YouTube is updating policies regarding "Harmful and Dangerous" challenges/pranks

[Galactic Druid]

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/1063345?hl=en

In light of the recent "Birdbox Challenge", in which youtubers are doing various things blindfolded, including walking through traffic and even driving, YouTube finally decided maybe they should be doing something about this kind of content on their platform.

I personally think this has been a long time coming. YouTube has been profiting of these kinds of trends for a while with no real effort to control them, and I've always felt a lot of prank channels are disgusting at best. If anything, I kind of feel YouTube isn't doing enough, even with these new guidelines. Things like the "exposing gold digger" pranks, channels like Roman Atwood who do nothing but try to get under people's skin, and pretty much everything to do with the Paul brothers come to mind for me.

I'm curious what other people think about the situation, and there's no online community I respect more than my fellow elliers. I personally feel YouTube still isn't doing enough to curate its content. What about you guys?

[Tolvo]

This is really good to hear, though how they'll enforce it is another matter since Youtube already barely enforces their TOS as is. I'd like to see them actually enforce this.

[TheGlyphstone]

I'm with Tolvo. This would not be the first time they've claimed to put in a new policy banning bad stuff, then completely failed to follow through - or worse, selectively followed through depending on the creator's ad-revenue.

[Galactic Druid]

That is a concern of mine as well, that the rules are really just there so that in the unlikely event someone, say, I don’t know, eats a tide pod, some PR person can point and say “look, we had rules for this! Not our fault!”

[Yukina]

That is a concern of mine as well, that the rules are really just there so that in the unlikely event someone, say, I don’t know, eats a tide pod, some PR person can point and say “look, we had rules for this! Not our fault!”

Same here. It's similar to why schools tend to have no tolerance policies regarding bullying.

[Nachtmahr]

Yep, it's important to see whether or not they actually follow through with this. It's also important to make sure that they don't take it too far. It's safe to say that they should have a stronger policy when it comes to people doing utterly reckless and often illegal things on their channels, for the world to see. It's so easy to get a ton of views doing something utterly insane, and it really shouldn't be.

It's hard to say where the line was drawn for me - I'd like to say it was around the time Sam Pepper started being a sex-pest in public for views, but then someone did a "social experiment" wearing a traditional Muslim garb while throwing a briefcase at people, yelling.. Well, you've probably guessed what they were yelling. Those videos should all be held against them in a court of law, not be examples for people to replicate to gain their 15 minutes of infamy online. Having lax restrictions actively encourages overstepping certain boundaries, and while I'm as pro free-artistic-expression as they come, there does come a point where even the most hardcore liberal has to draw a line. That line is definitely when you put other people in real physical danger because of your reckless behavior.

But, as said, it really depends on whether or not they actually pull through, or if they do what they usually do - a mass-flagging that ends up taking down as much benign content as it does harmful content, destroy some perfectly healthy and uncontroversial careers and then call it a day.

[Galactic Druid]

It’s kind of a tricky thing, because there’s a lot of grey area for drawing that line, but I do agree it does need to be done.

I don’t know who many of these people are, as I get a lot of my YouTube news from a reddit thread, but a few kinds of things I can think of that I wouldn’t mind seeing gone would be;

A prank artist that did several ‘social experiements’ in which he would go up to couples (people that were walking along holding hands, or other signs they might be together) and do stuff like put his arm around the girl and try to walk off with her, ask her out, or even pinch her ass in one, to see the boyfriend’s reaction, with the usual “Dude it’s only a prank bro!” Anytime someone put their arms up.

A couple ‘social experiments’ that got called out for being fake, that were attempting to cast certain groups in a bad light had they not need called out. One guy was setting up a prank where he asked a woman out, she declined, he dropped his wallet or put away a wad of bills or something that showed how much money he had, Suddenly, she’;s magically interested and they go out for drinks, where she orders a bunch of expensive stuff, and is ditched at the last minute when he asks for split checks and informs her he ‘doesn’t date gold diggers’. There was another who’se setup was he was parking a car with a Trump bumper sticker in a ‘black neightborhood’, and people (who were hired, not some random happening) showed up with bats, tie irons, etc to smash it up. I really wonder how content like that is going to be handled under these guidelines.

I actually forgot about that last mass-flagging incident. It’s sad, so many decent creators seem to get hit the worst, while the absolute worse parts of YouTube seem untouchable.

[Nachtmahr]

It’s kind of a tricky thing, because there’s a lot of grey area for drawing that line, but I do agree it does need to be done.

There is, and that's why I'm kind of worried that updates like these might be overly restrictive and become an obstacle for perfectly benign creators - but I'd say that when you're causing real distress in public or putting other people at risk, or otherwise doing anything that'd be considered illegal in court, that's where the line should be drawn. So no random victims of "pranks" or "social experiments" (I hate that misnomer - YouTube pranksters aren't social scientists) that could potentially cause distress or real harm to someone, and no driving on public roads while blindfolded.