YouTube outlines steps it will take if a creator causes ‘widespread harm’ to the community

This morning, YouTube chose to temporarily demonetize creator Logan Paul due to a string of inappropriate videos were uploaded to the video platform. This afternoon, YouTube has now laid out steps it will take to stop and punish creators that upload videos that cause “widespread harm” to the community…

In a newly published blog post, Ariel Bardin, Vice President of Product Management at YouTube, gave the following statement:

When one creator does something particularly blatant—like conducts a heinous prank where people are traumatized, promotes violence or hate toward a group, demonstrates cruelty, or sensationalizes the pain of others in an attempt to gain views or subscribers—it can cause lasting damage to the community, including viewers, creators and the outside world. That damage can have real-world consequences not only to users, but also to other creators, leading to missed creative opportunities, lost revenue and serious harm to your livelihoods. That’s why it’s critical to ensure that the actions of a few don’t impact the 99.9 percent of you who use your channels to connect with your fans or build thriving businesses.

Beyond the current strike system that’s currently in place, YouTube will begin taking the following action when a creator uploads inappropriate content:

1. Premium Monetization Programs, Promotion and Content Development Partnerships. We may remove a channel from Google Preferred and also suspend, cancel or remove a creator’s YouTube Original.
2. Monetization and Creator Support Privileges. We may suspend a channel’s ability to serve ads, ability to earn revenue and potentially remove a channel from the YouTube Partner Program, including creator support and access to our YouTube Spaces.
3. Video Recommendations. We may remove a channel’s eligibility to be recommended on YouTube, such as appearing on our home page, trending tab or watch next.

As YouTube hopes to be more transparent in its actions (as CEO Susan Wojcicki expressed earlier this week), it has updated its Policy Center with all of the new rules and repercussions for not following them. As YouTube begins to crack down on creators who do more harm to the platform than good, hopefully, other creators will stop getting demonetized on accident.

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