YouTube

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

YouTube, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, is a global video-sharing platform and one of the most visited websites in the world. Acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube has since become the dominant platform for sharing videos on the internet.

YouTube

Basic Information
Release Year	2005
Product Type	Video sharing and streaming
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://youtube.com

YouTube's business model is built around advertising revenue, with creators earning money through ad views, subscriptions, and other monetization options. The platform hosts a wide range of content, including music videos, tutorials, news, vlogs, and live streams. YouTube has also begun offering subscription services, such as YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, for ad-free experiences, exclusive content, and live television.

YouTube has faced criticism and regulatory scrutiny on multiple fronts. Concerns have been raised about content moderation policies, the platform's role in the spread of misinformation, and its impact on user privacy, particularly in relation to data collection practices. Additionally, YouTube has been under fire for its algorithms, which some argue promote harmful or divisive content to maximize engagement.

Consumer Impact Summary

• User Freedom: Questionable; rampant bots and Elsagate suggest negligent moderation, yet at the same time, content moderation can be quite excessive for users as well.
• User Privacy: Poor; Since August 2025, accessing mature content without identification is a gamble. User data is also sold to advertisers.
• Business Model: Excessive advertising, YouTube Premium, YouTube Premium Lite
• Market Competition: Despite several platforms that follow its niche, such as Odysee, PeerTube, and DailyMotion, they provide no significant competition.

Incidents

Restricting users that don't share their personal information

Main article: Youtubes Requirement for Government ID

On July 30, 2025, in response to the UK Online Safety Act, YouTube announced a verification update that asks for either a government-issued ID, a photo, or credit card, otherwise they could not access content.

YouTube will estimate the age of a user from various sources, including the videos watched, and will ask for previously mentioned personal information when it believes that the user falls below 18.

Advertising overload on YouTube

Main article: Advertising overload

Advertisements are YouTube's primary source of revenue, but because the platform is run by a publicly shared parent company, it is forced to grow its revenue by any means necessary. This has led to advertisements becoming more pervasive on the platform such as an increasing number of spaces for static ads, longer ad breaks (which some users have documented being longer than the videos they watch, and most prevalent on YouTube TV, ) increased ad frequency in videos, and poorer quality ads. Practices are also put into place in order to force non-paying users into seeing these ads as well, such as subscription-gating playing videos in the background.

Furthermore, even if a user pays for YouTube premium, they do not necessarily receive an ad-free experience — they may still see ads within the video they watch, such as sponsored segments.^{[citation needed]} YouTube has added a "skip" feature, but it has been reported that this does not work consistently.

Refusal to handle malicious ads

A common phenomenon on YouTube's advertisements is content that is mature and/or malicious in nature. The content of these advertisements include pornography, false advertising, scams, and far more. Rather than working towards clearing these ads, or acknowledging this advertising content that has been harming consumers on the platform, YouTube moderation has only cut the revenue for these videos that attempt to call out these ads, which has been known to make said videos be less-showcased.

Demonetization and censorship

Since at least 2016, YouTube has had an extensive record of censoring content that is demonetized. Within understandable circumstances, legitimately malicious or offensive videos would be demonetized and should not be shown on the platform; however, how videos are considered to be demonetized has had a harmful impact upon both viewers and content creators. Transgender creators on YouTube, for example, have experienced unfair censorship via demonetization since 2018. Content creators affected by this unfairly balanced moderation via algorithms have dubbed these events as "adpocalypses".

Irresponsibly automated moderation

When YouTube integrated the ability to take down videos via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), they decided to often handle take-down requests in an automated manner. This automation has led to an excess in fraudulent DMCA take-downs of content, even going so far as to have Bungie call out YouTube in a legal case for their negligence. These take-down requests have ranged from users impersonating corporations, to users impersonating other users.

Crackdown against ad-blockers

The prevalence of advertising on the platform, coupled with the repeated appearance of harmful and deceptive ads within YouTube's advertising system, has led a significant number of users to employ ad-blocking tools to facilitate their viewing experience.

In response, Google has initiated technical countermeasures to limit the functionality of these tools. This has resulted in an ongoing cycle where ad-blocker developers adapt to new restrictions, and the platform subsequently implements further detection methods. A key strategy in this effort involves the implementation of advanced code integrity checks designed to ensure ad content is delivered to viewers.

However, these measures typically exhibit limited efficacy before ad-blocking tools develop new methods of circumvention, a dynamic that some analysts suggest exemplifies the Streisand effect.

Additional strategies have involved the integration of advertisements directly into video streams. This approach has impaired the functionality of certain browser extensions, including SponsorBlock, a community-driven tool designed to skip sponsored segments within videos. The extension relies on user-submitted timestamps to identify these segments; its effectiveness is significantly reduced when personalized advertisements, which vary in duration and placement for each viewer, are embedded into the stream itself.

