YouTube defeats racial bias lawsuit by Black, Hispanic content creators

Aug 17 (Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit accusing YouTube of restricting or removing videos from Black and Hispanic content creators because of their race.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco said that although the idea that YouTube's algorithm could discriminate based on race is plausible, the plaintiffs "do not come close" to suggesting they suffered any discrimination.

The proposed class action on behalf of non-white YouTube users was originally filed in June 2020, less than one month after a Minneapolis police officer's murder of George Floyd sparked a nationwide focus on racial injustice.

Nine plaintiffs said YouTube, owned by Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google, subjected their videos to more restrictions than similar videos from white contributors, violating a contractual obligation under its terms of service to provide race-neutral content moderation.

But the judge said YouTube promised only that its algorithm would not treat people differently based on their identities, not that the algorithm was infallible.

He also said the plaintiffs relied on too small a sample of videos, and some actually hurt their case.

In an example, he said YouTube's restriction of one plaintiff's "makeup tutorial" on how to create Donald Trump's "distinctive look" could reflect the plaintiff's mentioning the Ku Klux Klan and describing lighter makeup colors as white supremacy colors.