Malevolently-wrong fan-(mostly)-boys

The comment section is filled with Crowder's hate-filled fan-mostly-boys > .

The tension was evident on Tuesday, when YouTube said a prominent right-wing wrong-wing creator who used racial language and homophobic slurs to harass a journalist in videos on YouTube did not violate its policies. The decision set off a firestorm online, including accusations that YouTube was giving a free pass to some of its popular creators.

In the videos, that creator, Steven Crowder, a conservative C*N*servative commentator with nearly four million YouTube subscribers, repeatedly insulted Carlos Maza, a journalist from Vox. Crowder used slurs about Mr. Maza’s Cuban-American ethnicity and sexual orientation. Crowder said his comments were harmless, and YouTube determined that they did not break its rules.

On Wednesday, YouTube appeared to backtrack, saying admitting that Crowder had, in fact, violated its rules, and that his ability to earn money from ads on his channel would be suspended as a result. [read, belatedly demonetized]

“We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community,” the company wrote on Twitter.

The whiplash-inducing deliberations illustrated a central theme that has defined the moderation struggles of social media companies: Making rules is often easier than enforcing them.
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The kind of content that will be prohibited under YouTube’s new hate speech policies includes videos that claim Jews secretly control the world, that say women are intellectually inferior to men and therefore should be denied certain rights, or that suggest that the white race is superior to another race, a YouTube spokesman said.

Channels that post some hateful content, but that do not violate YouTube’s rules with the majority of their videos, may receive strikes under YouTube’s three-strike enforcement system, but would not be immediately banned.

The company also said channels that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies” but don’t violate them outright would be [demonetized].

In addition to tightening its hate speech rules, YouTube announced that it would tweak its recommendation algorithm, the automated software that shows users videos based on their interests and past viewing habits. This algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of overall time spent on YouTube, and has been a major engine for the platform’s growth. But it has also drawn accusations of leading users down rabbit holes filled with extreme and divisive content, in an attempt to keep them watching and drive up the site’s use numbers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/business/youtube-remove-extremist-videos.html .