Google has publicly acknowledged implementing code that degrades the user experience for individuals using ad blockers. This includes introducing artificial latency, which has been documented to slow page load times, an measure that also affected users of the Firefox browser.

Further viewing: 

Offline video DRM

The YouTube Mobile application permits users with a YouTube Premium subscription to download videos for offline viewing. However, the downloaded content is protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) that requires the application to establish an online connection with YouTube's servers at least once every 48 hours to maintain playback functionality. This requirement is not prominently featured on the primary YouTube Premium marketing page and is detailed instead within the platform's support documentation.

Universal DRM testing and violation of Creative Commons licences

YouTube on TV is an HTML5 web interface from Google to allow supported devices — such as game consoles which do not have a native YouTube app — to view content via YouTube. An A/B experiment has begun which protects all video and audio content regardless of bitrate or format via the YouTube on TV platform with DRM. One Xbox 360 user reported that the YouTube on TV functionality stopped working as a result of the DRM implementation^{[citation needed (18 Aug 2025)]}. A number of content creators license their work uploaded to YouTube via the Creative Commons licenses. The universal implementation of DRM to restrict a users ability to exercise their rights granted by the license is a violation of the aforementioned licenses.

Paywalling standard browser features

Another premium feature of the YouTube mobile app is the ability to play videos in the background. Without a premium subscription, neither the app nor a web browser will play YouTube videos in the background. However, the default HTML5 video player supports this with no extra effort needed from the developer.^{[citation needed]}

Removal of the dislike count on videos

On 10 November 2021, YouTube removed the public dislike count from all of its videos. Creators are still be able to view dislike counts on their videos through the YouTube Studio website and app.

According to YouTube, this was implemented after user testing revealed that users were less likely to feel incentivized to actively try and manipulate the dislike count on videos if the dislike count was not visible to them. This spurred the creation of "Return YouTube Dislike" by Dmitry Selivanov, a third-party web browser extension to expose the dislike count again. YouTube discontinued the related API, upon which the extension relied, on 13 December 2021. From thereon "Return YouTube Dislike" switched "to using a combination of archived dislike stats, estimates extrapolated from extension user data and estimates based on view/like ratios for videos whose dislikes weren't archived and for outdated dislike archives."

Anti-features and dark patterns to trick the user into staying longer

YouTube has introduced multiple features that are designed to make the user stay longer on the platform and watch more videos than they intended, thus increasing ad revenue. They come at the cost of making it harder to watch the content the user actually wants to watch.

This includes the introduction of a feature called Autoplay that resumes playback of another video (chosen by the platform) immediately after the current one ends (after a delay of about 8 seconds), in the hope that the user gets hooked and continues to watch. By default, this feature is enabled, and the user is not immediately informed that it is enabled.

Another feature like this is the inclusion of irrelevant videos in search results.^{[citation needed]} If the user searches for something and scrolls down the list too far, the likelihood of them finding what they were looking for decreases since results are generally sorted by what the platform deems relevant to the search query. Hence, if the user scrolls down too far, it is likely that they give up and leave the site. Therefore YouTube started to add random videos out of its recommendation list for the user into the search results, increasing the probability that they see something they will click and watch.^{[citation needed]} This makes it much harder and more inconvenient to find relevant search results since the user has to scroll past all the noise that is designed to distract them. It also means that a video that is actually relevant is less likely to be discovered — especially if it still has low view counts — since unrelated videos are promoted in search in its place.

High number of bots

Upon the initial publication of a video, the comment section is frequently targeted by coordinated automated accounts.^{[citation needed]} These accounts often engage in disruptive activities, including attempts to direct users to external scams or artificially inflate engagement.^{[citation needed]}

These accounts commonly employ identifiable tactics, such as:

• Utilizing profile pictures of popular public figures or suggestive imagery.
• Reposting highly-liked comments from the same video, sometimes with minor edits if the comment gains significant traction.
• Posting generic comments that are irrelevant to the video's content or the channel's focus.

Despite consistent feedback from content creators and the broader community, effective platform-level measures to automatically detect and mitigate this activity appear limited.^{[citation needed]} Consequently, content creators and their moderation teams are often required to manually review and remove these comments on a per-video basis to maintain the quality and safety of their community interactions.^{[citation needed]}

Crackdown against third-party front-ends

Since the beginning of 2025, users have been reporting issues with 3rd-party frontends accessing the platform. For FreeTube, there has been a heightened amount of people receiving 403 errors associated with IP blocks when attempting to view videos via this frontend.

References