‘Create With Care’: YouTube encourages diverse, inclusive content
It’s time we discuss about the time we spend on YouTube, and what that means to the society at large.
YouTube as a video platform has been looking at the ways it can turn the content into content that is more sensitive, more inclusive, more representative of the Indian population and the world, and it’s interesting to find out what that means for India as a whole – how a tech giant like YouTube can make that happen, how they can work with creators to make that transpire, and fundamentally what ‘more inclusive’ means, especially for people like us who are consuming the content on the other end.
Is this a platform where we can contribute in if we find something that according to us is not inclusive?
Does YouTube listen to our grievances?
YouTube has unveiled #CreateWithCare campaign to educate and empower creators about building and nurturing an open, inclusive community on the platform. The campaign unites 30 leading YouTube creators, across 8 languages, from across the country, who have pledged to develop content that is mindful of diversity and respectful of different cultures, identities, and demographics to continue welcoming all audiences and giving emerging creators an open platform to find their unique voice.
YouTube obviously has grown by leaps and bounds, and it has managed to gain in numbers during lockdown in the last two years. YouTube and videos are now becoming a gateway to the internet in India. To consider the internet cup of India, it’s either half full or half empty depending on the way it’s looked at. India comprises of ostensibly 1.2-1.4 billion people, and at this point in time, the internet reaches out to over 600 million people.
So, overwhelmingly, a large part of those 600 million-plus people are consuming videos on YouTube. In fact, a lot of them enter the internet first by clicking on the YouTube logo or the other video platforms. And India has been blessed as a country for all the tailwinds that it has witnessed because of the telecom revolution – the telecom companies coming up with affordable plans, and making data or contents easily accessible.
Prior to 2013 or 2014, YouTube and the internet was a metro phenomenon. During that time, there were only a 100 million people that were connected to the internet. So, in these past 6-7 years, YouTube has tremendously grown.
“The first set of growth beyond these metros was witnessed in some of the south Indian languages. We really saw states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana pick up this entire YouTube phenomenon. Then, South India didn’t look back ever since,” Satya Raghavan, Director, YouTube partnership in India said.
Because of the entire telecom revolution that happened in 2017, a certain amount of blooming of some of the other languages could be seen. So, languages like Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati started to emerge as the next frontier of languages. And as a result, the language of YouTube, today, can be considered as our mother tongue.
At this point of time, there isn’t a corner of India where people are not creating or consuming contents on YouTube. We see this journey having a long runway to the future.
Moreover, there are a lot of women creators today, much more than we thought there would be as time progressed, but it’s needed a lot more. Last year, a program was run in Tamil Nadu called SHE CREATES by YouTube to encourage women creators to put their best foot forward, and to help them get inspired by other creators. The global number of male creators on YouTube as of 2021, according to a website named Omnicore, is 56%, and that of the female creators is 44%.
On being asked about the points to keep in mind while creating content more diverse and sensitive for the audience base, a senior creator said, “We feel that it’s a huge responsibility since many people are watching us, but at the same time, it’s also a basic necessity to ensure that we’re making content in a way that considers the sensitivities of people from all walks of life.
And inclusivity for me comes from the fact that since many years, there’s been this constant portrayal of Us Vs Them, and this othering of people who are deemed to be ‘different.’ And hence on our channel we ensure that no one is excluded or talked about in a way that is different solely on the basis of their orientation, caste or disabilities.
And also we ensure that we don’t fall for the classic trope of making the minorities the butt of our jokes. We feel that comedy should never be at the expense of someone’s identity.”
Basically, as a creator grows, he/she must be more sensitive towards the content that’s created. YouTube is actually one of the very few platforms which take these initiatives to help creators curate better content and help the society at large.
In terms of surveillance, on the back end, YouTube is constantly cleaning up the system from contents that might be misogynistic or casteist or offensive to either sexual or religious minorities. Fundamental to that are YouTube’s community guidelines. There are, currently, 21 community guidelines and these are being constantly evolving, and are being reviewed time and again.
As we understand, audiences will change, more languages will emerge, so YouTube constantly needs to keep these guidelines updated as well. For example, if a creator uses abusive or vulgar language, then there is a community guideline on it as well. But, context, for that matter, is more important. A word used in a certain context is more offensive than a word used in a different context.
Fundamental to how YouTube then take action and enforce it is their heavy investment, in what they call their 4r framework – one of the pillars of that is to reduce ‘bad’ content from YouTube, and a lot of that actually happens through using AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) technologies, and almost 99% of the content that is actually taken down is even before someone has viewed the video.
If, for example, there is a piece of content that has run afoul of their community guidelines, their AI and ML technologies will 99% of the time take it away even before someone has seen a single view on that video. So it’s that amount of safeguard that YouTube build.
On being asked if there is any kind of initiative that YouTube has taken in order to bring in different kinds of creators, to empower the creators to be able to create more and better, Satya Raghavan said, “YouTube has been helping journalists, now, to do better on the platform; it has been helping independent digital newsrooms do better on YouTube, and through many other ways in which they can define inclusivity. Either be it content created by and for the LGBTQIA+ creators and audiences. We periodically run a programme called PRIDE ACADEMY where we work with creators, and educate pride creators how they can do better; we hear them talk about their experiences, and they are then able to share that stories with many other people. And more initiatives even for people with disabilities, and on audiences and creators from a certain geography like the Northeast of India has always been our focus.”
Besides, if we push the envelope a little further, we find that while there are those people who are lucky enough to have access to lights, a decent phone camera, a good internet connection that they can start with and eventually get stronger and more confident to build the equipment in order to be able to do better editing, videography, etc., but a large part of our country functions out of its low-end phones, deprived of making good quality videos etc.
YouTube has seen a beautiful movement where a lot of cooking contents is being made out of our villages. There are a lot of creators in the villages, today, who are doing remarkably well by posting their raw, unedited videos. People, in fact, are surprisingly going gaga over these unfiltered videos from the villages. It’s astounding. I just love watching these “village cooking” videos to while away my free time.
Effectively, if you’re someone who wants to get started with YouTube irrespective of who you’re, where you’re from, as long as you have a phone and some sort of internet connection, you can get started in no time.
And with YouTube, you don’t have to, unlike television, feel helpless as a consumer of content; you can, actually, do something about it if you find that the content that you’re watching is not inclusive, and it’s offensive to you or a particular group of people. You can use these various mechanisms made available to you by YouTube to flag it to them, to look at it.
And it’s really by the power of the subscribers and the users of YouTube that that difference can be made.
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