Criticism of YouTube

YouTube has received an extremely large amount of criticism since Google bought the site in late 2006, and especially during Susan Wojcicki's time as the CEO of YouTube from 2014 to 2023, with countless changes and decisions that have garnered criticism from users. YouTube is still often mocked and parodied to this day by the public, and especially by creators.

YouTube's policies

Community Guidelines

The Community Guidelines have been criticized by users for seeming needlessly strict, downright unfair and at times vague as well as the staff's enforcement of these rules wavering from time to time.

Another complaint is that YouTube constantly changes the rules to keep advertisers on the site, barring any content that doesn't fit their "family friendly" image from being monetized. This causes users to point out that there are some inappropriate videos such as the Happy Tree Friends series, which are not removed or age-restricted despite their content not being family friendly. This inconsistency culminated into Elsagate in 2017.

Additionally, whenever YouTube makes changes to the rules, any videos that "violate" the new rules but uploaded prior to the change are also taken down.

Removal of star rating system

In 2010, YouTube replaced the 1-5 star rating system with a like and dislike system in an effort to imitate Facebook more closely. There was slight outrage due to it feeling limited compared to before when users had more options on how many stars they could add.

Flagging

On every video there is a flag button to remove any inappropriate videos. However, this has received very negative feedback, with people touting it as a near useless service because violating videos that are flagged tend not to get removed anyway. There are also constant reports of non-inappropriate videos being false flagged and getting removed. Rude or offensive language in videos cannot be flagged.

Age-restrictions

Age-restrictions have been deeply criticized for blocking underage users from viewing the video. Users living in Europe or Australia are hard-hit because they have to verify their identity using a passport, driver's license, or credit card, which leads to privacy concerns. This is due to laws in those regions to prevent minors from being exposed to obscene content.

Videos can be age-restricted for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to strong violence or bloody images, graphic sexual content/nudity, pervasive vulgar language, dangerous or crude stunts, or in some cases hate speech.

There have also been complaints of videos with no inappropriate content being age restricted. Videos that are age-restricted cannot be monetized nor embedded on external websites. Another complaint is that YouTube itself has the right to decide whether or not content should be age restricted and can permanently restrict on their jurisdiction.

2019 COPPA rule changes

In September 2019, YouTube came under fire from the FTC for inappropriately collecting data on children after a compliant was filed to the FTC earlier in August that year concerning sponsored videos not being disclosed on the channel Ryan's World. A $170 million fine was levied on YouTube.

As a result of this, YouTube began work on implementing stricter guidelines over whether videos are suitable for children or not which went into effect in January 2020. One of the biggest changes was that creators would now have to mark whether their videos or channels were for kids or not. The new guidelines garnered criticism not only for their vague guidelines and potential legal risks for creators, but for also retroactively rendering "The Adpocalypse" all for nothing in the long run since the "family-friendly content" creators had been forced to make for years to appease advertisers was now what was putting their revenue, and some key features of videos, at stake.

The fact that YouTube Kids, the branch site made specifically for kids, was not made the platform for all kids content going forward instead was a major source of criticism. Other sources of criticism include the fact bots have been automatically flagging various inappropriate videos as being made for kids with no convenient way for users to report such mistakes and the fact that such videos have various features disabled for no apparent reason which YouTube refuses to explain.

Copyright

Copyright policies on YouTube have faced steep criticism for making it impossible to post short clips from movies or use songs within videos without getting copyright-striked by companies, even if the video falls under fair use. There have also been reports of licensed people's videos getting removed from YouTube despite them owning the content.

The vulnerability to abuse of copyright strikes has led to dedicated hoax companies unfairly copyright claiming videos and demanding a ransom to have the strike removed. It is often impossible for smaller YouTubers without legal teams to file a counter-strike with the risk of their channel getting terminated, and therefore the claiming party gets away with the ad revenue.

Copyright on YouTube gained notoriously awful reputation due to these incidents.

