock drug that YouTubers (and Fox News Favorites) have been touting as a cure for COVID. .

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/23... [npr.org]

Misinformation is not a free speech issue. Misinformation is not free speech. It

Re: Yes, police me more.

[NagrothAgain]

People have been abusing animal meds since before the internet, ketamine is one common example. Instead of getting wacko alien government witchcraft conspiracy theories from the publication in the grocery store checkout aisle, they can get it online. Youtube doesn't neccessarily make any of this more common but it does make it more visible.

This.

[rsilvergun]

As soon as you start making money off misinformation it stops being a free speech issue becomes an advertising issue. We have laws against false advertising for a reason. We have a judicial system to fairly apply those laws. And we can make adjustments to that judicial system as needed through democracy. It's time to apply those institutions.

Re:

[Britz]

It's the other way around. Youtube as well as other social media only take your subscriptions as a suggestion and will promote all kinds of videos. So yes, you are being told what to think on social media. And you have been since the beginning if you ever used it.

And for the longest time, social media has promoted content that turns out to be very toxic. Because lots of people watch it and keep watching it. Humans are fairly easy to manipulate into watching something. You can't look away from a car crash. S

What's good for business and what's good for democ

[RightwingNutjob]

Dissent is important for democracy but by definition there will always be fewer dissidents than there are mainstream content creators.

Niche publishers and universities were the traditional creative outlets for these people, some of whose ideas got purchase in the culture and in politics, mainly to everyone's benefit.

The point is that the marketplace of ideas wasn't a walk in the park, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was more or less open to all.

Consolidation in publishing and media, and the univer

This is a distraction

[memory_register]

Content policing is their way of appearing moral, while really not caring about their creators. Everyone - creator, viewer - is just a cog to be monetized for ad spend, and talking about censoring is a way to keep your attention off how they treat their creators. It seems oddly fitting that their broken moral compass which tells them dehumanizing their users would also tell them that censorship is good.

Police your Ads!

[jellomizer]

Many of YouTube's Ads that are shown would had been taken down if it were a normal posted video.
I have seen ads that were overtly racist, trying to scam me out of money by pretending to be a popular youtuber, showing sexual content that would get banned if from an other poster.

Those are often worse than if a random YouTube guy who posted it, because you can normally just block their channel, but the Ads pop up over and over, you block them or report them, they will still pop up, because they just change their name.

Re:

[thegarbz]

I have seen ads that were overtly racist, trying to scam me out of money

Adds are shown based on Google's knowledge of your interests. Just know the only ads I ever get are for shitty mobile games, soft drink, and local hardware stores.

I won't pass judgement but you should think about that for a second.

Re:

[jellomizer]

Those ads are often not based on my interest. That is the problem, It is not only based on my interest but also my Location (A rather conservative area of my state) , and also it often based on a massive tangential correlation. I like Woodworking, so for Google all wood workers fit a profile, that may include political views, age, gender... You would think Google would also take dislikes and reports on ads as also a way to fix the info.

I often get ads for crappy mobile games (that is where I often get

Re:

[thegarbz]

Those ads are often not based on my interest.

Well no. They are based on algorithmically attempting to identify your interest which is usually based on your search history and your communications online. So think about that for a second. Why does Google think you're into that stuff?

It's like those people who complain about getting nothing but anti-vaxx nonsense and racism on Facebook. All I get on Facebook are things shared by my friends along with mobile phone games and music related adverts. That makes me really question who these people hang out wit

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

YouTube ads are in fact just ordinary YouTube videos. You can report them just like normal if they had content that violates the ToS. The issue is usually finding the video to report, as most ads are unlisted.

So is Bribery

[GrassMudWhores]

It's pretty clear that If you gave free ads to the political candidates you support, then that would clearly constitute an illegal contribution. But suppressing the grass roots messaging of their opponents and supporters seems to be totally legal at the moment, and even seen by many as moral.

Re:

[doconnor]

They are only suppressing the grass roots messaging of their opponents and supports that are descending into Fascism.

Well, yes

[cascadingstylesheet]

Going along with censors (or joining them ideologically) is good for business ...

