YouTube hit with discrimination suit by black video artists

SAN FRANCISCO: A lawsuit filed this week in federal court accuses YouTube of discriminating against African American video makers and viewers by factoring in race when it comes to filtering or monetizing content.

The suit filed in a courthouse in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose on Tuesday seeks class action status and names as defendants the leading video sharing platform and its parent companies Google and Alphabet.

“Under the pretext of finding that videos violate some vague, ambiguous, and non- specific video content rule, defendants use computer driven racial, identity and viewpoint profiling and filtering tools to restrict, censor, and denigrate” blacks, the suit argued.