YouTube is one of the largest online video streaming platforms that enable users to have their own unique space. YouTube is a platform full of marketers and creators. A variety of creators focus on providing unique content to influence others and to make a strong reputation among peers. Majority of the people nowadays rely on the internet for almost everything. People now prefer recommendations or suggestions from other users over the internet instead of word of mouth. The usage of digital media is making people rely more on social media apps than ever. Whether it is latest fashion trends they want to search or some new camera gadgets, the internet covers it all. Creators on YouTube make a variety of review videos of trending products and services to make their voice heard and to create influence among others.
Although YouTube can be a very beneficial place for creators but one second of ignorance on the platform can lead to a lot of trolls. Recently, the problem that occurred targeted harassment rather than spamming the creators. A YouTuber named JT found himself a victim of large-scale harassment through translations for PewDiePie’s videos after he uploaded a video on the bad behavior in PewdiePie’s translations.
YouTube always knew about the possibility of this abuse within the previous rules and it even warned creators about the importance of reviewing contributions in a creator Academy post from 2017.
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Issues faced by creators due to community contributions
Recently, YouTube changed its policies of community contributions after the feature was misused by trolls for a harassment campaign. YouTube enabled community translations intending to help channels with huge fan-base to source translation work directly from the crowd instead of searching for it themselves. The Filipino fans were happy to translate their first YouTube creator’s titles, descriptions into language easily accessible to international fans without the need for any additional work from the team of YouTube or the Channel owner himself. With the previous policies, creators could review contributions and be enabled with the option to disable community contributions for specific videos or groups of videos but usually, most of the creators saw working themselves as the downside to this option so they simply found leaving the option enabled without review more easy for them.Although YouTube can be a very beneficial place for creators but one second of ignorance on the platform can lead to a lot of trolls. Recently, the problem that occurred targeted harassment rather than spamming the creators. A YouTuber named JT found himself a victim of large-scale harassment through translations for PewDiePie’s videos after he uploaded a video on the bad behavior in PewdiePie’s translations.
Response from YouTube to JT
The harassing titles quickly spread to other channels without even the creator’s knowledge. JT reported to YouTube via Twitter and they suggested to simply report the offending translations for review. JT confronted the YouTube account on Twitter to roll out an actual fix for these issues rather than asking creators to report it. With the support of the fans, JT pretty much convinced YouTube into taking more responsible action against these trolls which resulted in new policies for Community contributions.The new update launched by YouTube on community contributions
With YouTube’s new update, Channel owners can now manually approve each contribution and eliminate the risk of harassment translations. After the feature was misused, YouTube launched new policies specially designed to help creators with contributed translations to not publish the translations to YouTube until the channel owner approves them manually. This new policy makes it hard for trollers to sneak any sort of abusive or self-promoting translations into popular YouTube channels.YouTube always knew about the possibility of this abuse within the previous rules and it even warned creators about the importance of reviewing contributions in a creator Academy post from 2017.
Bottom Line
Despite the fact that most of the community contributors are there to ease creators by taking some work off of them but still all it takes is a little ignorance and all sort of abuse can happen. The regular reviews of contributions can help make the platform free from spam links or offensive language from translated content.
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