"Nice online empire you got there. Shame if something should happen to it ... "

Socialism

[groobly]

Youtube and Twitter should both be services provided by the government. It is said that freedom of the press is for those who own a press. That's the root of this problem.

It all resumes to Mastercard as always

[Z80a]

They decided to be THE moral guardians of everything, and are most likely the reason why onlyfans dropped the porn.
So youtube have to bend over to em as well, or they might risk losing the entire youtube premium business.

Re:

[Areyoukiddingme]

It all resumes to Mastercard as always. They decided to be THE moral guardians of everything, and are most likely the reason why onlyfans dropped the porn.

Strangely enough, no. A reporter actually asked Mastercard and Visa about the OnlyFans situation. Visa didn't respond, but Mastercard did, rather surprisingly. They denied having anything to do with it. They said they "were not involved in OnlyFans' decision to restrict content."

Maybe that's because it didn't occur to them to do so, or because they're not aware what OnlyFans models get up to, but at least this time, Mastercard is uninvolved. They process the payments and don't say a word.

Re:

[Z80a]

Pretty unusual, but maybe onlyfans is just allergic to money then

Nice attempt to change the subject...

[QuietLagoon]

Instead of youtube talking about the disinformation videos that inhabit its site, youtube talks about moderation being good for business.

Yeah, policing

[smooth wombat]

Someone kindly explain why BatMetal is now hidden behind age verification. All three videos are now inaccessible unless you have an account and verified age.

Apparently showing video clips or movies where people get shot, stabbed, dismembered, or blown up is fine, but it's an absolute travesty to have a female cartoon character in "skin tight" clothes gyrate on an imaginary stage.

Re:

[Areyoukiddingme]

Someone kindly explain why BatMetal is now hidden behind age verification. All three videos are now inaccessible unless you have an account and verified age.

Self-protection. YouTube has a notice on the video:

Age-restricted video (requested by uploader)

There's been a wave of videos being reported for inappropriate content by self-appointed Puritanical morality police, and because YouTube is run almost exclusively by dumb algorithms, people who think they might be targeted have been using the built-in YouTube content restriction system to make themselves immune to such nonsense. The dumb algorithms treat "inappropriate content" reports on age-restricted content differently.

As usual, YouTube's idiot softw

Content Policing is Good for Business?

[Nokey]

Which rule of Acquisition is that?

Re:

[tepples]

I found a couple Rules of Acquisition from Star Trek [fandom.com] that apply to particular Google practices:

Rule 33: It never hurts to suck up to the boss.

Google's bosses are its advertisers and the payment processors for Google Pay.

Rule 194: It's always good business to know about new customers before they walk in your door.

Hence reCAPTCHA and "Sign in with Google" buttons even on sites that don't carry AdSense or DoubleClick ads.

proven in the 90s with adult video rentals

[Somervillain]

The places with those swinging doors to all the porn videos made less money than the stores than banned adult videos....not from me, but yeah...the local blockbuster always had more lines than my local rental place...even the best one in Chicago...the store everyone went to for obscure movies because of a great staff, carefully curated content and LOTS of videos, adult, cult and mainstream...had half the content of the nearest blockbuster.

Family friendly makes more money. Disneyworld makes more money t

Sure it is!!

[BardBollocks]

like.. we can't be knowing honest knowledge that undermine wars for profit!

or how about ongoing ethnic cleansing by Israel? yep - no - can't have that because you only oppose Israeli ethnic cleansing if you're racist.

how about footage showing crimes against humanity taken by palestinians? nope that promotes terrorism.

yeah - like this isn't about keeping information that the elites don't want us to know buried.

YouTube pays 2000 people to do the wrong thing

[ljw1004]

YouTube ... has two million people in its programs that enable creators to get paid
99.9% of creators are looking to do the right thing

From their own numbers: YouTube has invented a new platform which gives 2,000 people a paid opportunity to do the wrong thing, where they didn't have this platform before.

Thanks YouTube!

YouTube also says..

[strUser_Name]

YouTube also says "YouTube is awarded YouTube's Free Expression Award 2021"

"demonetized"

[mapkinase]

I read it first as "demonized"