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Ah YouTube, you know, the place where you watch tutorial videos on how to deal with your cat that can’t stop humping your other cat? Yea, that place – it has 1.8 billion people logging in every month, and this isn’t even taking into account all of the folks who don’t log in.
“It’s incredibly important to me and to everyone at YouTube that we grow responsibly,” Wojcicki said Thursday, speaking at a New York presentation for advertisers known as a Newfront. “There is not a playbook for how open platforms like us operate at scale…it’s critical that we’re on the right side of history.”
YouTube is going through some major damage control right now. Last year, the service had to deal with advertisers fleeing from the platform because they found their ads were being displayed right alongside with offensive or racial videos. This ended with YouTube removing ads from users content, which sparked a huge outrage amongst creators. One instance was so extreme that a YouTube creator went to the company’s headquarters and shot three employees.
To put things in perspective, the company boasts that 400 hours of video are uploaded to the video service every minute. This makes it extremely difficult for YouTube to flag all of the content that doesn’t meet the ToS and that might be found abusive or insensitive.
“This is the impact of an open platform: it brings the world together in ways that were just not possible before. But we’ve also seen that with openness comes challenges, as some have tried to take advantage of our services,” Wojcicki said. “It is incredibly important to me and to everyone at YouTube that we grow responsibly.”
YouTube is really trying, but it seems like every month or so a new controversy pops up, and we go through the same news cycle all over again. YouTube has a responsibility to its users, and so far it shows they’re doing a really poor job at keeping them happy. But hey, doesn’t seem like it all matters if they’re still boasting 1.8 billion people logging in every month.
Are you one of the 1.8 billion people logging in each month? How do you feel about the company’s practices? Let us know down below!
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