Google’s platform for hate

Youtube has become the cesspool of the internet, despite its pious declarations about upholding ‘community standards’

I’d never heard of Carlos Maza until this month, when the Vox producer made a compilation of the homophobic, racist ranting of popular Youtuber Steven Crowder. Crowder, a right-wing pundit whose Youtube channel has 3.8million subscribers, has attacked Maza repeatedly, calling him an “anchor baby, a lispy queer, [and] a Mexican”.

Amazingly, Crowder apparently did not violate “community” standards at Youtube, which prohibits videos that “humiliate someone, make hurtful and negative personal comments … or incite others to harass or threaten individuals on or off Youtube”. His videos have remained online.

It’s the latest example of Youtube’s bizarre response to abuse on its platform, which has become a place where hate speech is rife.

It is the cesspool of the internet. It’s filled with vicious, callous attacks on historic truths and verified science, including such events as the Holocaust and the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings. Don’t get me started on antivaxxers.

And yet, Youtube allows this content.

Why? I suspect because people watch that drivel. And the more controversial the video, the greater the number of hits, which boosts Youtube’s advertising revenue. It’s a vicious circle created by the

Google-owned site’s business model. Stopping the abuse is directly at odds with its rationale for revenue generation.

As if this isn’t bad enough, this month there were also some scary revelations about how Youtube’s algorithms show innocent videos of children to paedophiles. The algorithms recommended the clips, researchers found, after people had watched sexually themed videos.

This follows another outrage last month about the video site’s comments section, which was found to contain the opinions of paedophiles, sometimes on otherwise innocuous footage.

Worse still, Youtube’s bosses knew about it and did nothing, according to a Bloomberg investigation in April.

In a blogpost last week about its “ongoing work to tackle hate”, Youtube said it would update its hate speech policy by “specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status”. This includes videos glorifying Nazi ideology and those that deny “well-documented violent events”.

Time will tell if this new moral code trumps its advertising model.

It’s worth remembering that Google’s original mantra was:

“Don’t do evil.”

How the mighty have fallen.

Youtube is filled with vicious attacks on historic truths and science