YouTube changed its anti-harassment policies, six months after a controversy involving a Vox Media journalist and a conservative commentator brought the delicate issue to light.
In an official note posted on YouTube's blog page Wednesday, the video-sharing platform announced that it had been working "over the last several years" in ways to quickly remove content when it violated its community guidelines.
Wednesday, the Google-owned company noted, it would finally change some of its harassment policies.
"We are announcing a series of policy and product changes that update how we tackle harassment on YouTube," read the statement _ which was signed by Matt Halprin, YouTube's vice president of global head of trust and safety.
"We systematically review all our policies to make sure the line between what we remove and what we allow is drawn in the right place, and recognized earlier this year that for harassment, there is more we can do to protect our creators and community," he continued.
Halprin was likely referring to a much publicized episode involving Carlos Maza, a gay Latino journalist with Vox Media, who for years was the subject of vicious hateful attacks on the platform by right-wing commentator Steven Crowder.
"Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video 'debunking' (YouTube series) Strikethrough. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity, Maza tweeted on May 30.
"I've been called an anchor baby, a lispy queer, a Mexican, etc. These videos get millions of views on YouTube. Every time one gets posted, I wake up to a wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter," he added.
Shortly after Maza spoke out about the constant bullying, YouTube announced that Crowder's videos did not violate the company's community guidelines, even though it admitted the language was "hurtful."
The company later announced that it'd suspended Crowder's channel's monetization, but it failed to remove any of his videos from the platform.
In Wednesday's announcement, Halprin acknowledged that "harassment hurts our community by making people less inclined to share their opinions and engage with each other."
"We heard this time and again from creators, including those who met with us during the development of this policy update," he wrote, adding that, "We will no longer allow content that maliciously insults someone based on protected attributes such as their race, gender expression, or sexual orientation. This applies to everyone, from private individuals, to YouTube creators, to public officials."
Maza remains skeptical: "'Malicious insults' were already prohibited under YouTube's anti-hate and anti-harassment policies," he tweeted after the statement was posted. "YouTube rolls out policies like this to distract reporters from the real story: YouTube's non-enforcement."
Besides, he continued, "'Malicious insults' are only a small part of the problem on YouTube. The bigger problem is hateful content _ stuff that targets entire groups."
Speaking to Vox Media's Recode about the news, Maza said that the changes simply won't "fix the problem _ which is not that these videos exist, but that YouTube is designed to make videos like this in perpetuity for profit."
"One of the goals (of the changes) is to make sure that the free speech and public debate that exists on YouTube platform is not stifled, but that it continues to exist," Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer, told Recode about the changes.
