- YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was recently interviewed on 60 minutes where she revealed a few milestones and the company’s plans to address hateful content
Recently, Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes on CBS interviewed YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to learn how the company is planning to address hateful content on the platform. Wojcicki said that she limits the amount of time that her five children use YouTube. And she only allows them to use the YouTube Kids platform.
Wojcicki was originally the landlord of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when the search giant was still in its infancy. Page and Brin hired her as Google employee #16 and she worked there as a marketing manager. Google bought YouTube based on Wojcicki’s recommendation for over $1.6 billion in 2006. And eight years later, she was named CEO of YouTube with a goal of making it profitable. Now YouTube is valued at $160 billion.
Wojcicki revealed that people spend 1 billion hours watching videos on YouTube every day. Plus YouTube now hits 500 hours of video uploaded every single minute. Over a billion people to listen to music on YouTube every month. And YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world after Google itself.
Unfortunately, YouTube has been used as a tool for spreading conspiracy theories. And YouTube also generates ad revenue from that content. Plus YouTube also recently agreed to pay $170 million as a settlement for targeting children with ads.
Stahl asked Wojcicki whether a politician can lie on YouTube.
“For every single video I think it’s really important to look at it. Politicians are always accusing their opponents of lying. That said, it’s not okay to have technically manipulated content that would be misleading. For example, there was a video uploaded of Nancy Pelosi. It was slowed down just enough that it was unclear whether or not she was in her full capacity because she was speaking in a slower voice,” replied Wojcicki. “The title of the video actually said drunk, had that in the title. And we removed that video.”
YouTube removed 9 million videos in the last quarter alone.
