Utah video maker claims YouTube is flagging clean content

CEDAR HILLS – YouTube recently came under fire for accidentally allowing inappropriate content to be aimed at children.  They’ve taken steps to fix that, but, some content creators in Utah are wondering if YouTube is overreacting.

Branden Bingham  has around 110 thousand subscribers to his channel “This Is How We Bingham.” He posts videos that show him spending time with his family, doing services acts and watching Christmas devotionals.  He says, “What we’re trying to do is fill the void of good, wholesome content on the internet.”

However, about a month ago, some of his videos were demonetized and he was told they had “content not appropriate for advertisers.”  He submitted them for manual review, but, “Recently, we had a couple of our videos that we submitted for manual review, which was just a nightly step in the process at this point, come back as having been manually reviewed, watched by a human, and confirmed to have content that was not suitable for advertisers,” Bingham says.

This seemed odd to him, since one of the videos showed his family baking cookies and giving them to a neighbor. So, he checked YouTube’s guidelines.  “For the life of me, I could not figure out why I was in violation of any of them.”

Bingham says he hasn’t been given clear feedback as to why his videos were demonetized, but he believes YouTube is overreacting to criticism over a controversy called Elsagate, which happened when video makers made inappropriate and sometimes graphic material and got around YouTube’s measures so they could market them to kids.  Bingham says, “There have been some people under the guise of of a family vlog that have actually been putting terrible filth out there, bullying their own kids and doing all kinds of inappropriate things.  In an effort [to fix it] YouTube has really overreacted the other way.”

YouTube issued a statement to KSL, saying, “Over the last few months, we’ve used the signals from creator appeals to help improve the machine learning technology that determines whether a video is suitable for ads. Our recent update, for example, decreased the number of impacted videos by 30%. We know it’s important to get this right, and it’s a huge focus for our teams.