YouTube and its owner company, Google, gets a lot of flak from many people from all sides of the political spectrum and even people who don't do anything related to politics.
One of the major and main sources of complaints is (what's perceived by many people to be) the completely broken copyright claim system of the platform. Pretty much anybody can take down anybody else's video by merely filling a simple online form. In practice this can be done anonymously because you can, of course, completely make up the information you enter in that form. What's worse, too many copyright claims and your channel will be shut down. Automatically.
Such claims can be contested, but responses tend to be very slow and take quite some time even if YouTube decides to remove the claim and restore the video.
If the claimant actually does own the clips in the "offending" video that are the basis for the claim, and especially if the claimant is a corporation, there's even less of a chance of getting the claim removed, even if the use of the material is very clearly within fair use territory.
What is worse, not only does YouTube offer the possibility (to anybody) of taking down anybody's video, but a more egregious possibility being offered is not to take down the video but to redirect all the advertisement revenue to the claimant. At least a few years ago the money was automatically redirected to the claimant without question. Meaning that, indeed, anybody could rob the advertisement money from anybody else's video until the claim was removed. In the worst cases, with smaller youtubers, having the claim removed could take up to a month or even more. All this time all the advertisement money went to the claimant, no questions asked. When the claim was removed, none of that money was demanded back. It was just gone forever. (The only recourse that the video creator has is to legally sue that claimant.)
(Many have suggested a solution to this problem where in the case of a redirected-ad-money claim, for the duration of the dispute all the ad revenue would go to some neutral bank account owned by YouTube, and when the dispute was settled, then YouTube would transfer all the money that had accumulated there to whoever won the dispute. As far as I know, no such thing has ever been implemented, so the exploit is still there.)
The copyright strike system in YouTube has been, and to this day is still being notoriously misused and abused to extents completely beyond the intent of copyright protection. People constantly abuse the system to try to take down videos they don't like, or to harass people.
Of course ad revenue itself has become a source of complaints as well. When the ad revenue system was first implemented, pretty much anybody with a sizeable viewer count could actually make a full living off of creating YouTube videos, as YouTube would pay them fairly for the ads shown in their videos, and pretty much any video could have ads if requested by the authors. Nowadays, thanks to the several "adpocalypses" this source of income has pretty much vanished, except for very large youtubers with more "neutral" and "innocent" content. And oftentimes even for them, as YouTube's demonetization algorithm seems extremely trigger-happy and will demonetize videos seemingly for completely arbitrary reasons that nobody can understand. In the case of way too many videos it seems that the algorithm has misfired and incorrectly demonetized the video, even though it does not contain any content that could even remotely be classified as controversial, polemic or worthy of demonetization.
YouTube does offer a way to dispute demonetization, but especially when it comes to small youtubers, it's not very likely for the demonetization to be reversed. (YouTube seems to favor large channels, especially those owned by large corporations.)
And, quite obviously, YouTube very easily demonetizes, and sometimes even restricts, videos with heavy political content and opinions (apparently especially if these political opinions happen to be more on the conservative and anti-leftist side). Restricting a video is the worst form of punishment because the video essentially becomes invisible to anybody who doesn't have a direct link to it.
There are also many other complaints besides those (for example related to how videos are ranked in visibility to casual visitors), but this list could get really long if I started to detail them all (and this post is already long enough).
However, I would like to present a different point of view to all this.
Almost everybody seems to assume that YouTube is doing all this out of laziness, incompetence, greed, malice, corporate favoritism, political bias, or a combination of those. That may be true to some extent and/or in some individual instances. However, I think a more charitable interpretation could be given.
Consider that YouTube, as (by far) the biggest video sharing platform, who is offering this service completely for free for literally billions of people, is caught between a rock and a hard place.
At least in the beginning (and I'm sure that at least to some extent even to this day) Google just wants YouTube to be a video sharing platform open to everybody, where people can create and share videos with each other, with family and friends, and potentially millions of viewers around the world. I don't think it can be argued that they are doing this out of greed, given that, as mentioned, they are offering the service completely free of charge to everybody (them getting revenue only from third-party advertisers, rather than the users themselves). (Yes, there is "YouTube Premium", which is a paid service, but this is completely optional and you aren't really losing all that much for not getting it.)
But when you open a platform for anybody to use, especially when it can be done anonymously and completely for free, it will be abused by bad actors (and I'm not here referring to inept thespians). That's just an absolute certainty, and part of the human condition. People will try to upload outright illegal content, very controversial content that's either borderline illegal or deeply, deeply immoral and unethical to absolutely nausea-inducing extents, vicious harassment and attacks on other people, doxxing, and so on and so forth. Some of the content being uploaded will inevitably be illegal or highly, highly inappropriate. (And, let's face it, without any restrictions YouTube would just become a pornographic video website.)
YouTube is trying to be a "family friendly" platform to a large extent, and a platform that's as inoffensive as practically feasible. And who can blame them? It's most certainly not an unreasonable thing to strive for, especially for such a free service.
Yet, even then, YouTube does try to maintain at least some level of free speech principles. You can find quite extreme left-wing and right-wing content. It might be demonetized, but it's still there, available and uncensored. YouTube, as a privately owned platform, could well engage in heavy censorship, even politically biased censorship, and they would be doing nothing illegal. Yet they do allow a good amount of controversial political opinion pieces to stay and be visible.
This is quite a balancing act: Supporting free speech and trying to be family-friendly and "safe" are not very compatible goals, and YouTube needs to constantly struggle between the two extremes, without going too far into either (ie. either allowing pretty much anything that's not just outright illegal, or censoring everything except the most innocent and neutral content).
When it comes to advertisers and copyright owners, the struggle is even more difficult.
YouTube exists because of advertisers. No advertisers, no YouTube. Thus no matter what YouTube would want to do, they are subject to what advertisers want. If the advertisers refuse to monetize certain type of content, there's little that YouTube can do about it. It's not up to them. If they ignore the advertisers and show their ads on controversial videos regardless, the advertisers will simply pull their ads and YouTube (and the video creators) get nothing.
YouTube also has to obey the laws of the country, namely the United States. The law mandates that copyright claims need to be obeyed, and copyrighted content taken down at the request of the copyright owners. There's nothing YouTube can do about this. They have to obey they law.
It's also unreasonable to demand that YouTube be the arbiters of what is "fair use" and what isn't, especially given that literally millions of videos are uploaded (and copyright-claimed) every single day. Even then, to some extent YouTube does judge whether something breaks copyright or not, when a copyright claim is disputed. Not always, and oftentimes quite lazily, but they do. Which is rather commendable. There's nothing that would mandate them to do so, yet they do.
So YouTube really is in this difficult place where they need to balance between the platform existing in the first place, being popular enough to be profitable, and supporting free speech and fair use of copyrighted material. And all this with literally millions of videos being uploaded every single day, which cannot possibly be individually checked by people.
It's not an enviable situation.
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