Geronimo Ritcheson ’29 is a freshman eyeing a major for government or public policy. He’s involved in various organizations such as William and Mary Young Democrats, Theodore Roosevelt Society and Apologetics Club. Contact him at gritcheson@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
YouTube is one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and many people, including many students on the campus of the College of William and Mary, use the platform for everything from education to entertainment to even content creation. And in spite of the vast trust many have placed in YouTube to be a reliable service, the platform is plagued with issues stemming from ens—tification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the gradual decline in quality of services on a platform to better serve the interests of shareholders and maximize profit.
These issues are plentiful and directly harmful to online content creators, as well as indirectly harmful to consumers of YouTube content. In regard to content creators, channels on YouTube, especially those pertaining to anime, such as cawcawTV, have been subject to hundreds of strikes within a short period of time from automated systems and malicious actors abusing the copyright system. This phenomenon hits generally smaller channels harder, with little ability to reverse strikes or restore monetization due to the also-automated nature of YouTube’s appeals system.
Leading to another point of contention for YouTube, demonetization has become another particular problem for YouTubers. More channels have seen either some or all ad revenue for their videos disabled, including PhantomStrider. A channel with over 730,000 subscribers specializing in discussing animation, PhantomStrider had his entire catalog demonetized (although it has since been restored) due to a video discussing “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” being flagged as “misleading family content,” despite the video not being specifically targeted to children. With this channel being relatively well known, not even larger channels are necessarily safe from this kind of demonetization, with smaller channels standing less of a chance given their smaller influence.
As previously stated, there has been an uptick in the growth of bad actors that seek to exploit the algorithm for monetary growth. In particular, content farms, which produce a large amount of content and use keywords and algorithms to ensure high placement on social media platforms or search engines, have become especially common. Content farms push out low-quality content that predominantly targets children, incorporating media from games like “Poppy Playtime” and “Minecraft.” Their generally nonsensical storylines and mindless entertainment, as well as the abundant use of generative AI to create such videos, tarnish the reputations of media featured in content farms and risks the development of the young children consuming this media by exposing them to violent, disturbing or even sexual material that would get smaller channels wiped off the platform. However, these violations are excused for low-quality slop that attracts millions of subscribers and thousands of dollars in ad revenue.
Finally, relating to generative AI, YouTube as a platform has been increasingly embracing the usage of AI for almost every system and service, from video creation to automation. As alluded to before, moderation, especially regarding copyright material, is largely automated. This places an unfair disadvantage on smaller creators who have to work harder to convince algorithmic systems trained on keywords and other metadata that their content is suitable for the platform. Furthermore, moderation focuses on smaller issues, like specific content in videos like in the case of PhantomStrider, while larger issues like sexualized kids’ content and other content that violates terms of service guidelines are ignored due to the limitations of automated moderation. Other areas where YouTube has embraced AI include auto-dubbing, brain rot games with heavy assistance from generative AI and more recently A/B testing for videos, thumbnails and titles.
Overall, YouTube has become a much more hostile platform towards creators than ever before, and while the vast majority of students at the College only engage with the platform as viewers and not active creators, this ens—tification will negatively impact the student community. Some students are content creators and will face greater hardships as a result of these changes, including a recent viewership change to adopt an exposure-based model similar to short-form platforms like TikTok. View numbers for long-form content now double due to views now counting from the first frame. Meanwhile, casual viewers among the student community will likely be recommended fewer smaller channels with authentic content and more larger channels that churn out slop that has no rightful place on YouTube.
