YouTube still struggling to remove hate videos, and to avoid recommending them to users
- Racists, anti-Semites and other extremists continue to use YouTube to spread their ideas. Critics say platform is slow to identify such content
- YouTube doesn’t ban conspiracy theories or false news stories, but has made efforts to reduce the reach of such content this year
A year after YouTube’s chief executive promised to curb “problematic” videos, it continues to harbour and even recommend hateful, conspiratorial videos, allowing racists, anti-Semites and proponents of other extremist views to use the platform as an online library for spreading their ideas.
YouTube is particularly valuable to users of social media sites that are popular among hate groups but have scant video capacity of their own. Users on these sites link to YouTube more than to any other website, thousands of times a day, according to the recent work of Data and Society and the Network Contagion Research Institute, both of which track the spread of hate speech.
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The platform routinely serves videos espousing neo-Nazi propaganda, phoney reports portraying dark-skinned people as violent savages and conspiracy theories claiming that large numbers of leading politicians and celebrities molested children. Critics say that even though YouTube removes millions of videos on average each month, it is slow to identify troubling content and, when it does, is too permissive in what it allows to remain.
The struggle to control the spread of such content poses ethical and political challenges to YouTube and its embattled parent company, Google, whose chief executive, Sundar Pichai, testified before the US House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee this month amid several controversies.
YouTube has focused its clean-up efforts on what chief executive Susan Wojcicki in a blog post last year called “violent extremism”. But she also signalled the urgency of tackling other categories of content that allows “bad actors” to take advantage of the platform, which 1.8 billion people log on to each month.