Reports are coming in that YouTube has removed more than 100,000 videos and banned 17,000 channels since committing to their promise of purging “hate speech” back in June.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the news comes courtesy of YouTube, who admitted to removing thousands upon and thousands of channels and content that they deem both violated their policies or “brushed up against” their policies, as stated by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcick in a late August blog post.
YouTube removed it, no strike though.
They’ve changed their mind about the video so many times that I’ve stopped caring. https://t.co/vAcuVaheco
— Count Dankula (@CountDankulaTV) September 4, 2019
Deleted videos range from pranks, to music, to archives, to commentary, and everything else in between.
As noted in a video by Jeremy Hambly over on his MidWestly channel, this accounts for five times the amount of removals than what’s normal at YouTube and they’ve purged more than 500 million comments.
But it gets worse.
In a follow-up blog post published on September 4th, 2019 – in response to the $170 million fine issued by the Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children’s Privacy Law – they stated that within the next four months they will be implementing new changes to kids content on the platform. Specifically, they will be removing comments and notifications from channels and videos categorized for kids.
In the blog, Susan Wojcicki writes…
“We are changing how we treat data for children’s content on YouTube. Starting in about four months, we will treat data from anyone watching children’s content on YouTube as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user. This means that we will limit data collection and use on videos made for kids only to what is needed to support the operation of the service. We will also stop serving personalized ads on this content entirely, and some features will no longer be available on this type of content, like comments and notifications. In order to identify content made for kids, creators will be required to tell us when their content falls in this category, and we’ll also use machine learning to find videos that clearly target young audiences, for example those that have an emphasis on kids characters, themes, toys, or games.”
The removal of comments was previously put through a limited roll-out on select channels earlier this year during the Childadpocalypse, with popular channels like Chadtronic having all of the comments disabled on his videos. It appears they’re now ramping up that measure across every channel that gets labeled as a “Kids” channel.
And of course, this means that some channels may be thrust under the “Kids” label even if they’re not.
The blog post also notes that they will set aside $100 million to develop original content for kids around the world, and will work with COPPA and the FTC to make the platform more child friendly.
As outlined in the Sankaku Complex article, lots of channels have already been terminated on YouTube that either contained historical archival footage or classic European music… or in the case! GoePPels Chan, parody content.
(Thanks for the news tips Clownfish TV and P69 (All Lolis Are Queens))
