YouTube Updates Its Profanity Policy After Backlash

A couple of months back, we discussed YouTube pulling a Twitch and changing up its content policies for its streaming community in a way that was not well-announced nor understood by that community. The new policy made a number of changes, all of which had an impact on how monetization of content was to be handled. The first notable change was that any streams or recorded content that either “consistently” featured violent content within a video or featured violence very early on in the video, such as the first 8 seconds, would be demonitized. Unhelpfully for a huge swath of the streaming community, this policy applied not only to IRL violence, but to violent images from video games as well. The policy also had the exact same standards for “profanity.” I put that word in scare-quotes because, also unhelpfully, YouTube’s list of naughty words was treated with blanket equality, meaning that a “shit” was treated the same as a “fuck.” As a regular purveyor of such colorful language, this was self-evidently silly and the streaming community was pissed, especially as the policy was made retroactive on previous recorded videos.

Well, YouTube at least acted more quickly than Twitch to the backlash. On the profanity side of the house at least, YouTube announced that changes have been made to allow for more colorful language than the old-new policy. Monetization lead Conor Kavanaugh released a video explaining the changes:

Kavanagh detailed what YouTube is doing to address the feedback it received regarding the “stricter approach” to profanity. He said the criticism was heard loud and clear, especially regarding action taken retroactively against older uploads and how the content creator community wasn’t sufficiently informed on the impact of the changes.

“Upon reviewing our own enforcement data, we found the profanity policy resulted in a stricter approach than we intended,” Kavanagh said. “As a result, we are making the following changes to better reflect the goals of our initial update in November.”

So now, in something that is not entirely un-Orwellian, there are listed categories of naughty words. Some are “moderate”, while others are harsher. Moderate language won’t result in any action at all in most cases, while the same 8-second standard for the harsher language — such as your F-bombs — will apply, but only as a limitation of the number/type of ads that can be shown on those videos. The standards for how often naughty words are used throughout a video have been lowered as well.

And that makes some sense. It would probably be jarring, for instance, to be watching a video called “Fuck These Fucking Game Developers To Hell & Back” only to be greeted with an ad mid-video for the latest Care Bear toy or whatever kids are into these days. And, overall, the lessening of the punishment for actions that have been something of the standard for a while now, particularly in the gaming community.

These are worthwhile changes for a platform riddled with folks who love to cuss up a storm. Gaming creators are especially at fault for their potty mouths for a variety of reasons, particularly due to the extemporaneousness of language that comes with Let’s Plays and unscripted content. At least now there will be less severe punishment.

So at least YouTube did this better than Twitch, by all accounts. Rather than staying firm and staying opaque, changes were made and communication went out. We’ll now have to see if the follow through is there as well.