YouTube spent this year answering critics with some of the most drastic changes in its 15-year history. With each step, it gave those activists, regulators and lawmakers more reasons to attack its free-wheeling, user-generated business model.
YouTube chief executive officer Susan Wojcicki announced her goals in April.
“My top priority is responsibility,” Wojcicki wrote.
Illustration: Tania Chou
Her company spent the year trying to traverse an almost impossible tightrope: Nurture a growing community of demanding creators, while pledging to police troubling videos and protect millions of underage users who officially should not even be watching.
The efforts pleased almost no one and highlighted an existential quandary. Every time YouTube tries to fix something, the company, an arm of Alphabet Inc’s Google, risks losing the neutrality that it needs to thrive.
“They know that every time they are successful catching problematic content or removing it, this just raises expectations,” said Mike Godwin, a senior fellow at think tank R Street Institute and a trustee of the Internet Society. “It’s a never-ending cycle of increasing demands for these dominant platforms to operate fairly.”
As next year looms, the largest online video service is being dragged deeper into political fights over privacy, copyright and content moderation.
In response, YouTube is trying to preserve the sanctity of its status as an online platform with little liability for what happens on its site. Instead, that burden is increasingly falling on the shoulders of regulators, video creators and other partners.
Nowhere is that more evident than YouTube’s approach to children.
A landmark privacy settlement this year with the US Federal Trade Commission is forcing YouTube to split its massive site in two. Every clip, starting next month, must be designated as “made for kids” or not.
The overhaul puts billions of advertisement dollars at stake and has sparked panic among creators, who face new legal risk. The company is not offering creators legal advice or ways to salvage their businesses. It is not even defining what a “made for kids” video is on YouTube — and has argued to the US government that it should not have to.
“Creators will make those decisions themselves,” Wojcicki said last week. “Creators know their content best.”
YouTube privately considered taking more control.
Earlier this year, it assembled a team of more than 40 employees to brace for the commission’s decision. The team was code-named “Crosswalk” — as in a way to guide children across YouTube’s chaotic streets.
Among its proposals was a radical one, at least by the standards of Silicon Valley: YouTube would screen every video aimed at children under the age of eight in its YouTube Kids app, ensuring that no untoward content crept into the feed.
A news release was even drafted in which Wojcicki said that professional moderators would check each clip, people familiar with the plans said.
Yet at the last minute, the chief executive and her top deputies ditched the plan, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.
The rationale was clear to some at YouTube, one person involved in the project said.
Handpicking videos, even for children, made YouTube look too much like a media company, not a neutral platform.
A YouTube spokeswoman denied the idea was turned down because it put the company in charge of programming, but she declined to comment further on the decision.
In an interview, Wojcicki made it clear that her content-moderation push only goes so far, telling CBS News that even being liable for video recommendations would destroy the essence of the service.
“If we were held liable for every single piece of content that we recommended, we would have to review it,” she said. “That would mean there would be a much smaller set of information that people would be finding. Much, much smaller.”
YouTube’s balancing act between media publisher or hands-off Internet bulletin board has sparked intense debate internally. For some business partners and employees, this year’s decisions leave them with the impression that the company is unable to take a serious stand.
“What is the mission of this company? People don’t even know,” said former YouTube marketing manager Claire Stapleton, who left this year after clashing with Google over employee protests. “YouTube is so ill-equipped to manage these massive challenges.”
The company spokeswoman said that YouTube has made significant investments to better protect its online community. Over the past 18 months, the results of those efforts include an 80 percent reduction in views of videos that breach its policies.
YouTube also increased viewership on videos from “authoritative news publishers” by 60 percent, the spokeswoman said.
“While there will always be healthy debate around this work, we’ll continue to make the hard decisions needed to better protect the openness of the YouTube platform and the community that depends on it,” she added.
No episode this year typified YouTube’s arduous search for middle ground more than the Maza affair.
In June, gay journalist and YouTube creator Carlos Maza accused Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber, of repeated harassment.
The Vox Web site put together a montage of clips from Crowder’s YouTube channel to highlight what Maza said were homophobic and racist insults.
After saying it would review Maza’s complaints, YouTube concluded that the comments were not a breach of its policies, angering some of its own employees.
YouTube employees held a private call to explain its rationale to Maza, who remained unconvinced.
“It was very awkward,” Maza said.
Meanwhile, Crowder devoted a 21-minute video to rehashing his comments. After days of criticism, YouTube removed ads from his videos, angering him.
At a conference about a week later, Wojcicki apologized to the LGBTQ community, but defended YouTube’s decision to keep Crowder’s videos on the site.
