YouTube's Algorithms Failed to Remove Violating Content Related to Suicide and Self-Harm

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

• Colorado AI Act Colorado (United States) · Repealed · binding
• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding
• NYC Local Law 144 (automated employment decision tools) New York (United States) · In force · binding
• EU AI Act European Union · Partially applicable · binding

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (3)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

1. 4 Feb 2019
   YouTube recommended self-harm videos to children as young as 13

   telegraph.co.uk · Matthew Field
2. 5 Feb 2019
   YouTube criticized for recommending 'self-harm' videos with graphic images

   businessinsider.in · Nick Bastone
3. 5 Feb 2019
   YouTube caught promoting deadly 'how to self harm' tutorials for youngsters aged 13

   thesun.co.uk · Sean Keach

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Youtube

Alleged developer

Youtube

Alleged harmed party

Youtube Young Users, Youtube Users

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

Discrimination and Toxicity

Risk subdomain

1.2 Exposure to toxic content

Causal entity

AI

Intent

Unintentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

none

Sectors

information and communication, arts, entertainment and recreation

Countries

—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

• Harmful Content

  "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Toxicity

  "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Toxic Training Data

  "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

  "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Controversial Opinions

  The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

  Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

• Toxicity and Abusive Content

  This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

  Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

• Harmful responses

  "Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...

  Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

• Violation of social norms

  "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

  The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 2 Apr 2026KBS AI Translation Subtitles Reportedly Broadcast Profanity During Artemis II Launch Livestream
• 10 Mar 2026Grok Allegedly Generated Publicly Visible Sexist Abuse Targeting Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter After X User Prompt
• 5 Feb 2026Trump Reportedly Posted Purportedly AI-Generated Racist Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes on Truth Social
• 2 Jan 2026Tencent's WeChat-Integrated Yuanbao Chatbot Reportedly Insulted User During Coding Debug Request
• 21 Nov 2025Alleged Harmful Outputs and Data Exposure in Children's AI Products by FoloToy, Miko, and Character.AI
• 24 Oct 2025AI Training Dataset for Detecting Nudity Allegedly Found to Contain CSAM Images of Identified Victims

Other incidents involving Youtube

• 1 Nov 2020YouTube Recommendation Reportedly Pushed Election Fraud Content to Skeptics Disproportionately
• 28 Jun 2020YouTube's AI Mistakenly Banned Chess Channel over Chess Language Misinterpretation
• 15 Mar 2019The Christchurch shooter and YouTube’s radicalization trap
• 1 Feb 2019YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Allegedly Promoted Climate Misinformation Content
• 23 Apr 2018Content Using Bestiality Thumbnails Allegedly Evaded YouTube’s Thumbnail Monitoring System
• 13 Nov 2015YouTube Recommendations Allegedly Promoted Radicalizing Material Contributing to Terrorist Acts