YouTube just can’t seem to get out of this hole it has dug itself into. According to a Washington Post report, the video giant has let top video creators get away more lightly with problematic content than those who bring in in fewer videos. The publication spoke with 11 current and former moderators for the platform, who have worked in teams that make decisions around this content, and they expressed that popular accounts “often get special treatment in the form of looser interpretations of YouTube’s guidelines prohibiting demeaning speech, bullying and other forms of graphic content.”
A key difference between YouTube and other social networks is that YouTube’s biggest stars generate it orders of magnitude more money than the small-timers, while all Facebook accounts (for example) make about the same. A second difference is that YouTube’s content moderators can’t actually punish creators or delete videos themselves, instead, they must pass along their recommendations with evidence to the higher-ups.
Moderators say their recommendations are basically ignored in circumstances where the channel generates a large amount of revenue, and the higher-ups go with the unofficial policy of “nothing is really an issue until there is a headline about it.”
If a channel violates one of YouTube’s policies it can have its advertisements taken away, videos deleted, or the entire channel could be banned. In all three of those circumstances, YouTube loses just as much money as the creator. Moderators highlighted the Logan Paul incident, where he filmed a suicide victim one month and deceased vermin another, as an example of biased standards. Logan Paul was removed from a premium advertising program, costing him a little, and all his advertisements were cut for two weeks.
“It felt like a slap in the face,” a moderator told the Washington Post. “You’re told you have specific policies for monetization that are extremely strict. And then Logan Paul broke one of their biggest policies and it became like it never happened.” The moderators all agreed that they’d expected Logan Paul’s channel to be removed or permanently deprived of revenue, based on past examples and guidelines they were familiar with.
The ugly fact is, both YouTube’s moderators and audience draw the line in one spot, while YouTube’s executives count their dollars and draw it somewhere else.
