YouTube reportedly ignored extremism in order to boost engagement

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A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Bergen details in damning specificity how YouTube has allowed extremist content to run rampant on its site. According to the report, YouTube executives, including CEO Susan Wojcicki, repeatedly ignored warnings from YouTube employees regarding extreme and misleading videos gaining popularity on the site. This was done reportedly for "fear of throttling engagement."

Reportedly, "scores" of YouTube and Google employees raised concerns about incendiary content on YouTube. Some also offered solutions—one engineer suggested removing videos from recommendations that were "close to the line" of the company's takedown policy, while another employee wanted to track toxic videos in a spreadsheet to monitor how popular they became over time. YouTube did not take these employees up on their suggestions and continued to turn a blind eye to many types of extreme content.

While none of these rebuttals seem to be documented on paper as official policy, employees were reportedly discouraged from being proactive. YouTube lawyers told employees who were not assigned to moderation tasks to not research toxic content on their own.

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