Transcript of YouTube video – Hey everybody I just watched our CEO Susan Wojcicki (I say our because I’m a YouTube Partner) talking with Lesley Stahl about YouTube, particularly around the controversies about content that has been uploaded that is racist white supremacist homophobic – you know the story by now.
I think Susan did a great job but fortunately she forgot to mention the many controls that do exist that, although I agree they don’t entirely block undesirable content, they do work well at minimizing the appearance of that content. First of all let’s just talk about something that Lesley Stahl herself did not do in her demonstration of video she saw on YouTube that were undesirable she didn’t flag them – she just allowed them to be shown for the purpose of the broadcast.
But either she didn’t know forgot or didn’t realize that she could simply push the flag button flagged the video and YouTube will go about the process of taking it down I have to give YouTube high marks over the years for addressing my concerns regarding racism YouTube does listen unlike a number of organizations some traditional media organizations today in my case this goes all the way back to 2009 I complained that there was a habit among some commenters we call them haters to use the n-word in my comments.
I took my case to the YouTube community meeting that we had in San Francisco this is in October that year it’s actually on my YouTube zhenya sixty-two channel here and although I didn’t discuss that part of our meeting what happened during the meeting was that myself and Jamal who runs Black team media asked about how he could stop this seemingly inordinate number of times that we were being bombarded with the word we didn’t want to see and the reason was very simple.
Our white counterparts didn’t have to deal with that so for brands looking at where they want to do business that say that they want to do business with someone like me because they like my content regardless some like race but these in words come up and they don’t want to be associated with that so guess what I lose and I lose over something that then I wasn’t able to control so I wrote an op-ed piece about it it was on Ad Age (Thank you Ad age) and it was in CBS online (Thank You CBS) and after a number of people kept saying hey this guy’s got a point we finally got the comment moderation’ system.
Now I have a lexicon of 900 words that are flagged automatically if used and I can determine whether or not I want that comment up or not some people say oh you know you’re violating free speech but I remind everyone this is nota public forum this is not a place wheryou can go right on the street and say anything you want that’s a public forum this is a privately owned platform and I am a private citizen with his own media effort and startup also privately-owned I have a right to determine what I want seen on my youtube channel and video pages
I am not the only one there are millions of YouTubers who agree with me and use these controls and so Susan and YouTube team should really be given a lot of credit for trying consistently to get it right it’s not easy when you have the volume to deal with it’s also made harder we have people like Miss Stahl herself when we do a flag a video let alone telling you but the video can be flagged so keep on as they say Susan keep on keeping on and I’m gonna send this video to your mom it’s like make sure that you see it rock on and subscribe to Zennie62 on YouTube.