Moistcr1tikal reveals surprising results of call with YouTube CEO
YouTube: penguin0After lashing out at YouTube over a sudden strike on a three-year-old video, Moistcr1tikal got the chance to have a call with platform CEO Susan Wojcicki — leading to a hugely productive conversation for content creators.
On November 25, YouTuber Moistcr1tikal — a long-time creator with over 6.9 million subscribers — hit out at the platform via Twitter, claiming that one of his three-year-old videos had been suddenly hit with a strike.
The strike came in spite of his efforts to censor the video (which, admittedly, showed edited gameplay from a lewd video game) beforehand, leading him to criticize YouTube out of frustration.
“I got another strike on a 3-year-old video of a censored lewd game,” he wrote. “I would do anything to talk to @SusanWojcicki about the policy team’s refusal to communicate and explain their decisions. They have complete control over everyone’s channels but just spit in the face of creators.”
I got another strike on a 3 year old video of a censored lewd game. I would do anything to talk to @SusanWojcicki about the policy team's refusal to communicate and explain their decisions. They have complete control over everyone's channels but just spit in the face of creators pic.twitter.com/HLxbPqzpNF
— Charlie (@MoistCr1TiKaL) November 25, 2020
In a surprising turn of events, Wojcicki herself — the CEO of YouTube — offered to hop on a call with Cr1TiKaL to hammer out a solution to this recurring problem on the site.
That’s not all; even the head of YouTube’s policy team got on the line, leading to what Cr1TiKaL called a “huge step in the right direction” for users.
What did we learn from Cr1TiKaL’s call with YouTube?
YouTube doesn’t wantonly dole out strikes out of spite.
According to YouTube’s head of policy, the strikes are in place for “bad actors who constantly show a disregard for the rules” — but sometimes, it “falls through the cracks due to the size of the team and the volume [of infractions] they deal with.”
YouTube is looking into ways to prevent strikes and removals without warning.
While there are no solid answers yet (at least, ones that Cr1TiKaL is comfortable sharing), he did say that the team is looking into a tool that allows creators to edit offending content out of their videos after being notified of “infringing content,” rather than having the video removed and a strike against their record.
“Susan, in particular, really liked the idea, and wanted to press it on the policy team,” Cr1TiKaL revealed. “The policy head also liked the idea, and wanted to explore ways of slowly implementing this policy over time.”
It’s hard to communicate with YouTube’s policy team because it’s fairly small.
Well, that, and the sheer volume of work they have to do among themselves. Luckily, Wojcicki suggested a workaround for this issue, stating that the policy team should have a specific group of employees in place whose sole task is communicating with creators.
YouTube doesn’t like that it takes a huge Twitter scandal to communicate with them.
Cr1TiKaL also claimed that YouTube is looking into ways to better this issue in 2021, although the team itself wasn’t exactly certain what those solutions would be.
“They recognize the problems,” the YouTuber stated. “They’re not oblivious to them. They’re just working on the best ways of combating it, given the situation and everything going on. I can respect that. I just wish they were more transparent with it.”
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YouTube is working hard to make sure its ‘Trending’ page isn’t dominated by traditional media.
According to Cr1TiKaL, Wojcicki claimed that for the past one or two years, the platform has been placing a focus on making sure its organic creators are getting featured on the Trending page, rather than mainstream media outlets.
“They want to make sure the creators are showcased on trending,” he said of the subject. “They want to make sure that policies are uniformly enforced across the traditional and creator-generated content. …It’s just a matter of making sure it comes across that way.”
Overall, Cr1TiKaL seemed pleased with his call with YouTube and is hopeful for better changes to come in the future. While this isn’t his first brush with the company over a confusing strike, it seems that this situation, at least, has resulted in a constructive conversation that will lead to a more transparent environment for content creators.