Country restrictions

Country restrictions (sometimes referred to as a regional lockout) have been severely criticized due to many users not being able to watch videos because it is blocked either in their country or worldwide. Country restrictions are usually enforced for several reasons, such as to stagger the release of a featured product within a video, avoid losing viewership to users in other countries, maximizing a featured product's impact in a certain region, or to prevent users from accessing certain content in their region for legal reasons, usually due to censorship laws or licensing restrictions if the uploader doesn't have the rights to certain intellectual property outside a specified region.

This can happen even if the video in question is in the viewer's language. Such examples are the Beyblade and LEGO channels making the English versions of their respective series unavailable in the United States. The only way to circumvent the restriction would be to use a VPN.

Appeals

Appeals can give a channel the chance to recover from a strike or other sanction but have been criticized for being ineffective thanks to a low success rate. Another common complaint is that YouTube has the right to decide whether or not videos removed for Community Guidelines violations should remain off the site or if reinstated permanently age restricted.

2013 content ID system update

On December 10, 2013, YouTube made changes to the content ID System, which upon startup quickly flagged thousands of videos on the site. The update was widely criticized for making it much harder to monetize videos without getting claims for copyrighted music, video games, or any other sort of copyrighted material. The fact that the system is automated and thus cannot tell if someone has permission from the copyright holder to use their material did not help matters. Gaming channels were hit the hardest as footage of games was a huge target at the beginning.

A Wikia (now Fandom) wiki located at letsplaylist.wikia.com was founded by video game developer Lars Doucet which listed publishers that allowed their games to be uploaded and monetized as let's plays. The site later migrated to independent hosting and can be found at wholetsplay.com.

Since 2021, a "copyright check" tool is available on YouTube Studio, which automatically and mandatorily checks a video in the upload window for any automatic copyright claims and notifies the YouTuber before publishing to avoid potential strikes.

Advertisements

Advertisements on YouTube have been criticized for taking up a lot of space on the site. Video ads are likewise viewed as a waste of time, especially the unskippable ads. This has led to many users installing adblocking extensions to keep the site ad-free. Eventually, YouTube made every 30 second-long ad skippable in a gradual aggressive pursuit for the revenue lost due to users using adblocks. Two-minute long unskippable ads have also been reported. Over time, this has resulted in degrading quality and non-existent moderation of YouTube ads, often containing content that violates YouTube's community guidelines.

In 2021, YouTube announced their "Right to Monetize" policy which brought about changes in where advertisements are shown. According to the change, YouTubers not in the YouTube Partner Program would also have advertisements shown on their videos, without them receiving any revenue from the ads.

In 2023, YouTube introduced further changes to their advertisement policy, removing YouTubers' ability to customise positions of ads on their videos, which will now be controlled by YouTube. Additionally, YouTube now restricts users using adblockers to watching up to three videos before they turn off the adblocker or subscribe to YouTube Premium. This change has received heavy criticism from YouTubers and viewers alike.

YouTube Heroes

The introduction of the YouTube Heroes program in September 2016 was met with skepticism and scorn from many users, since it was asking the users to do a job they believed Google themselves should've been doing already, all for no reward other than tools that allow them to work better.

The fact that users would be given the power to do things like mass-flag videos once they reached a certain level was a huge cause for alarm, given the high probability people would abuse it to censor videos they didn't like. The backlash was so immense that YouTube deleted the announcement video, rebranded the service to YouTube Contributors and have kept the program in closed beta ever since.

Abbreviation of subscriber counts

In May 2019, YouTube announced that by August of that year, live subscriber counts would be abbreviated (1,356,924 million subscribers would be shown as 1.35M) to "make things more consistent", with it going into effect that September. This immediately garnered criticism for not only depriving the community of yet another important statistic, but for severely hampering every site that depended on YouTube's API to track subscriber counts, most famously SocialBlade.

