Study: YouTube performs best in media responsibility audit

YouTube has topped the list of an audit report conducted by IPG Mediabrands’ performance agency Reprise, in its response to advertisers’ brand safety concerns some years ago.

Aiming at enhancing brand safety and media responsibility in advertising, the report of Media Responsibility Audit included doing a comprehensive assessment of all the primary social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, twitch, Twitter and YouTube, for 10 principles of accountability.

The principles included promoting respect, protecting people, being diverse and representative, data collection and use, children's wellbeing, no hate speech, no misinformation or disinformation, enforcing policies, advertising transparency, and accountability. 

One of the key findings of this report is that YouTube topped the overall rankings and performed best against several principles.

However, most surveyed platforms had some level of enforcement reporting, but many of these were inconsistent and limited in scope. They rarely focused on the platforms holding themselves accountable for their own enforcement of policies. The report suggested that there is a need to better define expectations and metrics to be included within future policy enforcement reporting.

A lack of consistency across platforms was also another problem mentioned in the study. Given broad regulations that surround anti-discrimination and data privacy, there are opportunities to become even more consistent in how data collection policies are enacted across the various social platforms.

As social media platforms have been working on combating hate speech and misinformation or disinformation, there has been a shared recognition across platforms that eliminating hate speech is important. 

But there were inconsistent definitions of what qualifies as hate speech, inconsistent identification of protected classes of people, and a lack of prevalence reporting and independent auditing of hate speech reports.

Some surveyed platforms made no effort on combating misinformation and some cited their unique engagement models as a reason to de-prioritise fact-checking. The report suggests that even minor instances could lead to unsafe ad placement for advertisers.

Other issues highlighted in this report include non-registered user experiences. For platforms that allow access to their services without user registration, there is an opportunity to be more consistent with that user experience.

Some platforms still allow certain advertising placements to be viewed by a non-registered user, which may not result in responsible media delivery.

Only a few partners have specific controls for protecting advertisers from adjacency to content in objectionable or harmful categories. The report suggested that the industry needs to promote and use third-party verification partners more widely.

“What this audit shows is that there is work to be done across all platforms from a media responsibility perspective and that the different platforms each need to earn their place on a brand’s marketing plan,” said Elijah Harris, global head of social at Reprise.

"We hope the audit resonates with our industry and we can all work towards creating a greater good together," he added.

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