How a mistake by YouTube shows its power over media
LONDON — The email subject line that arrived on a recent morning carried some of the worst information a small online news outlet can receive: “Novara Media we have removed your channel from YouTube.”
Novara had spent years using YouTube to attract more than 170,000 subscribers for its left-leaning coverage of issues such as climate change, capitalism and social policy. Suddenly, and without warning, that powerful distribution tool was zapped.
“We had this ambient awareness of our dependence on these Big Tech platforms,” Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor, said in an interview at Novara’s one-room office inside a converted factory. “But there’s nothing like having your livelihood snatched away from you to make you feel really disempowered.”
Every hour, YouTube deletes nearly 2,000 channels. The deletions are meant to keep out spam, misinformation, financial scams, nudity, hate speech and other material that it says violates its policies.
But the rules are opaque and sometimes arbitrarily or mistakenly enforced. Policy experts say Novara’s experience is indicative of thorny free speech issues YouTube faces as the world’s largest online video service.
The gatekeeper role leads to criticism from multiple directions. Many on the right of the political spectrum in the United States and Europe say YouTube unfairly blocks them. Some civil society groups say YouTube should do more to stop the spread of illicit content and misinformation.
Sometimes that leaves organizations such as Novara in the middle.
After an outcry online, YouTube restored Novara’s channel in a few hours, saying that it had been removed in error. But other independent journalists, activists and creators on YouTube often don’t have similar success, particularly in countries such as Belarus, Russia and Turkey, where YouTube is under pressure from authorities to remove opposition content and where the company does not have as much language or cultural expertise. Roughly 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute globally.
“It’s impossible to get our minds around what it means to try and govern that kind of volume of content,” said Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York. “YouTube is a juggernaut, by some metrics as big or bigger than Facebook.”
In its email, YouTube said Novara was guilty of “repeated violations” of YouTube’s community guidelines, without elaborating.
Novara’s staff was left guessing what had caused the problem.
YouTube typically has a three-strikes policy before deleting a channel. It had penalized Novara only once before, after a news segment with scenes from an anti-vaccination rally, and YouTube later reversed that decision. Novara’s last show released before the deletion was about sewage policy. And one of the organization’s few previous interactions with YouTube was when the video service sent Novara a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers.
Angry and frustrated, Novara posted a statement on Twitter and other social media services about the deletion. The post drew attention in the British press and from members of Parliament.
Within hours, Novara’s channel had been restored. Later, YouTube said Novara had been mistakenly flagged as spam, without providing further detail.
“On occasion we make the wrong call,” YouTube said in a statement.