Removal of Community Captions

YouTube's announcement in August 2020 that Community Captions were being removed for "spam and low engagement" drew heavy criticism from the community for removing a much beloved feature because some people were abusing them and the low engagement being an effect of YouTube not telling its users where it was. Much criticism came from channels who were dependent on community captions to help those who spoke different languages or had hearing disabilities understand what was going on in the video.

Another point of criticism was that while the ability for creators to change captions was kept, many creators wouldn't have the time or effort to create captions for different languages, with the only channels that could being corporations and companies. The original announcement video months prior asking if they should be removed had a universal "keep them" reaction, which only made the decision more egregious.

Hiding the dislike count

On March 30, 2021, YouTube announced that they were testing a feature which hid the dislike count from videos, which would only be visible to the creator, citing the reason being creators complaining about targeted disliking, and it affecting their mental health. This received major backlash, as it prevented users from seeing if a video was worth watching or not, and it prevented users from punishing clickbaiters and scammers. Another reason the update got hate was because the creator could still see the dislikes on YouTube Studio, making the update pointless.

Matt Koven and Susan tried to convince the community that this was to prevent "dislike attacks," but this was later proven to be false, especially in the case of the latter, who was a subject of dislike bombing.

On November 10, 2021, YouTube announced that they would start rolling out the update starting that day, as well as later uploading a video on the YouTube Creators channel explaining why. The update gained major backlash from big and small YouTubers, as well as users, and even YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, who explained in the description of his video that the removal of the dislike count could start the decline of YouTube as a whole. Many others criticized the update for reasons mentioned above, with some users believing that it was done to appeal to brands and advertisers. Many people have made browser extensions that show dislikes, but due to their obscurity, they are not popular among most of the users.

In response to the dislike removal, some comments on videos, usually most-disliked videos, would sometimes say "Use this comment as a dislike button" representing the amount of likes in the comment as the dislikes itself. This trend died later on.

Removal of the "Sort by Oldest" option

In October 2022, YouTube removed the "Sort by Oldest" option on a channel's "Videos" tab for mobile viewers (eventually for desktop too). This sparked major criticism due to some users wanting to know what a certain content creator's first video was, or just wanting to watch someone's much older videos without having to spend a long time scrolling to the list of uploads, trying to find it themselves.

However, the YouTube Team confirmed on Twitter that they had no choice but to remove the tab due to some issues they ran into when they launched filters for content types on the YouTube App, and said the "Sort by Oldest" option would return sometime in 2023. It was restored in the summer of 2023, owing to critical user feedback.

Channel layouts

Cosmic Panda layout

This layout received backlash when it was first released for aesthetic reasons. However, this largely died down when the One Channel layout was released.

One Channel layout

The One Channel Layout, which rolled out in 2013, received far more criticism. Many YouTubers disliked the lack of customization options and discussion features compared to the older layouts. When the layout became mandatory, there was a ton of outrage, causing some YouTubers to quit and delete their channels.

Commenting

2013 comments section update

An image from 2013 showing a user logging into their Google+ account to comment on a video.

From 2013 to 2014, users were required to create a Google+ account on the site. This was highly disliked for the following reasons:

• Many accused Google+ of being a shallow copy of Facebook
• Users were forced to use their real names
• Google+ made it more difficult to edit channel settings
• Google+ makes messages to Google+ and not YouTube
• Google+ was required to comment and reply to comments
• Google+ sometimes automatically logged users out
• Google+ also broke dislikes on comments by making them invisible

The comments section of the now-removed YouTube video announcing the change was dominated by users swearing and posting ASCII arts of penises. Jawed Karim himself also voiced his disapproval for the new system, lamenting that he would no longer be able to comment on the site since he did not want a Google+ account. A change.org petition calling for a revert of the change stands at more than 200,000 signs.

This gave birth to the "Bob building an army" meme in an attempt to get Google+ off of the site.

Two other major criticisms were the inclusion of links and the removal of the 500 character limit, since those two changes led to a massive influx of spam comments, which was what YouTube was actually trying to prevent with the update.

