Here’s how YouTube’s new Hate Speech changes affect content creators

Hate speech – that is, expressing prejudice or attacking someone based on protected attributes like sexual orientation, race or others – usually doesn’t abide by the law. And that’s why in today’s online world, globally used services like YouTube have strict policies to leave no room for such incidents.

Taking another step forward, just yesterday, Google’s video-sharing platform YouTube announced the company is modifying their Hate Speech policies. To shed more clarity on what exactly is going to change, a Google employee recently came up with FAQs to answer some of the concerns.

We have created a quick read gist of what all they shared. So lets get started.

What has changed in YouTube’s Hate Speech policies?

As you may know, YouTube bans content that promotes violence or hatred on the basis of attributes like age, disability, ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, immigration status, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status. Caste has also been added in this policy now.

The above listed attributes will no more be accepted as an illness, a mental/physical deficiency or to justify subjugation. Now onward, the company will remove the content that claims the superiority of a group, race or religion as a justification to discriminate against others.

Also, hatred towards victims of violent events and their families will not be acceptable. Even the content claiming violent events as staged will also be taken down.

What if your content violates the revamped policy?

The videos that were uploaded before June 05 and violate YouTube’s revised Hate Speech policy, will be removed without a strike. However, the violative videos that’ll be uploaded after this date will be removed along with a strike.

Content creators will be notified in YouTube whenever there’s a violation of the policies. And not to miss, channels that are devoted to violating these policies will be terminated.

Channels that cover/analyze controversial topics

If your content is about analyzing hate speech or other controversial topics, it will be accepted until it doesn’t include the hate speech that’s prohibited by Community Guidelines. Moreover, for such content that contains hate speech, make sure you provide the context either in image or audio.

Videos with disabled features

In case, the features on your videos have already been disabled, and these videos violate the new Hate Speech policies, they’ll be removed without a strike. You’ll be notified in YouTube when such content will be taken down.

Videos with educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context

If the primary purpose of your video is educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic, but it incorporates hate speech, you may be excused. But there’s a catch. The context must be emphasized either in audio or video. Here’s how YouTube explains this:

For example, footage of hateful protests with only context in the title such as “Footages from the rally” is not allowed. The same footage may be allowed if it contained commentary from a news report in the video itself explaining the circumstances and making it clear to the viewer that the purpose of sharing the footage is not to promote hatred.

Even pseudoscience or statistics used in videos to promote hatred will be removed. Here’s how the company explains it with a use-case:

One of the examples in your help center says it’s not allowed to say things like “[People with attributes noted above] are less intelligent than us because their brains are smaller.” What’s that all about?
Sometimes we see content that uses widely discredited pseudoscience to promote hateful messages and stereotypes. If we determine that pseudoscience or statistics are being used in content to promote hatred, we will treat that content as hate speech and remove it.

Lastly, these Hate Speech policy changes apply not only to videos, but also to comments and other content on YouTube. So be careful about what you post.

P.S. Just in case you feel your content doesn’t violate the Community Guidelines, filing an appeal is always an option.

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