YouTube wants to earn on us in the name of “freedom of expression”. In practice, it is mainly “freedom of monetization”
In practice, this can be summarized in a few words: Amnesty for films that previously flew into the basket. A flagship example is a video entitled “RFK Jr. Delivers Sledgehammer Blows to Gene-Altering JABS” (RFK JR. Displays the crushing blows of vaccines changing genes “), in which the multi-minute argument combines sensational headlines and false claims about the mrna with a spectacular title-now legal YouTube, because it is allegedly more important for voters to see what the candidate is saying than that they hear disinformation.
A similar pass was received by a long podcast containing offensive statements directed at transgender people, which was considered acceptable, because this fragment was only a small fraction of the whole.
This is a radical correction of the course in relation to what happened in 2017.When advertisers withdrew budgets and Google cleaned the platform of everything that raised even a shadow of risk. Today, the interest of Big Techów is measured not at risk of losing the image, but with their range.
In the first quarter of 2025, YouTube earned $ 8.93 billion. From the ads themselves – by over 10 percent more than a year ago. It was the second largest engine growth engine. Such good results will be difficult to repeat if we have problems with aging society and more and more competitions of websites and platforms seeking the attention of the Internet user.
When the politicians after the victory of Donald Trump raised the “Conservative Censorship”, and the Antitrust Commission attacks Google for the advertising dominance, a cool calculation was performed in Mountain View. Giant He came to the conclusion that less content removal is more hours of viewing (more ads to display) and cheaper maintained moderation. Win-Win.
We observe the same mechanism at the rival. In January 2025, the finish line deleted the American Fact-Checking program and gave control to users using the Community Notes, because-as Mark Zuckerberg announced-“one percent of incorrectly removed posts are millions of victims of censorship.”
However, there is no evidence that such crowdsourcing is effectively filtering falsehood. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has shown that in the system from Platform X, which is very similar to that of the meta, misleading and harmful posts receive an average of thirteen times more views than the correction themselvesfor example, a false entry about the alleged distribution of registration forms to illegal immigrants was watched 74.8 million times.
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Why delete if you can earn on it?
Since it is cheaper to leave a movie or post than to pay for moderation teams and lose their income from advertising, The trend of pushing the limits of acceptability has also reached streaming.
From 17 June 2025, Amazon introduces ads to all Prime Video accounts, offering “silence” for an additional two to three dollars a month. The company argues that there will be less blocks than on traditional television, but it is the subscriber who now finances the same service twice.
Netflix, which has swore for years that the advertisement would destroy the impressions provided by streaming platforms, has already built a database of 94 million users in the plan with advertisements and is currently boasted experiment with “invisible” blocks created by AI. The spots are to visually blend with the series so that the viewer does not feel that he is just watching the advertisement.
The entire industry combines growing ad adding. The emarketer survey a few weeks ago shows that almost half of American subscribers of VOD services today pay for plans with advertisements – and they, not expensive premium packages, drive giants.
The collision of these numbers with user preferences is brutally. The global Oxford Internet Institute survey has shown that in every country surveyed most of the prefers of the platform free from hate and disinformation, and not absolute freedom of expression.
YouTube, on the other hand, plays a double role in this paradox. He looses the rules to stop the controversial clicks, and at the same time closes bypasses for ad-blockers and suspends accounts that block ads in Firefox or Opera. The user can choose: accept longer advertising breaks or pay for Premium, where he will also watch harmful and misleading content, but without advertising. It's a perfect spiral. The louder the movie, the more attention, and the more attention, the more expensive the advertising slot. In turn, the more expensive the slot, the greater the pressure for further loosening of the rules that attract controversial content.
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Big Techy love freedom … to earn
A political argument lurks in the background, but the bars with growing revenues are more important in quarterly balances. When YouTube announces almost a nine-billion quarter, Amazon mows subscribers with a silence fee, and Netflix releases AI-spots in the middle of the series, it becomes clear that Public interest is just a new bag, which can be thrown in everything that increases the number of views. This is not freedom of speech, but freedom for monetization.
If companies consistently optimize the algorithms in terms of the maximum number of advertising breaks, the logical consequence is quality erosion of public debate. Researchers from the University of Michigan warn that when the limit of tolerance moves from “quarter” to “half” of the film, the clickbait category becomes a de facto official genre. The consumer remains as a hostage, and the increase in Big Techów revenues is at the expense of information health health.
What can he stop this spiral? The EU DSA imposes on the platform an obligation to assess system risk, and the European Commission already checks whether the looser moderation of YouTube does not violate the new regulations. In the USA, the Federal Trade Commission is watching how Alphabet combines data with Google Search and YouTube ADS to maximize profit from controversial content. However, the regulatory bat is growing more slowly than the revenue curve. At this rate, it will be difficult to catch up the sensation supply created by the algorithms.
The history of moderation on YouTube comes a circle. From the fear of losing advertisers, for a period of raw blockades, to the moment when “half -” harmful “video becomes more valuable than completely reliable, but less sensational, which generates fewer views.
The common denominator of the changes is greed repainted to the rhetoric of freedom. Who in this case will pay the invoice for lowering the quality of public space? Users already pay their time and attention, and we will pay the rest as a society, when we realize that Clickbait is constantly winning with the truth.
Author: Grzegorz Kubera, Business Insider Polska journalist
