The History And Impact Of YouTube

History

YouTube

Original Youtube logo

YouTube is a Social media and video sharing platform with over an estimated 2.24 billion users as of 2021 and more than 22.8 billion monthly visits making it the 2nd most popular website in the world following Google.com. Owned by Google currently, it was created by three former employees of PayPal Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Chad Hurley.

Original Idea

The original idea behind YouTube was a start-up idea called Tune In which was meant to be a dating platform where users could upload videos. The product however was extremely primitive to the point that users could not specify which videos they wanted to see, it was completely random. However, the idea did not catch any traction and the site had very few visitors. The creators of the website even tried to pay women to create channels and upload “dating videos” but no one took them up on their offer. Eventually, the creators of the website noticed that the users of the website were not using it for its intended purpose but were using it to upload videos of their personal life such as “dogs, vacations, anything”. This inspired the creators of YouTube to make it a more general website instead, redesigning it to be a general-purpose video sharing platform and social media platform. This approach of theirs was successful and gave birth to the current idea of YouTube. The co-founder of YouTube Jawed Karim has also gone on record to say that his idea of YouTube was also inspired by “Nipplegate” and how when it happened, he noticed that it was incredibly hard to find videos of Janet Jackson online during the “Nipplegate” event.

The First Video Debate

Most people would agree that the first YouTuber (a holder of a YouTube account) of sorts was Jawed Karim with his revolutionary 18-second first video which he called “Me at the zoo” which was released on the 24th of April 2005. The videos showed Jawed at the San Diego Zoo standing in front of a cage of elephants with him talking about the elephants. The video currently stands having 221,032,051 views and 11 million likes. However, evidence suggests that this was probably the 6th video uploaded to YouTube. The earliest YouTube account seems to be held by another channel called “COM-TEST” which released 5 videos “com-test”, “com-test1”, “com-test3”, com-test4” and “com-test5”. It is theorized that these videos were uploaded just to test the working of YouTube’s playback system. We must also note the absence of “com-test2” suggesting that there was a way to edit channel videos and delete videos. There is, however, no way to view these videos as these videos have been deleted ever since. However, this is just a theory considering that the original Reddit account containing this information has now been hacked and the information has been deleted.

Acquisition by Google

Google acquired YouTube on the 13th of November 2006. It acquired YouTube for the hefty price of 1.65 billion dollars. The actual announcement occurred on the 9th of October 2006. This has turned out to be a splendid move on Google’s part. In advertisement revenue alone, YouTube has generated around 20 billion dollars in 2020, this number was around 8 billion dollars in 2017.

YouTube Viacom Lawsuit

On March 13th, 2007, Viacom launched a lawsuit against YouTube for 1 billion dollars claiming copyright infringement. Viacom claimed that YouTube had committed “brazen” copyright infringement from over 150,000 clips from Viacom TV shows and that the clips had been seen 1.5 billion times. The event was extremely important in YouTube’s history as it had set a legal precedent. During the trial, Viacom won a court ruling which forced YouTube to reveal private data about its users including the viewing habits of every website that had ever used YouTube, the move was heavily criticized as a backward step in privacy rights. Viacom gave in to the criticism and allowed YouTube to anonymize the data before handing it over. YouTube’s defense was that the DMCA safe harbor provision exempted them from any incurred liability. This even gave birth to the YouTube content ID system which allows media companies to register their content on a database that is used to check any newly uploaded videos for any cases of copyright infringement. YouTube’s victory, in this case, set a precedent for the protection of the video streaming rights of the internet in totality.

YouTube Partner Program

In December 2007, YouTube introduced the partner program. This meant that now, popular creators on the platform could monetize their videos. This meant now that certain YouTube users started earning money for their videos, which led to YouTube now being taken seriously as a profession. In the early days, creators could not get monetized on their own, they had to join an MCN(Multi-channel network) to get monetized and use custom thumbnails. On the 13th of April 2012, YouTube lets anyone (in a list of 20 countries) be monetized even those who are not huge YouTubers. YouTubers no longer had to work under a multi-channel network and could directly get revenue from YouTube. The primary focus of multi-channel networks now became to provide partnered YouTubers with copyright protection. The increase in inclusion of anyone in its partner program incentivized the release of fresh ideas and content with good production values, it also ushered in a new wave of YouTubers who would upload regularly. YouTube as of the 23rd of August 2021 has over 2 million YouTube creators in its YouTube partner program.

Multi-Channel Networks

According to YouTube support, Multi-Channel Networks are “third-party services that affiliate with YouTube channels to offer services that may include audience development, content programming, digital rights management, monetization, and/or sales.” Multi-Channel Networks offer creators many benefits, such as a community of other creators to collaborate and to have better ad revenue and sales opportunities with brands. In the earlier days of YouTube (2007-2012), a channel could not be monetized unless it was part of a multi-channel network, which is why some of YouTube’s earliest creators are signed with Multi-Channel Networks such as FullScreen, Maker, Machinima, revelmode, etc. However now, when everyone can be monetized, Multi-Channel Networks cannot offer the same kind of benefits as they used to, or more appropriately, there is not much of a reason to join a multi-channel network except for the fact that they can provide you with legal protection. It is not recommended to join a Multi-Channel Network as a YouTuber however, considering the thousands of stories of YouTubers getting duped by their Multi-Channel Network. One of the biggest of such cases is Defy Media, whose owner ran away with 1.7 million dollars of revenue stolen from 50 creators. Defy media also scammed the owner of Smosh media Anthony Padilla by coaxing him to accept stock in the company in exchange for the Smosh brand, Defy media never went public which meant that the stock that Smosh had was completely valueless. The problem with joining a multi-channel network is the complete lack of accountability on the part of the multi-channel networks which have no authoritative bodies regulating their behavior.

Lets Plays

Original Youtube logo

The genesis of monetization on YouTube was marked by the great boom of the category of Gaming, and within the genre of Gaming, specifically, the category of Lets plays. The first lets plays on the site were made in the form of walkthroughs, where the video creator would guide you through the game unedited to show you how to get through certain levels, this slowly progressed to people adding commentary to their performance and people started being watched either because they were entertaining or because they were good at the game. This often gave a great deal of publicity to the game and boosted game sales. Gaming and YouTube are incredibly intertwined with some of the biggest YouTubers such as PewDiePie, JackSepticEye, Markiplier, Vanoss Gaming, WoodysGamerTag, etc. having their roots in Gaming content.

1st Adpocalypse

With the growing popularity of YouTube, it was inevitable that questionable content would eventually come under the scrutiny of major advertisers such as Disney, Coca-cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson and Johnson, the UK government, etc. YouTube attempted to steer its site towards a more family-oriented platform and modified the algorithm to favor and promote such content. However, the major trigger that manifested the situation in February 2017 was the biggest YouTuber on the platform making a video reacting to jokes that could be perceived as discriminatory in nature but were jokes nonetheless. Many major news publications mainly the Wall Street Journal caught wind of the video and portrayed him as a white supremacist and an antisemite, the topic became a mainstream talking point, the result of which major advertisers were practically forced to withdraw their support of YouTube. Another event that happened in close proximity of this event was an incident when Pepsi uploaded an advertisement that showed Kendall Jenner walking through a group of protesters that were protesting against police brutality, the conclusion being that she hands a Pepsi can to the police officer thus quelling the turmoil between the two groups. The advertisement garnered a lot of criticism both online and offline pointing out that it was trivializing the entire movement. This marked the end of all Pepsi ads on YouTube. The word adpocalypse itself was coined to represent the boycotting of advertisements by Major Companies. The 1st adpocalypse introduced the system of demonetization. This meant that YouTube now had systems in place to demonetize a video if it was related to any controversial video or contained any “non-family-friendly” content. This effort was made by YouTube to try and prevent any further incidents.

2nd Adpocalypse

The second adpocalypse occurred on the 31st of December 2017 when popular internet celebrity Logan Paul released a video of his trip to Japan, in this video, he films himself in Aokigahara, or ‘the suicide forest’ where he shows the body of a recently deceased Japanese man who had died after hanging himself from a tree. The event triggered a lot of controversy and the YouTube introduced a new policy. The policy included increased the requirements necessary to join the YouTube partner program, creators now had to have at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours worth of watch time to be eligible for partnership. Due to this course of action, thousands of creators worldwide lost their monetization overnight.

3rd Adpocalypse

The second adpocalypse was caused single-handedly due to a man named Matt Watson who on Feb 19 2019 made a stream regarding a huge problem regarding YouTube’s algorithm and how it promoted pedophiles. Matt on stream went on to show how if one started watching videos showing little girls, it was very likely that YouTube would start recommending videos that had very dubious intent behind it and was clearly paedophilic in nature. However, instead of letting YouTube fix the issue. Matt decided to alert news publications regarding his discovery. This resulted in the 2nd adpocalypse, huge corporations that had just recently started pooling their ads into YouTube were forced into removing ads once again. The outcome of this event was disastrous. YouTube panicked and started to ban all comments on YouTube videos containing minors, in a single day thousands of comments were deleted are currently being deleted to this day on videos containing a minor regardless of the context.

Introduction of Shorts

“Shorts is a new short-form video experience for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones.” This format of video platforming was pioneered by Vine and then popularised by other apps like musical.ly and TikTok. YouTube first launched the beta edition of Shorts in India on the 14th of September 2020 shortly after India banned TikTok on the 14th of September 2020. Soon afterward, YouTube launched Shorts in the U.S.A on the 18th of March 2021, the move was incredibly successful and the feature stuck permanently.

How Youtube Works

Technical Aspects

To handle the growth of YouTube as the most popular video streaming platform and the second most popular website on the Internet, the need for optimized technologies and appropriate infrastructures became more and more pronounced. In 2019, YouTube was responsible for 12% of the global downstream Internet traffic and the annual cost for running and maintaining the platform is estimated at more than 6 million dollars­.

The Infrastructure

The backend infrastructure of YouTube is written in Python, C, C++, Java and Go. All the data except the video files are stored in a database whose complexity has significantly increased over the years. It started as a simple MySQL database, then switched to a Master – Replica model where read operations were sent to mirrors to minimize the load on the main DB server (which was still taking care of the write operations). Later, as the database continued growing, another scaling method started being used: sharding. It allowed to spread the data (and thus the load) on multiple server groups (each group still being using the Master – Replica model). In addition, the data is stored in several data centers all across the world, enhancing reliability and performance. On top of that, YouTube deployed Vitess, an additional logic layer that brought better abstraction allowing developers to manage the database more easily and further improving its performances.

Video files are stored separately, on regular and cheap servers and HDDs. To store the hundreds of hours of video content uploaded every minute on YouTube, it uses services from the Google Cloud Platform and solutions developed by Google such as the Google File System (GFS) and BigTable. These solutions are specifically designed to handle very large-scale datasets spread between thousand of machines, and are used by other Google products as well.

Finally, YouTube takes advantage of Google’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve its performances.

Video Conversion & Buffering

Whenever a user uploads a video to YouTube, the video gets transcoded (converted) to various resolutions (from 144p to 4320p or 8K, as of 2022) and formats / codecs (mainly VP9, H.264 and AV1, depending on the number of views of the video). Using different codecs allows YouTube to maintain a balance between the storage, bandwidth and computational costs, and also helps optimizing the bandwidth needed by the clients to play a video in a given resolution.

That said, the main upside of these transcoding tasks is the variety of resolutions available to the clients, and the possibility for YouTube’s video player to switch dynamically between these different video qualities. On servers, videos are stored by blocks (called chunks) of only a few seconds. Thus every time a client retrieves video chunks, the choice between the different available resolutions is made according to the speed at which they were downloaded and processed, making sure to minimize buffering times. This is known as Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP.

The Users’ Perspective

The attraction YouTube has gained from its very beginning boils down to two key characteristics: its convenience as a video hosting and streaming platform, and its social aspect.

A Convenient Hub for Video Streaming

After being launched, YouTube quickly gained more and more popularity, providing a simple way for people to share and watch videos on the Internet, for free and with little restrictions. Currently, users can upload videos of up to 12 hours, worth a maximum of 256GB of data, extremely easily; while Vimeo, for example, restricts users to 500MB of free upload per week. The various features made available to creators, including some editing possibilities, detailed analytics, and monetizing attracted creators, helping the platform’s video catalog growing quickly. This, in turn, attracted users who had other helpful features to find relevant content: the powerful search engine (YouTube is owned by Google), playlists, but also subscriptions and video suggestions. The two last ones are also part of what makes YouTube special: its social dimension.

With Social Features

Since its very beginning, YouTube has been thought out as a social platform. This led to features enabling people to react to the videos being posted, and allowing them to create communities. The concept of subscription, similar to the “follow” function of other social media, is a very common example. Comments are another important part of the interaction on the platform; it has evolved thoughout the years to receive voting and replying features. There have always been reaction mechanisms for videos as well: the current Thumb up / Thumb down system replaced the earlier five-star rating possibility. In 2016, the platform added a Community section to channels, allowing content creators to share texts and images to their community, with the possibility for people to comment and vote, in a similar fashion to what was already possible with videos.
In recent years, YouTube has also tried to implement some social features inspired from other social media, like Stories (2018) and Shorts (2020).

Finally, one of the main similarity to other social media is the ability of the platform to recommend content based on user preferences. This recommendation algorithm is an important part of any social media, and YouTube is no exception.

The Algorithm

Social media generally use recommendation algorithms to provide their users with relevant content and maximize the time they spend on the platform. In the case of YouTube, the algorithms started with only basic metrics like clicks, views and watch time. However since 2015-16 the content pushed to users by the platform became more tailored to their habits and preferences. To achieve this, three categories of parameters are considered: personalization (according to the user’s history and actions), performance (interest in watching the video, watch time) and external factors (the user’s fields of interest, relevancy to the current season...).
Once a user starts a video, he is being suggested other content that may be relevant, either according to the user’s profile, or because they cover similar topics or are often watched together.

From the content creator point of view, this model can raise concerns as they are incentivized to make videos according to what is privileged by the algorithm if they want to make views. From their perspective, two metrics are utterly important, namely watch time and click-through rate. The former encourage creators to produce quality content that will retain viewers’ attention, while the latter essentially pushes these creators to make sensational titles and thumbnails, to trigger users’ curiosity. All in all, YouTube’s goal is to retain users on their platform, which they try to do by pushing up content that will maximize user satisfaction.

Social Impact

Since the beginning of YouTube, it has been an influence on our society, acquiring a major impact through the passing of the years, reaching today’s mark of more than 800 million unique user visits to the search engine monthly. One of the greatest contributing factors to this number is the vast amount of diverse content produced on YouTube daily, ranging from educational videos to humoristic entertainment, political campaigns, social movements, music, videogames, health, and much more. It is important to note that as much as YouTube can have a positive impact on society, it can generate the opposite effect, and harm society in multiple ways, one of them being the spread of false information. Critics state that YouTube’s extreme freedom when publishing videos works as a double-edged sword by allowing the spread of misinformation with little to no consequences. YouTube’s impact on society can be divided into several sections:

Communities

One of the most important aspects of life is socialization, which normally would be with groups with similar interests. These groups with one or more common interests are called Communities. Communities are critical because they are often an important source of social connections and a sense of belonging, and the absence of communities in a person’s life can lead to serious mental health issues.

YouTube nowadays plays a very important role in this aspect. Once again, thanks to the immense variety of content, communities of all types, forms, and sizes have formed. These communities are an important resource for individuals who are part of underrepresented groups and may not have access to or feel comfortable in traditional organizations rooted in inequity.

The effect these communities have is one of auto-development in which thanks to the publishing of content, the community grows and grows in a steady manner, allowing to attract new members as well to keep the veterans. Benefits of communities include a support network, professional development, sense of purpose, new inspiration and ideas, and greater resilience among many others.

Education

YouTube videos have had a major role in students learning abilities, becoming the best and most popular source of educational video content. It is constantly used by institutions, teachers, and students to upload videos with academic material, as well as homework and any other video and sound resource. Most educational institutes and organizations also record their lessons and lectures as videos and upload them to YouTube. This has completely changed the way of teaching as well as studying. Previously it was extremely important to take notes in a classroom, but now that doesn’t matter because one student can repeat the lecture as many times as he/she wants.

KHAN Academy Logo

Khan Academy and YouTube

Khan Academy has a well-established presence as one of the most popular non-profit education schools. It is well established among different social media, but it has a major impact on YouTube, having more than 7.12 million subscribers (February 2022). The channel has playlists of Maths, Chemistry, Biology, Arts and Humanities, Science &Engineering, Computing, Economics & finance. All these playlists are constantly used in schools all around the world to teach a variety of subjects. Another important mention concerning the impact of Youtube and Khan Academy is a study that shows that “Use of Khan Academy was positively associated with better than predicted test scores, lower math anxiety, and higher confidence in one’s ability to do the math.”

Independent Educational Youtubers

Education is not only available through Organizations or schools themselves, but there is a great variety of individuals whose channels are dedicated to education.

3blue1brown, by Grant Sanderson, is a channel dedicated to math problems, linear algebra, neural networks, calculus, quantum mechanics, etc. 3blue1brown videos use a special animation engine created by him which further increases the quality of his videos and help his channel become one of the best educational sources in Youtube according to diverse surveys.

Numberphile is a popular math YouTube channel created by Brady Haron. His videos are composed by all sorts of mathematical concepts which often feature mathematicians and other experts in different math fields. Other important educational channels include Socratica, Mathologer, The Organic Chemistry Tutor, Julioprofe, Math TV, kurtzgesagt, etc.

Politics

Many politicians all around the world have used YouTube as the main form of communication for the promotion of their campaigns, replacing tv commercials and direct mail for ads and videos. It has also been used to promote several other political groups, including extremist content, far-right and conspiracy propaganda, rebellious groups, and others. It is important to note that it has been proven that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm tends to recommend extremist content, far-right, and conspiracy propaganda. This has led to claims that YouTube has been used as a tool for political radicalization.

YouTube became more important in politics by 2008 when the political landscape started a major shift by having seven of the sixteen presidential candidates announcing their campaigns on YouTube. Right after, many tests showed that the videos affected popular perception much more than direct mail.

By 2009 several entities such as the U.S. Congress and the Vatican used YouTube to disseminate information. By 2012, Obama’s re-election campaign included 30 staff working on YouTube.

Since Obama’s rise to the presidency, YouTube has been a major tool for the dissemination of information for every branch of the U.S. government. Other governments would follow the same standard right after if they were not already doing it.

Many other important political social movements owe a great part of their influence to YouTube, some examples include the Arab Spring, Hannan’s radical libertarian politics, Bassem Youssef, Mocking of Presidential elections in Russia, etc.

Advertising and Marketing

YouTube brought a new way of advertisement. Instead of sitting through annoying commercials when watching television, people would go to YouTube and click on adverts themselves. This is because of the new method of marketing developed, in which, instead of forcing people to forcefully watch adverts, now you must pull people toward it. This change made brands try to connect with people associating common interests with their products, such as Red Bull with their extreme sports commercials or Nike with football.

Another change was in the length of adverts. Previously on tv adverts were normally 30 seconds long, with YouTube the length has extended to 3 minutes, normally the 3-minute advert being an extension of the 30 seconds one.

Another important change is to partner and sponsor programs with YouTubers. YouTube channels today offer advertisers more guaranteed reachability to a specific public, which previously could not be done on tv.

Note that YouTube also has 30 seconds average adverts in videos that can be both skippable and not and are found in any part of a video. These adverts have not brought a major impact of any kind since they are similar to tv adverts.

Living off Youtube

The greatest impact of YouTube is the creation of a new form of living which normally includes winning money by working on your hobby, something you like doing. YouTube has a “Partner Program” which is an ad-revenue-sharing arrangement started in 2007. This program allows for any person lucky or skilled enough to win money in exchange of views and adverts on their videos.

Today, there are thousands of YouTubers living off Youtube as their main source of income, with the top ones winning more than one million USD dollars a month.

This new model of job has brought a major change in the work. It gives everyone the opportunity to try, anyone can upload almost anything to YouTube, for free, and be in the chance of making a living off it. This brings a new wave of thought in which it is not necessary to go to university and get a standard 8-hour job.

The Effect of YouTube on Politics.

It is irrefutable that YouTube possesses the capability to shape the political sphere. YouTube has an estimated 2.6 billion active users. More than ¼ of the world's population use YouTube every month. Around half of the internet users around the world have access to YouTube.

This harmless tool can do much more than one may be led to think. Some videos reveal truths, others spread disinformation, propaganda, and even lies. Regardless of the content, they all are part of the YouTube effect

Propaganda

Propaganda is a supply of profound influence in each election, along with also the 2016 presidential elections is no exception. However, as technology advances, propaganda is made to evolve with this.

Short Videos, banners, images, and networking campaigns are now increasingly widespread across the world, leading to social media sites like YouTube to operate in a sphere of influence that could not be obtained years ago.

In an age formed from the revolution, and this has changed data into also the usage of the world wide web and a commodity by means of devices, collecting information that is political has gotten effortless. Due to the prevalence of networking, propaganda adapted and was updated to reach each corner of the earth and to match demographics.

“YouTube Impact”

YouTube Impact is an expression defined by foreign policy.com This concept exemplifies how propaganda spreads as networking usage will be altered and tailored to customers in the press.

Due to the ease with which sharing videos or simply uploading images or basic content, audiences begin to form opinions and shape interactions based on. The content they are most exposed to.

Owed to YouTube videos’ caliber along with their prevalence with millennials’ participation on YouTube can manipulate young voters’ opinions and conclusions. Given that more young men and women are enrolling to vote to desire their voices to be heard and to have a say in parties, the effects of YouTube on politics is influential.

Politicking

YouTube is viewed as transforming the way politicians communicate with the public. Because politicians are able to use YouTube to eliminate the “gatekeeping” function of the mass media, they are able to define terms and manage impressions in their own words, and to influence the public directly without needing to solicit coverage from news organizations. [5]

In addition to the political campaign and image control tools that YouTube provides, it also has become a platform for candidates to launch advertising and fundraising efforts. These candidates have found that such online advertising campaigns can “increase interactivity, accountability, iterability, and targeting, making them an attractive complement to mainstream campaign advertising strategies” (48-49)[5].

In a report by Ricke, LaChrystal D, He postulated that “Historically, political debates have not overtly welcomed public interaction, with most recent research suggesting that debates are created for audiences only in the sense that candidates construct arguments to persuade them, but not necessarily to engage them,” . However, in the new era of politics, social media outlets such as YouTube have offered the public “many novel ways to become involved and engaged in this traditionally closed form of political communication” (66)[5].

Terrorism

YouTube was used by some terrorist organisations as a means to recruit and train followers via the Internet and to incite terrorist attacks around the world (“Hamas”, “Hezbollah”, “Al Qaeda”, “Islamic State”, etc.).

At some points on YouTube, one can see the ISIS group instruct prospective recruits how to build bombs. Groups like AL-Qaeda now post their videos withe the sole intent that it would eventually creep its way into larger mainstream media

“Innovations in media technology were also used by Hezbollah in order to film insurgent attacks for propaganda purposes. purposes. Probably it is not an exaggeration to say that nowadays terrorist attacks have become media events and their aim is to draw the attention of the larger audience. “

“These on-line activities threaten the global security. Modern technologies allow today’s terrorist groups to film, edit, and upload online their own attacks (roadside bombings, hostage takings, ambushes, rocket attacks, etc.) within minutes of staging them without depending on the approval of any traditional media. In fact, terrorists are now no longer dependent upon the professional media to communicate because the professional media have become dependent upon them.”

Some researchers describe such activities as modern war, hybrid warfare or “YouTube War”.

Censorship

Some countries react to YouTube’s impact. An interesting example is the government of Iran that reduced connection speed several years ago in order to limit its citizens’ access to video streaming in YouTube.

Another example of state censorship to the YouTube effect is China’s attempt to stop its citizens’ access not only in order to limit the publication of country situation materials, but also to limit the impact of the world over the minds of the Chinese people.  

Turkey, is another state where YouTube was censored in order to stymie its effects.  

After launching a Pakistan-specific version in the beginning of 2016 Pakistan unblocked the access to YouTube, more than three years after it was banned for posting the video “Innocence of Muslims”. This video led to riots and political upheaval in several Muslim countries (Iran, Sudan, etc.).

Guidelines

The main purpose of YouTube’s community guidelines particularly schemes for their community. These guidelines are supposed to protect the general community that uses its services, and these guidelines dictate what videos are eligible and those that are not eligible for general consumption.

Sensitive Content

On a surface level, YouTube like any other mainstream media company, at least in recent years, prefers an output of family-friendly consumable content. This means that YouTube censors a lot of “inappropriate” content, as this could include pornography, racial profanity, graphic violence, child protection, and speech that is considered to be hate speech. This is accomplished by the combination of human moderators who flag the video, regular watchers who also flag the video, and automated algorithms that work on the principle of machine learning.

Firearms and Regulated Goods

YouTube in accordance with its family-friendly image, takes an anti-gun and anti-drug stance and does not promote:

Firearm

• The direct sale of firearms
• Instruction on the creation of firearms, ammunition, homemade suppressors, etc.
• Instruction on converting a firearm into an automatic one
• The sale of or linking of regulated goods. Regulated goods can include:
  • Alcohol
  • Nicotine products including vaping
  • Firearms
  • Human smuggling
  • Pharmaceuticals without prescription
  • Organs
  • Explosives
  • Narcotics
  • Sexual services
  • Unlicensed medical services
  • Stolen bank accounts etc.

Spam and Misleading Content

YouTube defines spam as content or correspondences that is capable of producing negative experiences which may result in difficulties in searching for relevant and substantive material. All uploaded videos are subjected to the following guidelines on spam:

• Video Spam
• Clickbait or misleading thumbnails
• Scams
• Incentivization Spam
• Comments Spam
• Repetitive comments
• Live Stream misbehavior

Violent or Dangerous Content

Violent or dangerous content according to YouTube can include harassment and cyberbullying, harmful or dangerous content, incitement to hatred, criminal organizations, graphically violent material, and coronavirus misinformation. This section of YouTube guidelines is extremely controversial and has caused massive uproar and debate from time to time in the Internet ecosystem.

Criticisms of The YouTube Guideline System

Harassment and Cyberbullying

YouTube has a long history of being extremely lenient with its enforcement of harassment and cyberbullying guidelines, especially when the guidelines would affect either popular or rising channels or mainstream media. An example of this would be the former YouTuber called “Leafyishere”. Calvin Lee Vail created the online persona of “Leafyishere” in 2011, originally, he uploaded simple gaming videos, but these videos did not gain much popularity. After a little bit of experimentation, Calvin noticed that if he displayed his gameplay over a voiceover of the discussion of some topic his gameplay would get a lot more attention and views. He would often make reaction videos on smaller channels to make light-hearted fun of them; however, with the growth of his audience and the saturation of the genre of content that he had himself pioneered Leafy now found himself having to sacrifice morality in order to retain relevance and uniqueness. This would mean that Calvin broke a variety of guidelines presented by YouTube such as harassment and bullying, and clickbait guidelines, he would also elaborate upon his experiences with various illegal substances in his videos. Leafy has also inspired countless similar channels to be born in his absence, all of the similar quality; however, they are not under such intense scrutiny as they have to grow a lot more for YouTube to consider them a threat to the YouTube atmosphere. Some similar YouTubers include “GradeAUnderA”, “Birdman”, “Penguinz0”, etc.

Spam and Misleading Content

Spam and misleading content is a section of the YouTube Guidelines that is violated regularly and on a daily basis. This is a section that is treated very lightly and is actively ignored. Some channels have even made an entire career over clickbait thumbnails and titles. Some of these YouTubers are “Sam Pepper”, “RiceGum”, “Morgz”, “5-Minute Crafts” etc. An extreme violation of the spam and misleading content section of YouTube guidelines can be seen in the example of a certain YouTuber named “ImJayStation”. His content would be considered by most people crude, disrespectful, and extremely distasteful. His worst offending series would be his “3 AM” challenges where he would pretend to call recently deceased celebrities or YouTubers. Understandably, this caused massive controversy and the fanbases of the deceased persons would direct their hostility towards ImJayStation.

Keemstar

Incitement to Violence

Daniel M. Keem is the creator of the popular online news channel which is known as “DramaAlert”, and he is more commonly referred to as “Keemstar”. He has misused his platform multiple times over the 10 years he has been on YouTube resulting in more than 12 account terminations. Incitement to violence is an issue that should be taken extremely seriously as it can lead to horrible situations. An example of this is when Daniel takes it upon himself to swat his rivals. Swatting implies calling the police and informing them that a certain person is a threat to society (bombs, terrorism, etc.). Then a SWAT team shows up at the target’s house to determine whether the threats are real or not. One of those swatting attacks happened during his feud with another YouTuber who is called “MundaneMatt”. However, Daniel was allegedly the perpetrator of the attack that could have possibly killed the man. The day after the swatting incident, the FBI paid a visit to Keemstar in order to ask him questions about the swat that took place. Daniel has also swatted more than 2 other YouTubers and has caused many others to receive death threats. Despite this, he has never faced serious repercussions for his actions as he could have potentially killed his victims.