Removing his clips, or banning him from YouTube, would have put the company in an untenable situation, with millions of viewers asking “what about this one?” about hundreds of comedy, hip-hop and late-night TV show videos, she said.
Two months later, a group of LGBTQ YouTube creators filed a class action lawsuit accusing the company of discrimination. The case mirrored similar charges from across the ideological aisle — a filing from PragerU, a conservative video channel, which has accused YouTube of censorship.
In fact, the lawsuits were brought by the same attorney.
“It just looks like YouTube is taking the maximum amount of time for a solution that pleases no one,” Stapleton said.
YouTube spent the months after the Maza episode rewriting its harassment policy. The update, announced earlier this month, sets new rules that would treat Crowder’s videos as breaches subject to removal.
Like clockwork, the decision riled other creators.
Felix Kjellberg, YouTube’s biggest star, who posts as PewDiePie, said that he was leaving the site and blamed the new policy.
“We have this anarchy system, OK,” Kjellberg said. “If YouTube knows what’s good for them, they’ll keep their [expletive] hands out... Don’t come and ruin it for us.”
While criticism comes from all sides, YouTube’s challenge is practically insurmountable: More than 500 hours of footage are uploaded every minute and the company’s software is unable to gain a thorough understanding of the content before people start watching.
“You are trying to keep free speech going and, at the same time, you’re trying to make sure crud doesn’t get in, and trying to make sure that people who watch aren’t getting affected. It’s a really, really, really hard problem,” said former YouTube executive Diya Jolly, who left in 2017. “Susan is doing an awesome job.”
Wojcicki’s task is set to become even more difficult.
The European Parliament has approved rules that make YouTube liable the moment anyone uploads a video that breaches a copyright. That could force YouTube to take down content from popular creators, while increasing its legal bills and hurting ad sales.
Wojcicki used Google’s political muscle and invited creators to lobby against the regulations, but she has failed to stop them. One former senior employee said that fight claimed as much of the executive team’s attention as the more-public battles over children’s privacy and inappropriate content.
Even in the US, the walls are closing in around YouTube.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers have proposed peeling back protections that have shielded Internet companies from liability for decades, while YouTube’s dominance could draw antitrust scrutiny.
US lawmakers are also considering tougher copyright laws, egged on by YouTube’s rivals in media and music.
“That’s where there is a lot of money at stake and people have valid objections,”said Jeff Kosseff, an assistant professor at the US Naval Academy and an expert on Internet law.
For now, though, YouTube’s biggest challenge is children’s privacy.
The US Federal Trade Commission in September fined Google for illegally tracking children for its ads business, forcing significant changes to YouTube’s operations.
YouTube on Nov. 13 sent an e-mail to tens of thousands of creators about the coming “made for kids” designation. If marked as “made for kids,” videos would lose lucrative personalized ads and other valuable features, including user comments. If clips are not labeled this way, and the government decides the footage is indeed reaching children, creators could be fined thousands of dollars.
“We know this won’t be easy for some creators, and that this required change is going to take some getting used to,” the company wrote in the e-mail.
YouTube has also advised many of them to “lawyer up,” partners said.
A regulatory filing went further, with Google estimating that the changes would mean YouTube creators “who make mostly child-directed content will likely lose a majority of their revenue.”
In contrast, YouTube itself emerged relatively unscathed. Google paid a US$170 million fine, a tiny sliver of its profit.
The commission’s settlement on the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act focused on YouTube, not other parts of Google. The Internet giant worked hard to limit any broader impact on the rest of its businesses, one former executive said.
Best of all for YouTube, it does not need to screen clips before they go up, nor is it liable for any infringing videos.
The commission is rewriting its rules and has invited public comment. In a filing, Google told the agency it was worried about any laws forcing it to “identify and police” videos aimed at children. The company was, in effect, arguing that it could not know for sure the age of its audience and should not be punished for that.
Critics were appalled.
Lindsey Barrett, a staff attorney at Georgetown Law’s communications and technology clinic, who worked with complainants, found it hard to imagine the contortions required for Google to make that argument.
“Our entire business is based on being able to slice and dice our audience, and see who’s watching what, but we couldn’t possibly tell you if there’s a child here,” she said.
The company spokeswoman said that YouTube has done its best to comply with its US obligations, as it understands them, and has asked the commission for more clarification on the rules.
The firm is “not answering the questions everyone wants,” said Greg Alkalay, chief executive officer of BatteryPOP, a children’s media company. “YouTube’s success comes from its creators. They built a beast and don’t know how to wrangle it.”
Additional reporting by Ben Brody
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