A court in the US has ruled that YouTube's algorithms are not racist in a case involving the removal of videos by black content creators

A US federal judge in California has dismissed a racial discrimination lawsuit filed against YouTube and its parent company Google by non-white content creators on the platform.

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The plaintiffs claimed that YouTube's recommendation algorithms unfairly restricted and even removed their content. However, the judge said that the complainants failed to prove discrimination by Google.

The ruling ended a three-year legal battle that began just months after the murder of George Floyd. The plaintiffs in the case were four YouTube video creators who claimed that the company's algorithms racially profiled their content. As a consequence, this results in a diminished audience.

In some cases, the creators claimed that the platform was shadow banning channels or removing content completely without any explanation. In their view, this was a violation of YouTube's policy guaranteeing race-neutral content moderation.

The plaintiffs' arguments failed to convince Judge Vince Chhabria. According to him, the creators relied on too few and weak examples. In particular, one creator said his make-up tutorial "how to look like Donald Trump" was unfairly removed.

However, after studying the example, Chhabria admitted the possibility of an algorithm error. The creator of the video mentioned the Ku Klux Klan in it and described the shade of Trump's makeup as "the colours of white supremacy". YouTube's algorithms may have made the wrong choice, but attorneys have not proven it was the result of racial discrimination.

Source: Gizmodo