Digital Down Low: Wall Street Journal antagonizes YouTube again

The Wall Street Journal has lashed out toward YouTube and its users once again, but this time, instead of focusing on tearing down one content creator, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, the news reporting publication has gone after the website itself and its advertising policies. In a recent WSJ article about YouTube advertising on racist videos, WSJ acted suspiciously and pulled out examples from videos that made little to no money. h3h3productions discusses that article in great detail, but be warned, multiple slurs will be shown onscreen.

What Ethan Klein of h3h3productions explains is that not only does WSJ show extremely well-paying advertisers on its “screenshots” of videos with barely any views, they are barely even making any money (which he outlines more in another video). For about 160,000 views, the uploader made $12. This doesn’t seem to add up with huge, well-paying advertisers being played over the video repeatedly. Additionally, multiple examples were pulled from a single video, which had somehow bypassed the YouTube advertisement censoring system, and those were essentially used as evidence that YouTube had been playing many ads over many racist videos.

While YouTube’s censorship in restricted mode of LGBT videos was concerning, this event of an advertisement being played over offensive videos should not necessarily be taken as a systemic issue throughout the entire company of YouTube. While it is indeed news and should be fixed if YouTube wants to abide by its moral policy, the event is probably — and hopefully — a minor slip-up in the system, if it even is as dramatic as the WSJ claims it to be.

YouTube still has a long way to go in terms of how it deals with certain social and content-related issues, but every now and then someone — seemingly recently the WSJ — comes along and creates some drama that doesn’t need to be created. Not only is that poor reporting, it is often damaging to content creators and communities. After all, the WSJ itself should certainly have better things to do.

Marco Omta is a sophomore studying music production. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Does the Wall Street Journal have anything better to do than harass YouTubers? Email Marco at mo183714@ohio.edu.