YouTube may allow hate speech if it is part of a larger argument

YouTube has long had a stormy relationship with its queer users, thanks to a tradition of restricting homosexual content. These tensions worsened this week when Vox video reporter Carlos Maza called Steven Crowder, a right-wing personality, claiming Crowder had been harassing him for years on the platform.

Crowder is the host of Stronger with powder, a political commentary broadcast on Blaze TV, a conservative broadcast network with cable, satellite and streaming resources that hosts celebrities like Glenn Beck and Ben Shapiro. Maza says that Crowder has targeted him personally because of his race and his sexual orientation.

Maza is host to the Vox YouTube series Closed off, which analyzes the role of the news media in the Trump era. In the last two years, Maza said on Twitter last weekCrowder aimed him through Stronger with powder, on which Crowder regularly makes fun of Maza for being gay and latinx. The effect, says Maza, is that Crowder's supporters harassed Maza and invaded his private life.

On May 30, Maza publicly explained his concerns by illustrating Crowder's behavior through a video compilation of Stronger with powder video footage that he shared on Twitter. The compilation contains repeated clips of Crowder imitating Maza with an exaggerated slippage, saying that Maza "sashays" around, and painting it with other homophobic stereotypes, while calling him "the gay writer Vox ".

YouTube responded publicly to Maza in a series of tweets On June 4, the company disagrees with Maza's assessment of Crowder's behavior, saying that Crowder's language is not harassment because it is part of a wider political debate.

The company's statements triggered a debate and discussions on Wednesday, as well as the wrath of Maza and his supporters. And although YouTube has then to penalize Crowder – somehow – is because of a "set of blatant actions", and not because of the specific language used in his videos on Maza.

YouTube's official position regarding Crowder is confusing and difficult to analyze, but it has major implications for the many YouTube communities, especially those made up of marginalized creators who are often victims of abuse. And with the evolution of the situation during the first days of June – queer pride month – YouTube's actions touched users and made them furious.

A Vox reporter made a video to prove that he was being harassed by a popular popular right, YouTuber. YouTube has judged the situation differently.

Steven Crowder is a Canadian talk show and comedy broadcaster known for his right-wing political commentary. His YouTube channel, where he publishes comedy videos and news commentary, has nearly 4 million subscribers.

On May 30, Vox reporter Carlos Maza posted on his personal Twitter account a video compilation of instances in which he claims that Crowder targeted him:

Maza argued that Crowder's videos revealed a pattern ofrepeated and overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity"and"homophobic / racist harassment. "Such a speech would violate the YouTube community's guidelines, which explicitly prohibit" content or behavior that is intended to harass, threaten or intimidate in a malicious manner, "including" content that contains hurtful and negative personal comments / videos on a particular subject. other person "and" content inciting others to harass or threaten people on YouTube or not. "

Maza noted on Twitter that Crowder frequently wore a homophobic t-shirt in the videos; the t-shirt is marked "Socialism is for girls" and he sells it in his online shop. Showing homophobic messages in his videos would seem to put Crowder clearly in violation of YouTube's policy against malicious intimidation.

Maza also noted on Twitter that whenever Crowder mentioned it in a video, he was harassed and sometimes doxxed – meaning that personal information such as his phone number was disclosed on the Internet, prompting Crowder fans to contact Maza to harass him. Maza described the consequences of Crowder's videos as "waking up to a wall of homophobic / racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter." (Crowder m said on Twitter, he "completely condemned" doxxing Vox staff, but has not yet responded to Vox's request for comment.)

Highlighting Maza's point of view, Crowder's fans responded to his Twitter feed by creating a version of Crowder's "socialism" t-shirt, which directly targets Maza with a homophobic insult.

After Maza's complaint thread garnered more than 20,000 retweets and coverage from several major media outlets, YouTube responded directly via Twitter. His position was that, while Crowder used language that was "clearly hateful", the type of harassment Maza claimed was below the standard described in the YouTube community policy.

YouTube told Vox in an email that the company had discovered that Crowder did not directly incite his followers to attack Maza, although Maza claimed that a large number of Crowder fans had harassed him at following his videos.

According to YouTube, the platform takes the context of all critics into account when considering harassment complaints – that is, it checks whether criticism is associated with broader debate or whether it's mainly about targeting an individual.

In the case of Crowder, YouTube decided that since Crowder's main objective was apparently to respond to Maza's views on various contemporary issues, as expressed in Maza Closed off videos, his videos are not examples of hate speech; instead, they called it an analysis.

The moment has been complicated more. A few hours later, YouTube responded to Maza's complaints before revealing a policy change regarding hate speech. In the afternoon of Wednesday, June 5, the company updated its guidelines for the community in a blog post detailing its efforts to combat white supremacist rhetoric and other extremist rhetoric across the platform. The company has agreed to take action against thousands of videos violating the updated guidelines by purging them from its archives. And while promising to take a "firmer stance" against extremist content, YouTube also clarified that some controversial clips might stay on the site if they were part of a larger analytic comment:

We recognize that some of this content is valuable to researchers and NGOs seeking to understand hatred in order to combat it, and we are exploring options to make it available in the future. And as always, the context counts, so some videos may remain unresolved because they deal with topics such as pending legislation, aim to condemn or expose hate, or provide an analysis of the news.

According to YouTube, this political announcement was unrelated to complaints about Maza's harassment.

