No matter how upset you are with a company’s policies, it will never make it okay to go and open fire on innocent employees, but now that it’s happened to YouTube’s San Bruno, California headquarters what will the company do regarding the changes it had made?
On April 4th, a woman by the name of Nasim Aghdam unjustifiably opened fire on YouTube employees.
Aghdam’s misdirected rage resulted in at least three injured YouTube employees and then took her own life.
It was revealed that Aghdam acted out because she was upset with the companies recent policy changes which she claimed were censoring her videos and demonetizing her unjustly.
Now Aghdam isn’t the only Youtuber to express this kind of malcontent, though she is the first one to jump to an extreme.
In September of 2017 LGBT+ content creators had their content demonetized when the company made the move to keep videos with ‘controversial’ content from gaining revenue.
Other Youtubers were also coming forward that their videos on mental health issues and non controversial topics were being unjustly demonetized.
For a while, there was also a glitch in the system where if someone unsubscribed from a channel two users would be unsubscribed.
There’s also the ongoing issue with how even if users turn on notifications for their favorite channels they still aren’t always notified about the newest uploads.
YouTube’s content creators often rely on these channels as main or large sources of income.
So they being upset with YouTube suddenly changing things that affects their livelihoods without properly communicating or even taking them into consideration is justified, Nasim Aghdam’s attack on the company never will be.
However, now that the flaws in these policies and how they have impacted both the company and its users are being brought to the mainstream media’s attention because of these unfortunate events it should take this time to reflect and revise it’s algorithms and rules.
YouTube could make an effort to reach out to its content creators and users to find methods that could benefit all the parties involved, have an open and honest method of communication.
A major change the company should make is to stop leaving the job of picking which videos are too controversial to be monetized to its automated algorithm and put it back into human hands.
As the site stands now, videos are screened via a secret algorithm based on YouTube’s community guidelines.
None of the company’s content creators understand exactly how the algorithm works and none of the sites users can seem to figure out how the program decides who will be age restricted and/or demonetized and who won’t be.
Human moderators aren’t called to screen videos unless the uploader notices that their video has been demonetized and submit an appeal.
YouTube can look into making contracts, officially hire its content creators instead of just maintaining these advertisement partnerships with them.
That way YouTubers can rest assured that they will definitely receive payment for their continued work and YouTube will continue to get a steady stream of new content that pulls in and keeps users on the site.
The company could also revise or make its advertisement policy clearer so that YouTubers can adjust and manage their content accordingly.
What happened at YouTube’s never should have, but instead of focusing on a shooter that took things too far this could be used as an opportunity to advance the company and make it better.
