Recently the members of YouTube’s LGBTQ community have raised concerns about their videos being demonetized seemingly because they fall under queer categories, but CEO Susan Wojcicki says that’s not the case.
In recent interview with popular vlogger Alfie Deyes: Wojcicki said that YouTube does not automatically demonetize LGBTQ content and that YouTube’s monetization system, which determines whether a video is appropriate for ads, and its recommendation systems, which promote videos across the platform, operate independently. It’s set up that way to ensure that the systems are fair.
There’s no policies that say If you put certain words in a title that will be demonetized. We work incredibly hard to make sure that when our machines learn something — because a lot of our decisions are made algorithmically — that our machines are fair. There shouldn’t be [any automatic demonetization] said Wojcicki.
Wojcicki said “we want to support the LGBTQ community. We have specifically created systems and processes to make sure our [machine learning] systems are fair.”
“We have a machine-learning fairness initiative,” Wojcicki said, to make sure that our algorithms and the ways our machines work are fair. We want to have all different voices expressing different points of views.
That doesn’t mean everything is working as intended, as Wojcicki acknowledged. Sometimes YouTube’s machine learning tools get things wrong, as the company previously admitted.
I want to be sensitive to people who have those concerns, Wojcicki said. It always comes down to the specific video and what happened in the video.
