Starting in late 2011, YouTube made a program nicknamed "Deputy" to enable selective high-accuracy, high-volume users, Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), and Government Organisations (GOs) to report at higher volumes and accuracy by giving them access to tools and direct communication with YouTube Trust and Safety members. These users that joined the program would later become known as Trusted Flaggers (TFs) - YouTube's volunteers to clean up YouTube.
Very near the start of the program, TFs were given access to the "deputy" tool - an altered version of the search feature that allowed them to select up to 20 videos at a time to be reported under a single policy. Back in the days when rabbit holes and the use of SEO tagging heavily influenced search results, this tool worked wonders to pick up on abuse trends and report them en masse to YouTube. In about 5 seconds you could report 20 videos. Even better, there was a feature to
exclude previously reported videos from search results, enabling users to report without having duplicates!
Also near the very start of the program, TFs were allowed -
and encouraged - to escalate problems. Escalations were a way for TFs to raise up trends, abuse vectors that needed to be added to the community guidelines, and more.
Most importantly were the strike and channel escalations - where a TF would send an email detailing what they know about a video/channel that was removed, and what made it an inaccurate removal.
u/TrustedFlagger and I were most notable in our efforts on this front - TrustedFlagger on Twitter and myself on this very subreddit, long before I became a moderator here. Together we helped hundreds, if not thousands of users.
u/TrustedFlagger was removed from the program in 2018 after disagreements in how YouTube was handling certain types of abuse being reported and our ability to escalate strikes/terminations was removed shortly after that.
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- My Entry Into The Program
In September of 2016, I was invited to the YouTube Contributors (Heroes) Program - now defunct. While at the summit, I met a few of the TFs that were invited to the Contributors Program (when reporting was planned as a part of the program.) While chatting with them, I learned about the TF program and was intrigued, so I started reporting. I went from 4 reports with 25% accuracy at the time of being invited to the Contributors Program to just over 1,200 reports with 75% accuracy in December of 2017 - when I was invited to the TF Program.
Once I joined the program, I was able to see the actions (or inactions) taken by YouTube on videos I had reported in the past. After escalating a large number of videos that hadn't been handled correctly the first time around, I jumped to around 85% accuracy. I then learned the magic that was the Deputy tool. In the first year of using the tool, I jumped to over 45,000 reports with over 95% accuracy. This was the TF program at its prime.
I also learned that we were promised new tools in the future once developer time freed up.
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After a few months of being in the program, I (as well as the other TFs) was informed that our then Community Manager (CM) was stepping down and a new one was to be in place immediately after. No big deal - it was a smooth transition. A few months later, they too, were replaced and once again. This time, however, the CM stayed. It's now early 2018.
Shortly after this newest CM joined,
u/TrustedFlagger was removed from the program. Teams meetings stopped happening - where we would normally talk about trends, numbers, and policy changes. Communication slowed to a crawl, escalations started taking longer. Instead of a day or two, it was now around a week's turnaround.
In March of 2018, I was informed by my then recruiter that I was approved to join Google as a software engineer for a year-long contract starting in July 2018. In the second half of my contract, I was placed on the team that handled report tooling - including those for TFs. I excitedly told my friends from the TF program and they were even more excited -
they finally had a person to communicate with directly at YouTube again - except I wasn't allowed to do anything with the information they told me, per the CM's directions. While on this rotation I personally developed a new tool for the trusted flaggers - a tool to dump links to videos to report them en masse. The first new tool in over 6 years.
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At the end of July of 2019, I left Google and was reinstated in the TF program. Around the same time, just about all communications with the CM ceased. During 2020, near the start of the COVID outbreak in the US, our reports and escalations stopped being handled. Reports started taking months to be reviewed, and our escalations that were originally taking a week? They jumped to months. A few months later, we brought this up as most of us had over 200 videos outstanding for review, even more in escalations. We were told by our CM that 'we are reduced staff right now because of COVID', that 'these things will take some time, but we'll get more resources put towards your reports and escalations'.
It's worth noting that heavier automated removals were introduced around this time and that appeals success rates for videos jumped to almost 45%, per the Transparency Report data at that time.
Things
slightly improved for the next month or two. Reports were getting caught up, our
newest escalations were being handled again. In late 2020, however, we noticed it just stopped again. I personally had escalations that were outstanding for almost a full year at this point. We pointed it out and had radio silence in response until early February 2021.
We got an email titled "[YouTube Trusted Flagger Program] Updates". Cool, they are finally going to do something!
WRONG. We were told in this email that
"Since most Trusted Flaggers search for violative content using the main YouTube interface (www.youtube.com), on February 25th, we will deprecate the [
tools]."
Essentially we were told, 'well, since you aren't using the tools we made for you, we are just going to get rid of them'. The search tool didn't get much use because it was harder to find trends - abusers started to learn to vary their tags and titles to evade being caught. The link tool was a special use case for rabbit holes, which were hard to find. Of course they would get lesser usage - they weren't intended to be the only source of reports.
We raised major concerns with this, seeing as we would no longer have
any tools and would more or less be stuck reporting the same way an average user would. The CM agreed to a meeting to discuss it - except it wasn't a discussion. It was them telling us that we need to 'suck it up, this is how it is, get over yourselves.'
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Jump forward to a few weeks ago - hardly any of us are reporting anymore because we aren't getting communications. The few of us that still report videos are not getting reviews on our reports (I still have reports outstanding from Sep of 2020) and we gave one last-ditch effort to revive the program. We contacted Derek Slater. The man who goes before UK's parliament to say how much good the
Individuals TF program is doing for YouTube.
Multiple TFs personally emailed him, after his approval on Twitter, to explain what is going on with the program. The lack of communications, the lack of reports being handled, escalations being ignored. He replied saying he would investigate and get back to us within a week.
What he told us was a punch to the gut followed by an uppercut to the chin. He told us that
in February of 2021, shortly before our meeting about the tool removal, that the program was
changing direction - to prioritize NGO/GO reports and escalations. That individuals no longer had a CM -something our
former CM failed to mention back in February. That the tools were removed, not because of Individual TF disuse, but
because the NGO/GO did not use them. Ever. Not once.
The tools that only we used were removed because we were the only ones using them.
The best part about all of this? 200+ NGOs and 70+ GOs only reported
157,437 and 700 videos, respectively,
over the last four years. I singlehandedly did a third of that in 3 years. It takes 270
groups of people to do 3 times what a single person did.
During the same time frame, a total of 12+ Individual TFs have reported over
9.5 million videos. And they want to focus on NGOs and GOs? They want to prioritize
270 groups of people, a minimum
of 540 people, who have reported an average of 293 videos each, over 12+ users who reported an average of 814,100 each?
We're done. We're pissed. We're not taking this anymore. This is our last-ditch attempt to get this clusterfuck fixed. If not? Let the world know that YouTube is reaping what they sow. Especially you, Derek. The one who uses us as a defense against government accusations. How can you use us then drop us and think Individual TFs won't get angry? The ball's in your court now.
