A US federal judge in California has dismissed a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by non-white YouTube content creators against YouTube and its parent company Google.
These creators have claimed so The platform’s recommendation algorithms unfairly violated their content and even removed it. According to Reuters, the judge found that the plaintiffs had not sufficiently established discrimination by Google.
This decision ends a three-year legal battle that began shortly after the killing of George Floyd. The plaintiffs were four YouTube video creators who alleged that the company’s algorithms applied racial profiling to their content, resulting in a smaller audience. In some cases, the creators claimed that the company’s algorithms overshadowed channels or removed content without clear explanations.
They argued that these unequal restrictions on their content violated YouTube’s policy of ensuring racially neutral content moderation.
However, those arguments weren’t enough to convince Judge Vince Chhabria. This judge found that the authors relied on too few and weak examples. One example involved a YouTuber claiming his Donald Trump Look-Alike makeup tutorial was wrongfully removed.
After reviewing the sample, Chhabria said the company’s algorithm may have flagged the video for removal because the creator mentioned the Ku Klux Klan and described the shade of Trump’s makeup as white supremacist colors. Although YouTube’s algorithms may have made a wrong decision, the judge found that the lawyers could not prove that the removal was the result of racial profiling.