In the past month, a popular YouTuber by the name of CoryxKenshin created a video titled “YouTube: Racism and Favoritism.” This video gained a whopping 7.8 million views in only a few days. In the video, Cory discussed the discrimination he has experienced on his YouTube platform over the past thirteen years.
Cory goes on to explain how he refuses to stay silent and is disappointed in the YouTube team as a whole for letting this go on for so long. This has striked up many other big name YouTubers to also speak out against YouTube.
Some, purposely making inappropriate videos or completely going against YouTube’s policies to see what happens to their content. Others made videos speaking out about how their friends have been treated or even themselves through their careers. This sparked up a lot of controversy against YouTube, making people question: What is going on?
AJ Homequest, a senior at Troy High School, expresses their concern of the trending racism on the platform, “I know there was a video that was posted on I believe Cory’s page that got taken down but it was on a bigger YouTuber’s channel–maybe Jack [Jacksepticeye] or Marks’s [Markiplier] page and it wasn’t taken down at all. And that’s just ridiculous because you could look it up and it’s all over the internet but then this one person who did it, who happens to be a person of color had their video taken down. It’s just really suspicious.”
Another Senior, Destiny Sanders, explains how YouTube’s platform doesn’t uplift people of color’s voices in the way that it advertises, “To put into a ratio, for every ten YouTuber’s maybe one or two are Black and then you’ll see one asian like Markiplier who happens to be the most popular. And then I hardly ever see any other ethnicities besides big names like Markiplier or CoryxKenshin.”
On top of the racism, many YouTubers along with Cory verbalized their other concerns of favoritism. The issue with YouTube’s policy team according to creators revolves around the demonetization of videos and flagging videos unnecessarily for things like age restrictions when there shouldn’t be.
Sophomore Lexi Eichenlaub voices their opinion on the favoritism topic that has popped up on YouTube as of the past couple months, “I feel like a lot more problematic creators are getting more up votes because they are so popular and so they keep upvoting them. YouTubers like Dream, Dream is a very controversial creator who is extremely popular regardless of things that he’s done and anyone who is problematic really shouldn’t be getting the attention that they’re getting because they don’t necessarily deserve it.”
All over YouTube, many content creators are trying hard to work with the company on resolving the issues with racism and favoritism amongst the YouTube community. Knowing that all of these designers and artists are receiving no solutions to the problems and unfairness that is being voiced, the community is hard at work for the justice they all want.