Greg's Corner

YouTube finds itself fighting controversy on two fronts

When you have a virtual monopoly on user-generated video content like YouTube does, it’s difficult to please everyone all the time.Recently, YouTube found itself at odds with two groups that are very important to them, content creators and advertisers.

The first controversy stems from the fact that some major advertisers didn’t like have their ads played before, or displayed next to videos that promote hate speech. While YouTube’s parent company, Google, has promised advertisers greater tools to limit where their ads are displayed, a few major advertisers have already pulled their ad dollars from the video platform.

In the second controversy, many of YouTube’s LGBTQ content creators found their videos being restricted and filtered out as not being family friendly even though no explicit subjects were being discussed. In a statement YouTube said that it was due to a glitch in a parental control mode that it added to the service in 2010 and promised to do better. However, it seems like the damage had already been done when it appeared that YouTube was targeting such a specific part of its user community.

While no company is perfect, both of these controversies show that Google still hasn’t ironed out all the bugs in YouTube even after having purchased it over a decade ago. With the cracks in YouTube’s armor that its shown over the years it’s surprising that a large competitor, for example Facebook, hasn’t tried launching its own video service to try to pull away creators from YouTube. Maybe that time is now, or at least soon.