Nevertheless, YouTube's public statement confused and infuriated many viewers who felt it was a slap to the queer community members of the platform. Among the angry people, a group of Google employees quickly formed a demonstration against social media to express his frustration with YouTube (owned by Google).

According to a report by BuzzFeed, some YouTube staff members were so upset by the management of the situation by their company that they circulated an internal petition asking YouTube to remove from the decision of the channel all its image of the month Pride at rainbow pattern.

And after a widespread public reaction to YouTube's statement, the company updated it with a Addendum: It suspended the monetization of the Crowder channel, which means that Crowder would no longer be eligible to participate in the YouTube Ad Sense program for its creators. YouTube stated that the reason for the action was not to have changed position about Crowder's comments about Maza, but to have found that Crowder was engaging in " a set of blatant actions ":

The company then explained that, in order for monetization of its channel to be reinstated, Crowder should remove the links leading to the homophobic t-shirts that it has for sale.

In response, Crowder seemed overtly provocative, throwing a Twitter hashtag, #VoxAdpocalypse, to protest against YouTube's decision and assert that Vox Media has the broader goal of "silence the independent creators"On the platform.

Meanwhile, Maza was among many YouTube users who were irritated by YouTube's policy, including its decision to demonetize Crowder – what Maza said was a meaningless gesture It would not stop Crowder fans' YouTube earnings.

All of this resulted in another late YouTube statement. On Wednesday June 5th, shortly before midnight, the company updated its blog again. Chris Dale, YouTube's Global Head of Communications and Public Affairs, has released a much more detailed statement on the Maza and Crowder business, as well as the considerations taken into account by the company when deciding when and how to apply it. harassment policy:

Two main policies are at stake: harassment and hate speech. For harassment, we examine whether the purpose of the video is to incite harassment, to threaten or to humiliate an individual; or if personal information is revealed. We consider the entire video. … For hate speech, we examine whether the main purpose of the video is to incite hatred towards the protected group or to promote it, to the detriment of it. or if he's trying to incite violence. To be clear, using racist, homophobic or sexist epithets would not necessarily be a violation of either one of these policies. For example, as stated above, obscene or offensive language is often used in comic songs and routines. That's when the main purpose of the video is hate or harassment. And when videos break these rules, we delete them.

Not everyone will agree with the calls we make – some will say we have not done enough; others will say that we have gone too far. And, sometimes, a decision to leave a shocking video on the site will look like us defending people who have used their platforms and their audiences to intimidate, belittle, marginalize or ignore others. If we remove any potentially offensive content, we would lose valuable speech. …

Even if the content of a creator does not violate the guidelines of our community, we will examine the context and the impact in a broad sense. If his behavior is flagrant and harms the community, we can take action. In the case of Crowder, a thorough review over the weekend revealed that, individually, the videos reported did not violate our community guidelines. However, in the days that followed, we saw the damage done to the YouTube community by the ever-flagrant behavior, took a closer look and made the decision to suspend monetization. To be reinstated, all issues related to the channel must be resolved, including videos that violate our rules, as well as items such as offensive products.

Despite YouTube's repeated attempts to change its initial response, skeptics about its policy are good reasons to worry.

YouTube's new policy follows a long history of missteps regarding queer content

Maza feels that YouTube is shirking its responsibility to protect its creators queers and other marginalized users, and that its experience is only the latest example of the platform's history.

"It's a botched policy and YouTube knows it," he told Vox in an interview about YouTube's response to his complaints about Crowder's harassment. "A policy that says all you need to do to get rid of a hate speech on the platform is to mix it up with something else is an instruction manual for monsters who want to find a way to target people based on their identity. "

The way Crowder talks about Maza in the video clips compiled by Maza exactly matches the type of methods used by bullies in real life, said Maza: "Anyone who is bullied knows that harassment is always associated with other reviews. " For queer people and other marginalized users wishing to create content on YouTube, he said, "the price of the entry is that you must accept that the people who answer you are allowed to use the speech of hate to target your identity as part of their criticism. It is a miserable policy. It's not really an anti-harassment policy. It's a loophole. "

Maza's comments were picked up by the queer YouTube community, who were adamant about the danger of confusing homophobia with political debate.

Some YouTubers have promised to remove their channels, while others have pointed out that YouTube's rules often apply in a way that seems to benefit extremists and hurt their victims:

But even without considering harassment, YouTube has often acted in ways that give queer users an impression of second-class citizens. In the past, YouTube struggled to treat homosexual and sexual content fairly with other types of content. In 2017, the site had to revert to a policy that mistakenly restricted LGBTQ content after a negative public reaction. The restriction was intended to eliminate "potentially inappropriate" content; YouTube's algorithms seemed to automatically confuse queer content with explicit content.

A year after YouTube took steps to correct the problem, however, transgender creators still claimed that YouTube's algorithms demonetize and automatically restrict their content. And these creators allege that YouTube's decisions are entirely based on their use of the word "transgender" in video descriptions and titles. (YouTube has denied that this content triggers its algorithm.)

In addition, some queer creators have discovered that YouTube has homophobic ads associated with their content:

The outcry sparked by the appearance of homophobic ads on gay content on YouTube began in May 2018 and continued throughout the month of June – the month of pride – and ultimately resulted in that YouTube apologizes to the gay community as a whole:

But a year later, while another month of pride is defined by a wave of outrage centered on YouTube, it seems that the platform is no closer to the understanding of protection and promoting a positive homosexual community.