“New” YouTube Content Rules

By Joon Hyun

Staff Writer

The First Amendment states that “it guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.” The freedom of speech granted by the First Amendment has allowed people to talk about controversial topics and voice their opinions without being censored by the United States government. However, there has been controversy over the YouTube guidelines that aims to demonetize videos with content that it deems inappropriate for advertisers. In response to this, several popular YouTubers, most notably Philip DeFranco, have made videos complaining about YouTube’s advertiser-friendly policy and how it may affect YouTube because of how it apparently acts as a form of censorship.

Despite the recent outburst from YouTubers, the advertiser-friendly video guidelines have been established for quite some time. YouTube has already been demonetizing several videos since 2012 over inappropriate content that violated their rules, but YouTube did not actively enforce it. A YouTube spokesperson said in a statement, “While our policy of demonetizing videos due to advertiser-friendly concerns hasn't changed, we've recently improved the notification and appeal process to ensure better communication.” Therefore, the YouTube community’s negative reaction to the recent demonization is not justified.

However, this statement raises some concerns. It implies that YouTube may have not notified YouTubers when their video was demonetized. As a result, they may have lost money over the views after the video was demonetized, potentially denying ad revenue to some of the YouTubers. DeFranco addressed this concern over Twitter, “Given that many of the new appeals are putting ads back on videos, how much Ad money has Youtube incorrectly denied creators in the past?”

Due to the fact that YouTube prevents YouTubers from gaining money over certain content, the YouTube community has considered these guidelines as a form of censorship that limits the YouTubers’ freedom to upload any type of content. Although this is the general belief of the community, “censorship” isn’t the right word to use. In fact, people can upload any video as long as it falls under YouTube’s community guidelines, but videos that have inappropriate content for advertisers are just not monetized.

But, this doesn’t necessarily mean that YouTube is not censoring certain content. By enforcing these new rules, many YouTubers are now limited to what they say (cannot use inappropriate language) and what kind of content they create (advertiser-friendly) in order to make money. Thus, YouTube is indirectly censoring by forcing the content creators to create videos that contain little to no inappropriate language and topics that will not result in demonetization.

Is it wrong? Not exactly. There is no requirement for YouTube to allow content creators to make money off of their site. The whole site is run by YouTube, not the content creators. Despite this, the content creators are still protesting over this issue because they feel as if YouTube is obligated to pay them for using a site that YouTube owns. The purpose of these guidelines is to prevent advertisers from being associated with an inappropriate video by making YouTube seem like a safer platform to get their advertisement out there.

These new guidelines do not come without their flaws, however. Some YouTubers who rely solely on ad revenue may lose out on the money that could be made from their videos. Without another way to earn money, they will no longer gain income from YouTube and may refrain from posting videos because the time invested does not seem worth it. In addition, this system will most likely be run by bots because of the lack of time and staff that can monitor each and every video for inappropriate content. As a result, videos may be wrongly demonetized and may spark more outrage among the community.

To address this problem, YouTube has considered this possibility and allowed for an easier and more communicative appeal that would allow users to appeal the decision to demonetize a video. All that YouTube needs to do is improve that system so that the correct videos are flagged as inappropriate for advertisers rather than the wrong ones. If this problem is not fixed, YouTube may truly be over.