YouTube

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The Internet's most popular video sharing site; owned by Google. Aggressively removing information about Covid-19 while promoting Covid vaccines.

 https://www.YouTube.com link
Started: 15 February 2005
Founders: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim

Owner: Alphabet Inc.
Constitutes: Website, Social media

YouTube is a video sharing website that allows "content creators" to earn money with their uploads. In 2021, it was attempting to promote acceptance of the COVID-19 jab by young people and heavily censoring alternative views.

History

Three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim — started YouTube in February 2005. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.

In November 2021, YouTube removed "dislike" buttons from their site, after corporate media had been heavily disliked during COVID-19. Jawed Karim, co-founder of YouTube, predicted the decline of the site following this decision.

Profitability

Google has build a network of the highest performance for the service since the acquisition; it remained free of charge for around 10 years and by 2022 can still be accessed in full without a paid subscriber account. At the end of 2017, Warren Shaeffer, in a blog post on the closing of the video platform vid.me, suggested, based on a remark of Susan Wojcicki in 2016, that Youtube "to this day is still likely operating at a loss". Based on initial growth rates, in 2015 it's database was estimated to be 660 Petabyte; other estimates put it at 500 Petabyte at the time. In 2020 YouTube's revenue was reported to be above 15 billion USD.

Content removal

Full article: YouTube/Censorship

File:YouTube Censorship.png

In 2016, YouTube announced that making "negative comments" about someone else and hurting their feelings might be considered sufficient grounds for the to censor content. In 2017, YouTube was reportedly faster as censoring content than Facebook or Twitter, taking down 90% of all content flagged within 24 hours.

Gradual redesign

As well as censoring content, YouTube is gradually adjusting to a more menu based system, together with other changes that use big data to suggest content to users rather than responding to their input.

Elsagate

Full article: Elsagate

Beginning in 2014, reaching a peak in 2017/2018, Youtube hosted videos geared towards very young children that depicted disturbing scenes and which became known as Elsagate. Youtube was forced to remove the content since there was common agreement that it is harmful. However, due to the massive distribution and monetization, Youtube must have been aware that their platform is used for this.

Incentives for small content creators

It has been reported that Youtube tries to incentivize small channels to make videos on one of four topics:

• Black lives matter
• Women's empowerment
• LGBTQ
• Drag Queens

The video would have to take a positive stand towards the matter and if selected after review, the creator would be eligible for up to 2400 Dollar of studio equipment and possibly a seminar for content creators.

Alternatives

Full article: Alt_Tech

YouTube on Wikispooks

Currently, Template:YouTubeVideo is available for embedding videos on this site. This may be replaced in time, but remains an easy way to add video content to the site. It is not yet deprecated and is still available for use.