In their quest to drive massive viewer engagement, YouTube executives ignored employee warnings and shelved product changes that could have curbed the spread of toxic videos on its site, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday.
The report — which resulted from conversations with over twenty current and former YouTube employees — outlines multiple executive decisions that prioritized the site’s growth ahead of cracking down on harmful content, like conspiracy theories and graphic videos.
One incident reported by Bloomberg included an employee suggestion that YouTube should stop recommending videos that didn’t necessarily violate hate speech rules, but were troubling nonetheless. Years later, this January, YouTube finally adopted this approach.
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The report describes YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s focus on an internal goal to reach one billion hours of viewing a day. The company reached that milestone in 2016, but according to employees cited in the report, those massive engagement numbers came as troublesome videos were flourishing on the site. Some even nicknamed the problem as “bad virality,” according to the report.
YouTube started taking meaningful action in late 2017 when it cut off monetization abilities for thousands of channels which pushed harmful videos. In the last quarter of 2018, according to the report, YouTube removed 8.8 million channels for violating its guidelines.
Last week, in a New York Times interview, YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan said the company has “made great strides” in curbing its recommendation of radical videos, known as the “rabbit hole effect.”
On Tuesday, a YouTube spokesperson told Business Insider, in part: “Over the past two years, our primary focus has been tackling some of the platform’s toughest content challenges, taking into account feedback and concerns from users, creators, advertisers, experts and employees… responsibility remains our number one priority.”
Read the full Bloomberg report here.
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