YouTube Updates Its Profanity Policy After Backlash
from the about-fucking-time dept
A couple of months back, we discussed YouTube pulling a Twitch and changing up its content policies for its streaming community in a way that was not well-announced nor understood by that community. The new policy made a number of changes, all of which had an impact on how monetization of content was to be handled. The first notable change was that any streams or recorded content that either “consistently” featured violent content within a video or featured violence very early on in the video, such as the first 8 seconds, would be demonitized. Unhelpfully for a huge swath of the streaming community, this policy applied not only to IRL violence, but to violent images from video games as well. The policy also had the exact same standards for “profanity.” I put that word in scare-quotes because, also unhelpfully, YouTube’s list of naughty words was treated with blanket equality, meaning that a “shit” was treated the same as a “fuck.” As a regular purveyor of such colorful language, this was self-evidently silly and the streaming community was pissed, especially as the policy was made retroactive on previous recorded videos.
Well, YouTube at least acted more quickly than Twitch to the backlash. On the profanity side of the house at least, YouTube announced that changes have been made to allow for more colorful language than the old-new policy. Monetization lead Conor Kavanaugh released a video explaining the changes:
Kavanagh detailed what YouTube is doing to address the feedback it received regarding the “stricter approach” to profanity. He said the criticism was heard loud and clear, especially regarding action taken retroactively against older uploads and how the content creator community wasn’t sufficiently informed on the impact of the changes.
“Upon reviewing our own enforcement data, we found the profanity policy resulted in a stricter approach than we intended,” Kavanagh said. “As a result, we are making the following changes to better reflect the goals of our initial update in November.”
So now, in something that is not entirely un-Orwellian, there are listed categories of naughty words. Some are “moderate”, while others are harsher. Moderate language won’t result in any action at all in most cases, while the same 8-second standard for the harsher language — such as your F-bombs — will apply, but only as a limitation of the number/type of ads that can be shown on those videos. The standards for how often naughty words are used throughout a video have been lowered as well.
And that makes some sense. It would probably be jarring, for instance, to be watching a video called “Fuck These Fucking Game Developers To Hell & Back” only to be greeted with an ad mid-video for the latest Care Bear toy or whatever kids are into these days. And, overall, the lessening of the punishment for actions that have been something of the standard for a while now, particularly in the gaming community.
These are worthwhile changes for a platform riddled with folks who love to cuss up a storm. Gaming creators are especially at fault for their potty mouths for a variety of reasons, particularly due to the extemporaneousness of language that comes with Let’s Plays and unscripted content. At least now there will be less severe punishment.
So at least YouTube did this better than Twitch, by all accounts. Rather than staying firm and staying opaque, changes were made and communication went out. We’ll now have to see if the follow through is there as well.
Filed Under: content moderation, profanity
Companies: youtube
Comments on “YouTube Updates Its Profanity Policy After Backlash”
cultural imperialism?
Do YouTube feel the need to define what words in French are offensive? Or Tagalog? Or Swedish?
Why the need to do it in English?
How are they coping with the fact that different standards apply in different cultures just between USian, Canadian, British and Australian Englishes. (not an exclusive list – there are many other Englishes).
How about making it consistent across cultures where English is the most common second language? Even harder.
What a pointless, shitty exercise, as once again, a US-based corporation (much like the US government) thinks it can rule the internet … well, in YouTube’s case, at least their only doing it on their own systems, and not attempting to the whole internet to live by US standards and cultural mores.
Re:
You sure? Sounds like a service provider clarifying their ts and C’s to me.
👍
Dear Youtube,
Here is a handy guide as to which words to allow and which words to ban, courtesy of George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbZhpf3sQxQ
You’re Welcome.
Care Bears are still a thing?
Re:
https://www.carebears.com/
Re:
They haven’t existed since nostalgia and tweeness were killed in a murder-suicide.
What if – now, this might be crazy, but bear with me – what if channels could post about their general demeanor, and hang on to your hats, advertisers could decide whether its cool or not, instead of making blanket rules. YouTube is not fucking Disney, and the second it looks like it is going that way, they won’t have one-tenth of the people to advertise with or to.
Like no one runs ads on TV during shows that say “fuck”. LOL
Re:
Well, not “nobody”, but there will be some advertisers who don’t want their ads to be associated with it, so they potentially lose some money. It’s easier to manage on TV where there’s blocks of content with certain themes or audience demographic, compared to YouTube where they have no direct control over what people want to watch.
That's different...
I think that service providers mistake point-of-sale acceptance of terms and conditions as an agreement to accept all future alterations to those terms, as well. They don’t see it as a long-term application of “bait and switch”, at all.
Makes me recall a certain fictional exchange, as best I recall:
“We had a deal!”
“I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further.”
Which role is the customer seems obvious, so…
Important note about the updated guidelines
Cursing in the title or thumbnail disqualifies the video for ads:
Labels
Why punish for profanity at all? Just require a label indicating profanity, and advertisers and viewers can act accordingly. Then punish if videos are mislabeled.
Re:
My guess is that because there’s a lot more ad dollars in “family friendly” ads than those targeted purely at adult content in all senses of the word (at least until you go off the other side of the scale with actual porn, etc.), YouTube wanted to try and force people into that box. Restricting titles, thumbnails and the first 8 seconds means there’s more chance they make some ad money before a person skips the video.
It’s silly, but such is the way these things are run, they will always be chasing the higher profit even if it’s nonsense outside of that goal.
If this is an intentional joke about how Orwell hated the pretentious and meaningless “not-un” prefix, then good show.
If it’s unintentional, that’s even funnier.