YouTube lets biggest stars off the hook for breaking rules, moderators say

[Valin]

Ars Technica

Moderators say YouTube overrode them when high-profile creators went too far.

Kate Cox

8/9/2019

If it feels like certain high-profile YouTubers get way more lenience when it comes to content moderation than everyone else does, that's apparently because they really do, according to a new report.

The Washington Post spoke with almost a dozen former and current YouTube content moderators, who told the paper that the gargantuan video platform "made exceptions" for popular creators who push content boundaries.

“Our responsibility was never to the creators or to the users," one former moderator told the Post. "It was to the advertisers.”

The employees told the Post in interviews that YouTube's internal guidelines for how to rate videos are confusing and hard to follow. Workers are also "typically given unrealistic quotas by the outsourcing companies of reviewing 120 videos a day," the Post reports, which makes it difficult to scrutinize longer videos without skipping over content that may turn out to be problematic. (A YouTube spokesperson told the Post it does not give moderators quotas.)

(Snip)

The workers on the front lines of content moderation are particularly disempowered to push for change or clarity because they, like their peers at most major platforms, are not Google employees but rather work for third-party outsourcing firms. The toll these jobs take on their workers is now extremely well documented, both domestically and abroad. One former moderator filed a lawsuit against Facebook in 2018, alleging the work left her with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

One YouTube moderator told the Post that ultimately the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. “The picture we get from YouTube is that the company has to make money," they said. "So what we think should be crossing a line, to them isn’t crossing one.”

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