In June 2012, Google started asking YouTubers to use their real names on YouTube, redirecting them to their Google+ accounts. The popup was persistent, coming back after about a week. This garnered criticism as many didn't want to use their real names for privacy reasons, or wanted to keep their well known channel username. Eventually, Google got the message from all the complaining and dropped this requirement in 2014.

Commenting links

An example of old YouTube comments. Note that they lack timestamps.

Before 2013, YouTube did not allow users to comment links. Users disliked this since they couldn't link other users to other YouTube videos. After the 2013 Comments Section Update removed this limitation, many were upset since it allowed bots to spam links to websites that were loaded with malware. Users can, however, report these comments if they contain such malware.

Removal of uploader review

A few months after the 2013 Comment Section Update, YouTube removed the ability for creators to approve comments before they're posted or shown. This drew criticism since it removed the moderation creators had for swearing and spam in the comments section.

Community

Userbase

YouTube is highly criticized for its extremely immature community, possibly arising from the fact that it is the most accessible entertainment service to children,^{[citation needed]} accelerated by YouTube's push towards child-friendly content and ads targeted towards children. Users on YouTube have been known to make very childish responses to changes on YouTube as well as posting rude comments to people asking about the video.

r/youngpeopleyoutube, a Reddit community, is entirely dedicated to posting instances of and ridiculing children being naive and immature in YouTube (and other social media) comments.

Music and media companies

Music and media companies in particular have been heavily criticized, with the biggest targets being Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Viacom, VEVO, GEMA, Nintendo, and Toei Animation. Common complaints are their constant complaining and attempted lawsuits on the site which led to many of the rule changes concerning copyright, their blatant exploitation of the content ID and copyright systems to claim properties that are not even theirs, and their claims on countless videos and parodies despite them being Fair Use or the music/media being used in them only taking a few seconds at most.

A significant example of this are Japanese media companies. Because Japan's Copyright Act does not have the same exceptions as the US Copyright Act, use of such content that would normally be considered fair use in the US is unlawful unless the copyright holder gave permission. This renders use of copyrighted Japanese media the most prone to getting the channel a copyright strike.

TikTok

YouTube was also criticized for being a benefactor of the infamous social media app TikTok ever since the latter's users moved into YouTube during the pandemic.

Most notably, these users were nominated for the YouTube Streamy Awards as breakout creators, when most of them did little to no contributions to the site, and didn't even have trending videos. For example, Bella Poarch, who has founded fame on YouTube with her debut single, was awarded Breakout Creator of 2021, even though she is seen as a mainstream artist according to her channel's videos. YouTube used her TikTok clips as proof of being creator during the Awards livestream.

Misinformation

United States

YouTube has come under scrutiny in various countries, including the United States, for not keeping publication of misinformation under check. An open letter in 2022 signed by more than eighty groups claimed that YouTube played a pivotal role in spreading medical misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21, especially the "'fraud' narrative during the US presidential election."

The January 6 United States Capitol attacks were organised through social media, particularly YouTube, where extremist militants recruited rioters. Although, YouTube has proved to be more effective at combatting misinformation than its rivals, Facebook Video and TikTok.

India

India has the highest number of users on YouTube, and likewise, YouTube has the highest penetration in India out of all social media services. YouTube, alongside Twitter and Facebook, has received criticism for hosting content carrying misinformation and propaganda that promotes vigilantism.

In a dataset collected from June 2016 to December 2019 which included 4,803 incidents of fake news, 866 incidents were reported on YouTube. Eight channels have been blocked in the region following violations of the new IT Act passed in 2021.

Slayy Point in a video also covered obsessive attempts of Bollywood news outlets to create "gossips" about news of celebrities doing mundane daily tasks, hyped-up using clickbait and misleading headlines.

See also

• Criticism of Google § YouTube on Wikipedia
• YouTube copyright issues on Wikipedia