We’ve had scandal after scandal about drill music, Nazis, terrorism and beheadings – yet YouTube continues to rake in money from advertising.
Now we’ve got communities of paedophiles thriving in the comment sections of seemingly innocent videos of children. These are videos you can find yourself watching within five clicks of the platform’s algorithmic recommendations – just as soon as you’ve sat through a pre-roll ad.
A few heavyweight advertisers, including Epic Games and Nestlé, have pulled their ads from YouTube in response to the news. But the question is why, in this era of corporate social responsibility, “brave brands” and brand purpose, more advertisers aren’t taking a stand and publicly ditching platforms that cause social harm.
It’s telling that it’s so difficult to get agencies to comment on the matter, but Richard Cable, head of content at Tribal Worldwide London, admits that although he thinks YouTube is “a wonderful thing”, we’re now past the point where the digital behemoths can “play cute” about being a platform, not a publisher.
“The longer YouTube delays a proper solution, the more the suspicion grows that they might not be in full control of their own platform,” Cable says, adding that taking their money elsewhere is the “best leverage” brands have to ensure their advertising appears next to safe content.
However, Graeme Douglas, chief strategy officer and co-founder at Bountiful Cow, insists that platforms such as YouTube aren’t “inherently bad”.
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“As long as they’re working hard to protect their users and eradicate negative and illegal content, brands will continue to work with them because they deliver the audiences they crave,” he says.
But is YouTube working hard to protect its users? Whilst it does work with organisations such as the Internet Watch Foundation to identify images of sexual abuse, the problems that allow unsafe content to appear across the platform are built into the foundations of the company’s business model. It’s a result of the algorithms designed to keep people watching, and the lack of human oversight over the content it allows advertising to appear against.
Both the NSPCC and ISBA have renewed calls for independent oversight of the big tech companies in response to the news, with ISBA stating: “we are ready to play our part in shaping whatever form of regulation is necessary to provide assurances to consumers, advertisers and Government.”
Elsewhere, Matt Whelan, director of product innovation at The Specialist Works, says that more agencies should be “proactively managing to mitigate the risk” to their clients (the agency pulled all advertising from YouTube in 2017 and now only uses a handcrafted whitelist of human-viewed content for all of its clients’ ads).
However, in Mediatel’s view – and as ISBA quite rightly said – this is no longer just an issue of brand safety, but one of social responsibility. Brands can no longer claim to be victims in this narrative whilst simultaneously funding these platforms without holding them to account.
