The multi-year initiative is one of several actions taken by the platform in an aim to support the Black community, as well as a fundraising livestream taking place on Saturday.
In her latest letter to the YouTube community, CEO Susan Wojcicki said: “We’ll host a live stream fundraising event produced by YouTube Originals (YTO), ‘Bear Witness, Take Action.’
“The YTO will bring together creators, artists, influential public figures and prominent activist voices for roundtable discussions and musical performances, with donations benefiting the Equal Justice Initiative.”
The boss also went on to write that YouTube’s Spotlight channel will “highlight racial justice issues” throughout the month of June, including “the latest perspectives from the Black community on YouTube alongside historical content, educational videos and protest coverage”.
Today I updated the @YouTube community on the events of the past few months. We're committed to amplifying Black voices, including a new $100M content fund, and to examining how our products and policies work for the Black community. Read more here: https://t.co/VjNrKdBqco
— Susan Wojcicki (@SusanWojcicki) June 11, 2020
Later on in the blog post, Susan added that YouTube had removed more than 100,000 videos and 100m comments for hate and harassment in the last quarter alone.
The platform introduced new updates to its hate speech policy in 2019, which included the banning of supremacist content.
“Building on our work over the past several years, we’re taking this moment to examine how our policies and products are working for everyone — but specifically for the Black community — and close any gaps.
“More broadly, we will work to ensure Black users, artists, and creators can share their stories and be protected from hateful, white supremacist, and bullying content,” Susan said.
She also says that YouTube believes Black lives matter and that “we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism”.
“I’m committed to listening — to Black employees at YouTube, to Black creators, to Black artists, to leaders in the Black community, and to Black users who tune in to YouTube every day,” Susan writes.
On coronavirus, the YouTube CEO revealed that the platform’s health information panels, which appear on the homepage, videos and in searches, have been shown to users more than 200 billion times.
It was also announced that when users search YouTube for coronavirus topics, on average, 94% of the videos in the top 10 results are from “high authority channels”.
The figures are part of YouTube’s work to tackle misinformation on the platform, with over 200,000 videos removed from the site to date for violating its policies on “harmful medical information”.
Elsewhere, Susan said that YouTube is encouraging creators to in other forms of monetisation, citing “fluctuations with the advertising market”.
It also follows the announcement of new livestream alerts when viewers have purchased creator merch, and statistics which revealed that the number of channels who earned the majority of their revenue from products such as Super Chat and memberships had increased by over 40% since January.
The full letter is available to view online on the YouTube’s official blog.
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