YouTube will fix the bug making its Restricted Mode censor LGBTQ+ content, the company’s Vice President of Product Management Johanna Wright promised on Monday. In a short post published on the YouTube Creator Blog, Wright said that the platform’s Restricted Mode isn’t working as intended as it’s apparently broken in a way that filters out any LGBTQ+ content despite being designed to only block access to mature videos. As a result, plenty of users recently started complaining that the Google-owned online video platform aggressively censors any content related to or posted by the LGBTQ+ community. YouTube’s Restricted Mode was initially intended to censor content that isn’t suitable for younger audiences and Wright clearly stated that YouTube doesn’t believe LGBTQ+ content should automatically be a part of that category.
While YouTube’s executive promised the issue outlined above will be fixed, she also downplayed the entire ordeal to a degree by pointing out that only around 1.5 percent of YouTube’s daily traffic comes from users who are browsing the platform using Restricted Mode. The Google-owned company introduced this mode in 2010 and primarily advertised it for schools and other institutions that weren’t looking to expose a younger audience to sensitive and potentially inappropriate content like overly sexual videos, clips that contain profanity, or content depicting violence, addictions, or diseases. Wright still noted how YouTube understands “this isn’t about numbers” and vowed the company will change Restricted Mode in a way that will stop the censoring of content that’s related to the LGBTQ+ community but is otherwise tame in nature, which wasn’t the case so far.
YouTube’s official admitted that Restricted Mode will hardly ever be perfect and 100-percent accurate, but promised the company will do a better job at improving it in the future. She didn’t provide a specific timeframe to accompany that announcement but did say how user feedback is of tremendous help to the company and asked users to remain patient while YouTube is tweaking Restricted Mode and making sure its online video platform is suitable for everyone. The Google-owned company already started manually approving some videos that were automatically censored by Restricted Mode in the past and an update on the situation is expected to follow shortly.