YouTube Heroes Controversy

Overview

YouTube Heroes is a program introduced by YouTube offering rewards and incentives to users who contribute to the site by providing subtitles to videos, moderating comments and reporting videos for violating the site's Terms of Service. The program was met with a large backlash from content creators and the YouTube community, who predicted that rewarding users for mass flagging videos would promote censorship and lead to false strikes against videos and channel take-downs.

Background

On September 20th, 2016, the official YouTube Help channel announced the YouTube Heroes program with a video titled "Getting Started with YouTube Heroes" (shown below). Within 72 hours, the video gathered upwards of 1.2 million views, 411,000 dislikes and just 7,100 likes. Comments on the video were disabled by YouTube

Participants in the YouTube Heroes program gain levels for performing various tasks on the site, which include the ability to mass flag videos at level 3, directly contact YouTube staff at level 4 and test new products prior to release at level 5.^[14]

Developments

Online Reactions

On September 21st, Redditor zephanorion submitted a post referring to the new program as "censorship by proxy" to the /r/youtube^[7] subreddit. That day, YouTuber Chris Ray Gun uploaded a video titled "YouTube Heroes – Censorship the Game" (shown below, left). Meanwhile, YouTuber Cr1tikal uploaded a reaction video providing mocking commentary over the YouTuber Heroes promotional video (shown below, right).

On September 22nd, 2016, YouTuber H3h3productions uploaded a video titled "YouTube's New Program is Horrible," which denounced the mass flagging rewards in new program (shown below). Within 24 hours, the video gained over 930,000 views and 14,000 comments. That day, the OfficialNerdCubed YouTube channel uploaded a video suggesting that users can also flag videos as "protected" (shown below, right).

Meanwhile, Redditor nirvanabreh uploaded the original YouTube Heroes promotional video in a post titled "Youtube introduces a new program that rewards users with "points" for mass flagging videos. What can go wrong?" on /r/videos,^[1] garnering more than 8,800 votes (85% upvoted) and 6,800 comments within 24 hours.

YouTube's Blog Post

On September 22nd, the official YouTube Blog published a post explaining that YouTube Heroes was a expansion of their "Trusted Flagger" program and revealed that all flagged content is reviewed by YouTube prior to removal:^[5][6]

"When a flag is received, the reported content is always reviewed by YouTube before being removed. We have internal teams from around the world who carefully evaluate reports 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and these teams remove content that violates our policies or are careful to leave content up if it hasn’t crossed the line."^[6]

YouTube's Edits To The Original Video

On May 22nd, 2016, YouTube discreetly modified the original video, clarifying their original statements, without notifying anyone that they had changed the video to begin with. These changes notably included the rewording of certain parts, such as changing "Help Moderate Community Content"(below, top left) to "Help Moderate Content In The YouTube Heroes Community"(below, top right) and changing "Report Negative Content"(below, bottom left) to "Report innapropriate videos accurately"(below, bottom right).

YouTubers' Response

This decision itself was met with criticism from the community, as many YouTubers felt that YouTube was being sneaky with this decision. The most notable of these are Harmful Opinion(below, left) and Philip DeFranco(below, right) who both noted the confusion that viewers had after seeing the new video without being aware of the changes.

News Media Coverage

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the program, including The Next Web,^[9] Fortune,^[10] TechCrunch,^[11] BoingBoing^[12] and Cnet.^[13]

Search Interest

External References