Corporate censorship online: Vagueness and discursive imprecision in YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines

Author:

Kopf Susanne1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria

Abstract

This article deals with YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines – the content rules dedicated to defining what YouTube deems advertiser (un)friendly and that YouTube creators seeking to monetise their content through advertising have to follow. Specifically, this study addresses the textual composition of YouTube’s regulations with a focus on occurrences of vagueness. Regarding methods of data analysis, I take a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach to YouTube’s texts on advertiser-friendliness. That is, I take a wide-angle view on all concordance lines of ‘content’ and identify occurrences of different forms of vagueness. Findings suggest that at least 26% of the lines of ‘content’ detailing YouTube’s ad-friendly content guidelines exhibit at least one of eight forms of vagueness. Consequently, content creators – left unsure about the monetisability of particular content – may choose not to push any boundaries but to produce noncontroversial content, which, in turn, may impede content plurality on YouTube.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Sociology and Political Science,Communication

Reference58 articles.

1. Alexa (2021) The Top 500 Sites on the Web – Global. Alexa. Available at: https://www.alexa.com/topsites

2. Critical Theory and Social Media

3. Anthony L (2020) AntConc (Computer software). Laurence Anthony. Available at: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html

4. ‘This is citizen journalism at its finest’: YouTube and the public sphere in the Oscar Grant shooting incident

Cited by 6 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3