Google is taking steps to remove supremacist videos from YouTube and limit the spread of videos that approach the threshold of harmful hate speech.
Yesterday, Google announced it will immediately prohibit “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.” The company will also remove videos that deny that “well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.” Although the ban went into effect yesterday, Google cautions it will take several months for their systems to cleanse YouTube of offending videos and channels.
Google is also working to curtail the spread of videos that promote hate and harmful misinformation but are not egregious enough to provoke an outright ban. Recommendations for these videos will be “limited” and more authoritative content from trusted sources will be offered up in the “Watch next” panel on the page displaying the offending videos. Google doesn’t specify what “limited” means, but it notes that a pilot program tested in the US in January cut views of the problematic videos by more than 50%. Recommendation limits will be brought to more countries throughout 2019.
Finally, channels that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies” will be prevented from monetizing their content by running ads or using Super Chat to entice users to pay to have their comments pinned on the channel.
It’s worth noting that the outright ban only applies to videos that justify “discrimination, segregation or exclusion” based on an explicit comparison of supposedly superior and inferior groups. This seems to open the door for videos that promote hate by claiming that certain groups are inferior without mention of groups that are thought to be superior. In other words, the racists and hate mongers can avoid the ban with a relatively minor change to the way they present their message.
It’s easy to rage against racist videos or ran rant about curtailing the right to freely express one’s opinion, but it’s very difficult to define and administer a policy that treads the fine line between free and harmful speech. Google deserves praise for continuing to try. How effective these new policies will be remains to be seen.
