Age-restricted YouTube pool exposed by 78-minute Mega Man documentary [Updated]

A YouTube creator has gone on the offensive after encountering an increasingly common problem on the platform: moderation and enforcement that leaves creators confused by the logic and fallacy of the monetization potential of their videos.

The issue focuses on an old YouTube video host whose content is popular among the retro gaming enthusiasts among the Ars Technica staff. The creator, using the online handle “Summoning Salt”, tells the history of the speed records of various classic games. His over an hour analyzes show how different players approach older games and exploit various bugs. The games in question are typically cartoonish 2D fare rather than violent or M-rated titles.

On Friday, Summoning Salt took to social media to claim that his final 78-minute documentary on 1989’s Mega Man 2, which went live in mid-September, is “age-related” by YouTube’s moderation system. Oddly enough, about a week ago, the video had been age-restricted, only for YouTube to give in to the creator’s appeal and claim that the restriction was placed incorrectly.

For example, Summoning Salt was surprised on Friday when she heard that the video was regardingage restriction, which he believes severely limits a creator’s ability to monetize content on YouTube. An age restriction flag works against content creators in two ways: it limits the ad pool that can run in pre-roll and midview breaks, and it essentially shuts the door on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which would otherwise restrict Summoning Salt’s content to new ones. viewers.

Remember, this is Mega Man 2 we talk about

YouTube’s initial announcement didn’t clarify which moderation flag is Summoning Salt’s latest video — a video documenting the 18-year history of people playing and exploiting the NES game. Mega Man 2, embedded above, had activated. His call eventually led to a response from YouTube’s moderation team: “explicit language in certain parts.” As Summoning Salt explained, the video features a three-second burst of six F words taken straight from the microphone of a Twitch streamer during a passionate gameplay moment.

Summoning Salt, a fast-growing creator, took its analytics tools to the microsecond level and searched other unlimited YouTube content in the gaming category to see if its video’s percentage of swearing was per capita (0.16 percent). exceeded. He immediately found an unlimited sample from another popular retro-minded channel, Angry Video Game Nerd, which had nearly double the swearing in a video a twelfth closer in script. (It’s unclear how many of AVGN’s videos, which are famous with curse words, are marked with age restrictions.)

Ultimately, Summoning Salt points to YouTube’s unclear recommendations to content creators for content as curse words. According to YouTube’s own rules, the line between “moderate profanity” (allowed in YouTube’s unlimited videos) and “strong profanity” comes down not only to a specific choice of words, but also to frequency, and YouTube is only suggesting that the limit is exceeded when reaching a threshold of ‘used in every sentence’ or having certain swear words appear in prominent moments such as the first 30 seconds of a video or as text in a thumbnail.

Summoning Salt noted that the moderation team initially responded with a “full review” in about 40 minutes, less than the length of the entire video. Such a quick review process involved an automatic moderation system using voice analysis to record the number of swear words, and Summoning Salt told Ars via email that YouTube has tools to automatically mute what it detects as offensive content, but YouTube doesn’t match them. automatically in the event of age restriction disputes, and using built-in auto-mute tools does not necessarily reverse the damage done by age restriction moderators. This keeps creators out of the revenue circuit once YouTube raises such a flag. He also told Ars that in the past his videos have only been restricted by YouTube due to copyright flags on recorded music, which he has no problem with.