YouTube’s double standards in banning PewDiePie
If you've ever wondered what on earth a PewDiePie is, you’re not alone.
He’s a man, Felix Kjellberg, who reviews video games online. In the YouTube world, he’s as famous as James Corden, as influential as Nick Robinson, and as we found out last week, as funny as Jim Davidson.
“Very rich Swedish man pays impoverished minorities $5 to hold up ‘death to all jews’ sign” is an apt headline for his irreverence. In a YouTube video, Kjellberg, ever the idiot, wanted to demonstrate what people online would do – essentially, how low they would go – for $5, to prove “how crazy the modern world is”.
The naive Swede has found out just how crazy the modern world is. Disney has dropped him for anti-semitism, while YouTube has removed him from its premium ad service, Google Preferred, which gives brands exclusive access to the top 5 per cent of content on the site.
I’ll come back to that shortly.
More YouTube news last week: advertisers are pulling or suspending ads en masse following allegations that they were inadvertently funding terrorists and Nazis. Without sufficient black or white lists and appropriate filters, targeted ads will appear within, or next to a video, regardless of whether it’s “23 times cats were better than humans”, or “23 times the infidel must die”.
There’s a quandary here: are agencies to blame for using too broad parameters and ineffective filters? Or should YouTube be responsible for the videos published on its site? Of course it has community standards that ban lots of ‘isms, but if the video giant isn’t enforcing its own rules, the only thing agencies can be blamed for is using the platform in the first place.
So long as anyone can upload to YouTube, videos from the very scourges of society will continue.
That means a double standard exists: YouTube bans its biggest star for anti-semitism, yet continues to profit from anti-semites who upload videos.
Swing back to Google Preferred, the premium “brand-safe” service, which provides “advertiser-friendly content” at a price. Now call me old fashioned, but one might expect, as an advertiser, that all content on the channels you were placing ads on was “advertiser friendly.”
But it’s not. This is not so much a defence of The Insouciant Mr Pie, as it is highlighting the inadequacy of YouTube as an advertising platform. Clearly, a hierarchy exists. Pay more, and you won’t appear next to deplorables. As if to prove my point, YouTube hasn’t banned him completely, nor removed the offending video. PewDiePie is free to post videos that “violate its premium ad partnership requirements”.
As with most things in life, you get what you pay for.
Elliott Haworth is business features writer at City PM