When Google took over Youtube in 2006, most of us had a feeling that everything would go downhill. First started the spam and the trolls, who were annoying, but at least they weren't abusive. Then I started noticing more and more hate speech and harassment happening in the YouTube comments. It continued to escalate until the harassment began to happen on a daily basis, especially to youtubers who are openly part of the LGBT+ community or racial minorities. Even if it wasn't the same user attacking you over and over again, the comment section would quickly fill with people attacking your appearance, your sexuality, your gender, etc. Blocking them only sent them to find another victim or convinced them to create a new profile to evade the block and continue the harassment.



Today, it's gotten no better, perhaps even worse. In the photo I have given examples of hate speech and harassment that came from only ONE video. Every day I come across hundreds of comments similar to these, or much worse.

http://40.media.tumblr.com/13d37d77004df9e328dbbb76978fc8a3/tumblr_nleyzhGHjs1tviq7fo1_1280.png

They range from personal attacks to suggestions of genocide or asking someone to kill themselves, and they're all examples of what happens when people are allowed to hide behind anonymity to speak their mind. YouTube's only solution was forcing people to use Google+ profiles but even that has done nothing to stop the hatred, and all in all was just an attempt for them to make Google+ at least decently popular like Facebook.

YouTube has community guidelines and terms of services to cover themselves from lawsuits, but the fact that they ignore it and don't even look at the things that are being reported proves that they don't care. We need to show YouTube that we don't think that's acceptable and that they need to step up their game or lose their audience to other streaming sites.

Keep in mind that I'm not asking anyone to give up free speech. I'm not even asking anyone to give up hate speech, even though that is not protected under the free speech law. I'm asking that YouTube stops with their lying and either enforces their community guideline policy or gets rid of it altogether so new users aren't tricked into thinking they are going to a safe site. People have the right to know that they are going to a site where they will potentially be harassed, threatened, belittled and triggered by hate speech.