YouTube ‘ignored staff pleas to delete hateful videos’ to boost views for YEARS, as insiders reveal spread of ‘disturbing extremist clips’
A total of 20 people who work at or have recently left YouTube have claimed that the corporate leadership was unable or unwilling to act on internal concerns
YOUTUBE is in hot water as claims emerge about company executives ignoring pleas to delete toxic videos in favour of engagement.
Controversial conspiracy theory videos that have been on the platform include one linking Hillary Clinton to a Satanic cult and one which accuses Parkland high school shooting victims of being "crisis actors".
has accused YouTube of allowing "nonsense to spread" and reported that scores of the company's employees raised multiple concerns about inflammatory and false content.
One employee was said to flag videos which fell just short of hate speech as they didn't want them to be recommended to viewers.
Another employee tried to show management just how popular “alt-right” video bloggers were.
Both employees were apparently ignored and advised not to 'rock the boat'.
A total of 20 people who work at or have recently left YouTube have claimed that the corporate leadership was unable or unwilling to act on internal concerns because they didn't want removing controversial videos to have a negative impact on engagement figures.
One employee told Bloomberg news that the YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki thought her job of running the company meant she didn't have to deal with these complaints.
YouTube has contested that Wojcicki is inattentive.
When asked to comment on the latest reports of ignored staff concerns, a YouTube spokesperson provided this statement: "Over the past two years, our primary focus has been tackling some of the platform’s toughest content challenges, taking into account feedback and concerns from users, creators, advertisers, experts and employees.
"We’ve taken a number of significant steps, including updating our recommendations system to prevent the spread of harmful misinformation, improving the news experience on YouTube, bringing the number of people focused on content issues across Google to 10,000, investing in machine learning to be able to more quickly find and remove violative content, and reviewing and updating our policies - we made more than 30 policy updates in 2018 alone. And this is not the end: responsibility remains our number one priority."
Controversial videos mentioned in the Bloomberg report have now been removed and anyone trying to click on the links will see this message: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on harassment and bullying.”
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