According to Kovalakides, there’s always been “a bit of paranoia” about what YouTube employees can say to creators. Part of YouTube’s strategy has been putting its own employees in front of the camera. If we make any kind of slight change, they’re going to feel it under their feet.”

“I try to make it clear to people that could affect people’s careers, and lives, and jobs, since they’re sitting on top of our business at YouTube. The company can have an adversarial role with its creators, who feel the impact of platform changes more acutely than anyone else. “I try to convey the experience of that to YouTube, the company, as much as I can,” he says. Putting yourself out there every day online can be an exhausting emotional journey. Revenue is a constantly moving target, unlike the reliable paycheck of a YouTube employee. Kovalakides’ transition into the corporate YouTube world has allowed him to better understand the struggles creators face. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.” Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users.Īlthough Facebook doesn’t permit advertisers to view the racial composition of an ad’s viewers, the researchers said they were able to confidently infer these numbers by cross-referencing the indicators Facebook does provide, particularly regions where users live, which in some states can be cross-referenced with race data held in voter registration records. For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options.

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