The other day, I received an email with the subject line “YouTube removed your content”. Oh dear, what have I done now?
“It looks like [your video] didn’t follow our Community Guidelines. We removed it from YouTube.
We think your content violated our hate speech policy.”
What the fuck?
“Content that promotes hateful supremacism by alleging the superiority of a group over those with protected group status to justify violence, discrimination, segregation, or exclusion isn’t allowed on YouTube. We review educational, documentary, artistic, and scientific content on a case-by-case basis. Limited exceptions are made for content with sufficient and appropriate context.”
Right, OK. I instantly appealed, and ten minutes later, got back the following reply:
We reviewed [your video] again and confirmed it’s not allowed under our hate speech policy.
Your video won’t be put back on YouTube.
We understand this may be frustrating, but we’re committed to keeping YouTube a safe place for everyone.
Our goal is to help you succeed on YouTube. We encourage you to take a look at our Community Guidelines and keep them in mind when posting content in the future.
So what was this totally outrageous video on my account?
A clip from ‘Allo ‘Allo, “The Confusion of the Generals”, transmitted on 12th November 1988.
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So yeah, let’s get the obvious joke out the way first: obviously, Google are only concerned with hate speech against Nazis.
More seriously, who knows exactly how I fell foul of the guidelines? The first email I received from YouTube stated the following:
“We use a combination of automated systems and human reviews to detect violations of our Community Guidelines.”
Maybe the initial flagging was from an automated system. (The video was called ‘Allo ‘Allo: Heil Hitler.) Maybe somebody reported it. Presumably the appeal itself was a human review, though, and I can only assume that reviewer was vastly overworked. It’s a real stretch to say the above video in any way breaks YouTube’s policy on hate speech. The kind of stretch that even Rose Mary Woods would struggle with.
But here’s why I really care about this one. I suspect that actions like this from YouTube are exactly the kind of thing which can turn reasonable people into unreasonable people. It inspires those people to say things like the deathless phrase “Cuh, you can’t joke about anything these days”. It annoys people to the point where they can’t be bothered to think about things properly, and instead reach for the easy cliche.
I’m not saying a YouTube video being falsely removed is going to immediately send somebody down an alt-right rabbit hole. That would be ludicrous. I’m just saying: I think shit like this matters. And I think it genuinely poisons the debate. People get grumpy when they’re incorrectly accused of hate speech, who’d have thought?
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I do have some actual practical advice here, if YouTube wants to pay any attention to it. Because here’s the other thing about that video: it was uploaded on the 12th August 2010. That video has sat on YouTube for nearly 15 years, without causing any widespread offence.
So here is my suggestion. Any content which is more than a year old should have a high threshold of proof when it comes to its removal by a moderation team. And anything more than five years old should have an absurdly high threshold of proof. Because it’s clearly far more unlikely for such old material to be against the guidelines, and not been picked up and removed earlier. Not impossible, of course – simply more unlikely.
Now, does anyone wish to guess how long this video will remain online?
Uploaded on the 21st June 2015. The ball’s in your court, YouTube.