(Getty Images)

in moderation

YouTube has taken down 220 million videos since 2018

Now it’s getting a little less strict on what’s allowed on the site, per The New York Times.

6/11/25 5:46AM

According to a report from The New York Times on Monday, YouTube’s content moderation policies have been quietly relaxed after more lenient new guidelines were introduced in mid-December.

Alphabet’s video platform — which reportedly supported 490,000 jobs and contributed $55 billion to the US economy last year — joins Meta platforms and Elon Musk’s X in revising its approach to content moderation. Unlike those two, however, YouTube hasn’t made any public statement about the move, though a spokesperson told the Times that it continuously updates its guidance for moderators.

New rules

YouTube workers are now advised to keep policy-contravening content up if it’s in the public interest and less than half of the video breaks the site’s code of conduct; previously, that threshold was a quarter of the video. Videos are in the public interest if creators “discuss or debate elections, ideologies, movements, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, censorship and other issues,” the Times reported from training materials it accessed.

Google’s quarterly transparency report shows that millions of videos are still taken off YouTube every single month.

YouTube total content moderation total chart — Sherwood News

In Q1 2025, the first quarter after YouTube’s new policies had come into play, the site took down some 8.6 million videos for breaching community guidelines. Worryingly, over half of those videos were removed for breaking YouTube’s child safety terms, though almost 55% of the content was actioned before it received a single view, thanks to YouTube’s automatic flagging system.

Indeed, when automated flagging is taken out of the YouTube moderation picture, there’s not actually all that much left. From the start of 2018, just ~19.9 million video removals came from human detection, with more than 90% stemming from the site’s AI-powered moderation system, which has been accused of being a little trigger-happy in the past.

Rani Molla

Tunnel Vision

Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

Jon Keegan

19h

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

22h

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal