YouTube faced considerable backlash last week about how it handled the accusations of political bias while trying to enforce its policies, with many people indicating that they are guilty of censoring conservative content and its creators.
The Google-owned company was accused of being biased against conservatives, enabling child sexual exploitation, failing to protect LGBTQ content creators from online harassment, and purging a large amount of extremist videos.
On Tuesday, a document surfaced that showed an employee of Google accusing conservative author Ben Shapiro and others of being Nazis. Although the company has faced accusations for some time about its bias from several conservative organizations, the Tweet on Wednesday appeared to be a direct response to the recent accusations. This statement was released from their Twitter account used for press updates, “We’ve had a lot of questions today…clarifying, we apply our policies fairly and without political bias. All creators are held to the same standard.”
There was such an uproar about the tweet that the responses were noted as an indicator of how much support or opposition the message received. The results from thousands of responses indicated that the majority of people think that YouTube blatantly lied about not being politically biased against conservative content creators.
The bias controversy started in June for YouTube, as it reversed its decision not to ban or punish conservative comedian Steven Crowder for his comments about a journalist at Vox even though he did not violate any of the community guidelines. The company demonetized his videos and accused him of harming the broader YouTube community, and banned him until he deals with some of the “issues” he has been accused of.
More accusations have been made against the video giant, including one from Lila Rose of the pro-life organization Live Action, who indicated that the platform buried her group’s videos after receiving complaints about its content. In addition, radio host Dennis Prager of Prager University, also said that YouTube is censoring his content.
“If it is pro-America, if it’s pro-Israel, if it is pro-religion, it is likely to be censored by Google or YouTube,” he told Fox News.
And finally, the New York Times has indicated that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was enabling child sexual exploitation.
Politicians are now focusing their attention on several major tech companies including Twitter and Facebook, alleging that they have censored conservatives and said that they needed to be broken up to weaken their economic power. President Trump talked about this issue in May after Facebook banned Milo Yiannopoulos and others from the platform.
“I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms,” he tweeted. “This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!”
