How Youtube's year-in-review 'rewind' video set off a civil war

You might guess that a surefire way to make a hit video on YouTube would be to gather a bunch of YouTube megastars, film them riffing on some of the year’s most popular YouTube themes and release it as a year-in-review spectacular.

You would be wrong.

YouTube tested that theory this week, releasing its annual “YouTube Rewind” year-end retrospective. The eight-minute video was a jam-packed montage of YouTube meta-humor, featuring a who’s-who of YouTube stars (Ninja! The Try Guys! Bongo Cat!) along with conventional celebrities (Will Smith! Trevor Noah! John Oliver!). The video was slickly produced and wholesome, with lots of references to the popular video game Fortnite, shout-outs to popular video formats, and earnest paeans to YouTube’s diversity and inclusiveness.

It was meant to be a feel-good celebration of a year’s worth of YouTube creativity, but the video started a firestorm, and led to a mass-downvoting campaign that became a meme of its own. Within 48 hours, the video had been “disliked” more than four million times. On Thursday, it became the most-disliked video in the history of the website, gathering more than 10 million dislikes and beating out the previous record-holder, the music video for Justin Bieber’s “Baby.”

The issue that upset so many YouTube fans, it turns out, was what the Rewind video did not show. Many of the most notable YouTube moments of the year — such as the August boxing match between KSI and Logan Paul, two YouTube stars who fought in a highly publicized spectacle watched by millions — went unmentioned. And some prominent YouTubers were absent, including Felix Kjellberg, a.k.a. “PewDiePie,” one of the most popular creators in YouTube’s history, who had appeared in the Rewind videos as recently as 2016.

Some YouTubers enjoyed the video. But to many, it felt like evidence that YouTube the company was snubbing YouTube the community by featuring mainstream celebrities in addition to the platform’s homegrown creators, and by glossing over major moments in favor of advertiser-friendly scenes.

“It’s so disconnected with the community and its creators,” said Mr. Kjellberg, who called the Rewind compilation a “train wreck of a video” in a video he posted.

Ethan Klein, another popular YouTuber, posted his own video, “It’s Time to Stop YouTube Rewind.”

Marques Brownlee, a YouTube creator who was featured in the Rewind video and subsequently made his own video called “The Problem With YouTube Rewind,” explained more calmly that the video’s primary issue was that it was trying to please two disparate audiences — creators, who want to see the breadth of YouTube’s output reflected back at them, and advertisers, who need to be reassured that the platform is a safe place to spend their money.

A YouTube spokeswoman, Andrea Faville, said in a statement that “dethroning ‘Baby’ in dislikes wasn’t exactly our goal this year.” She added: “Honest feedback can suck, but we are listening and we appreciate how much people care. Trying to capture the magic of YouTube in one single video is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. We also learned that creating content can be really hard and this underscores our respect and admiration for YouTube creators doing it every day.”

Ms. Faville also included, as part of YouTube’s statement, an animated SpongeBob SquarePants image

YouTube’s decision to keep things G-rated is understandable. Advertisers have been jittery about the platform since revelations last year that YouTube’s algorithms placed some ads next to extremist, racist content and hate speech. That led several large advertisers to pull their ads from YouTube. YouTube then tightened its monetization rules, limiting which videos could earn money through advertising and prompting another conflict with creators, who called it “the adpocalypse.”

It’s also natural that YouTube would avoid promoting some of its more controversial creators. Mr. Paul, who has 18 million subscribers and is one of the best-known personalities on YouTube, spent much of the year making amends for an ill-advised stunt in which he filmed a dead body hanging from a tree in a Japanese “suicide forest.” Mr. Kjellberg, who has more than 76 million subscribers, has repeatedly been criticized for his on-camera behavior, including making Nazi jokes and praising anti-Semitic YouTube channels.

Drama between YouTube and its creators is nothing new. But the Rewind controversy is indicative of a larger issue at YouTube, which is trying to promote itself as a bastion of cool, inclusive creativity while being accused of radicalizing a generation of young people by pushing them toward increasingly extreme content, and allowing reactionary cranks and conspiracy theorists to dominate its platform.

YouTube’s efforts are complicated by the fact that it does, in fact, have many diverse and interesting creators making compelling videos. But those voices have struggled, at times, to be heard above the roar of the site’s most incendiary figures. There is no mention in YouTube Rewind of Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy-theory site Infowars, who built a YouTube empire with millions of subscribers and generated more than 1.6 billion views. There was no mention of the group of political YouTubers who make up what Rebecca Lewis at the Data & Society Research Institute has called YouTube’s “alternative influence network,” an influential cohort of video creators who have used their platforms to promote ideas from the right-wing fringes.

YouTube has taken admirable steps in the past year to clean up its platform. This summer, it barred Alex Jones and Infowars for hate speech, and it has tried to keep conspiracy theory videos out of searches for “trending” videos after breaking news events.

But people like Mr. Kjellberg and Mr. Paul — stars who rose to prominence through YouTube, and still garner tens of millions of views every month — remain in a kind of dysfunctional relationship with the platform. YouTube doesn’t want to endorse their behavior in its official promotions, but it doesn’t want to alienate their large, passionate audiences, either. And since no other platform can rival the large audiences and earning potential YouTube gives these creators, they are stuck in a kind of unhappy purgatory — making aggrieved videos about how badly YouTube has wronged them, while also tiptoeing to avoid crossing any lines that might get them barred, or prevent them from making money from their videos.

This tension — between YouTube’s self-image as an empowering, tolerant space and the people behind much of the platform’s most popular content — is at the heart of the controversy over YouTube Rewind. If YouTube had been trying to create an accurate picture of its platform’s most visible faces, it would need to include bigots, reactionaries and juvenile shock jocks. A YouTube recap that includes only displays of tolerance and pluralism is a little like a Weather Channel highlight reel featuring only footage of sunny days — it might be more pleasant to look at, but it doesn’t reflect the actual weather.

There’s nothing wrong with YouTube’s using its year-end video to show off the good work being done on its platform. But it’s unfortunate that, in order to do that, the platform needs to write much of its recent history out of the script. Perhaps, instead of an attempt to make everyone happy with its video next year, the answer lies in taking steps to make YouTube more like the version of itself depicted in this year’s Rewind, the platform it clearly wishes it was.