Does anyone have any idea about why these rules would be secret?
The only thing I can think of is that YouTube is not confident in their guidelines & categorization, and does not want to defend these choices publicly.
The only thing I can think of is that YouTube is not confident in their guidelines & categorization, and does not want to defend these choices publicly.
Don't work for youtube, but I'm guessing they would be secret for a couple of reasons.
1. If made public, people could post violating content and work around it by making sure they won't get flagged with carefully crafted thumbnails, content etc. Ex: Take a look at the 'Nudity' section. There are examples of 'Partial nudity' in which a guy wearing underwear is deemed inappropriate because it looks 'Vulgar'. So one could, in theory avoid such thumbnails, and still post vulgar content in the video and get by their censors.
2. It would also open Youtube to criticism, just like the Facebook breastfeeding content was, a whiles back.
Rules are open to arguments, and with dozens of bans/appeals a day, it'd be ridiculous to do that. We tried strict rules, and they are both too restrictive and ineffective.
Humans need to make judgements, and guidelines give you the latitude to do that.
2. The guidelines seemingly allow what would be considered hate speech if the topic is women's equality.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en
The only thing I found confusing was the unwanted creators for the alleged secret meeting. GradeAUnderA is hilarious[0] and has a few videos that point out the drama in YouTube. Keemstar is toxic. I don't know about the others and I can name quite a few channels that should be on YouTube's unwanted creators list (if such thing existed).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XyH8MJARcM (NSFW language)
My wife literally posted a 3 minute sped up video of us decorating our Christmas tree and it was demonetized without explanation.