Youtube and Regulation

          The question of the week was: who controls and monitors the media? I decided to look specifically at who controls and monitors YouTube since they are under intense scrutiny at the moment for the way they are handling the regulation of the content on their site.
          YouTube relies entirely on self-regulation as a way to monitor the content being uploaded by the creators. They have a set of community guidelines which help to lay out their policies for what cannot be included in a video, which includes no Nudity or Sexual Content, hateful content, violent or disturbing content, to name a few. Users of youtube can flag content which they believe violates one or more of the community guidelines and these flags are then reviewed by someone who works within YouTube. If it is deemed to be rightfully flagged then the company will place a community guideline strike on the creators account, and if one user gets three community guideline strikes within a three month period, their account will be terminated. However, lately YouTube has been under fire for not holding their top creators to the same standards as the rest of the creators on their website, which has lead to the explosion of the Logan Paul situation.
          Logan Paul is one of YouTube's top creators with 16,727,068 subscribers. He brings YouTube a great deal of money and publicity, so when he uploaded a video in early January where he and his friends went to the "Suicide Forrest" in Japan and filmed themselves with the body of a suicide victim YouTube had to make a choice about how to handle the situation. The video was promoted by YouTube themselves on the trending page, as most of Paul's videos are, for almost a full day before Logan himself took removed the video due to the backlash he was receiving. It took YouTube a couple of days to make any sort of statement about the situation and originally they simply stated that they were looking into further consequences, which made the community angry. Recently they have stated that after deliberation they have removed Logan Paul from their google preferred premium advertising program, temporarily suspended his Adsense revenue, and suspended his YouTube Red movie from being released. This has made some of the community feel better since they have taken some disciplinary action against him, but it has not snuffed out the anger that most of the community feels.
          This case study shows that when their is gray area in the policies set out for self regulation it can lead to public discourse about when action should be taken. YouTube is under a big spotlight right now and the YouTube community as well as their advertisers are waiting to see what they will do in light of this situation.

SOURCES

YouTube, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines

YouTube responds to Logan Paul controversy. (2018, January 02). Retrieved February

12, 2018, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/logan-paul-suicide-video-youtube-responds/

Rosney, D. (2018, January 22). After Logan Paul scandal, YouTube says it shouldn't be

regulated like TV. Retrieved January, from http://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-42768180

Akingbade, T. (2018, February 09). YouTube refuses to be regulated despite Logan

Paul's disgusting 'suicide video'. Retrieved from http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/22/youtube-refuses-regulated-despite-logan-pauls-disgusting-suicide-video-7250533/

Logan Paul Vlogs YouTube Stats, Channel Statistics. Social Blade (n.d.). Retrieved

February 12, 2018, from

https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/ucg8rbf3g2amx70yod8vqizg

Spangler, T. (2018, February 10). YouTube Details New Policy for Punishing Rogue

Creators, After Penalizing Logan Paul. Retrieved from http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/youtube-rogue-creators-policy-logan-paul-1202694534/