Youtube sued over animal abuse
An animal rights group said the site had ignored efforts to get clear violations taken down. YouTube said it had removed hundreds of thousands.
The videos are disturbing. A giant python wraps its thick body around the neck of a puppy, which thrashes and squeals in panic. A baby monkey, trembling and screeching in horror, is poked, prodded and pinched inside a basket. Another monkey is forced to fend off a giant snake slithering toward it while tied to the ground.
As of Monday, all of those videos of animal abuse — and dozens more — were available on YouTube. Some of the videos have been on the site for years, viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Some also carried advertisements for pet food or vacation rental homes. That meant YouTube’s parent company, Google, was sharing advertising revenue with the people who posted the videos.
The videos are now the subject of a lawsuit filed on Monday in California Superior Court in Santa Clara. Lady Freethinker, an animal rights nonprofit, sued YouTube, accusing it of breach of contract. The suit claims that the platform failed to live up to its agreement with users by allowing animal abuse videos to be uploaded and failing to take action when alerted about the content.
Lady Freethinker, which has exposed dogfighting rings in Chile and dog meat auctions in South Korea, said YouTube had ignored the group’s repeated flagging of animal abuse videos. YouTube’s community guidelines, the rules for what is allowed on the site, say animal abuse content is not permitted.
The ban includes videos in which humans inflict physical harm to an animal to cause suffering. The guidelines say YouTube also does not allow videos in which humans prompt animals to fight or stage a rescue that places the animal in a dangerous situation.
“YouTube is aware of these videos and its role in distributing them, as well as its continuing support of their creation, production and circulation,” the animal rights group’s complaint said. “It is unfortunate that YouTube has chosen to put profits over principles of ethical and humane treatment of innocent animals.”
The lawsuit reflects a repeated criticism of YouTube: Despite detailed and extensive policies for what is permissible, it has struggled to enforce them and prevent dangerous and disturbing videos from reaching its audience of more than one billion users. Enforcement remains a challenge even after YouTube has added thousands of human reviewers and made major investments in artificial intelligence to identify problematic videos before they are uploaded.