World’s biggest video-sharing and streaming website YouTube said it doesn’t censor content uploaded on it, but instead relies on users flagging videos and then takes the appropriate action based on its strong community guidelines.
Recently, a French v-blogger – Laetitia Birbes claimed that Youtube had censor her video which contained an interview of European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker.
Satya Raghavan, Head, Entertainment Content at YouTube India, was asked at a conference about how YouTube dealt with videos that could be create security issues and whether there were any plans on restricting them.
“We have very strong community guidelines. The way it works is that we rely on users flagging off content that is inappropriate and when that happens, that is when we review it. We see where it is against our community guidelines and then we take the right kind of action. That’s the chain,” Raghavan said.
“We don’t censor anything. What we do is we rely on the wisdom of the masses to flag-off things. We are a truly democratic platform,” he said.
Raghavan said YouTube doesn’t demonetize videos that have controversial topics.
“No. What we have realized is there are some videos that we think are not fit for advertisers. So those videos we definitely turn off at times. The website also takes into consideration requests from local governments,” he said.
“There are a lot of places where the law of the land is important. And that’s where we work with local governments where there are specific requests. Obviously we obey that,” added Raghavan.
